Showing papers in "Reviews in American History in 2011"

What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us

Abstract: About halfway through the introduction of Mark L. Kamrath’s The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown: Radical History and the Early Republic, I began to think of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Reg and the gang of the Judean People’s Front—sorry, the People’s Front of Judea (“splitters!”)—laid down the principles of their struggle. My initial expectations of this book were conditioned by its odd title. I doubted that Kamrath was going to associate Brown with the protean German historiographic tradition of Historismus that emerged during Brown’s lifetime. I anticipated a more likely tie-in with the rhetoric-based historicism of Hayden White. A final possibility was that by “historicism” Kamrath means the New Historicism associated with the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, and that the book wasn’t entitled “The New Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown” because that might sound, well . . . ludicrously anachronistic—like the Monty Python film? So which is it? In his introduction, Kamrath asserts that Brown’s late-career periodical and historical writings—which will be the focus of the book to come—“strike us as having a self-conscious, meta-critical quality in the mode of Hayden White or Robert Berkhofer” (p. xiii). I want to flag in passing that “us.” Who exactly is Kamrath referring to? A general community of scholars? A particular community of scholars? Or does the solitary author have a frog in his pocket? The spirit of Hayden White would also seem to hover over Kamrath’s claim that “Brown’s self-reflexive inquiry into modes of historical representation tested assumed boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in eighteenth-century writing” (p. xiv). But in an endnote, Kamrath specifically defines “historicism” as “the theory and practice of history writing that attempts to be impartial or factual and avoid biased judgments of the past” (p. 267). That sounds more like the “wie es eigentlich gewesen war” Historismus of Leopold von Ranke and less like the Hayden White of Metahistory. However, he adds in the same note: “By ‘historicism,’ I mean a theory and method of history writing that

Who Speaks for the Poor

Abstract: On the morning when I started to write this review—September 8, 2010—NPR’s Morning Edition reported at length on President Barack Obama’s proposals to create jobs and accelerate economic recovery. Obama and his spokespeople referred over and over again to the plight of the “middle class,” whose prosperity they promised to restore. In all the talk about job creation and the renewal of economic growth, there was, however, one group left unmentioned: poor people. Despite the rise in poverty accompanying economic recession, poverty remains startlingly absent from either Democrats’ or Republicans’ political rhetoric. The Obama administration is not insensitive to poverty—in fact, quite the opposite. But they have felt it necessary to smuggle programs that assist poor people into other legislation. Is this the result of public disinterest, the conviction that poverty will elicit nothing more than a huge yawn from the mass of voters? Or is it more than that: a national aversion to programs that address poverty head-on? Has poverty become another “third rail” in American politics? President of the Other America and Who Cares? do not answer these questions in the same way, and the tension between their explanations raises important interpretive and research issues. Schmitt’s reconstruction of Robert F. Kennedy’s political career points to a link between economic justice and civil rights that turned poverty into a potentially winning issue as RFK tapped into a passionate social movement. Katherine Newman’s and Elisabeth Jacobs’ evidence, on the other hand, suggests one constant in American politics from at least the New Deal to Obama: most Americans have not cared very much about poor people and have been reluctant to help them. In the face of public apathy or

The Politics of Accommodation

Abstract: With this book, Steven P. Miller emerges as a significant new voice in the history of evangelical Christianity. This is a first-rate book, well written, strongly researched, and full of insight into the politics of racial accommodation in the postwar South. Miller ably captures Graham’s effort to support racial integration in the postwar South through his religious “Crusades.” Although Graham became closely allied in the public mind with President Richard Nixon, Miller shows that Graham, a registered Democrat, formed close relations with other presidents, especially Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson. While Miller does not fully explain why or how Graham wielded so much political influence, he shows that politicians from both parties called upon Graham for political advice, personal counseling, and public show. Miller persuasively frames Graham within what he calls the social ethic of evangelical universalism and a political ethic he terms the politics of decency. For Graham, both ethics followed from his deeply rooted Christian faith that accepted all men and women as equal in the eyes of God and open to personal salvation. Miller finds the essence of universalism in the belief that the individual soul is the primary theological and political unit of society; that relational solutions surpass legislative ones in resolving social problems; and that Christians should acquiesce to legitimate government authority. These social and political ethics had important consequences in shaping Graham’s public life. They led Graham to insist that his religious revivals be racially integrated. As a consequence, he held his first desegregated Southern “Crusade” in 1953, before the landmark events of the civil rights era. At the same time, the politics of decency invoked “law and order,” which proved to be a double-edged sword used to denounce both violence by white segregationists and in inner-city race riots. As Miller observes, Graham viewed himself as an evangelical, not a fundamentalist. By the 1950s, a deep divide between evangelicals and fundamentalists had widened. Although Miller understands that “evangelical”

