The 50 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2018

Arguably, scholars tend to use two general interpretative paradigms in American religious history to evaluate trajectories of religious identities and institutions over the long twentieth century. In the first, much of modern U.S. religious history is written against a backdrop of slow, steady declension of mainline American Protestantism's primacy in the public square. In the other, black religious traditions in America are more often sidelined as expressions of political defiance or pathological deviancy rather than pietistic diversity. It is delightful to witness how Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming attacks these twin shibboleths in poignant, provocative, and lucid prose. In this meticulously researched and vividly written book, Weisenfeld frames her examination around groups such as the Moorish Science Temple, Ethiopian Hebrew congregations, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission as the central foci. The author masterfully provides readers with “the theologies, practices, community formations, and politics of early twentieth-century black religious…

In Knocking on Labor's Door Lane Windham complicates our understanding of union organizing and the declining influence of organized labor during the 1970s. In standard accounts, the decade begins with considerable promise and labor activism but ends with significant drops in rates of union membership. In fact, in Stayin' Alive (2010), his acclaimed overview of the decade, Jefferson R. Cowie goes so far as to subtitle the book “The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.” Windham finds Cowie's requiem premature. Using statistics from the National Labor Relations Board, she demonstrates that the number of workers eligible to vote in union elections remained relatively constant throughout the 1970s and was also consistent with rates since the mid-1950s. In other words, unorganized groups of workers continued to seek union representation despite national drops in union density; the working class was hardly dead. Who were these unorganized workers whose enthusiasm for unionization has largely been overlooked? According to Windham, they were people of color and women of all races;…

From contraception to abortion, including LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) rights, sexual harassment, and sex education, nothing ignites American passions today more than sexual politics. Based on these issues, staunch moral points of view inform voting behavior and the choice of political party. Conservatives derive their stance from traditionally held convictions, while liberals often champion human equality and social justice. The public debate involves passionate opinions, inspires angered responses, and sways elections from the local level to the presidency. Historians have attempted to explain various facets of this reality, but few brave the idea of an expansive history. R. Marie Griffith's Moral Combat ventures to understand “why so many American Christians seemed disproportionately obsessed with sex” (p. 323, emphasis in original). Griffith organizes her chapters by decade, and within each decade she concentrates on the emergence of one issue. Readers thus travel from the mid-1910s through the 1920s with the debate over contraception,…

Disaster literature has experienced a rapid evolution from hackneyed tales of death and destruction wrapped in florid story lines into a diverse scholarly palette redolent with social, political, economic, and cultural meaning. Disasters offer great explanatory power and a useful lens to examine American culture. The great Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of the most destructive river floods in U.S. history and has been extensively studied in popular and scholarly texts. In The Flood Year 1927, Susan Scott Parrish, a professor of English and literature at the University of Michigan, eschews a pat retelling of the 1927 flood in favor of a multidisciplinary approach examining “how this disaster took on form and meaning … across multiple media platforms” (p. 3). The shape and style this disaster took, according to Parrish, were unique to the modern age and mediated in the pages of local and national press, the broadcasts of radio programs, vaudevillian performances, literature, blues lyrics, and political cartoons.

In Nothing Ever Dies (2016), the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen highlights the afterlife of war. The so-called Viet Nam War did not end with the 1973 Paris Peace Accord or the 1975 reunification of the North and South. The conflict continues to haunt the lives of those who survived. Phuong Tran Nguyen explores this insight by analyzing the political formation of the Vietnamese diasporic community in the United States. The title of his book, Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon, foregrounds its central arguments. The identification of Vietnamese Americans as refugees resonated as a political project on multiple levels. The arrival of successive waves of Southeast Asians forced the United States to codify its policies regarding refugee admissions and practices regarding resettlement. In addition, the refugee identity of the Vietnamese allowed community members and the U.S. nation-state to win an ideological war against communism. In fact, Vietnamese people gained visibility, access to economic resources, and a degree of acceptance in…

How the state engages religion and how religion, in turn, affects the state have prompted considerable discussion in American life, thanks to the First Amendment's prohibition of a religious establishment and its guarantee of the “free exercise” of religion. Ronit Y. Stahl plunges into that conversation in this study of the U.S. military chaplaincy between World War I and the 1980s. Her argument avoids the question of whether maintaining a military chaplaincy creates a kind of religious establishment; courts have consistently ruled that the chaplaincy is constitutional because it theoretically treats all religious expressions equally and aims to nurture the spiritual welfare of those in the military. Stahl's thesis is that the military chaplaincy and its policies are critical catalysts in shaping the nation's religious culture, often anticipating how Americans understand religion's role in public life and identifying issues and problems (and their resolution) in the larger culture. For example, Stahl insists that when, in the era of World War I, the military adopted a…

