JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld
• Dwain Coleman

The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration, by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld, provides readers with a fascinating glimpse into the largely unknown and understudied history of early Black migration to the [End Page 634] western plains of America. With this monograph, Edwards and Friefeld seek to disrupt and enrich the conventional story of the settlement of the Great Plains by reinserting Black homesteaders into their rightful place in the story of westward expansion. In addition, by examining the creation of colonies and communities as well as individual Black homesteaders, The First Migrants asserts the important strategic role homesteading played in Black Americans’ struggle for citizenship rights before the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.

As members of the Black Homesteader Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Edwards and Friefeld have gathered the latest and greatest research on Black homesteaders of the Great Plains. As such, The First Migrants utilizes various source materials like state and local archival records, newspaper articles, homestead claims, and census records to assist them in telling the story of Black homesteaders. In particular, the authors’ use of the remembrances, family photos, and oral histories of the descendants of Black homesteaders allows the reader a window into the lived experience of Black Americans on the Great Plains from 1877 to 1920. Through these intimate sources, readers explore the struggles of Black homesteaders, the close-knit families and communities they built on the rural plains, and the continued significance these colonies and individual homesteads play in the lives of the descendants of Black homesteaders today.

The First Migrants makes several major assertions. First, Black migrants did indeed participate in the post-Reconstruction settlement of the West and utilized the Homestead Act to their benefit. Second, these early post- Reconstruction southern Black migrants were fleeing racial injustice and violence in the hopes of creating new lives and communities on the Great Plains. In the West, they hoped to experience true freedom and independence through the ownership of land and the exercise of citizens

Reviewed by:

• Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise
• Andrew H. Fisher

Any trip to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., should include a meal at Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe, which offers a living testament to the history explored in Michael D. Wise’s new book Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. Voted the best cafe in D.C., among other accolades, it features Indigenous dishes from the Great Plains, Mesoamerica, the Northern Woodlands, the Northwest Coast, and South America that are designed to educate visitors about the traditional cuisines and culinary practices of the Western Hemisphere’s diverse Native cultures. Many of these foods and foodways have survived centuries of settler colonialism, yet until recently Mitsitam was one of the few restaurants in the country where the public could readily sample them. As Wise suggests, our general ignorance of Indigenous cuisine reflects “a logic of erasure and replacement that seeks to confine Native lives in the past in order to legitimize the dispossession of Native land and labor in the present” (p. 7). [End Page 599] Native Foods challenges this eliminatory logic by refuting four intertwined colonialist myths: namely, that American Indians “did not practice agriculture,” that they lived mainly by hunting, that they “were usually hungry as a result,” and that persistent privation made them indifferent to flavor or cuisine (p. 9).

To make his case, Wise employs five case studies that trace the progress of American settler colonialism across the continent and through four centuries of history. Predictably, chapter 1 locates the roots of settler discourse concerning Native agriculture in the contest for control of New England during the seventeenth century. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly detail the consequences of this logic for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and the Cherokee Nation, respectively, but also delve into the ways food production shaped intercultural diplomacy, gender roles, and the landscapes of the Eastern Woodlands. Chapter 4 carries the story out onto the Great Plains, using the Blackfeet Reservation to explore how western Native nations adapted to wrenching changes wrought by federal Indian policy and ecological imperialism. In each section, Wise strives to emphasize Indigenous agency and to turn the tables on settler colonial narratives of Indian food insecurity and culinary incompetence,

• The Ideological Origins of the Texas Revolution
• Stefan Roel Reyes (bio)

During the convention of 1836, delegates adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence. It justified independence by accusing the Mexican government of having failed “to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted.” Later in the document, the writers reiterated the association between property and liberty by arguing that trial by jury was the “guarantee” of the right to “life, liberty, and property of the citizen.”¹ Such statements almost echo the American Revolution’s declaration, which espoused the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”² In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally considered property among the inalienable rights. While historians debate whether Jefferson substituted happiness to signify a life of virtue or to reflect his uneasiness with slavery in the euphemism of property, Texans held no such qualms.³ Why this difference between the American and Texas Declarations of Independence? Did Texans see property in slavery as a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness as well as other liberties?