State of the Field: The Politics of Consumption

Abstract: More than half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter pointed to a fundamental transformation in American history, what he called “a major shift in the American economy and American life from an absorbing concern with production to an equal concern with consumption as a sphere of life.” He located this shift in the late nineteenth century, when, as he put it, the United States, which was born in the country, moved to the city. In this period, he wrote, “the urban consumer first stepped forward as a serious and self-conscious factor in American social politics.” According to Hofstadter, a “consumer consciousness” had emerged to reshape American politics. Why, then, did it take historians decades to pursue this insight and offer well-documented accounts of the rise of the consumer in American politics not only in the Progressive Era but also in other periods of American history?1 American intellectuals, including Hofstadter and his contemporaries, have long tended to see consumerism in a negative light. Living suburban lifestyles, with the rate of home and automobile ownership going up rapidly, Americans in the postwar years became obsessed with material abundance, or so intellectuals believed. For Hofstadter and his peers, consumerism debased cultural sensibilities and dampened political activism. Part of the consensus school of historians in the 1950s and 1960s, Hofstadter saw a commitment to private property and free enterprise as defining the American political tradition. These beliefs established the boundaries of political debate. That commitment to the market explained the tepid nature of political reform in the twentieth century. If, perhaps, consumers had advocated for political reform in the Progressive Era, by mid-century they lost their sharp edge—if indeed their brand of social politics, as Hofstadter called them, ever had one. Writing in the early 1950s, he remarked of this group: “Today the white-collar class is more apathetic and more self-indulgent; it hopes chiefly for security, leisure, and comfort and for the enjoyment of the pleasures of mass entertainment.” In other words, Americans sat on their couches in their air-conditioned living rooms, watching television and tuning out the larger issues of the day. The famous liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith captured that critique when he discussed the paradox of public poverty amid

Losing the War

Abstract: Authors are not responsible for the cover designs of their books, and for every cover proudly posted on campus office doors or Facebook pages, some smaller number have been greeted with a vague sense of disappointment. Within the historical profession, of course, dust jackets matter little; we all understand that complexities of historical argument are not easily translated into visual design, and in any case we know better than to judge a book by its cover. Nonetheless, the best place to start making sense of these two identically titled books may be with their covers. The dust jackets of both Kathleen Frydl’s and Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin’s versions of The GI Bill picture soldiers returning from war. Altschuler and Blumin’s veterans are the AP photo version, jubilant men crowded onto the deck of a transport ship, grinning and waving as they pull into dock. The Signal Corps photograph on Frydl’s book portrays a different homecoming, the men somber, no more than silhouettes, dark shapes in helmets and heavy packs, rifles evident, heads bowed, trudging single file down the gangplank to shore. The black-and-white photograph on Altschuler and Blumin’s book is embedded in patriotism, the book’s title rendered in red, white, and blue, a strip of full-color U.S. flag running along the cover’s top edge. The blackand-white photograph that fills Frydl’s cover is washed, top to bottom, in dark, murky green. In one way, the covers’ different promises are fulfilled: the first book is forthright and generally celebratory, a straightforward work with little irony and no hidden layers. The second is full of ambivalence and ambiguity. But in a more fundamental way, these images are misleading. For in The GI Bills of Frydl, Altschuler, and Blumin, war offers only the most distant of contexts.

Transatlantic Revolution, National Identity, and American Exceptionalism in the Early Republic

Abstract: Since the history of the early American republic revitalized as a field some thirty-odd years ago, its students have devoted a great part of their energies to researching the emergence of national identity, politics, and culture in the wake of the Revolution. This steady attention to the development of nationhood has been neither unintentional nor unconsidered. The period once had a reputation as “the most boring part of American history to research or teach,” and attention to topics such as nationalism and national identity seemed a likely route out of that debased position.1 Those subjects gained increasing traction during the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a host of nationalist struggles. Today, historians of the early American republic continue to emphasize the nation’s creation as the primary significance of the field. The present mission statement of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) highlights the “special public significance” of the “founding of the United States” and the creation of “the American nation-state.”2 Even the very name attached to the field, which lays stress on the adjective “American,” clearly conveys its national orientation. Many of the most-cited histories of the era published in the last four decades, including books by Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, David Waldstreicher, and Joanne

Immigration Historiography at the Crossroads

Abstract: Well-respected immigration historians James M. Berquist and June Granatir Alexander have both recently published significant works of synthesis in the field. Together they cover the classic era of European immigration from the return of prosperity and rise of immigration in the 1820s, following the Panic of 1819, to the imposition of quota laws on immigration in the 1920s. These studies provide an opportunity to take the measure of the current state of immigration historiography, a particularly self-conscious field to the extent that there is a powerful and abiding tradition of academic inquiry that has survived over the course of almost a century. It is manifest in both books, inviting the professional reader’s scrutiny for markers of the evolution of that tradition. I myself write from within that interpretive tradition and am sympathetic to its aspirations for both the emotional weight of the stories it has to tell and the importance of those stories for understanding Americans. In 2008, I wrote a review essay defending immigration history against recent criticisms I felt were overdrawn and unfair.1 But that does not mean that I regard the current writing of immigration history to be unproblematic or the field not in need of renewal. Both of these gracefully written, well-conceived books, which are intended for lay readers and college surveys but are also useful summaries for scholars, have been published at a time when stock-taking in immigration historiography also has been urged from outside the field. The field has witnessed an enormous expansion of knowledge in the last four decades. But its basic

