The 50 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2016

In his latest book, The Democratic Surround, the media historian Fred Turner asks not what Democracy might mean, as several political theorists have done in recent years, but just who the democratic citizen Americans envision might be and how their conception of that individual was formulated. Beginning in the late 1930s with a brief, fascinating account of Americans' distrust of the technologies of mass communication—a distrust sparked, in many ways, by European fascists' apparent use of films and radio broadcasts to turn populations into mindless followers—Turner chronicles a cultural response that looked to use open-ended media installations to foster a contrasting, productive individualism. From the German emigrant and former Bauhaus instructor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to composer John Cage, Turner highlights several midcentury artists and designers who attempted to create exhibitions and performances that would engage viewers or listeners as active participants in the construction of meaning. By refusing to adopt the voice of authority, they believed, artists might empower the public…

In Household Workers Unite Premilla Nadasen places African American female domestic workers at the center of a broader social movement that spanned the labor and civil rights movements. Using oral histories and archival records Nadasen uncovers the history of African American female household workers who struggled to achieve improved working conditions, social citizenship, and dignity for their profession from the 1950s through the 1980s. Nadasen focuses her study on women activists such as Dorothy Bolden, Geraldine Roberts, and Josephine Hulett, and the organizations they led, including the National Committee on Household Employment (nche), the Household Technicians of America (hta), and later, the National Domestic Workers Union of America. Through these organizations, Nadasen argues, black women workers who labored in the homes of wealthy and middle-class families sought more than improved working conditions and wages; they wanted to “reshape the contours of the occupation” (p. 85). Household Workers Unite relies on the voices of female domestic workers. In numerous interviews…

Arguing powerfully against the privatization of public goods, Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux detail how our enjoyment of mediated violence trivializes human life. Foregrounding the corporatism of politics—as Benito Mussolini described fascism—allows them to do more than call into question the transfer of power from the state to private institutions. They also examine the fascism of the mind, how we may be said to love our oppression and how this love compounds in the spectacle of violence. Evans and Giroux call us to account for our enjoyment of violence in movies, television programs, and video games, even as they ask us to direct attention to the everyday forms of racial violence and economic oppression that deprive many of life. Our taste for violent entertainment has never been more refined, yet our attention to the violence around us remains distracted. Relying on the work of critical scholars such as Guy Debord and Michael J. Shapiro, Evans and Giroux explore how the spectacle of violence captures and orders our bodily senses yet contributes to our neglect of the massive…

David H. Price's Cold War Anthropology is the culminating book of his series on the relationship between American anthropology and U.S. military and intelligence agencies from World War II through the Cold War. His Anthropological Intelligence (2008) examined the recruitment of anthropologists into World War II projects, while Threatening Anthropology (2004) considered the postwar monitoring and harassment of anthropologists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The present book turns to anthropology's relationship with the military desire for knowledge of foreign places and populations during the Cold War, and, in particular, its interactions with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As such, the volume asks harder questions of the discipline. Price's work has been marked by extensive use of governmental archives, including many sources declassified through the Freedom of Information Act. Simply bringing this information to light should be reckoned as a major achievement. Price chronicles numerous specific Cold War articulations of anthropology with the CIA and other…

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Puritan Sympathy Chapter 2: Love of the Brethren and the Antinomian Controversy Chapter 3: Sympathy, Persuasion, and Seduction Chapter 4: Transatlantic Relations and the Rhetoric of Sympathy Chapter 5: Sympathy, Sincerity, and Sentimental Technique Chapter 6: Bewildered Sympathy Conclusion: Transformation and Continuity at the End of the Century Notes Index

Between 1975 and 1994 approximately 150,000 Cambodian refugees entered the United States as part of the country's largest resettlement program, which granted asylum to nearly 1 million war refugees from Southeast Asia. Many of these refugees were resettled in some of the nation's poorest urban areas. During the 1980s and 1990s as many as ten thousand Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx, a New York City borough beset by “poverty, crime, and derelict housing” (p. 4). In Unsettled Eric Tang tells the story of the Bronx Cambodians with insight, verve, and compassion. Whereas most sociological accounts depict refugees moving gradually but inevitably toward greater stability, Tang's study insists that the desperate conditions of refugees' lives during war and in transit—including experiences of uprooting, displacement, and captivity—persist in resettlement America. This riveting ethnography draws on Tang's field notes from his years as a youth organizer in the northwest Bronx's refugee neighborhoods and his extensive interviews over three years with one Cambodian woman, Ra…