It is difficult to take Texas revolutionaries’ language of freedom and rights seriously when they also believed in racism and slavery. Modern historians dismiss Texas revolutionaries’ arguments as a propagandistic narrative. Indeed, scholarly skepticism toward such rhetoric is well justified. Since the nineteenth century, Texas historians and writers have attempted to cleanse Texas history of the stain of slavery, often by emphasizing American exceptionalism—that is, by casting the Texas [End Page 479] Revolution as an heir to supposedly irresistible American ideas of universal human liberation. In 1855, Henderson K. Yoakum published one of the earliest accounts of the Texas Revolution. Although Yoakum refers to slavery a few times, the account is dominated by a narrative of affinity between Texan and American values.⁴ Eugene C. Barker built on this perspective that the Texas Revolution was the offspring of the American Revolution. Barker’s work recognizes that the issue of slavery called into question the sincerity of Texan ideals. Nonetheless, he argues that the Mexican government’s attempt to enforce laws on a culturally different people was the impetus for the Texas Revolution, drawing parallels to Britain’s attempts to bring the American colonies under control. Barker suggests that Texas settlers were too American to blend successfully into Mexican society.⁵ Amelia Worthington Williams was a historian, a student of Eugene Barker’s, and an act

Reviewed by:

• Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities by Thomas D. Wilson
• Abel A. Bartley

Thomas D. Wilson chronicles the strange relationship between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, in Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities. Charleston and Savannah are rival sister cities and were founded by some of England’s most provocative political thinkers. Charleston was influenced by John Locke, whose colonial admirers passionately argued for the natural rights of individuals but sanctioned a rigid slavocracy in Charleston. Built on an urban pattern called the Grand Model, Charleston was located on high ground, with street grids facing the prevailing winds. Its founders also avoided building near extensive wet-lands. It was a contradiction from the beginning: a city dependent on African labor but dedicated to white supremacy. Charleston utilized slavery and rice cultivation to become the richest city in colonial America. Savannah, in contrast, was founded by James Oglethorpe, who envisioned a land built on yeoman farmers working small plots of land.

The two cities influenced colonial American culture and set a tone for southern urbanization. The cities grew up together, with similar cultural, economic, and architectural beginnings. Though having an age difference of less than sixty years, Charleston had a medieval-style urban plan and was wedded to slavery, while Savannah’s design was influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and, initially, more progressive thinking regarding slavery. Savannah, under the influence of Georgia’s trustees, initially rejected slavery and encouraged small-scale agriculture. Eventually, Charlestonians won the day and shaped the politics of what became the South. As a result, slavery spread like a weed through the area below the Mason-Dixon Line.

The book is a very interesting and exhaustive history of these two cities. Wilson merges the cities’ histories into a compelling story of race, politics, and urban development in the South. Wilson, an independent scholar, takes the reader on an intellectual journey, using economic and political arguments to explain the significance of these cities. He argues that Charleston shaped Savannah and had an outsized role in shaping the South. Its devotion to slavery and white supremacy produced a powerful oligarchy, which profoundly impacted the way white southerners saw everything. By relying on a monoculture underwritten by plantation slavery based fi

Reviewed by:

• Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland by Scott Shane
• Rita Reynolds

The history of the American abolitionist movement has primarily been understood through the eyes of fugitive slaves, who told their stories using oral or written accounts, and of white northerners, who were morally and religiously opposed to the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the American Antislavery Society are central historical figures on the subject. Within Garrison’s circle, moral suasion and pacifism [End Page 612] were the fundamental tools used in the struggle to rid the United States of the peculiar institution.

However, recent scholarship, such as Manisha Sinha’s A Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016), reconstructs the considerable role that free Black people and fugitive slaves played in the antislavery movement. In a similar vein, Scott Shane’s book Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland tells the largely overlooked story of Thomas Smallwood, a former slave, shoemaker, and radical abolitionist who lived in Washington, D.C. Smallwood, despite the personal danger associated with assisting fugitives, helped hundreds of enslaved African Americans escape from the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland to the northern states and Canada in the 1840s.

Smallwood’s fascinating story is a unique one. With the help of white abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey, Smallwood personally assisted groups of African Americans to safely navigate the arduous journey out of the slave South. In one typical instance, he guided five fugitives to freedom in 1842. According to Shane, conducting routes of the Underground Railroad—a term Smallwood coined in print—was just one of Smallwood’s roles as an antislavery activist. Smallwood and Torrey believed that depriving masters of their slave property was not enough. The two men used the abolitionist press to taunt and admonish the owners of the slaves they had helped obtain their liberty. Writing under the pen name Samivel Weller Jr., Smallwood chided and embarrassed individual slave masters for their inhumanity, brutality, and greed. He also used the column to comment on the discrimination that free and enslaved African Americans faced in antebellum America. With help from Torrey, who was the editor of an Albany, New York, abolitionist newspaper, Tocsin of Liberty (later called the Albany Weekly Patriot), Smallwood took the unusual step of having his column ma

Reviewed by:

• Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy by Gregory S. Wilson
• Adam Tompkins

