REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"The Reform Not Traveled: Reconsidering Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform","authors":"Aaron Freedman","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917244","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 Reform Not Traveled: Reconsidering Alan Brinkley’s <em>The End of Reform</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Aaron Freedman (bio) </li> </ul> Alan Brinkley, <em>The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War</em>. New York: Vintage, 1996. x + 384 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $17.95. <p>In 1985, Alan Brinkley, then still a relatively young scholar whose first book had only been published two years earlier, took to the pages of this journal to assess a giant: Richard Hofstadter’s <em>The Age of Reform</em>. Thirty years after its original publication, Brinkley wrote, Hofstadter’s treatise loomed over the field of American political history as “something of a relic.” More recent scholarship had pilloried Hofstadter’s often condescending portrayal of the late-nineteenth-century agrarian populists as left-behind reactionaries, and his “consensus school” approach to American history seemed woefully out of date in the wake of the Reagan Revolution’s toppling of the postwar liberal order. <em>The Age of Reform</em>, Brinkley pronounced, had come to “embody something of a scholarly paradox…It is a book whose central interpretations few historians any longer accept, but one whose influence few historians can escape.”<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Yet despite this tough judgement, now akin to conventional wisdom for generations of students of American history, Brinkley found that something quite useful remained in <em>The Age of Reform</em>, an observation that had in fact improved with age: its understanding of the New Deal not as the completion of a decades-long arc of reform, but as a break from it. As Brinkley noted, Hofstadter had touched on what was still an uncomfortable truth in the 1950s: that the old driving forces of reform—antimonopoly and state planning—had, by the end of Roosevelt’s life, given way to something else entirely. Whereas earlier generations of reformers looked to fundamentally restructure the capitalist system itself, the liberalism ascendent after World War II aspired to a more modest shift: a big business-approved form of Keynesian demand management with a side of social welfare and individual rights protection. Though Brinkley was left dissatisfied with Hofstadter’s treatment of how and why “the language of liberalism, and the substantive direction of liberalism” <strong>[End Page 289]</strong> had changed, he recognized that question as core to understanding America in the twentieth century.<sup>2</sup></p> <p>It is now nearly thirty years since the publication of <em>The End of Reform</em>, the book in which Brinkley first worked through his own answer to Hofstadter’s question. It is difficult to avoid a comparison of the two scholars. While never reaching quite the stature of Hofstadter at his prime, Brinkley nonetheless became a towering figure in American political history, his influ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414851","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":"Escaping the Education Trap","authors":"William D. Goldsmith","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917239","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 --> Escaping the Education Trap <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> William D. Goldsmith (bio) </li> </ul> Cristina Viviana Groeger, <em>The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston</em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 384 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, and index. $36.00. Daniel S. Moak, <em>From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State</em>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xiv + 326 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, <em>Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt</em>. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. 400 pp. Photos, illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. $29.95. <p>“America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!” That was the exclamatory question put to policymakers as the 1990s dawned, the title of a report from an illustrious group of politicians, academics, educators, labor leaders, and business executives who had joined forces as the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. The report’s framing was not narrowly focused on how investing in education would promote economic growth or productivity—it pitched more and better education as a way to raise pay for average workers, lower poverty, and equalize income distribution. Bill Clinton incorporated the message on the 1992 campaign trail, and several committee members joined his presidential administration.</p> <p>The “America’s Choice” report was one of many published in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s that preached what W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson skeptically dubbed the “education gospel,” this emphasis that better schools would mean a better economy for everyone, that more credentials would lead to higher wages, that college for all would create economic security for all.