REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY最新文献

{"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}

{"title":"The Museum in Crisis","authors":"Reed Gochberg","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911204","url":null,"abstract":"The Museum in Crisis Reed Gochberg (bio) Samuel J. Redman, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pp. Notes and index. $24.95. On April 8, 2020, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History announced a Rapid Response Collecting Task Force in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acknowledging \"the urgency to document the ephemeral aspects of the historic turning points . . . and the need to provide a long-term historical perspective,\" the Smithsonian outlined a significant role for the museum during a period of major uncertainty.1 By pursuing objects from across different areas of American society, from science and medicine to business, politics, and culture, museum curators saw an opportunity to record the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all aspects of everyday life. These materials would ensure that such a crisis would not be forgotten, and they would allow future historians and members of the public to understand this significant moment in history. The crisis the Smithsonian sought to preserve was taking place not only outside the walls of museums, but also within them. Many museums remained closed for months in 2020 due to the pandemic, and even when they reopened, the consequences were deeply felt. Staff layoffs, new masking and distancing policies, and ongoing economic impacts all transformed the way museums had to operate. These closures also coincided with nationwide protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, which prompted a wider reckoning about racial injustice across American political, social, and cultural institutions. Some saw these challenges as a chance to rethink the role of a museum. An article for the American Alliance of Museums proclaimed that, \"The museum we closed will not be the museum we reopen,\" suggesting a sense of tentative optimism that perhaps this pause in everyday operations might create space for reflection and an opportunity for change.2 Samuel Redman's recent book The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience reveals the much longer history of how museums have survived challenging times. Redman traces a set of key moments in American history throughout the twentieth century, including the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Great Depression to World War II and the culture wars of the 1980s [End Page 103] and 1990s, situating the work of museums against the backdrop of major crises. Throughout this book, Redman defines museums as dynamic institutions, capable of shifting priorities and operations in order to respond actively to the needs of a given moment. The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience emphasizes that a crisis can also provide an opportunity to reflect on institutional values: \"What are our main priorities? Whom do museums serve? How do cultural institutions continue to survive with curtailed operations? What operations are deemed 'essential'?\" (p. 4). Such questions have enormous consequences f","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"105 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":"135195492","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":"Ray, George, and Mabel: Friendship, Politics, and the Tragedies of American Liberalism","authors":"Thomas G. Andrews","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911213","url":null,"abstract":"Ray, George, and Mabel:Friendship, Politics, and the Tragedies of American Liberalism Thomas G. Andrews (bio) Historians simultaneously react to and build upon the work of other scholars. At some point in our training—possibly as undergraduates but at least in the first year or two of graduate school—we should begin to treat the study of the resulting dynamics of critique, corroboration, and creative leaps forward as worthy of scrutiny in its own right. Often, the critical examination of historical literature and how it has changed over time, a pursuit which most now refer to as historiography, veers into rarefied theoretical debates or intricate methodological disputes.1 When we go to the trouble of considering our fellow historians as actual human beings as well as abstracted intellects, though, richer and more interesting vantage points on what historians do and why can open up. Historical work, like any other human endeavor, has always been and will always be shaped by personalities and personal relationships. Think back on your own career within the profession, and note how your triumphs and traumas have been shaped by your fellow historians. An unkind intellectual smackdown from a tyrannical advisor. A late-night round of drinks with kindred spirits at a conference hotel. A moment of frailty during a barbed exchange when another scholar's inability to hide their feelings belied the conceit that history could ever be a purely intellectual pursuit. An unbidden act of kindness from a senior scholar who needn't have but nonetheless did. A bond of true friendship forged amid the posturing and performativity that prevail with disconcerting predictability whenever scholars gather. In such moments, we can no longer overlook the irreducible humanity of the people who do the thing we collectively call history. The personal politics of history, as all of us realize sooner or later, story our field. Only rarely, though, do historians subject these peculiar, closely held narratives to systematic research or concerted analysis. Our reluctance to get personal is hardly surprising. Who among us, after all, can discern any margin in conceding just how much an enterprise that we frequently lionize, [End Page 177] particularly to undergraduates, as the \"historians' craft,\" has been indelibly shaped not just by the disciplined endeavor of applying our intellects to the past's sundry remnants, but also by pettier factors including jealousy and envy, intimacy and alliance? Although each of us can testify about the ways that those and an array of other dynamics have affected our own careers, we nonetheless typically exhibit a concerted inclination to tuck away our own personal stories about how the historical sausage actually gets made into categories—lore, insider knowledge, trade secrets, gossip, dirt—that we almost always treat as unworthy of scrutiny. What I want to suggest in this essay, though, is that historians might learn a great deal about history and h","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"10 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":"135195487","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":"Rehabilitating the Beast","authors":"Douglas R. Egerton","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911209","url":null,"abstract":"Rehabilitating the Beast Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Elizabeth D. Leonard, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xix + 365 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. General, congressman, and governor Benjamin Franklin Butler remains one of the more mercurial figures of the Civil War and