U.S. Television as Cold War Cultural Missionary

Abstract: Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners, framed her “‘five years on the carousel of early television’” as a period of “making mistakes, making rules, and making quality entertainment” (Baughman, p. 3). Making history should be added to that list of accomplishments as demonstrated by the books under review, which contribute to and deepen—albeit in very different ways—the scholarship on the development of U.S. television from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. Using differing methodological approaches and source materials, these three authors enrich our understanding of television as cultural, political, and economic broker in mid–twentieth-century America. In Same Time, Same Station, James Baughman provides an exhaustively researched overview of the institutional, regulatory, social, and technological history of television from the late 1940s through the early 1960s that now stands as the finest comprehensive narrative on the subject. Lynn Spigel, in TV by Design, uses the compelling concept of “everyday modernism” to illustrate how early television was both shaped by and helped to shape modern art, design, and architecture. In the process, television served as a tool of Cold War cultural and political nationalism. Spigel’s monograph is an important cultural and media history that rejects the notion of commercial television as a “cultural wasteland” and instead demonstrates that “television was the mid–twentieth-century centerpiece of deeply social and political struggles over art, commerce, taste, and everyday visual forms through which publics are

The Landscape of Life on the Mid-Atlantic Frontier

Abstract: Explorations of intercultural relations in the Mid-Atlantic colonies have produced some of the best recent work on early America, including two Bancroft Prize–winning works: James Merrell’s Into the American Woods and Peter Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors. In many of these works, historians have cast cross-cultural relations in the Mid-Atlantic region in terms of declension, a narrative that often ends with unfettered violence, as embodied by the Paxton Boys’ Rebellion in 1763. Kevin Kenny in Peaceable Kingdom Lost and David Preston in Texture of Contact join these scholars in studying the nature of Indian-white relations on the Mid-Atlantic borderlands. Kenny’s work largely conforms to the historiographic consensus forged over the course of the last decades, while Preston aims to challenge this established narrative. While much in their respective analyses seems divergent, their two works combine to provide a more complete—and complicated—portrait of life in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. In clear and crisp prose, Kenny’s Peaceable Kingdom Lost brings to bear more than a generation of scholarship on Pennsylvania to offer a pointed critique of Pennsylvania’s expansionist history. Kenny’s grand narrative of Pennsylvania’s history contrasts starkly with William Penn’s vision for his “holy experiment.” Kenny writes of a colony founded upon a great promise that, through poor policy, greed, and ineptitude, ultimately caused Indian disillusionment and civil strife. For Kenny, the Paxton Boys’ massacre of the Conestoga Indians in 1763 symbolizes how the colony had abandoned Penn’s founding vision. Preston’s Texture of Contact challenges the declension narrative, forcing

And the War Came

Abstract: No one knew what was coming. For all the portents—the comets and meteors, the half-finished domes and monuments—a “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” to borrow a phrase of Lincoln’s, was not what anyone expected, though some feared it. Not James Chesnut of South Carolina. He boasted that one would be safely able to drink all the blood spilled in establishing the Confederacy. Others, as well, doubted that secession would lead to war; or they believed that if war erupted, it would be a brief and decisive affair. Two very different books take us back to the secession winter of 1860–61 and to the months between the assault on Fort Sumter and Bull Run. Adam Goodheart, a young historian who learned his craft writing for magazines and newspapers—not in seminar rooms heavy with historiography—offers a lyrical work of literary nonfiction; Emory Thomas, emeritus professor of history at the University of Georgia and one of the leading scholars of the Confederacy, offers a personal meditation on the horrors of war. Goodheart’s work is over 400 pages with notes; Thomas’ barely reaches 100. Goodheart tells stories; Thomas makes judgments. Each book, in its own way, invites us to consider the purposes of historical writing. “Night fell at last.” With that simple opening sentence of 1861, we are placed in the hands of a storyteller. Goodheart’s aim is to situate the reader alongside numerous individuals and to recover the immediacy of experience. He includes a portrait of Jessie Benton Fremont and offers a riveting account of Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, the first slaves who escaped to Fortress Monroe. But the core of the book is a study of elite men: John J. Crittenden, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Abner Doubleday, Elmer Ellsworth, Thomas Starr King, Nathaniel Lyon, and Benjamin Butler. Knowing the names does not mean we know the stories, and it is in the telling of those

Evangelical Economics: Reexamining Christian Political Culture from a Market-Based Perspective

