The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of American History, 2024

Matthew Lassiter first offered his “Cold Cases” course at the University of Michigan in the autumn of 2018. It had been four years since police officers killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, and Tamir Rice; three years since Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland had died in police custody; and just a few months since two patrolmen had shot Stephon Clark eight times as he stood in his grandmother's backyard, holding a cell phone they mistook for a handgun. So a course committed to recovering the history of police violence in Detroit, an hour down the road from Michigan's campus, had an obvious immediacy. Sixteen students enrolled. Their biggest challenge was evidentiary. According to the Detroit Police Department, its on-duty officers killed 201 people in the sixteen years, from 1957 to 1973, that Lassiter set as the class parameters. But the details of almost all those cases remained buried in the department's still-sealed files. To get past that enormous barrier, the students pulled what they could from Detroit's newspapers and archival sources, a process that gave them basic…

Universities often make troublesome neighbors, particularly in cities. Students take apartments and houses, research and athletic facilities displace residences and local business, housing costs rise, and traffic clogs local streets. Laura Wolf-Powers contributes an informative account of struggles over these and other issues in Philadelphia, documenting reactions to efforts by two major institutions to expand their footprints. She begins in the latter half of the 1950s, as the University of Pennsylvania prepared to “upgrade” its immediate vicinity to attract more “responsible” residents to a perceived slum, where a student was violently murdered. It was the era of urban renewal, and Penn intended to follow the lead of other urban institutions. But the planned University City development project ran into neighborhood opposition and student protest, which slowed its completion and revealed the racial dynamics of residential displacement that most such projects entailed. When finally completed in the early 1970s, featuring the Science Center and a specialized public high school, it…

A new historiography on the origins of the modern American state is thriving, and William J. Novak is one of its leading figures. He and others argue that America was not a nation with a “weak state” that paled in comparison to the welfare states of Europe. Nor did U.S. private business grow large and powerful before the government did. Instead, the new literature argues that America had substantial capacity to shape society and economy from the early nineteenth century. Novak here focuses on the post–Civil War era, uncovering a long and robust history of state intervention built around a new positive liberalism, a shift from legal formalism to legal realism, the discovery of society against individualistic doctrines such as social Darwinism, and specific interventions through policies built on antimonopoly and public utility concepts, expanded state administrative capacity, and especially the use of the state's police power to regulate society in the public interest. All these ideas and practices flourished after the Civil War and through the Progressive Era. Rather than having to…

Beset by book bans and politicized curricula, historians today will not be surprised that teaching history has long been a high-stakes contest over national identity. Donald Yacovone's compelling study of history textbooks from the antebellum era to the present reveals how history education both challenged and, more often, instilled white supremacy. Before the Civil War, textbooks unfolded a history of white Americans exclusively. “Schoolbooks became a liberating force” after the war, however, by centering the history of slavery and recognizing African Americans as part of the nation (p. 146). These emancipationist textbooks underscore Reconstruction's radicalism and delayed potential. Lost Cause history triumphed after Reconstruction but did not fully eclipse emancipationist interpretations. Emancipationist history reemerged as Black activists and professional historians reoriented history education, particularly after the mid-twentieth century. While we may be experiencing an emancipationist moment in our teaching of U.S. history today, Yacovone's account of white supremacy's…

In Immeasurable Weather, Sara J. Grossman argues that efforts to catalogue weather in the United States beginning in the early nineteenth century emerged from the intertwined forces of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The accumulation of such weather data, in turn, contributed to the rise of the nation-state founded on those ideas; as she notes, “data gathering and quantification gave coherence to a national weather project, and to a notion—grounded on settler and heteropatriarchal values—of ‘nation’ itself” (p. 3). Grossman is particularly interested in what she calls “the cultural production of data,” the process by which data was gathered over time and how and why weather became “a distinctly numerical phenomenon” (pp. 12, 13). By emphasizing weather and the natural world more broadly as quantifiable, settlers erased other, especially Indigenous, forms of knowing and engaging with weather forces and contributed to a mentality and process that viewed those forces through a singular lens that ignored “relationships of impact and reciprocity across biospheric…

