Comps Field 1

Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 573 pp. $17.95 [paper].

Year: 1998 Field: cold war Summary: The main purpose of the book is to explain the common "mechanisms, assumptions, and institutions" of McCarthyism. That phenomenon began with the onset of World War II and lingered after Senator Joseph McCarthy's fall. It came in several varieties: right-wing, liberal, Republican, and even left-wing versions (the latter comprising anti-Stalinist radicals and apostates from the Communist Party). All anti-Communists shared a consensus about the nature of Communism and its potential threat to American life, and they cooperated with one another to combat that threat. Thesis: According to Schrecker, these writers, lawyers, and activists shared, to one degree or another, McCarthy's "dishonesty, opportunism, and disregard for civil liberties" (p. 265). She argues that, with the institutional support of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they were able indirectly to guide the loyalty proceedings, blacklists, and other McCarthyist actions against suspected Communists in government, academia, the media, and the business world. chrecker's strength lies in showing how McCarthy-ism worked and how its various constituencies some-times cooperated and sometimes battled one another.Nonetheless, she repeatedly goes to great pains todemonstrate balance. If the Red-hunters were evil,their victims were not political innocents: "A few hadpassed information to the Russians; others had nottold the truth about their relationship to the Commu-nist party" (p. xi). A ] anticommunist consensus devel-oped "because it was plausible. Many of its underlyingassumptions were grounded in what real Communistssaid and did" (p. xii). A perfunctory and possiblymandatory mea culpa also surfaces: "And, yes, ofcourse, Joseph Stalin was far more repressive thanJoseph McCarthy" (p. xviii). Thirty-four years afterMcCarthy's censure by the United States Senate,Schrecker still feels compelled to throw in that one.That the Soviet Joe was worse than the American Joeneeds to be said no more than, say, David Halberstamneeds to make sure up front that his readers under-stand this about the sports figure he recently profiled:"Of course, Michael can play basketball better than Other: The concluding chapter of Many Are the Crimes assesses the effects of McCarthyism in four areas of American life: the budding civil rights movement, the federal government, organized labor, and the arts. Schrecker claims that the "body count" from McCarthyism totaled 10,000 to 12,000 persons. She acknowledges that only a handful actually lost their lives but contends that many lost their liberty, reputations, jobs, careers, or even spouses as a result of prosecution, blackballing, or stress. The "human wreckage" ranged from the Rosenbergs, executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, to Ellen Schrecker's sixth-grade teacher, who was eased out of his post for his leftist past. According to Schrecker, the effects of McCarthyism have reached down through the decades by chilling debate and stifling change in all four areas of American life on which she concentrates. In each area, radicals have lost their nerve or their jobs. By intimidating [End Page 101] the left and foreclosing the political development of a generation of activists, she argues, McCarthyism contributed to a narrowing of the possibilities for a more democratic life in a modern capitalist state. On this and other points, the historiography of the McCarthy era seems to be nearing coherence, if not consensus. Conservatives, liberals, and progressives would all seem to agree with Schrecker that Senator McCarthy was indeed loathsome--but was so only because of his virulence, not because of his aims. Indeed, the Senator himself plays no more than a cameo role in Many Are the Crimes, appearing as the main subject of only one of its chapters. This raises a question about the very term "McCarthyism." Schrecker seems a little unsatisfied with it at points. She argues that American Communists made themselves peculiarly vulnerable to attack. The party's rigid adherence to the Soviet line and its conspiratorial manner were easy targets for the anti-Communists: "Many of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists"; they had indeed joined or aided the CPUSA. "Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentified" (p. xiv, emphasis in original). If the phenomenon was created by both Democrats and Republicans, and if many of its victims were not misidentified, then why call the movement "McCarthyism" at all? I do not have a better term to substitute, but perhaps someone else wi 1 cent: Intro \ McCarthyism was bigger than Mcarthy bhimslef; it was a poltical appartus and philsophy It turned dissent into disloyalty Dififerent politcal groups took on this mantle and pmehtod with fdifferent aims including liberals The fear oif the cold qwar allowed for this process McC is about the use of pwower to repress a b poltically unpopulart minority and we must loook at the people and insututition s that had that [popweer 1 The CPUSA facilitated itrs own demise by contuining to identify andf my being the outspoken in a time of concensus 2 Top dowen history wghere those in power created the enemies and cimmtted the salvos 3 Libertals like roosevelt and truyman eliminated copmmunists In their ranks; diminisdhing tnheir power 4 Acadmeics and others ion power characterized communists as evil and even mentallyt ill 5 Ciommusits in US seem3ed like a weapon of Stalin The communists were tkilled in the courts //I think thisd is a biottom up thing or both; it gives too muchg credit to actors 6 Fbi single mopst impotant weapon in the anticommie crusade It was illegal 7 Mcarthy was a wave not the ocean 8 Cvommunists were crippled economiv=cally and polically This fear brought people to the center or right 9 The crusade was undemocratic and lkiukked unions 1 Leehgacy carried to crm; but not as effectoive wghich is why her top down approach is flawed Nixon was a child of it Story of margionalized and polically disadvantaged groups beeing oppressed by thoikse ion power unfairly Mcasrthyism affected the political lives and decuscions of those through nixon 11

were The Tragedy of AmericanDiplomacy (1959

Year: 1959 Field: Summary: Thesis: Other: needs a review! 1 cent: Intro Wanted economic independence to avooid being paterrnalized It was econimic and intellectual/moralistoiic - Wilson big example here - Amero=icasn prosperity at hjome relied on power abroad Eocnomic comnpetiton between nations tht the US seeks to dominate Stablize the world as pro-maerican The US expnaded democrqacy theroguh expansion and imperailism but that will no longer work because of nukes and a different world. It must shore up the class ineuqlaity at home and abroad in order to ensure its own safety and that of the world. According to Williams, the Open Door Policy reflected an almost unanimous belief among leading economic and political leaders at the time that overseas commercial expansion was imperative to stave off economic dislocation and sustain American prosperity and democracy. In order to secure foreign markets for industrial and agricultural surplus production and ensure access to raw materials, U.S. elites embarked "for the next half-century" on a mission to establish an open-door "informal empire" of "free-trade imperialism"—not only in East Asia but throughout the entire world. Though American leaders "were not evil men," Williams asserts that even their ideological and humanitarian efforts in developing nations were designed to harvest "the fruits of expansion. In the latter part of Tragedy, Williams turns his attention to the onset of the Cold War, for which he lays the blame squarely on Washington. Embracing the traditional pattern of Open Door expansionism, U.S. diplomats aimed to "economically penetrate" markets throughout Europe and Asia, and thus resisted the Soviets' desire for "minimum natural and desirable frontiers in eastern Europe" and ignored Moscow's postwar reconstruction and reparation needs. Williams takes issue with claims that the Soviet Union was a dynamically expansionist power analogous to Nazi Germany, and argues that Stalin's ruthless Sovietization and Communization of Eastern Europe was a warranted response to America's and Britain's growing hostility. Similarly, the "rising tide of revolution" throughout the world was yet another sign that the U.S. needed to respect rather than resist left-wing radicals who, unlike America and its allies, offered a picture of "brutality and betterment." For all its nuance and complexity, Undocumented Lives's discussion of the "triple exclusion" experienced by Mexican men falls somewhat short because it centers on the on-the-ground effects of economic and political policies of Mexico and the United States (6). Little room is left to explore in-depth how these migrants navigated other exclusions, such as ethnoracial systems of hierarchy, on both sides of the border. This shortcoming is likely an artifact of the ambitiousness of the book, whose deep and vast terrain is sustained by compellingly humane narratives. Undocumented Lives will surely appeal to broad audiences—from scholars of immigration, Mexico, labor, and gender and sexuality to policy makers, activists, and advanced undergraduate and doctoral students. In the end, the history recounted in this book is very much alive today: as Minian concludes, the United States still considers migrants "illegal," the Mexican government continues to favor emigration, and migrants persist in forging a sense of belonging across borders (232). Additionally, Tragedy convincingly rebuts the traditional narrative of the U.S. being a historically "isolationist" power, pointing to episodes of westward expansion and interventions in Latin America, and provides thoughtful observations about the limitations of promoting American-style modernity in the developing world. Williams is not entirely wrong, either, that U.S. diplomats could have taken steps to mitigate the intensity of the Cold War at certain points. It is also important to note that some criticisms of Tragedy, particularly regarding the stability of the Soviet Union, can only be made in hindsight.

We Shall Be All; A History of the Industrial Workers of the World.By MELVYN DUBOFSKY

Year: 1969 Field: Labor Summary: Most attention needs to be paid by the wobblies His book must be described as "expansive." His publishers haveallowed him to use more than 225,000 words. And he used them wellto cover all the major events, and some minor ones, in the rise of theIWW-from its backgrounds in the Western Federation of Minersand the Cripple Creek Strike of 1904 through to the Chicago, Sacra-mento, and Omaha "trials" of 1919; he gives less but fairly adequateattention to the IWW in decline. Thesis: Unencumbered by a feudal-aristocratic traditionand the paternalistic anti-capitalism associated with it," writes Dubofsky aboutthe four decades following 1877, "America's dominant business class couldimpose its values on society with relative ease." In other words, he sees theIWW struggling heroically (though in vain) to gain a measure of dignity anda minimum standard for minority groups-specially immigrants and blacks-who were ignored by both American society and the labor movement (whichrepresented the interests of a relatively small group of skilled workers).The ideology of the IWW, according to Dubofsky, was inchoate and disor-ganized; it sought goals that proved inherently incompatible. The Wobbliestaught workers to strive for short-term goals indistinguishable from thosesought by ordinary, non-revolutionary trade unions. At the same time it failedto develop in American workers a higher sense of revolutionary class conscious-ness. Consequently the IWW found itself in a quandry, for its greatest suc-cesses involved concrete and pragmatic objectives rather than revolutionaryones. Although doomed to failure, the organization yet bequeathed to futuregenerations of Americans an impressive legacy of a society based on com-munity rather than coercion, a society where all individuals and groups pos-sessed a measure of dignity Other: They were responding to many american conservativ eills and prived that organziing and badning together was the most effort motor of change Thye chmapioned civil libnerties, provided balcks with an outlet in the east, combatted nativism -anticpailtkist Statred in the mining communties and arose from the wfm, in the iuntian states they founded the iww in the violence of the miners world and fight for rights Embraced marxism in the ountains Cripple Creek sttrike They went from unionism to a syndicate because of the mono;oly, betryal, and violence fot he miner buisness men Immigrants created a revoling new workinf class that prevented class consciousness!!!! Afl hated iww they libs Culture of poverty IWW ultimatre goal: Primilvie millenarism and modern revulsion foals The new milleunim will usher in utopia Liked pacisfism but would retatilae Loved a sabotage Totally uncompromising Iww and scolailsit conflicted more than they agreed Part three free speech free men Street speaking ewas how they gained populatirty Direct action and industrial uniomism Never got the same traction in the East Police and state were used to break up their strikes The war ensured the decline and suppression of the iww under a unted and poerful fed gov

JOHN LEWIS GADDIS. Strategies of Containment: A Criti-cal Appraisal of Postwar American National SecurityPolicy. New York: Oxford University Press. 1982.Pp. xi, 432. $25.0

Year: 1982 Field: foregin Summary: How did each administration de-fine the country's interests abroad? How did itperceive the threats to those interests? What re-sponses did it select to defend those interests? Howdid it justify its responses? Through such questionsJohn Lewis Gaddis has distinguished and analyzedfive successive geopolitical codes that together de-fined the nation's response to the Russian andCommunist challenges of the postwar period.Gaddis opens his progression with an acute anddetailed analysis of George F. Kennan's originalconcept of containment. He then proceeds througha series of modifications: the Truman administra-tion's NSC 68, the Eisenhower "New Look," theKennedy-Johnson "flexible response," and, finally,the concept of detente, which motivated the ap-proaches of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years untilthe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December1979. Through detailed and studied comparisons ofthese strategies of containment the author has un-covered their varied patterns and problem Gaddis analyzes five geopolitical codes in thepostwar era: (1) George F. Kennan's originalstrategy of containment from 1947 to 1949; (2) theassumptions incorporated into the NationalSecurity Council paper NSC-68 from 1950 to 1953; (3) the Eisenhower-Dulles "new look" from1953 to 1961; (4) the Kennedy-Johnson "flexibleresponse" strategy from 1961 to 1969; and (5)"detente," which was followed for the most partby Nixon, Kissinger, Ford, and Carter from 1969until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Thesis: the note card is really good NSC-68 was not intended as a repudiation of Kennan. He was consulted at several stages in the drafting process and the final document— of some sixty-six single-spaced typed pages— reflected his views at several points. The objective rather was to systematize containment, and to find the means to make it work. But the very act of reducing the strategy to writing exposed the differences that had begun to develop between Kennan and the administration. The search for means, together with the generous way in which the drafting committee construed its mandate, accentuated these. The result, like that more prominent product of a broadly construed mandate, the United States Constitution,* was a document more sweeping in content and implications than its originators had intended. Other: Symmetry offers protection against incremen-tal threats: against the danger that peripheralchallenges to the balance of power may becomemajor ones, if not in fact, then psychologically,which amounts to the same thing. It makes avail-able multiple levels of response, affording policy-makers choices wider than those of escalation orhumiliation. But it also involves letting adver-saries select the nature and location of competi-tion, and that, for the nation on the defensive, re-quires virtually unlimited resources" (pp. 352-53)."Asymmetry recognizes the reality of limitedresources, and stresses the need to pick andchoose the manner of one's response, lest wars infact be lost while winning battles. It concentratesnot so much on a multiplicity of options as on avariety of means, emphasizing the need to act incircumstances, at times, and in ways calculated toapply one's own strengths against adversaryweaknesses. It retains, thereby, the initiative, butat the price of yielding positions not easily de-fended, or of expanding the confrontation to ex-ploit positions that can be" (p. 353). 1 cent: addis uses the early experience with containment to put forward a kind ofhistorical schema of the doctrine. Drawing upon deterrence theory, he distin-guishes between "symmetrical" containment-where the United States hasused every means at its disposal to frustrate the Russians-and its "asym-metrical" variant-where the emphasis has been upon one particular method,such as economic sanctions or nuclear threats, to accomplish that end. Con-tainment, the author claims, has also varied in tactics, between a "perimeter"defense by the United States of all of its interests and a "strongpoint" defenseof only those interests deemed vital.It is in the attempt to match the means of containment with its ends, Gaddisargues, that the policy has most often come to grief. The practice of sym-metrical containment in the Truman Doctrine and in John F. Kennedy's policyof flexible response has left the United States overextended and vulnerablealong a thinly defended perimeter-sometimes, as in Korea and Vietman, withdisastrous results. However, asymetrical containment, as in the policy of mas-sive retaliation elaborated by Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles,has often caused the nation to go to the brink of war over "strong points"-such as Quemoy and Matsu-that have had only a symbolic relation to realAmerican interests.Gaddis's thesis is most persuasive when he applies it to the early Cold War,a subject he has written on before and about which the most documentation isnow available The author's thesis is that there have been twoversions of containment: symmetrical (NSC-68and flexible response), and asymmetrical (Ken-nan's original strategy of containment, new look,and detente). gaddis method and pardigm nature is imortanty and influence the other foreign policy books

The Uprooted. By Oscar Handlin. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1951. Pp. 310. $4.oo.)