Gregory S. Wilson’s Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy chronicles the yearslong effort to determine the severity of harm and to minimize the threat to the environment and human health from the corporate malfeasance of Allied Chemical and Life Science Products in the manufacture of Kepone (chlordecone), a persistent organochlorine insecticide that was widely used in the cultivation of potatoes and bananas in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Through extensive use of legal proceedings, government documents, oral histories, and other primary sources, Wilson makes clear the complicated process of identifying the reach of Kepone contamination, proving culpability, strengthening environmental management at state and federal levels, and creating an innovative solution in the form of the Virginia Environmental Endowment to improve environmental conditions within the state. Poison Powder is an engaging procedural that argues that the prompt action of regulatory agencies and the courts reduced, but did not wholly eliminate, the impacts of the Kepone disaster in Virginia. [End Page 659]

Wilson conducted over twenty oral history interviews, which he effectively uses to “remind us of the human dimension at the heart of the Kepone story” (p. xi). These interviews constitute a core strength of the book, showing how various constituencies—scientists, regulators, fisherfolk—considered partial evidence and scientific uncertainty when responding to the problem. The interviews also provide an opportunity for many of the key players to reflect on their thinking and decision-making in the past. Wilson marshals these voices into an engaging discussion of the precautionary principle, as evidenced in the decision to close the James River, and quantitative risk assessment, which underlay much of the argument to reopen the river to fishing.

Wilson makes regular reference to the various residues left by Kepone when discussing the lasting impact of the pesticide on place, politics, environment, and memory. Often the word residue carries a negative connotation, but that is not always the case here. Wilson, for example, argues that the federal Toxic Substances Control Act and much of Virginia’s state legislation relating to toxic substances bear the residue of Kepone. Such residues, in this manner, largely functio

Reviewed by:

• Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis by Christopher C. Sellers
• Andrew Gutkowski

In recent years, Atlanta has emerged as a key battleground in the fate of American democracy. In the 2020 presidential election, the city proved decisive in tilting Georgia to the Democrats and consequently became the focus of voting fraud conspiracies in the election’s aftermath. Fulton County has also issued a historic indictment of Donald J. Trump for attempting to overturn Georgia’s election results. In Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, Christopher C. Sellers provides important context for understanding this moment, demonstrating how Atlanta first became a laboratory for democratizing movements. Throughout the twentieth century, environmental and civil rights activists undermined racial authoritarian rule in Georgia and democratized the city. Sellers emphasizes that both movements, often seen as adversaries, were intertwined. Both provided a fulcrum for dismantling Jim Crow and launching a new cadre of Black civil rights leaders such as Maynard Jackson Jr. and John Lewis into positions of political leadership, simultaneously appealing to concerns over civil rights and environmental issues.

Before the 1960s, Sellers argues, Atlanta was shackled by a system of “rustic rule” (p. 4). This regime not only disenfranchised Black citizens but also severely curtailed the voting power and governing authority of cities, concentrated wealth in the hands of a rural elite, and enabled industry to resist unionization and freely exploit Georgia’s air and waterways. An influx of federal assistance and New Deal programs, however, catalyzed the rise of both a white and a Black middle class along the city’s suburban arc. Throughout the 1960s, both groups challenged racial authoritarianism from different vantage points, with the city’s civil rights leaders pressing for greater Black representation in metropolitan planning and housing opportunities for Black citizens, while a mostly white environmental movement advocated for nature preserves and pollution control measures. Historians have generally treated these as separate social movements with intractable differences in ideology, structure, and racial composition. Although each group articulated a different understanding of the “environment,”

Reviewed by:

• Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine by Maceo C. Dailey Jr
• Sheena Harris Hayes

In recent years, scholars have begun addressing the gaps in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century biographical studies, especially those of men and women at historically Black colleges and universities. Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson Jr. have edited and completed the first volume of the late Maceo C. Dailey Jr.’s much-anticipated biography Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine. Dailey’s book uncovers the often overlooked work and leadership of Emmett Jay Scott, an early-twentieth-century leader who, until now, has been relegated to the shadows of the much more well known Booker T. Washington. Not only does this biography complicate the traditional narrative of Washington as the sole mastermind behind the Tuskegee Machine, but it also reconstructs everything we thought we knew about Black male leadership in the early twentieth century by providing a closer reading of Tuskegee’s past.

Dailey’s well-researched biography of Scott offers an alternative to the traditional history of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute by expanding our understanding of the solidarity between the “private secretary,” Scott, and the public “Wizard of Tuskegee,” Washington (p. 3). Dailey argues that Washington came to “rely on and many times defer to the genius of Scott in dealing with Tuskegee opposition” (p. 70). Even further, Dailey adds that “Scott did not hesitate to bring his detractors to the mourner’s bench, and this biography only sees itself as a lead, reinterpretative one in the modern, future series of works on Scott and those of his era” (p. 7).

