REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Author-title-Reviewer Index for Volume 51 (2023)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926396","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Author-title-Reviewer Index for Volume 51 (2023) <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p>No. 1 (March): 1–102</p> <p>No. 2 (June): 103–211</p> <p>No. 3 (September): 213–311</p> <p>No. 4 (December): 313–405</p> <h2>_______</h2> <p><em>Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times</em>, 40</p> <p><em>African American Aritsts and New Deal Art Programs</em>, 160</p> <p>Andrews, Thomas G., 177</p> <p><em>Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival, The</em>, 321</p> <p>Baumgartner, Alice L., 23</p> <p><em>Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America</em>, 341</p> <p><em>Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life</em>, 138</p> <p>Berger, Jane, 48</p> <p>Berman, Elizabeth Popp, 262</p> <p>Berry, Stephen, 351</p> <p><em>Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society</em>, 271</p> <p>Blue, Ethan, 236</p> <p>Boag, Peter, 143</p> <p><em>Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism</em>, 127</p> <p>Borchert, Scott, 160</p> <p>Brinkley, Alan, 289</p> <p>Browning, Elizabeth Grennan, 313</p> <p>Burge, Daniel J., 23, 345</p> <p><em>California: An American History</em>, 108</p> <p>Calo, Mary Ann, 160</p> <p><em>Capitalist Humanitarianism</em>, 213</p> <p>Cebul, Brent, 391</p> <p>Chard, David S., 56</p> <p>Coclanis, Peter A., 68</p> <p>Conrad, Paul, 321</p> <p><em>Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, A</em>, 377</p> <p><em>Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It</em>, 351</p> <p>Crabtree, Sarah, 1</p> <p>Cragun, Ryan T., 271</p> <p>Crandall, Maurice, 321</p> <p><em>Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country</em>, 345</p> <p>Daggar, Lori J., 345</p> <p>Davis, Rebecca L., 258</p> <p>DeLong, J. Bradford, 68</p> <p><em>Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal, The</em>, 236</p> <p><em>Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World</em>, 121, 329</p> <p><em>Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, The</em>, 244</p> <p>Egerton, Douglas R., 138</p> <p><em>Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees</em>, 313</p> <p><em>End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, The</em>, 289</p> <p><em>Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern</em>, 391</p> <p><em>Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872, A</em>, 23 <strong>[End Page 409]</strong></p> <p>Faragher, John Mack, 108</p> <p>Farmer, Jared, 313</p> <p><em>Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession</em>, 198</p> <p>Fredman, Zach, 370</p> <p>Freedman, Aaron, 289</p> <p>Freedman, Samuel G., 361</p> <p>Friedman, Danielle, 198</p> <p><em>From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State</em>, 244</p> <p>Geismer, Lily, 391</p>","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834356","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}

{"title":"Apaches in Unexpected Places","authors":"Maurice Crandall","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926387","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Apaches in Unexpected Places <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maurice Crandall (bio) </li> </ul> Paul Conrad, <em>The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 366 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95. <p>In the interest of full disclosure, this essay has taken me far too long to complete (the better part of two years). I’ve made abortive attempts at writing this essay no fewer than three times. During the writing process, I switched institutions and moved my family from one corner of the United States to another. Even more so, as a Dilzhe’e (“The Hunters,” commonly known as “Tonto”) Apache and member of the Yua’né clan (“Over the Rim People”), I have felt the weighty responsibility to review this work carefully and thoughtfully. It is not often that books come along that so powerfully engage with central elements of the Apache experience, and Paul Conrad’s <em>The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival</em> is clearly one such work. The questions at the heart of Conrad’s book are these: “How does one exist in a world that does not want you to exist as you are? How does one survive that which so many are not surviving? How does one start over in a foreign land or on land made foreign by colonialism?” (pp. 1–2) Conrad has attempted to answer those questions through the lens of diaspora, while utilizing as many Apache voices as he can locate in the archive.</p> <p>For starters, diaspora is an interesting choice for an overarching framework. Conrad admits that he struggled to find what felt like the right term to recount the Apache experience with colonialism. For him, survival/survivance, resistance, displacement, even genocide, are all important concepts and part of the Apache experience, but fall short. Previous frameworks, even those emanating from Apaches attempting to make sense of the recent past, have often stressed Apache mobility. For example, White Mountain Apache, Eva Tulene Watt, stated in her classic as-told-to autoethnography, <em>Don’t Let the Sun Step over You: A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860–1975</em> (2004):</p> <blockquote> <p>I don’t remember too much from when I was small. It seems like the family was always traveling, though, I remember that. That’s how it was in those days—people traveled all the time, looking for something to eat, looking for something to do. People went where they were needed. Wherever we went, it seems like we had <strong>[End Page 321]</strong> relatives that we stayed with. My grandmother Rose used to tell us, me and my brothers, “You have to know who your relatives are. If something happens, they’re the ones that will try to help you out.” So wherever we went, I guess that’s what we did—we got to know our relatives and learned about them.</p> </blockquote> <p>Fittingly","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834509","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}