Year: 1951 Field: Summary: Although Dr. Handlin's book is described on the jacket as "the epic story of the great migrations that made the American people," it is not a history of immigration, but rather a sociological and psychological analysis of the effect of the act of immigration upon the millions of uprooted individuals who became strangers in a strange land. In that sense, the book is a history of the conse- quences of "alienation," for though the United States offered them equality before the law, the actual experiences of the new- comers were generally otherwise. Beginning with an analysis of the European peasant economy and perhaps an overemphasis on its virtues, and a description of what happened to it in the early nineteenth century, the author is concerned with explaining what befell the immigrant when he was transplanted from a kind of communal system of mutual help to the competitive struggle in the United States where men became mere cogs in a huge industrial process. Various chapters describe the hazards and horrors of the immigrant traffic and exploitation of the human cargo that came in steer gle for jobs and the effect of an apparently inexha of unskilled labor on American industrial development; life in the teeming immigrant sections of our great cities; the loneliness in unfamiliar environments whether on the open prairies or in the city slums; the longing for organizations which provided op- portunities for sociability in mutual benefit societies, churches, clubs, the theatre, picnics, parades and sports; the immigrant's ex- periences with American politics, bosses and boodle best historical interpretation of the inner meanin dealing here with the European folk who came to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-deal tunes of particular national groups nor with the imp them on the American scene, but rather with the ge the transfer on their own life and spirit. Althoug study, the book grew out of a rich knowledge of records. This knowledge it fuses with the methods a sociologists have long applied to the same subject, sonal sympathy for the people involved. The res recreation, cast in prose of p Thesis: In Handlin's telling, the story is profoundly tragic grants-and Handlin's eye is always on the mass, neve or outstanding--came from a peasant society whos plied an ancient stability of status and values. The an economic and demographic revolution violent After a disaster-ridden flight to America, they fo individualized world for which peasant ways had no swallowed most of them, breaking their ties with na into job insecurity, demoralization, and family d to their religion did they hold desperately fast, but its old significance. This approach obliterates hallowed distinctions"new" immigrations. More significantly, it reverse tomary view of immigration as a process of attainme Most of our immigrant history has been written fro traditional American optimism. Handlin writes out and upheaval which pervades the present intellect may have more of the truth than the conventional o tionably an overstatement. Did no hope of improv different life, leaven the immigrant's coming? W can explain almost no positive growth, save a reac immigrant lives. In a concluding statement of greatthat the other side of alienation is freedom, but h room to tell its deve Other: Handlin argued that immigrants were socially disorganized and became functional again once they learned to assimilate into U.S. institutions and culture. Since Handlin, revisionist immigration studies have established the empirical underpinnings for what we call multiculturalism: immigrants in the work of John Bodnar, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Donna Gabaccia, and many others are transplanted rather than uprooted. They have carried their social networks with them and built distinctive communities of strength within a plural society. 4 1 sent:: IntorL: //!! This not about how immigrants affected soceity, rather it is about how soceity affected the lvies iof the immigrants //humanist approach //immigration as alientation and its consequences //immigrants lived in crisis becazuse they were uprtooted //Early disscussion of intergenerational trauma or experience on children 1 Old world had instabiltiy and cozxed them here, but it was not diasyes when they got here as theyy were aleintaed anin the dispassionate city //family was the fundamentsal unit in old world //more rural //oit was about stabiltiy //soceuty was changing and upsetting the pastoral dfmailal lifestyle in weurope //variety of reqsons to move //disease+war+eetc. \2 the crossing //tech advancments allowed for new poassage//steam // the corssing was hard and there was little time top recup as they had tro immediately stake out a livelihood, mjmotably in the cities 3 daily bread //little skilled labborers, so they labored unskuilled and abnused //lack of cash put them in debt credit wise The curban industry oif the city uprooted immigrant values so they coukd suceed iun america 4 Really focuses on their experience. Their alienation and loneliness //a helplessnjness handlin overstates Destoryed their contetxts and ideals 5 Religion kept them grounded in the new woirld Belief intensified in thios struggle 6 the ghettos Forced to ghettos for ethnic and economic reasons, they created their communtiies in these places and a=safeguayrded themselves there. 7 They fortmed form al andinformal groups, handlin wrongly asserts that they arew helpess this whiole time while showing their ingenituy 8democracy and power immigrants created poolicialy heterodoxy democracy and ytthe state were new ideas they were out if the reach if power immigrants fgorm mafias to contenbd in the city and this diminishges with th new deal they don't trust the d=state but then they realize tis power 9 generations Families are abstracted and not as connected with their larger communitiesds Children forced to choose wbetween the old worlds and the new Destroyed the uinified family 10 The shock of alientation Limbo as a they were alientated from the old world too The old wor.ldld saw the immi as a american and america didn't The strogglues of assimilation 11 Restirciton Immigatiron law and nbativism Thwey wer eressiticted from the same rights as ameircans 12 promioses

Glenda E. Gilmore Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina 1896-1920

Year: Field: Summary: Gilmore's pro- lific evidence and profound conclusions, ex- panded from her prize-winning dissertation, have significant implications for southern his- tory, African American history, American wom- en's history, and, most pointedly, that which has been too long a white male driving range, American political history. Gilmore's subtle but devastating analysis allows us to contemplate the roads not taken in southern history. ortant new interpretation of Progressive reform.Gilmore draws a convincing picture of the rise of prosperousmiddle-class black communities in North Carolina after the Civil War.Sharing Woodward's view that Jim Crow laws and practices were newto the upper South in the I89os, she emphasizes the "cataclysmicruptures" that these laws introduced into "the fabric of black civil rights"(8).1 In 1898, a new system of repression, rooted in spurious and inflam-matory rhetoric about the rape of white women by black men, restoredDemocrats to power in the state legislature and justified strategies thatdisfranchised black men. White working-class women and men learnedto pursue their racial, rather than their class, interests; and imperialistrhetoric about the "white man's burden" reinforced white suprmacy Thesis: Gender and Jim Crow provides a wonderful analysis of the roles of race, class, and gender in Southern politics prior to the 1900s, but also includes African-American disenfranchisement and the woman suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While other accounts of disenfranchisement focus on African-American and white men, Gilmore skillfully infuses the important roles both African-American and white women played. Gilmore: First 3 chaps argue that racial repression at the turn of the century did not simply intsittuioanlize the prevailing trend in race relations; rather is profoundly reordered soceity. The relations between race and gedner prior to disenfranchisment. 4 and 5 show how white supremacists disenfranchsised. 4 argues that the white supremacists responded to growing assertiviness amoung white woman, to urban and social pressures, and the the spectacular african american success. Reactionary. 5 shows how they were removed from the public sphere. Last three argue that after disenfranchisment of black men, black women became diplomats to the white community, just as southern progressivism flowered. Black women wrested control back through their civic and sovcial connections to white!! Sufferage forced white women to question their racial beleifs. "Women's dufferage forever altered white suprmeacy's style and cleared a narrow path for black men to return to electoral politics." Other: Chapters 4 and 5 provide new and important evidence regarding the disenfranchisement of African-American men. Gilmore persuasively argues that in an effort to regain power from the Republican Party, which forged a coalition with elite African Americans, Southern Democrats sought ways to expel black politicians. To achieve this goal, they centered their white supremacist rhetoric on the stereotypical image of the African-American male rapist, striking fear into their white constituents' hearts. Southern Democrats began focusing on the protection of white women's sexuality and the demonization of African-American men, and, ultimately, succeeded in their supremacist campaign with the disenfranchisement of African-American men.!!!! 1 cent: Central to her argument is that African-American women's participation in the woman suffrage movement, along with their connections to white women activists, provided a space for the reentry of African-American men into Southern politics. That agenda includes fresh questions about the natureand politics of the post-Emancipation black middleclass; the meanings of education, gender, and marriagefor its members; the ways black women worked behindthe scenes to secure needed services for their commu-nities; the variables affecting white women's interest ininterracial cooperation; and the impact of women'ssuffrage on racial politics in the South. The result is a Jim Crow South much more inter-esting than the one we knew before, a South of greatpossibility as well as abiding tragedy1!!! This plus interracial coalesence of sufferage and civil rughts Gilmore convincingly demonstrates howthe meaning of middle-class standing differed forblacks and whites at the time. Her contextual approachto class deserves notice and emulation. Yet she dis-misses without a full hearing critical questions aboutthe relationship between these middle-class activistsand the working-class women and men whose livesthey set out to refashion.!!! //check reveiw again

The Strange Career of Jim Crow. By C. Vann Woodward. (New York:Oxford University Press, 1955. Pp. xii, 155. $2.50.

Year: 55 Field: jim crow crm Summary: And now comes a native Southern white scholarto tell us how we got this way and to suggest to the die-hards thatthe South's position vis-a'-vis racial segregation is not so tragic as theywould have their fellow countrymen believe-and this in spite of thefact that as Dr. Woodward sees the action in the public school cases:"A unanimous decision, it has all the moral and legal authority of theSupreme Court behind it, and it is unthinkable that it can be in-definitely evaded." Thesis: Dispel the myth about the origin of Jim Crow; white supremacy predates jim crow not a hsitorical fact!!!!!!!1!!!! e evaluated the status of "the Woodward thesis," which posited that racial segregation did not emerge at the time of slavery's demise, but instead after a period of flux and experimentation in race relations that ended in the 1890s. Beginning in that decade, Woodward argued, a dramatic surge in racial extremism led to the promulgation of 'de jure' (by statute) segregation. Citing his own work that found that segregation had in fact emerged after 1865 in response to the demands of African-Americans that they not be completely excluded from public accommodations,[2] Rabinowitz asserted that the Woodward thesis was amorphous, over-emphasized law as opposed to customary practice, and was "wrong" about the degree of fluidity in race relations prior to the 1890s.[3] Segregation is a recent invention " The twilight zone that the author hadunder consideration was: (1) presenting infor-mation concerning the origin and developmentof Jim Crow laws, and (2) analyzing the reasonsand processes involved in the development ofsuch laws.In the book Jim Crowism is described as asocial movement with a slow and doubtfulorigin. Involved in the social movement weremany pressure and propaganda organizations,many Negroes and whites, labor and professionalorganizations, some churches, several state legis-latures, political parties, and the Supreme Courtof the United States. According to the author,the major objective that prompted the move-ment was the attempt to unify the whites, bothin the South and between the North and theSouth. It is distinctlyillustrated that for the Negro the processes ofopposition prevailed, resulting in the initiationof Jim Crow legislation, which served to lowerthe status of the Negro to that of inferiors.That Jim Crowism was not the result of asystematic plan is clearly indicated in the book m. To those who mightthink that folkways and mores cannot bechanged by laws, the book illustrates that thisis possible by pointing out how Jim Crow lawschanged the thinking of many people in theUnited States from that of equality to thatof inequality of the races ut again, Dr. Woodward's treatise shows that change became theorder of the day. Quietly, imperceptibly at first, changes in the statusquo of race relations began to take shape, beginning in the periodbetween the two world wars and greatly accelerating during the lastdecade. The "reasons" supporting the change, Dr. Woodward lists(without necessarily placing them in this order) as follows: (1) theNegroes' own activity and improvement; (2) religious sentiment favor-ing better treatment of the Negro; (3) growth of urban liberalism inthe South; (4) congressional concern with the race question as a na-tional one; (5) war and international tensions; (6) desegregation infederal government agencies, including the armed forces; (7) courtdecisions outlawing disfranchisement and nullifying other discrimina-tory statutes; and (8) "Slow, patient devoted work of many Southern-ers of both races" who have "laid the foundation of a new order."The book concludes with the wise and heartening observation thatthe South can no longer be identified with South Africa in its racialpractices; its problems are still real, but somewhere along the waythe South of these United States has chosen a different road to travel.This is a very readable, authoritative work by an American historianof acknowledged high rank and demonstrated ability. It must be readby every serious student of Southern history; it would be most helpfulif every official in each of the Southern states also gave careful atten-tion to the story the book relates. Other: 1 cent:

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and theFamily from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones

Year: 85 Field: Summary: historical study of theblack family focusing upon the work experience of black women is most timely,and Jones is fully aware of the political implications of her analysis. She is amongthose who argue that the current problems within the black family can be tracedto the failure of modern, urban America to replace those jobs lost, especiallyby males, to automation in both agriculture and industry. "Should black menand women," Jones asks rhetorically, "be held morally accountable as individuals for the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy had twisted their expectationsof one another. Jacqueline Jones's study of black women as slaves, sharecroppers, andwage earners is an important contribution to the ongoing effort to expandthe scope of southern history to incorporate the experiences of all southern-ers. In Labor of hove. Labor of Sorrow, JacquelineJones offers a provocative assessment of blackwomen's experience in America from the timeof slavery to the present. Thesis: Jones proceeds from the thesis that black people, regardless of class, experienced historical events in a way fundamentally different than did whites and that black women's historical experience differed significantly from that of men of their race and from that of white women of their class: "Black women actually inhabited a unique subculture, one not shared by either black men or white women" (p. 5). One of the strengths of Jones's work is that she analyzes and delineates that subculture with great sensitivity as to its complexities and with a fine balance between larger generalizations and concrete detail Jones argues that in the Old South "racial and patriarchal ideologies [were] wedded to the pursuit of profit** (12). Slave women were exploited both as workers and as women capable of producing new slave laborers. If emancipation freed black women from the daily threat of white sexual violation ? which Jones asserts but does not prove "rivaled the separation of families as the foremost provocation injected into black family life by slaveholders in general" (37) - it left intact the double whammy of racial and sexual discrimination, which forced black women into the labor force and there restricted them to the bottom rung of the wage lad Jones presents a simple and clear-cut thesis: black women have been torn between "two distinct spheres" (p. 3) - white-dominated economic institu- tions where they labored in "sorrow" and black families and communities where they served with "love." According to Jones, black women most fully realized themselves as mothers, wives, and community activists outside the public workplace.*** Other:In Jones' view, a black woman's determination to work on behalf of her ownfamily "amounted to a political act of protest against the callousness of owners,mistresses, and overseers. nd overseers" (12). Family, thus, is counterpoised to patriarchy andcapitalism; it forms the basis, after emancipation, of "a rural folk culture basedupon group cooperation rather than male competition and the accumulationof goods" (100). Jones' rural blacks are like Steven Hahn's yeomen, only moreso, for racism isolated them even further from the market; moreover, "thepreservation of family integrity served as a political statement to the white South"(107). In the twentieth century and in cities, black women have continued towork on behalf of their families; those individual strengths and sacrifices achievedtheir apotheosis in the Civil Rights movement, "which recapitulated therelationships with the black family.. . . In calling out the time-tested strengthsof black women, and in sustaining their roles as life-givers, the movementrepresented a compelling historical moment, the culmination of the black family'sresistance She argues that the same goals continued to be the aspirations of suc-cessive generations of black women despite emancipation, northwardmigration, or occupational shifts. Neither unions nor federal policy beforethe 1960s challenged the "dual caste system" (p. 11) that forced blackwomen to work in racially and sexually segregated workplaces and keptthem impoverished. It is only when her narrative discusses the period sincethe 1950s that Jones discovers a possible solution to the persistence of"racial discrimination compounded by sexual prejudice" (p. 3) that com-bined to keep black women economically exploited. Jones 304 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYpotential for alliance between the civil rights and women's movements,although she acknowledges that black feminism has yet to overcome thesharp divisions between the two constituencies. "Until that coalition bearsfruit," she concludes, black women's labor "will continue to represent thatparticular combination of love and sorrow that has for so long endured athome and on the job" (p. 330). The history of black working women does not constitute a subset of white women's history; rather, the history of white women remains incomplete without a full understanding of the ways racial and gender ideologies shaped the lives of all women— and all men, for that matter. Nevertheless, the basic premise of this work remains a compelling one: In their poverty and vulnerability, black people experienced these historical economic transformations in fundamentally different ways compared with other groups regardless of class, and black women, while not removed from the larger history of the American working class, shouldered unique burdens at home and endured unique forms of discrimination in the workplace. This theme holds true up to the present time, despite some observers' claims that the United States has achieved "colorblind" and "post-racial" workplaces. Throws out class, misses a lot of similairites and nuances/ dequate. When "family" is evoked as the opposite of capitalism, it is strippedof all attributes that can be measured or assessed: size, composition, function.Jones has generated useful statistics for the last-nineteenth century to show thesimilarities between poor black and white families, but she never carries theminto twentieth century. Consequently, her work will add little to the debate aboutLosing Ground. She describes neither family strategies nor values; she does notdiscuss interactions among family members, and hence her work will have littlebearing upon Moyniha Jones apparently argues thatgender-based exploitation of the black woman occurred only outside thefamily. She consistently minimizes the presence of gender conflict betweenblack men and women by emphasizing cohesion, harmony, and male respectfor black women's needs and abilities despite contradictory evidence.Although the concept of "class" is invoked, it is not integrated into most ofthe analysis. Perhaps her insistence on white hostility towards blacks makesit difficult to insert a discussion of a relationship that transcended raciallines. Her references to black women's "doubly disadvantaged status" (p. 3)gives primacy to race and gender while erasing the notion of class!! Similarly, her description of the South as containing a "dual caste system"(p. 11) prevents a more complicated analysis of the intersection of race,gender, and class from becoming fully developed. Nor does Jones flesh outher explanation of the caste-like aspects of the southern racial system. Fo-cusing primarily on work as the cause of black women's exploitation, shedoes not give sufficient attention to sexuality as an important arena for theconstruction of black female subordination. The stereotyping of blackwomen as sexually impure was one of the "ravages of oppression" (p. 330)to which Jones refers but gives insufficient attention. Yet whatever the occa-sions for controversy and criticism about the way Jones has handled thetheoretical issues raised by her text, scholars can benefit from an encounterwith so detailed an account of black women's experiences and percepti Finally, there is a stylistic problem. Al-though Jones warns about the danger ofviewing black women eithet as total victims oras total heroines, she sometimes falls into thetrap herself, on one page arguing that endlesshours of household service deprived black do-mestic servants of any time for self and family,then teiling us on the next page that "domes-tics arrived late, ieft early . . . or stayed awayfor days at a time to mark special events andholidays." Both statements may be true, butthey should be interwoven so as to appear lessblatantly contradictory.Despite those shortcomings, Jones's book isan important effort to define the distinctivehistory of black working women in America.Together with other recent books on the sub-ject, it should help to chart the agenda fotscholars interested in the diíFerences —andsimilarities — between women of different classand ethnic background 1 cent:

