The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2020

This book is not a work of academic history. Rather, it is a call to action on behalf of indigenous environmental justice. The call, however, is deeply grounded in the histories and legacies of settler colonialism and the nonnative environmental movement. Understanding this past, the author believes, is fundamental to reshaping the future. Dina Gilio-Whitaker (of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation) maintains that European colonization was a process of invasion, domination, dispossession, and environmental injustice. The consequent relocation and displacement stripped indigenous peoples of their homelands and crushed (without thoroughly extinguishing) their distinctive ways of conceptualizing land and nature. Where Europeans saw property and dominion, native people saw relationship, responsibility, and reciprocity. Although the emergence of a twenthieth-century American environmental movement offered opportunities to rethink exploitation and join forces with indigenous peoples, white supremacy and cultural misunderstandings often evoked conflict rather than…

Recent scholarship on the twentieth-century feminist antiviolence movement has focused on white feminist activists who fought for increased criminal sanctions and prosecution of perpetrators as the solution to violence against women (see, for example, Rose Corrigan's Up against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success [2013]). By contrast, Emily L. Thuma's All Our Trials is a much-needed history of anticarceral activism by radical women of color and antiracist white women, many of whom were lesbian-identified. These activists organized against interpersonal and institutional violence that interconnected in the lives of marginalized women in the United States. Thuma begins with the stories of four women of color—Joan Little, Inez Garcia, Dessie Woods, and Yvonne Wanrow—all of whom were prosecuted for using lethal force in self-defense from sexual assault. According to Thuma, powerful grassroots campaigns to free these four women became “coalitional spaces where multiple liberation movements interfaced and cross-fertilized” to challenge “gendered violence and racialized…

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields present a data-driven analysis of how the Republican party successfully mobilized white southerners into a durable voting bloc. Though Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon are considered architects of the southern strategy, it took over a generation for the Gop to dominate southern politics and drive a stake through the heart of the New Deal coalition. How did the Republican party do it? While many white southerners felt betrayed by the Democratic party's embrace of civil rights in the 1960s, their migration into the Gop was a forty-year political journey that relied as much on overtures to paternalism and Christian fundamentalism as it did on white supremacy, according to Maxwell and Shields. Christian paternalism had become deeply entwined with the South's history of legally sanctioned racial hierarchy. Southern white masculinity was, of course, bound up in the alleged protection and guardianship of white womanhood. That...

In the past twenty-five years, scholarship on the history of punishment and the emergence of mass incarceration has grown significantly. Even so, our understanding of the historical development of police powers and the significance of Americans’ first encounter with criminal justice—the police—has largely lagged behind, no doubt because of the difficulties entailed in accessing highly decentralized and restricted official sources. Among the few histories of policing, Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) revealed the arbitrary powers police derived from old vagrancy laws and the constitutional challenges that discredited the concept of vagrancy in the 1960s. Now, Policing the Open Road tells us the complementary story of how law enforcement officers in the United States came to expand their reach and authority in the twentieth century through the policing of automobile traffic. Sarah A. Seo argues that, the allure of cars as expressions and means of freedom and individual liberty notwithstanding, the mass production of automobiles almost immediately brought forth the imperative to…

In 1950 Joseph Beauharnais, an affiliate of the American Nazi party, wrote a pamphlet calling on his fellow “self-respecting white people in Chicago” to unite against the blacks who were invading white neighborhoods. He was arrested by the Chicago police after he distributed the pamphlet on street corners in Chicago's Loop. He was charged with violating an Illinois law against publishing anything that libeled a class of citizens defined by race, creed, color, or religion and that might cause a riot or breach of the peace. He was tried and found guilty, yet appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court upheld the verdict against him in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952). Undeterred, Beauharnais continued to advance the cause of white supremacy in Chicago. In 1953 he wrote to Chicago mayor Martin H. Kennelly, complaining that the city's police department was being used “to forcibly infiltrate the negro into...

