Register of the Kentucky Historical Society最新文献

{"title":"New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State by William J. Novak (review)","authors":"David E. Hamilton","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907779","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State by William J. Novak David E. Hamilton (bio) New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. By William J. Novak. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 384. $45.00 cloth) American historians have long debated how to interpret the nearly seventy-year period from the end of the Civil War to the start of the New Deal. Was the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century aimed at wiping away outmoded laissez-faire principles and an ineffective and undemocratic system of party-based governance in order to create a more just, democratic, and socially responsible America? Or was it an unstable amalgam of movements that privileged bureaucratic efficiency over democracy, a white, middle-class over workers, immigrants, and African Americans, and a government dominated by unelected professionals over locally-centered political parties and elected officials? In New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, William J. Novak boldly argues that the years [End Page 194] 1866 to 1932 brought about a “great transformation in public law and public policy” that amounted to nothing less than a “second American Revolution” (pp. 2, 22). These years, he insists, not only “ushered in an American political modernity” but they imbued American politics and governance with new democratic ideals and an enlarged sense of democratic possibilities (p. 2). America after 1870, Novak contends, faced a “full-blown legitimation crisis” as industrialization, the emergence of corporations organized on an unprecedented scale, mass immigration, rapid urbanization, and other developments rendered anachronistic the nineteenth century’s constitutionally constrained and decentralized governing system (p. 16). In response, an array of “American moderns”—jurists, social scientists, and reformers such as John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Walter Weyl—began to fashion a new legal order built around public law (such as constitutional law and legislative statutes) in place of a judge-centered common law. This in turn made possible a new and enlarged national government with greater administrative capacities for problem-solving and policymaking in the interests of the larger nation and the common good. Novak explains these developments in six well-crafted chapters that explore new conceptions of citizenship; the expansion of the power of the national government to regulate in the interest of public health, safety, and welfare; a new body of public utility law that enabled cities, states, and the national government to regulate market activity; an expanded conception of the “social” that empowered courts and governments to regulate, police, and protect social welfare; the construction of a modern regulatory state to prevent monopoly and constrain the power of the new corporations; and the proliferation of new and expanded forms of progressive administration. What took shape in these years, Novak ins","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Page","authors":"Stephanie M. Lang","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907781","url":null,"abstract":"Editor’s Page Stephanie M. Lang In July 2022, eastern Kentucky experienced catastrophic flooding, which topped a billion dollars in damages, displaced thousands, and most tragically, claimed more than forty lives. The National Weather Service estimated fourteen to sixteen inches of rain fell in the mountains between July 25 to July 30, creating, according to one expert, “a 600-year flood.”1 The inability of the mountainous terrain to handle extreme bouts of rain is often blamed for these “acts of God.” However, the destruction last summer, and subsequent ridicule from some people who criticized residents for building homes in floodplains, renewed decades-long conversations regarding the effects of climate change, the impact of coal mining on the landscape, and landowner-ship patterns.2 The region is no stranger to flooding. Growing up in Prestonsburg in Floyd County, I saw a swift and swollen Big Sandy River push over its banks and flood portions of town, including my grandmother’s home and the high school. But how did we get to the sheer level of devastation this time? Suggesting the use of history as a lens to decipher some of these problems sounds perhaps like a cliché response from an Appalachian historian, but I was struck by the timeliness of the articles in this issue. The development of the land, the social, racial, and political structures put in place during the early twentieth [End Page 97] century, and later challenges to these constructs by organized legal services in the mountains provide context and strategies for our current predicament. The first article charts the exploitation of Appalachia’s resources by wealthy elites both inside and outside of the region. “How to Jim Crow a Coalfield: Land, Politics, and Race in Appalachian Kentucky Before World War I” by Matthew O’Neal explores the developmental stages of the coal industry and capitalist interests. Industrialists salivated at the rich seams of bituminous coal. As mineral rights were bought and sold out of the mountains, railroads like the L&N expanded lines to carry the coal to market. However, as O’Neal notes, populist opposition in the 1890s along with state Republicans and Democrats vying for control over the future industrial development of the area complicated these ventures. At the same time, Berea College advanced its own racial ideology for Appalachia during the Great Migration that was equally challenged by the state’s political machine. O’Neal makes a convincing argument that by accepting “northern capital investment while retaining a semblance of the antebellum racial hierarchy,” New South businessmen recast the social and economic fabric of eastern Kentucky “in iron and steel.” It was the arrival of the coal industry and the consolidation of land in the hands of absentee landowners shown in the first article that reshaped, both figuratively and literally, the region.3 As cleanup of exorbitant amounts of thick, silty river mud and debris began following the flood,","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How to Jim Crow a Coalfield: Land, Politics, and Race in Appalachian Kentucky Before World War I","authors":"Matthew O’Neal","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a907771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a907771","url":null,"abstract":"How to Jim Crow a Coalfield: Land, Politics, and Race in Appalachian Kentucky Before World War I Matthew O’Neal (bio) In the summer of 1908, Franklin Delano Roosevelt rode horseback through the hills of southeastern Kentucky. He accompanied his uncle, Warren Delano, Jr., and a party of surveyors through the would-be empire of the Massachusetts-based Kentenia Corporation— a land development venture led by Delano and the industrialist and civil engineer Charles H. Davis, so named for its coal and timber holdings along the shared borders of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. On cool mornings Roosevelt donned a woolen sweater emblazoned with the Harvard “H,” and when he stopped to write, he relayed detailed descriptions of the Cumberland Gap to his wife Eleanor. “If you can imagine a succession of ridges, each fifteen hundred or so feet above the valleys,” he penned from Pennington Gap, Virginia, “running up at a very precipitous angle and covered with marvelous trees and an undergrowth of rhododendrons and holly you can get a general idea of the country.” At the top of the Cumberland Mountains, Roosevelt experienced “one of the most magnificent views I have ever seen, looking to the South over the angle of Virginia . . . over the Harlan County, Kentucky section that Uncle Warren and Davis are interested in.” Down at a fork of the Cumberland