Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911206
Christine Leigh Heyrman
Seduced and Avenged Christine Leigh Heyrman (bio) John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022. 365 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99 Tales can be true or false, factual narratives or sheer fictions. John Wood Sweet has summoned all his powers of digging and discernment to authenticate the tale of seduction and rape told by a young woman named Lanah Sawyer in the 1790s. The result—a page-turner that might be subtitled "The Me Too Movement Meets True Crime"—deserves an audience reaching far beyond the borders of the scholarly community. Demeaned and diminished by the tales told by others as her case made its way through the courts and into the press, this sewing girl has won belated vindication from an accomplished historian with a genius for recovering the lives of ordinary Americans in the early republic (p. 1). Readers will win the pleasure of exploring the Manhattan of the 1790s, a few decades before the construction of the Erie Canal turned a small town of 40,000 souls into the Big Apple. And they will experience that place and time in the company of a learned guide, one steeped in knowledge about the devastating impact of the British occupation, the booming but dangerous business of prostitution, the vibrant culture and politics of skilled artisans, and the democratic impulse of America's republican revolution. As for John Wood Sweet, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Parkman Prize. Lanah Sawyer herself presents the greatest challenge to Sweet's powers of historical detection. Aged seventeen at the start of her tale, she was the daughter of a wheelwright and carriage maker now ten years dead and the stepdaughter of another skilled workingman, John Callanan. She lived in his household, assisting her mother with domestic chores and taking in small sewing jobs from neighbors and piecework from tailors. Her other responsibility, well understood even if unspoken, was to preserve her chastity until marriage, something that would attest to her respectability and redound to her stepfather's honor as the household patriarch, a man in full control of all "his" women. But keeping her good name, all the more crucial because Lanah was nearing marriageable age for women of her class, seemed a lost cause when she slipped away from home one September night in 1793. [End Page 115] Less daunting to track through time, even at the remove of more than two centuries, are the two men who would have a profound impact on Lanah Sawyer's young life. The first, Harry Bedlow, was the fellow whom she had agreed to meet on that fateful evening. Unlike many other young gentlemen in Manhattan who were preparing for careers in business or law, he counted on inheriting a windfall in real estate from his relations, old Dutch families who owned substantial portions of the city. Relieved of the dreary responsibility of work, he devoted himself
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911211
Chad Pearson
It's the Union Leaders, Stupid:Organized Labor's Failures in the South Chad Pearson (bio) Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Race, Class, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. ix + 416pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index $49.95. Labor historians have debated questions relating to race, place, and class for well over a century. What explains the relative weakness of labor in the South compared to other areas of the United States? And how have such weaknesses impacted the nation as a whole? These essential questions are taken up by Michael Goldfield in his 2020 book The Southern Key. His ambitious, polemical, and provocative work deserves a wide readership, especially given the poor state of our current political and scholarly moment, one plagued on the one hand by efforts in some states to impose bans on parts of the study of Black history, and on the other hand by the presence of the enormously popular New York Times's 1619 Project (2021), which indefensibly says little about unions and class.1 In eight well-crafted chapters, Goldfield advances several salient points, including the idea that organized labor's failure to secure a significant foothold