In Entitled the sociologist Jennifer C. Lena examines the adoption of low-art forms into the high-art canon in the twentieth-century United States. Archival research from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, sociological surveys, and a variety of published sources and interviews inform this study. Lena argues that elite (often white) patrons broadened aesthetic tastes in the twentieth century through their privileged access to the cultures of others. Seven chapters outline the expansion of American art forms from the 1820s through the early 2000s. This is primarily a history of institutional change, rather than of consumption or aesthetics. Lena's analysis centers on a detailed study of Nelson Rockefeller's Museum of Primitive Art (Mpa), from 1940 to 1982. “Reputational entrepreneurs” such as Rockefeller asserted the value of their collections by seeking institutional sponsorship, making large donations, and stimulating a market for primitive art (p. 47). Through the Mpa, critics...

In this highly engaging book, Nicholas Buccola skillfully traces the paths of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., culminating in the two famous writers' debate in 1965 at Cambridge University, where Baldwin outshone Buckley. While a considerable amount of scholarship on each man exists, Buccola effectively highlights the chasm between the intellectual depth and the integrity of the conservative and civil rights movements in the 1960s by analyzing the two towering figures together at that moment. For Buccola, the stark differences in each man's upbringing shaped their philosophies as well as the legacies of each movement. Buccola rightly describes Buckley as a...

On June 27, 1925, the citizens of Markle, Indiana, put a bull on trial for crimes against the herd. Approximately 1,200 spectators from Huntington, Uniondale, and the surrounding countryside flooded into Markle for the trial. F. H. Bowers, a local attorney, promised the bull a robust defense, but the jury convicted. Judge Abram Simmons handed down a sentence of death, and, with that, the bull was summarily executed. The funeral oration delivered by a local minister is unrecorded, but the content most likely followed a script furnished for the occasion by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Usda). The minister would have reminded the assembled audience of the bull's grievous crime, inseparable from the bull's inferior body and tainted blood. “Let us bury him so deep and seal his tomb so tight that both he and his posterity will be lost to this world forever,” implored the Usda's funeral oration.1 The bull was a scrub. The Usda defined a scrub bull as an inferior bull “of mixed or unknown breeding.” In its Better Sires—Better Stock campaign, the Usda designated scrub sires—scrub male…

A compelling study of social movements in the thirty years following the Civil War, Equality provides scholars with a timely examination of how inequalities emerged during the first American Gilded Age. Charles Postel's analysis could not have come at a more significant moment, as the first decade of the twenty-first century has ushered in a second gilded age of tremendous inequalities. Postel examines how farmhands, women's rights activists, former slaves, and factory workers were all in pursuit of the meaning of equality in America. The book begins with the farmers' Grange, “the largest, strongest, and most impactful social movement of its time” (p. 12). Through the early 1870s, the Grange grew exponentially to 860,000 members of both genders by 1875. In fact, women helped secure its success, “appointed or elected to serve as lecturers, secretaries, and other responsible positions within the organization” (p. 46). The Grange also had a segment...

Creole Drama showcases the vibrant and internationally connected world of New Orleans spoken-drama theater from the end of the eighteenth century to the Civil War. Impressively rich historical context enlivens the neighborhoods, populations, and venues that helped sustain a lively and contentious theater scene. Sustaining the rivalries between Anglophone and Francophone populations was a shifting desire to preserve the French language and colonial cultures and to increase pressure on developing American and Louisianan identities. In Creole Drama Juliane Braun successfully demonstrates that her study “reintegrates non-English-speaking societies and their cultural production into the field of American literary and cultural studies” (p. 7). In this endeavor she aligns herself with scholars such as Lawrence A. Rosenwald and Werner Sollors while also providing a bridge between the scholarship on New Orleans and early American theater by scholars including Shirley Thompson, Jeffrey Richards, and Heather S. Nathans. The book begins by highlighting the deep connections between New Orleans…