This book focuses on the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), a multiracial organization with an internationalist outlook that emerged from the Popular Front in depression-era New York City. Over the next five decades it would defend immigrants against repression and deportation. With the ACPFB at its center, the immigrant-rights movement became, Rachel Ida Buff shows in this deeply researched and fascinating account, a bridge between the Old Left and the New Left. The group publicized the cases of denaturalized Communists threatened with deportation under the McCarran Act (1950), such as Rose Chernin, prosecuted for allegedly entering the country fraudulently “with plans to become a Communist agent” (p. 219)—when she was twelve years old! A small but vigorous Los Angeles–based chapter of the ACPFB arranged legal representation for Mexican Americans targeted in Operation Wetback (launched in 1954), and persuaded the New York office to take West Coast minority populations as seriously as its traditional focus on the Ellis Island generation. Throughout…

In No Mercy Here Sarah Haley explores the complex constructions of race and gender in the Georgia legal and prison system at the turn of the twentieth century. By examining judicial proceedings and African American women's carceral experiences, Haley reveals how “gender is constructed by and through race and that the production of woman and other stable gender categories required violence” (p. 8). The setting for Haley's work is the Georgia judicial system, the Milledgeville State Prison Farm, and popular imagination. Within these systems, readers will find the not-all-together surprising reach of Jim Crow's social, political, and economic influence. The work's seven chapters illustrate the ways courts and news print media portrayed black women as “others,” thereby justifying exploitation of their sexual and physical labor. Imprisoned African American women suffered sexualized whippings, which Haley rightly labels as “pornographic,” sexual assault—generally ignored by prison officials even when the rape resulted in pregnancy—and the double injustice of forced domestic labor through…

In 1968 the war in Vietnam had entered its bloodiest year and the Cultural Revolution in China was at its height. Amid this turmoil, a group of young American scholars specializing in the study of Asia created the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS). Hoping to transform the professional field of Asian studies, they simultaneously challenged American imperialist policies in Asia. As Fabio Lanza explains in this study of the CCAS, the concerned scholars, most of whom were graduate students, saw the field of Asian studies and American imperialism as mutually supporting. Government funding of research sustained the symbiotic relationship between policy and the profession and raised disturbing questions about the complicity of scholars in American imperialism. The CCAS promoted members' ideas through the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, a less formal newsletter, and several volumes of essays. As Lanza notes, “concerned,” implied “a subjective, personal commitment, a direct involvement in the issue at stake” (p. 2). Concern with China dominated the pages of the Bulletin of…

Gregory Laski's Untimely Democracy is an intriguing and thought-provoking assessment of how writers and activists of the post-Reconstruction era grappled with the period's troubling realities. For many, the growth in violence against African Americans and the rescinding of their newly granted rights and freedoms were evidence that while the bodily enslavement of African Americans had ended with abolition, the degradation of African Americans was far from over. Laski focuses on these writers' understanding of the political implications of those conditions: If the injustices of the past were still extant in the present, was a better, more democratic future possible? Laski explores these issues through close readings of a range of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century texts, such as speeches, petitions, expository essays and books, slave narratives, and novels, which he sees as “political theory in narrative form” (p. 3). He includes texts by a few white writers—most notably Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Crane—but his primary focus is on works by African American writers,…

The United States had many weapons to use against the Soviet Union—from missiles to development aid to blue jeans and cans of Coca Cola. Among the most important were what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “spiritual weapons,” by which he meant the mobilization of religious communities against communism. The important and growing literature on Cold War religion focuses on Christianity and Europe. Eugene Ford's Cold War Monks is a welcome addition to this scholarship because of its sustained focus on Buddhism. It is also a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Cold War studies, which is shifting the focus away from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union to understand the Cold War globally. Ford's focus is primarily on Thailand, with substantial sections as well on Vietnam and Cambodia. He argues that the Cold War forced Thai Buddhism away from “its closed, indeed closeted, approach to the world outside Thailand” to become “more diverse, more political, and more internationalized under Cold War pressures” (p. 2). Ford is also attentive to the evolving U.S.…

The editors of the Cambridge University Press's Studies in North American Indian History promise the series will “exemplify new approaches to the Native American past” (p. iii). With Allan Greer's Property and Dispossession that promise is fulfilled. For readers, of course, there is no mystery that the end result of the European invasion of North America was the dispossession of the lands of indigenous people. However, Greer offers a comparative study of the similarities and dissimilarities of that process by different European empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. “The practical business of dispossessing natives and remaking American space as colonial property and state,” he writes, “had fallen to Europeans on the spot: explorers, conquerors, priests, administrators, settlers, magistrates, soldiers, and others who came and gave tangible meaning to the concepts of ‘New Spain,’ ‘New France’ and ‘New England.’ By and large, it was they who constructed colonial jurisdictions, distributed land, and developed tenure practices within their respective enclaves; they also…

Ashley D. Farmer offers students of twentieth-century U.S. history a marvelous gift: an intellectual genealogy of radical black women's black power activism, grounded in their political theorizing and cultural production and spanning the post–World War II years through the 1970s. Remaking Black Power focuses on the gendered imaginary—a symbolic terrain where activists critiqued ideas of manhood and womanhood and envisioned new paths to empowerment—as a primary site of women's engagement with the larger project of redefining black identity. Examining speeches, essays, prison writings, and artwork, Farmer considers what they reveal about radical black women's aspirations and how a range of activists endeavored “to reshape Black Power–era symbols and politics to fit their needs and lived experiences” (p. 3). Farmer's argument is broad and deep, a remarkable achievement given her expansive chronology and the proliferation of black power groups with often-conflicting agendas and allegiances. She manages this by organizing the book so that each chapter considers a specific trope generated…