Why is there no Socialismin the United States?by Eric Foner

Year: Field: Summary: Thesis: If America was, in so many ways, the most capitalist nation onearth, should it not also become the most socialist? In this essay, I propose toexamine the most recent trends in this seemingly timeless debate. The essay is notmeant as a history of socialism in the United States, or as an exhaustive surveyof the immense body of literature that now exists on the subject (since nearlyevery work on American radicalism and labor explicitly or implicitly proposes ananswer to the question, 'why is there no socialism'). It will not examine expressionsof American radicalism, such as abolitionism and feminism, whose impact uponAmerican life has been far more profound than socialism. I hope, however, bothto draw attention to the most recent contributions to this debate, and to raisequestions about both the adequacy of specific explanations, and the underlyingpremises upon which the entire discussion appears to rest. It might well be worthraising at the outset the question whether the experience of socialism in the UnitedStates is, in reality, exceptional, or whether it represents an extreme example ofthe dilemma of socialism throughout western society Thus, 'why is there nosocialism?' really means, why is the United States the only advanced capitalistnation whose political system lacks a social democratic presence and whoseworking class lacks socialist class consciousness One must, in other words, be wary of explanations for Americanexceptionalism based upon trends and phenomena equally evident in other coun-trie ut whatever the specific argument,disproportionate influence is too often assigned to a single element of the socialstructure, and politics and ideology are too often viewed as simple reflections ofeconomic relationships. As Montgomery observes, the American form of socialism hascentered on control of the workplace, rather than creating a working-class presencein politics.3 'Why is there no socialism' thus becomes a problem of explalning thedisjuncture of industrial relations and political practice in the United States Thus, what must be explained is not simply why socialism is today absentfrom American politics, but why it once rose and fell. Such a definition of thequestion, I will argue, requires that we 'historicize' the problem of Americansocialism. Rather than assuming an unchanging pattern of American exceptiona-lism, we need to examine the key periods when American development divergedmost markedly from that of Europe. The ideologies of nineteenth-century labor and farmers' movements,and even early twentieth-century socialism itself, owed more to traditional repub-lican notions of the equal citizen and the independent small producer, than to thecoherent analysis of class-divided society. he 'internal' approach, in other words,tends to 'historicize' the socialism question, forcing the historian to examine thespecific contingencies that affected the failure of socialist parties, rather thanfocusing on generalizations about American society so sweeping as almost to standoutside history itself. Not surprisingly, the two periods of American history thathave attracted most attention from those interested in tracing the history of pastsocialisms, are the first two decades of this century, and the 1930's and 1940's e end, of course, 'why is there no socialism' rests upon an interpretationof history that accords socialism a privileged position among radical movementsbecause it arises inexorably out of the inner logic of capitalist development, andholds out the promise of a far-reaching social revolution. To the Marxist paradigmthat underlies this vision, I have no objection. But it does seem to me that theempirical evidence that justifies the question - the existence of mass Labour,Socialist and Communist parties in western Europe and not in the United States- fundamentally contradicts the Marxist foundation of the question. A Marxistquestion, in other words, arises from a non-Marxist outcome, for the 'absence' tobe explained is not socialism (a revolutionary transformation of society) but theexistence of political parties of a decidedly social democratic bent that aim at nosuch transformation. The Left parties of Western Europe have without doubtimproved the conditions of life of their constituents, but they have proved incap-able of using their impressive political strength to reshape fundamentally theirsocieties. They have, one might say, promoted liberalism and egalitarianism moresuccessfully than socialism, and presented themselves as the proponents of modern-ization and social rationalization rather than class rule, thus operating in waysmore analogous to American political parties than either Americans or Europeanswould care to admit. The issue for Western European socialist parties is notprecisely socialism, but the equitable distribution of the products of capitalism. Inother words, one might well ask not 'why is there no socialism in the UnitedStates,' but, 'why has there been no socialist transformation in any advancedcapitalist society!! erhaps, because mass politics, mass culture, and mass consumption came toAmerica before it did to Europe, American socialists were the first to face thedilemma of how to define socialist politics in a capitalist democracy. Perhaps, inthe dissipation of class ideologies, Europe is now catching up with a historicalprocess already experienced in the United States.34 Perhaps future expressions ofradicalism in Europe will embody less a traditional socialist ideology than an'American' appeal to libertarian and moral values and resistance to disabilitiesbased upon race and gender. Or, perhaps a continuing world economic crisis willpropel politics in both Western Europe and America down a more class-orientedpath. Onlv time will tell whether the United States has been behind Europe inthe development of socialism, or ahead of it, in socialism's declin of course, 'why is there no socialism' rests upon an interpretationof history that accords socialism a privileged position among radical movementsbecause it arises inexorably out of the inner logic of capitalist development, andholds out the promise of a far-reaching social revolution. To the Marxist paradigmthat underlies this vision, I have no objection. But it does seem to me that theempirical evidence that justifies the question - the existence of mass Labour,Socialist and Communist parties in western Europe and not in the United States- fundamentally contradicts the Marxist foundation of the question. A Marxistquestion, in other words, arises from a non-Marxist outcome, for the 'absence' tobe explained is not socialism (a revolutionary transformation of society) but theexistence of political parties of a decidedly social democratic bent that aim at nosuch transformation. The Left parties of Western Europe have without doubtimproved the conditions of life of their constituents, but they have proved incap-able of using their impressive political strength to reshape fundamentally theirsocieties. They have, one might say, promoted liberalism and egalitarianism moresuccessfully than socialism, and presented themselves as the proponents of modern-ization and social rationalization rather than class rule, thus operating in waysmore analogous to American political parties than either Americans or Europeanswould care to admit. The issue for Western European socialist parties is notprecisely socialism, but the equitable distribution of the products of capitalism. Inother words, one might well ask not 'why is there no socialism in the UnitedStates,' but, 'why has there been no socialist transformation in any advancedcapitalist society?' End is big. Talk to Foner about it. Other: note cqard better; reread for exam 1 cent:

Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration. By Ana Raquel Minian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 336. $29.95 (cloth).

Year: Field: Summary: Mostly overlooking the migrants' human right to seek asylum, the government placed children in shelters, foster homes, or with relatives or sponsors while it prosecuted—and, in some cases, deported—their parents. Officials in the Trump administration openly voiced hope that this devastatingly harsh policy would deter such migration in the future. Minian's nuanced book puts this moment in stark historical perspective, showing it as a continuation of inhumane and inefficient policies and governance across the North American corridor. Ultimately, Undocumented Lives warns against legal systems that disregard the lived experiences of migrants themselves. Thesis: Ana Raquel Minian begins her book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration, with the tale of these migrants as a way to introduce readers to her subjects: Mexican migrants "from neither here nor there" caught between two nations (1). Minian argues that the United States and Mexico effectively created a permanent class of displaced and unwanted people who did not belong to either nation (3). Consequently, her book demonstrates, these migrants settled into a pattern of circulatory migration between 1965 and 1986 that created a transnational map of social and family networks. Beyond telling the story of the largely undocumented migrants and their lives in California, the book also examines the communities they left behind in the Central Plateau region of Mexico, provides insightful analysis of immigration policy decisions in both countries, and offers instructive lessons for American policymakers today seeking to curb undocumented immigration through militarized border control. Mexicans traveled north of the international border for work throughout the twentieth century, and the Mexican government often cooperated with U.S. officials to limit both long-term and undocumented migration of its citizens to the United States. Minian begins her book discussing how the Mexican government, facing serious economic crises during the 1970s, reversed its long-held policies and began encouraging and then facilitating migration north. Mexican officials came to see emigration—legal or not—as a "release valve for a surplus population" of unemployed Mexican men (16). Consequently, "undocumented migration became inextricable from life in Mexican and US communities" (104). Minian ends the book with an analysis of how policymakers ignored the reality that undocumented immigration was intrinsic to life in both the United States and Mexico when they passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. U.S. efforts to militarize border control proved ineffective, trapping undocumented immigrants in a "Cage of Gold" north of the border (209). Policymakers and others interested in the history of migrants' communities on both sides of the border would benefit from reading this book. Other: During the first half of the twentieth century, the Mexican government opposed emigration of its citi- zens, claiming that they were needed for Mexico's own economic growth and actively supporting U.S. deportation and repatriation of unauthorized migrants, such as with the policies carried out during the Great Depression and Operation Wetback in 1954. But as Mexico faced rising inflation and budget deficits in the 1970s, including high unemployment, the Mexican government began to view migrants as surplus labor and out-migration as a safety valve necessary to allevi- ate social and economic pressures. Mexican policy- makers modified the population law to facilitate emi- gration and encouraged women to have fewer births. Pressured to leave Mexico and branded "illegal aliens" north of the border, many migrants experienced a sense of not belonging in either country, of being "from nei- ther here nor there" ("ni de aquí ni de allá") (3). Begin- ning in the 1970s, they sought to change the world of their exclusion from Mexico, the United States, and their home communities by reconfiguring the meaning of home communities to "include a transnational di- mension" and claiming rights in the United States de- spite their status as unauthorized migrants. After the passage of the IRCA in 1986 and with heightened en- forcement of the border, most migrants decided to set- tle permanently in the United States, where they found themselves trapped in a "cage of gold" (jaula de oro) that prevented them from leaving (6). In one of the most revealing chapters in this insight- ful study, Minian probes the intimate lives of migrants and non-migrants based on over two hundred oral his- tory interviews documenting the role played by gender and sexuality in determining who migrated and who remained in Mexico. Men faced pressure from their families and from friends in their communities to fol- low other men before them to el Norte, while women were expected to remain in their communities, raising children and refraining from being seen on the streets, lest they be accused of infidelity or dubbed "muy calle- jeras" (loose women) (102). Heterosexual men often felt social and economic pressure to demonstrate their manhood by migrating to support wives, children, and parents. Gay men, who did not typically face the same economic pressures to support family, migrated in fewer numbers, preferring to perform "women's work" in their home communities that straight men avoided, and for which they received higher wages than women performing the same work. Gay men also experienced more liberty in Mexico, where consensual sex among adults of the same sex was not a crime, whereas in the United States they could be arrested for sexual solicita- tion. Sexual violence on the border discouraged many women from attempting to cross without papers, while parents worried that daughters who migrated transna- tionally could "lose their sexual respectability" (99). Decades of transnational circular migration reconfig- ured the meanings of family, hometown, and commu- nity as migrants formed clubs to support hometown communities through their remittances, which the Mexican government sometimes matched. Through their club activism, migrants participated in "an inclu- sive world of welfare provision . . . that fostered a ca- pacious sense of migrant identity" (156). In Los Ange- les, for example, they organized hometown clubs to support schools, clinics, and other public services often lacking or neglected in their home communities, giving them a degree of political power in Mexico, which they would not have had if they remained in Mexico. Clubs included women, Indigenous, and mestizo Mexicans, promoting a vision of racial belonging and "civic citizenship" that many did not experience in Mexico (148). Undocumented and legalized migrants also organized to claim rights in the United States to unionize, to attend public schools, and to be free of random highway stops. But by claiming rights for un- documented migrants, activists reinforced migrants' classification as "illegals," an identity that migrants themselves rejected. As Minian accurately notes, their "'illegality' did not stem from their own sense of self but rather from immigration laws" (160). When the children of undocumented migrants were denied public schooling in Texas unless the parents paid an annual $1,000 "tuition" fee, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (457 U.S. 202 [1982]) that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to un- documented immigrants because they were persons within the jurisdiction of a state. With public education available to undocumented children, many migrants considered the option of moving their families to the Featured Reviews 1837 A MERICAN H ISTORICAL R EVIEW D ECEMBER 2019 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/5/1833/5672907 by 81695661, OUP on 20 December 2019 United States, which is precisely what happened after the passage of the IRCA, when ramped-up border en- forcement served to "trap" them on the U.S. side. Mini- an concludes that the "greatest tragedy" of the narrative of undocumented migrants is that it "obscures the lives and humanity" of the undocumented persons them- selves, never letting the reader forget that there was a dignity to the everyday lives of the people she writes about (236). What unites these studies is the close attention they pay to the role of the U.S.-Mexico border in the com- plicated and often precarious lives of those who crossed it—Native, Mexican, Anglo, Chinese, and Af- rican American persons—from the early nineteenth century to the decades after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended quotas based on race and ethnicity and gave rise to unprece- dented immigration from Mexico. By situating their narratives of transborder mobility in the larger context of state building, immigration politics, and the forging of competing national racial regimes, these works broaden and deepen our understanding of the aspira- tions and challenges migrants faced in their quest for the safety, stability, and opportunity that often eluded them on both sides of the border. Today the children of undocumented migrants, called Dreamers (the backro- nym for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), face the frightening prospect of be- ing deported to countries in which they did not grow up. Perhaps no case better illustrates the plight of migrants today than the thousands of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans seeking asylum in the United States. As these works conclude, the U.S.- Mexico border continues to be a site of violence and racial, gendered, and class conflict: "una herida abierta" (an open wound), as the late mestiza poet and author Gloria Anzaldúa famously put it, "where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds, . . . the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture" (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987], 1 cent:

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. By Beth Lew-Williams. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 349 pp. $39.95.)

Year: 2018 Field: Summary: This brilliant book by Beth Lew-Williams eloquently explains how the late nineteenth century anti-Chinese movement in the Pacific Northwest helped to simultaneously create the idea of the modern alien and the rights-bearing citizen. Written in an elegant style that highlights individual stories, Lew-Williams manages to capture the gritty details of peoples' lives and make a powerful argument about citizenship and alienage in the United States. Thesis: In the end, Lew-Williams argues that the displacement of Chinese in the mid1880s was worse than those who have relied on census data have imagined. Even though the borders remained leaky, the Chinese population declined dramatically, and as importantly, Chinese who remained faced segregation and forced migration. Total exclusion might not have worked, but it served to marginalize and severely curtail opportunities for Chinese. Lew-Williams argues that the most significant impact of Chinese exclusion was the development of the concept of the alien. Although in recent years Congress has expressed regret for Chinese exclusion, it continues to uphold the notion that rights belong exclusively to American citizens. The Chinese Must Go ends with a question: "What rights can an alien claim in modern America?" (p. 233). It is a question worth asking in our current political moment not only of aliens but of all marginalized groups. On the frontier, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, white settlers attacked Asian migrants. In her new book, however, Lew-Williams has suggested that her work is an attempt to correct the way professional historians have dealt with this period of Chinese Exclusion: "While historians often claim that racial violence is fundamental to the making of the United States, rarely are they referring to the Chinese in the U.S. West" (2-3). Furthermore, "the violent antiChinese movement was not a weak imitation of racial violence elsewhere. It was a distinct phenomenon that must be considered on its own terms. Even without lethal force, anti-Chinese violence had profound and lasting consequences" (3). One of the most obvious was exclusion itself, as well as the body of immigration law and procedure that grew around it: "the vigilantes made Chinese exclusion possible, even probable, when their violent protests drew the national spotlight. The federal policy of Chinese exclusion, touted as a solution to Chinese migration, was also designed to combat the more immediate threat of white violence" (7). In The Chinese Must Go, Beth Lew-Williams argues that American immigration policy and local anti-Chinese violence eventually produced the concept of the "alien" in the United States The principal result of anti-Chinese violence was the modern American alien. The term "alien" has long referred to foreigners, strangers, and outsiders, and in U.S. law has come to define foreign-born persons on American soil who have not been naturalized. Admittedly, "alien" has become unpleasant or even offensive to our modern ears, and recently scholars and ournalists have begun to replace it with "noncitizen." This more neutral alternative, however, is too imprecise for the subject at hand. In the nineteenth century, the term "noncitizen" would have encompassed a large and diverse group, including, at various times, slaves, free blacks, Native Americans, and colonial subjects.15 We cannot simply do away with the word "alien," therefore, since it offers historical accuracy and specificity. In this book, the term is used cautiously to describe a particular legal and social status, not an intrinsic trait. The Chinese entered America as migrants and were made into aliens, in law and society. Through a halting process of exclusion at the local, national, and international levels, the Chinese migrant became the quintessential alien in America by the turn of the twentieth century.16 Other: 1 cent: Federal officials had encouraged a form of vigilantism, but balked when this extralegal border enforcement took a violent turn. In the summer of 1885, when the federal government exhausted its appropriation and deportation to Canada became untenable, it was clear to all that the government had lost any semblance of control. "There is no longer any hope of obtaining relief from this Chinese curse through the laws enacted by Congress," declared the Seattle Call. "Their inefficiency to prevent Chinese immigration has been demonstrated. To this northern country, bordering on British Columbia, they absolutely afford no protection whatever." Since the federal government had failed, the paper concluded, "we must protect ourselves or be overrun by these heathen."95 Abandoned by the state, "the people" must intervene to enforce the law.!!!! That said, it is important not to assume that direct resistance was the only form of Chinese agency.7 While some Chinese elites fought to stay, many Chinese workers chose to leave. Like their more privileged countrymen, members of the lower classes maintained the ability to make individual choices, albeit within tight parameters. Facing a cascading series of events beyond their control, many Chinese workers decided that retreating and regrouping elsewhere offered the best hope of finding peace, work, and a prosperous future. After all, they were migrant laborers accustomed to seasonal work, and they lacked financial stakes in the local community. Having crossed the Pacific and traveled inland, they were practiced at using mobility as a strategy for survival. This chapter recovers stories of Chinese resistance and flight in the face of white violence, but this is not its sole intent. A long and troubling tradition exists that renders the history of Chinese in America as primarily a history of white oppression.8 There are dangers to selectively shining the spotlight on moments when Chinese migrants were objects of white prejudice. Doing so reinforces the biases of the past and threatens to deprive the Chinese of their full humanity. While we consider the Chinese reaction to racial violence, we must also attend to what these spectacular events reveal about their everyday lives. Moments of crisis and the unique sources they produce can expose aspects of the Chinese American experience that usually remain hidden, in this case, critical divisions between workers and merchant-contractors. Contemporary observers and historians have described a community tightly bound by vertically organized businesses and village kinship networks. The pressure of white violence, however, revealed and accentuated divergent class interests within a seemingly unified Chinese community. Violent racial politics and homegrown border control infused federal law with local prejudices. And as the Chinese became aliens in the eyes of American government, their position fell in the local hierarchy and on the international stage. In turn, America's mounting ambitions in Asia helped to justify the use of plenary power at home. From this confluence of local violence, national law, and international diplomacy came the modern American alien and, not surprisingly, the "illegal" alien as well.

