The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2023

Intrigued by U.S. immigration law's fixation on Asians and radicals in the early twentieth century, Moon-Ho Jung locates their connection in resistance to the imposition of U.S. sovereignty on the U.S. mainland and territories. To contain the threat to its liberal political and economic order, the U.S. state racialized and radicalized this opposition and criminalized and delegitimized resisters' politics, thereby constructing its security apparatus. Alfred W. McCoy's Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009) traces the U.S. security state's origins to colonial authorities' strategies for defeating Filipino revolutionaries during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). While McCoy views such practices as “antithetical to American political traditions,” though introduced into “a deeply democratic society” by empire, Jung regards nation building as consistent with empire building since both “operated hand in hand, an ongoing process that has shaped and defined the United States” (McCoy, Policing America's Empire, p.…

In 2005 the activist Frank Kameny sold his vast trove of personal papers documenting years of his battle against a federal agency and his involvement in a wider campaign to counter deeply entrenched assumptions about, and discrimination against, homosexuals. His collection was in turn donated to the Library of Congress, and less than a decade later Harvard University undergraduate Eric Cervini trekked to Washington, D.C., to comb through it, noting, “I quickly realized that I was staring at the hidden history of the American gay rights movement” (p. 386). The result of his efforts is The Deviant's War, a history told in exacting detail, offering a rich narrative of one man's life, work, and relentless pursuit of justice and a recounting of the emergence of organized gay activism in the 1960s. An astronomer by training, Kameny was employed by the Army Map Service on a provisional basis in 1957 when the U.S. Civil Service Commission questioned him about allegations of his homosexuality. Thus began his extended fight for federal government employment as a gay man, which he carried over…

Thulani Davis's The Emancipation Circuit explains how 4 million newly freed African Americans built upon networks developed during slavery to forge new political, religious, educational, and labor organizations, networks, and connections in the post–Civil War South. With the region loosely tied by rail lines and waterways, political and religious organizations and activists, and the mass migration of liberated persons, the “emancipation circuit” created avenues for new citizens to demand their rights in a rapidly changing, often-hostile environment. To maintain strict control over labor and quell Black efforts to organize politically, some whites resorted to violence, including massacres and lynchings. The Ku Klux Klan, of course, is most well known for terror of this type. To rationalize the atrocities, voter suppression, and other activities, whites invoked the need to avoid much-feared “Negro rule” (p. 324). At the outset of the book, Davis explains that: the main proposition of [the book] … is that the first offensive in history launched by Negroes “along a broad front” was…

Of those who escaped slavery and told the tale, few inspired such admiration as the Reverend Josiah Henson. No slave narrative was as “instructive” as his, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe believed. Indeed, Stowe used Henson's pious account of suffering slavery's torments as a basis for her wildly popular novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854). Henson's life, she explained, ran “parallel with that of Uncle Tom,” her personification of enslaved virtue. The Uncle Tom connection made Henson into a celebrity, a living embodiment of “the archetypal ‘good slave,’” the scholar Jan Marsh has written.1 If Henson was the celebrated “good slave,” then Harry Smith was something else. He certainly was not celebrated; he barely registers in the historical record, and most of what we know about him is from an error-riddled and unreliable slave narrative quietly published in 1891 by an obscure Michigan press. Nor was he, by his own reckoning, good. He had been “very saucy and mischevious” as a youth, and his five decades in bondage did little to change that. Telling his story in his old age, Smith reveled…

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman offers a chronology of how Americans have worried about wiretapping. He argues that fear of governmental secret interception became a dominant phenomenon only recently. For much of the twentieth century, Americans were more concerned about the tapping activities of private detective agencies, labor spies, and criminals. This bold finding is bound to provoke speculation about whether it may be applicable to concerns about other forms of surveillance. Hochman's account ranges from 1860, when telegraph tapping became a Civil War intelligence practice, to 2001, when the terrorist attack of September 11 precipitated a wave of federal electronic and digital surveillance. He pays attention to facets of surveillance history that one would hope to see covered in a book such as The Listeners: the 1924 countereavesdropping reforms of Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone; tapping practices, the Venona effort included, associated with the case of Judith Coplon, who was charged with being a Soviet spy in 1949; the Title III legislation of 1968, which proclaimed the…