in the South in the 1930s and 1940s has adversely impacted the working classes nationally.2 That failure, in Goldfield's view, stems mainly from the strategic mistakes, wrongheaded assumptions, and the relative conservatism of labor leaders and organizers, especially those in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Beginning in the late 1930s, union organizers demonstrated a sustained unwillingness to build multiracial coalitions while spending an inordinate amount of time fighting, and ultimately eliminating, activists on their left. They appeared primarily interested in establishing cushy relationships with liberal politicians and securing labor peace at worksites. Goldfield comes out swinging: "One is struck at times by the sheer incompetence and stupidity of many of the conservative leaders of the CIO" (p. 32). In making his case, Goldfield has amassed much evidence and provided useful frameworks. Building on the work of sociologists Erik Olin Wright [End Page 152] and Beverly Silver, Goldfield reintroduces us to the concepts of structural and associational power.3 Skilled workers enjoyed structural power; because of their skill, bosses had difficulties replacing them during industrial disputes. Associational power emerges out of labor's ability to mobilize additional support during times of struggle, and often includes other unions, civil rights organizations, and/or community activists. Coalminers, as skilled workers, have traditionally benefited from their structural power. Textile workers, on the other hand, were more easily replaced and thus needed associational power to secure their demands. Regardless of the type of power employed, mobilizing the masses during labor struggles has traditionally helped all workers. Goldfield wrote this b
这是工会领导人，愚蠢:南方劳工组织的失败查德·皮尔森(传记)迈克尔·戈德菲尔德，南方钥匙:种族、阶级和激进主义在1930年代和1940年代。牛津:牛津大学出版社，2020。Ix + 416页。表格、注释、参考书目和索引49.95美元。劳工历史学家就种族、地域和阶级等问题争论了一个多世纪。如何解释南方劳动力相对于美国其他地区的弱势?这些弱点是如何影响整个国家的?迈克尔·戈德菲尔德(Michael Goldfield)在2020年出版的《南方之钥》(The Southern Key)一书中探讨了这些基本问题。他那雄心勃勃、富有争议性和挑衅性的作品值得拥有广泛的读者，尤其是考虑到我们当前的政治和学术状况不佳，一方面，一些州试图禁止部分黑人历史的研究，另一方面，《纽约时报》(New York Times)非常受欢迎的《1619计划》(1619 Project, 2021)的存在，无可辩驳地，它几乎没有提到工会和阶级在精心设计的八个章节中，戈德菲尔德提出了几个突出的观点，包括20世纪30年代和40年代，有组织的劳工未能在南方获得重要的立足点，这对全国的工人阶级产生了不利影响在戈德菲尔德看来，这种失败主要源于战略错误、错误的假设，以及劳工领袖和组织者，尤其是产业组织大会(Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO)的相对保守。从20世纪30年代末开始，工会组织者表现出一种持续的不愿意建立多种族联盟的态度，同时花了大量的时间与左翼激进分子斗争，并最终消灭了他们。他们似乎主要感兴趣的是与自由派政治家建立轻松的关系，并确保工作场所的劳工和平。戈德菲尔德直言不讳:“CIO中许多保守派领导人的无能和愚蠢，有时会让人感到震惊”(第32页)。在论证过程中，戈德菲尔德收集了大量证据，并提供了有用的框架。在社会学家Erik Olin Wright和Beverly Silver的著作基础上，Goldfield重新向我们介绍了结构权力和联想权力的概念熟练工人享有结构性权力;由于他们的技能，老板们在劳资纠纷中很难找人代替他们。工会力量来自于劳工在斗争期间动员额外支持的能力，通常包括其他工会、民权组织和/或社区活动家。作为技术工人，煤矿工人历来受益于他们的结构性力量。另一方面，纺织工人更容易被取代，因此需要协会的力量来确保他们的要求。无论使用何种力量，在劳工斗争中动员群众传统上对所有工人都有帮助。戈德菲尔德写这本书，部分是为了挑战他认为在学术和政治圈中存在的一些不准确的假设和神话。一种误解集中在一个不真实的想法上，即南方工人在文化上与其他地方的工人不同，因此很难组织起来。戈德菲尔德表明，事实并非如此:他们对不平等和剥削的憎恨就像其他地方表达的厌恶一样自然和普遍。戈德菲尔德讨论了在新政时期之前劳工斗争的悠久历史，以及跨越种族界限组织起来的活动家。例如，劳工骑士团(Knights of Labor)在各行各业招募了许多非裔美国人(尽管他们同时也因丑陋的恐华表情而感到内疚)。美国矿工联合会(United Mine Workers)虽然也远非完美，但在代表不同种族的工薪阶层方面确实有记录。世界产业工人组织，毫无疑问的激进和种族包容，在20世纪早期在南方的部分地区享有一席之地。戈德菲尔德挑战的另一个神话涉及联邦政府及其来自劳工组织官方的支持者的角色。在这里，他重复了早前关于20世纪30年代有组织的劳工和政治的论点，证明了工作场所改善的核心代理人是普通的激进分子，而不是主流工会领袖或自由派政府决策者和官僚。他重新进入了一场经常有争议的辩论，这场辩论继续在劳工和政治历史学家之间产生分歧。虽然许多自由派学者从进步的角度来描述新政国家……
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911204
Reed Gochberg
The Museum in Crisis Reed Gochberg (bio) Samuel J. Redman, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pp. Notes and index. $24.95. On April 8, 2020, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History announced a Rapid Response Collecting Task Force in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acknowledging "the urgency to document the ephemeral aspects of the historic turning points . . . and the need to provide a long-term historical perspective," the Smithsonian outlined a significant role for the museum during a period of major uncertainty.1 By pursuing objects from across different areas of American society, from science and medicine to business, politics, and culture, museum curators saw an opportunity to record the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all aspects of everyday life. These materials would ensure that such a