K ERRI K. G REENIDGE . Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter. New York: Liver- ight Publishing, 2020. Pp. xxii, 408. Cloth $35.00.

Year: 2020 Field: Summary: Kerri K. Greenidge has written a magnificent biogra- phy of William Monroe Trotter, the legendary Boston newspaper editor. Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is also a history of grass- roots black politics from the 1880s through the 1920s. African Americans confronted stifling oppression in cities such as Boston, but they also fought back with their voices and their votes. William Monroe Trotter "used the Guardian to vent the blind outrage that black people felt, but rarely expressed." He "galvanized black working people to recognize and embrace their political power" (xii) Thesis: uced a new form of black activism, one that mobi- lized ordinary African Americans. Frederick Douglass is the most obvious example of a prior leader who complicates this point. Douglass may not have been as closely allied with the masses, but in comparison with Trotter he was as uncompromising and as influential. Black Radical establishes a firm place for Trotter within this pantheon. Greenidge argues that "Trotter and his radical coalition of working-class black acti- vists inaugurated a civil rights strategy" that CORE and SNCC later replicated (211). Trotter thus emerges as a crucial link between Douglass and the activists of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights revolution Other: . Of course, the story is far more complex, involving a range of nuanced characters who rarely make it onto the February posterboards. William Trotter is one such unjustly neglected figure. Founder and publisher of Boston's radical Black newspaper the Guardian, (established four years before the Chicago Defender), Trotter articulated a working-class vision of Black liberation, blending labor activism and civil disobedience with an uncompromising insistence on full social and political rights for African Americans. Rejecting both the accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington and the "talented tenth" elitism of W. E. B. Dubois, and challenging the complacency of northern liberals who preferred to see racism as a uniquely southern problem, Trotter resists easy categorization. Yet as Greenidge argues in her beautifully realized biography, Trotter's theory and practice of Black liberation anticipated Black Lives Matter and the contemporary focus on institutional rather than individual racism. Essential reading for our times.--Lesley Williams Intro Did more than anyone elsse to inspire racial balck consciouness during the progressive era. Critized the black elites and inspire a black poitcal consciousness Beacon of blakc public outrage, which was unacceptable during this p-[epriod of lyn chigns which he spoke out agaoisnt' The federal government was needed to secuyre balck rights and balcks shou;ld ebt he definers opf thosre rightrzs not white allies Was of the 3elite Only balck can decide what civil rights must look like More faith in the black then dubois or washington Biograpghy of the post reconstructiopn north and ita place in the prtoigrssive civil rights Reorients our undertbnsinf of balck radicalims and civil righta Led sit ins Mobilized and weaponized reconstruyction admendmantsin the name of equality Famiall racial trauma informs all aspects of contemportary opolktics Very very modern in his type of activism Race-frist poltics Insistence on black agitation Dfemand for international vclored democracy during wilson's leavbureof nation years Radicalized racial poltics in boiston 1 cent:

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. By Martha S. Jones. (New York: Basic Books, 2020. Pp. 352. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $18.99.)

Year: 2020 Field: Summary: Risk ran in many directions" for Black women who challenged American racism, sexism, and inequality in all its forms in the United States during the past two hundred years (45). The risk and danger that confronted Black women in their ongoing battle for equality is a critical theme of Martha S. Jones's inspiring narrative. Yet, in a book centered to a large extent on the persistent and destructive power of racism and misogyny, Jones maintains a resolutely and perhaps surprisingly hopeful tone. Jones encourages readers to be heartened by the bravery of the incredible women and the real advances in equality they wrought. Remarkably, one emerges from the book disappointed but never deterred by the setbacks and discrimination faced by women for whom "risk taking ... became part of the bargain" (143). Thesis: Dr. Jones's intention is clear in Vanguard: to retell the last 200 years of women's history in the United States in a manner that includes Black women, rather than relegating them to the margins. When presenting their narratives, she uses familial stories, letters to the editor of abolitionist newspapers, newspaper articles, and minutes from organizational meetings to fill in the blanks. Overall, she succeeds. She identifies well-known and lesser-known women who had an impact and the situations and environments in which they succeeded. Black women, Jones asserts, never limited their work to a single issue. "Winning the vote was one goal, but it was a companion to securing civil rights, prison reform, juvenile justice" and other political gains. "Their view was always intersectional. They could not support any movement that separated out matters of racism from sexism, at least not for long." This is why Jones invokes the term "Vanguard": she explains that "despite the burdens of racism," Black women, "blazed trails across the whole of two centuries." Woman always were fighting for dignity and power through organizing lobbying and the aim of dignity for all 2 cenmtury loing woman's movement Their view was alays intersectional Black women pointed the nation towars its best ideals Other:Even for specialists, Jones's effort to link these women in a coherent narrative may open new pathways for understanding and inspire research that periodizes Black women's advocacy in new ways. For the interested but nonspecialist reader, Vanguard provides a compelling and eminently readable history of Black women's roles in the struggle for equality beyond the traditional categories of abolitionist or suffragist. By describing Black women's activism over the past two centuries as a consistent and coherent battle against inequality in all its forms, Jones emphasizes how discrimination operated against Black women in the social and associational as well as civil and political realms. Critically, disenfranchisement in Vanguard extends beyond the mere suppression of the vote. It encompasses the denial of humanity that Black women were among the first to articulate as a core problem in American society. Chapter 5, "Make Us a Power," which focuses on the 1870s-1900, stands out as perhaps the most dramatic section of the book. Jones sets aside the well-told stories of the political advances and retreats of Black men in that era to emphasize the arena in which Black women were most successful at gaining advances in equality—the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Jones thus tells a very different story of Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Instead of riding the roller coaster of Black male political rights, examining the fight within the AME Church over the ordination of women allows Jones to trace the radical continuity of Black women's fight for equality. Black women's successful fight for ordination in the AME Church also took place at the same time as formal segregation took hold in many elements of public transportation. Jones demonstrates that Black women employed a similar language of equality, liberation, and freedom from tyranny in both struggles. That rhetoric then carried forward into the woman suffrage movement and the twentieth-century civil rights campaign. [End Page 140] Yet the "litany of risks" that have confronted Black women for the past two centuries remains just as potent today (47). Jones emphasizes that early Black women advocates for equality "won some battles" in social and religious areas but were largely betrayed and deprived of political and societal power on the "long road to the 1965 Voting Rights Act" (8). If Black women are the vanguard of equality, then they have long been so far ahead of American society as to resemble a forlorn hope. If America finally caught up with the vanguard in 1965, large segments of it, as Jones acknowledges in the concluding chapter, have been attempting to retreat ever since. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act and revival of widespread voter suppression in the past decade suggest that the "distinct mix of threat and danger" that confronts Black women may have changed a great deal during the past two hundred years, but it remains powerful (93). [End Page 141] 1 cent:Black women exhcnaged ideas in pamhpelts and newspapers, in churchs and meeting halls and held public postions of political note at poidums and pulpits. Very politcally active dfuring thje rev 2. B.W. banded together, reache3d across the color line and took chnaces, they spoke out about their rights. They were active members of the aboloition pmovement and influenced their white compatriots. Had colored convention meetiongs and participated in antislavery conventions. 3. Dealt with racism and sexism in these convetnions but perservered and reminded everyone of their agenda 4. Bws spoke to equaklitatianism mjore than any group; some wne tfor the vote therough organizations and others applied sopcial presure. 5. About that power to jones and these bws in her estimation. Concerned with dignity for all and self determination 6. votinbg rfghts for women made bws the new keeps of the integrity of civil rights 7. Reitierates that women are at the fore front of this push fo0r voting rights in 1965 8. long traidtion held on to topday and shown in abrams

A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn

Year: needs another review 2003 Field: reconstrucion Summary: Thesis: Hahn's most original argument, and certainly the core theme binding his narrative together, is that the kinship relations in blackcommunities—slave and free—were the enabling feature of their politics. What Hahn does is delineate the political space occupied by blacks, explain how they struggled to expand it, and show how that space was continually contested by whites. Over time, these factors constantly reshaped and redefined the political influence of African Americans. Initially, during slavery, black political space was limited to exercising some control over their own labor, forging communities, both familial and religious, and creating a network of information and literacy. This book ultimately is about black agency. It reminds me of traditions in Latin American scholarship. With an interest in subaltern studies, Latin American scholars, such as Steve Stern, Cynthia Radding, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, have, for the last twenty years at least, looked at the persistence and power of natives under Spanish rule. Like Hahn, they recognize that an unequal power relationship never eliminates the possibility of activism and like Hahn they articulate the presence of the political in the cultural and social. Other: Moreover, blacks seeking to escapethe murderous white reaction to their effortsto build a more democratic South were pre-pared to go to either Liberia or Kansas, ex-pressing thereby less the suppressed national-ism of organic ideologues than the pragmaticsurvival strategies of ordinary folk. More compelling are Hahn's efforts toground formal electoral politics in the grass-roots politics of communities, indeed, a poli-tics determined by the distinctive social rela-tions of those communities. With their effortsto forge solidarity among themselves, whichchallenged the fundamental trajectory of thepower relations defining master and slave,even slaves lived in inherently political worlds.Silently correcting Eugene Genovese's famousdeclaration that slaves were not political men,Hahn shows how slave politics were an ines-capable consequence of labor relations inwhich group ties emerged to counterbalanceand mediate the extreme individualism osten-sibly promoted by the master's paternalism.!! While it is certainly true that part of Hahn's project is to underscore the efforts of the numerous individuals who worked against the brutal domination imposed on African Americans, he clearly believes that collectivity was central to this enterprise. In Chapter 1, he suggests that mobilizing communities of slaves was, in and of itself, a method of resisting the individuating force of slavery. Often these groups centered on familial work formations, but those who were relegated to more isolated and scarcely populated plantations managed to create extended communities beyond their plantation's borders. Skilled workers "hired out" by their masters frequently served as conduits between plantations, and some slave communities even established bartering systems and other reciprocal exchanges. As revolutionary movements spread in the Atlantic world and abolitionist fervor mounted, slaves received this news through clandestine communication networks. Hahn points out that the increasing political awareness of slaves coincided with the exact moment that slaveholders tightened their hold on both slave and free blacks. Hahn argues that freedpeople continued to use the same organizing strategies they had used during slavery: kinship ties, work formations, leadership skills, and religious beliefs. In addition to organizing themselves into units that would allow them to perform agricultural labor more efficiently, they held "mass meetings" where they conducted military drills for the purpose of self-protection. Hahn argues that Union Leagues played a critical function in the Reconstruction era, serving as a kind of "political school" for newly enfranchised blacks. Consequently, the participation of blacks in the state Republican conventions during the summer of 1867 was strong. Black women also played a crucial role during this period, pressuring the men in their communities to vote Republican. The efforts of these local activists helped to establish enclaves of black power. Hahn attempts to redirect the traditional impulse of historians to downplay the "Negro rule" that white conservatives complained about so much at the time by suggesting that there was, indeed, a grounding to these anxieties. In Chapter 6, Hahn again prompts a historical reconsideration by insisting that vigilante violence during Reconstruction was connected to a history of violence against African Americans and was not an aberration as has been suggested. The Union Leagues were a primary target of the Klan, and to this end, they attacked or killed grassroots leaders. In Chapter 8, Hahn describes their attempts at biracial political coalitions. Most notably, the Readjuster Movement in Virginia provided an insurgency movement whereby African Americans could join whites in Virginia and successfully challenge Democratic rule. In some places, African Americans and Democrats found it mutually beneficial to ally together in what were known as "fusionist" political parties. Elsewhere, insurgency movements such as Greenbacks and Populists continued to be a viable alternative for blacks. Ultimately, however, blacks found that they were unable to find a "just" biracialism. In the end, however, African Americans felt compelled to turn inward, to embrace a self-reliance that promoted land acquisition, literacy, and civic and associational life. This self-reliance later fostered the popularity of such nationalist figures as Marcus Garvey, whose political activism is depicted in the Epilogue. HaHN REJECTS THE LIBERAL-INTEGRATIONIST FRAMEWORK: IE THE IDEA THAT BLACK POLITICAL AUTONPOMY IS IN THE NAME OF CIVILITY AND EQUALITY 1 cent:

The Search for Order, 1877-1920. By Robert H. Wiebe. The Makingof America. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Pp. xvi, 333.$5.75.)

