America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel (review)

and private papers in order to understand the formative moment. Despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Lewis noted that the clause’s residual constructions of American identity linger on in the national mind. In her conceptualization of the past, the ThreeFifths Clause is a shadow that proves hard to shake. “And it is in this space, between expansive and capacious notions of citizenship and the backward pull of history and custom, written in circumlocutions that mask the operations of power, that American history continues to be made,” she wrote, thereby inviting further study. Jan Ellen Lewis’s early Amer i ca still holds worlds to explore.