The 50 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2019

Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty is yet another highly significant and extremely well-researched and theoretically contextualized contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature by native Hawaiian scholars on their history, culture, and political struggles. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book “seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender relations and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation” (p. 3). By “paradoxes,” she refers to the “contradictions” in the contemporary sovereignty movement that emerge when “statist claims” are asserted, which often are in conflict with indigenous ones (p. 11). Major paradoxes are discussed in separate chapters. Chapter 1 notes that the legal status of native governing entities, such as that proposed for native Hawaiians by the defunct Akaka bill, is conditioned by U.S. law restricting their self-governance as “domestic dependent sovereigns” (p. 37). Chapter 2, on land, points out that, while the Mahele land division resulted in the loss of Hawaiian…

Questions of memory and forgetting have become increasingly central as the politics of historiography have threatened to fracture the profession since Peter Novick's That Noble Dream appeared in 1988. One of the hallmarks of this conversation is the pervasive discussion of historical (and current) erasure both within and beyond the academy since 2012. Jeanne Theoharis marshals the energy of this moment with this statement in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: “Racial injustice is America's original sin and deepest silence” (p. xi). The project intends to caution historians against the distortions of the American civil rights movement by constructing a fuller history of the black freedom struggle. It builds on a series of manuscripts that Theoharis has edited or authored over the last twenty years. The three most compelling chapters address Martin Luther King Jr.'s condemnation of white moderates in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) and the ways scholars, and educators more widely, have adopted King as a “great man” of American history at the expense of the youth and…

In this thought-provoking book, Monica Kim uses an iconic Korean War figure—the prisoner of war (Pow)—to illuminate Cold War decolonization in Asia. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War argues that the “forgotten war” was important for its escalation not only of Cold War politico-military tensions but also lesser-known sociocultural tensions, especially among Koreans, for whom the war climaxed a long, agonizing era of colonialism and anticolonialism. Broadly, Kim argues that the legal and sociocultural battles waged by United Nations (Un) representatives and Communist delegates over the Pow's voluntary repatriation—a new humanitarian concept that broke with established law—emphasize modern warfare's “productive capabilities” over “its destructive ones” (p. 354, emphasis in original). Within the conflict's turbulent social context, the Pow was not only the chief diplomatic obstacle to a truce agreement but also a foundational construct for a U.S. “liberal empire” globally expanding by treating human “interiority” as “both the terrain and jus ad bellum” of war (pp. 15, 356).

Sebastian Edwards, professor of international economics at the University of California, Los Angeles's Anderson School of Management, has written a compelling history of one of the most important macroeconomic and public policy events of the early twentieth century—the decision to depreciate the U.S. dollar in 1933, the subsequent U.S. default on its sovereign debts, and the controversial Supreme Court ruling that upheld both. Edwards, who has written on emerging-market political economy and sovereign debt crises, provides a necessary corrective to the perception that U.S. constitutional protections of property and contracts rights have been absolute, or timeless. Indeed, his study was motivated by the 2014 New York federal district court ruling that forced Argentina to pay its sovereign debts to foreign bondholders after its 2001 default. Argentina cited the American default in its defense, though to no avail. American Default reads with fast-paced action. Based on newspaper accounts, personal papers, and a thorough economic history, the book envelops readers in a political and…

This study contributes admirably to Atlantic world studies of enslavement, and to produce it Katharine Gerbner has mastered a wide variety of sources, regional histories, and theoretical approaches to history. The book shines in its discussion of religion and proslavery ideology and offers a valuable and original thesis on English, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Protestant Atlantic world. Gerbner first examines the seventeenth-century planter proslavery ideology, labeled by the author as “Protestant supremacy,” that separated “Christian” masters from “heathenish” slaves (p. 2). In the 1600s Protestant masters associated their faith with freedom. These colonial masters resisted missions to convert the enslaved “heathens,” and, instead, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries promoted “Christian slavery,” which became the dominant ideology in the eighteenth century. This ideology justified slavery by extolling its role in converting and Christianizing the enslaved. Gerbner convincingly shows how, particularly in Barbados and St. Thomas, missionaries of these denominations…