River, Roosevelt noted “great poplars, chestnuts and a dozen or two other deciduous trees and every mile or so a fertile bottom with fine crops [End Page 101] and a stream of splendid water.” Roosevelt also spent time “chewing the rag” with Harlan County politicians and corporation officials before returning to New York. His uncle eventually helped him acquire one hundred square miles of coal and timber, some 64,000 acres, all in the name of Kentenia.1 Roosevelt was one of America’s wealthy elites that saw the possibilities of a resource-rich empire in Appalachia. This article examines the history of this process in several distinct stages, first outlining the early history of land ownership in the state, then examining the boom period of the late 1880s as manufacturers sought the bituminous coking coal of Appalachia, and its eventual acquisition throughout the early twentieth century. Northern industrialists like Delano partnered with lawyers, land agents, and local elites to decipher issues with titles so that they could buy and sell the land of southeastern Kentucky. Meanwhile, the L&N Railroad constructed its line southward and eastward to pierce the Cumberland Plateau and provide an outlet for the minerals in the hillsides. The resource realm proposed by industrialists did not go unchallenged, however. The state of Kentucky’s most powerful corporation faced populist opposition in the 1890s, and a tumultuous political tug-of-war among and between the state’s two political parties complicated capital’s plans for the coalfield. All the while, liberal reformers at the interracial Berea College advanced their own","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"688 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell (review)","authors":"Walter C. Stern","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902572","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"76 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49005064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing by Tracy E. K'Meyer (review)","authors":"R. Rothstein","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902576","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"58 2","pages":"85 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41290102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"African American State Volunteers in the New South: Race, Masculinity, and the Militia in Georgia, Texas, and Virginia, 1871–1906 by John Patrick Blair (review)","authors":"John D. Smith","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902575","url":null,"abstract":"83 kidnap union leaders, and drive them out of the state. Yet judges consistently ruled against union pleas for a defense of workers’ constitutional rights in the face of these tactics. Pearson’s innovative work is sure to generate new questions. Were managers more successful in utilizing violence strategically against workers in regions with weak or limited state authority? Are the Gilded Age and Progressive Era no longer suitable labels for this extended period of business repression and vigilante violence against workers? We are indebted to Pearson for exposing employer terrorism and challenging those narrative-creators who excused and justified these outrages as benefitting the common people.","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"83 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45176938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Suffrage: Lincoln's Last Goal by Paul D. Escott (review)","authors":"W. E. Hardy","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902573","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"79 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48458294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"It's Our Movement Now: Black Women's Politics and the 1977 National Women's Conference ed. by Laura L. Lovett, Rachel Jessica Daniel, Kelly N. Giles (review)","authors":"E. Westkaemper","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902578","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"91 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42419361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January–May 1862 by Ethan S. Rafuse (review)","authors":"Adam J. Zucconi","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902569","url":null,"abstract":"69 committees and their allies, as well as their wide-ranging approach to reform. Unlike the educated, middle-class activists of the American Antislavery Society, Black men headed the VCs, and worked with runaways, porters, sailors, ship captains, boardinghouse keepers, Black and white women, local Black residents, and antislavery societies to aid fugitives. VC members’ critical engagement with American society meant they were involved in other movements such as women’s rights, prison reform, and efforts to come out of mainstream churches. Through their writing, fugitives and VC members also had a profound and lasting influence on American culture. Olsavsky offers a persuasive new interpretation of vigilance committees as an integral force in the abolitionist movement. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, vigilance committees engaged in aggressive and violent confrontations with slavecatchers and the law. As Olsavsky shows, their actions radicalized and intensified the antislavery movement. John Brown depended on VC members and their knowledge in planning his raid on Harpers Ferry. In Olsavsky’s account, this violent action was not a break from the pacifism of many abolitionists, but the culmination of the revolutionary ideas and actions of fugitives and vigilance committees.","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"69 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46497964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century by Chad E. Pearson (review)","authors":"C. Pearson","doi":"10.1353/khs.2023.a902574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902574","url":null,"abstract":"Should we view the violence and intimidation of the first Ku Klux Klan as labor management tactics? How did Owen Wister’s pioneering western, The Virginian, justify murderous, private policing that served business elites? How did business leaders during the second Industrial Revolution deploy vigilante violence as a management strategy alongside scientific management or welfare capitalism? Chad Pearson carefully explores these provocative questions in this imaginative study of labor-fighting organizations from the 1860s through the open-shop movement of the early twentieth century. Crafting a range of case studies from the South, Midwest, and Mountain West, Pearson insists that vigilante violence and anti-radical repression by business leaders and elites became key management strategies within corporate capitalism. His creative scholarship here builds on his 2016 book, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, to connect the histories of vigilante violence with those taught in business schools. Pearson begins his study with the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. He examines Klan leaders, typically southern elites, as a preindustrial employers association ruthlessly committed to terrorist tactics to secure and discipline ex-slave employees. Whipping, mob intimidation, and drive-out campaigns also led to Klan efforts to destroy spaces and tools of Black worker resistance like schools, books, and guns. Pearson is sensitive to those public “enablers,” such as judges, who gave legal protections to employer vigilante violence, even murder, such as the 1876 Cruikshank decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Attempting to uncover previously hidden employer networks, Pearson focuses attention on Law and Order Leagues of the 1880s and 1890s as well as the Citizens’ Alliance network that promoted","PeriodicalId":40382,"journal":{"name":"Register of the Kentucky Historical Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"81 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43413934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}