Seeking to understand U.S. eugenic sterilization in the twentieth century, Molly Ladd-Taylor looks beyond national elites who advanced eugenic science as a route to racial purity. Thirty-two U.S. states passed eugenic sterilization laws, surgically sterilizing at least 63,000 Americans, nearly 80% of them women, and Ladd-Taylor believes that more was at work than eugenic ideology. Focusing on Minnesota, Ladd-Taylor argues that social welfare imperatives and administrative regimes were critical drivers of sterilization. Eugenic sterilization targeted members of the majority white population and was grafted onto a social welfare system tasked with prudent spending while caring for dependent and disorderly populations. Unmarried sexually active women had long been linked with poverty and dependency, and the sterilization program that developed after 1925 “owed less to abstract ideas about preventing the degeneration of the white race than to practical concerns with keeping relief costs low by controlling dependency, delinquency, and sex” (p. 18).

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery introduces agricultural history into discussions regarding the vitality of capitalism within transnational slavery during the nineteenth century. Throughout this book, Daniel B. Rood offers a reading of how racialized bodies linked with specific technological skills as dynamic plantation systems altered to accommodate capitalist and industrial changes to slave systems. He specifically explores how desires in the 1830s and 1840s for increased material output in Cuba transformed slave systems due to varying fits and starts of industrial progress. With this assertion, he follows numerous scholars who have searched the fragile and dynamic links between capitalism and slavery after the Haitian Rebellion. In positing these connections, Rood widens the transnational lens of slave studies through exploring economic relations between the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. These associations, between southern wheat crops, Cuban sugar planters, and Brazilian coffee expansion, tied the Atlantic world tighter during the “second slavery.”

“It just don't make any sense,” exclaimed an African American soldier, training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi in 1942. “We're all in the same army, wearing the same khaki, and they say we're fighting for the same thing. … [And] when those Japs and Wops start shooting they don't try to find out who is white and who is black before they aim. Yet they draw all kinds of damn fool lines and say ‘black boys on this side, whites on the other.’” The soldier was absolutely right, and not just about Shelby. As numerous scholars have documented, black-white color lines wended their ways through every imaginable aspect of World War II U.S. military life, both at home and overseas. These lines were formal—the War Department rule, for example, that barred black and white enlisted personnel from serving in the same regiment. And they were informal—the unwritten yet seemingly inviolable rule that prevented black officers from outranking white ones in the same unit. They were also physical—say, a string separating black and white sections of a post movie theater. And they were symbolic—the notion,…

As Eddie Cantor worked his way from neighborhood theatricals to vaudeville stardom, he learned that his career would rise or fall on waves of applause. The audience was always right, he concluded, and he used that insight to forge a career that carried him from vaudeville to radio, film, and early television. Vaudeville Melodies ably explores the origins and significance of this insight to understand the relationship between artists and audiences that shaped not only vaudeville but also popular music and popular culture, in ways that endure into our own time. Nicholas Gebhardt explores vaudeville as a product of the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, when the “corporate reconstruction of American culture” introduced “a new version of the good life in which consumption, desire, novelty, and pecuniary reward were principal values” (pp. 1, 127). Within vaudeville, Gebhardt emphasizes the complex relationships among booking offices that organized performers' touring routes, the interactions between performers and audiences at the heart of the vaudeville experience, and the popular…

By the 1980s, labor historians began to look more closely at the role of employers in labor-management relations. This endeavor resulted in a prodigious amount of scholarship. Some of this scholarship is to be found in this edited collection. The key to understanding employer activism against labor is found in a series of questions and answers presented by the editors in the introduction to these essays dedicated to understanding employer activism against labor. The editors also include “a brief overview of employers organizing against labor” and continue with a broad essay by Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger on race and labor management in the United States. Chad Pearson's essay, “‘Free Shops For Free Men’? The Challenges of Strikebreaking and Union-Busting in the Progressive Era,” follows the development of the open shop mentality, accompanied by depictions of strikebreaking and union busting in the Progressive Era. A balanced essay by Thomas A. Klug concerning employers' push for the open shop and the resistance by labor in Detroit in 1907 follows Pearson's contribution. His…

This is a careful, subtle, and insightful study of the religious relationships of Langston Hughes, one of the most important African American literary figures of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Wallace D. Best closely interrogates the usual depiction of Hughes as an atheist or as antireligious and finds such portrayals gravely wanting. A shift in religious attitudes among the African American cultural elite in the early twentieth century did, indeed, occur, with social gospel attitudes, new religious movements, agnosticism, and atheism all becoming increasingly acceptable. Hughes was affected by these shifts and influenced them also. He was a severe critic of organized religion after a failed conversion experience in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, when he was twelve years old. Hughes's religious oeuvre includes poems and religious dramas. Many of his religious poems were omitted from his collected works—something Best attributes to hard editorial decisions made necessary by the enormous quantity of Hughes's work. Best devotes an entire chapter to Hughes's most…