The founder of Salon and a progressive journalist, David Talbot has set himself the task of rehearsing in detail a sometimes-familiar litany of misdeeds by the most famous director of the Central Intelligence Agency (cia). His readable account furnishes biographical background and runs through a number of contentious issues. He portrays Allen Dulles as not quite an anti-Semite but rather as someone whose sympathies never rose above the freezing point when confronted with evidence of Adolf Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Dulles's law firm had business ties to German corporations in the 1930s, and he did not want to rock the boat. Serving with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, he ignored an opportunity to publicize the plight of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, instead choosing to protect the reputation of German companies with which his firm had dealt before the war. As a private citizen in the postwar period, he utilized wealth looted from Jewish families to promote his own ends, and with the cia he organized the ratlines, a free escape route for Nazi criminals…

The environmental justice movement in the United States began in the 1980s, but the inequities identified by those activists were many years in the making. In Clean and White Carl A. Zimring locates the origin of inequitable exposures to environmental risks and hazards experienced by nonwhite Americans to the intertwined histories of racist ideologies, public health and hygiene, and urban sanitation. Zimring centers his history of environmental racism on solid waste disposal sites in and near American cities, one of the earliest and most central concerns of environmental justice activists. Zimring argues that these discriminatory landscapes, identified and well documented by scholars and activists in recent years, have nineteenth-century roots. The book begins with a discussion of Thomas Jefferson's racism, his love of all things rural, and his disdain for the filth of cities. It then moves quickly through the Civil War years to the postbellum urban boom. Histories of racism in the United States and of waste management in this first part of the book are told as parallel but largely…

Late in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up a national network of local organizations that joined farmers with public administrators, adult-educators, and social scientists. The aim was to localize and unify earlier New Deal programs concerning soil conservation, farm production control, tenure security, and other reforms, and by 1941 some 200,000 farm people were involved. Even so, conservative anti-New Dealers killed the successful program the next year. This book reexamines the era's agricultural policy and tells the neglected story of the New Deal agrarian leaders and their visionary ideas about land, democratization, and progressive social change.

In America Dancing Megan Pugh investigates the quest to define American dance in the twentieth century. As her subtitle suggests, she has a specific thesis: that African American culture, and the ways it has been borrowed, appropriated, and reworked across racial lines, lies at the heart of what makes dance American. America Dancing is not a comprehensive survey, but rather a series of six case studies. Because Pugh aims at a general readership that may not have much familiarity with dance history, her choices carry an extra burden of representation. Luckily, it feels like the right story to be telling in 2016 about how ongoing issues with racism have played out in the struggle to find American identity through dance. Pugh's first chapter, on the cakewalk, best supports her thesis that part of what makes a dance American is endless layers of racial parody and masking. In the cakewalk, it was not always clear who was parodying whom. Pugh argues that the cakewalk is “haunted” by the twin ghosts of “white brutality” and “the ingenuity of African Americans” (pp. 24–25). Chapters follow…

On July 22, 1971, officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (hew) met to clarify regulation of noncitizen access to welfare and Medicaid. The meeting was prompted by the Supreme Court's decision in Graham v. Richardson one month earlier. Carmen Richardson, the lead plaintiff in the case, had emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1956, at the age of fifty-one. Several years later, she became disabled and applied for public assistance in Arizona; her application was denied because she did not satisfy Arizona's fifteen-year residency requirement for noncitizens. Without the state's $90 monthly allowance, she was forced to subsist on charity from friends and neighbors. With help from a legal aid lawyer she sued the state on behalf of the three thousand noncitizens barred from public assistance in Arizona. In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court declared such state alienage-based restrictions unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and encroached on the federal government's exclusive power to…