crisis would not be forgotten, and they would allow future historians and members of the public to understand this significant moment in history. The crisis the Smithsonian sought to preserve was taking place not only outside the walls of museums, but also within them. Many museums remained closed for months in 2020 due to the pandemic, and even when they reopened, the consequences were deeply felt. Staff layoffs, new masking and distancing policies, and ongoing economic impacts all transformed the way museums had to operate. These closures also coincided with nationwide protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, which prompted a wider reckoning about racial injustice across American political, social, and cultural institutions. Some saw these challenges as a chance to rethink the role of a museum. An article for the American Alliance of Museums proclaimed that, "The museum we closed will not be the museum we reopen," suggesting a sense of tentative optimism that perhaps this pause in everyday operations might create space for reflection and an opportunity for change.2 Samuel Redman's recent book The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience reveals the much longer history of how museums have survived challenging times. Redman traces a set of key moments in American history throughout the twentieth century, including the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Great Depression to World War II and the culture wars of the 1980s [End Page 103] and 1990s, situating the work of museums against the backdrop of major crises. Throughout this book, Redman defines museums as dynamic institutions, capable of shifting priorities and operations in order to respond actively to the needs of a given moment. The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience emphasizes that a crisis can also provide an opportunity to reflect on institutional values: "What are our main priorities? Whom do museums serve? How do cultural institutions continue to survive with curtailed operations? What operations are deemed 'essential'?" (p. 4). Such questions have enormous consequences f
《危机中的博物馆》(Reed Gochberg，传记)Samuel J. Redman，《博物馆:危机与复原力的简史》。纽约:纽约大学出版社，2022。232页。注释和索引。24.95美元。2020年4月8日，史密森尼美国国家历史博物馆宣布成立快速反应收集工作组，以应对COVID-19大流行。承认“迫切需要记录历史转折点的短暂方面……以及提供长期历史视角的必要性，”史密森尼概述了博物馆在这一重大不确定时期的重要作用通过从科学、医学到商业、政治和文化等美国社会不同领域的展品，博物馆馆长们看到了一个记录新冠疫情对日常生活方方面面影响的机会。这些材料将确保这样的危机不会被遗忘，它们将使未来的历史学家和公众能够理解这一重要的历史时刻。史密森学会试图保存的危机不仅发生在博物馆外，也发生在博物馆内。由于疫情，许多博物馆在2020年关闭了数月，即使重新开放，其后果也令人深感。员工裁员、新的掩蔽和隔离政策，以及持续的经济影响，都改变了博物馆的运营方式。这些关闭也恰逢2020年5月围绕乔治·弗洛伊德(George Floyd)被谋杀的全国性抗议活动，这促使人们对美国政治、社会和文化机构中的种族不公正现象进行了更广泛的反思。一些人认为这些挑战是重新思考博物馆角色的机会。美国博物馆联盟(American Alliance of Museums)的一篇文章宣称，“我们关闭的博物馆将不再是我们重新开放的博物馆”，这暗示了一种试探性的乐观情绪，也许这种日常运作的暂停可能会创造反思的空间和变革的机会塞缪尔·雷德曼(Samuel Redman)的新书《博物馆:危机和恢复力的简史》揭示了博物馆如何在充满挑战的时代中生存下来的更悠久的历史。雷德曼追溯了整个二十世纪美国历史上的一系列关键时刻，包括1918年的流感流行和大萧条，到第二次世界大战和20世纪80年代和90年代的文化战争，将博物馆的工作置于重大危机的背景下。在这本书中，雷德曼将博物馆定义为动态的机构，能够改变优先事项和操作，以积极响应特定时刻的需求。博物馆:危机和复原力的简史强调，危机也可以提供一个反思制度价值观的机会:“我们的主要优先事项是什么?博物馆为谁服务?文化机构如何在缩减运营的情况下继续生存?哪些操作被认为是‘必要的’?”这些问题对博物馆如何定义他们的观众和社区，如何理解他们的社会责任感，以及如何为未来的不确定时刻做好准备有着巨大的影响。Redman的工作证明了关注博物馆如何应对过去的挑战的重要性，以便更好地理解他们如何想象未来的替代方法。第一章讲述了一场当代读者可能会感到非常熟悉的危机:1918年被称为“西班牙流感”的流感大流行的影响，以及美国自然历史博物馆等博物馆如何试图驾驭和管理他们的应对措施。这一章强调了过去几年博物馆面临的许多挑战，包括游客人数下降，几年来缓慢而渐进的恢复，甚至使用口罩等策略来减轻疾病的传播。1918年流感大流行发生时，公共博物馆正经历着巨大的变革，通过展览向游客展示信息的新方法直到最近才开始流行。将博物馆作为公共教育空间的想法并不新鲜，但进步时代的教育和社会改革使这些问题在文化机构的世界中变得更加紧迫。因此，流感大流行带来的冲击和不确定性……
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911213
Thomas G. Andrews
Ray, George, and Mabel:Friendship, Politics, and the Tragedies of American Liberalism Thomas G. Andrews (bio) Historians simultaneously react to and build upon the work of other scholars. At some point in our training—possibly as undergraduates but at least in the first year or two of graduate school—we should begin to treat the study of the resulting dynamics of critique, corroboration, and creative leaps forward as worthy of scrutiny in its own right. Often, the critical examination of historical literature and how it has changed over time, a pursuit which most now refer to as historiography, veers into rarefied theoretical debates or intricate methodological disputes.1 When we go to the trouble of considering our fellow historians as actual human