Kendra Taira Field has written a personal book about emancipation, migration, and the quest for black political and social autonomy from white supremacy. Field is interested in the social history of African American families and kinship groups who migrated or passed through Indian Territory in Oklahoma in the decades following emancipation. The key figures in the book are all distant relatives or connected to her through some kinship network, in ways organizationally similar to Thulani Davis's My Confederate Kinfolk (2007). Although genealogical methods are part of this work, the author seats the history in a broad context that addresses scholarly debates and trends in Jim Crow–era American history. Field employs microhistory to put a kinship network that passed through Brownville, Oklahoma, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the lens of what Rayford W. Logan described as the nadir so she can interrogate past and present interpretations of the period. The book also touches on the role of agency in social history, the “exodusters,” the Great Migration, the…

This important collection reconsiders the refutation of evolutionary schema and racial essentialism in the work of Franz Boas, the key figure in U.S. anthropology, in light of his conversations with a “vast network of Indigenous collaborators” and other diverse scholars (p. x). As Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner argue in their introduction, “Indigenous peoples helped to redirect the currents of Western metaphysics, drawing on their own cultural values and their experiences under colonial rule” (ibid.). “Indigenous visions,” or at least “mutually constituted visions,” lay at the heart of Boasian anthropology (p. xiii). Only the volume's first and last essays truly fulfill this bold argument. Wilner argues that Boas's view of cultural relativity depended on the Tlingit consultants George Hunt and his sister Annie Spencer, who taught Boas to recognize that one could don a new “layer of perception” as a Pacific Northwest dancer wears a mask (pp. 28–29). Christopher Heaney shows that the Peruvian archaeologist Julio Cesar Tello built upon his family's longtime role as mediators…

The political scientist Chloe N. Thurston investigates federal policy obstacles to homeownership that African Americans, women, and low-income people faced, as well as remedies that these excluded groups pursued. In three tightly defined cases that span the 1930s to the 1970s, she untangles public-private welfare state policies that simultaneously encouraged ownership for privileged groups and erected barriers for marginalized groups. Thurston makes significant contributions to policy and social movement scholarship by thinking systematically about the collective action of organizations that represented people cut off from benefits that fostered ownership. Countering the proposition that complexities of the delegated or submerged state made public action opaque and dampened reform efforts, the author urges scholars to probe how this public-private arrangement shaped the work of “boundary groups.” Civil rights organizations, feminists, and antipoverty activists engaged first in a “politics of discovery,” dislodging claims that the logic of the market alone justified exclusion. By…

C. Donald Johnson's book is a history of U.S. trade policy from the early years of the Republic to the first year of the Trump administration. Though this lengthy book encompasses the entire sweep of U.S. history, its focus is the post–World War II triumph of an American-led liberal trade order and the threat to that system posed by public disapproval and its avatar, President Donald J. Trump. The book is framed by a cautionary tale about the Chinese Empire in the early fifteenth century, which, according to Johnson, squandered its economic and military dominance by retreating from trade—dominance that it has taken nearly five centuries to regain. The choice the United States faces in the twenty-first century is therefore to either maintain its openness to trade or to wither away behind its own “great wall.” Johnson aims to counter a perception that open markets favor big businesses over working people by invoking Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776)—described as the “foundational reference” of Johnson's book (p. xiii). Johnson asserts that free trade as outlined by Smith is a…