{"title":"Nothing to Smile About: Quaker Capitalism and the Conquest of the Ohio Valley","authors":"Daniel J. Burge","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926390","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Nothing to Smile About: <span>Quaker Capitalism and the Conquest of the Ohio Valley</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Daniel J. Burge (bio) </li> </ul> Lori J. Daggar, <em>Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 264 pp. $45.00. <p>If you travel throughout the region of the Ohio Valley today, you are likely to come across a variety of monuments, counties, and street names that honor an assortment of figures who helped conquer the region for the United States. In Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort, you can visit the Old State Capitol by driving down St. Clair Street. This street was named in honor of Arthur St. Clair, a Revolutionary War veteran and governor of the Northwest Territory. Frankfort also boasts a Shelby Street, created in honor of Isaac Shelby, who served both as the first and fifth governor of Kentucky. Although most associated with Kentucky, Shelby is also honored with counties in several states in the Ohio Valley, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee. Travelers to Harrodsburg, a city about thirty miles south of Frankfort, will be unlikely to miss a monument that is “Dedicated to the Pioneers of Kentucky.” Carved in granite, the massive frieze depicts six figures: four men, dressed like Daniel Boone, carry guns and stare off heroically into the vast expanse. In the far left, a woman clutches her child.</p> <p>The modern historian can learn much by studying the archetypes depicted in this frieze. John Mack Faragher in <em>Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer</em> (1993) and Stephen Aron in <em>How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay</em> (1999) have explored Boone as man and myth, while literary scholars and historians have examined the frontiersman in popular culture.<sup>1</sup> A vast literature abounds on frontier violence, conflicts between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. military, and the War of 1812.<sup>2</sup> A growing historiography, as well, highlights the role that women—or ideas about women and their role in society—played in the conquest of the Ohio Valley.<sup>3</sup> These men and women hardly resembled the stoic figures carved into granite in Harrodsburg, but they nonetheless enabled the United States to establish a foothold in the Ohio Valley region. <strong>[End Page 345]</strong></p> <p>More recently, however, historians have begun to shift their gaze away from individuals and have instead highlighted the role of the state in the conquest of the Ohio Valley.<sup>4</sup> Notable works in this vein include Eric Hinder-aker’s <em>Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800</em> (1997), William Bergmann’s <em>The American National State and the Early West</em> (2012), and Rob Ha","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834404","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}

{"title":"The Topology of Tree Time","authors":"Elizabeth Grennan Browning","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926386","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Topology of Tree Time <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Elizabeth Grennan Browning (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Jared Farmer</em>, <em>Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees</em>. New York: Basic Books, 2022. vii + 432 pp. Bibliography, notes, and indexes. $35.00. <p>Aristotle reasoned in 350 BCE: “since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the now, and the now is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time.” His accounting of the structure of time was directly opposed to Plato’s; Aristotle singled Plato out as the sole philosopher who had argued for “the creation of time, saying that it is simultaneous with the world, and that the world came into being.”<sup>1</sup> Such an ancient debate begs the perpetual question: what is the topology of time, and why does this matter for the telling of history?</p> <p>Aristotle turned to plants to help understand the nature of existence across time: “[W]e must discover the reason why trees are of an enduring constitution….Plants continually renew themselves and hence last for a long time. New shoots continually come and the others grow old, and with the roots the same thing happens….Thus it continues, one part dying and the other growing, and hence also it lives a long time.”<sup>2</sup> Trees’ simultaneity of life and death spun into longevity has long inspired wonder about the nature of time and how humans experience it.</p> <p>Historians are in the business of creating timelines and delineating periodization—mapping important junctures where inflections of change and causality appear clearly, if only for a moment. These are linear topologies: in theory, the timeline extends both forward and backward, without end. Although, for the historians’ specialized training, this pure linear model is truncated, with a periodized beginning, middle, and end, allowing us to chart the evolution of social, political, economic, and environmental developments. Whether Aristotle’s argument holds up or not, historians rarely turn our gaze from the middle of our curated timelines to contemplate his core point—a refutation of the notion that there could be a beginning or end of time. As much as we push against the dangers of teleology, historians are wedded to the straight line in conceptualizing the passage of time: more often than not, <strong>[End Page 313]</strong> time’s continual sequencing is the unquestioned disciplinary foundation upon which we go about our work.</p> <p>In trying to make sense of the myriad abstractions of time, what can we learn from the oldest known living thing on Earth? Providing a masterful and lyrical account of the modern science of tree time, Jared Farmer’s <em>Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees</em> illuminates how our ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834499","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}