Lori Merish's book tells the tales of many kinds of distressed seamstresses, especially those who were pauperized by their demeaning labor as well as those whose sewing and domestic labor were racialized. Each of the six chapters concentrates on a different dimension of this dynamic: resistant, even radical, domestic work, social reform narratives, or Mexican women's potential for economic freedom. Merish's archive is mostly made up of the written record, including the Lowell Offering and the Voice of Industry to express attitudes toward women's labor, e.g., their compliance or resistance, their range of emotions, or their views on the progress of female “self-reliance.” In other writings, these poverty-stricken antebellum laborers are linked through their class and sexuality to prostitutes and “willful female adventuresses” in a revolt to escape the brutality of the textile industry and the exploitation of domestic service (pp. 146–52). A significant trait of Merish's narrative is her return to key phrases: the “emerging norm of the family wage” (pp. 9, 38, 58), the poverty of…

By the early 1980s, Japan's gross national product surpassed that of the Soviet Union, and Japan's economy became the second-largest in the world, behind only the United States. Japanese cars, television sets, VCRs, and Walkmans became ubiquitous around the world, while the television miniseries Shogun (1980) and Japanese-made or Japanese-themed films, cartoons, and books permeated global popular culture. This rise of Japan as an industry (“Japan, Inc.”) on the world economic stage and the fascination with Japanese popular culture led to fear and loathing (known as “Japan bashing”) by some Americans at the time. Meanwhile, Americans who benefited from Japan's growing economic presence or appreciated Japanese popular culture loved the nation, or at least defended it against the advocates of Japan bashing. Andrew C. McKevitt's book is a multipronged dissection of this eventful era of globalization in which Japanese companies, such as Sony and Honda, and Japanese popular culture played central roles in American politics and economy. He begins by examining warnings about the strength of…

In words that ring truer today than they have for many years, the black historian Carter G. Woodson told a Harlem audience in 1928 that “segregation is the next step to extermination” (New York Amsterdam News, April 25, 1928, p. 3). Burnis R. Morris's minibiography is an effort to place Woodson into a broader context, not just as the father of black history and founder of the Journal of African American History and Negro History Week (now Black History Month) but also as a pioneering advocate for the inclusion of blacks in all aspects of American life and history. To do this, Morris argues that Woodson was more than the historian he professed to be; he was also a journalist and founding member of the professional public relations fraternity. Of the former, it seems a little strange now that Woodson would want to be associated with such a dying profession as journalism. He was never paid by any of the mid-twentieth-century black newspapers that published him, telling the Baltimore Afro-American in 1936, “when I write I never think of compensation. I think about the good I can do” (p.…

The saxophonist John Coltrane (1926–1967) was always circumspect when he talked about his music. He never talked about race or politics, even though he lived through the revolutions of the 1960s. His low-key statements contrast strikingly with the complexity and fury as well as the romance and spirituality with which he played. His 1963 recording of “Alabama,” for example, was a heart-rending dirge recorded just two months after racists bombed a church and killed four children in Birmingham. In subsequent recordings, Coltrane moved beyond the accepted practices of jazz improvisation, cracking notes, squealing in the upper register, producing sounds that suggest human desperation. In 1964 he recorded the tour de force declaration of his religious conversion with the suite A Love Supreme. Coltrane actually contributed liner notes and a poem to the LP release of A Love Supreme. He wrote, “In the year of 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” This is a moving statement, but it says very little…

“This sudden vast enhancement of man's ability to make nonhuman nature produce what man requires from her has, for the first time in history, made the ideal of welfare for all a practical objective instead of a mere utopian dream.” “Mosquitoes are justifiably unloved, but unjustifiably understudied by historians.” The Rapti Valley would surprise anyone for whom Nepal evokes only terraced hillsides and snow-capped peaks. At a few hundred feet above sea level, the broad six-hundred-square-mile basin is a Kiplingesque jungle crowded with wildlife—not yaks and yeti but one-horned rhinos, gharial crocodiles, elephants, wild buffalo, and Bengal tigers. It forms part of the tarai, the low-lying subtropical strip of jungle grasslands and hardwood forest that runs along the base of the Himalayas from northwest India across Nepal and into northeast India. For much of its history, the Rapti Valley, like much of the tarai, was also famous for another form of warm-weather wildlife: malaria. “The local pestilence,” a British observer noted in the 1920s, “is known far and wide as awal, a name…

The folk ballad “Frankie and Johnny” was based on a murder that took place in St. Louis in 1899. Frankie Baker shot Allen Britt while he was with another woman, Alyce Pryor. The sensational killing provided the inspiration for “Frankie and Albert” (later retitled). Albert's love interest evolved into Nelly Bly, but the elements of the ballad remained fairly constant—Frankie and Johnny were lovers. Johnny was untrue. Frankie shot him in a jealous rage. In Frankie and Johnny Stacy I. Morgan demonstrates that the many cultural uses to which this ballad was put in the 1930s helps us see how African American folk materials circulated widely in the mass media. The book contradicts the view of folklorists who believe that folk culture arises from people isolated from the mainstream. Morgan analyzes seven representations of the “Frankie and Johnny” story: a 1938 one-act ballet by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone; Huddie Ledbetter's various renditions of the ballad; Thomas Hart Benton's depiction of the story in a 1936 mural; John Huston's 1929 stage play for marionettes; Mae West's film She Done…

In Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic, Andrew E. Barnes, a professor of history at Arizona State University, chronicles the Christian educational foray into Africa from 1880 to 1920. The book focuses on black industrial education that grew in the American South under Samuel Chapman Armstrong at the Hampton Institute and later, and most famously, Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute, and its transplanting in West Africa. Barnes sees the Christian proponents of industrial schooling in Africa as forces for progressive development of the continent and its people. Moreover, he concludes, “industrial education served as the leading edge of the African challenge to European conquest of Africa” (p. 6). The author presents critical perspective on the missionary presence in Africa when he mentions the exultation of white supremacy and the fact that some of the missionaries were enthralled with scientific racism. He says that scientific racism “lasted only a few generations, but it left an imprint” (p. xi). It is good to see, here and there in his work, attention given to the…

Emily Skidmore builds an absorbing and sometimes astonishing analysis of the queerness of the American past on the foundation of press stories about the “discovery” of the “true sex” of individuals who were assigned female at birth but chose to live as men. Using online newspaper databases and traditional archives to explore local and national responses to these moments of revelation—often occasioned by death, illness, or crime—Skidmore reveals that trans men were not universally denounced. Their gender transgressions were condemned only when they also departed from ideals of normative male citizenship, which required economic productivity, responsible heterosexuality, and persuasive claims to whiteness. Trans men's lives, and the debates through which Americans tried to make meaning of those lives, demonstrate “the open-ended nature of gender being made and remade” from the 1870s into the 1940s (p. 10). One of Skidmore's main interventions is to trouble the idea that sexological theories linking gender nonconformity and deviant sexuality were hegemonic during those years. She…

Torrie Hester's meticulous and timely monograph traces the roots of the contemporary deportation regime back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a series of congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions gave the federal government exclusive authority over immigration enforcement. It situates deportation within a national and international legal framework, shedding light on the process of immigrant removal and the limits of immigration officials' power. How, where, and whether someone was deported depended, in part, on one's race and nationality. After the Supreme Court's decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893)declared deportation to be a way to protect the nation rather than punish noncitizens, most immigrants lost the ability to contest their expulsions. Hester details how the creation of two separate deportation policies during the exclusion era enabled Chinese immigrants to petition for a writ of habeas corpus and fight their cases in court. Even though the requirements of such appeals stacked the deck in favor of the government, in places such…

Although most studies of built environments and American slavery have focused on rural plantations, the investigations in Slavery in the City deal with particular towns and cities in which slaveholders and their bondsmen coexisted in urban settings. Without the supervision they would have had in the field, blacks instead roamed city streets on errands for their masters, engaged in outside work, and lived in close proximity to freed blacks, challenging white power and requiring a range of solutions to keep the enslaved subjugated. These essays—grounded in architectural and archeological research—present a spectrum of settings. Edward A. Chappell's analysis of domestic architecture focuses on prerevolutionary Williamsburg, later on Annapolis, and still later on Falmouth, a prosperous center of the sugar trade in Jamaica. John Michael Vlach's investigation deals with the North, where, despite some thirty thousand slaves listed in official records for New York and New Jersey alone, few examples of their housing survive. Clifton Ellis's analysis of Annapolis pools information from tax…

Documenting the Now is a project with two overlapping efforts. First, it develops a set of tools to help researchers work with data from Twitter. Second, it brings together a community of users and developers concerned with the ethical use and preservation of data from social media. The project began in 2014 at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in Washington, D.C., which happened to coincide with the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, by the white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Attendees at the conference talked informally about what could be done to document the local protests that were being broadcast to a global audience on social media. What began as an effort by Bergis Jules at the University of California, Riverside, library, Ed Summers at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Meredith Evans at Washington University in St. Louis to document and preserve social media activity surrounding the events in Ferguson grew into a successful Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant proposal for Documenting…

Of all sports, boxing afforded African Americans the best opportunity to achieve public recognition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work examines the extent to which black boxers succeeded in challenging long-standing pernicious stereotypes of African American men as docile and childlike. It focuses on white resistance to overturning these images, as well as on divisions among blacks as to whether prizefighting contributed to or undermined racial uplift. Boxing was particularly important because the ring was one of the few public arenas that sanctioned black men's use of physical force. Louis Moore points out that black fighters often defeated white opponents in mixed matches. He also notes that African Americans were being closed out of organized baseball and barred from working as jockeys, an occupation in which they had attained prominence. Although there is important scholarship on the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, Moore provides valuable insight into the experience and impact of many other top-flight black boxers of the 1885–1915 period,…