beings as well as abstracted intellects, though, richer and more interesting vantage points on what historians do and why can open up. Historical work, like any other human endeavor, has always been and will always be shaped by personalities and personal relationships. Think back on your own career within the profession, and note how your triumphs and traumas have been shaped by your fellow historians. An unkind intellectual smackdown from a tyrannical advisor. A late-night round of drinks with kindred spirits at a conference hotel. A moment of frailty during a barbed exchange when another scholar's inability to hide their feelings belied the conceit that history could ever be a purely intellectual pursuit. An unbidden act of kindness from a senior scholar who needn't have but nonetheless did. A bond of true friendship forged amid the posturing and performativity that prevail with disconcerting predictability whenever scholars gather. In such moments, we can no longer overlook the irreducible humanity of the people who do the thing we collectively call history. The personal politics of history, as all of us realize sooner or later, story our field. Only rarely, though, do historians subject these peculiar, closely held narratives to systematic research or concerted analysis. Our reluctance to get personal is hardly surprising. Who among us, after all, can discern any margin in conceding just how much an enterprise that we frequently lionize, [End Page 177] particularly to undergraduates, as the "historians' craft," has been indelibly shaped not just by the disciplined endeavor of applying our intellects to the past's sundry remnants, but also by pettier factors including jealousy and envy, intimacy and alliance? Although each of us can testify about the ways that those and an array of other dynamics have affected our own careers, we nonetheless typically exhibit a concerted inclination to tuck away our own personal stories about how the historical sausage actually gets made into categories—lore, insider knowledge, trade secrets, gossip, dirt—that we almost always treat as unworthy of scrutiny. What I want to suggest in this essay, though, is that historians might learn a great deal about history and h
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911209
Douglas R. Egerton
Rehabilitating the Beast Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Elizabeth D. Leonard, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xix + 365 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. General, congressman, and governor Benjamin Franklin Butler remains one of the more mercurial figures of the Civil War and Reconstruction years. As a young Democrat and attorney, Butler took the side of laboring women against the managers and owners of cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, yet for most of the antebellum years, he was silent on the question of where that cotton came from. As a delegate to the 1860 Charleston and Baltimore Democratic conventions, Butler first endorsed Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas before transferring his loyalty to Mississippi's Jefferson Davis as the best hope of defeating a Republican presidential candidate, yet in his later years as a Republican congressman, many thought Butler the most likely progressive to take up the mantle of the ailing Thaddeus Stevens. Certainly, historians have rarely known what to make of his unpredictable career and flamboyant personality. Butler's inconsistencies soundly defeated biographer Hans Trefousse, who in Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast! (1957) flattened his life into a dull affair, and as late as 1997's When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, Chester Hearn demonized his tenure in New Orleans as a charming rogue who devoted his time to enriching himself at the expense of white southerners. At last, Butler has received the proper balance in Elizabeth Leonard's masterful and elegantly written biography. Leonard, the author of numerous books about these decades, and particularly the Lincoln-Prize-winning biography of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, knows this terrain well, of course, but as a professor at Maine's Colby College, she is also associated with the