{"title":"Between Continuity and Contingency","authors":"Samuel Zipp","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926395","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Between Continuity and Contingency <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Samuel Zipp (bio) </li> </ul> Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, eds., <em>Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. viii + 396 pp. Contributors and index. $38.00. Stuart Jeffries, <em>Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern</em>. New York: Verso, 2021. 378 pp. Notes and index. $19.99. <p>What are historians for? This is the question I sensed lurking just beneath the surface of <em>Shaped by the State</em>. What might first appear as a rather by-the-numbers undertaking, a standard attempt to tote up the accomplishments and agendas of political history, hints here and there at something else altogether. The editors—and now and then the contributors—appear concerned that historians of twentieth-century U.S. politics are missing something much more profound about the country and its history, some set of underlying or persistent dynamics that have so far eluded work that has been mostly about tracking the rise and fall of governing regimes. This worry leads them toward a series of questions about historical thinking, questions that sometimes hover just in view, and other times move imperceptibly in the murky depths. Ultimately, <em>Shaped by the State</em> allows us to see how some older, somewhat neglected questions about the balance between contingency and continuity in historical writing are with us again, opening up a Pandora’s box of dilemmas last sighted a generation or so ago, when the paradigms that political history displaced—the cultural turn and the postmodern—still stalked the land.</p> <p>In introducing the volume, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams suggest that the overall success of political history over the last two decades or so has left the field in disarray. Having made itself into the dominant tendency in the profession, political history finds itself somehow without fitting tools to account for its subject. The problem, they argue, is a fundamental failure to develop the proper understanding of “politics and historical time” (p. 4). Historians of U.S. politics, by this account, return again and again to a predictable set of stories and periodizing conventions, all of which are shaped by the concept of “crisis.” They focus on “why seemingly stable political orders crack up, and how American politics gets reconstructed in the aftermath of those <strong>[End Page 391]</strong> crack-ups” (p. 4). Stuck rerunning “established paradigms,” particularly the “rise and fall of the New Deal order” and the consolidation of modern conservatism out of the conflicts of the 1960s and 70s, they have obscured more profound “continuities” and “deeper forms of consensus” (p. 6).</p> <p>“Continuity” emerges as the keyword for this v","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140842226","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}

{"title":"Watch the Morgues","authors":"Susan J. Pearson","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926391","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Watch the Morgues <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Susan J. Pearson (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Stephen Berry</em>, <em>Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It</em>. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xviii + 119pp. Figures, graph, notes, and index. $21.95 <p>In 2021, the British medical journal <em>The Lancet</em> published a study showing that more than half of all deaths that occur in police custody in the United States go unreported. Most states do not require that death certificates indicate whether a death occurred while in custody, and a 2014 federal law requiring law enforcement to report such deaths has generated no public data. Among the Black men who die at the hands of police, a <em>New York Times</em> investigation found that medical examiners and coroners sometimes listed the cause of death as “sickle cell traits” despite the fact that the deceased were attacked by police.<sup>1</sup> In the case of George Floyd, murdered by Minneapolis police, the county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. This was both exceptional and critical to the eventual indictment and conviction of officer Derek Chauvin.</p> <p>Clearly, it matters how we record death. Knowing who dies and how they die enables a society to track everything from epidemic disease to structural inequality. In his new book, <em>Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It</em>, Stephen Berry helps historicize such grim accounting. Besides being the author of numerous books about the nineteenth-century United States, Berry is the creator of the digital history project <em>CSI: Dixie</em>, which gathers together and analyzes coroner’s inquests from South Carolina between 1800 and 1900. In both that project, and in <em>Count the Dead</em> (originally delivered as the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era at Penn State University), Berry is interested in “the dead as data” (p. ix). That is, he is interested not only in how we came to think of information about dead people as useful data but why. It matters, he argues, because counting the dead has led not only to improvements in public health, but also to improvements in Americans’ ability to reckon with the social and moral dimensions of death. When we know how many people die and how, we can assess whether their deaths have been just or fair.</p> <p>Quantification and allied topics such as abstraction and standardization are quite hot among U.S. historians. Once largely the domain of historians <strong>[End Page 351]</strong> of science like Ted Porter, numbers and the things that people do with them have entered the mainstream. This is thanks in part to historians of statecraft and statebuilding who, following in the tradition of the anthropologists such as James Scott and Ann Laura Stoler, see counting, mapping, ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140842329","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}