In five tautly written case studies—of Ball State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—LaDale C. Winling analyzes the mutually constitutive relationships between twentieth-century American urban environments and the major institutions of higher education sited within them. Twisted may be a more apt word for the alliances Winling describes among city boosters, university administrators, and political elites. In each case, the cityscapes these consortia shaped were more bitterly riven by race, class, and ethnicity than they had been before. By the time Winling gets to the twenty-first-century neoliberal apotheosis of Harvard/MIT, the equalizing and redistributive promise of higher education has waned. But the promise was never for everyone, as Winling shows in the especially strong chapter on how Ball State University and the city of Muncie created each other a century earlier. The black and white workers who built the university were…

Mining North America establishes mining's centrality in two of the most transformative processes in world history: imperialism and industrialization. “As minerals moved from the periphery to the core of economic production, they reordered whole economies, reshaped deep-seated cultural and social patterns, redirected scientific and technological initiatives, redistributed military and economic might, refocused political power and international relations, and recast the health and fortunes of local communities and entire regions” (p. 2). The editors divide the insightful essays into three sections. In the first section, precious metal ventures in colonial Mexico initiated the capitalist transformations that followed. Surprisingly, repeated cycles of production, decline, and reanimation did not result in mineral exhaustion despite extensive environmental degradation. Instead, greater concentrations of capital, expanded use of fossil fuels, and technological improvements contributed to increased production over time. The second section identifies mining as the primary catalyst of North…

In September 1995 the Atlanta-based black women's reproductive health organization SisterLove conducted a workshop titled “OJ Simpson: Black Women Speak on Violence, Black Men, and Interracial Relationships.” An interracial group of over one hundred feminists shared perspectives on domestic violence and expressed frustrations with the sensationalized news coverage of the trial of the African American football star for the murder of his white ex-wife. In many respects the exchange felt familiar. Similar dialogues were happening in churches, universities, community centers, and living rooms across the country. But this conversation happened far from home. The site of the workshop was Huairou, China, a suburb of Beijing.1 The workshop participants were among the tens of thousands of activists who had traveled to China for twelve days to take part in the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women. United Nations (UN) conferences had typically been formal events where national representatives discussed policy in terms barely accessible to the public. But at the end of the century,…

Christina Snyder's first book, Slavery in Indian Country (2010), expanded our understanding of the history of captivity and enslavement in America by drawing first peoples' experiences into the center of the story. Great Crossings further extends such insights to the practices of race making that gave such brute force to the expression of Jacksonian America. How racism shifted from the environmentalist underpinnings of the eighteenth century to the allegedly scientific ideas of the nineteenth, Snyder argues, cannot be understood without coming to grips with first peoples' implication in the change. What Snyder has found in the story of a modest school that ran for twenty-odd years in the bluegrass of Kentucky is the perfect confluence of the ethnic cleansing of Native America, the absolute manacling of black America, and the consequent creation of white America's modern United States. Richard M. Johnson founded the Choctaw Academy in 1825 at the village of Great Crossings. The school's origins are ambiguous. Johnson advocated a Jeffersonian vision of racial amalgamation whereby…

American religious historians have rediscovered capitalism, it seems, but are no longer trapped by the formulations of Max Weber. The Business Turn in American Religious History offers several chapters exploring older but nonetheless timely themes concerning Protestantism and business and contains chapters on Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Asian Indians, and American Indians, revealing how encompassing the business turn can be. Beginning with Robert E. Wright's challenge that historians probe the link between theological tenets and church coffers or that they apply public choice theory to the study of religious groups, this collection is a bold attempt not only to provide samples of the current scholarship but also to spur new work. The first three chapters, by Daniel Vaca, Timothy E. W. Gloege, and David P. King, examine the relationship of evangelical Protestantism and business, but with new twists. Vaca focuses on the case of the Zondervan publishing house to interrogate just who was evangelical. He demonstrates how business ultimately determined the authority of conservative…

In 1975 the Society for Individual Rights, a San Francisco gay-rights organization that had been a leading part of the campaign for equal rights since the mid-1960s, published a “survival manual” under the auspices of its magazine, Vector. Announcing the city as “the Mecca of nearly every form of lifestyle you would ever want to encounter,” the manual provided newly arrived gay residents with information on “housing, food, clothing, legal, medical and dental referrals…. We even tell you how to get on General Assistance.” Readers could view information on help lines, social services, and gay-friendly businesses. A whole section on “medical aid” detailed hospitals, health centers, and clinics, including St. Mary's Hospital Clinic, with “fees on sliding scale [that] will help you get on Medi-Cal,” and the City Venereal Disease Clinic, described as a walk-in facility with “no age or residency requirements.” A section on “welfare” detailed how General Assistance and Supplementary Security Income for the disabled (SSI) worked and provided information on how to apply for food stamps.1 That…

In 1965 Intel cofounder Gordon Moore pointed out that the number of economically viable circuit components you can fit onto a silicon chip, as they continue to miniaturize, doubles every year, and this drove the computer business and related industries. Although the time span was altered to every two years in 1975, the adherence to Moore's Law by those in research and development continued. Now that cadence has started to slow, and in the present moment we could well be going through a paradigm shift away from Moore's Law, with many declaring it dead. Cyrus C. M. Mody wishes to clarify its impact and legacy. He uses this classic calculation to trace the evolving shifts from 1965 to the early 2010s in the roles and relationships of government, academia, and corporations in research and development in microelectronics—and, on a broader scale, as the title suggests, in science itself. It is that complexity of interconnections, the networks of cross-networks being created on institutional levels and how such permutations affected technological change, that this study seeks to reveal and…

