Historical journal of Massachusetts最新文献

{"title":"Foreign Affairs and the Ratification of the U.S. Constitution in Massachusetts","authors":"Robert W. Smith","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim030080014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim030080014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines the role of foreign policy in the heated debates that took place in Massachusetts newspapers and at its state ratification convention. In Massachusetts, the Constitution was endorsed by only a slight majority: 187-168 or 52.7 percent in favor. With 355 delegates, the convention was the largest in the nation and among the most impassioned. Tensions ran high. Conflicting interests and ideologies deeply divided the delegates. In contrast, the total count from all thirteen state conventions reveah that nationally 67 percent voted in favor of ratification (1,171 of the 1,748 delegates). Indeed, in three states the vote was unanimous: Delaware, New Jersey, and Georgia. Massachusetts had a unique set of foreign policy interests connected both to the sea and to its forge frontier possession in Maine, which bordered the remaining British colonies in Canada. Federalists connected these focal commercial and security concerns to foreign policy issues in order to argue in favor of the strong national government. In contrast, Antifederalists downplayed the alleged commercial and security dangers posed by foreign nations. Antifederalists argued instead that the powers that would be granted to a national government to conduct foreign policy, particularly the powers to raise an army and make treaties, created even greater potential threats to domestic liberty. Previous scholarly focus on how these debates phyed out at the national level has obscured the importance of local and state-level debates around ratification. Because the constitution was ratified in thirteen local conventions, the foreign policy issues were as much local as national. Dr. Robert W. Smith has written extensively about these debates. His htest book, Amid a Warring World: American Foreign Relations, 1775-1815, is forthcoming from Potomac Press. Since its founding, Massachusetts has played a significant role in the wider world. From Puritanism to abolitionism and beyond, the state has stood at the center of the political movements that shaped the broader Atlantic. The Commonwealth's companies, whether involved in fishing, shipping, manufacturing, or biotechnology, have long shaped the global economy. The contest over the ratification of the United States Constitution was a critical moment in which citizens debated Massachusetts' place in the wider world. Supporters of ratification attempted to connect local commercial and security interests to national foreign policy concerns. Historian Frederick Marks observed that foreign policy was the Federalists' best issue, and they made it the centerpiece of their campaign in favor of ratifying the Constitution. The Antifederalists, on the other hand, downplayed foreign dangers, relying instead on the argument that the powers granted to the national government to conduct foreign policy, particularly the powers to raise an army and make treaties, threatened domestic liberty. Historians readily acknowledge the role of forei","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"40 1","pages":"148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64629674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thoreau's Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity","authors":"Corinne H. Smith","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-5510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-5510","url":null,"abstract":"Mariotti, Shannon L. Thoreau's Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. 222 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Almost 150 years have passed since the author of Waiden took his last breath of Concord air. Yet each year brings with it the release of at least a dozen new Thoreaurelated volumes. Many of the entries are mere quotation compilations, but a few others dare to offer fresh interpretations of the man and his writings. With this book, Mariotti (a political scientist at Southwestern University) expands upon a thesis that she first voiced in an essay in The Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009). Her approach should raise more than a few \"Thoreauvian\" eyebrows. Mariotti chooses to examine selected writings of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) \"through the lens\" of the critical theories posed by German intellectual Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). Adorno participated in the Frankfurt School movement, and his philosophic study, Negative Dialectics, was published in 1966. By analyzing Thoreau's work through the viewfinder provided by Adorno and Negative Dialectics, Mariotti outlines the positive effects that alienation and democratic withdrawal can have on an individual and, as a result, on society as a whole. She maintains that these practices are best illustrated in several of Thoreau's nature-based writings, and not among his political essays or lectures. Thoreau's frequent forays into the woods and surrounding countryside are therefore considered not as thoughtful launches into Nature, but as intentional and useful retreats away from the town, from politics and from democracy. Her concept is a logical one, but it creates a sometimes challenging thread to follow. Devoted scholars are apt to find a few holes in her hypothesis. For example, it was only after Henry Thoreau left the shoreline that he claimed that his goals at the Waiden Pond house had been \"to live deliberately\" and \"to front only the essential facts of life\" (\"Where I Lived, and What I Lived for,\" Waiden). His more tangible assignment had been to find a time and place to write a manuscript about the two-week boating trip he took with his brother John in 1839. Mariotti ignores that well-documented objective and never once mentions it, the excursion, John Thoreau, or the resulting book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Instead she considers Thoreau's move solely as a departure from the town's business district. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71129841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900","authors":"J. Barnhill","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-2279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-2279","url":null,"abstract":"Janette Thomas Greenwood. First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 256 pages. $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. This relatively small work covers a lot of ground and breaks some as well. It offers the first study of post-Civil War Black migration to New England, with previous works dealing with the migrations to the Midwest, from Kansas to the Great Lakes. It is also original in that it deals with migrations other than those sponsored by the Freedmen's Bureau. Worcester is different from Chicago or the Black towns of Kansas. At the time of the Civil War it was a well-established city enjoying a boom in manufacturing. It was attractive to immigrants from Ireland as well as French Canada, sympathetic to runaway slaves and had a strong abolitionist community. When the war began, Worcester had a small Black community and a powerful impulse to join the anti-slavery war in the South. Troops made their way to Virginia and eastern North Carolina, establishing themselves especially in the latter state. The Union forces attracted contrabands, or runaway slaves, and contraband encampments attracted New England teachers to the enclave near to the coast. As the war pushed rebels and more contraband into the coastal areas, and the volume of contrabands, refugees, and \"schoolmarms\" grew. During and after the war, former slaves made their way to Worcester and environs, mostly sponsored by soldiers or teachers and other social welfare workers, often as servants or otherwise in the households of their sponsors. During Reconstruction another Black migration occurred, this one under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau. This group came without sponsorship. All three waves received favorable welcomes in Massachusetts, probably because the numbers were small, unlike the large waves sent to unwelcoming Midwestern sites. The Black population through the period remained below one thousand souls. Those who had sponsors in the community fared better than the Freedmen's Bureau group who were relocated but not provided resources. Once in New England, Southern Blacks adapted to Northern life but did not abandon their Southern preferences. The Southern Black and Northern Black communities were on opposite sides of Worcester, and the Southerners built their own Baptist Church rather than joining the older Black denominations or the White Baptists. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71131711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Slate to Marble: Gravestone Carving Traditions in Eastern Massachusetts 1770-1870","authors":"A. Krakowski","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-4188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-4188","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71115214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, a New History","authors":"J. Mifflin","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-1019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-1019","url":null,"abstract":"Nick Bunker. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and their World, a New History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 489 pages. $30.00 (hardcover). Plymouth Colony and the English men and women who settled there in the 1620s have been the subject of hundreds of books, at least twenty-five of which have been published in the last twenty-five years. The topics and controversies explored (and re-explored) by recent historians have included religious life, social life, Native American and colonial conflicts and acculturation, land transfers, changes in New England's ecology, the books read by Pilgrims, myths of American origins, law and authority, the role of women, and other matters. Classic first-person accounts of the Pilgrim experience penned by colonists William Bradford and Edward Winslow have been reissued in new editions. Nick Bunker's thoroughly researched new history digs deeper than previous accounts into the economic circumstances that urged migration in the early- to mid-seventeenth century, as well as the intellectual and social backgrounds of the colonists and their backers. He notes that \"the very early history of New England contains many hidden, forgotten corners . . . spots of vagueness or omission . . . because, in the British Isles, the evidence lies neglected, scattered in odd places in dozens of archive collections\" (5). Who were the Pilgrims? Who influenced them, what were their options, and how and why were they persecuted? How were their decisions affected by their physical and political environment? The author's well argued, multifaceted attempts to answer questions such as these are based on visits to key sites, extensive excavations in archives, and thoughtful reconstruction of places and events. Bunker (an Englishman who has lived and traveled in the United States) is a keen observer of environments and a resourceful researcher, whose skills as an investment banker and financial journalist are clearly on display. The book's economic emphasis includes close analysis of agricultural and trade conditions in England, the stressful sojourn of the Pilgrims in Leiden, the fragility of their hardscrabble early settlement at Plimoth Plantation, and the colony's eventual rescue from failure by means of transatlantic commerce in beaver pelts. The practices of the Church of England and Separatist (or \"Brownist\") objections to them are also carefully explained, as are the intellectual and spiritual connections linking Calvinism, Puritanism, and Separatism. The circumstances leading to the establishment of Puritan New England, as Bunker explains, were interconnected and complex, but the most important contributing factor was \"Calvinist zeal\" (408). Bunker's emphasis on cross-disciplinary research (agricultural practices, climate, flora and fauna, trade relations, prices, population movements, etc.) owes much to the influence of the Annales school of historians in France, especially Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. His extens","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71131038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America","authors":"Stephen Donnelly","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-5284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-5284","url":null,"abstract":"Eric Jay Dolin. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, July 12, 2010. 442 pages. $29.95 (cloth). Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America is a sweeping work that showcases the vital role the fur trade played in the colonization and expansion of the United States. Most of us think of Canada or perhaps the north woods of Maine or Minnesota when we think of furs. Few realize that the fur trade was a key factor in the survival of the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts, the Dutch in New York, and of the early settlers of the Mid-Atlantic States. The Puritans in particular were so assiduous in their pursuit of the fur trade that for a time all Europeans were referred to as \"Boston Men\" by their Native American trading partners. Eric Jay Dolin relates many of the familiar horrors and injustices of our relations with the native inhabitants, including the introduction of diseases, firearms, and alcohol. But he also sheds light on many little known facts that give a far more nuanced picture of the intercourse between two vastly different cultures. It is now taken as an article of faith that European settlers cheated the Native Americans out of vast wealth by trading trinkets for valuable furs. But iron fishhooks, pots, and tools were of immense value to members of a less developed culture, especially when all they needed to provide in exchange were pelts from a seemingly limitless supply. As for wampum and beads, they were a medium of exchange for the Native Americans of no less intrinsic value as gold was to the settlers, and therefore seemingly a bargain when traded for surplus pelts. This book demonstrates how the Native American culture grew to be dependent on European trading goods, and was transformed accordingly. The common perception of Native Americans living in harmony with nature before the advent of the White man was perhaps true. But it is also true that the near extermination of many North American fur bearing animals, with the exception of the buffalo, was accomplished primarily by these natives in pursuit of trade goods. The slaughter was initiated at the behest of the settlers to be sure, but it was perpetrated primarily by Native Americans. It was not until the widespread use of the leg hold trap allowed Western mountain men the option of easily killing their own prey that this equation started to substantially change. The author also recounts an anecdote that illustrates just how destructive alcohol, another item of trade, was to Native American cultures. Women learned from experience to hide all weapons of any kind from their men on the eve of a trading conference with the settlers. If the men received alcohol as compensation for furs, they would often drink until fighting broke out. This would frequently prove serious or fatal if weapons were at hand. Perhaps there is a history lesson here as our society debates \"open carry\" legisla","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71133883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775","authors":"Deborah Bauer","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-3996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-3996","url":null,"abstract":"Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. 293 pages. $28.95. In 1666, Joseph Daggett, an English settler colonist who owned a 500-acre farm near Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, married a woman closely related to two chiefs of nearby Native American tribes. Over the next twenty-five years, local sachems, or native chiefs, conducted a number of land transactions with Daggett's descendants, most likely based on an affinity established by the 1666 marriage. The story of Daggett's marriage illustrates one of the main themes of Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1 775 by Kathleen J. Bragdon. Bragdon attempts to demonstrate that scholars who consider the relationships that existed between English colonists and Native Americans in New England rely too much on English sources. An anthropologist with an extensive linguistic familiarity with several Native American languages, Bragdon argues that the incorporation of primary source documents written in those Native American languages can provide new perspectives on well-known historical topics. For example, based only on evidence taken from the letters and journals of other English settlers, local historians and descendants of the Daggett family maintained a belief that the mixed-race children produced from Joseph Daggett's marriage splintered his family into two distinct groups. Supposedly, the pureblooded English branch treated their mixed-heritage family members as outcasts and pariahs. However, Bragdon's research revealed that land records and other Native American sources indicate that Daggett's descendants continued to interact with one another and the Native American community at Sangekantacket throughout the late eighteenth century. Bragdon's efforts demonstrate that political, economic and social relationships in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are infinitely more complex than previously thought, and that an examination of sources written in the Native American languages can help to clarify misperceptions perpetuated by the attitude of racial superiority in some sources written by English colonists. Essentially, Native People of Southern New England is a continuation of Bragdon's 1999 book Native People of Southern New England, 15001650. Bragdon's new book attempts to show the ways in which Native American tribes in southern New England resisted English attempts to homogenize native culture. The six main Native American tribes of the area - the Pequots, Massachusetts, Pokanokets, Nipmunks, Pawtuckets, and Narragansetts - reacted to English conversion attempts in different ways. Traditional historiographie interpretations have argued that, over time, the interactions between the English colonists and the Native American tribes resulted in the native population becoming anglicized as Christian converts and losing their unique cultural heritage. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"39 1","pages":"259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71128189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives","authors":"J. Barnhill","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-6213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-6213","url":null,"abstract":"The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. By Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 306 pages. $21.95 paperback. As diasporas go, the Puerto Rican numbers are relatively small, 3.4 million in the United States in 2000. However, given that the population of Puerto Rico was only 3.8 million in 2000, the impact of this out migration on Puerto Rico has been great. In the U.S., the geographic distribution was originally limited to the old industrial states. Although the diaspora spread to the south and west in the late twentieth century, following the pattern of other Hispanics in seeking opportunity in the Sunbelt, the stories told in this collection are of Puerto Rican communities begun in an earlier era. Although Puerto Ricans migrated to Hawaii early in the twentieth century, they mainly located to New England and the general northeast, the \"rust belt\" extending to Chicago. This collection of essays is fairly representative of academic surveys that focus on a particular ethnic group. Structurally the work includes an introductory overview and synopsis of the chapters to follow, histories of Puerto Ricans in various cities, and a final chapter that ties the essays together by highlighting patterns across the essays. Whether discussing Boston, Chicago, the various cities of Connecticut, a county in New Jersey, or a small city in Ohio, most essays begin in the nineteenth century with the first Puerto Rican merchant or cigar maker or some other respectable individual identified through the census or city directories. The story continues through long years of a small presence, recruitment of a different class, perhaps the agricultural worker, and then the surge to the cities as the Puerto Rican economy becomes unable to support the available workforce. Sometimes there is a secondary migration from the fields to the cities or from a larger to a smaller community. Regardless of how the first Puerto Ricans entered a new setting, the early migrants received a hospitable welcome, but just as commonly the surge created identifiable neighborhoods and provoked negative responses. Prejudice gave way in time to ethnic pride on the model of the African American movement, and Puerto Rican communities created activist organizations, protested, gained federal money and recognition, and moved slowly toward middle class status while creating an identifiable Puerto Rican section of the city (Boston's Villa Victoria, for example). Eventually Puerto Ricans became a political force, although the first statewide electoral victory of a Puerto Rican candidate in Massachusetts was not until 1988. Although the numbers are relatively small, tens of thousands in most cities rather than the hundreds of thousands that characterize the comparable surges in the Southwest, a given Puerto Rican community quickly reached the critical mass that tipped them into a status as outsiders, aliens, or \"undesirable\" competi","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation: A Heritage of Civic Engagement","authors":"B. A. Drew","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-0879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-0879","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71126270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement","authors":"S. Condon","doi":"10.5860/choice.36-4671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.36-4671","url":null,"abstract":"The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 311 pages. $23.95 (paperback). Julie Roy Jeffrey provides a broad overview of white and black women's roles in the abolition movement from the emergence of immediatism in the 1830s through the Civil War. Before this book appeared, most historians of abolitionism concentrated on the ideas and actions of men in the movement, and those who did investigate the role of women typically focused on those antislavery activists who also became involved in women's rights. This work redirects the historiography of American abolition in two ways. First, it persuasively argues that while prominent men have received the lion's share of attention, ordinary women in a variety of places served as the backbone of the movement, helping to keep many local societies going even as the movement as a whole appeared to lose momentum in the 1840's. Second, it reminds historians that while abolitionism did help to launch a women's rights movement, the work women did as abolitionists needs to be understood on its own terms. In order to make her case for the prominence of women in the movement, Jeffrey painstakingly recaptures the nature of women's contributions. One constant challenge facing abolitionists was fundraising, and she highlights the various ways that women worked to meet this need. One method, which had previously received little attention from historians, was the antislavery fair, which became a central activity of female abolitionists by the 1840's. Held in big cities as well as smaller towns, these fairs not only offered consumer goods made in Europe but also a variety of locally-made goods sewn or crafted by women themselves, from quilts and hats to shirts and pocketbooks. In addition to creating goods, women also booked the halls, generated publicity, and priced and sold the items. The fairs were often held on holidays and could draw large numbers of customers, who would encounter anti-slavery banners as they perused the goods available for purchase. In addition to raising money, women played a primary role in petition campaigns. While these campaigns were most active in the 1830's, they continued to take place through the antebellum period and actually became more prominent again during the Civil War itself. Women also did the work of creating antislavery propaganda as well as sponsoring antislavery lectures. Taken together, women engaged in much of the day-to-day work needed to keep local antislavery societies functioning. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71076407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}