{"title":"The Tragedy of Phrenology and Physiognomy","authors":"Haimo Li","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a926389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a926389","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Tragedy of Phrenology and Physiognomy <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Haimo Li (bio) </li> </ul> Rachel E. Walker, <em>Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America</em>. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 288 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. <p>Between the 1770s and the 1860s, physiognomy and phrenology were very popular sciences in America. Both elite intellectuals and ordinary men and women tended to buy into their core (and essentially prejudicial) teaching: that “facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality,” that “countenances and craniums reveal people’s inner capacities,” and that “external beauty is a sign of internal worth” (p. 145). In this new book, historian Rachel E. Walker offers us a clear and thorough account of the details and fate of these popular sciences of human nature in Early America.</p> <p>Walker nicely displays how the American founding generation deliberately used the ideas of physiognomy “to craft an idealized vision of the disinterested republican citizen” and “superior specimens of humanity” (pp. 14–15). The teachings of physiognomy and phrenology also suggested that “old hierarchies were not only legitimate but also based on bodily realities” (pp. 23–24), “wealthy white men” tended always to have “better brains and bodies than their compatriots” (p. 5), so it would be absurd (and futile) to challenge the exclusive sociopolitical status occupied by established elites. Walker also shows that beginning from the 1830s, physiognomists and phrenologists had broadened their attention to the heads and faces of Native peoples and people of African descent, mainly in order to prove that members of these groups were intrinsically inferior to white people. Many physiognomists believed that physiognomy “demonstrated the reasonableness of racial hierarchies” (p. 66). Building on this foundation, new groups of craniometrists and ethnologists emerged, their main arguments and purposes generally similar to the old groups of physiognomists and phrenologists. Together, these intellectuals formed the so-called science of “a racist ethnological system,” which was firmly based on “the faulty assumption that external beauty conveyed internal worth” (pp. 65–68). “Working women, immigrants, and women of color” had also been depicted as “inferior” in human capacity (p. 70). According to physiognomy <strong>[End Page 341]</strong> and phrenology, there exists a “clear hierarchy of humanity” (p. 74). Within this structure, there were some physiognomists and phrenologists with more progressive mindsets, but they still expressed and participated in a system of “bigotry” (pp. 75–76).</p> <p>Even as physiognomists and phrenologists “dangled the promise of personal betterment before the United States population,” they never reall","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140834620","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}

{"title":"Queer History and Domestic Possibilities","authors":"Rebecca L. Davis","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917240","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Queer History and Domestic Possibilities <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rebecca L. Davis (bio) </li> </ul> Stephen Vider, <em>The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II</em>. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.00. <p>Stephen Vider’s poignant addition to the history of sexuality in the United States begins with an invitation to domestic familiarity. He vividly renders a scene from the 1990 documentary, <em>We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS</em>, centering the voice of Marie, a fifty-five-year-old, HIV–positive African American woman living in Brooklyn, as she welcomes the filmmakers into her apartment. Although Black women are not the primary focus of the book, Marie’s invitation into her home highlights several of the book’s intersecting themes: the importance of home-making to HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ political activism; the significance of oft-overlooked primary sources, such as video (as well as cookbooks, architectural plans, and family albums); and “how performances of domesticity” shaped post–World War II LGBTQ political movements, ideals, and identities (p. 26).</p> <p>Vider excels at interpreting material objects of domesticity for insights into cultural and political history. He argues that although historians of post-World War II domesticity have tended to frame those decades as a period of normative (and often oppressive) heterosexuality and conformist gender ideals, LGBTQ people during the same period created alternative spaces—real and imagined—of queer domesticity. “Home” offered LGBTQ activists resources for resistance and assimilation, Vider finds; “they adapted, challenged, and reshaped domestic conventions at the same time they reaffirmed the home as a privileged site of intimate, communal, and national belonging” (p. 3). The resulting study provides a two-fold narrative: “a private counterhistory of LGBTQ liberation and rights in the United States” and “a queer counterhistory of American domesticity” (p. 26). This intervention stands as an important reminder that scholars in a field premised in part on the disruption of binary categories, such as public/private, must be vigilant not to recreate those binaries in their work.</p> <p><em>The Queerness of Home</em> additionally speaks to the importance of privacy as a central theme in LGBTQ history and the history of sexuality more broadly <strong>[End Page 258]</strong> in the United States. Recent books, such as <em>Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History</em> (2021), a collection of essays edited by Nancy Cott, Margot Canaday, and Robert Self, as well as books such as Anna Lvovsky’s <em>Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall</em> (2021), demonstrate how p","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414130","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}