Phoebe Apperson Hearst explores the thinking and strategies of a middle-class border-state girl as she became an influential Gilded Age philanthropist. Phoebe Hearst's philanthropy ranged widely, from San Francisco schools to women's rights, from the Young Women's Christian Association to the research university. Hearst (1842–1919) helped many young women gain the education, credentials, and rights required for self-support and careers. Alexandra M. Nickliss seeks especially to clarify Hearst's thinking as she moved, step by careful step, from work in her teenage years as a Cumberland Presbyterian home companion and country school teacher of limited education to marriage with George Hearst, a wealthy man twenty years her senior, to motherhood, and to civic prominence. She shows how Hearst drew strength and knowledge from lasting relationships with her son's wet nurse, a remarkable woman school administrator, prominent museum leaders, and many others. As Hearst coped with a San Francisco from which her husband was usually absent, she found herself through repeated independent trips…

In April 2018, during her set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Beyoncé prefaced her claim on black power, “Formation” (2016), by singing the historical black national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (a 1900 poem by James Weldon Johnson set to music by John Rosamond Johnson in 1905). Couched in the musical and visual imagery of the brass bands of historically black colleges and universities, her performance provided an updated context to a song that predated “Formation” by 116 years. Imani Perry, in her book focused on the history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” helps explain the power and continued relevance of this composition, and she provides a thoughtful take on the contours of black radicalism. Much of the first part of Perry's book focuses on placing the creation of the composition within the larger Jim Crow context of the nadir and the rise of black associationism. Perry orients this discussion around the concept of black formalism—the rituals and normative culture of black America during these years—and posits “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as fundamental to…

As its title suggests, this book argues that human rights activists transformed U.S. foreign policy during the “long sixties” (1961–1977). Covering the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the book details human rights activism in the United States, including Americans' response to white rule in Rhodesia, the plight of Soviet Jews, and military coups in Greece, South Korea, and Chile. Sarah B. Snyder researched in an impressive array of archives, ranging from presidential libraries to records of various human rights groups, to highlight the role played by transnational connections, social movements, and political entrepreneurs (such as Democratic congressman Donald Fraser) in refocusing U.S. foreign policy on human rights and creating laws and institutions to limit U.S. aid to countries guilty of international human rights abuses. The author admits that many factors led to the rise of human rights in foreign policy, namely the failures of the Vietnam War and congressional push back against executive overreach. But she wants to make the case for…

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the telegraph made its way across western North America as the frontier was being explored and Native Americans were fighting for their lands. While many historical narratives of the telegraph in North America focus on the experience in the East, highlighting invention, innovation, and manufacturing, James Schwoch's Wired into Nature examines the extension of the telegraph into the challenging landscapes and ecosystems of the West. The book is broad-ranging and based on detailed archival research and analysis. The author tells stories of the trials of extending telegraph lines across the Great Plains—the threats from bison knocking over poles, from passenger pigeons alighting in groups on wires, and from conflicts with Native Americans. He recounts how the Western Union Company completed the first transcontinental telegraph in October 1861, connecting the Eastern Seaboard to California by enlisting the help of the Mormons in Salt Lake City. He chronicles the synergistic expansion of the telegraph with the railroads across western North…

The charge that major American newspapers are tainted by “liberal bias” has become one of the most durable misperceptions in our culture. Matthew Pressman's fascinating book is in some respects another effort to demolish it. But Pressman also demonstrates why it has persisted and become a central tenet of conservatism. As Pressman reveals, the values that shaped the news produced by elite newspapers changed significantly between the late 1950s and late 1970s, and these changes resulted in a journalism more acceptable to liberals than to conservatives. Focusing on the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Pressman illuminates a major shift in the professional values of reporters, editors, and executives. By the late 1970s, both newspapers had come to embrace interpretive reporting and a broader understanding of “newsworthiness.” They published a wider range of stories, including “soft news” about entertainment, life-style, and consumer trends. They had begun to hire and promote minorities and women, and had improved coverage of issues related to these groups. More important, both…