Abstract: American evangelicals have long had a complicated relationship with the market. At the end of the nineteenth century, populist evangelical politician William Jennings Bryan railed against the injustices of the rich, and in the 1930s evangelical preachers encouraged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to go farther in redistributing the nation’s wealth. At the same time, other evangelicals enjoyed a cozier relationship with capitalism. In the early twentieth century, evangelical revivalist Billy Sunday welcomed contributions from John D. Rockefeller, and at the end of the century, Christian Right activists campaigned for tax cuts for the rich. Faced with the complexity of evangelical economic views, most historians of modern evangelical politics have avoided a discussion of commerce, preferring instead to explain the Christian Right as a product of the culture wars, racial attitudes, the growth of the Sunbelt, or the Cold War—anything, it seems, except economics. Yet recent histories of secular conservatism have demonstrated the centrality of corporations and global economic trends in shaping the modern American Right.1 Now historians are beginning to apply a similar analysis to evangelical politics,

A Matter of Perspective: Local Approaches to Studying Civil Rights Activism and Liberal Policymaking in the Urban North

Abstract: On Sunday, March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, 600 supporters of African American voting rights marched, two abreast, across the steeply arched Edmund Pettus Bridge. Awaiting them at the bridge’s eastern end were scores of mounted Alabama state troopers and Dallas County police. When the marchers refused an order to disperse, the officers attacked, firing dozens of canisters of tear gas and smoke into the crowd and beating the demonstrators as they fled. That evening, film footage of the brutal attack was broadcast nationwide, transforming Selma into a symbol of violent white opposition to the civil rights movement.1 Two and a half years later, the violence of “Bloody Sunday” repeated itself, but this time it occurred beyond Dixie’s borders. On Tuesday, August 29, 1967, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 200 advocates of open housing marched across the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, which separated the city’s black community from several white ethnic communities. Not long after the demonstrators crossed the span, a riotous mob of more than 1,000 whites attacked. The brutality of the assault reminded observers of “Bloody Sunday” and earned Milwaukee the designation “The Selma of the North.” Milwaukee’s version of “Bloody Sunday” serves as the opening for Patrick Jones’ book The Selma of the North, which examines Civil Rights and Black Power activism in Milwaukee in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the confrontations in Selma and Milwaukee were strikingly similar, they were also starkly different. Among other things, in Milwaukee, public officials ordered the police to protect the demonstrators; whereas in Selma, Governor George Wallace

The Radical Sixties

Abstract: To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties has become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost “the Sixties” in writing about the Sixties. On this topic, as I have contributed to that capacious banality, I am a man in a glass house. Right now historians seem to be taking the Sixties in several different directions, all at the same time. Many of us are invested in writing a history of the transnational Sixties, which is not surprising given the herd-like movement in the transnational direction by historians-at-large. And cattiness aside, I am convinced that the “transnational Sixties” will prove to be a fruitful approach.1 Similarly, I think (obviously, given my own work) that a “Conservative Sixties” is a useful angle.2 At the same time, a few historians have begun to re-emphasize the liberal triumphs of the era, with a focus on national civil rights policy and the war on poverty. Given the long conservative policy ascendency that followed the Kennedy-Johnson years, I think these historians are right to argue that liberals were not the soulless, sell-out compromisers some have made them out to be. They were not just impediments, in other words, to greater social justice.3 Then, too, we are all now convinced that the social changes and political challenges associated with the “Sixties” really transpired over a much longer time frame, making the events that happened to occur in the 1960s less important, or at least less causal, than earlier accounts often made them seem. So we all now acknowledge that the civil rights movement was a “long” movement and not a historical subject best understood as being just of the 1960s or best characterized by the now-legendary Southern protests of the 1960–65 years. Similarly, historians are convincing us to see many of the other classic Sixties-identified historical processes, such as the sexual revolution, as being born of a longer, decade-defying process.4 A “long” Sixties, then, extending from World War II through the 1970s, makes a certain amount of sense—although why the “Sixties” label should be retained, in that case, is

The Supreme Court in Politics

Abstract: The U.S. Supreme Court is an important political institution. Nonetheless, general political histories of the United States give little attention to the Court and its justices. The appointment of justices and the decisions of courts are mere footnotes, at best, in the history of presidential administrations. Perhaps this reflects the relative insignificance of the judiciary and its actions on the broader political stage. The work of the Court pales in comparison with wars, elections and legislative struggles. The history of the Court has instead been relegated to more specialized accounts. Often those accounts were written from a primarily legal perspective or framed in terms of a history of constitutional law. The relationship between politics and the judiciary was pushed into the background. For many years, the classic one-volume history of the Court has been Robert G. McCloskey’s The American Supreme Court (4th ed., revised by Sanford Levinson, 2004). Originally published in 1960, The American Supreme Court situated the history of the Court within politics. McCloskey’s concern was to describe the Court as an “agency in the American governing process, an agency with a mind and a will and an influence of its own,” which used the law to achieve or try to achieve results (p. xv). The Harvard political scientist hoped to set aside the legalistic suggestion that the justices were primarily working out the logic of the law. The justices had agency in determining the course of public policy, and the Court was an agency within the structure of the government that made and implemented policy. The Court’s power was both real and fragile. The Court’s story, according to McCloskey, could “be broadly understood as an endless search for a position in American government that is appropriate” to the political era and the “subtle limits of judicial capability” (p. 15). A central lesson of his account, he concluded, was that the historical Court had been “fully alive to such realities as the drift of public opinion and the distribution of power in the American republic” (p. 246). The point was not that the justices “slavishly” adjusted themselves to public