<sup>1</sup> In retrospect, it is far from clear that America did face a choice between high skills and low wages, then or since. The education gospel treated the construction of the global economy as beyond policymakers’ control, ignoring the roles of trade policy, labor policy, and tax policy in hollowing out the middle class, enriching a narrow economic elite, and driving a further wage <strong>[End Page 244]</strong> wedge between those with and without bachelor’s degrees. Jason Resnikoff’s <em>Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work</em> (2021) dissects how postwar policymakers employed the concept of “automation” to speed up, intensify, and degrade work, underscoring how rarely the “skills gap” diagnosis captured the economic facts of life in the 20<sup>th</sup>-century U.S. And yet, in contrast to the 1990s free market zealots, “America’s Choice” at least acknowledged that economic inequality was getting worse and that government should do someth","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414437","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":"Reimagining The Far Right","authors":"Alex McPhee-Browne","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917245","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 --> Reimagining The Far Right <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Alex McPhee-Browne (bio) </li> </ul> Leo P. Ribuffo’s <em>The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War</em>. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. xix + 274 pp. Notes and Index. <p>All historical work is, at least implicitly, revisionist. All historical work seeks to alter our perception of a set of individuals, ideas, or events. But some work is Revisionist with a capital R, capable of profoundly, if often subtly, shifting the existing terms of debate, opening a new perspective that comes to seem like common sense. The late Leo Ribuffo’s first book, <em>The Old Christian Right</em> (1983), was one of those works, a tour de force that made us see the past of the Great Depression and the early Cold War in a new and unsettling light.</p> <p>With far-right movements flourishing across the globe, a return to and reconsideration of Ribuffo’s work can provide us with a deeper understanding of the roots, significance, and impact of the far right in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. <em>The Old Christian Right</em> was published when the American far right was largely, though not wholly, in abeyance, and Ribuffo’s account of the far right of the 1930s and 1940s provided a definitive analysis of the political fortunes of the movement in those pivotal decades. Ribuffo wrote with a skeptical eye and a roving curiosity. What made his work so fresh—and so prescient—was its utter refusal to carry on a tradition of analysis inherited from the postwar era. Although the subjects of his book, as he noted, were not heroes—indeed, they were “villains” (p. xi)—he refused to treat them with anything but the utmost scrupulous, probing, and critical respect, the kind of respect due any subject of historical inquiry, however repugnant their views or even their actions.</p> <p>In practice, this principle, Ribuffo believed, had been ignored by the previous generation’s literature on the far right. Scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter had tended to pathologize the far right, attributing its rancor and extreme beliefs to a mix of “status anxiety,” fundamentalist Christianity, psychopathology, and the deracinating force of industrial capitalism. <strong>[End Page 295]</strong> These “pluralist”—or “consensus”—scholars, Ribuffo argued, seldom provided a comprehensive explanation of the ideology held by members of the right or left “extremes,” even as a prelude to subsequent analysis. Their beliefs, instead, were treated by pluralists as tokens of personal neuroses or status deprivation; they were caricatured rather than examined as “complex human beings” (p. xi).</p> <p>The concept of “extremism,” originally used to make sense of the fractious politics of the 1930s, dominated post-World War II scholarship on the","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139414131","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":"Railroaded: How Trains Made Mass Immigrant Expulsion Possible","authors":"Elliott Young","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917238","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 --> Railroaded: <span>How Trains Made Mass Immigrant Expulsion Possible</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Elliott Young (bio) </li> </ul> Ethan Blue, <em>The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal</em>. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. xiii + 448 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $39.95. <blockquote> <p>“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,</p> <p>Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;</p> <p>You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,</p> <p>All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”</p> —Maryin Hoffman and Woody Guthrie, “Deportee” </blockquote> <p>A few years back, as I was waiting to board a flight to Mexico from San Francisco International airport, I noticed some government agents escorting handcuffed migrants onto my commercial flight. I wanted to say something, to scream, to denounce ICE, to lay my body down on the gears of the deportation machine, but I didn’t. The passengers on my flight that day got a glimpse of the mass expulsion industry that mostly remains hidden from view, but nobody said a word. It was routine. Another day in America.