The author of this book is an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and the work is unashamedly an exercise in his discipline. Nonetheless, an immensely impressive feature is its command of American historical writing, for it is based on a great many secondary sources. While the book's principal attention is to the two great political alliances of recent times—between organized labor and the Democratic party and between the Christian Right and the Republican party—the analysis does extend to abolitionism, Populism, and the 1960s antiwar movement. Daniel Schlozman is interested in the relationships between social movements and political parties, and he is correct that we need a better understanding of the complex processes involved. Social movements (though the term social is not altogether satisfactory; in Britain the term extra-parliamentary is sometimes used) characteristically originate outside party structures but may seek particular policy outcomes, sometimes developing as pressure groups. Opportunities may also allow a movement to forge an…

The Prohibition party has been derided as the most rigid and insignificant expression of a failed social movement. But by analyzing the Prohibition party within the context of American political structures and party mechanisms between the Civil War and the Progressive Era drive to constitutional prohibition, Lisa M. F. Andersen places partisan Prohibitionists at the center of vital struggles that reshaped and curtailed democratic political expression during the party age. Andersen argues that more than stubborn devotion to a hopeless cause motivated Prohibitionists to resist the domination of the Republican and Democratic parties in electoral politics. Prohibitionists insisted “that minor parties protected the right of all citizens to vote in a way that clearly expressed their interests” (pp. 133–34). The major parties centralized decision making, minimized input from rank-and-file partisans, and ignored divisive or minor issues. Despite causing the defection of some of its members, the Prohibition party even criticized as undemocratic the nonpartisan pressure tactics of the…

An Anglican clergyman crossing Virginia's James River in 1711 used the occasion to probe the religious beliefs of his black ferryman. What was his idea of God? “He was the maker of all things both in Heaven and Earth.” Did he profess any religion? “He did, and … when he had time he went to the Church of England.” Was he baptized? “He said not. His Master not admitting it. Notwithstanding his great desire.”1 This anecdote and a growing body of similar comment challenge the familiar notion that northern mainland blacks showed little interest in Christianity before the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. The assumption of black apathy toward Christianity has come under increasing scrutiny as the complexity of Africans' spiritual universe—encompassing not only traditional African and Muslim practices but also Afro-Christian beliefs—attracted the interest of historians of the Atlantic world. A number of scholars turned their attention to the Americas as a cultural terrain on which Christian and African religions met, mixed, and evolved. Writings on the formation of…

In this sophisticated and insightful book, Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the process of “wastelanding” helps explain the history and persistence of environmental injustice. Environmental racism stems not only from constructed discourses of race but also from constructed conceptions of place. Asserting their colonial dominance over the Navajo, Euro-Americans defined indigenous lands in the American Southwest as wasted and useless, making those landscapes, and the people who inhabited them, pollutable. Wastelanding enabled the development of uranium mining and milling on Navajo land, a continuation of the colonial project with dramatic, if slowly evolving, violence inflicted on both the land and people. “The power exerted over environmental resources,” Voyles explains, “and the ways in which those in power construct knowledge about landscapes, are a central part of how what we now call social injustices are produced” (p. ix). In exploring the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country, Voyles draws from tremendously powerful histories: the forced sterilization of indigenous women…

This ambitious book aims to reshape the field of African American religious history, long dominated by a narrative pointing toward freedom, civil rights, and justice. Johnson audaciously proposes to point it in another direction, toward empire, and by pointing in that direction he compels us to examine everything involved in the rise of the concept of race, corporate economic forms, and the rise of the modern nation-state. Race here is defined here as “colonial governance administered through the frame of essential differences among human populations” (p. 88). The book is not a narrative history of African American religions. Instead, it is a deliberately selective examination of key moments connecting the themes of colonialism, democracy, and freedom, with an emphasis on their intersections with a variety of African American religious traditions. The argument fundamentally challenges scholars in African American religious studies to foreground state power over alienated subjects rather than narrate stories of freedom from enslaving or colonizing powers. The subjects range from the…

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Medicine May Be the Way We Got in the Door: Social Justice and Community Health in the Mid-1960s 15 2. Thank You for Your Help ... Six Children Are Enough: The Abortion Birth Control Referral Service 57 3. Reproductive Control, Sexual Empowerment: The Aradia Women's Health Center and the Early Movement for Feminist Health Reform 91 4. Conserving Feminist Health Care, Confronting Anti-Abortion: The Atlanta Feminist Women's Health Center 123 5. All This That Has Happened to Me Shouldn't Happen to Nobody Else: Loretta Ross and the Women of Color Reproductive Freedom Movement of the 1980s 167 6. Women of Color and the Movement for Reproductive Justice: A Human Rights Agenda 193 Notes 221 Index 253 About the Author 265

