JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"The Ideological Origins of the Texas Revolution","authors":"Stefan Roel Reyes","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932552","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 Ideological Origins of the Texas Revolution <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stefan Roel Reyes (bio) </li> </ul> <p>D<small>uring the convention of</small> 1836, <small>delegates adopted the</small> T<small>exas</small> Declaration of Independence. It justified independence by accusing the Mexican government of having failed “to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted.” Later in the document, the writers reiterated the association between property and liberty by arguing that trial by jury was the “guarantee” of the right to “life, liberty, and property of the citizen.”<sup>1</sup> Such statements almost echo the American Revolution’s declaration, which espoused the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”<sup>2</sup> In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally considered property among the inalienable rights. While historians debate whether Jefferson substituted <em>happiness</em> to signify a life of virtue or to reflect his uneasiness with slavery in the euphemism of property, Texans held no such qualms.<sup>3</sup> Why this difference between the American and Texas Declarations of Independence? Did Texans see property in slavery as a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness as well as other liberties?</p> <p>It is difficult to take Texas revolutionaries’ language of freedom and rights seriously when they also believed in racism and slavery. Modern historians dismiss Texas revolutionaries’ arguments as a propagandistic narrative. Indeed, scholarly skepticism toward such rhetoric is well justified. Since the nineteenth century, Texas historians and writers have attempted to cleanse Texas history of the stain of slavery, often by emphasizing American exceptionalism—that is, by casting the Texas <strong>[End Page 479]</strong> Revolution as an heir to supposedly irresistible American ideas of universal human liberation. In 1855, Henderson K. Yoakum published one of the earliest accounts of the Texas Revolution. Although Yoakum refers to slavery a few times, the account is dominated by a narrative of affinity between Texan and American values.<sup>4</sup> Eugene C. Barker built on this perspective that the Texas Revolution was the offspring of the American Revolution. Barker’s work recognizes that the issue of slavery called into question the sincerity of Texan ideals. Nonetheless, he argues that the Mexican government’s attempt to enforce laws on a culturally different people was the impetus for the Texas Revolution, drawing parallels to Britain’s attempts to bring the American colonies under control. Barker suggests that Texas settlers were too American to blend successfully into Mexican society.<sup>5</sup> Amelia Worthington Williams was a historian, a student of Eugene Barker’s, and an act","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"171 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities by Thomas D. Wilson (review)","authors":"Abel A. Bartley","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932561","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities</em> by Thomas D. Wilson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Abel A. Bartley </li> </ul> <em>Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities</em>. By Thomas D. Wilson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 348. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6319-6; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6321-9.) <p>Thomas D. Wilson chronicles the strange relationship between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, in <em>Charleston and Savannah: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Two Rival Cities</em>. Charleston and Savannah are rival sister cities and were founded by some of England’s most provocative political thinkers. Charleston was influenced by John Locke, whose colonial admirers passionately argued for the natural rights of individuals but sanctioned a rigid slavocracy in Charleston. Built on an urban pattern called the Grand Model, Charleston was located on high ground, with street grids facing the prevailing winds. Its founders also avoided building near extensive wet-lands. It was a contradiction from the beginning: a city dependent on African labor but dedicated to white supremacy. Charleston utilized slavery and rice cultivation to become the richest city in colonial America. Savannah, in contrast, was founded by James Oglethorpe, who envisioned a land built on yeoman farmers working small plots of land.</p> <p>The two cities influenced colonial American culture and set a tone for southern urbanization. The cities grew up together, with similar cultural, economic, and architectural beginnings. Though having an age difference of less than sixty years, Charleston had a medieval-style urban plan and was wedded to slavery, while Savannah’s design was influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and, initially, more progressive thinking regarding slavery. Savannah, under the influence of Georgia’s trustees, initially rejected slavery and encouraged small-scale agriculture. Eventually, Charlestonians won the day and shaped the politics of what became the South. As a result, slavery spread like a weed through the area below the Mason-Dixon Line.