The United States has often historically embraced the power and importance of “innovation,” valuing newness regardless of genuine social benefits or costs. If something is new, this thinking generally goes, it is improved. Helen Anne Curry's study of plant breeding puts this idea of novelty and its intrinsic, self-evident value at the center of her analysis. She considers the strange, lively history of technological systems of plant breeding that were oriented around producing novelty. People in the twentieth century who tried to change plants and their heredity used a range of different organisms and technologies and had varying investments, intentions, purposes, and goals. But as her story makes clear, they shared a sometimes-murky enthusiasm for the uncharted potential of new plants—to be beautiful, huge, patriotic, and profitable. Providing compelling perspectives on consumerism, marketing, and the everyday roles of technology and science in the United States in the twentieth century, her study tracks efforts to produce mutations in plants. The seed merchant David Burpee's…

Exonerated delineates the origin story of the “innocence movement,” a highly publicized pivot in legal circles in the late twentieth century toward the wrongful conviction of innocent persons. Robert J. Norris focuses mostly on the key players involved in the early days of using forensic DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) to exonerate innocents. The protagonists are figures such as Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project, an organization that has been responsible for hundreds of exonerations and has spawned dozens of similar organizations worldwide. Norris devotes few pages to the stories of the wrongfully convicted, which is bad and good. On the one hand, even persons with familiarity with the innocent movement are drawn to the riveting tales of men such as Kirk Bloodsworth or Rolando Cruz, so the short bits mentioning these and other cases are tantalizing but unsatisfying. On the other hand, because the book is not about wrongful conviction—it is about the innocencemovement—it keeps the focus on the work of a handful of dedicated lawyers struggling against the…

Franklin D. Roosevelt spent his second Thanksgiving as president at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. En route from Washington, D.C., Roosevelt toured the Tennessee River valley, visiting Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. “Two years ago, in 1932,” he told reporters in Tupelo, Mississippi, “I came through … and … what I saw of human beings made the tears come to my eyes.” “And yet today,” he continued, “I see not only hope, but I see determination and a knowledge … that we are Coming back.” The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the New Deal's massive experiment in federally subsidized electricity generation and distribution, helped create this sunnier outlook. But the reasons for citizens' newfound hope, Roosevelt contended, were more material: families were at last able “to improve their standard of living.” As he put it in Kentucky, “we are hewing out a Commonwealth … which we hope will give to its people more truly than any that has gone before.” Beneath his soaring rhetoric, Roosevelt described the quotidian symbols of progress appearing in…

Since 1984, when the prominent scholar of French interwar politics Serge Berstein diagnosed France as “allergic to fascism,” historians of the French popular Right have led a revolution in the study of fascism. On the way to establishing the now-dominant view that France suffered a severe case of fascism in the 1930s, historians of the French popular Right have reimagined the very nature of fascism. Rather than see fascism as an ideology, as Berstein did, these historians have turned to treating fascism as a form of political behavior, predominantly a form of popular politics. Rather than a question of whether political actors in depression-era France possessed a fascist ideology, the question has become whether political actors in depression-era France performed the political practices that form fascism.1 During the same time span, the depressions-era U.S. Right has not drawn any comparable historiographical attention. Though a generation of works on the making of the U.S. modern Right means that twentieth-century American conservatism is no longer the historiographical orphan that…

In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left the theater historian Malik Gaines argues that, when set against the more famous examples of 1960s political activism, the specific performances of blackness by several key figures embodied a type of “radical ambivalence,” a politics that resisted formulation in the “illusory” terms of racial or class revolution (p. 95). In the theatrical excesses of Nina Simone's live shows, in the works of the Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland and the Ghanaian author and poet Ama Ata Aidoo, in the acting of Günther Kaufmann, and in the drag performances of Sylvester (stage name of Sylvester James Jr.), Gaines sees a productive complexity. When Simone bounced between renditions of folk songs, jazz standards, African work songs, and pop songs in her sets, or broke off in the middle of a tune to offer commentary, as the band played on, she evinced what Gaines calls a “quadruple consciousness,” his play on W. E. B. Du Bois's famous notion of the “double consciousness” of subordinated individuals, explored in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (p. 21).…

Richard Rabinowitz has multiple aims for Curating America. He presents an autobiography, including his journeys as a public historian over the past fifty years. He also seeks to address the significant developments in public history overall in this time frame. For Rabinowitz, the visitor is the “heart of the museum enterprise” (p. 10). His preferred history museum is a place “where visitors actively and dramatically encounter the stories of past lives” (p. 11). He terms that landscape of engagement a “storyscape” (ibid.). The author organizes his book into four parts: Becoming a Pubic Historian; Finding Ourselves: Interpreting Place; Beholding: Interpreting Stuff; and Belonging: Interpreting Identity and Community; and concludes with a postscript. Enrolled in the Harvard University American Civilization Ph.D. program, Rabinowitz took a job at Old Sturbridge Village where he worked for seven years and found his true calling as a public historian. Along with the urban historian Sam Bass Warner, he established the American History Workshop (AHW) in 1980; it became his professional…