The journey from rights to justice is perilous. Across the interconnected realms of labor, gender, race, immigration, health care, housing, food, climate, reproduction, sexuality, and prisons and policing, are scholars, activists, and practitioners who are challenging the status quo with intersectional, transformative, justice-oriented strategies. Beleaguered rights advocates insisting on freedom to often clash with marginalized communities fighting for freedom from. To the work of historians, activists, and memoirists documenting struggles for safe, effective, accessible, and affordable contraception and abortion and against coerced, racist, and imperialist sterilization, Felicia Kornbluh contributes a deeply researched account of sixty years of politics and praxis in New York State. Kornbluh's third book is directed at a more popular audience than her previous excellent histories of poverty, welfare, politics, social policy, and movement change in the United States. Her compelling hook is hyperlocal. The lawyer who drafted the original legislation repealing New York's…

School reform is a recurring political issue, and the “crisis” in U.S. public education seems to get more intense each year. Daniel S. Moak offers a provocative account of why public schools and public education policy have become so contentious. The central reason, Moak argues, stems from liberal beliefs that education can compensate for the nation's persistent racial and class inequalities and that schools can become effective vehicles for eliminating poverty. When schools, despite repeated attempts at reform, fail to achieve those goals, policy makers and the public blame teachers, administrators, and education reformers, and they institute accountability measures that are, at heart, punitive surveillance tools leaving no room for effective reform. Yet, Moak points out, all along there have been alternative visions for public education that emphasize possibilities for transformative civic engagement and social engagement. While these views have generally lost out to more punitive reform models, it is instructive to trace the conflicting strains in public school reform.

Andrew Curley's Carbon Sovereignty should be read by historians interested in various concentrations, including American Indians, the environment, and the American West. The book is a careful, if not always historical, examination of the ways the Navajo participated in the coal economy. Carbon Sovereignty is a companion to other works on American Indian history and economies of extraction by scholars such as James Allison, Donald Fixico, and Marjane Ambler. The Navajo relationship to coal has been complicated: it has allowed a measure of independence via what Curley calls carbon sovereignty, but it has also left the Navajo at the mercy of the shifts in energy needs, the politics of environmentalism, and climate change. Coal financed the growth of the Navajo economy after World War II; it helped transform the Navajo tribe into the Navajo Nation. Native workers, their families, and their communities benefited from laboring in the mines. Curley reports that 25 percent of the Navajo Nation's annual operating budget ($30–$50 million) came from coal revenues. Even so, those revenues dried…

“The time has come to consider groups that are neither white nor black in the jurisprudence on race,” the legal scholar Frank H. Wu wrote in 1995. Wu was concerned by arguments that affirmative action programs necessarily led to discrimination against Asian Americans. Beginning in the late 1980s, conservatives had made such arguments with increasing frequency to undermine race-conscious admissions in higher education. Wu, however, remained optimistic about separating Asian Americans' struggles against racial discrimination from the agenda of rolling back affirmative action. “The Asian-American experience,” Wu wrote, “should demonstrate the continuing importance of race and the necessity of remedial programs based on race.”1 Wu's confidence that “the Asian-American experience” would justify ongoing antiracist policies—not just for Asian Americans but for other racial minorities—reflected the influence that ethnic studies had on the study of Asian American communities. Asian American studies was born from the activism of college students who rallied in the late 1960s under the banner…

Lauren Hirshberg's Suburban Empire tells the compelling and little-known story of the central role that the Marshall Islands played in the global development and imperial expansion of the U.S. Cold War security state. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. military chose the sparsely populated Marshall Islands as an ideal location for testing its expanding nuclear weapons program. Over the next dozen years, the island and its residents were devastated and displaced by sixty-seven nuclear atmospheric tests, including the 1954 Castle Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb equivalent to one thousand of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. After the cessation of nuclear tests in 1958, the island found itself again a key military site, now for the expanding U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (Icbm) program. While Hirshberg recounts the immediate and slow violence wrought by this weapons testing, at the heart of her book is the military base, and how it restructured life in the Marshall Islands. Specifically, the United States exported a model of the American suburbs to the Kwajalein…