The long arch of American religious history traditionally bends toward the right. Scholars and pundits alike normally see the consolidation of socially conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews into a reliably Republican voting block as a singular event in America's past. But a new collection of essays by Leilah Danielson, Marian Mollin, and Doug Rossinow seeks to bring balance to our religious histories of American politics. Focusing on what they call “the religious left tradition in the industrial-era United States,” defined by both a “tremendous heterogeneity” and a “rich and continuous history,” the editors demonstrate the long-standing impact that faith has had on liberal reform efforts in the United States (p. 2). The thirteen essays they have pulled together do not disappoint. Running from the late nineteenth century through the present, each highlights how Christian and Jewish idioms, beliefs, and organizations contributed to the progressive movements of their day. Contributions on the theology of labor leaders, the social gospel of Young Men's Christian Association…

Derek Leebaert has produced a lively, scholarly, and generally persuasive reinterpretation of Anglo-American international history after 1945. He does not see an abrupt and inevitable transfer of global sway from London to Washington occurring during the period. Rather, he suggests that British elites remained committed to their policies of global reach. Their American equivalents were jittery and uncertain about assuming new responsibilities. Leebaert musters extensive archival evidence. A July 1950 National Security Council document (Nsc 75) concluded, in Leebaert's words, that “the British Empire and Commonwealth would stay much as it had been, covering the globe with its nearly one million men under arms and who-knew-what in reserve” (p. 234). The doctrine of militarized global containment, as articulated a couple of months earlier in another National Security Council document (Nsc 68), was thus severely qualified. According to Leebaert, neither the Truman administration nor the first Eisenhower administration seriously questioned Britain's global commitment. Only in December…

Gary Dorrien's impressive book is one of the first to examine how the black social gospel shaped much of progressive Christianity, the movement for black liberation, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s theological approach to his social, political, economic, and pacifist activism. Dorrien traces this influential theology in biographical portraits of men, such as Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays (whom King called his spiritual mentor), Mordecai Johnson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who preceded King in attempts at dismantling white supremacy, as well as men and women who continued their work battling white supremacy after his assassination. Although Breaking White Supremacy reads like an intellectual history, Dorrien has actually crafted a biography of the black social gospel through examining its central role in multiple figures' interpretation of Ghandian nonviolence, which served as the ideological underpinnings of both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and black liberation theology. The book relies heavily on theological and philosophical discourse, often spending pages…

“We, the women, have a big stake in these issues,” proclaimed Florence Sillers Ogden as she spoke in favor of segregation to eight hundred women assembled in Mississippi in 1948 (p. 132). The description of the speech comes at the midpoint in Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's brilliantly argued Mothers of Massive Resistance, encapsulating the book's central thesis: white southern women were deeply committed to Jim Crow. McRae locates the roots of “massive resistance” as early as the 1920s. She tells this story through women she describes as segregation's “constant gardeners”: Ogden, Nell Battle Lewis, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, who promoted segregation in newspaper columns and issue-based campaigns in North Carolina, Mississippi, and South Carolina (p. 1). She sets the stage with an earlier generation who promoted white supremacy whether as ideologues or bureaucrats. First, readers meet women of the segregationist bureaucracy: midwives, nurses, social workers, teachers, or registrars, such as Margaret Aileen Goodman, whose decisions about marriage licenses were part of…

Revolting New York is an important and timely edited collection exploring the role of violent unrest in the history of New York City. The contributors do a fine job of tracing nearly fifty riots, both famous events such as the New York City draft riots of 1863 and much smaller events such as the doctors' riot of 1788. In the process, as the coeditor Don Mitchell points out in the introduction, they present a way to think about New York City's historical geography, about how struggle has created urban spaces, and about how those spaces have, in turn, shaped the behavior of city residents. The extensively illustrated individual essays, each covering one specific moment of urban upheaval, are, by and large, quite good, even when they cover well-worn ground. Peter Waldman's brief discussion of the riots against the Gary Plan (an educational system instituted in Gary, Indiana, in 1907) is an excellent example of this; if Waldman does little new research, he neatly uses the struggle over who would control the city's school—progressive reformers or Tammany Hall—as a lovely encapsulation of…