Religion in the Public Square: Interactions Between the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial and Revolutionary America

Abstract: Over the past three decades, books on religion in America have often overstated or understated religion’s role in the public square. So-called “evangelical” historians stress religion as one of the most powerful formative agents in shaping American politics and culture. More secular historians sometimes dismiss or ignore religion’s influence outside the private realm. Framing these widely different interpretations is secularization, which directs the narrative toward that of religious declension or religious persistence. The result is a historiographical debate in which one body of work depicts the steady march of secular forces in economics, politics, and culture pushing religion to the margins of American public life. An opposing body of work sees religion as ever-vital in all arenas of American life, including the marketplace and the statehouse, while its vitality has been largely undermined by liberal politicians and ignored by secular historians. One of the most daunting challenges for the historian wishing to explore religious influence in America is to measure that influence. If one gauges influence by rhetoric, then there is a strong case to be made that religion has, from the beginning of the republic, shaped public affairs. Sermons abound that speak to political issues of the day, couching them in biblical and moral language. Political addresses teem with references to divine guidance and providential favor for public undertakings. This is especially the interpretation of evangelicals, who, by their self-understanding, are called to proclaim the gospel to the world. Whether in the mid–eighteenth-century Great Awakening or in today’s culture wars, evangelicals make bold proclamations. They pres-

From Deference to Democracy: The Transformation of American Society, 1789-1815

Abstract: Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789–1815 is an impressive and magisterial survey of one of the most complex and writtenabout eras in American history by one of the leading historians of the early republic. This extraordinary new book, the eighth and latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States, complements and amplifies the author’s arguments in two of his earlier books, the Bancroft Prize-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). In Empire of Liberty, Wood has skillfully navigated the twenty-six–year critical period when the future of republicanism and the union were in doubt. The periodization of Wood’s new work, however, is unlike that in two earlier series: The American Nation: A History, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its successor, The New American History Series. While both earlier series had separate volumes dealing with the Federalist and Jeffersonian eras, Wood’s covers both periods. This more comprehensive approach has put a burden on Wood to analyze, explain, and conceptualize the multifaceted forces that were at work in the United States from 1789 to 1815. Henry Adams, for example, took nine volumes to deal only with the period from 1800 to 1816. This also puts a burden on the reviewer, even one who has been allotted extra space, to attempt to do justice to such a large, sweeping, and detailed account. Wood has chosen to meet this imposing challenge by organizing his book in two different ways. For the most part, the first eight chapters deal chronologically with the period up through the election of 1800. In contrast, the remaining eleven chapters are primarily arranged topically. Topical arrangement, however, sometimes means that events with a specific and timely significance

Refashioning Indigenous Identities and Making the American Self: Native American Voices from Haskell and Yale

Abstract: Joel Pfister. The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xviii + 259 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. $22.95. Myriam Vuckovic. Voices from Haskell: Indian Students between Two Worlds, 1884-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. ix + 330 pp. Illustra- tions, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. In the late nineteenth century, the federal government took on an ambitious and misguided plan to educate American Indian children in large off-reservation boarding schools in order to transform their indigenous tribal identities into American identities shaped by white, Anglo-Saxon Christian values and concepts of work, personhood, and nation. Among these institutions, Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas (established in 1884) was at the forefront of these transformative efforts, reflecting the missionary-like zeal of the federal government to solve its perceived "Indian Problem" by converting as many young Indians as possible to the values of individualism, industry, and prog- ress that characterized late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of the ideal American citizenry. Halfway across the country, in New Haven, Connecticut, students (mostly white) at Yale were learning some of the same lessons about American selfhood during this period, and the higher education they received focused as much on the creation and maintenance of their elite class status and its concomitant cultural capital as it did on conveying a clas- sical education or professional skills. Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) student, Henry Roe Cloud, who was born the year that Haskell was established, became the first full-blood American Indian person to receive an undergraduate (1910) and graduate (1914) degree from Yale. 1 Roe Cloud's groundbreaking solitary journey as a privileged Yalie may, at first glance, appear to be far from the shared experiences of younger Indian boarding-school students at Haskell. However, authors Joel Pfister (The Yale Indian) and Myriam Vuckovic (Voices from Haskell) show us that, at both Yale and Haskell, indigenous identities and