Year: 1967 Field: Summary: Robert H. Wiebe's The Search For Order successfully appliessocial theory to the study of history. Wiebe conceives of the decadesfrom the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War I as anera in which the industrial process disrupted the traditional socialstructure. Established patterns of life based on autonomous small-town communities were splintered by the pact of an inter-dependent, highly mechanized, quickly changing, impersonal andurbanized society. The years between the Panics of 1873 and 1893witnessed the corporate conflicts, the politics of irresponsibility andthe atavistic social theories symptomatic of an age that had out-grown its previous social system but had not yet accommodated itselfto contemporary developments. By the 1 890's ideas and institutionswhich would enable America to come to terms with industrializa-tion were being conceived and implemented. These devices andpolicies derived from the mechanized urban life and consequentlywere better suited to modern conditions. Bureaucracy grew topermeate business and governmental organizations. The contingent,informal, and personal arrangements of preceding periods gaveway to a centralized rational and regulative order manifested inthe managerially directed trust, interventionist politics, and the cientific-pragmatic orientation of thinking in the social sciences.During the first part of the period the industrial process differenti-ated society into complex and specialized entities. By the 1890'sAmerica began formulating the means to integrate the ideas,impulses, and institutions created by modern mechanized civiliza-tion. Progressive reform and the nation's performance in WorldWar I indicated that the search for order had not been in vain. Thesis: Wiebe's paradigm of the disintegration of small-towncommunities first followed by an interim of chaos and then by re-integration of American society, when bureaucratic order wasimposed by industrialismS is essentially valid. Nonetheless it is anabstracted construction in which the order that destroys the chaoswas created by the same process which caused the chaos. Thistheoretical construct, like other ideal types, rests on categories ofanalysis that are purer than any mundane situation could ever be.Small-town America was not as staticS decentralized or harmonious,nor was the bureaucratic relationship to industrialism as conduciveto social control, as the logical thrust of this model implies. The1830's and 1840's presumably the pinnacle of local village societySseem no less confused and chaotic than the 1870s and 1880swhen the nation was in transition to a mechanized civilization.Similarly, the depression of 1929 was at least as severe a disloca-tion as were the Panics of 1873 and 1893, even though it occurredin a society that had adjusted to industrialism. ssor Wiebe starts this provocative study from the premise thatnineteenth-century American society consisted of "island communi-ties" and that poor communication limited interaction among theislands while it also scattered the power to form opinion and to enactpublic policy. Each community's affairs were handled informally sincelocal autonomy continued to be the essence of American democracy.By the 1870's, he argues, community autonomy was badly erodedeven though the illusion of authority lasted on. In the 1880's and es-pecially the 1890's, however, citizens struggled in vain to defend theindependence of the communities only to lose confidence finally inthe old system and old ways. Early in this century, then, in the Progressive Era, Professor Wiebesees an alternative system emerging. The "regulative, hierarchicalneeds of urban-industrial life" gave rise to a new scheme of things inwhich government possessed far greater power, authority becamemore centralized, and men sorted themselves out more by occupationthan by community. With applications in foreign as well as domesticaffairs, this was "America's initial experiment in bureaucratic order,an experiment that was still in process as the nation passed throughthe First World War" (p. xiv). Ethical values replaced with buearucratic ones bureaucratization." It was a trend involving an increase in communica-tions, voluntary associations, and intergroup relations; and it continueduntil the elements were present that could be welded together quickly ondemand, as demonstrated, the author says, by Wilson's domestic-mobiliza-tion schemes of World War I. Socail change in modern America involved the decline of the communtiy and the rise of soceity. ; modern scoeity eroded community //Do I agree or did community evolve. Other: For example, anti-monopolyand a "preoccupation with purity and unity" expressed "community self-de-termination" (pp. 52, 56); these underlay anti-alien feeling, temperance,Jim Crow, and the mushrooming of voluntary associations such as theKnights of Labor, Bellamy clubs, and farmers' alliances (what aboutlodges and benevolent associations?). Likewise, in chapter six, the docu-mentation for the shift from "ethical idealism" to "bureaucratic" values isimpressive, though the reasons for the shift are not very clear. The tech-nique produces its plausibilities, however, as when the author severely criti-cizes Roosevelt-Wilson foreign policy on the ground that statesmen failedto extend increased communication and bureaucratization beyond theboundaries of the United States, with the result that "America's first ven-tures into foreign policy showed an unmistakable immaturity" (p. 254).The suggestiveness of this idea, and many others in the book, is consid-erable indeed. Despite the author's reliance on descriptive and impression-istic techniques, which he handles unusually well, the fact that this is thefirst book to present a unified intelligible overview of the half century be-fore 1920 makes it required reading for anyone interested in modernAmerica, or for that matter in the modern world. Since the book soabounds with information and is written very gracefully, that reading re-quirement is a very light burde e strongest part of the work lies in the author's description of the new,more cosmopolitan human relationships that grew with urban industrialism.He provides, for example, striking illustrations of the process of rationalizationon linkages among people. But most important is his description of the "newmiddle class" as the root of reform movements in the early twentieth century.Convincingly he argues that this source was not the "old middle class," the in-dependent proprietor of the past, but the new group of professionals and organ-izational representatives who were constructing new systems, ordering life withlarge, rather than parochial, perspectives, and seeking to manipulate factorsbeyond community. In this context, reform was not the irrational expression of anattempt to regain a lost status, but a conscious and reasoned effort to shapeinstitutions according to the values of the new social ord How did authority develop or switch from that of the community to that of the scoeity Its triump was the centralization authority from that of the fractured authority of island communties. It was the order neededd from the rise of industirialsm and economic instabiltiy People ideinitfed with tasks in communtiy not the reptuation of a smal town Cevelopnment of fiance capitlaism from communtiy to Economic chnages that boosted capial and poltical cnrtrilaization and money defeated the comm untiy Nativism was in response to these changes// econpmic Politics were now the real of idealism //this was toatlly truw before, The heart of progressivism was the ambition of the new middle vlass to fulfill its destiny through beautcatic means The exefcutive branch were nuetral because of this desire for order //monocasuall They attmepted to aslo shape world events in the name of order. Order order orderr 1 cent: the progressive impulse was in the name of order

All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960By Robert (X Self. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Pp. viii, 518. $30.00ISBN 978-0-8090-9502-5

Year: Field: Summary: Thesis: . In All in the Family, Self presents a complex and nuanced argument, tracing how breadwinning liberalism, focusing upon economic issues and the safety net, transformed into breadwinning conservatism with an emphasis upon the traditional family and cultural issues. This transformation, argues Self, explains contemporary political dialogue dominated by social conservatives and neoliberals. //this is about how libs became consevative through breadwiunning Robert O. Self has contributed an important new book to the literature on the rise of the American Right. Self argues that the Right won in large measure because it turned the myth of the nuclear family into a potent political weapon. Beginning with the New Deal and extending through the Great Society, liberals framed public policy to support "the white patriotic, heterosexual male at the head of the nuclear family" (p. 275). Self labels efforts to bolster the economic foundations of this family as "breadwinner liberalism" (p. 4). During the latter half of the 1960s, feminists, lesbians, and gay men emerged and scored notable victories challenging this breadwinner and his cultural preeminence. But they provoked a backlash—"breadwinner conservatism"—that mobilized under the banner of family values and helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 (p. 5). The great achievement of the Right, according to Self, was to persuade the silent majority that the liberal Left, once the people's economic protector, now constituted a mortal threat to its deepest values—values embedded in the fictive traditional family family, gender, and sexuality are the focus of Self s book. He offers a powerful thesis about how these were central to the collapse of the Dem- ocratic political order and ong-term construc-tion of the modern Right. Across five decades,and in great detail, he shows the emergence andtransformation of various social movements thateither explicitly or implicitly concerned family:feminism, gay rights, black power, the antiwarmovement, conservative populism, and Chris-tian evangelicalism, among others. At the centerof these cultural, social, and political transforma-tions is what he calls breadwinner ideology: anidealized notion of nuclear families financiallysupported solely by fathers. This anchored domi-nant visions of social order for working- andmiddle-class whites across the postwar era. Self sbook joins a growing body of work in the fieldsof history and political science on the centralityof family to political change in the late twentiethcentury, including work by Margot Canaday,Priscilla Yamin, Michelle Nickerson, and DarrenDochuk. or to the 1960s, breadwinner ideology wasyoked politically to the New Deal and the com-mitments of democratic liberalism - before en-countering pressure from without and within.The various identity-based movements in the1 960s destabilized accepted tenets of white mas-culinity, though in different ways. Early femi-nism challenged the role of women in the homeand the workplace. The early homophile move-ment and later the gay liberation movement chal-lenged basic taboos and stigmas associated withmale sexuality. The antiwar movement chal-lenged cherished assumptions about masculinehonor and sacrifice. The black freedom move-ment challenged a white masculine sense of own-ership over jobs, unions, and neighborhoods. Theeconomic burdens on families, which worsened af-ter the 1 960s, pressed hard on an already-fragile dentity. As both liberalism and masculinitywere challenged, this identity became availablefor reassociation on the right. "Stripped of its so-cial welfare and government support components,"Self writes, "breadwinner liberalism could fastbecome breadwinner conservatism : a defense ofwhite male breadwinners and their nuclear fam-ilies against the claims of nonwhites, women,and ultimately gay men and lesbians." Self s ac-count depicts political actors in constant motionon both the Left and the Right from the 1960sforward; this creates a sometimes-dizzying kalei-doscope effect for the reader as new issues and ac-tors surge to the fore, displacing the struggles thatmade them possible, and in the process gener-ating new forms of resi elf lays bare the political heterogeneity, con- tingency, and fluidity of the 1960s and its after- math. Yet he concludes by arguing that defenders of breadwinner ideology had a logical affinity with the incipient forces of neoliberalism, since conservatives argued convincingly that liberal- ism's intrusion into the traditional realm of fam- ily (through abortion, moral permissiveness, and women's rights) was of a piece with the liberal state's intrusions into the "natural" functions of the market. This is indeed how conservatives have forged the link between these two political positions, just as they argued that federal intru- sion into state sovereignty on behalf of civil rights was synonymous with interference in the market. But there was nothing logical about such connec- tions, and it was not given in advance that assaults on white masculinity would easily be absorbed into economic conservatism. They reflected the Right's creativity in forging new politica!!!!!!! Other: If "equal rights" had been the driving force of American politics in one era, three decades on, "family values" had usurped that position. Those who espoused family values did not reject the equal rights framework in its entirety, but they dismissed elemental features of what it had come to mean, and they put the full force of their considerable political movement behind foreclosing the extent of transformation. Their efforts shifted not just electoral politics but the entire culture of American democracy rightward.¹ Among these, three are crucial to the book: first, the dis- tinction between the private life of the family and the public life of the citizenry; second, the tension between liberty and equality, between the freedom to do as one wishes and the goal of social equity; and third, the problem of identity, of con- ceiving of a stable subject of democratic rights and governance. These form the piv- ots of each chapter. The political arc from equal rights to family values was accompanied by a parallel arc: from a demand for positive rights and robust state action to a reluctant acceptance of negative rights and a weaker state more com- mitted to liberty than equality.¹⁰ Conflict over gender, sex, and family in these decades was thus not simply a "cultural war," if that term is meant to imply a sharp distinction between culture and political economy. Such a distinction is false and historically misleading. De- bates about Americans' sexual practices and intimate lives, women's reproduction, and the nature of family are inseparable from the history of capitalism and the modern liberal state. This cannot be emphasized enough. At its heart, the social contract overseen by government mediates the relationship among individuals, so- cial institutions such as the family, and the market. The question is not whether gender, sex, and family are structured and regulated by the state; the question is what kinds of regulations exist and to what end. When commentators began in the 1980s to distinguish between "cultural" or "values" conservatives and economic conservatives, they identified a distinction between political constituencies, not an underlying reality of American life. Finally, there is the problem of identity in American democracy. Those on the liberal left who sought to reimagine the subject of democratic governance faced considerable challenges. They argued that women and men, male and female, sex and sexuality are in the end socially constituted, made by human society. As such, they can be remade. To imagine a social order in which a lesbian mother, a female physician, and a poor African American man with AIDS are all equal citizens is a noble and morally just goal. But it is not easy to bring that social order into being. To be inclusive and to live up to its professed values, the liberal left embraced mul- tiple identities, which proved both internally divisive and especially difficult when political opponents posited fixed identities in response. Americans who argued that manhood and womanhood are largely, or even entirely, invented and thus can be reimagined faced the considerable challenge of opponents who claimed the opposite: that manhood and womanhood, sex and sexuality, are fixed and timeless. 1 cent:At the centerof these cultural, social, and political transforma-tions is what he calls breadwinner ideology: anidealized notion of nuclear families financiallysupported solely by fathers. This anchored domi-nant visions of social order for working- andmiddle-class whites across the postwar era. Self sbook joins a growing body of work in the fieldsof history and political science on the centralityof family to political change in the late twentiethcentury, including work by Margot Canaday,Priscilla Yamin, Michelle Nickerson, and DarrenDochuk. ions underlying American democracy could not fully accommodate. The liberal left could win, within limits, freedom to do as one pleased. But it could not win positive rights that would make such freedom mean ingful to many, many Americans. Meanwhile, conservatives found themselves advocating a form of freedom—market-based, without government meddling— that was at the heart of that very political philosophy. Americans now live, whether they recognize it day to day or not, in the long shadow of that battle!!!

Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II. By Nelson Lichtenstein. Cambridge,London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xii

Year: 1983 Field: Summary: With their attention riveted on specific industries and local communities, practitioners of the new labor history have succeeded admirably in reconstructing the daily lives of American workers. They have often been less successful in placing their subjects into the broader context of the American political economy. Too much recent work fits well into G.M. Trevelyan's 1944 description of social history- "history with the politics left out." In this excellent study of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during World War II, Nelson Lichtenstein has not only left the politics in, he has made them the focal point of his boo Thesis: To those labor historians who have long suspectedthat the homef'ront exigencies occasioned by theSecond World War definitively influenced the insti-tutional structure and administrative style, as well asthe ideological content, of industrial unionism inpostwar America, the appearance of Nelson Lich-tenstein's Labor's War At Home confirms i!! Like any social movement, the new CIO unions were not merely the product of the ideology of their leadership or the momentary consciousness of the rank and file, but represented a dialectical combination subject to the often violently changing economic and political crosscurrents of the era. The author develops two related themes in thecourse of his analysis: the progressive integration of the emerging industrial unionorganizations and the wartime New Deal state; and the growing tension between thenational union bureaucracy and rank and file organization. By establishing a clearconnection between the themes, Lichtenstein brings us a long way toward understand-ing the contemporary labor movement which is characterized by both bureaucraticconservatism and periodic rank-and-file revolt . Many historians have noted the close working relationship betweenthe CIO and the wartime government, and several labor historians have called attentionto the burst of rank-and-file militancy that erupted in the course of the war. WhatLichtenstein has done is to show how the two phenomena were part of the sameprocess. The increasing bureaucratization of the labor movement produced the rank-and-file upsurge**!!!!!!!!! The subsequent tension between the control mechanisms of the state, the social pressure from below, and the political requirements of the union leadership became the pivot of labor politics for the remainder of the war. By the late 1940s, the adjustment or suppression of this multifaceted conflict had reshaped the internal character of the industrial unions and done much to set their course in the increasingly hostile environment of the immediate postwar era. Other: n arguing that American workers have often been as militant as their Europeancounterparts, Lichtenstein notes that this fact has been obscured by "an overlay ofethnic culture or by identification with the local community and its social and politicalvalues" (p. 8). As if determined to avoid such complications, Lichtenstein has steeredclear of the local community entirely.There is much less sense of what life and work was like during the war than one mightget from a good community study. Many labor historians would also argue for a greateremphasis on ethnic, racial, and regional differences than the author has applied.But Lichtenstein did not intend to write a social history of American workers duringWorld War II. He aimed instead at a nuanced analysis of labor politics within themovement itself and in the society at large. In this regard, his book represents animportant addition not only to labor history but to political history as w milarly, hisassertion that CIO leaders created the Political Ac-tion Committee as much for the purpose of subvert-ing independent political action among a disaffectedrank and file in 1944 as for its annotinced pur-pose-the reversing of a strongly antiunion politicaltide-appears to reflect his determination to suspectevery facet of their stewardship rather than hisunbiased assessment of the available historical re-cord During the defense era, most CIO unionists linked the enhancement of labor's domestic power with the defeat of fascism abroad. After the fall of France, most American trade unionists, like the larger liberal community, shifted rapidly to support of an active defense against European fascism. Unwilling to strain their alliance with the president and the New Deal wing of his administration, few unionists could see any alternative to Roosevelt's defense program or to his increasingly interventionist foreign policy. Certainly, much of the popularity enjoyed by figures such as Wendell Willkie and Henry Wallace stemmed from their sanguine assurance that the war indeed represented a liberal crusade to advance New Deal principles beyond the frontiers of America. 39 Roosevelt too recognized the importance of this sentiment, especially before Pearl Harbor, when domestic opinion still remained divided. At the Argentia Bay conference with Churchill that produced the Atlantic Charter, FOR insisted upon a clause in the new agreement "securing for all improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security. "4 0 Given this liberal interpretation of American war aims, most CIO leaders easily rejected the sullen, pessimistic counsel of John L. Lewis and vowed cooperation with Roosevelt and the military in the rapidly expanding mobilization effort. The suppression of this strike proved a turning point in defense era labor relations. Thereafter, work stoppages declined and most unions enforced a de facto no-strike pledge. In turn, union leaders demanded some form of government-enforced union security for the duration of the wartime mobilization. After June 194 I, the NDMB's new authority, the genuine support of defense preparedness by most AFL and CIO leaders, and the shift in the Communist line all seemed to promise a relatively trouble-free labor front as the nation moved toward even greater involvement in the war. But the enforced labor peace soon brought a new series of problems for those leaders who willingly subordinated immediate trade union goals to the overall success of the defense effort. Deprived of the right to strike, and with many of the normal functions of the union leadership now assumed by government agencies, many unionists feared for the stability and integrity of their organizations. To counter this threat, CIO leaders demanded that the government enforce the union shop in all basic industries. In the twelve months following the suppression of the North American Aviation strike, this issue would dominate the labor-management-government debate. The CIO attempted neither, and its failure laid the basis for the pyrrhic victory won by labor in the winter of 1946. The outcome of this conflict with a phalanx of major corporations demonstrated the permanence and the tremendous potential power of industrial unionism, but it also doomed American labor to a Sisyphean struggle against the inflationary spiral and political harassment of the immediate postwar years. The experience of the CIO industrial unions during World War II formed a crucial stage in the transition from their institutionally fluid, socially aggressive character in the 1930S to the relative accommodation and bureaucratic stability of the postwar years. This institutional growth was real, but the consolidation of the new unions coincided with a generation-long decline in the power of the reformist wing of the New Deal coalition and a turn toward management of the political economy increasingly in the interests of an effective prosecution of the Cold War. The accommodation of the major CIa unions, which began under wartime conditions, proceeded equally rapidly in the late 19405, especially after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the expulsion or defeat of the Communists in the following two years. At the same time, the dependent relationship the CIa had built with the Democratic party withstood the trauma of the reconversion crisis and the Henry Wallace presidential candidacy, even as the political and economic payoff from this alliance declined with the recomposition of Democratic party politics in the postwar years. Finally, the increasingly conservative political environment generated a set of conditions under which shop-floor activism atrophied, union bureaucracy flourished, and the power of management renewed itself, even in the narrow field of contract collective bargaining. Unions have again become an arena for political debate, and the issues with which the early CIO grappled - the quality of daily work life, union democracy, and the political independence of the labor movement - have again been brought forward on the social agenda. 1 cent: we need to go over this intensly