The cotton grown by Mississippi slaves, insured by New York and Boston financiers, and spun by Manchester wage laborers germinated in soil that had belonged, only a few months or years earlier, to Native Americans. For a brief five decades, the U.S. South dominated global cotton production, a result of the transformation of the region from indigenous farms to slave labor camps. Scholars have recently traced the network of financial capital that yoked mortgaged slaves and impoverished mill workers to planters, bankers, and consumers around the world. While it is evident that the global reach of the cotton empire—the millions of laborers and the vast sums of money at work—precipitated the dispossession of native peoples in the antebellum South, the precise link between financial capital and Indian expulsion has remained obscure. As a result, we speak in generalizations: Indian removal forced “60,000 of the cotton frontier's original inhabitants across the Mississippi,” opening the land “for speculation and cotton production”; it “transformed territory into property,” after which…

Taking a synoptic perspective on the various movements for racial, class, and gender justice that arose in the Americas during the 1960s and 1970s enables Lillian Calles Barger to craft an innovative and compelling account of the family of “prophetic” biblical and theological ideas that inspired not only the liberationists of Latin America but also the feminist and black radicals of North America. Paramount among these ideas was the convergence of the religious and the political. Liberationists sought to desacralize theology and to desecularize politics—to demonstrate the political relevance of religion while making explicit the theological imagination infusing even the most “worldly” political aspirations. As one would expect from a farrago of ideas and impulses that never coalesced into one coherent school of thought, the meanings and methods of “liberation” varied as dramatically as the world views and social settings of its interpreters. The black power theologian James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York vowed that, after three hundred years of suppression and…

Rosina Lozano's An American Language argues that Spanish played an important role in southwestern U.S. politics between the Mexican-American War and World War II. The book is a timely reminder not only that contemporary efforts to vilify Spanish-speakers as un-American have a historical precedent but also that Spanish has been an autochthonous American language in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California since the acquisition of these regions by the United States. Part 1 of the book emphasizes the active role that Spanish-speakers from the newly acquired Mexican territory played in nineteenth-century U.S. politics. Lozano's meticulously researched archival history illustrates how Spanish-speaking “treaty citizens” in New Mexico, and later the territorial inhabitants of Puerto Rico, insisted on the inclusion of Spanish in formal political venues and schools (p. 5). Lozano critiques the racialization of Spanish-speakers based on their language, which sometimes led to their treatment as second-class citizens. Lozano successfully challenges perceptions that universalist citizenship…

“The rich are different than you and me; they have more money.” Regardless of whether, per an oft-repeated literary legend, a conclusive exchange of that sort occurred between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Devin Fergus's book provides a poignant and sobering rejoinder (Eddy Dow, “The Rich Are Different,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1988). The poor are different, Fergus explains. They pay more fees. In Land of the Fee Fergus writes the history of fees into the larger story of American social and economic life since 1980. Structured around four key developments in the history of debt—subprime lending, student debt, automobile insurance, and payday lending—the book argues that policy decisions, racial ideology, and class prejudices have spawned a massive transfer of wealth from poor and middle-class Americans to an elite few. In the process, Fergus shows “how deregulation has contributed to exposing the nation's entire financial system to unsafe banking practices and systemic risk” (p. 162).

How and why did more than 1,600 scientists and engineers from Nazi Germany become part of the U.S. military-industrial complex during the Cold War? Brian E. Crim's recent book tackles this perplexing question, among other puzzles surrounding Operation Paperclip—named for the device used to expedite review of some scientists' dossiers. The simple answer is that the U.S. military feared losing German genius to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, both the U.S. government and civil society bitterly contested the ethics and strategic wisdom of the project. The historiography of Operation Paperclip reflects the political controversies that surrounded it. In the 1960s the U.S. military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) granted one scholar selective access to historical records, helping create a positive account of their work. However, in the 1980s, investigative journalists exposed the complicity of many Operation Paperclip scientists in wartime atrocities. Between 1998 and 2007, millions of documents were declassified, prompting additional books. Crim draws on these archival…