Bowling Together?: Resurrecting the "Public" in Modern America

Abstract: How sustainable is public culture in a society as pluralistic as the United States? Can diversity and collective values be reconciled? What insights can academics contribute to understanding the structure of culture? A great variety of scholars in many different disciplines have sought to provide answers to these questions, but they often appear walled off from one another, bound by separate methodologies, theories, and other discipline-specific boundaries that unwittingly reflect the postmodern society that appears to define America today. Practitioners in newer fields of study often seek to bridge these intellectual divides, and perhaps none are better equipped to do so than scholars of American Studies. It was in this spirit that Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States was conceived as a book project, explains its editor, Marguerite Shaffer. The essays in this book, which were originally presented as conference papers at an American Studies symposium hosted by the University of Miami–Ohio, where Shaffer teaches, examine the myriad ways Americans come together in the “complicated and conflicted process of negotiating new forms of belonging in a diverse society” (p. xiv). Most of the essay authors are historians, but others include sociologists, cultural theorists, and political scientists. Collectively, they seek to not only study public culture but to redefine it in light of modern American history. Prudently divided into four sections that examine broad variations of the “public”—action, image, space, and identity—the essays largely succeed; in its totality, this book is an excellent dissection of the tension between common experience and societal plurality. Mary Kupiec Cayton’s introductory essay usefully reviews disparate theories of how public culture is framed in the United States. She correctly argues that, since American public discourse ostensibly values “freedom,” “justice” and “equality,” those values are often assumed to be predominant (but do not necessarily coalesce) in the public sphere. In fact, because American political

Who are "The People"? Locating Popular Authority in Postrevolutionary America. A Review of: Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America

Abstract: The challenge of defining “the people,” political theorist Jason Frank writes, “haunts all theories of democracy and continually vivifies democratic practice.” The phrase “the people” haunts because, like a specter, it claims to speak for something that never was and is always in formation. Yet it “vivifies” democratic theory because the American political tradition’s legitimacy derives from popular sovereignty, and thus outsider groups can use the idea of the people to claim a role for themselves within our democracy. But who are the people? For some constitutional scholars, including political scientists and theorists, the people are the constituent sovereign who, in conventions, design their government. From this perspective, the most important outcome of the American Revolution was the convention as a mechanism to enact the social contract. But many have challenged this conclusion. As Progressive historians and their heirs remind us, the Constitution was itself contested, did not fully embody popular will, and was an elite backlash against more popular democracy. These two perspectives created a theoretical and practical problem that played out in the postrevolutionary decades. If the state authorized by “the people” cannot speak for the people, how can elected leaders represent the public will? Alternatively, if others in civil society have a stronger claim to represent the people, how can representative government be legitimate? Given this conundrum, it is no wonder that Daniel Rodgers in Contested Truths (1987) considers “the people” one of America’s “contested truths,” a phrase that can be used by those in power and by outsider groups—as in populist uprisings—who claim to represent better the people than elected leaders do. It is into these confusing waters that Frank wades. He hopes to contribute to democratic theory by exploring how postrevolutionary Americans struggled with this fundamental problem, which is, ultimately, one of the relationship between representative government and civil society. Frank’s answer draws

The Magus of Connecticut: How Taking Alchemy Seriously Changes Early New England History

Abstract: In this original and intelligent study, Walter Woodward shows himself deeply knowledgeable as he opens up the history of seventeenth-century New England to new avenues of consideration. Woodward centers his account on John Winthrop, Jr., the son of the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, who himself became a governor of Connecticut. However, Woodward’s attentiveness to Winthrop’s alchemical beliefs and practices, drawing on extensive attention to alchemy in recent decades by historians of science, allows him to offer a significantly different interpretation of Puritan New England, one with more capacity for toleration and intercultural sensitivity than one usually finds in historians’ accounts of this time and place. Woodward’s provocative and gracefully written monograph should be read widely by historians of early America and of early modern science. While the narrative spine of the book is Winthrop’s life, Prospero’s America is a cultural history, not a biography. Woodward writes that “Winthrop, by almost every account, was a gentle, affable, and likable human being” (p. 193), but we do not finish the book feeling we know him as a person. The issue is one of sources. Woodward can scrutinize Winthrop’s account books, the titles in his library, and many letters written to him, but much of his outgoing correspondence is lost. Moreover, alchemists were committed to secrecy, to the circulation of knowledge only within the elect; much that they communicated was done in code or face to face. Without a corpus of letters or a diary, Woodward can’t get at Winthrop’s interior life. However, this matters little, as Woodward uses Winthrop’s life as a route into a serious reconsideration of what we thought we knew about New England. Each chapter links a period in Winthrop’s life with some wider issue. Winthrop’s pursuit of alchemical

Addressed to General Readers

Abstract: When historians write partly or primarily for general readers or for undergraduate course adoption, we may find the format constraining, though it can be empowering as well. Sally McMillen’s Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement was written for the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series, edited by James McPherson and David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. The series reaches out to general readers with engaging narratives, and its framework of “pivotal moments” puts a premium on historical contingency. “Pivotal Moments” is well suited to dramatic episodes like Washington crossing the Delaware, or the Union army turning back Lee’s invasion of Maryland at Antietam, when concentrated events—especially military events—changed the course of history. Women’s history, however, has usually been viewed through the lens of social and cultural history, where change is less concentrated or dramatic. McMillen tells us frankly how she came to write within this unlikely framework: in a casual conversation with one of the editors, she asked about titles and was surprised at what she did not hear in his response. “But you have nothing on women!” she objected, and James McPherson responded, “Do you have any ideas?” McMillen named Seneca Falls “as a start,” whereupon she was asked to write this book (p. 7). It is impossible not to sympathize with McMillen’s impulsive comment, but one suspects she may have found herself regretting it, because the constraints of the series bear heavily upon her. She argues that the actions of a few women in Seneca Falls in July 1848 “unleashed a social revolution and inaugurated the women’s movement,” and she fashions her narrative around the stories of “four remarkable women”: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Surely McMillen understands that much recent

American Sovietology: In Service of Mars and Minerva?