institution once known as Waterville College, where Butler studied while briefly considering a life in the ministry. (Apart from the fact that Colby has a large cache of Butler's materials, the ever-helpful Butler attempted to assist his future biographers by writing Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (1892), which filled 1037 pages and contained another 94 pages of documents and correspondence.)1 As one has come to expect from her earlier work, Leonard's study is deeply [End Page 138] grounded in archival materials, cites ninety-eight newspapers, and draws on a small library of books and articles. Her prose is lively and clear and wonderfully free of jargon, and this is an extraordinarily readable biography for a fairly hefty volume. Although Butler is today famous, or infamous, perhaps, for his later exploits as a soldier and politician, Leonard makes wise use of his early correspondence, and that of his wife, Sarah Jones Butler, in mapping out his years as a young Democratic operative and defense attorney. Justifiably, she here finds much to admire. His support for
道格拉斯·r·埃格顿(传记)伊丽莎白·d·伦纳德，本杰明·富兰克林·巴特勒:喧闹无畏的生活。教堂山:北卡罗来纳大学出版社，2022年。19 + 365页。注释，参考书目和索引。36.00美元。将军、国会议员和州长本杰明·富兰克林·巴特勒仍然是内战和重建时期最善变的人物之一。作为一名年轻的民主党人和律师，巴特勒站在劳动妇女的一边，反对马萨诸塞州洛厄尔市棉纺厂的经理和老板，但在内战前的大部分时间里，他对棉花从哪里来的问题保持沉默。作为1860年查尔斯顿和巴尔的摩民主党大会的代表，巴特勒先是支持伊利诺伊州参议员斯蒂芬·道格拉斯，然后又转而支持密西西比州的杰斐逊·戴维斯，认为他最有希望击败共和党总统候选人。然而，在他担任共和党国会议员的晚年，许多人认为巴特勒最有可能继承生病的塞迪斯·史蒂文斯的衣钵。当然，历史学家很少知道如何理解他不可预测的职业生涯和张扬的个性。巴特勒的前后矛盾彻底击败了传记作家汉斯·特雷福斯，他在《本·巴特勒:南方称他为野兽!》直到1997年的《当魔鬼降临到迪克西》，切斯特·赫恩还把他在新奥尔良的任期妖魔化为一个迷人的流氓，他把时间都花在了牺牲南方白人的利益上，让自己变得富有。最后，巴特勒在伊丽莎白·伦纳德这本精湛而优雅的传记中得到了适当的平衡。伦纳德写了很多关于这几十年的书，尤其是获得林肯奖的大法官约瑟夫·霍尔特的传记，当然，她对这方面非常了解，但作为缅因州科尔比学院的教授，她也与曾经被称为沃特维尔学院的机构有联系，巴特勒曾在那里学习过，并短暂地考虑过牧师的生活。(除了科尔比拥有大量巴特勒的资料外，总是乐于助人的巴特勒还试图通过撰写巴特勒的书来帮助他未来的传记作者:《自传与个人回忆》(Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences, 1892)，长达1037页，其中包含另外94页的文件和信件。1正如人们从她早期的作品中所期望的那样，伦纳德的研究深深扎根于档案材料，引用了98份报纸，并利用了一个小图书馆的书籍和文章。她的文笔生动清晰，没有行话，这是一本相当厚的传记，可读性极佳。尽管巴特勒后来作为军人和政治家的功绩在今天很出名，或者是臭名昭著，但伦纳德明智地利用了他早期的信件，以及他妻子莎拉·琼斯·巴特勒的信件，描绘了他年轻时作为民主党特工和辩护律师的岁月。毫无疑问，她在这里发现了很多值得钦佩的地方。他对进步改革的支持，如无记名投票和在洛厄尔工厂每天工作十小时，为他在辉格党报刊上赢得了大量负面报道。在1853年赢得马萨诸塞州议会席位后，巴特勒起草了一份法案，以补偿20年前被烧毁的查尔斯敦乌尔苏拉修道院和学校。考虑到当时在新英格兰肆虐的反天主教本土主义，巴特勒对他的法案失败并不感到惊讶，但正如他向一位支持者透露的那样，当他认为有人“被冤枉了”时，他的“精神状态”总是让他“在战斗中站在弱者一边”。与此同时，他反对为波士顿地区提供更多的州议会席位，因为波士顿地区的商人坚持认为，他们应该获得更多的代表席位，因为他们缴纳了更多的税款。巴特勒宣称，州政府不应该“给富人比穷人投更多票的权利”(第35-37页)。如果说巴特勒的言论与其他北方民主党人的看法一致，那么他也是他所在政党和地区的典型代表，他希望忽视西部地区围绕奴隶制的斗争。巴特勒最初是道格拉斯和人民主权的支持者，但他开始怀疑这位民主党领跑者能否在即将到来的总统竞选中赢得选举人团。虽然他……
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911210
Katrina Jagodinsky
Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories Katrina Jagodinsky (bio) Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with University of Washington Press, 2022. xii + 298 pp. Figures, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.1 Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in the North American West, a region characterized in the popular imagination and in most scholarly treatments as fundamentally violent.2 Peter Boag's most recent book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (2022), joins this conversation, arguing that violence is intrinsic to American culture, particularly pioneering culture. Boag borrows an approach from Foucault to offer readers an "ethnology of parricide" (p. 9) that links a horrific "fifteen or so minutes" to "the westward expansion of the United States, rural and agricultural decline, the consolidation of market capitalism, political change, environmental transformation, race and labor, penal reform and the evolution of justice, religion and the meaning of death, and the especially intimate matters of childhood, family, gender relations, and memory" (p. 10).3 What unfolds is a compelling story that incorporates a diverse set of analytical methods to describe an eighteen year-old's parricide and murder in the 1895 Willamette Valley and explain "why children kill their parents–a question that has haunted humanity since humanity has haunted the world" (p. 217). [End Page 143] At the core of Boag's study is Loyd Montgomery's parricide of his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and murder of neighbor Daniel McKercher on 19 November, 1895. The eldest of five siblings at eighteen, Loyd stood at the intersection of boyhood and manhood, though his heinous actions ensured he would face execution before completing that transformation—unless we believe his murderous acts marked the end of his childhood. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were the children of Oregon founding families who had themselves practiced genocidal anti-Indian violence to secure their settler-colonial claims to the Willamette Valley in the 1840s and 1850s. As adults and parents of the Valley's thir
