The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2017

In the 1970s scholars began to use the term genocide loosely to describe the murderous extermination campaigns and state policies directed at California's Indian peoples from the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846 through the conclusion of the Modoc War in 1873. Notably, thirty years later Brendan C. Lindsay's Murder State left little doubt that “if genocide had existed as a term in the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans might have used it as a way to describe their campaign to exterminate Indians” (2012, p. 23) Benjamin Madley's shocking An American Genocide covers the same period as Murder State but to a very different end. Whereas Lindsay used the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to frame his discussion of the killing of Indians, Madley uses the convention to indict local, state, and federal officials for genocide, leaving no stone unturned in his quest to document every Indian killed and expose every genocidal perpetrator, many of whom became pillars of California society. The result is a terrifying portrayal.…

Matthew Desmond's ethnographic masterpiece begins when thirteen-year-old Jori Belle throws a snowball at a car on Milwaukee's north side in December 2008. When the driver chases him home and kicks down his door, his mother, Arleen, and her two boys are summarily evicted. After months in a shelter, they find a roomy affordable house, which the city soon condemns as “unfit for human habitation.” Two evictions later, they manage to find an apartment, but rent and utilities take up 88 percent of Arleen's disability check, and a sister's funeral puts her behind in rent. The family is evicted just after Christmas, and the landlord advises Arleen, as they exit housing court together, never to become a landlord. Arleen's family slips from hope into crushing misfortune, down a legal and economic slope engineered for maximum risk to renters and maximum profit to landlords and lawyers. Arleen loses another apartment, misses an appointment, loses her stipend, and, with that, loses her boys. Of the eight black and white Milwaukee families whose stories Desmond interweaves in aching detail, this…

James T. Kloppenberg's massive Toward Democracy is an exploration of American, British, and French thinking about democracy from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. The book dazzles through its range and sweep, offering new interpretations of familiar texts and drawing attention to unfamiliar ones. Readers will find, in this single volume—in addition to a history of political developments in the United States, Great Britain, and France—penetrating interpretations of major thinkers from Michel de Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke to James Madison. To navigate this vast expanse of material in a coherent way, Kloppenberg needs to limit what he will do. He is entirely forthright about what he considers “democracy” to be and how he will trace its history. This makes for the book's strengths and weaknesses. For Kloppenberg, democracy cannot be reduced to any particular set of institutions and practices. These must and will change over time. Democracy does, however, entail (a) a commitment to deliberation, (b) an…

As a Wake Forest University undergraduate, I had several classes with Thomas F. Gossett, whose 1963 book, Race: The History of an Idea in America, first brought the connection between race and eugenics to my attention and to the attention of many others. Since Gossett's work appeared, the literature on the topic has burgeoned. Like Gossett, Thomas C. Leonard is interested in the history of ideas that shape meaning and policy, and like Gossett, Leonard draws on the writings of Progressive Era reformers. For Gossett, race, after 1865, became an idea shaped both by a southern aristocracy ready to reassert its prewar authority and by northern reformers and industrial conservatives prepared to adjust the nation to dramatic economic and social changes. Gossett was certainly appreciative of the effects of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement on the shaping of American post–Civil War views of race. For Leonard, a group of progressive economists, who, amid late nineteenth-century disciplinary and professional formation, were just as likely to think of themselves as sociologists and…

Leigh Eric Schmidt's Village Atheists gives readers a refreshing look at the social and legal spaces occupied by atheists and unbelievers in America during the late nineteenth century. Schmidt has organized this book around four individuals, whose biographies allow him to capture the lived experience of these radicals—people he describes as “aggrieved contrarians.” Schmidt wants to bring the “mundane materiality” of their lives into view as he explores the “religious estrangement” that arose out of the “intricate web of everyday encounters” (p. 18). Schmidt argues that these daily interactions alienated these atheists from the believing majority. Village Atheists takes an approach that is not immediately obvious. Each of the four historical chapters centers on an individual, but in a couple of them the purpose seems to be less biographical and more contextual. The most biographical chapter is the first one, on Samuel Porter Putnam, which uses Putnam's autobiography to structure the narrative of his journey from Congregational minister to secular lecturer. The chapter on the…

When and how did the United States become home to the largest prison system in the world? In what way did the development of that system exacerbate urban racial segregation and inequality? In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime Elizabeth Hinton documents the federal government's mobilization of the war on crime. Although the Reagan administration is usually credited with initiating massive urban surveillance, Hinton argues that the practice has a much longer history. It began with John F. Kennedy's President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime in 1961. He framed welfare programs as antidelinquency measures, introducing new forms of supervision (“soft surveillance”) in targeted urban areas (p. 45). Lyndon B. Johnson expanded Kennedy's intervention and blended its “two separate but related urban policies” the War on Poverty and the war on crime (p. 105). As the Johnson administration and Congress scaled back funding for the former, financial support for the latter swelled. Under the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Johnson created the Law Enforcement…

In letters, legal and political documents, diaries, and commonplace books, women in early America crafted an alternative public. In their exchanges, they practiced a particularity that distinguished them from the print publication that has been the focus of a literary history populated by males. In the Neighborhood, a highly original exploration of this world, highlights the range of textual forms that constituted “women's publication in early America.” Circulating through the interpersonal relations that women enacted in their neighborhoods, these forms include the important oral and scribal forms in which women's ideas circulated. Relational publication, as Caroline Wigginton labels the dynamics of interpersonal exchange, was a sociable enterprise that mapped the intimacy of daily life. In a series of case studies, she brings the significance of these dynamics to the fore. The relational publication presented and documented in Milcah Martha Moore's Book is Wigginton's most telling illustration. In the 126 entries in Milcah Martha Moore's commonplace book, elite women gathered a…

Kristen Hogan's The Feminist Bookstore Movement is a carefully researched and highly engaging account of the social, economic, and political roles of feminist bookstores in North America in the late twentieth century. More than an account of the rise and fall of feminist bookstores, Hogan's study makes a case for understanding the stores as integral to the development of lesbian antiracist and feminist accountability. Hundreds of feminist presses in North America turned out thousands of titles every year from the 1970s to the 1980s. The majority of these publications were distributed via an equally well-established network of feminist bookstores. In the predigital era, feminist bookstores were the primary distribution mechanism for feminist and lesbian materials. Feminist bookstores did more than distribute books, journals, and magazines, however. For many women, these stores were also integral to coming out—the first places to find a lesbian text and meet other lesbians because the locations often doubled as cafés, child care centers, or community meeting sites. Drawing on archival…