Borderland Films is an ambitious and impressive work of cultural history. While focused on a relatively short period, 1908–1919, the book covers approximately five hundred films made in the United States in those years. Most of the films discussed have been lost in print form, but as Dominique Brégent-Heald proves, much relevant information can be gleaned from the extrafilmic textual record, including film reviews, publicity materials, letters to the editor, and production records. Contributing to her analysis of these films is the author's synthesis of scholarship from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including social and cultural history, film studies, and border studies. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the book is its effective argument for the study of place-based films generally and “borderland films” specifically. Heretofore bracketed under the amorphous heading of “westerns,” these borderland films are distinctive, the author argues, for their use of those liminal settings, the spaces that make up the boundaries between Canada, the United States, and Mexico,…

Andrew Woolford examines in detail the history of four indigenous boarding schools, two in New Mexico and two in Manitoba, drawing upon official reports, available interviews with former students, and other sources. The study illuminates significant differences between American and Canadian policies and the implications for students and staff. The Canadian schools were entrusted to poorly funded denominational agencies with little guidance by government, while in the United States the schools were government institutions, but federal policy toward educating indigenous youth changed repeatedly. This Benevolent Experiment is a contribution to the field of genocide studies rather than to the history of education or indigenous history. Before Woolford turns to discussing the schools he provides nearly one hundred pages on “Settler Colonial Genocide in North America” and “Framing the Indian as a Problem.” The discussion of the four schools is consequently highly selective, seeking to prove the “genocidal” intentions of those who created the system of residential schools. If there were…

Journal Article “Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations.” Get access Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C., http://www.americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/item/?id=934.Temporary exhibition, Sept. 21, 2014–Fall 2018. 8,000 square feet. Kevin Gover (Pawnee), National Museum of the American Indian director; Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), guest curator. Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 148–150, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw016 Published: 01 June 2016

John Fea has written a lively and reasonably comprehensive bicentennial history of the American Bible Society (ABS) that should prove useful for institutional administrators and academic scholars. Historians who know the ABS primarily as an early nineteenth-century creation that constituted part of the “benevolent empire” of Bible, tract, and Sunday school organizations will be surprised at the extent of the institution's reach. The society's story seemingly intersected with every aspect of American culture over the past two centuries, from antebellum sectional tensions to late nineteenth-century global expansion through anticommunist crusades in the 1950s. Fea nicely contextualizes the ways this long-lived institution innovatively engaged with all of these issues, and he effectively elucidates the tension between Americanism and Christianity that remained at the core of the ABS's self-perception and image. He never loses sight of the religious aspect of the story. One particularly strong chapter concerns the ways this historically and occasionally nativist Protestant institution…

Tiyi M. Morris's account of the work of Womanpower Unlimited (wu), a small Mississippi-based women's organization with a predominately African American membership, begins with an explanation of the invisibility of such groups in historical memory. For many black women, Morris asserts, taking care of their communities was simply “what Black women did; without fanfare or expecting praise” (p. 13). Morris's account of wu uncovers this vital communal work and provides important evidence of black women's activism, not only in Mississippi but also on a global stage. wu sprang up in Jackson in May 1961, when the formidable Claire Collins Harvey, local business owner and activist, joined a delegation of prominent black citizens determined to observe the trial of the young freedom riders who had been arrested in their city. Harvey was shocked by the physical vulnerability of the freedom riders she observed and rallied her allies to provide clothing and other personal items for them. From this small effort to demonstrate community support and maternal protection emerged wu, determined to…

Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

In the past decade ragtime has experienced a rebirth. Recent studies of early twentieth-century modernity have appropriately reoriented their attention to the age of ragtime, drawing attention to the musical form's cultural confluences. Reevaluating ragtime's cultural importance in the new American century calls attention to African American citizenship in the discourse about what, and who, produced distinctively American culture. The extent to which African American musical culture was reviled or celebrated by American national discourses of culture, profession, and policy indicates relative dispositions toward African American citizenship and acceptance. Ragtime's inclusion in modern America's composition was recognized mostly by its African American composers. Debating in the New York Times with the writer and former black bohemian lyrical composer James Weldon Johnson, the noted music critic Henry Krehbiel called ragtime “a degraded form of music” with brothel beginnings. The ragtime cultural debates emblematized these polemic attitudes about African American citizenship. White…