Abstract: Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts is a work of remarkable depth and breadth. In twelve succinct chapters organized in three parts, David C. Engerman explains the formation, elaboration, and near demolition of the field of Sovietology, drawing on extensive research in archival collections, oral histories, and an extraordinary swath of scholarship. Engerman’s study begins toward the close of WWII, when hostile suspicions were rising between Russia and the Allies. Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe prompted Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, to deploy his powerful metaphor of “the iron curtain.” The following year, financier Bernard Baruch and journalist Walter Lippmann clinched the rigidity and the feel of this metaphor in a fresh way by using the term “cold war” to characterize relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the time, most Americans knew little about their nation’s new enemy, their WWII ally. Worse yet, most U.S. policymakers were remarkably uninformed. In 1948, the newly organized CIA employed only thirty-eight Soviet analysts, a mere twelve of whom were Russian-speaking experts (with a lone Ph.D). Washington realized the nation suffered from an acute lack of Soviet expertise. During WWII the U.S. government tapped available academic expertise, and, as Engerman shows, this experience shaped the postwar period’s unprecedented intellectual mobilization. Federal and nonprofit organizations quickly collaborated to fund relevant studies in universities and research centers. An interdisciplinary field of Soviet Studies, or Sovietology, was created from scratch through tightly knit groups of scholars, soldiers, spies, students, diplomats, foreign service officers, knowledgeable laymen, and philanthropists. While the U.S. military built the machinery of defenses, a new network of analysts compiled the knowledge vital to the policy of deterrence. At the same time, diplomats puzzled over Soviet intentions. The challenge seemed urgent. American leaders demanded wide-ranging studies to under-

Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance: Christian Prayer, American Politics, and Indian Protest

Abstract: Perhaps the most notorious massacre in American history took place on December 29, 1890, when 400 U.S. troops surrounded, disarmed, and then gunned down a band of Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The government put 146 bodies into a mass grave, but more fled the scene and later died from their wounds and exposure. The atrocity was the culmination of army efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance, a pan-Indian religious movement inspired by the visions of Wovoka, a Pauite prophet. We do not know for certain what Wovoka told his followers. But Sioux and Cheyenne disciples often presented the prophet either as an Indian Christ or as his messenger, and his teachings were certainly infused with Christian ideals. Wovoka claimed to have visited heaven, where God told him Indians should perform a communal dance and live by a moral code: do not lie, do not steal, love one another, remain at peace, and go to work. For all this, their reward would be a renewed earth (in some versions, one cleansed of white people), with the Indian dead returned to life, and Indians young and forever free. Coming on the heels of centuries of violence, at the nadir of Indian fortunes in the far West, the prophecy attracted a large following. Among the Lakota, it became known as “the spirit dance,” which eventually translated into its most enduring name among Americans, the Ghost Dance.

Colonizing Crime Control

Abstract: l isa Ford. Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. viii + 313 pp. Maps, notes, and index. In my youth I went to courthouses in western Kentucky, looking for the oldest documents I could find. Years later, remembering the excitement I felt when finding those aging pages, I took my students to courthouses, assigning them to write papers about what they found. That was when I understood just how difficult it can be to connect the ordinary business of the courts to larger historical issues. In Kentucky, I found some cases involving Indians, but not very many, and they seemed peripheral to the main business of the courts. Reading Settler Sovereignty makes me realize I should have paid a lot more at- tention to those cases. I had no idea I was seeing the spread of state authority over indigenous peoples through its criminal justice system. Settler Sovereignty is local history, rooted in detailed examinations of court records in Georgia and New South Wales, Australia. Lisa Ford skillfully uses these local accounts to tell a global narrative, "a peculiar chapter in Lauren Benton's story about the global drive of colonial states to control plural regimes of law" (p. 4). Lauren Benton's Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (2002) makes the connection between colonizing and law; colonizers tolerated indigenous systems of justice, passing through a period of pluralism, before imposing their legal systems on conquered peoples. In Ford's telling of the story, settlers perfected their power over indigenous peoples by claiming the right to rule everyone within their jurisdictions. She recognizes Locke, Blackstone, and Vatel's influence, but argues that well-read and well- traveled bureaucrats did the real work of colonial conquest in courthouses scattered around the world. In Georgia and New South Wales, many small- scale interactions, prosecutions for ordinary crimes, exemplified a global shift in British legal practices, a change from pluralism in favor of territorialism. The first portion of Settler Sovereignty describes the pluralism that preceded territoriality. Ford writes precisely, taking unusual care in the words she chooses. Hers is a limited lexicon; she knows the right words, and not many synonyms will do. The word "lynching," for example, appears just one time,