In 1972 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sold the concept of a “space shuttle” to President Richard M. Nixon; thereafter, through a lengthy purgatory of development delays and cost overruns, and into the program's operational phase, the agency worked to define the purpose of shuttle-borne spaceflight in a manner that resonated with the American public, which was, after all, being billed for the ride. This was not a simple task. To project a likely payoff in terms of a Cold War competition for prestige, as President John F. Kennedy had done when announcing the Apollo program, cut across efforts in the mid-1970s to establish space as an arena of détente. The other stock theme in NASA's Apollo-era marketing repertoire—the continuity of spaceflight with America's frontier heritage—also no longer played well. Audiences were increasingly aware of the victims of the nation's westering adventures; and in any case, was a vehicle confined to low earth orbit really a worthy heir to the mythic tradition of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone? Moreover, NASA had not exactly…

Business is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about the countercultural movements of the 1960s. But in From Head Shops to Whole Foods Joshua Clark Davis makes a compelling case that the businesses he examines provide a useful vantage point on the counterculture while also allowing a new perspective on today's business. The book is framed around two neologisms: “activist entrepreneurs” and “participatory economics.” Davis claims that activist entrepreneurs introduced “products that promoted progressive and radical politics as well as cultural pluralism,” “conceived of their storefronts as political places,” and “reconceptualized processes of doing business by promoting shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces” (p. 4). Davis focuses on four types of businesses: African American bookstores, head shops, women's businesses, and natural food stores. While the heart of the book is in the period between 1965 and 1975, Davis puts each of these activist entrepreneurs into a larger context. African American book shops had roots dating back to the period…

Welcome to Fairyland is a deeply researched study of early Miami, Florida, that adds depth to the history of Florida, the history of American cities, and the history of sexuality. Full of delightful stories to appeal to social historians, and creative, intersectional analyses for those interested in the history and theory of culture, it exhibits many of the best qualities of queer history. Forced to turn over every rock and read between every line, Julio Capó Jr. has done what many historians of the queer past must do—skillfully combine the methods of social and cultural history. Capó's central argument is that early boosters of Miami marketed it as a “fairyland,” a place where tourists and snowbirds might have a warm, magical experience. At the same time, due to its location and labor requirements, it also offered “fairies” (and other queers) spaces in which to live, find pleasure, and resist surveillance and policing. Importantly, Capó uses a very broad definition of queer—“numerous acts of transgression, including same-sex intimacies, interracial encounters, commercialized sex,…

In a sophisticated analysis of youth activism in the United States during the 1930s, Britt Haas explores the role that young people, eighteen to twenty-five year olds, played in tackling the era's socioeconomic and political crises. Attempting to secure their version of the American dream—economic opportunity, democratic freedom, and social equality—activist youths created their own organizations, pushed the New Deal to the left, and contemplated the efficacy of socialism and communism. Three events politicized young people, helping them find their voice and develop means of obtaining their goals. The Harlan County, Kentucky, coal miners' strike in 1931–1932 reinforced capitalism's inherent unfairness and deprivations, exacerbated by the depression. Columbia University's expulsion of a student activist in 1932 highlighted the link between academic freedom, democracy, and civil liberties. The Scottsboro Boys case clarified the prevalence of racial discrimination and the connection between racial equality and democracy. These events led to increased youth self-mobilization and…

In 1948, one week before the United Nations (UN) ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) asked the American public to confront the domestic implications of the global ideas found in the UN document. The FCC, founded in 1908, was the largest Protestant body in the United States, representing at midcentury nearly thirty denominations and approximately one-quarter of the American population. In 1948 the organization insisted that international human rights made Jim Crow both immoral and illegal. The FCC issued its own list of human rights, encompassing virtually every demand of the African American political struggle of the era, including freedom from police brutality and mob violence, the right to employment, the right to join a labor union, the right to receive equal services, and the right to participate fully in government institutions, including the military. These rights “cannot be obtained under a system of racial segregation,” the predominantly white FCC declared. Headlines across the country pronounced, “End of Racial…

Most discussions of fashion focus on styles aimed at upper-class or upper-middle-class consumers. Fashionable clothes are usually expensive and intended to project an image of their wearer's elevated social position. Instead, Jennifer Le Zotte provides an extensive analysis of secondhand clothing and its history in America, including its sellers and its consumers. Le Zotte argues that secondhand clothes are not only a means for those with limited resources to acquire clothing but also a way to make social statements that express resistance to the dominant culture. Secondhand clothing has performed an important role in avant-garde artistic cultures, such as Dada and surrealism. Artists in these cultures viewed flea markets and junk shops as sources of artistic stimulation. Rebellious youth have developed their own styles from secondhand clothes, some of which have been adopted by their elders. Le Zotte argues that, for example, “grunge dress with its widespread accessibility, gender-role deviance, cross-class identification, and ironic inflections, referenced a century of secondhand…