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Polities in the Post-Civil War North, 1865- 1901. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress. 2001. Pp. xvi, 312. $39.95

Year: 01 Field: Summary: Why did northerners abandon Reconstruction? Afteryears of pursuing a rough equality for the newly freedslaves, why did they walk away and watch in silence asJim Crow descended on the South? Historians haveoffered a number of explanations for this abandon-ment: partisan polities, racism, war weariness, corrup-tion, class needs of planters. Thesis: But Heather Cox Richardson argues that these explanations, whilecompelling, are "disparate aspects" (p. xi) of thenorthern experience. How, she asks, did they fit to-gether? The answer can be found in northerners'adherence to free labor ideology!! Foner Having fought a warfor free labor, Republicans were committed to theSouth's transformation into a free labor society andwere drawn to the newly emancipated slaves as idealfree laborers: workmen who "worked hard and skill-fully, lived frugally, saved their money, and planned torise as individuals through their own efforts" (pp. 7-8).These "good" workers, who believed in the harmony ofinterests between employees and employers, stood insharp contrast to bad workers: those who allied withthe Democratie Party, believed that "polarizing wealthmeant the creation of economic classes locked ininevitable conflict" (p. 8), and looked to the federalgovernment for help in solving their problems. Increasingly, Republicans "read the Northernstruggle over political economy into the racial strug-gles of the South" (p. 94)—including the campaign fora civil rights bill and the 1879 black exodus—and thedebate over Reconstruction was recast as a debateover state action, individualism, and the American wayof life. By the 1890s, it was clear to northerners thattheir faith in the freedmen as free laborers had beenmisplaced, and virtually all black activism had come tosymbolize the threat that European-style class conflictposed to American individualism. Thus northernerswho hoped to preserve traditional American valuesaccepted black disenfranchisement and came to be-lieve that blacks were "bound by race into permanentsemi-barbarism" (p. 224).!! Other: Ultimately "The UnAmerican Negro," as she titles her final chapter, came to embody all thefears "mainstream" Americans had of class conflict and proletarianrevolution - "the face of 'communism' or 'socialism'" (244) - and thisexplains the discrimination they faced in the first half of the twentiethcentury. It is not clear that she intends so extreme a conclusion, but herrelentless stress on northern class fears suggests that class conflictprecipitated post-war northern racism 1 cent:When recalcitrant southern whites interfered withthe South's transition to a free labor society, Repub-licans concluded that the federal government wouldhave to assume an active role in the process. Repub-licans passed civil rights legislation and the FourteenthAmendment and then fought for universal male suf-frage, all to ensure the protection of the freedmen'seconomic rights. But Republicans' commitment toblack male suffrage evoked Democratie complaints ofcorruption and empire building, and the freedmen'spolitical activism, viewed in the context of increasinglabor unrest in the North, engendered Republicanworries that enfranchising black men would "harnessthe government to the service of disaffected workers,who hoped to confiscate the wealth of others ratherthan to work their own way to economic success" (p.82) Heather Cox Richardson stresses the centrality of labor issues in understanding northern attitudes toward Reconstruction. After the Civil War, "fear of a perceived black rejection of the free labor ideal, coupled with anxiety over labor unrest," overcame wartime sympathy for the freed people (p. xiv).The northerners jettisoned "the midcentury vision of an egalitarian free labor society," so far as the freedpeople were concerned (p. xiv). While Richardson concedes racism had much to do with the eventual outcome, her emphasis is on fears of class warfare and social disorder-and how they affected white northern perceptions of black behavior. In essence, Parisian Communards and a politically corrupt working class pushed well-off northerners into the armsof white southeuerner!! ct. Richardson concludes that "Northerners turned againstAfrican-Americans not because of racism .... [but] because African-Americans came to represent a concept of society and government that woulddestroy the free labor world (Why not stay and reshape?)!!! Richardson follows the trajectory of northern free-labor ideology and finds in that ideology a compellingexplanation for the death of Reconstruction. But herbook does not come to terms with the complexities ofthe period: it elevates the agency of liberal individual-ism and slights the influence of radicals, racism, south-ern class interests, and the black community!!

Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America. By LawrenceGoodwyn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. xxviii, 718.$19.95.)

Year: 1976 Field:populism Summary: ' Goodwyn argues that populism offered Americans of the late nineteenth century a new frame of reference-a unique perception that lay outside the Weltanschauung of the prevailing culture. Populists had, according to Goodwyn, "a greater sense of self as democratic citizens and a more hopeful view of democratic possibility than that which is culturally licensed within the modern progressive societies around the globe, either socialist or capitalist" (p. xiii). Goodwyn's task is nothing less than the demonstration that populism was the last viable alternative to the triumph of American capitalism.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Professor Goodwyn believes, Populism ignited a spark ofhope which constituted the essential spirit of the movement."It was a spirit of egalitarian hope, expressed in. . .a self-generatedculture of collective dignity and individual longing. As a move-ment of people, it was expansive, passionate, flawed, creative-above all, enhancing in its assertion of human striving. That wasPopulism in the nineteenth century." (p. 542. Goodwyn argues that populism offered Americans of the late nineteenth century a new frame of reference-a unique perception that lay outside the Weltanschauung of the prevailing culture. Populists had, according to Goodwyn, "a greater sense of self as democratic citizens and a more hopeful view of democratic possibility than that which is culturally licensed within the modern progressive societies around the globe, either socialist or capitalist" (p. xiii). Goodwyn's task is nothing less than the demonstration that populism was the last viable alternative to the triumph of American capitalism.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ple. Aboveall, Professor Goodwyn believes, Populism ignited a spark ofhope which constituted the essential spirit of the movement."It was a spirit of egalitarian hope, expressed in. . .a self-generatedculture of collective dignity and individual longing. As a move-ment of people, it was expansive, passionate, flawed, creative-above all, enhancing in its assertion of human striving. That wasPopulism in the nineteenth century." (p. 542. opulism was the last viable alternative to the triumph ofcorporate capitalism, Professor Goodwyn argues, and it repre-sented something more than the People's Party. He equatesPopulism with a radical spirit that developed within the Farmers'Alliance in Texas in 1886 and that eventually came to permeatethe entire movement as it spread to other sta Thesis: Other: Throughout Part Oneof the work, Goodwyn successfully weaves the threads of economic, politi, social, and organizational development into a coherent fabric ofcultural analysis. He convinces us that the men and women of the agrarianmovement were caught up in "the sheer drama and power of their massiveparades, their ... summer encampments, their far-flung lecturing system,their suballiance rituals, [and] their dreams of the new day of the coopera-tive commonwealth . . ." (pp. 196-97). Two of Democratic Promise does not sustain the analytical focus ofPart One. There are valuable chapters on the largely unexplored questionsof blacks and the populist movement and the role of the National ReformPress Association, but the larger analysis gets hung up on the author'sinability to distinguish clearly between culture and politics. For example,Goodwyn carefully documents the correlation between those areas withthird-party strength and those areas that had a vigorously organizedexperience with cooperative culture (Chapter XI), only to abandon thiscultural analysis for an extended discussion of internal People's partypolitics. Goodwyn recognizes that populism lacked a social theory of sufficientbreadth to appeal to urban as well as rural peoples, but he dismisses theurban working class because it had not developed "a working-class cultureof economic and political consciousness essential to-the maintenance of aninsurgent posture in the presence of the continuing cultural influences ofthe corporate state" (p. 308). What Goodwyn is unable to confront is the fact that agrarian radicalism was no better equipped to withstand the onslaught of American corporate culture than was urban radicalism. Despite his assertion that a "movement culture" of populism had "armed its participants against being intimidated by the larger corporate culture" (p.311), Goodwyn's study documents the collapse of populist culture in the face of that challenge \Goodwyn concludes that defeat in the election of 1896 signaled popu-lism's cultural collapse: "And finding no coherent way to express itself infusion, it was this spirit that expired in the autumn of 1896" (p. 514). He isunwilling to admit that if the rise of populism was a cultural phenomenonthen its demise must be understood as a cultural phenomenon rather thana negative side effect of electoral defeat. Goodwyn's denial of populistcultural credentials to William Jennings Bryan suggests the same unwil-lingness to confront the cultural collapse of agrarian radicalism. If Bryan was a mere political office seeker outside the mass-based populist move-ment, then why did his nomination in 1896 cause millions of Americansto fear "that the very foundations of the capitalist system were beingthreatened by the 'boy orator of the Platte' " (p. 522)? Goodwyn's refusalto explain Bryan in cultural terms indicates the limits of his analyticalfocus.Democratic Promise offers the most thoroughgoing analysis of American populism available today. It is clear that Goodwyn has captured theessential culture of the Southern Alliance, but American populism as anational cultural phenomenon has yet to find definitive historical ana He points out that the radical Populists based their criticism of the American economic system on the Greenback ideology that monetary reformers had espoused earlier in the nineteenth century. The Midroaders, unlike the followers of William Jennings Bryan, never believed that free silver alone would solve the nation's economic problems. Instead they insisted that America needed a fiat currency that could be expanded and contracted in accord with the actual performance of the econ- omy-a far more radi!! , ProfessorGoodwyn argues that the Populists attempted to form a politicalunion between black and white farmers and thereby offered amore humane alternative than the racial system that developedby the early twentieth century. But the Southern Alliance adheredto a strong white supremist position throughout its history.Southern Alliancemen barred blacks from membership; theyclashed with the Colored Alliance over the Lodge election bill,a measure designed to protect the voting rights of blacks; andthey strongly opposed the cotton pickers' strike that the ColoredAlliance called for k. It argues that Pop-ulism could have transformed American life for thebetter. So be it. Populists were impassioned menand women who believed they could make Amer-ica a more humane and democratic place. This isalso a deeply pessimistic book that begins by an-nouncing its subject to be "the decline of freedomin America. " And yet the author is the same LarryGoodwyn who once edited, with some optimism,that humane and authentically Populist journal,the Texas Observer. His book, as its dust jacketnotes, "is grounded in the faith that the demo-cratic ethos is not yet fully compromis 1 cent:

Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F.Litwack 1979

Year: 1979 Field: Recon/New South Summary: For the four million blacks,t};e Yankee invasion and victory meant freedom, acondition they soon learned would have real mean-ing only to the extent that they were able to give itsuch meaning. In this richly documented, beau-tifully written, and sensitive book, Leon F. Litwackdescribes "the countless ways in which freedom wasperceived and experienced by the black men andwomen who had been born into slavery and howthey acted on every level to help shape their con-dition and future as freedmen and freedwomen What Litwack intends-and achieves admira-bly-is to describe the exhilarations, fears, ex-pectations, and uncertainties of a people who foundthemselves free after generations of enslavement. Itis a story of a people who had learned to survive asslaves subject to the will and the whim of their own-ers. Survival had always required accommodationto the will of the master and a struggle to maintaina semblance of dignity and to carve out a meaning-ful life within the confines of slavery Emancipation lifted the burdens of slavery and,the blacks soon learned, replaced them with theburdens of freedom, burdens that weighed heavilyon the poor everywhere in the nation but were espe-cially heavy for a people set free with neither wealthnor property and despised and feared by theirformer masters and often by their Northern libera-tors as well. Survival required new forms of accom-modation, even as emancipation opened new op-portunities Thesis: Litwack's study is truly history from the bottomup-not in the form of cold aggregated statisticsthat are so characteristic of this genre, but in theform of descriptions of the actions, the thoughts,and the words of the common folk as they struggledwith themselves and with their friends and enemiesto make freedom meaningful. Reconstruction-po-litical, economic, and social-cannot be understoodapart from such struggles. Litwack gives detailed at-tention to each of the questions that historians havelong considered the initial response to emancipa-tion, the efforts to reunite families, the struggle toachieve economic and political independence, theimportance placed upon education, the emergenceof black leadership, and the gradual evolution of anew ethnic consciousness under new conditions.Each is presented from the point of view or, moreprecisely, from the points of view of the blacksthemselves. With remarkable ingenuity Litwackteases information from a vast array of sources, in-cluding planters' records, visitors' impressions,W.P.A. interviews, government documents, and sec-ondary literature. It is the variety, the diversity of responses that Litwackwants his readers to see and appreciate Litwack writes that the struggle for education and the establishment of separate churches "reflected a growing if not fully developed sense of community and racial pride, even as it sharpened the separation from and accentuated the differences with both their northern friendsand native whites" (p. 500). Like W. E. B. DuBois,whom he quotes approvingly, Litwack describes thetwo conflicting souls within the body of the black ashe strives for self-definition in a society that is atonce his own and alien. The book's final chapter de-scribes black political organization and activities,but its title, "Becoming a People," summarizes thistheme, a theme that gives this massive but alwaysabsorbing book coherence and makes it a uniqueand important contribution to our understandingof the meaning of the social revolution brought byemancipation Litwack has recreated the experiences of the former slaves throughout theSouth during the first years of freedom. His monumental volume coversapproximately seven years between the beginning of the Civil War and theend of presidential Reconstruction. These were the years during which thefreedmen came to know the meaning of freedom and white southerners torecognize the fact of emancipation. The central theme on the other side is, while more recent in origin, just astraditional. The world of the former slave was one in which survival wastranscendent. The freedmen struggled against seemingly insurmountableodds for physical and mental survival. The first years of freedom were esspecially difficult for black southerners, for they fell victim to the wrath offormer slaveowners, betrayal by the federal government, and the racism ofnorthern whites. It is the development of this theme, however, that placesBeen in the Storm So Long among those works that have helped to stamp anew vision upon American history. Other: It was so clear that "some blacks preferred to look, act, and sound as little Negro, colored, or black as possible." Their search for racial identity and for integration into a society as thoroughly racist as that of the South and that of America faced almost unimaginable handicaps from the start. Blacks at that time and since have seen this military participation as a keyelement in both the blacks' enhanced perception of themselves and of changesin whites' perception of them. "That black men managed to win the respectof white America," Litwack concluded, "only by fighting and killing whitemen was an ironic commentary on the ways in which American culture . . .measured success, manliness, and fitness for citizenship" (p. 102).Often, it was the coming of the Union army that first permitted slaves todare to act as free persons This quest by the freedmen for the substance of freedom was marked byfrustration and disappointment. In trying to exercise their independence asfree persons, the former slaves had not only their former owners but also their erstwhile liberators arrayed against them. Basically, the former slavescould only bargain with their labor Through violence, state laws, and the assistance of Freedmen's Bureauagents, the planters were able to exploit the labor of the freedmen. Still the black workers used what leverage they had to seek better pay and a change in the labor system. On some plantations, blacks acted collectively to gain concessions. The principal change resulting from the action of the freedmen was the institution of tenant farming. Although this system provided moreindependence, the black farmer often found that his economic conditionhad deteriorated.Litwack's final two chapters treat the development of churches and schoolsamong the freedmen and the freedmen's first efforts at political organization.The convention was the vehicle for their political expression. These con-ventions gave rise to new leaders and provided valuable experience whichbecame useful during the period of congressional Reconstruction 1 cent: The extent to which blacks and whites shaped each other's lives and destinies and were forced to respond to each other's presence had never been more starkly apparent. But in 1860 they were as American as the whites who lorded over them. Not only did most of the slaves learn to endure but they managed to create a reservoir of spiritual and moral power and kinship ties that enabled them under the most oppressive of conditions to maintain their essential humanity and dignity. But for the black men and women who lived to experience the Civil War, there would be the moment when they learned a complex of new truths: they were no longer slaves, they were free to leave the families they had served, they could negotiate the terms of their future labor, and they could aspire to the same rights and privileges enjoyed by their former owners. It is that mo¬ ment—and the days, months, and years that immediately followed—which this book seeks to capture: the countless ways in which freedom was per¬ ceived and experienced by the black men and women who had been born into slavery and how they acted on every level to help shape their condition and future as freedmen and freedwomen. To measure the significance of emancipation is not to compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contemporaries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they acted. !!!!!!!!!!!!

WILLIAM H. CHAFE. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greens- boro, North Carolina, and the Black Strugglefor Freedom.