"Over 15 chapters, Dunaway transforms what we know about icons and events. Seeing Green is the first history of ads, films, political posters, and magazine photography in the postwar American environmental movement. From fear of radioactive fallout during the Cold War to anxieties about global warming today, images have helped to produce what Dunaway calls "ecological citizenship," telling us that "we are all to blame." Dunaway heightens our awareness of how depictions of environmental catastrophes are constructed, manipulated, and fought over"...Publisher info

George C. Rable traces the depth and breadth of southern hatred of northerners before, during, and after the Civil War. He argues that their rhetoric continued well after the cessation of armed conflict, shaping the way southerners perceived the postbellum world and contributing to the fraught legacy of Reconstruction. To explore the ways white southerners vilified northerners Rable relies heavily on newspapers and examines political speeches and sermons as well. He also mines the letters and journals of soldiers and civilians, and draws heavily on evidence left by Confederate women, although largely those confined to the planter class. Rable's focus is on the power of language, demonstrating that a verbal war can have visceral consequences. White southerners' contempt for Yankees existed long before the start of hostilities. Those of Puritan background were seen as self-righteous and intolerant, and nascent Confederates compared them to the worst of every other nationality. This demonization only grew during the war as Confederates argued that Yankee society was rotten to the core…

In this fascinating study, Gregory Evans Dowd makes a compelling case for the importance of rumors—stories that are not necessarily false but rather groundless, or unsupported by evidence—to understanding early America. Drawing on the insights of such scholars as Marc Bloch, Georges Lefebvre, and Tamotsu Shibutani, Dowd examines the role of rumors in selected historical episodes, most of which concern the Cherokees and other southeastern natives, though materials from other regions, such as the northern theater of the Revolutionary War and the removal-era Midwest, also appear. Dowd leaves readers with a new appreciation of rumor in history—and unease over how historians have treated groundless tales. Dowd demonstrates how rumors can cause historical change. From the devastating sixteenth-century southeastern entradas (Spanish expeditions) through the Roanoke fiasco, stories of gold spurred colonial efforts. Rumored gold continued to glimmer through the colonial period in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and into the early nineteenth century, when gold was uncovered in Cherokee…

For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all else, dignity. The “land question” was a major concern for African American theorists and activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Attempts to identify a territorial base for the construction of an autonomous black community or nation reflected one of the period's defining political developments: the rebirth of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. By 1970 much of the new “pan-African nationalist” intelligentsia—from the former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and the Malcolm X Liberation University director Owusu Sadaukai to the artist-activist Amiri Baraka and the Black Panther officer Eldridge Cleaver to lesser-known figures such as the writer Ann F. Cook and the economist Robert S. Browne—linked the major questions of freedom and self-determination to the issue of land tenure. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses has noted, the 1850s through the 1920s represented the…

This collection of essays offers two different contributions to American immigration historiography. The editors' introduction provides a valuable primer on the recently emergent approach of entanglement theory, described by the historian Christian Goeschel as “a dynamic theory of crossovers, transfers, and exchanges.” In Entangling Migration History Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund provide a pithy intellectual genealogy of the constituent approaches of transnationalism, borderlands studies, and comparative history, each having played an important role in migration studies during the last several decades. The second accomplishment of this volume is more specific, as a number of contributors applied combinations of the those approaches to specific topics within the field of North American migration. The resulting scholarship sheds new light on largely overlooked time periods or subjects. José C. Moya's “hemispheric” study of early modern migration to Canada, for example, establishes the relatively unattractive nature of early modern movement to British North America (rather than…

