The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2021

This volume, in which Vincent Brown both compellingly narrates a Jamaican slave revolt and offers scholars a bracing new analytical frame for all slave revolts, is a major achievement. Brown makes a strong case that Tacky's Revolt, which began in April 1760 and lasted eighteen months, was “only one conflict within a larger war” against the Jamaican regime (p. 163). Moreover, Brown invites historians to analyze this and other slave insurrections as military history. Tacky's Revolt, he argues, was a product of the West African wars that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, and of the daily warfare of slavery that made Jamaica “a militarized society from top to bottom” (p. 44). Furthermore, the revolt took place so thoroughly in the context of the Seven Years' War that he classifies it as “one of the hardest-fought battles of that titanic global conflict” (p. 7). Brown's broad interpretive assertions raise questions. One...

Racial segregation and racial inequality fundamentally shaped U.S. cities in the twentieth century and are key to understanding the American social and political landscape. A particularly notorious tool for promoting segregation has been redlining—the targeted denial of home mortgages and other financial supports according to presumed risk. Institutionalized by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (Holc) and adopted by the Federal Housing Administration (Fha), historical redlining defined the riskiness of investing in urban neighborhoods based on demographics, infrastructure, housing quality, neighborhood stability, and proximity to amenities or hazards such as manufacturing. Holc's assessment of urban neighborhoods in the 1930s was racially and ethnically discriminatory. It used the power of the federal government to formalize patterns of segregation and discrimination.1 The work of journalists, public intellectuals, and public-facing digital projects has joined scholarly research on redlining, creating a wider awareness than when the phenomenon first came to light in the 1970s. Two…

The recent militarized response to Black Lives Matter rallies highlights just how repressive the policing of racially marginalized and economically vulnerable populations in the United States has become. It is in this context that Stuart Schrader's Badges without Borders is a particular compelling and relevant study. For those already aware of the negative consequences of police-training programs and how they have led to extensive human rights abuses around the world, this book will come as no surprise; rather, it extends and deepens what we already know. Schrader examines how domestic law enforcement in the United States and international war making have become intertwined as the distinction between the two become blurred. He places the rise of the carceral state in the United States in a transnational context in which counterinsurgency practices that the government employed elsewhere were subsequently repatriated as policing practices on the city streets of the United States....

In 1915 the Onondaga Indian Lydia Pierce delivered a speech to the Six Nations Temperance Society titled “From an Indian to Indians.” Pierce reminded her largely Native American audience of historic struggles against numerous foes; it was now time, she said, for a “Temperance League to conquer their last and worst enemy” (p. 73). She implored her audience to recognize that the best thing, then, is to surround our children with [a] better environment, give them a good education, teach them to be self-dependent and industrious, to respect themselves, and above all, teach them the religion of Jesus Christ. (ibid.) Utilizing archival sources from across the nation, Thomas J. Lappas analyzes a complex partnership between Native American women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Wctu). This partnership worked to instill a temperance ethos in the young, to punish bootleggers, and to encourage US citizenship, Euro-American-style education,...

Nine years before protestors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Unc) hauled down the long-standing campus statue of the Confederate soldier known as “Silent Sam,” graduate student Adam H. Domby had unearthed a long-forgotten speech delivered at the monument's 1913 dedication. In that address, wealthy Unc alumnus and white supremacist Julian S. Carr had not only revealed the racism permeating the unveiling but actually boasted of once horsewhipping “a negro wench, until her skirt hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady” (p. 20). In 2011 Domby published excerpts from Carr's address in the Daily Tar Heel, Unc's campus newspaper. Still, it took another seven years, and explosive events such as the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in 2017, before a 2018 crowd wrenched Silent Sam from its pedestal....

Nominated for over thirty awards, including Best Documentary Feature from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and co-produced by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions, Crip Camp begins in 1971 at Camp Jened, a summer camp founded in 1951 for disabled people located in New York's Catskill Mountains, and follows some of the campers through their participation in disability rights protests, including the 504 Sit-ins in 1977 and various demonstrations leading to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (Ada) in 1990. Crip Camp uses archival footage and interviews with former Jened campers and counselors, and participants in the San Francisco 504 Sit-in, to tell the story of how disabled people, some of whom became close friends at summer camp, led the movement to force the Nixon and Carter administrations to enact Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and convince the...

Opening with the women's march on Washington to protest the election of President Donald J. Trump, Lisa Levenstein's book explains that the hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children who showed up in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 2017, were the result of sustained feminist organizing noticed by “no one”—except for all the people who had been developing a feminist praxis and theory based in antiracist, intersectional, and grounded-in-grassroots experiences since at least the mid-1980s. Focusing specifically on realpolitik, on feminist organizations and practices rather than cultural moments, Levenstein's book is a timely intervention and a reminder of how much work we really did. Levenstein identifies the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing as a specific moment for this critical shift in feminist politics in the United States. Against a contemporary discourse that debated the feminist backlash, Beijing drew thirty thousand people from around...

In this polemical yet scholarly tour de force, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan interrogates the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings in recent major religious freedom cases on theological and legal grounds. Sullivan believes the Court has misinterpreted the separation of church and state to mean that the state must cede sovereignty to any corporate body claiming exemption from generally applicable laws for reasons of faith. In the 2012 case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the justices unanimously agreed that the school could fire a teacher of secular subjects because of her physical disability, despite federal antidiscrimination statutes. Writing for the Court, Justice John Roberts justified the ruling by saying that “the church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.” On reading the opinion, Sullivan reports, “I sat up. The church? What is the church in US law? … Is it...

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States built an enormous infrastructure for community treatment: more than sixty-five thousand beds in halfway houses and similar small-scale residential facilities. By promising to displace prisons and to establish forms of intervention that were less expensive, less restrictive, less dependent on institutional confinement, more effective in rehabilitation, and more humane, halfway houses became linchpins of criminal and juvenile justice systems, drug and alcohol treatment, and other court-ordered interventions. Nationwide zeal for community treatment caused the number of correctional halfway houses to explode from fewer than twelve in 1960 to more than two thousand in 1978. That year, more than two hundred thousand people spent time in residential treatment facilities, as common a fixture of 1970s American life as roller-skating rinks. The total capacity of all U.S. halfway houses rivaled the number of prison beds in California, New York, and Texas combined.1 Despite...

In winter, the Yukon River watershed quiets and fills with snow. By March and April, eastern Beringia—roughly the land from Alaska's Norton Sound north to the Beaufort Sea and eastward to the juncture of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers—is covered in drifts six or more feet deep. Paths fill with each new storm. In summer, taiga and tundra goes boggy, alternating knots of sedge grasses with pooled water. Arctic and sub-Arctic terrain and seasons make movement laborious, the land a great sink into which peoples' labor pours. It has been centuries, however, since people moved through eastern Beringia alone: dogs expand the capacity for humans to cross this space. Historically, canine labor enabled trade, politics, and the basic tasks of finding food and fuel, particularly in winter. Until snowmobiles and airplanes became common in the 1950s, how people shared and contested space was done partly on canine terms. And those terms were both material and emotional: to work well with people, dogs required relationships of close affiliation, established by consistent mutual care and interaction.…