Most of the essays in this provocative edited collection originated from an academic conference. To an uncommon degree, this volume captures much of the intellectual give and take of such a venue. The editors deserve praise for their willingness to incorporate diverse, even conflicting, perspectives on the multiple intersections of law with colonialism in Iberian American and Anglo-American contexts. Emphasizing the “extraordinary variability” in the ways various indigenous and settler populations addressed the problem of understanding the other side's ideas of legality, the book provides a useful entrée into this emerging field of colonial studies (p. 22). The essays are framed around a classic comparative assessment of, on the one hand, an Iberian colonialism that sought to integrate indigenous peoples and, on the other hand, an exclusionist orientation long considered integral to how English models of settler colonialism dealt with indigenous populations. The contributions offer fresh insights into how various processes of settler intrusion in the Western Hemisphere were…

This volume from the University of Chicago Press's Trios series offers three essays that complicate Eurocentric treatments of church-state relations. These case studies demonstrate that in the New World religion and government were inescapably entangled in the constituting of new peoples. The Greek concept of ekklesia, a called-out community, with its rituals, ceremonies, symbols, and exclusions, provides the central theme. The authors, a trinity of established scholars, were brought together by the American Academy of Religion and mutual interests in religion, anthropology, and comparative and legal studies. Paul Christopher Johnson, in the first essay, details the creation of the Brazilian community drawn to the prophet-like Antônio Conselheiro at Canudos and the suppression of this group by the new republic in 1897. Johnson analyzes the material culture, rituals, poetry, and songs of rival ekklesia, one claiming to be the people of the new republic and the other unfairly labeled a horde. Conflicts over taxation, race, monarchy, civil marriage, and the authority of church and…

Historians have written extensively on farmers' and laborers' attempts to combat business concentration during the second industrial revolution. Laura Phillips Sawyer's American Fair Trade focuses on the trade associations of independent proprietors that embraced the antimonopoly struggle. Starting in the World War I era, these associations worked with government bureaucracies to create favorable market conditions. Although fair competition was a shifting and contested concept, independent proprietors sought a middle ground between free-market competition and regulated monopoly. Sawyer's work builds on Ellis Hawley's scholarship on Herbert Hoover and the associative state. Sawyer explains that the 1911 Supreme Court ruling against Dr. Miles Medical Company's protection plan that created vertical contracts to preserve its pharmaceutical secrets and prices (Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Part and Sons Co.) mobilized other independent proprietors to form the American Fair Trade League (AFTL). Made up of specialty producers and retailers in medicines, jewelry, tobacco, name-brand…

Kirsten Swinth's Feminism's Forgotten Fight is necessary, important, and long overdue. At last, a scholar restores second-wave feminism to its full dimensions by centering demands for public day care and shared housework and child care as the mainstays they were. Moreover, we finally have a synthetic treatment of the movement that foregrounds the early and sustained leadership of African American feminists. Swinth resurfaces second-wave campaigns for the social and economic value of child-rearing and homemaking that have gone missing in plain sight. Beginning in the late 1970s, according to Swinth, the conservative backlash sweeping American politics erased feminist theory and practice, and instead...

Joyce Antler's Jewish Radical Feminism successfully presents the theoretical and historical complexities of the experience of Jewish radical feminist pioneers that shaped women's liberation. The book's insights come alive through Antler's innovative approach to historical narratives—deepened by side-by-side biographical portraits of over forty social activists, based on extensive interviews and apparently painstaking archival research. “Writing history in sets of multiple biographies” (rather than representative “types”), replete with “thick descriptions”—influences, motivations, turning points, struggles, lives in motion—lends credence to Antler's assumption that no single prototype exists outside its commonalities with others. Thus, as articulated in her conclusion, such distinguishing categories as outsider-insider, behavioral style, and “values” (which she deems amorphous) are shaped when imbued with an underlying belief in social justice, subject to the influence of history. The concept of “collectives” is the second organizational principle of the book, its chapters focused on…