Photographic historians emphasize the importance of the production, circulation, and reception of photographs. However, as Cara A. Finnegan notes, there are very few studies that examine the ways photographs were viewed historically. Visual studies scholars discuss what “we” see in an image, but this “we” is more often the historian than the historical viewer (p. 6). Finnegan's study ably addresses this problem by analyzing the “rhetorical traces of viewers' encounters with particular photographs” at four key historical moments, arguing that these viewers' engagement with photography helped them negotiate “emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life” (pp. 7, 1). In the first chapter, Finnegan links Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and James Gibson's battlefield images of Civil War casualties with William H. Mumler's studio portraits of departed spirits, showing how viewers of these images “acknowledged the capacity of photography to produce presence in the face of profound, and often permanent, absence” (p. 2). The second chapter explores how, when a newly discovered…

On June 20, 1840, Daniel O'Connell, a member of Parliament from Ireland, spoke on behalf of India. Addressing the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London, O'Connell invoked “another mighty movement on behalf of humanity; and that relates to the state of the tenure of lands in the East Indies.” He was referring to the land tax that the East India Company had placed on territory under its jurisdiction. O'Connell believed the assessment rate was far too high, lamenting that “so long as these people are in a state of poverty, rendered poor by the oppression of the East India Company, they will be exposed to the greatest misery.” Misrule had created Indian poverty.1 On April 24, 1842, Thomas Finnie, a plantation overseer from Mississippi who had relocated to India's North-Western Provinces, disputed O'Connell's conclusion. Recording his thoughts in a journal, Finnie claimed that “it is not the land-tax, but the indolent, licentious and prodigal habits of the people themselves, that keep them comparatively poor.” “And yet,” he complained, “Mr. O'Connell is about to bring up a Bill for…

On June 12, 1818, Capt. John Danels of Baltimore and his crew left Buenos Aires aboard the Irresistible. Danels wielded an illegal letter of marque from José Gervasio Artigas, the revolutionary leader of the Banda Oriental (modern-day Uruguay). In 1816 Portugal had invaded the Banda Oriental, which lies just south of the Brazilian border. As an eminent caudillo, Artigas led an army to stave off Portuguese encroachments and protect the province's autonomy. To assist him, he recruited Americans such as Danels as privateers. On July 10, 1818, the Irresistible approached Portuguese captain José Antônio Moreira's ship, the Maria de Lisboa, as it sailed from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo in the Banda Oriental. Without warning, the Irresistible fired on the Maria, causing “great destruction” and wounding three men. The privateers boarded the ship and looted money, cables, canvas, and other supplies. After completing their plunder, they sailed away, leaving most of the Portuguese crew to their luck on the damaged vessel. The Americans took with them, however, three African slaves belonging…

Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads traces the emergence of soul style while zeroing in on the quotidian histories of black women activists (p. 10). How did these women's style choices reflect their needs and experiences in this era? Conversely, how did black women “style” themselves as newly liberated black and female subjects in a period of rupture and change? Liberated Threads approaches style as a cultural practice closely tied to political activism. Ford's eclectic, transnational archive, which draws from newspapers, magazines, photographs, lp covers, and interviews, allows her to capture the dynamism of familiar signifiers of soul style. In the opening chapters, for example,…

Most observers agree that Hurricane Katrina is a defining moment in the history of Latinos in New Orleans. A common narrative suggests that the city had virtually no Latinos in the city prior to Katrina, that the racial landscape was defined exclusively along black-white lines, and that immediately after Katrina the city was “overrun with Mexicans.” This understanding exists for variety of reasons, including the fact that it has a certain amount of truth to it. The so-called Latino boom of the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans settled into the U.S. South, essentially bypassed New Orleans. A depressed economy, combined with ample cheap labor provided largely by poor black residents, resulted in very few Latin Americans being drawn to the Crescent City during the 1990s. By 2000, this metropolitan area with a population over 1 million was home to only fifty thousand Latinos. And Katrina, or rather the rebuilding of New Orleans, did, in fact, draw thousands of Latin Americans to the region. They helped rebuild the city under extremely difficult and exploitative…

Devery S. Anderson first encountered Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, as an undergraduate watching the Eyes on the Prize (1987–1990) documentary series. That initial encounter with Till's story launched a nearly twenty-year project to uncover everything that he could about Till and his family, the brutal crime, and its historical legacies. With Emmett Till Anderson has written what will likely become the definitive study of the lynching and its aftermath. Based on an immense amount of research—including over forty interviews by the author—Anderson recounts Till's childhood in Chicago; his fateful trip south to visit family in 1955; the incident at the Bryant general store in Money, Mississippi, that led Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam to decide that the fourteen year old needed to be taught the ways of southern white supremacy; Till's lynching; the trial and its aftermath; the reopening of the case by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2004; and Till's presence as a symbol of racial injustice in contemporary…

"Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West. The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments…

The study of racial segregation after World War II has rightly attracted the attention of multiple generations of historians. Their breakthroughs have led to valuable understandings about the most persistent and divisive questions in American history. Jeffery D. Gonda joins this cohort of determined analysts with Unjust Deeds. Gonda narrowly focuses on a crucial turning point in the history of race relations—the 1940–1948 period. He raises questions about the people at the grassroots who determined the legality of racial covenants. The history then follows the path of the litigation through the circuit and appellate court systems, culminating in the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). In an early discussion of covenant breaking, Gonda presents the case of J. D. Shelley and Ethel Lee Shelley. With the assistance of their pastor (who was also a real estate agent), Reverend Robert Bishop, they identified a home in St. Louis in 1945 owned by a white widow “who was eager to sell” (p. 35). The widow, Josephine Fitzgerald, was actually acting for Bishop as a…

Historians have long acknowledged the significance of the two Great Awakenings in shaping the United States' religious and cultural landscape. Paul B. Moyer, however, calls attention to the period in between. He adds to a growing body of studies that challenge the view of the American Revolution as “a spiritual valley between two peaks of religious revivalism” by offering a compelling new microhistory of an important figure in early American religious history—the Public Universal Friend (pp. 5–6). The Universal Friend was in some ways a combination of William Miller and Mother Ann Lee. A prophet who challenged gender conventions of the time, the Friend allegedly emerged in 1776 to reanimate the lifeless corpse of a twenty-three-year-old Quaker named Jemima Wilkinson, who had died after a long illness. After assuming the identity of the Friend, Wilkinson began dressing, acting, and self-identifying as a man. The masculine persona then developed a following and eventually founded a couple of settlements in western New York, where his followers could pursue a spiritual life that…

In The Borderlands of Race the anthropologist Jennifer R. Nájera merges microhistorical analysis and participant-observer anthropology to uncover the development and dismantling of racial segregation of ethnic Mexican people along the Texas border. Nájera utilizes the small town of La Feria, Texas, to reveal the institutional and cultural structures that shaped social relations along racial lines. She argues that the Mexican community there found ways to counter decades of segregation, and those actions facilitated integration in later years. Through historical anthropology methods, Nájera engages readers in the process of historical recovery, connecting interpretations of the past to memory of that time to reveal the deep cultural and structural impact of segregation. Nájera divides the history of segregation in La Feria into three periods: segregation in the early twentieth century, accommodation in the 1940s and 1950s, and integration beginning in the civil rights era. The initial chapters on the development of segregation rely primarily on the literature on Chicano history.…

A popular account explains how the banjo became such an iconic American instrument: it arrived from Africa via the slave trade, and when it found its way to Appalachia the Scots-Irish mountaineers added the distinctive fifth-string drone in an attempt to replicate the sound of bagpipes from their homelands. In this account the instrument is characterized by a cultural hybridity that borrows from and combines musical traditions from multiple continents. Laurent Dubois's “biography” of the banjo concurs with the general notion of cross-fertilization—he focuses extensively on the complicated mixture of exchange and struggle, collaboration and oppression, within the history of the instrument. However, this meticulously researched book dispels such easy stories as the Scots-Irish account, showing instead that African precursors to the banjo had short fifth strings long before the banjo appeared in the Appalachian mountains or the workshop of the nineteenth-century white banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney, who claimed to have invented the banjo's fifth string. More than a minor point of…

Jen Manion's book examines how, in the wake of the American Revolution, the new American states, rejecting the “bloody code” of the mother country, addressed the issue of reforming their systems of punishment in accordance with enlightenment thinking and liberal reform. What they achieved, however, argues Manion, was a harsh regime of punishment centered on the penitentiary and a system of incarceration for minor offenders driven (though not explicitly) by “ideas about race, gender and sexuality” and intended to shore up the social order threatened by a growing underclass (p. 5). The purpose of the penitentiary was to reform the criminal by means of lengthy sentences, during which time inmates were expected to contemplate their situation, repent the errors of their ways, turn to work as therapy, and prepare to return to, and survive in, the world outside the prison. Classification and segregation were part of the process. By focusing on the punishment meted out to selected groups—immigrants, African Americans, and the poor—Manion moves discussions of change away from an earlier…