</p> <p>In December 2018, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights received a database of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Alien Repatriation Tracking System (ARTS) following a Freedom of Information Act request. Although journalists have reported on the activities of ICE Air, as it is colloquially known, this network of chartered deportation flights operates in the shadows. Nobody had an idea of the size and shape of this aerial expulsion machine. The ARTS dataset revealed that there were 1.73 million passengers on almost 15,000 ICE Air Operations flights between 2010 and 2018. Almost three-quarters of these flights brought deportees back to their home countries, mostly Mexico, while just over one-quarter were internal transfers in which migrants were shuffled between detention centers in the United States. 150,000–250,000 migrants were boarded onto ICE Air each year, making it one of the largest mass removal strategies in U.S. history.¹ We know that under presidents Obama and Trump, the system reached unprecedented levels of deportation, removing more than half a million migrants annually at <strong>[End Page 236]</strong> its height. But understanding the mechanism for how those mass deportations actually happened remains fuzzy.</p> <p>When something like mass incarceration or mass deportation becomes routine, it can happen before our very eyes without our understanding the intricacies of how the complex system operates. While today airplanes and busses are used to ferry migrants around the country and expel them to other countries, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the primary mode of transport was the railroad. Ethan Blue’s <em>Deportation Express</em> helps us to ","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":"139414135","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":"Settler Answers to Settler Problems: Centering Settler Colonialism in Environmental History","authors":"Kaitlin Reed","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917237","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 --> Settler Answers to Settler Problems: <span>Centering Settler Colonialism in Environmental History</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kaitlin Reed (bio) </li> </ul> Traci Brynne Voyles, <em>The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism</em>. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xiv + 382pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. <p>What do salt, toxic algae, hotel furniture, and fighter jets have in common? All of them can be found in the “ecological conundrum” that is the Salton Sea (p. 2). Paradoxically conceptualized as both an environmental refuge and toxic wasteland, the Salton Sea’s story, in Traci Brynne Voyles’s telling, perfectly illustrates the “precariousness of the settler world, not just settler approaches to environmentalism but settler epistemologies about human relationships to nature and to one another” (pp. 266–7).</p> <p>In dialogue with other scholars of Indigenous California, Voyles makes two critical interventions in her second book: first, a call for centering settler colonialism within historical discourse of California and the United States, but especially within environmental histories. Voyles and others are pointing out how, “People misunderstand the settler invasion of Indigenous California <em>as</em> California history rather than an unsustainable and disruptive episode in it.”¹ In settler colonial societies, settler colonialism is normalized to the point where it becomes invisibilized—from state-mandated curriculum oriented around the imaginary of Manifest Destiny² to environmental decision making. ³ Voyles argues that the:</p> <blockquote> <p>Salton Sea served as a microcosm of the twentieth-century West, reflecting back to us—sometimes with the exaggerated distortions of a funhouse mirror—the major forces that have shaped that century’s western environmental history: dryland irrigation, Indigenous dispossession, dam-building, militarization, pesticide-intensive agriculture, labor exploitation, tourism, prisons and policing, and wildlife conservation (p. 268).</p> </blockquote> <p>Voyles’ second, and related, intervention is oriented around environmental justice—namely, that environmental conditions that are created and maintained by settler colonialism can produce environmental injustices. Fans of <strong>[End Page 229]</strong> her <em>Wastelanding</em> (2015) will be happy to find a few threads that continue through Voyles’ sophomore manuscript: aridity and nuclearism. At the same time, the prose in <em>The Settler Sea</em> is a pleasure. Powerful imagery throughout transports the reader—from imagining Cahuilla families fishing the shores of the ancient Lake Cahuilla to the hotel furniture afloat in the Salton Sea “succumbed to bloat, mold, and rot” (p. 168). The structure of the book moves chronologica","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"5 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139415177","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":"Liberal