Academic studies and popular culture depict the 1940–1973 U.S. economic boom as a golden age. Economic historians note that U.S. per capita real gross national product (Gnp) tripled between 1938 and 1973, one of the greatest economic growth spurts in American history. Moreover, the great boom period was nearly historically unique in decreasing economic inequality. The rich became richer, but more slowly than the rest of the population. The share of national income going to the top 1 percent fell by more than half. Every income decile saw significant income increases with rates of income growth for the lowest deciles exceeding growth for the more well-to-do. The real take-home pay of factory workers doubled between World War II and the late 1960s. In contrast, while real per capita Gnp more than doubled between 1973 and 2018, more than two-thirds of the population saw little or no increase in living standards. The 1 percent regained their pre–New Deal income share (close to one-fourth). Popular culture draws a sharp contrast between the warm glow of the boom and the years since.…

In 1794 Joseph Brant, a leader of the Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, met with representatives bearing a message from Henry Knox, the U.S. secretary of war. Knox insisted that “principles of moderation and humanity” would govern the conduct of the United States toward the Indians within its borders, but Brant had little patience for Knox's condescension. “We are of the same opinion with the people of the United States,” he informed Knox. “You consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.”1 Brant's statement exists at the intersection between two significant trends traced in recent historiography. One is the ubiquity of sovereignty talk throughout the late eighteenth-century Americas. As imperial crises spawned new nation-states, participants turned to law to legitimate their actions—particularly the law of nations, the body of rules governing “sovereign states” elaborated in the canonical treatises of European…

Paul J. Croce identifies William James (1842–1910) as “a significant figure in many branches of philosophy, neuroscience, intellectual and cultural history, history of science, psychology, depth psychology intersecting with spirituality, religious studies, rhetoric, and even cultural studies and literature” (p. 20). James might be seen as a pioneer of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education. He wrote the most popular psychology textbook of his day, The Principles of Psychology (1890), as well as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragmatism (1907), in addition to dozens of other philosophical books, essays, and public lectures. James's intellectual foundation in both science and the humanities made his theories more intellectually persuasive; he needed that persuasiveness since—despite or because of his scientific training—James was open to the universe, including homeopathic remedies and seances. Like homeopaths, James's approach to medicine included the whole person, body and mind. In this illuminating intellectual history, Croce, professor…

Brenden W. Rensink's Native but Foreign makes a significant contribution to both borderland and transnational studies. The core of this work is a comparative study of Native American efforts to traverse the international borders between the United States and Canada and between the United States and Mexico. The author examines the struggle to gain American federal recognition and reservation lands by the Cree, Chippewa, and Cree-Chippawa in the North, and the Yaqui in the South. In doing so Rensink achieves several important ends. By taking a native perspective the author reveals the complexity of negotiating life after the creation of new international boundaries...

Few points seem more historically settled than that of the proslavery Constitution. Following the lead of scholars such as Paul Finkelman, William Wiecek and Gary Nash, historians have taken for granted that the Constitution's protections of slavery aided slaveholders in their quest for power and abetted the expansion of slavery across the continent. Even those who argued in favor of a more slavery-neutral Constitution—notably Don E. Fehrenbacher—admitted that the Constitution had been given a permanent proslavery interpretation after a short period of operation. Sean Wilentz offers a potent rejoinder in this reprinting of his Nathan I. Huggins Lecture at Harvard University. He plants his argument in the soil of ideas. It was, claims Wilentz, the trenchant refusal of several framers (Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, and James Madison) to allow the Constitution to admit the principle of property in man that mattered. This—not any political calculus over representation or the slave trade—lent critical support to the antislavery cause.