That's No Guppy, That's Leviathan: Rethinking the Federal Government in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: It has long been a shibboleth in historical writing and public debate that the United States government was small and weak during the nineteenth century. With the dramatic exception of the Civil War and Reconstruction, scholars and pundits agree, the federal government had a minimal administrative structure and a small policy footprint before the 1890s. It was only with the adoption of a regulatory state in the early twentieth century and the New Deal that the federal government acquired influence comparable to that of European states. Such a view has bolstered American exceptionalism in both historical and political circles. Even the “new institutionalists” agreed, at least at first. From the late 1970s on, these political scientists, historical sociologists, and historians, who also refer to their school of thought as American Political Development, rejected the view that governments merely mirrored social interests. They insisted that institutional structures, routines, and networks determined political possibilities and shaped policy. During its early years, the state-centered story told by this scholarly movement began at the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen Skowronek, one of the founders of the new institutionalism, described the nineteenth-century American government as “a state of courts and parties.”1 Skowronek’s memorable phrase set the terms of scholarly work and undergraduate lectures for a generation. There have been dissenters from this view. In 1947, Oscar and Mary Handlin argued that local and state governments actively intervened in social and economic affairs between the Revolution and the Civil War. Scholars since then have emphasized state and local governments’ active role in shaping social and economic life.2 But few if any scholars contested the view that the federal government played a minimal role in American social and economic life. This consensus began to crack in the 1990s, as scholars (mostly legal historians and

Reporting Across the Color Line: A Retrospective on Calvin Trillin's An Education in Georgia

Abstract: When thinking of the University of Georgia’s desegregation, the fiftieth anniversary of which we mark this year, the writer Calvin Trillin’s name may not be among the first that comes to mind. Trillin is best known today as a humorist, Nation magazine’s “Deadline Poet,” food and travel author, and novelist. But Trillin began his career covering the South for Time magazine in the early 1960s, work that culminated in his New Yorker magazine articles (1963)—classics of civil rights reportage—on the challenge to the color line at the University of Georgia (UGA). These articles became the core of Trillin’s first book, An Education in Georgia: Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes, and the Integration of the University of Georgia (1964), a pathbreaking study exploring the dynamics and meaning of educational desegregation in the deep South.1 As a Time reporter, Trillin covered the trial—Holmes v. Danner—that led to the federal court order desegregating UGA. He reported on the racist student protests that ended in an ugly riot outside Charlayne Hunter’s dormitory during the week that she and Hamilton Holmes became the first African American students on the Athens campus in January 1961. While his work for Time placed Trillin on the Georgia scene during these moments of high historical drama, the brief reports that Time’s editors ran about the desegregation crisis left Trillin dissatisfied. Hoping to dig beneath the headlines to explore how black Georgians had mounted this effort to topple Jim Crow, Trillin returned to Georgia in the spring of 1963, just before Holmes and Hunter graduated from UGA, to write their stories and assess how well integration had progressed.2 Though Trillin was a journalist covering a story, An Education in Georgia is more than merely a report; it is a pioneering venture in African American biography, social, educational, and oral history. It was the first book-length study of desegregation at a deep South university. Realizing that UGA’s desegregation struggle was born in black Atlanta, the hometown of Hunter

Seeing Like a Town: Putting the Politics Back into Colonial New England's Economy and Society

Abstract: To John Adams and other late eighteenthand early-nineteenth century commentators, New England’s town meetings, churches, and schools were prominent among the region’s virtues. Migrants to the West later cited the contribution of these institutions to stable national expansion. Post–Civil War New Englanders claimed their local democracy, faith, and education as roots of freedom’s victory over slavery. “The New England town” became a focus of celebration, sentiment, and nostalgia. The post–World War Two efflorescence of American Studies refreshed this interest. The Puritans, long vilified, were rehabilitated as intellectuals, loving family folk, and architects of enduring traditions. In the late 1960s, when pioneering community studies by John Demos, Kenneth Lockridge, Michael Zuckerman, Philip Greven, and others began to carve out the new field of social history, the New England town once again gripped the attention of historians. But the moment was relatively brief. Social history, though concerned with politics, addressed a wide range of other issues as well: demography; economic development; settlers’ encounters with indigenous peoples; mentalités; gender; ecological change. Even as Edward M. Cook published The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth Century New England in 1976, it seemed that the town was becoming marginal to many historians’ concerns, more often a backdrop or geographical convenience than the focus of study. As historians paid increasing attention to other regions of early America, the New England town remained peripheral to the main channels of historical enquiry. It is time for a reevaluation, and Barry Levy’s new book provides one. Drawing on the insights of a generation’s fresh research, Town Born brings New England local institutions back to our notice. But this is New England town history with a twist. Long gone is the notion that New England towns were the preeminent seeds of national development. Starting with Bernard Bailyn’s work in the 1950s on