Technocrats and the Economic Ideology of Efficiency","authors":"Laura Phillips-Sawyer","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a917241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a917241","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 --> Liberal Technocrats and the Economic Ideology of Efficiency <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Laura Phillips-Sawyer (bio) </li> </ul> Elizabeth Popp Berman, <em>Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy</em>. Princeton University Press, 2022. x + 334 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $37.00 <p><em>Thinking like an Economist</em> opens with a familiar lament: that liberal Democratic presidents have lost their progressive edge. Democratic policies, Elizabeth Popp Berman explains, no longer embody the core values and aspirations of New Deal and Great Society programs—”political claims grounded in values of rights, universalism, equity, and limiting corporate power” (p. 4). Those noneconomic values once motivated and sustained progressive policies in social policy, antitrust law, and social regulation of health, safety, and the environment. Today, however, Democratic policymaking embraces a traditionally Republican focus on “leveraging choice, competition, incentives, and the power of markets in the pursuit of outcomes that would be not just effective, but efficient” (p. 2). This embrace, she argues, has redefined what constitutes “good policy (p. 6)” and constricted the “very horizons of possibility (p. 3)” for contemporary American progressives.</p> <p>Berman argues that “liberal technocrats”—professionally trained public servants who identified with a centrist Democratic Party—brought postwar neoclassical economics’ obsession with efficiency into government. Beginning in the 1960s, systems analysts and industrial organization (IO) economists deployed an economic style of reasoning as a politically-neutral tool to “rationalize” bureaucratic decision-making processes and economic regulation. Elite economics departments initially developed the core tenets and basic presumptions of neoclassical economics, but this way of thinking through real-world problems quickly spread to law schools, public administration programs, and especially think-tanks. A feedback loop formed that reinforced the trend. Eventually, those liberal technocrats—not right-wing conservative or libertarian pundits—elevated efficiency (broadly defined) as the core principle of policy analysis. Through the ubiquity of cost-benefit analysis, efficiency displaced other values, such as universal access, democratic participation, or decentralized economic power. By the 1980s, where many stories of “neoliberalism” <strong>[End Page 262]</strong> and deregulation begin, Democratic policymaking had already been captured by economists’ understanding of efficiency.</p> <p>So, what does it mean to think like an economist? Do all economists think alike? Here, Berman sets her book apart by focusing on postwar neoclassical <em>micro</em>economics, rather than <em>macro</em>economics. Macroeconomics is concerned with national-level fiscal, mo","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"81 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":"139414129","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 Agonist-Antagonist Myoneural Interface in a Transtibial Amputation.","authors":"Colin J Harrington, Marissa Dearden, John Richards, Matthew Carty, Jason Souza, Benjamin K Potter","doi":"10.2106/JBJS.ST.22.00038","DOIUrl":"10.2106/JBJS.ST.22.00038","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background: &lt;/strong&gt;The agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI) technique at the time of transtibial amputation involves the use of agonist-antagonist muscle pairs to restore natural contraction-stretch relationships and to improve proprioceptive feedback when utilizing a prosthetic limb&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description: &lt;/strong&gt;Utilizing the standard incision for a long posterior myofasciocutaneous flap, the lateral and medial aspects of the limb are dissected, identifying and preserving the superficial peroneal and saphenous nerve, respectively. The tendons of the tibialis anterior and peroneus longus are transected distally to allow adequate length for the AMI constructs. After ligation of the anterior tibial vessels, the deep peroneal nerve is identified and tagged to create a regenerative peripheral nerve interface (RPNI). The tibia and fibula are cut approximately 15 cm from the medial joint line, facilitating dissection of the deep posterior compartment and ligation of the peroneal and posterior tibial vessels. The tendons of the lateral gastrocnemius and tibialis posterior are transected distally, and the amputation is completed. The extensor retinaculum is harvested from the residual limb along with multiple 2 × 3-cm free muscle grafts, which will be used for the RPNI constructs. The retinaculum is secured to the tibia with suture anchors, and AMI pairs of the lateral gastrocnemius and tibialis anterior as well as the tibialis posterior and peroneus longus are constructed. Separate RPNIs of the major lower-extremity nerves are performed, and the wound is closed in a standard layered fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternatives: &lt;/strong&gt;An