The first eight chronological chapters cover Scott’s early life and his work at Tuskegee before the death of Washington. As with most biographies, the early pages reveal a closer glimpse into the more intimate and familial foundations of Scott. We learn that he hailed from Houston, Texas, enrolled at Wiley College at the age of fourteen, left two years later to secure employment, and eventually took a job at the Houston Post. Scott then co-founded and edited one of the first Black newspapers west of the Mississippi, the Texas Freeman. In 1897, after organizing Booker T. Washington’s visits to Houston and Prairie View State College (now Prairie View A&M University), Scott accepted a position as personal secretary to Washington, a relationship that [End Page 640] lasted nearly twenty years. Scott, by wa

Reviewed by:

• The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation by Keith P. Griffler
• Augustus Wood

For much of his career, historian Keith P. Griffler has challenged scholarship on the antislavery movement by showcasing often underrepresented Black voices in the struggle for emancipation. After decades of writing on the antebellum period, Griffler shifts his focus to the postemancipation era, when European powers sought new markets, new laws, and new forms of coerced labor to exploit after the fall of chattel slavery. In The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation, Griffler crafts an intellectual history that “traces the contested and evolving definition of slavery in the twentieth century” through the voices of Black intellectuals and prominent Black activists (p. 13). After European colonists carved up the African continent in the 1880s, colonial officials, in partnership with nineteenth-century abolitionists—who had abandoned their positions on the immorality of coerced labor in favor of new labor policies in Africa—devised a new articulation of antislavery that entrenched race into international labor law. [End Page 637]

Griffler recounts how Black leaders like Alice Victoria Kinloch, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned against this betrayal of Black workers, as so-called antislavery leaders like Frederick Lugard developed ambiguously named strategies like “the policy of ‘permissive freedom’” to trap African slaves into debt peonage for the remainder of their lives and concretize racial exploitation into the global political economy for the foreseeable future (p. 84). Because Griffler recognizes Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, 2008) as the defining narrative on the American episode of “new slavery,” Griffler chooses to focus much of his analysis on the international struggle of abolitionism against African colonialism (p. viii). This focus is a unique challenge for Griffler, who follows the work of mostly U.S.-based Black intellectuals despite dedicating a significant portion of the book to new slavery in Africa. Notable African revolutionaries and scholars like Steve Biko and Amílcar Cabral are absent from the narrative, while Kwame Nkrumah is mentioned in passing. All three, who wrote extensively or played vital roles in the fight against racial exploitation in African nations, would add a much more dynamic dimension to the so-called guerrilla intel

Reviewed by:

• Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford
• Margaret Lynn Brown

“Experience the timeless charm and unrivaled hospitality only found in Charleston,” a December 26, 2022, New Yorker advertisement proclaims, with “a stirring sense of history.” Full-page spreads like these attract “seven million mostly white tourists” every year to the city’s “luxury hotels . . . for care-free indulgence and relaxation,” according to author Susan Crawford (pp. 6, 7). Tourism contributes $10 billion a year to the regional economy. Little wonder why leaders of the coastal city will not utter the words “sea level rise,” [End Page 604] especially if to do so implies that climate change and human activity have something to do with increased flooding. “[I]f you were planning for the Charleston region of 2050 and beyond, you would not build there and you would not want people to move there,” Crawford writes. “Tick off the dangers: storm surge, sea level rise, chronic flooding, groundwaters rising, risk to drinking water—it’s all about to get much more dangerous” (p. 258).

Susan Crawford’s Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm juxtaposes the shortsighted view of civic leaders with the city’s long history of privileged development and racism. Like Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written a foreword to the book, Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School, and the book often adopts the tone of a polemic with grim statistics and frightening forecasts. “Forty years ago, the city flooded ten times a year. The city flooded eighty-nine times in 2019, almost once every four days, sixty-eight times in 2020, and forty-six times in 2021” (pp. 10–11). Historians—always more comfortable with measured statements focused on the past—may not read this book. Perhaps they should. Crawford describes how modern development rests upon “creeks and marshes,” filled in with “trash, rubble, dirt, [and] offal” and covered with sand and dirt, work that had been done using slave labor (p. 34). “Today,” she writes, “much of Charleston is sitting on landfill. Floating on trash” (p. 35).

The most engaging part of Crawford’s book, though, is a series of interviews with members of the African American community, including Rev. Joseph A. Darby, a Columbia, South Carolina–born pastor who led the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston for fifteen years. Darby describes how, when the Arthur J. Ravenel Jr. Bridge was built between 2001 and 2005, African Americans were displaced: “‘The city,’ Darby says drily, ‘created a few college