{"title":"When History Is Not History","authors":"Brian Steele","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917243","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> When History Is Not History <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brian Steele (bio) </li> </ul> Jason Steinhauer, <em>History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past</em>. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022. vii + 160pp. Notes and index. <p>It’s possible to argue that more history is more widely available than ever before in human… well, history, but Jason Steinhauer thinks that most of it isn’t, strictly speaking, history at all; and he makes a disturbingly cogent case that the internet has the potential to render—indeed already is rendering—history proper altogether obsolete. He is particularly concerned to distinguish “professional” history—which has, he says, <em>intrinsic</em> value—from what he labels “e-history,” the historically oriented podcasts, tweets, short-form videos, and blog posts that seem to have cornered the history market on what Steinhauer calls, somewhat awkwardly (if precisely), the “Social Web,” which more and more of us tend to entrust with our questions about the past. Steinhauer is, in his way, foretelling a new “End of History,” and it’s not the Fukuyama kind.</p> <p>The internet has made professional/academic scholarship more efficient in multiple ways, and the digital humanities have made the tools and products of academic research more widely accessible: the proliferation of digitized archives, online versions of academic journals and books, and recorded lectures, conferences, conversations, and courses has surely facilitated historical scholarship, and, presumably, historical understanding. But Steinhauer wants to distinguish this widespread availability of professional history from the explosion and increasing dominance of “e-history”: “discrete media products that package an element, or elements, of the past for consumption on the social Web and which try to leverage the social Web in order to gain visibility” (p. 1).</p> <p>In a nutshell, Steinhauer’s ultimate argument is this: “the values that underpin the professional discipline of history are at odds with the values that underpin the social Web” (p. 9). Professional history, he writes, is an “expertcentric, always-evolving intellectual pursuit that is time-consuming and rests on its intrinsic value. The social Web is a user-centric, data-driven commercial enterprise that is instantly gratifying and privileges extrinsic value” (p. 9). And here is the key insight: insofar as history is wrenched into the platforms of <strong>[End Page 278]</strong> the social web, its goals, irrespective of the intentions of the historians themselves, necessarily become transmuted to fit, and ultimately to serve, those of the platforms themselves. The more that happens, Steinhauer fears, the more “e-history” will become “a proxy for all history” (p. 7).</p> <p>Marshall McLuhan lurks in the background (though he only appears ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414442","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}

{"title":"Structuring Museums Usefully","authors":"Samuel J. Redman","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917236","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Structuring Museums Usefully <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Samuel J. Redman (bio) </li> </ul> Reed Gochberg. <em>Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 272 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. <p>During the mid-nineteenth century, traveling to Europe was an essential component in finishing an American’s elite education. The Grand Tour typically consisted of visits to Italy, France, and the UK, with guided tours to major cities, including time spent viewing cathedrals and other wonders. Visits to spectacular European museums, too, were deemed an important part of any culturally sophisticated Yankee’s upbringing. Many nineteenth-century travelers considered visits to museums important opportunities to learn about the arts and the natural world. Major European museums were still the envy of American institutions, zealously gathering specimens and other objects for their collections. Many visitors met their experiences in museums with awe and wonder.</p> <p>Not all visitors were equally impressed by the grand European museums, however. In one episode, an American writer in <em>Saturday Review</em> reflected, “What is the British Museum? Is it, in any real sense of the word, a museum?” The essay further described the museum to be, “chaotic, accidental, and ill-arranged.” Museums and their collections, it seems, had grown so vast and complex as to lose any sense of coherence. The writer concluded of the experience, “A day at the British Museum is like reading a dictionary straight through” (p. 86). Despite their many flaws and limitations, museums came to serve as important centers for research and popular education, bringing various ideas into collision with one another, with important developments for the institutions taking place throughout the nineteenth century. By the century’s end, visitors were pushed toward new ideas and experiences through their encounters at museums. Some turned to their sketchbooks and notepads to document their thoughts, writing about the things they witnessed in museum spaces.</p> <p>Recent scholarship has expanded our knowledge in this area, building on a field of museum history bursting forth during the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Much of this scholarship, however, has focused <strong>[End Page 221]</strong> on the history of these institutions, rather than how visitors to these places experienced museums. Tracing the social and cultural impact of these places proves to be a complicated story. It is a difficult history to chase down, requiring deep and careful reading into wide varieties of disparate source materials.</p> <p>Visitors, as I have written elsewhere, often leave but shadowy glimpses of museum history; their perspectives and reactions to exhibitions are rarely fully documente","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414390","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}