To secure his party's nomination in 1896, William McKinley courted Black Republicans. George Henry White, a Black attorney elected to Congress from North Carolina that same year, was an ardent McKinley supporter. Benjamin R. Justesen, the author of a 2001 biography of White, documents the fitful political partnership between McKinley and the congressman. Justesen argues, first, that biographers of McKinley have minimized his commitment to African American political equality; and second, that White and McKinley orchestrated the largest number of Black appointments to federal positions of any president. (Despite civil service reforms a decade earlier, both parties still expected their presidents to reward loyalists.) Justesen argues that “McKinley's role as a sincere friend and benefactor of African Americans may be among the best-kept secrets of American political history” (p. 2). White came to office at a precarious moment for Black rights. Raised on his free family's turpentine farm, he earned a law degree at Howard University and served in the North Carolina legislature before…

Sometimes a work of history is so timely that it seems as if the author intentionally delayed publication for just the right moment. Such is the case with J. Russell Hawkins's The Bible Told Them So. Even amid contemporary white evangelical hysteria over “critical race theory” supposedly infiltrating public schools, and with political campaigns aimed to whitewash America's racial past, Hawkins reminds us that the theological foundations for such movements were laid long before Donald J. Trump. Hawkins begins with the premise that our popular conception of the civil rights movement was that Christian faith animated only one group of participants—Black Christians. Conversely, southern white evangelicals often cited theology as the primary reason for opposing integration. Focusing on Southern Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina, Hawkins details how white evangelicals drew on biblical and theological arguments to oppose racial integration in their churches, public schools, and denominational colleges in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, as integration won the day at the legal and…

Kelly Lytle Hernández has written a truly gripping account of events leading up to the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Plm), she traces the complex history of political opposition to the Porfirio Díaz regime in the early twentieth century. Díaz and his allies called these dissenters “bad Mexicans,” a term that the author metaphorically turns on its head. Bad Mexicans is simultaneously a political history of the Plm, a biography of Ricardo Flores Magón, and a sweeping account of U.S.-Mexico relations in the contexts of capitalism, socialism, anarchism, empire, race, gender, migration, and violence. “The history of the U.S. as a global power cannot be told without Mexico,” Lytle Hernández writes, adding that “Díaz's Mexico was the ‘laboratory’ of U.S. imperialism” (pp. 8, 9). Organized into four parts with twenty-five chapters, Bad Mexicans begins with the rise of Díaz during the Reform War (1857–1861), the French Intervention (1861–1867), and the early Porfiriato. A crucial moment came in 1901 at a conference in San Luis Potosí, where the fledgling…

In Asylum Ways of Seeing, Heather Murray sets the ambitious agenda of integrating the perspective of patients in twentieth-century mental hospitals into big conversations in the United States. Using patient memoirs, letters written by and about patients, responses by hospital staff, as well as published works of the time, many with only a tangential relationship to psychiatric hospitals, Murray focuses on the meanings and interpretations of patient stillness and inaction in the hospital between the 1920s and the 1970s. Murray consistently uses the concept of the asylum as a space where patients were set apart from the rest of society. Whether they were there by choice (whatever that might have meant) or under the authority of others, the separation offered perspective on major preoccupations of Americans and the psychiatric profession of the time. In chapter 1, Murray points out that the figure of the still patient as automaton was perceived as good, and that the asylum functioned as a peaceful (though not always successful) haven against the tumult outside. In chapter 2, Murray…

According to Peniel E. Joseph, the United States is in a new period of Reconstruction. The first Reconstruction followed the Civil War, and with the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, it seemed as if the nation might commit to a project of “abolition democracy” (p. 15). However, redemptionism precipitated Reconstruction's premature end. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) initiated the second period of reconstruction, which Joseph says ended with Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Like Reconstruction legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were met with backlash. The election of Barack Obama signaled the start of the third reconstruction, but the advent of Donald J. Trump demonstrated a nation still structured by anti-Black racial animus. (Oddly, the third reconstruction is not characterized by any significant legislation expanding Black citizenship. This reader still wonders whether there is a third reconstruction at all.)