Showing papers in "The Journal of American History in 2006"

Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past

Abstract: History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal’s comprehensive bibliographic guide, “Recent Scholarship,” have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.1 Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of “Richard Hofstadter’s status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism.”2 And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter’s prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms. A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia’s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book—all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people—who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it—have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the

Theorizing Historical Consciousness

Abstract: * Peter Seixas: Introduction. I. Historiographies and Historical Consciousness. * Chris Lorenz, Professor of Philosophy and Medothology of History, Leiden University and Free University of Amsterdam. 'Towards A Theoretical Framework For Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations'* James Wertsch, Department of Education, Washington University, St. Louis. 'Specific Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates'* Jorn Riisen, Institute for the Advanced Studies of the Humanitiies, Essex. 'What Is Historical Consciousness? A Theoretical Approach To Empirical Evidence'* Mark Phillips, Department of History, Universtiy of British Columbia. 'Historical Distance: An Introduction'* II. History Education and Historical Consciousness * Jocelyn Letourneau and Sabrina Moisan, Department of History, Laval University, Quebec. 'Young People's Assimilation of a Collective Historical Memory'* Peter Lee, University of London Institute of Education. 'Understanding History'* Christian Laville. 'Historical Consciousness and History Education: What To Expect from the First for the Second'* Roger Simon, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. 'The Pedagogical Insistence of Public Memory'* Kent den Heyer (ed.). 'A Dialogue on Narrative and Historical Consciousness'* III. The Politics of Memory and History Education * Tony Taylor, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. 'Disputed Territory: Some Political Contexts for the Development of Australian Historical Consciousness'* John Torpey, Departments of Sociology and History, University of British Columbia. 'The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective'

Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey

Abstract: History professors say tbe darnedest tbings. Like tbe one wbo summed up bis teacbing pbilosopby declaring, "If I said it, tbat means tbey learned it!" Or tbe colleague wbo scoffed at "trendy" educational reforms because, as sbe put it, "You can't teacb students bow to tbink until you've taugbt tbem wbat to tbink." Tben tbere was tbe time an eminent bistorian rose to speak after my presentation on bow not to teacb tbe bistory survey. "I may be doing it wrong," conceded tbis gifted, award-winning teacber, "but I am doing it in tbe proper and customary way."' Tbe professor's droll remark points to wbere we stand today in tbe teacbing of bistory surveys, perbaps especially tbe U.S. bistory survey. Generations of undergraduates can testify tbat introductory surveys are taugbt in a "proper and customary way." "First you listen to a lecture, tben you read a textbook, tben you take a test," is bow a student described ber survey to me, adding, significantly, "It wasn't different, really, from my otber introductory courses." Here bistorians flirt witb calamity. Wben tbe only bistory course most people ever take from a professionally trained bistorian tempts students to believe tbere is little difference between bistory and sociology or bistory and biology except for tbe facts to be learned, it is not surprising tbat teacbers occasionally sense tbey migbt be "doing it wrong."^

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity

Abstract: The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. By Eric L. Goldstein. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xii, 307 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-691-12105-2.)

“Where the Common People Could Speculate”: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, 1880–1920

Abstract: On the morning of August 29, 1887, Abner Wright, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, forcibly removed the instruments of the Postal Telegraph and the Baltimore and Ohio Telegraph companies from the floor of the exchange, literally throwing their equipment out of the building. A few months later, on the night of December 15, Wright discovered some mysterious electrical cables leading out of the basement of the exchange building. Thinking that they were telegraph lines, he ordered them cut with an axe. Instead, they were cables connecting the building to the police and fire departments.' His desire to sever the Board of Trade's telegraph connections might seem surprising, since the telegraph network was indispensable to the operations of the major stock and commodity exchanges. Wright's forceful actions were part of a long struggle over control of financial information and of a broader effort to remove the taint of gambling from the nation's financial markets. That struggle, which pitted the nation's stock and commodity exchanges against thousands of bucket shops, began with the widespread adoption of the ticker, a low-cost and low-maintenance printing telegraph, in the late 1870s and lasted until about 1915. Bucket shops were places where customers wagered small sums on the price movements of stocks and commodities. The term "bucket shop" apparently originated in early nineteenth-century England. Poor youths drained beer kegs thrown out by pubs and sold the collected dregs in abandoned shops. In the late 1870s the term was applied to shops where customers could wager on the price movements of stocks and commodities.2 Bucket shops leased tickers from telegraph companies on the same terms as brokers did and used real-time quotations from exchange floors as the basis for customers' wagers. However, bucket shops did not place customers' transactions on any of the stock and commodity exchanges, nor did bucket shop transactions affect the actual prices of stock shares or agricultural products. Such transactions were fictitious and did not result in delivery of stock certificates or commodities to their patrons. Indeed, by the 1880s nearly every state had outlawed bucket shops as gambling dens. Unlike brokers, who acted as customers' agents

Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World

Abstract: Long before a single coastal or interior West African was enslaved and cargoed off to toil the length of his days under the skies of the New World, many had become adept swimmers and underwater divers. West Africans often grew up along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, many became proficient swimmers, incorporating this skill into their work and recreation. When carried to the Americas, slaves brought this ability with them, where it helped shape generations of bondpeople’s occupational and leisure activities. From the age of discovery up through the nineteenth century, the swimming and underwater diving abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants. Indeed, most whites, including sailors, probably could not swim. To reduce drowning deaths, some philanthropists advocated that sailors and others learn to swim. In 1838 the Sailor’s Magazine, a New York City missionary magazine, published the inscription on a city placard titled “Swimming.” It read: “For want of knowledge of this noble art thousands are annually sacrificed, and every fresh victim calls more strongly upon the best feelings of those who have the power to draw the attention of such persons as may be likely to require this art, to the simple fact, that there is no difficulty in floating or swimming.” Similarly, !eodorus Bailey Myers Mason’s 1879 pamphlet, !e Preservation of Life at Sea, claimed, “!e great majority of people cannot swim, and strange as it may seem to you, there are many who follow the sea as a profession who cannot swim a stroke.” Mason then proclaimed that, as part of their instruction, all United States Naval Academy cadets should be taught to swim.1

All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought

Abstract: With the nearly simultaneous publication ofT. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution and Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers'Republic, consumer interpretations of American history have come of age. Together these two monumental books erase any lingering doubt about the legitimacy of consumer history. They are capstones to an abundance of recent scholarship that has used the universal practice of consumption to examine, among other things, constructions of ethnicity and gender, the modernization of rural America, the leisure time of the industrial working class, and the character of contemporary politics. That Breen's book concerns the American Revolution while Cohen's covers post-World War II America suggests that consumers can stand as central characters across the span of the nation's past. Indeed, read together they suggest that consumption-how Americans have acquired and used goods not strictly necessary to biological existence-might well be the defining thread of American life. These are not just books: they are bookends.' If together these two consumer histories frame the historical life of the United States, they also stand at two ends of an interpretative spectrum concerning the historical consequences of consumption. At the heart of the different narratives are two opposing understandings of the nature of consumption: The one emphasizes the emancipatory potential of consumer choice for improving individual existence and challenging the status quo; the other a darker view of consumption as a process of manipulation buried within the larger system of social relations. T. H. Breen took the former view. He argued that the explosion of consumer choice in the mid-eighteenth-century colonies created the self-conscious citizen capable of revolutionary political action. Breen took as his point of departure the rather sudden appearance in the mid-eighteenth century of an "empire of goods," whose existence he and his fellow consumer historians have established beyond dispute. The imperial market system made available to Britain's North American colonies a breathtaking variety of simple consumer goods. Colonists eagerly imported "all Sorts of woolen cloath, Silks, Scythes, nails,

Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History

Abstract: As historians, many of us have had the experience of encountering a memoir, diary, or letter in which the individuals mentioned are far more intriguing than the author of the document. The chatty reminiscences of Senora Dona Jesus Moreno de Soza serve as a case in point. Born in California in 1855, she came of age, married, and cared for her family near Tucson, Arizona. When she was eighty-four, she recounted the following incident that had occurred at a local park some fifty years earlier:

Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom

Abstract: In a recent essay, David Pace decried the \"chasm\" between current practices in research and those in teaching in our profession. For more than a century, historians have worked together to build a research enterprise \"infused with a commitment to rigor and collective responsibility.\" Yet the discipline's approach to teaching could hardly differ more. Because we generally teach in isolation, behind doors that keep our students in and our colleagues out, a significant gap exists, in both orientation and practice, between our research and our teaching. We tend to frame problems in our research as exciting opportunities, and we often seek out colleagues to discuss our work. When it comes ro teaching, however, we see problems as disreputable, something to be hidden, rather than as invitations to further the knowledge of a community of practitioners through discussion and scholarship.'