{"title":"Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories","authors":"Katrina Jagodinsky","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911210","url":null,"abstract":"Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories Katrina Jagodinsky (bio) Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with University of Washington Press, 2022. xii + 298 pp. Figures, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.1 Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in the North American West, a region characterized in the popular imagination and in most scholarly treatments as fundamentally violent.2 Peter Boag's most recent book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (2022), joins this conversation, arguing that violence is intrinsic to American culture, particularly pioneering culture. Boag borrows an approach from Foucault to offer readers an \"ethnology of parricide\" (p. 9) that links a horrific \"fifteen or so minutes\" to \"the westward expansion of the United States, rural and agricultural decline, the consolidation of market capitalism, political change, environmental transformation, race and labor, penal reform and the evolution of justice, religion and the meaning of death, and the especially intimate matters of childhood, family, gender relations, and memory\" (p. 10).3 What unfolds is a compelling story that incorporates a diverse set of analytical methods to describe an eighteen year-old's parricide and murder in the 1895 Willamette Valley and explain \"why children kill their parents–a question that has haunted humanity since humanity has haunted the world\" (p. 217). [End Page 143] At the core of Boag's study is Loyd Montgomery's parricide of his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and murder of neighbor Daniel McKercher on 19 November, 1895. The eldest of five siblings at eighteen, Loyd stood at the intersection of boyhood and manhood, though his heinous actions ensured he would face execution before completing that transformation—unless we believe his murderous acts marked the end of his childhood. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were the children of Oregon founding families who had themselves practiced genocidal anti-Indian violence to secure their settler-colonial claims to the Willamette Valley in the 1840s and 1850s. As adults and parents of the Valley's thir","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911214
Sarah Schrank
American Fitness:Gender, Wellness, and the New Body Politic Sarah Schrank (bio) Bill Hayes, Sweat: A History of Exercise. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. 246 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $28.00 Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022. xxiii +328 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $27.00 Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022. 345 pp. Notes. $28.99 Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 424 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.00 Annie Weisman, creator. Physical. Apple TV+, Seasons 1 and 2. 2021–2022. Among the many challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic was the uncomfortably embodied nature of the experience. Millions of people got sick, millions died, millions felt physically trapped—unable to travel distances or even leave their homes—millions found it hard to get basic supplies, and millions discovered that, at some cost to waistline and bankbook, alcohol and food delivery services could smooth the pandemic's rougher edges. Millions also suffered great loneliness caused by physical isolation while others, conversely, suffered upticks in domestic violence as forced proximity stressed relationships to the breaking point.1 Surgical masks became