isometric myodesis of the gastrocnemius without coaptation of agonist-antagonist muscle pairs can be performed at the time of transtibial amputation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale: &lt;/strong&gt;The AMI technique restores natural agonist-antagonist relationships at the time of transtibial amputation to increase proprioceptive feedback and improve prosthetic control. These outcomes contrast with those of a traditional isometric myodesis, which prevents proprioceptive communication from the residual limb musculature to the central nervous system. Additionally, the AMI technique allows for concentric and eccentric muscular contractions, which may contribute to the maintenance of limb volume and aid with prosthetic fitting, as opposed to the typical limb atrophy observed following standard transtibial amputation&lt;sup&gt;1,2&lt;/sup&gt;. With the development and availability of more advanced prostheses, the AMI technique offers more precise control and increases the functionality of these innovative devices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expected outcomes: &lt;/strong&gt;Early clinical outcomes of the AMI technique at the time of transtibial amputation have been promising. In a case series of the first 3 patients who underwent the procedure, complications were minor and consisted of 2 episodes of cellulitis and 1 case of delayed wound","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10810585/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67755218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Whither Revivalism and Reform","authors":"Raymond James Krohn","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911208","url":null,"abstract":"Whither Revivalism and Reform Raymond James Krohn (bio) Ryan C. McIlhenny, To Preach Deliverance to the Captives: Freedom and Slavery in the Protestant Mind of George Bourne, 1780–1845. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. ix + 257pp. Acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Ben Wright, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. vii + 253pp. Acknowledgements, notes, and index. $45.00. In 1976, historian Ronald G. Walters opened a chapter-length analysis of religion and the reformist ethos by contending that crusading abolitionism in the United States \"could not . . . have been what it was after 1830 if there had not been an evangelical Protestant tradition behind it and if there had not been evangelical Protestants in it from beginning to end.\" Despite acknowledging that revivalism in and of itself did not fuel the drive to immediately emancipate the enslaved, at the section's close he nonetheless reaffirmed the revivalistic inheritance of post-1830 antislavery, whose zealous adherents appropriately transformed their cause into \"a church.\" Thirty years later, sociologist Michael P. Young premised the emergence of the American social movement on a solidly spiritual foundation, claiming that pre-Civil War antialcohol, antislavery, and anti-vice crusaders harnessed both the \"genteel orthodoxy\" of older Protestant sects and \"boisterous populism\" of newer ones while launching campaigns against individual immorality and societal wickedness. The instrumental connections that antebellum reformers had made between \"the intimate and the far-flung,\" he observed, \"stemm[ed] from an evangelical sense of the dynamic of sin, repentance, and reformation . . . .[a] reflexive force [that] projected personal sins onto national problems and introjected national evils into personal affairs.\" So closely intertwined are religious revitalization and the resurgence of such early nineteenth-century reforms as temperance and abolitionism in the scholarly literature, that any decoupling or reconceptualization is difficult to envision.1 Across the twentieth century, scholars crafted an array of texts on reformist religion that collectively produced a richly textured tapestry. Listing several of [End Page 127] these books suggests the warp and woof of a century-long conversation about reformism's nature and meaning: Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (1944); Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (1950); Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-19th-Century America (1957); Clifford S. Griffin, The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860 (1967); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976; rev. ed., 1997); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Roch","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"174 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":"135195488","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":"Seduced and Avenged","authors":"Christine Leigh Heyrman","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911206","url":null,"abstract":"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 ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"37 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":"135195489","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":"It's the Union Leaders, Stupid: Organized Labor's Failures in the South","authors":"Chad Pearson","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911211","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"126 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":"135195495","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}