More than two decades after the late professor of English Jenny Franchot observed that American literary scholars had relegated religion to an invisible domain, studies of religion and literature are ascendant. One (perhaps unintended) result can be found in secularity studies. Inspired by the philosophers Charles Taylor and Bruno Latour and the anthropologist Talal Asad, the field defines the secular not as the absence or denial of religion but as a set of prescriptions that affect a range of human behaviors. In this context, the literary scholar Emily Ogden takes up mesmerism, “a new set of procedures for regulating enchantment” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Mesmerism was introduced in late eighteenth-century France by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer; those who practiced it claimed to be able to manipulate the magnetic fluid present throughout the cosmos, including in the human body, to predict distant events, to diagnose disease, or even to control factory workers and slaves. It attracted interest for less than thirty years in the United States after 1836 but drew a…

There is no shortage of books on African Americans in the military or their role in specific conflicts or campaigns. Even the so-called forgotten war in Korea (1950–1953) no longer deserves that label and is now recognized as the moment when a desperate military situation finally led to the end of racial segregation in the American armed forces. Brotherhood in Combat adds little to this familiar narrative. Jeremy P. Maxwell wants to “demonstrate the evolution of the African American experience in the Army and Marine Corps from Executive Order 9981 in 1948 through the end of the Vietnam War in 1975” and show “how blacks found equality of experience in combat” in both Korea and Vietnam (p. 18). By “analyzing the experience of African Americans in combat against the growing Civil Rights Movement in the United States,” the author claims to “add a new dimension to the current scholarship on African American history” (ibid.).

It is nearly a truism that the law is one of the most powerful weapons in the centuries-old battle to control women's sexuality. Yet significant gaps remain in historical study of that conflict. Scott W. Stern addresses a largely forgotten front. For decades the United States enforced a federal plan to combat the spread of sexually transmitted infections (Stis) by arresting suspected prostitutes, subjecting them to physical examinations and forcibly treating them. In practice that meant rounding up women who merely looked suspicious and locking them in reformatories. Inmates were subjected to imprisonment, frequent pelvic examinations, hard labor, poisonous “treatments,” frequent brutal corporal punishment, and the threat of sterilization. The history of the rise and fall of the American plan encompasses a decades-long process involving a vast complex of state and federal legislation. Stern chooses to focus these events through the story of Nina McCall, a woman victimized in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. McCall is unique, not in her suffering but in the fact…

What distinguishes this study, in an increasingly cluttered landscape of research and reflections on the digital age, is the effort to delve deeply into history to understand the media-politics nexus of today. Largely based on secondary sources, The Only Constant Is Change proposes a model, labeled the “political communication cycle,” for how political actors and organizations capitalize on technological innovations to disseminate information, raise funds, energize voters, and mobilize constituencies. As technological breakthroughs turn more popular and less expensive they become ripe for experimentation. Success entails widespread imitation, eventually heralding a mature “political communication order,” routinized through new policies, norms, and institutions. The author Ben Epstein highlights three such historical revolutions: the advent of modern print and transportation technologies that, after the 1820s, helped refocus political communication from elites to the American masses; the coming of the broadcast era in the 1920s with first radio and later television; and, lastly, the…

In One in Christ Karen J. Johnson explores the efforts of African American and white Catholic laity in Chicago, sometimes with clergy support but often against clerical opposition, to challenge racism within and outside the Catholic Church. Johnson argues that the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, which “emphasized humanity's unity,” inspired and sustained Catholic interracial activists who “popularized the doctrine” and identified their efforts with it “several years before Pope Pius XII” endorsed mystical body of Christ theology in 1943 (p. 4). Catholic activists also “drew from the nineteenth-century tradition of Catholic social thought” (ibid.). Focusing on the 1930s through the mid-1960s, Johnson contends that Catholic activism, which included challenging racial discrimination in housing, was part of a long, broad civil rights movement that extended beyond the South. Like much of long civil rights movement historiography, her work draws attention to the contributions of women, contending that they “drove Catholic interracial activism forward” (p. 5). Although the Second…