rarified items, and wearing homemade masks became a political signifier. We might not be able to see each other's faces but we could read positionality through the body—is the mask covering their nose? Is their body six feet away from mine? In the United States, along with the closure of schools and workplaces, the 2020 shuttering of gyms, health clubs, yoga shalas, and dance studios brought [End Page 198] home the stark reality that familiar life had altered—possibly forever. Panic set in. Americans who incorporated exercise into their daily routines had to make changes very quickly. Those who could afford to invested in home gyms; there was a run on kettlebells almost immediately. Peloton, a company many of us had never heard of, became, practically overnight, a bourgeois household utility. The global adoption of Zoom meant that people could take live exercise classes of all types from the safety and convenience of their own homes. Some people started walking their dogs a lot more than their pets needed while others just threw in the towel. Who cares about BMI (body mass index) when the world feels like it's ending? As it turns out, we do care—often for conflicting and self-defeating reasons—and there is a bumper crop of new work to prove it. That it was all brought to press (or air) during the pandemic is a coincidence, as the projects had to be in production—or at least conceived—long before, but it is hard not to see the zeitgeist in it, too. Readers of Reviews in American History surely remember the almost daily editorials and o
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a911207
Chris Magra
Making America Not Great Chris Magra (bio) Dane A. Morrison, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xv + 314 pp. Notes, sources, and index. $57.00. There has been much recent interest in interactions between the United States and the rest of the world. America's dependence on Chinese manufacturers and shipping companies, red balloons with spy cameras, and TikTok tech have grabbed the attention of politicians, historians, and the wider public. A United States president and multiple state governors have played on popular xenophobic fears and toxic nationalism in a wild effort to make America great again. Historians have engaged with this public interest in America and the world.1 Dael Norwood in Trading Freedom (2022) and Brian Rouleau in With Sails Whitening Every Sea (2014), for example, have demonstrated that overseas trade and foreign entanglements shaped the course of early American political culture. For Norwood, United States commercial ties with China "put American merchants and sailors into direct contact with a vast array of new peoples and places, and at critical moments it inspired policymakers and politicians to consider national projects and domestic disputes in global perspective" (p. 10). In this top-down history, overseas commerce turned early American political leaders into cosmopolitans, and they began to associate world trade with freedom, or post-American-Revolution "liberation from the mercantilist confines of the British Empire" (p. 20).2 Rouleau tacks a different course. For him, "every barroom brawl, stabbing, or other violent incident" involving American mariners in overseas ports in China and throughout the Pacific Ocean, "jeopardized connections the United States (and its commercial class) had built with foreign governments (and their own merchants)." (p. 106) Controlling misbehaving maritime laborers became a means of sustaining global capitalism and America's burgeoning overseas empire. In this bottom-up account, early American maritime laborers were not cosmopolitans. Overseas trade did not foster worldly accommodationist attitudes among motley crews. Instead, they used contemporary notions of savage and civilized to describe themselves and the foreign peoples they encountered. Mariners frequently likened Pacific Islanders to negative stereotypes of American Indians. These [End Page 121] attitudes led at times to physical violence. Such "racialized vigilantism" even caused colonization in the case of Hawaii (p. 85). Dane Morrison's prize-winning new book, Eastward of Good Hope, further positions the early history of the United States in a global context. Morrison's book leans more toward Rouleau's bottom-up approach. For Morrison, increased interest in world trade meant greater antipathy among American merchants and mariners toward foreign peoples and places during the Early Republic, when U.S. attitudes were in their most formative state. The winner