Reconstruction years. As a young Democrat and attorney, Butler took the side of laboring women against the managers and owners of cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, yet for most of the antebellum years, he was silent on the question of where that cotton came from. As a delegate to the 1860 Charleston and Baltimore Democratic conventions, Butler first endorsed Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas before transferring his loyalty to Mississippi's Jefferson Davis as the best hope of defeating a Republican presidential candidate, yet in his later years as a Republican congressman, many thought Butler the most likely progressive to take up the mantle of the ailing Thaddeus Stevens. Certainly, historians have rarely known what to make of his unpredictable career and flamboyant personality. Butler's inconsistencies soundly defeated biographer Hans Trefousse, who in Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast! (1957) flattened his life into a dull affair, and as late as 1997's When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, Chester Hearn demonized his tenure in New Orleans as a charming rogue who devoted his time to enriching himself at the expense of white southerners. At last, Butler has received the proper balance in Elizabeth Leonard's masterful and elegantly written biography. Leonard, the author of numerous books about these decades, and particularly the Lincoln-Prize-winning biography of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, knows this terrain well, of course, but as a professor at Maine's Colby College, she is also associated with the institution once known as Waterville College, where Butler studied while briefly considering a life in the ministry. (Apart from the fact that Colby has a large cache of Butler's materials, the ever-helpful Butler attempted to assist his future biographers by writing Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (1892), which filled 1037 pages and contained another 94 pages of documents and correspondence.)1 As one has come to expect from her earlier work, Leonard's study is deeply [End Page 138] grounded in archival materials, cites ninety-eight newspapers, and draws on a small library of books and articles. Her prose is lively and clear and wonderfully free of jargon, and this is an extraordinarily readable biography for a fairly hefty volume. Although Butler is today famous, or infamous, perhaps, for his later exploits as a soldier and politician, Leonard makes wise use of his early correspondence, and that of his wife, Sarah Jones Butler, in mapping out his years as a young Democratic operative and defense attorney. Justifiably, she here finds much to admire. His support for ","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"47 12 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":"135195491","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":"Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories","authors":"Katrina Jagodinsky","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911210","url":null,"abstract":"Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories Katrina Jagodinsky (bio) Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with University of Washington Press, 2022. xii + 298 pp. Figures, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.1 Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in the North American West, a region characterized in the popular imagination and in most scholarly treatments as fundamentally violent.2 Peter Boag's most recent book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (2022), joins this conversation, arguing that violence is intrinsic to American culture, particularly pioneering culture. Boag borrows an approach from Foucault to offer readers an \"ethnology of parricide\" (p. 9) that links a horrific \"fifteen or so minutes\" to \"the westward expansion of the United States, rural and agricultural decline, the consolidation of market capitalism, political change, environmental transformation, race and labor, penal reform and the evolution of justice, religion and the meaning of death, and the especially intimate matters of childhood, family, gender relations, and memory\" (p. 10).3 What unfolds is a compelling story that incorporates a diverse set of analytical methods to describe an eighteen year-old's parricide and murder in the 1895 Willamette Valley and explain \"why children kill their parents–a question that has haunted humanity since humanity has haunted the world\" (p. 217). [End Page 143] At the core of Boag's study is Loyd Montgomery's parricide of his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and murder of neighbor Daniel McKercher on 19 November, 1895. The eldest of five siblings at eighteen, Loyd stood at the intersection of boyhood and manhood, though his heinous actions ensured he would face execution before completing that transformation—unless we believe his murderous acts marked the end of his childhood. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were the children of Oregon founding families who had themselves practiced genocidal anti-Indian violence to secure their settler-colonial claims to the Willamette Valley in the 1840s and 1850s. As adults and parents of the Valley's thir","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Fitness: Gender, Wellness, and the New Body Politic","authors":"Sarah Schrank","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911214","url":null,"abstract":"American Fitness:Gender, Wellness, and the New Body Politic Sarah Schrank (bio) Bill Hayes, Sweat: A History of Exercise. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. 246 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $28.00 Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022. xxiii +328 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $27.00 Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2022. 345 pp. Notes. $28.99 Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 424 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.00 Annie Weisman, creator. Physical. Apple TV+, Seasons 1 and 2. 2021–2022. Among the many challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic was the uncomfortably embodied nature of the experience. Millions of people got sick, millions died, millions felt physically trapped—unable to travel distances or even leave their homes—millions found it hard to get basic supplies, and millions discovered that, at some cost to waistline and bankbook, alcohol and food delivery services could smooth the pandemic's rougher edges. Millions also suffered great loneliness caused by physical isolation while others, conversely, suffered upticks in domestic violence as forced proximity stressed relationships to the breaking point.1 Surgical masks became rarified items, and wearing homemade masks became a political signifier. We might not be able to see each other's faces but we could read positionality through the body—is the mask covering their nose? Is their body six feet away from mine? In the United States, along with the closure of schools and workplaces, the 2020 shuttering of gyms, health clubs, yoga shalas, and dance studios brought [End Page 198] home the stark reality that familiar life had altered—possibly forever. Panic set in. Americans