</p> <p>The book is a very interesting and exhaustive history of these two cities. Wilson merges the cities’ histories into a compelling story of race, politics, and urban development in the South. Wilson, an independent scholar, takes the reader on an intellectual journey, using economic and political arguments to explain the significance of these cities. He argues that Charleston shaped Savannah and had an outsized role in shaping the South. Its devotion to slavery and white supremacy produced a powerful oligarchy, which profoundly impacted the way white southerners saw everything. By relying on a monoculture underwritten by plantation slavery based fi","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"231 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland by Scott Shane (review)","authors":"Rita Reynolds","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932569","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland</em> by Scott Shane <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rita Reynolds </li> </ul> <em>Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland</em>. By Scott Shane. (New York: Celadon Books, 2023. Pp. [x], 340. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-250-84321-0.) <p>The history of the American abolitionist movement has primarily been understood through the eyes of fugitive slaves, who told their stories using oral or written accounts, and of white northerners, who were morally and religiously opposed to the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the American Antislavery Society are central historical figures on the subject. Within Garrison’s circle, moral suasion and pacifism <strong>[End Page 612]</strong> were the fundamental tools used in the struggle to rid the United States of the peculiar institution.</p> <p>However, recent scholarship, such as Manisha Sinha’s <em>A Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition</em> (New Haven, 2016), reconstructs the considerable role that free Black people and fugitive slaves played in the antislavery movement. In a similar vein, Scott Shane’s book <em>Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland</em> tells the largely overlooked story of Thomas Smallwood, a former slave, shoemaker, and radical abolitionist who lived in Washington, D.C. Smallwood, despite the personal danger associated with assisting fugitives, helped hundreds of enslaved African Americans escape from the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland to the northern states and Canada in the 1840s.</p> <p>Smallwood’s fascinating story is a unique one. With the help of white abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey, Smallwood personally assisted groups of African Americans to safely navigate the arduous journey out of the slave South. In one typical instance, he guided five fugitives to freedom in 1842. According to Shane, conducting routes of the Underground Railroad—a term Smallwood coined in print—was just one of Smallwood’s roles as an antislavery activist. Smallwood and Torrey believed that depriving masters of their slave property was not enough. The two men used the abolitionist press to taunt and admonish the owners of the slaves they had helped obtain their liberty. Writing under the pen name Samivel Weller Jr., Smallwood chided and embarrassed individual slave masters for their inhumanity, brutality, and greed. He also used the column to comment on the discrimination that free and enslaved African Americans faced in antebellum America. With help from Torrey, who was the editor of an Albany, New York, abolitionist newspaper, <em>Tocsin of Liberty</em> (later called the Albany <em>Weekly Patriot</em>), Smallwood took the unusual step of having his column ma","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis by Christopher C. Sellers (review)","authors":"Andrew Gutkowski","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932598","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis</em> by Christopher C. Sellers <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Andrew Gutkowski </li> </ul> <em>Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis</em>. By Christopher C. Sellers. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 428. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4408-9; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4407-2.) <p>In recent years, Atlanta has emerged as a key battleground in the fate of American democracy. In the 2020 presidential election, the city proved decisive in tilting Georgia to the Democrats and consequently became the focus of voting fraud conspiracies in the election’s aftermath. Fulton County has also issued a historic indictment of Donald J. Trump for attempting to overturn Georgia’s election results. In <em>Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis</em>, Christopher C. Sellers provides important context for understanding this moment, demonstrating how Atlanta first became a laboratory for democratizing movements. Throughout the twentieth century, environmental and civil rights activists undermined racial authoritarian rule in Georgia and democratized the city. Sellers emphasizes that both movements, often seen as adversaries, were intertwined. Both provided a fulcrum for dismantling Jim Crow and launching a new cadre of Black civil rights leaders such as Maynard Jackson Jr. and John Lewis into positions of political leadership, simultaneously appealing to concerns over civil rights and environmental issues.</p> <p>Before the 1960s, Sellers argues, Atlanta was shackled by a system of “rustic rule” (p. 4). This regime not only disenfranchised Black citizens but also severely curtailed the voting power and governing authority of cities, concentrated wealth in the hands of a rural elite, and enabled industry to resist unionization and freely exploit Georgia’s air and waterways. An influx of federal assistance and New Deal programs, however, catalyzed the rise of both a white and a Black middle class along the city’s suburban arc. Throughout the 1960s, both groups challenged racial authoritarianism from different vantage points, with the city’s civil rights leaders pressing for greater Black representation in metropolitan planning and housing opportunities for Black citizens, while a mostly white environmental movement advocated for nature preserves and pollution control measures. Historians have generally treated these as separate social movements with intractable differences in ideology, structure, and racial composition. Although each group articulated a different understanding of the “environment,” ","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy by Gregory S. Wilson (review)","authors":"Adam Tompkins","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932605","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy</em> by Gregory S. Wilson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Adam Tompkins </li> </ul> <em>Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy</em>. By Gregory S. Wilson. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 236. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6348-6; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6347-9.) <p>Gregory S. Wilson’s <em>Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy</em> chronicles the yearslong effort to determine the severity of harm and to minimize the threat to the environment and human health from the corporate malfeasance of Allied Chemical and Life Science Products in the manufacture of Kepone (chlordecone), a persistent organochlorine insecticide that was widely used in the cultivation of potatoes and bananas in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Through extensive use of legal proceedings, government documents, oral histories, and other primary sources, Wilson makes clear the complicated process of identifying the reach of Kepone contamination, proving culpability, strengthening environmental management at state and federal levels, and creating an innovative solution in the form of the Virginia Environmental Endowment to improve environmental conditions within the state. <em>Poison Powder</em> is an engaging procedural that argues that the prompt action of regulatory agencies and the courts reduced, but did not wholly eliminate, the impacts of the Kepone disaster in Virginia. <strong>[End Page 659]</strong></p> <p>Wilson conducted over twenty oral history interviews, which he effectively uses to “remind us of the human dimension at the heart of the Kepone story” (p. xi). These interviews constitute a core strength of the book, showing how various constituencies—scientists, regulators, fisherfolk—considered partial evidence and scientific uncertainty when responding to the problem. The interviews also provide an opportunity for many of the key players to reflect on their thinking and decision-making in the past. Wilson marshals these voices into an engaging discussion of the precautionary principle, as evidenced in the decision to close the James River, and quantitative risk assessment, which underlay much of the argument to reopen the river to fishing.</p> <p>Wilson makes regular reference to the various residues left by Kepone when discussing the lasting impact of the pesticide on place, politics, environment, and memory. Often the word <em>residue</em> carries a negative connotation, but that is not always the case here. Wilson, for example, argues that the federal Toxic Substances Control Act and much of Virginia’s state legislation relating to toxic substances bear the residue of Kepone. Such residues, in this manner, largely functio","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies ed. by David J. Endres (review)","authors":"Maura Jane Farrelly","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932557","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies</em> ed. by David J. Endres <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maura Jane Farrelly </li> </ul> <em>Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies</em>. Edited by David J. Endres. Foreword by Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 292. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8132-3675-9.) <p>Editor David J. Endres’s concise <em>Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies</em> nicely exemplifies recent developments in the scholarly analysis of American Catholicism’s history with hereditary, race-based slavery. These trends have been a long time coming, as Endres notes. In the nineteenth century, scholars ignored the reality of Catholic slaveholding, along with the existence of African American Catholics. In the first half of the twentieth century, scholars did turn their attention to the church’s teachings on slavery and to the reality that American Catholics once held human beings in bondage. These scholars, however, tended to focus on the supposedly superior nature of Catholics’ slaveholding compared with Protestants’, and they depicted slavery as an “opportunity” to expose people of African descent to Catholicism. “While the Protestant slave-holders . . . were writing and rewriting arguments to prove that the Negroes were brutes and therefore should be enslaved,” one prominent scholar quoted by Endres asserted in 1946, “the Catholics were accepting the Negroes as brethren and treating them as men” (pp. 247–48).</p> <p>Not until the late 1980s—when a Black Benedictine monk, priest, and academic historian named Cyprian Davis started chronicling the history of African American Catholics—did scholars turn a truly critical eye to the topic of slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States. This attention resulted in deep dives into the sacramental records of several parishes in Louisiana, Maryland, and Kentucky. Some of these studies, such as C. Walker Gollar’s 1998 reconstruction of the Black and white Catholic community in Washington County, Kentucky, have been updated and reprinted in this volume.</p> <p>Sacramental records hold a wealth of information about the lives of enslaved Catholics. They also “document prejudices that researchers, scholars, and students . . . may find uncomfortable today,” as Emilie Gagnet Leumas asserts in an essay that considers how sacramental practices reflected Louisiana’s legal and social racism (p. 211). Records of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials tell us whom the acknowledged fathers of children were; which slaves were literate and/or skilled; when and if slaves were manumitted; and what families were broken up and sold by the people who owned them. In so doing, such records ","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise (review)","authors":"Andrew H. Fisher","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932559","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History</em> by Michael D. Wise <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Andrew H. Fisher </li> </ul> <em>Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History</em>. By Michael D. Wise. Food and Foodways. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2023. Pp. x, 200. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-68226- 238-2.) <p>Any trip to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., should include a meal at Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe, which offers a living testament to the history explored in Michael D. Wise’s new book <em>Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History</em>. Voted the best cafe in D.C., among other accolades, it features Indigenous dishes from the Great Plains, Mesoamerica, the Northern Woodlands, the Northwest Coast, and South America that are designed to educate visitors about the traditional cuisines and culinary practices of the Western Hemisphere’s diverse Native cultures. Many of these foods and foodways have survived centuries of settler colonialism, yet until recently Mitsitam was one of the few restaurants in the country where the public could readily sample them. As Wise suggests, our general ignorance of Indigenous cuisine reflects “a logic of erasure and replacement that seeks to confine Native lives in the past in order to legitimize the dispossession of Native land and labor in the present” (p. 7). <strong>[End Page 599]</strong> <em>Native Foods</em> challenges this eliminatory logic by refuting four intertwined colonialist myths: namely, that American Indians “did not practice agriculture,” that they lived mainly by hunting, that they “were usually hungry as a result,” and that persistent privation made them indifferent to flavor or cuisine (p. 9).</p> <p>To make his case, Wise employs five case studies that trace the progress of American settler colonialism across the continent and through four centuries of history. Predictably, chapter 1 locates the roots of settler discourse concerning Native agriculture in the contest for control of New England during the seventeenth century. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly detail the consequences of this logic for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and the Cherokee Nation, respectively, but also delve into the ways food production shaped intercultural diplomacy, gender roles, and the landscapes of the Eastern Woodlands. Chapter 4 carries the story out onto the Great Plains, using the Blackfeet Reservation to explore how western Native nations adapted to wrenching changes wrought by federal Indian policy and ecological imperialism. In each section, Wise strives to emphasize Indigenous agency and to turn the tables on settler colonial narratives of Indian food insecurity and culinary incompetence,","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Freedom Movement's Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation by Keith P. Griffler (review)","authors":"Augustus Wood","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932589","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation</em> by Keith P. Griffler <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Augustus Wood </li> </ul> <em>The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation</em>. By Keith P. Griffler. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Pp. x, 292. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-9728-9.) <p>For much of his career, historian Keith P. Griffler has challenged scholarship on the antislavery movement by showcasing often underrepresented Black voices in the struggle for emancipation. After decades of writing on the antebellum period, Griffler shifts his focus to the postemancipation era, when European powers sought new markets, new laws, and new forms of coerced labor to exploit after the fall of chattel slavery. In <em>The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation</em>, Griffler crafts an intellectual history that “traces the contested and evolving definition of slavery in the twentieth century” through the voices of Black intellectuals and prominent Black activists (p. 13). After European colonists carved up the African continent in the 1880s, colonial officials, in partnership with nineteenth-century abolitionists—who had abandoned their positions on the immorality of coerced labor in favor of new labor policies in Africa—devised a new articulation of <em>antislavery</em> that entrenched race into international labor law. <strong>[End Page 637]</strong></p> <p>Griffler recounts how Black leaders like Alice Victoria Kinloch, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned against this betrayal of Black workers, as so-called antislavery leaders like Frederick Lugard developed ambiguously named strategies like “the policy of ‘permissive freedom’” to trap African slaves into debt peonage for the remainder of their lives and concretize racial exploitation into the global political economy for the foreseeable future (p. 84). Because Griffler recognizes Douglas A. Blackmon’s <em>Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II</em> (New York, 2008) as the defining narrative on the American episode of “new slavery,” Griffler chooses to focus much of his analysis on the international struggle of abolitionism against African colonialism (p. viii). This focus is a unique challenge for Griffler, who follows the work of mostly U.S.-based Black intellectuals despite dedicating a significant portion of the book to new slavery in Africa. Notable African revolutionaries and scholars like Steve Biko and Amílcar Cabral are absent from the narrative, while Kwame Nkrumah is mentioned in passing. All three, who wrote extensively or played vital roles in the fight against racial exploitation in African nations, would add a much more dynamic dimension to the so-called guerrilla intel","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"237 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century by Brent Cebul (review)","authors":"Darren E. Grem","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932597","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century</em> by Brent Cebul <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Darren E. Grem </li> </ul> <em>Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century</em>. By Brent Cebul. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. x, 466. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-5128-2381-3.) <p>Brent Cebul’s <em>Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century</em> argues that neoliberalism is neither “neo” nor “liberal.” <strong>[End Page 648]</strong> New Dealers invented it nearly a century ago, and it is better understood as a political economy that Cebul terms “supply-side liberalism” (p. 4). This approach privileged local business interests, public-private partnerships, and market solutions to poverty. Historians have long acknowledged the business- friendly approaches of liberal social policy. But none have delved as deeply into the archives and told as subtle a story as Cebul, who masterfully traces the American welfare state’s early and long-lasting capture by the market’s means and ends.</p> <p>Half of Cebul’s book focuses on northwest Georgia, especially the small city of Rome, which he casts as a counterpart and contrast to Cleveland, Ohio, the setting of the book’s other half. Both Rome’s and Cleveland’s civic and business leaders privileged job growth and urban renewal–based development schemes, partnering with state planners, advisory boards, governmental commissions, and nonprofit entities to manage rural and urban poverty as primarily a local matter. “Liberals’ faith in economic growth also ensured that poverty continued to be immensely profitable for local elites,” Cebul argues, “cementing decentralized, administrative partnerships between liberals and often conservative businesspeople” (p. 91). Though hardly a radical policy shift, the War on Poverty presented “an unprecedented threat to their [business elites’] relationship with the supply-side state,” all while sparking revolt by the very communities under its administration (p. 148). Supply-side liberalism, however, would prove durable under protest. Urban renewal’s failures in Cleveland and the limits of liberalism’s growth-oriented platform in Rome set up space for a new round of Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s to “more muscularly articulate their producerist bona fides, expanded to include not simply their essential role in producing jobs, taxes, or affordable housing, but also their role in fighting poverty and reforming government itself” (p. 148).</p> <p>For Cebul, the quintessential supply-side liberal was Jimmy Carter. Carter advanced a “generational suspicion about traditional public programs,” especially as he and other “younger liberals reckoned with the reality that eve","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann (review)","authors":"Jack Carey","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932593","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU</em> by Robert Mann <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jack Carey </li> </ul> <em>Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU</em>. By Robert Mann. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xx, 330. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7952-9.) <p>Robert Mann’s <em>Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU</em> tells the story of Louisiana’s most famous political figure and the state’s flagship university. Mann, a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU) with an extensive background in journalism and politics in that state, fills the book’s twenty-seven brisk chapters with tales of scandals, portraits of an ambitious political and educational vision, and sketches of a sprawling cast of scheming characters. Throughout the story, Huey P. Long stands at the center.</p> <p>Long’s “fraught relationship with LSU” dated to his childhood (p. xv). As a teenager, Long’s first extended trips away from his family’s home were to Baton Rouge for competitions in Louisiana’s High School Rally program. Long later claimed that “he fell in love with LSU” on these trips (p. 9). He never attended LSU, though. For students from places like Winnfield, Long’s hometown in “hilly, north-central Louisiana,” Mann writes, attending LSU may have seemed like “an unattainable dream” (pp. 7, 10). In 1923, during his first gubernatorial campaign, Long denounced plans for an expanded LSU as a “temple of vanity erected to Governor [John M.] Parker” (p. 28). Long lost that election—the only one he ever lost. By 1927, during his successful gubernatorial campaign, Long was telling crowds in Baton Rouge, “There is no man in this state that holds dearer sentiments than I toward Louisiana State University” (p. 36).</p> <p>Mann disputes the idea that Long ignored LSU during the first two years of his governorship (1928 and 1929), but he acknowledges that it was not until “late 1930” that Long’s “active, near daily involvement” with the university began (p. 51). From November 1930, after bringing the LSU Board of Supervisors under his control, Long consistently meddled in the university, often involving himself in the hiring and firing of faculty members and administrators. While Long often denied his role in day-to-day decisions at LSU, he promoted his involvement with the school’s football team and marching band. Long’s belief in his prowess as a play-caller aside, Mann writes that the Kingfish acted as the football “team’s chief booster, motivational speaker, and sidelines cheerleader” (pp. 109–10). <strong>[End Page 643]</strong></p> <p>Mann credits Long, through his own governorship and the terms of his successors Oscar Allen and Richard Leche, with “lasting accomplishments at LSU, including increased enrollment, expansion of the campus, more and better faculty, and new academic departments” (p. 265). The money Long poured int","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}