克里斯·麦格拉(传记)戴恩·a·莫里森，《美好希望的东方:危险世界中的早期美国》。巴尔的摩:约翰霍普金斯大学出版社，2021。xv + 314页。注释，来源和索引。57.00美元。最近，人们对美国与世界其他地区的互动产生了浓厚的兴趣。美国对中国制造商和航运公司的依赖、带有间谍摄像头的红气球以及TikTok技术已经引起了政治家、历史学家和更广泛公众的注意。一位美国总统和多位州长利用民众的仇外恐惧和有害的民族主义，疯狂地试图让美国再次伟大。历史学家一直致力于研究美国和世界的这种公众利益例如，达尔·诺伍德在《贸易自由》(2022)和布莱恩·鲁罗在《风帆泛白每一片海洋》(2014)中表明，海外贸易和外国纠纷战塑造了早期美国政治文化的进程。对诺伍德来说，美国与中国的商业关系“使美国商人和水手与大量新的民族和地方直接接触，并在关键时刻激励决策者和政治家从全球视角考虑国家项目和国内争端”(第10页)。在这段自上而下的历史中，海外贸易把早期的美国政治领导人变成了世界主义者，他们开始把世界贸易与自由联系起来，或者美国革命后“从大英帝国的重商主义束缚中解放出来”(第20页)鲁罗采取了不同的做法。在他看来，在中国和整个太平洋的海外港口，涉及美国水手的“每一次酒吧斗殴、刺伤或其他暴力事件”，“都破坏了美国(及其商业阶层)与外国政府(及其本国商人)建立的联系”。控制行为不端的海上劳工成为维持全球资本主义和美国迅速发展的海外帝国的一种手段。在这种自下而上的叙述中，早期的美国海上劳工并不是世界主义者。海外贸易并没有在形形色色的船员中培养世俗的迁就主义态度。相反，他们用野蛮和文明的当代概念来描述自己和他们遇到的外国民族。水手们经常把太平洋岛民比作对美洲印第安人的负面刻板印象。这些态度有时会导致身体暴力。这种“种族化的警戒主义”甚至导致了夏威夷的殖民化(第85页)。戴恩·莫里森(Dane Morrison)的获奖新书《好望角的东方》(east of Good Hope)进一步将美国的早期历史置于全球背景下。莫里森的书更倾向于鲁罗自下而上的方法。对莫里森来说，在共和早期，美国人的态度处于最形成的状态，对世界贸易的兴趣增加意味着美国商人和水手对外国人民和地方的更大反感。这位约翰·莱曼图书奖得主尖锐地指出，“美国人想象的世界是无序和危险的，被暴政搞得精神错乱，或者沉浸在混乱之中，往往是致命的，总是不确定的，不可预测的，不稳定的……这种世界观，比其他任何东西都更能塑造美国人对自己在世界上的地位的看法”(第8页)。在研究生研讨会上，宏大而大胆的论点会促成良好的讨论。莫里森在整本书中都坚持自己的观点。美国与世界之间大量的直接、长途贸易并没有以积极的方式塑造美国文化的轮廓。海上贸易并没有产生美国的世界主义者或世界公民。相反，海外贸易刺激了美国早期的仇外情绪。作者整理了大量的证据来证明他的观点。莫里森着重分析了美国人对四个地区的态度:奥斯曼帝国;中国;印度;以及包括东印度群岛、大洋洲和北美太平洋西北部分的大南海。毫无疑问，年轻和年老的学者们会喜欢讨论这四个地区在多大程度上构成了“世界”3(第viii页)。莫里森主要依靠水手的新闻报道、船只的日志、日记、囚禁和旅行的叙述，以及商人之间的通信来记录美国人对这四个地区的人民和地方的恐惧的形成。莫里森在研究方法上既注重理论，又一丝不苟。他利用洛吉亚·加西亚-佩纳关于档案沉默的后殖民理论来揭示十八世纪……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a900725
Cecily N. Zander
{"title":"Whither the Radicals?","authors":"Cecily N. Zander","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a900725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a900725","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"51 1","pages":"102 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42400724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a900723
P. Coclanis
In 2004 I served as a member of the program committee for the annual meeting of a major historical association. The committee’s first task was to draft a call for papers. The association had already chosen a broad theme for the meeting, but wanted us to signal that proposals on topics other than that theme were acceptable. I suggested something like proposals on “other important topics were welcome,” but several committee members immediately objected on the grounds that the adjective “important” implied normativity. I then offered alternative language—proposals on “other important and unimportant topics were welcome”—but that didn’t fly either. I start with this story because the profession was then smack dab in the middle of a long, drawn-out battle against (flight from?) concepts such as objectivity, critical discernment, and judgements regarding value. Syntheses were ipso facto considered imperializing/hegemonizing, and thus increasingly frowned upon. Grand narratives were pretty much out altogether. For the most part, mainstream history at the time was about disaggregation, about smaller parallel stories, micro-histories, and multiple perspectives, indeed, even multiple conceptions of “truth”—whether personal (“my truth,” as it was sometimes put), or, alternatively, what Shelby Steele later called “poetic truth”, i.e., a distorted partisan version of reality espoused in order to promote a preferred ideological outcome.1 Fortunately, the worm has turned, as it were, and of late things have begun to change, to which Slouching Towards Utopia attests. Syntheses and grand narratives, while not exactly in, are no longer endangered species. To be sure, it still takes considerable chutzpah for someone to attempt one, but they are no longer rarae aves. If it is possible to generalize about a group qua group, the tribe known as economists, for better or worse (possibly both) can be said to be imbued with chutzpah, few more so than J. Bradford DeLong, a distinguished economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley. And I say this not
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