who incorporated exercise into their daily routines had to make changes very quickly. Those who could afford to invested in home gyms; there was a run on kettlebells almost immediately. Peloton, a company many of us had never heard of, became, practically overnight, a bourgeois household utility. The global adoption of Zoom meant that people could take live exercise classes of all types from the safety and convenience of their own homes. Some people started walking their dogs a lot more than their pets needed while others just threw in the towel. Who cares about BMI (body mass index) when the world feels like it's ending? As it turns out, we do care—often for conflicting and self-defeating reasons—and there is a bumper crop of new work to prove it. That it was all brought to press (or air) during the pandemic is a coincidence, as the projects had to be in production—or at least conceived—long before, but it is hard not to see the zeitgeist in it, too. Readers of Reviews in American History surely remember the almost daily editorials and o","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"19 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":"135195490","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":"Making America Not Great","authors":"Chris Magra","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a911207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a911207","url":null,"abstract":"Making America Not Great Chris Magra (bio) Dane A. Morrison, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xv + 314 pp. Notes, sources, and index. $57.00. There has been much recent interest in interactions between the United States and the rest of the world. America's dependence on Chinese manufacturers and shipping companies, red balloons with spy cameras, and TikTok tech have grabbed the attention of politicians, historians, and the wider public. A United States president and multiple state governors have played on popular xenophobic fears and toxic nationalism in a wild effort to make America great again. Historians have engaged with this public interest in America and the world.1 Dael Norwood in Trading Freedom (2022) and Brian Rouleau in With Sails Whitening Every Sea (2014), for example, have demonstrated that overseas trade and foreign entanglements shaped the course of early American political culture. For Norwood, United States commercial ties with China \"put American merchants and sailors into direct contact with a vast array of new peoples and places, and at critical moments it inspired policymakers and politicians to consider national projects and domestic disputes in global perspective\" (p. 10). In this top-down history, overseas commerce turned early American political leaders into cosmopolitans, and they began to associate world trade with freedom, or post-American-Revolution \"liberation from the mercantilist confines of the British Empire\" (p. 20).2 Rouleau tacks a different course. For him, \"every barroom brawl, stabbing, or other violent incident\" involving American mariners in overseas ports in China and throughout the Pacific Ocean, \"jeopardized connections the United States (and its commercial class) had built with foreign governments (and their own merchants).\" (p. 106) Controlling misbehaving maritime laborers became a means of sustaining global capitalism and America's burgeoning overseas empire. In this bottom-up account, early American maritime laborers were not cosmopolitans. Overseas trade did not foster worldly accommodationist attitudes among motley crews. Instead, they used contemporary notions of savage and civilized to describe themselves and the foreign peoples they encountered. Mariners frequently likened Pacific Islanders to negative stereotypes of American Indians. These [End Page 121] attitudes led at times to physical violence. Such \"racialized vigilantism\" even caused colonization in the case of Hawaii (p. 85). Dane Morrison's prize-winning new book, Eastward of Good Hope, further positions the early history of the United States in a global context. Morrison's book leans more toward Rouleau's bottom-up approach. For Morrison, increased interest in world trade meant greater antipathy among American merchants and mariners toward foreign peoples and places during the Early Republic, when U.S. attitudes were in their most formative state. The winner","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"80 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":"135195494","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":"Whither the Radicals?","authors":"Cecily N. Zander","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a900725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a900725","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"51 1","pages":"102 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42400724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (review)","authors":"P. Coclanis","doi":"10.1353/rah.2023.a900723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a900723","url":null,"abstract":"In 2004 I served as a member of the program committee for the annual meeting of a major historical association. The committee’s first task was to draft a call for papers. The association had already chosen a broad theme for the meeting, but wanted us to signal that proposals on topics other than that theme were acceptable. I suggested something like proposals on “other important topics were welcome,” but several committee members immediately objected on the grounds that the adjective “important” implied normativity. I then offered alternative language—proposals on “other important and unimportant topics were welcome”—but that didn’t fly either. I start with this story because the profession was then smack dab in the middle of a long, drawn-out battle against (flight from?) concepts such as objectivity, critical discernment, and judgements regarding value. Syntheses were ipso facto considered imperializing/hegemonizing, and thus increasingly frowned upon. Grand narratives were pretty much out altogether. For the most part, mainstream history at the time was about disaggregation, about smaller parallel stories, micro-histories, and multiple perspectives, indeed, even multiple conceptions of “truth”—whether personal (“my truth,” as it was sometimes put), or, alternatively, what Shelby Steele later called “poetic truth”, i.e., a distorted partisan version of reality espoused in order to promote a preferred ideological outcome.1 Fortunately, the worm has turned, as it were, and of late things have begun to change, to which Slouching Towards Utopia attests. Syntheses and grand narratives, while not exactly in, are no longer endangered species. To be sure, it still takes considerable chutzpah for someone to attempt one, but they are no longer rarae aves. If it is possible to generalize about a group qua group, the tribe known as economists, for better or worse (possibly both) can be said to be imbued with chutzpah, few more so than J. Bradford DeLong, a distinguished economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley. And I say this not","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"51 1","pages":"68 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47109111","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}