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 Part I Suburban Activism 1 No Ordinary Suburbs 19 2 Good Neighbors 43 3 A Multiracial World 71 4 Grappling with Growth 97 5 Political Action for Peace 123 Part II Massachusetts Liberals 6 A New Center 149 7 Open Suburbs vs. Open Space 173 8 Tightening the Belt 199 9 No One Home to Answer the Phone 227 10 From Taxachusetts to the Massachusetts Miracle 251 Epilogue 281 Notes 289 Index 357

The price of the Louisiana Purchase has long signaled one of world history's most spectacular real estate windfalls. Henry Adams called it “unparalleled, because it cost almost nothing.” At the sesquicentennial of the purchase, Bernard DeVoto cited the “fantastically small” cost and dubbed it the most important “event in all American history.” A recent historian of the deal uncovered a fanciful offer to take the land off federal hands at cost, “about 4 cents an acre,” and he mused that those making the offer “would have made a killing.” For generations of students, the $15 million price tag has embodied the story of a bargain that doubled a national domain for pennies on the acre, glossing over the fact that France had precious little real estate to sell.1 Over most of the area covered by the Louisiana Purchase the United States bought a territorial abstraction known to adherents of the doctrine of discovery as preemption. As legal scholars and historians have pointed out, preemption overlaid indigenous occupancy rights with exclusive authority to obtain Indian title by conquest or…

“Why is our novelty culture,” Gary Cross asks, “so fixed on memory?” (p. 2). Drawing on numerous telling episodes, anecdotes, and examples, this breezily written book attempts to provide an answer by combining historical methods, including textual and social analysis, with a wide range of evidence gained through his personal encounters with collectors, workers in the heritage industry, hot-rod aficionados, and more. Cross views a boom in “consumed nostalgia” as the most characteristic form of personal memory over the last half century. An increasingly fast-paced capitalism, Cross argues, has fueled and accelerated a plethora of changes since World War II. This maelstrom of transformation has led individuals to focus on the fleeting here and now while simultaneously producing forgetfulness through celebrations of innovation that blocks the emergence of a stable sense of history. In a highly individualized, increasingly fragmented, and ever-shifting society, personal nostalgia, Cross continues, provides an antidote to the pressures of a modernity in which many people feel adrift. He…

On October 25, 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the first modern prisons in the United States, received its first prisoner, Charles Williams, a young African American man. Although little is known of Williams, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict details the experiences of another African American prisoner, Austin Reed. Through his previously unknown memoir, Reed describes how he was held in various New York penal institutions, first as an indentured servant and juvenile delinquent and then as an adult convict, during roughly the same period as Williams. Recently acquired and authenticated by a team of researchers associated with Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Reed's writing sheds light on the cruelties essential to New York's model of penal servitude just as it was becoming central to the early republic's penal ideology. Reed's unfinished manuscript is one of the first known prison memoirs written by an African American, and its publication is prefaced by David W. Blight and Robert B. Stepto's foreword as well as an introduction by…

Historians of U.S. vaudeville, musical comedy, and other early twentieth-century popular entertainment have offered lively accounts of performers who negotiated, undermined, and exploited stereotypes of gender, race, class, and sexuality in their onstage and offstage appearances. Yet surprisingly few scholars have examined the complex entanglements of race and gender in such acts. Kathleen B. Casey skillfully addresses this oversight, foregrounding the intersectionality of race and gender in the careers of four performers—Eva Tanguay, Julian Eltinge, Lillyan Brown, and Sophie Tucker—who dominated the vaudeville stage between 1900 and 1930. In each chapter, Casey charts the career of an individual artist, detailing her or his race- and gender-bending performances through inventive readings of newspaper reviews, promotional articles, memoirs, advertisements, photographs, sheet music, and audio recordings. Casey begins with Tanguay, an electrifying performer who thrilled audiences with her flashy costumes, untamed hair, dynamic personality, and unapologetic projection of “animalistic…