Year: 1980 Field: crm Summary: On the surface, Greensboro was an unlikely set- ting for racial struggle. The first Southern city to announce its intention to comply with the Supreme Court's school desegregation decree, its image was that of a "beacon of Southern progressivism" (p. 6). Thesis: Chafe's thesis is that the white power structure, smugly immersed in itsprogressive mystique, believed that all was well as long as everyone wascivil in their relationships with each other. Dropping the mask of civilitywas necessary to jar them into the realization that they would have to makeconcessions to the black community in order to restore the peace, order,and the polite ways they valued so highly. In the end white progressivenessconsisted primarily of "shrewdness in opposing racial change" (p. 97). Asone black said, "Greensboro [was] a nice-nasty town"!!!!! Other: Three themes: 1.: the vitality of a protest heritage within the black community, 2.white determination to manipulate and deflect black initiative 3. un-finished struggle for racial justice in America , is in its leaders' insistence that "civility," "progressive" at-titudes, and "personal grace" rather than the exercise of naked power havemarked white Greensboro's behavior. Still, civility was more an instrument ofsocial control than of interracial rapport, and it proved a thin veneer whenblack activists sorely tested white patience. Civility dissolved in the face ofpolice and national guard measures, which, in the spring of 1969, for example,included a massive invasion of the predominantly black North Carolina A & Tcampus and the still unexplained shooting death of one stude //yo the libs are wilidn In fact, in a "context ofoppression," civility merely "provides a veneer formore oppression" by those who would "guard pow-er under the guise of sharing it" ' civility is the cornerstone of the progressive mystique, signfying courtesy, concern for an associates family, childen, health, etc. //More important than substantive action is optics //We love the poor and don't like personal conflict //Lib paternalism //trying to replace a white pov and sourcing with a black //Issues of justice self-detrmination, and autonomy may tell where we as a nation will be able to come to grips with re central theme of aoiut hsitory //whites saw the 60s as progress and balcks saw it as inhuane, lazy, and not enough. Black power created resenment from the progressives but was the best way to push them Whites finally gave in because they copoted balck issues to make themselves feel better and it benefitted them Harmony over balck lives //civilty and civil rights are not compatible concepts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore. Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1982. 437 pp. $24.95.

Year: 1982 Field: Summary: From the Pullman strike of 1894 until his death in 1926, Eugene V. Debs was perhaps the best known working-class and socialist activist in the United States, a leader whose very name came to stand for the humanitarian ideals of socialism in the eyes of millions of native and immigrant workers. Even today, Debs, who was the Socialist party's presi- dential candidate in five elections between 1900 and 1920, remains the best known and most highly regarded representative of the U.S. Socialist party tradition in America and throughout the world. Rising above the polemical and almost mythological history of the Socialist party in the early twentieth century, Nick Salvatore's magnificent biography of Debs does his remarkable subject justi Historians who have undertaken to write biographies of leading Americanlabor radicals over the last fifteen or twenty years have had fewhistoriographical obstacles to clear. Prior to the 1960s, the history of theAmerican Left was an esoteric study and had generated only a very sparebiographical literature. The subsequent appearance of any full, competenttreatment of the life and career of an important but previously neglected indi-vidual could be justly praised as a genuine contribution, since it almostautomatically improved upon the moldering left-wing philippics andhagiographies, the brief articles and sketches, and the occasional unpublishedtheses that had constituted the sum of existing knowledge. The same cannotbe said about the work on Eugene Debs-the central figure in the greatPullman strike, the charismatic, five-time presidential standard-bearer of theSocialist party, the only labor radical in American history who enjoyedauthentic mass appeal. Debs's story is the stuff of epics, and he has had hisshare of biographies, at least one of which, Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross(1949), is superb. The task confronting the modern Debs biographer, then, isnot breaking new ground, but increasing the yield.Nick Salvatore has sought to do that by writing what he ca Thesis: Salvatore utilizes the insights of the new social and labor history, urban and family history, and psychology to portray the molding of Eugene Debs in a particular American context. Thus, he shows how definitions of manhood and dignity were central to the working class world from which Debs came and how they helped to shape his political awareness and ideology. Salvatore also explores the influence of the tradition of the American Revolution and American conceptions of abundance and opportunity in the development of Debs's consciousness as a labor activist and socialist leader. Finally, he places the complex political history of the Socialist party and its internal struggles into a framework that elucidates both the debates and divisions on theoretical questions But this book is more than biography. Sal-vatore's understanding of the "republicanism'that was central, not simply to Debs's socialism,but to a national ethos that brought huge crowds,including many non-socialists, to hear Debsspeak, is part of a recovery of the American past.that is now under way in a number of quarters.Salvatore writes, Other: 1 cent: Nick Salvatore has sought to do that by writing what he calls a "socialbiography" -one attempting to view Debs within the larger cultural andsocietal panorama of his era. Although this initially might connote the old-fashioned life-and-times formula, it soon becomes clear that the authoraspires to be more au courant. His paradigm is the so-called "new" laborhistory, which has so dominated recent scholarship. Eschewing the olderinstitutional and "great man" focus of the Commons school, the new laborhistorians have defined the essence of their study to be the culture and collec-tive life of rank-and-file workers. Although the approach is well-nigh ortho-doxy today, Salvatore is the first scholar to try to extend it into the seeminglyinapposite realm of biography. e does so on the grounds that earlierbiographers have missed Debs's real historical significance and that an inac-curate image of him as "a curiosity" outside the national mainstream has assed into the textbooks. Salvatore contends that only by perceiving Debs asthe product of his culture and understanding that he was widely admiredprecisely because he effectively articulated and symbolized the most cherishedvalues of that culture do we gain a true appreciation of the man. The culturein question is that of traditional, preindustrial America wherein democracy,the commonweal, equality of opportunity, manly independence, the preceptsof evangelical Christianity, and the rights and obligations of citizenship werehighly esteemed. Salvatore argues that it was these very aspects of the culturewhich were threatened by the rise of large-scale corporate capitalism, andDebs, by propagating socialism in their name, came to be seen as a defenderof the national heritage.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The key to Debs's thought was aslowly evolving notion of manhood, a conceptdefined publicly through the action of citizensworking as part of a community. The ideal was anindependent citizen-producer, a standard whichDebs came increasingly to see in deep conflict withindustrial capitalism. In this stunning book, Salvatore sets Debs firmly within the central tradi- tions of United States political and social history and depicts, as never before, the triumph and tragedy that characterized the socialist leader's personal and public life. He also explores with a deft hand the travails of the first generation of American radicals who had to grapple with the emergence of modern corporate capitalism.

The Fall ofthe House ofLabor: The Workplace, the State, and Ameri'can Labor Activism, 1865-1925. By David Montgomery. (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xii + 494 pp. $27.95.)

Year: 1987 Field: Labor Hsitory Summary: How class consiousness permeates every aspect of daily life and how workers developed a class consciounsess About the neutering of the labor movement in the progressive era Thesis: "Its three basic points of reference are the human rekationships that wage labor generated at the workplace, the changing structures of economic and political power fashioned by the evolution of 19th c competive industrial capitialism into 20th c imperialism, and the divisece styles of thought and activity by which the working class activirs sought to interpret and imporve the society in which they ahd lived. " \ Montgomery confers on class as decisive arole in the history of the United States between1865 and 1925 as Thompson argued it had inthe England of 1760-1832. In Montgomery'sown words, "it remains not only possiblebut imperative to analyze the American exper-ience of the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries in terms of conflicting socialclasses." For him, class consciousness permeat-ed every aspect of working-class life, especiallyamong militant workers who strove to moldtheir brothers and sisters "into a self-aware andpurposeful working class." Montgomery seeksto explain and analyze how class consciousnessexpressed itself at the point of production, insocial life, and in relations with the state.!! Here howeverMontgomery seeks to steer the subject back to its earlier focus on political history,devoting much attention to union politics, ideologies, and the potential for a broadly-based socialist movement that seemed to be there during the turbulent years during andshortly after World War I. His broad point is that, at least during critical periods, largenumbers of American workers really were responsive to "dreams of an altogetherdifferent social existence" and "bold visions of social change," even while strugglingfor wage increases and other mundane improvements in their lives (p. 332, p. 389). Thetheme of the "lost cause" explains the otherwise puzzling choice of 1925 as an end-datefor a comprehensive survey of American labor history. n the last two decades, no one has done more than David Montgomery to placestruggles over control of the workplace!!!!!!!!!!! at the center of labor history. In a seriesof articles expanded into his earlier volume, Workers' Control in America (Cam?bridge, 1979), and in the work by a generation of his graduate students at Yale andby others profoundly affected by his work, a Workers' Control School of laborhistory has emerged with Montgomery as its leader and most forceful exponent.1Thus, this volume represents the summation ofa generation's work, by its authorand the school he has led. Labor historians, ironically including some of Montgom-ery's students, have already advanced the concentration on male workers in TheFall ofthe House of Labor in ways I will suggest below. Nonetheless, this volumeis quite simply the best, most lucid argument for the centrality of struggles overworkplace control in shaping the American labor movement. The book, though,is much more: it is a careful, detailed essay which integrates the roles ofthe stateand management with institutional trade-union history to provide a long-awaitedsynthesis of working-class history Other: ModernAmerica had been created over its workers' protests,even though every step in its formationhad been influenced by theactivities, organizations,and proposals that had sprung from work-ing-classlife." (7) In order to analyze these dimensions of daily life and theirrespective social movements in class terms, it is necessary to acceptthat class is constituted not only in production but also in procrea-tion, child rearing, family life, religious and secular education, as-sociational and neighborhood activity, cultural identity, modes ofinheritance, and all the other factors of social reproduction. The im-plication is that, especially in the United States, the labor movementwas not the sole voice of the working class. Again, the distinctionbetween production workers and the whole working class is impor-tant. Trade unions may have spoken for workers (although toooften, it must be recognized, for only a narrow occupational sectoror a still more narrow group of dues-paying members). But the greatmajority of unorganized workers and non-wage earners in theworking class often had no alternative but to look elsewhere. Neces-sity became habit and set stringent limits on class politicswhile rein-forcing the fragmented, pluralist political process that coalescedaround disparate social movements fighting for the attention of thetwo main consensual parties.!!!!!!! 1. 1890s Banded together across discpline to critize and pobilize against industial capitlaism Construction and coal 2. the common laborer Their common moved into the workplace and this fundamentally changed class concsiouness, the workplace allowed for q place of coalesence!! Race seperated laborers in the workplace too and in the house of labor Laborers understood themselves as wokrers very diffeently Progress would require them to overcome these differences 3. Craftsmen had latitude and laborers phically laboers, the operative was the first traditional wokrer in the sene that they ahd to go to the same place and do the saem job every day. Speicaliszed eorkers Th eperative craftsmen alliance called for larger social engineering and the reconginiztion of class had to be considered in every spect of a person life, home, family, social network, etc. 4. Scientifc management is here and machinists and modernism run everywhere abstracting labor from management. Scientific laborers and company bosses define the labor as traditonal and backward to undercut their criticisms and desires!! 5.Development of middle managemnt, its pormises and its advantages for capital Industrial life made promsies for the craftsmen and laborer 6. Labor became divided into two antagonist goups The Union > socialism This was worsened by the poltics of WWI Capital or not Homogenized labor force but not homogenized owrking class The working class was fighting itself 7. The blending of immediate demands with big socail reconstruction was the goal of post war labor Some of the disperate groups are coming together again behond the democrats 8. Gompers backed the war effort and afl Soiclaists arent as keen The War and nationalism over take class consiocuusness 9. Corporate management> laborers No compromsise was made between labor and caitpal and labor; apital wins 1 cent: Montgomery seeksto explain and analyze how class consciousnessexpressed itself at the point of production, insocial life, and in relations with the state.!!

LandofHope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the GreatMigration. By JamesR. Grossman (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1989.xiii plus 384 p

Year: 1989 Field: gm Summary: Thesis: //Takes on the migrants perspective as subjects and describes the reactions of old settler balck in the city who had a class bias and distain for new balcks. //Its about going from southern to northenr //This is a synthesis of sotuehrn hsitory, class formation in the North, ghettoization, and racial ideology. //Viewed forward not backward and shows the meanings and boundaries of Am. Citizenship and oppuruntiy. //The wuesrion is not wheter southern cutlure presisted but how it persisted and wained in the north Argues that the migrants flight singnaled a shift from an ealrier survival strategy that looked for automny through landownership to on ethat sought salvation in an emerging urban, industrial economy; the mvmt out of the south and off the land represented a second emancipation. The migrants were thus more driven objects of relentless hsitorical imperatives. Both an attempt to seoze ones destiny and an assertive statementy of dissadtifactio. A refusal to aquicese to Jim Crow. Other: visits. "Southerners asked relatives in Chicago to visit so they couldevaluate how those relatives looked' before uprooting themselves and migratingNorth." (p. Grossman superbly dissects the class differences among Blacks and how theireconomic status colored perceptions ofthe benefits of migration. Black southernerswere never of one mind concerning the wisdom or efficacy of migration, andaccording to Grossman, nor were all southern whites convinced that they shouldrid the region of Negroes. Some white opponents to migration proposed reformsin certain aspects ofthe South's racial code, while some middle-class Blacks fearedthat migration threatened a loss of status. That migrants ignored the objections of established Black leaders and thefutile gestures of southern white reformers is obvious, but what Grossman clarifiesand underscores is the pivotal role played by northern leaders, most notably byRobert S. Abbott, through the pages of his Chicago Defender, and that of "menand women in southern towns and cities who organized migration clubs, wroteletters North offering their services and those of their townsmen, and spoke outwithin their communities - often hiding such activity from whites..." (p. 65) Ina fascinating chapter on the Defender Grossman lays to rest long standing mythsas to the alleged seduction of labor agents. Migrants, we now know, made carefuldecisions based upon a variety of sources and actually knew more about northernconditions than previously believed. Thanks to the Chicago Defender, the would-be migrants "acquired a new source of power over their lives -information that abetter alternative not only existed but beckoned." (p. 97)The second part ofthe book contains chapters on the social, educational, andracial conditions that evolved as southern migrants swelled the Windy City.Grossman deserves special kudos for his skillful treatment of the development ofthe northern, urban, industrial Black working class. After the initial joy of beingfree to sit in any seat on the bus, and the thrill of observing an occasional blurringof the color line subsided, the migrants had to confront a sobering and oftendestructive reality. While the Chicago school system was woefully unprepared toeducate their children, the administrators had worked out an elaborate plan tosegregate them. As Grossman points out, "Many migrants were immediatelyushered into 'subnormal rooms,' whose number doubled citywide between 1915and 1924." (p. 251) Labeled "backward," "retarded," "defective," and "feeble- he second half of the book, focusing on the migrants' Chicago experience,questions the extent of their "liberation." Grossman concludes that mereaccess to economic, political, and educational institutions was not enoughto assure equality or power. Questioning the faith seemingly misplaced inindustrial capitalism, the author believes that "the migrants' hopes founderedon the shoals of northern racism, the business cycle, and class relations" (p. 8). 1 cent:

Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. By Lizabeth Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xviii, 526. $27.95, cloth; $15.95, pape

Year: 1990 Field: Summary: Lizabeth Cohen's study of manufacturing workers in Chicago is a trailblazer in this extension of the NLH. Addressing material familiar to the OLH, she argues that changes in working-class culture caused the rise of industrial unionism and worker politics in Chicago in the 1930s. She argues that prior to the 1930s, ethnic and racial divisions among the workers prevented effective working-class action. Without com- pletely discounting power and leadership, state policy and union strategy, she maintains that earlier struggles were doomed by "obstacles within the workers' own ranks.... Isolated in local neighborhoods and fragmented by ethnicity and race, workers proved incapable of mounting the unified action necessary for success" (p. 1 Thesis: Lizabeth Cohen's study of manufacturing workers in Chicago is a trailblazer in this extension of the NLH. Addressing material familiar to the OLH, she argues that changes in working-class culture caused the rise of industrial unionism and worker politics in Chicago in the 1930s. She argues that prior to the 1930s, ethnic and racial divisions among the workers prevented effective working-class action. Without com- pletely discounting power and leadership, state policy and union strategy, she maintains that earlier struggles were doomed by "obstacles within the workers' own ranks.... Isolated in local neighborhoods and fragmented by ethnicity and race, workers proved incapable of mounting the unified action necessary for success" (p. 1 In this impressive work, Lizabeth Cohen advances the thesis that the NewDeal was not simply handed down by the "Brain Trust," nor concocted byreformers and radicals, but that in the course of the thirties industrial work-ers, largely out of their own resources and experiences, created a new dealfor themselves. Taking Chicago as the locale for her study and focusing uponcertain industries (steel, meat-packing, and agricultural implements) andworking-class neighborhoods, Cohen explains how by 1939 its working peo-ple had wrought important changes in their lives through unprecedented par-ticipation in national party politics and labor organizations. The experience of common consumptionseparated the younger generation raised in the 1920s from their parents, without leadingthem to abandon ethnic and class affiliations. "Rather they used mass culture to createa second-generation ethnic, working-class culture that preserved the boundaries be-tween themselves and others" (p. 147). When the Great Depression discredited welfarecapitalism and bankrupted ethnic self-help associations it was easy for these second-generation workers who already belonged to a mass, working-class community to moveinto mass, working-class movements. Although again dismissing union strategy or statepolicy (this time prounion) as epiphenomena, Cohen argues that the workers whobelonged to this new, mass working-class culture nevertheless made a New Deal Other: schewing a simple story of assimilation, Cohen emphasizes the adapta-bility of ethnic cultures as they responded, on the whole successfully, to thesechallenges (including that posed by the primate). However, she notes that inthe process of coping with change, ethnic institutions themselves becamemore commercial, bureaucratic, and metropolitan. Cohen also rejects the pre-sumption that mass culture irresistibly homogenized ethnic working-classfamilies, transforming them willy-nilly into middle-class Americans in tastesand values. Rather, she astutely observes, the effects of mass culture, whethermovies, radio, or commodities, were mediated by circumstance and context,where and with whom they were experienced. As long as families and neigh-borhoods enjoyed a good deal of autonomy, the products of mass culture(e.g., ethnic recordings) could even strengthen identities based on ethnicityand class. While Cohen offers these generalizations as valid for Europeanorigin groups, she holds African Americans to be an exception. They avidlyembraced mass culture, since it provided an opportunity to participate inmainstream life in ways otherwise denied them. Although the ethnic enclaves are depicted as highly resistant to the inroads of mass culture in the twenties, Cohen suggests that by the end of the decade the walls were starting to crumble before the onslaught of store and movie chains and commercial broadcasting. Initially grassroots in operations and programming, by 1930 radio was becoming dominated by national networks. Workers of different races and ethnicities increasingly experienced a shared mass culture; consequently their lives had more in common with each other and with workers elsewhere in the country. Yet the outcome was not out- and-out Americanization, but rather, especially for youth, a melding of tra- ditional and new elements into a "second generation ethnic, working-class culture" (p. 147).!! Rejecting both the "working-class realism" thesis of John Bodnar (Workers'World: Kinship, Community and Protest in an Industrial Society, 1900-1940, 1982)and the Marxist concept of a revolutionary proletariat, Cohen argues that Chi-cago's workers did possess an ideology based on class consciousness and didpursue class interests through politics and labor organizing. While blamingthe capitalists for the depression, workers were not ready to overthrow cap-italism and embrace socialism. Cohen attributes their economic conservatismto an attachment to private property and a commitment to "moral capitalism,"a form of capitalism in which all received a just and fair share. This home-grown ideology did not emerge from the dialectic of the class struggle, butfrom participation in a worker culture which was itself largely a working-classversion of commercial mass culture. How patronage of mainstream mediaand consumption of commodities were transmuted into a politicized classconsciousness-and what constituted the content of this class conscious-ness-deserve to be more fully explicated makes the provocative argument that radio, now standardized and national,more than any other medium created a like-mindedness among factorymates. Broadcasts of the Joe Louis-Max Baer fight, a metaphor for the strugglebetween workers and bosses, are cited as nurturing cross-race alliances. (Butsuch symbolic events could have the opposite effect as was the case with theJoe Louis-Primo Carnera fight!3)Cohen credits the CIO leadership, keenly aware of the need for ethnic andracial amity among workers, with pursuing a "culture of unity." Seeking in-clusiveness, organizers of various backgrounds were recruited, meetingswere held in neighborhood saloons and halls, publications were dissemi-nated in ethnic languages, and the support of churches and community or-ganizations enlisted. Beyond those particular appeals to ethnicity ("a means,not an end," p. 339), the CIO sought to cultivate nationwide and industry-wide union loyalty through radio broadcasts, newspapers, recreational andsports programs, and a "family-oriented union culture" (p. 346). While rec-ognizing significant differences among various industrial unions, Cohenpasses critical judgment on the CIO overall for its centralized structure, whichrepressed grass-roots initiatives, for its "family orientation," which perpet-uated traditional gender roles, and for its dependence in the final analysis onthe benevolence of government rather than the strength of the workers. In-deed, Cohen's final conclusion appears to be reluctant and contrary: theworkers' success in the thirties turned out to be something of a will-o'-the-wisp. By tying their tail to the kite of the Democratic party and the CIO, theybecame committed to the preservation of a status quo that in many ways fellshort of their aspirations. 1 cent:

GEORGE J. SANCHEZ. Becoming Mexican American: Eth- nicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. Pp. xiv, 367. $35.00.

Year: 1993 Field: Summary: Chicanos are and have been both American and Mexican, native and foreign, an ethnic group and a race, native and immigrant, and traditional and modern. Their lived experience demonstrates the impossibility or improbability of such categories and, more so than perhaps any immigrant group before them, forces a reinterpretation of all such categories in American cultural history. Although Los Angeles is also a world capital of Korean and other cultures, learning from Los Angeles begins with learning from the Chicano experience. Thesis: The emergence of a amexican american ethnic and cultural identity during the first half of the 20th century; by 1934 mexican americans developed a unqiue identiy that was marked by cukltural adapataiton diversity and experimentation rather thgan a simple linear assimilatin from mexican to american cuture. Intense racial hate and a lack of singnificant exconomic upward mobility The crux of Sanchez's argument comes in his analysis of the Great Depression, which he sees as the crucible that formed Mexican- American identity. The deportations and repatriations of that period not only stripped the Los Angeles Mexican community of a third of its population and thoroughly disrupted its cultural life, they also fundamentally changed the outlook of the immigrant families who stayed behind. Those who remained became "ambivalent Americans" who subsequently engaged in oppositional politics. They joined militant cio (Congress of Industrial Organiza- tions) labor unions and formed Mexican- American civil rights organizations such as the radical Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples. These activities demonstrated Mexican Ameri- cans' commitment to bettering their lives in the United States and their willingness to com- bat racial discrimination. That women headed many of these organizations shows how far the immigrants had strayed from traditional Mexi- can cultural norms. Other: 1 cent: Intro: Handlin's account emphasized the loss of European peasant roots, the arduous journey across the Atlantic, and the painful, yet to him inevitable, process of absorption into American society. Yet, as effective as he was in demonstrating the importance of the immigrant experience, Handlin mistakenly assumed that every immigrant shared the same process of cultural adaptation. Indeed, his thesis regarding the disintegration of peasant cultures in the New World was extended even beyond his European subjects to include African Americans and Latinos. In the last three decades, revisionist historians have argued that Handlin's tendency to collapse all groups' migration experiences into one story belittles the diversity of such events and distorts history. The movement between Mexican and American cultures is not so much a world of confusion, but rather a place of opportunity and innovation. In Los Angeles, living in this cultural "borderlands" can also lend itself to adaptations drawn from African American or other ethnic peoples, depending on the time period, the local community, and the level and nature of contact. Ethnicity, therefore, was not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States. As such, ethnicity arose not only from interaction with fellow Mexicans and Mexican Americans but also through dialogue and debate with the larger cultural world Part 1 Most scholars who have analyzed this movement north have focused almost exclusively on the socio-economic factors involved in this migration. 3 This chapter will review those issues, but will also put into context the larger cultural questions raised by such a massive movement of people between two nations with unique histories. The railroads not only led to economic growth in Mexico and the American Southwest, they also facilitated the transmission of cultural values and practices between the two countries. By concentrating on cultural transformations occurring in Mexican villages, this chapter will also examine the beliefs and traditions that immigrants to the north brought with them. The structure of authority in the village, the rise of Mexican nationalism, and the adaptations in familial customs in this period all played a role in defining the outlook of Mexican immigrants. Finally, this chapter will explore the very decision to migrate itself, one which was clearly driven by economic considerations but also culturally conditioned. This examination will stress that the culture Mexican migrants brought with them, rather than being a product of a stagnant "traditional" society, was instead a vibrant, rather complicated amalgamation of rural and urban mores, developed in Mexican villages during half a century of changing cultural practices. The most prevalent image of the American West is, of course, the frontier— an image fixed in American history by Frederick Jackson Turner, but popularized since by a host of writers. The frontier has always projected one myopic vision, that of the East looking West, civilization looking toward chaos, Europe looking toward the rest of the world. It casts the Euro-American as conqueror of both nature and foreign peoples, sometimes depicted as "savages," and speaks to the belief that the young American country would know no bounds in fulfilling its destiny to become the world's leading nation. It serves as a continuation of the story of migration to the New World, depicting the movement west as a destiny just as manifest as the momentous undertaking of crossing the Atlantic was a mission of redemption. A concept of the border has had no comparable chroniclers among American historians for obvious reasons. While "frontier" evokes an image of expansive potentialities, "border" speaks to what is real and limiting between nations and peoples. The border, however, is also a social construct and has a distinct history. Simply demarking a line in the desert or a point on a river which designates the jurisdiction of two governments does not address the social and cultural significance assigned to that spot. It fails to account for the complex cultural and economic relationships that intertwine two countries when they share a common border. This chapter will address the impact of the social construction of the border in the early twentieth century upon the migrants who crossed it, particularly focusing on the border crossing at El Paso-Juarez, the major entry point of those on their way to Los Angeles in this period. First, the means by which migrants left their hometowns and arrived at the border will be discussed. The effects of this burgeoning mobility on border communities were massive, creating both labor conduits for direct migration to the U.S. and new and expanded settlements that would serve as future sending points for migrants north. Finally, the changes which marked the actual border crossing from 1910 to 1924 will be analyzed, with particular attention paid to the transformation of the process in the minds of Mexicans who chose to cross this line of demarcation. Even when individual exceptions were made, the new immigration statutes and their administration on the border heightened the significance of the boundary line between Mexico and the United States. Indeed, the modern version of the border was created during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It became a much more rigid line of demarcation, as the intricate economic relationship between Mexican labor and American capital was perpetuated through the labor recruitment agents. Here immigration officials, through their inspection of new arrivals and the enforcement of laws barring illegal entry, made it clear that passage across this barrier in the desert was a momentous occasion, a break from the past. The new role of the immigration inspector was duly noted by an El Paso attorney when he wrote to Washington, D.C.: "His business has brought him in contact with the poor, the ignorant, the friendless and the foreigner, over whom he has practically almost limitless power." 65 It was this power over the dreams of the individual immigrant which became increasingly evident at the border crossing. Ironically, it was in this period of transition that the term "alien" first began to be applied to the Mexican in the Southwest. Men born hundreds of miles away from the border region— in the American East or Midwest— were suddenly given the task of enforcing laws passed by a majority of legislators who had probably never seen the area. The establishment of fresh Mexican communities within the Los Angeles area, as this account will reveal, created new foundations for an emerging Mexican American culture. Part2 \ Eventually, Mexicans became the primary targets of Americanization programs in California during the decade preceding the Great Depression. Particularly in the southern half of the state, Americanization came to embody the Anglo majority's attitudes toward Mexican immigrants. Borrowing from the arguments of both restrictionists and employers, Mexican culture in the United States was carefully scrutinized in the 1920s and found wanting. The most potent weapon used to imbue the foreigner with American values was the English language. All social reformers cited the ability to speak English as a fundamental skill necessary for assimilation. Rather than provide Mexican immigrants with an attainable picture of assimilation, Americanization programs could offer these immigrants only idealized versions of American values. Instead, Americanization programs are an important window for looking at the assumptions made about both Mexican and American culture by progressive Californians during the 1920s. Mexican culture was seen as malleable, but required intense education in "American values" to fit into a modern, industrialized society. These efforts also made clear, however, that Mexicans were intended only to assimilate into the bottom segment of the American work force as low-paid, yet loyal, workers. As we shall see, Mexican immigrants generated their own version of Americanism without abandoning Mexican culture. What they would create would be quite a different product indeed. This chapter will explore these tensions to understand the role the Mexican government played in shaping Chicano community interests andidentity during the 1920s. As this government focused on the creation of a national identity south of the border, many facets of the emerging government-sponsored nationalism also surfaced among the immigrant population through the work of the consulate office. In Los Angeles, the consulate office launched Spanish-language schools and libraries as a way to reinforce loyalty to the mother country among immigrants and their children. As in Mexico, these activities and institutions did not always have the interests of the general population in mind, but rather served to promote a conception of Mexican nationalism shaped by a rather elite group of Mexican officials and intellectuals. Like Americanization efforts, these Mexicanization programs helped shape the culture of Mexican immigrants but were unable to control the complex process of cultural creation the newcomers underwent once they arrived in Los Angeles. The battle for cultural allegiance waged between the American and Mexican governments mirrored a more poignant struggle within each individual immigrant, as he or she learned to balance nationalistic sentiments with a new ethnic identity. Part3 Creative, adaptative strategies predominated among Mexican immigrants who settled in Los Angeles. Only strong, flexible family ties insured the survival of all members. Certain individuals chose to go it alone, and others left the barrio altogether. Yet, for most immigrants, family and community came together in the emerging neighborhoods east of the river. At times, the barrio was for some a stifling, restrictive environment. Strong cultural norms were enforced which kept the community at least outwardly familiar to most newcomers from Mexico. More often than not, however, the barrio provided a haven for Mexican immigrants and American-born Chicanos. There they could adapt to American society while still retaining in their daily lives much of the flavor of Mexico. Religion helped chape ethnicity sand unqiue identities in chicanos This chapter will explore the intersection between the growing mass market in cultural forms found in Los Angeles and the leisure-time activities of Mexican immigrants. The various actors who helped shape the creation of a market aimed at providing Mexican immigrants with products, services, and activities that somehow connected with the ethnic selfidentification and collective culture will be identified. The complicated nature of this exchange can best be described, however, by looking at one particular arena of cultural interaction. Music, specifically the creation of a Spanish-language music industry and market in Los Angeles, provides one of the best windows for viewing this nexus of cultural transformation in detail. Appeal to the tastes of youth also created subtle power shifts within the Chicano community. In Mexico, few outlets were available to young people for influencing cultural practices in an individual village or even one's own family. The American metropolis, on the other hand, gave Mexican youth an opportunity to exercise more cultural prerogatives merely by purchasing certain products or going to the movies. Rebellion against family often went hand in hand with a shift toward more American habits. This pattern was stimulated by the extent to which adolescents and unmarried sons and daughters worked and retained some of their own income. As the second generation came to dominate the Chicano population by the late 1930s, their tastes redefined the community's cultural practices and future directions of cultural adaptation. Behind the vast American commercial network lay an enterprising group of ethnic entrepreneurs who served as conduits between the Mexican immigrant population and the corporate world. These individuals were often the first to recognize cultural changes and spending patterns among the immigrant population. Individuals such as Mauricio Calderon and Pedro J. Gonzalez were able to promote Mexican music in entirely new forms in Los Angeles because they had daily contact with ordinary members of the Los Angeles Mexican community. Although they found tangible financial rewards in their efforts, they also served an important role in redefining Mexican culture in an American urban environment. The growth of a stable community of Mexican immigrants east of the Los Angeles River symbolized the important transformations that were occurring within the Chicano culture of Los Angeles during the 1920s. More integrated into the American consumer economy, Mexican immigrants nonetheless were adamant about controlling the direction of life in the barrios themselves. Increasingly they bought property and set down roots in Los Angeles. These communities, however, were not immune to the larger economic forces at work in the city. The barrio, despite its appearance as an isolated Mexican enclave, was still largely politically and economically controlled from the outside. 44 Certainly living within the barrio allowed Mexican immigrants a measure of control over their future. Yet economic and political developments outside the barrio continued to impinge on these decisionsimpact that the economic crisis of the next decade would have on Mexican immigrant families in Los Angeles. A decade of rapid demographic expansion, cultural growth, and adaptation was followed by a time of crisis. The Mexican/Chicano community in the city was put on the defensive as the events of the Great Depression rapidly altered the normal patterns of immigrant adaptation which had unfolded in previous decades. In their responses to this crisis, a new ethnic identity among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles took shape. Part4 Ironically, restoration was completed at the very moment when thousands of Mexicans were being prodded to repatriate. The lesson was clear: Mexicans were to be assigned a place in the mythic past of Los Angeles— one that could be relegated to a quaint section of a city destined to delight tourists and antiquarians. Real Mexicans were out of sight and increasingly out of mind. Physically farther away from the center of power, Mexican immigrants remained close enough to provide the cheap labor essential to industry and agriculture. Repatriation removed many, but others continued their struggle for survival east of the river. Their children, however, made it much harder for the Anglo American community to designate Mexicans as relics of the past. These young people, born and educated in the United States, demanded to be included in the city's future as Mexican Americans. Yet even more fundamental to the change in political direction was the rapid transformation of the population from a community dominated by the Mexican-born to one which centered around the American-born. The maturation of Mexican immigrant families in the United States, the cutoff of new Mexican immigration with the onset of the Depression, and the repatriation of thousands of Mexican nationals all contributed to the tilt toward second-generation dominance in the 1930s and 1940s. In the city of Los Angeles, the actual number of Mexican-born residents fell from 56,304 in 1930 to 38,040 in 1940, while the percentage of ethnically Mexican, but American-born members of the overall Chicano community skyrocketed from 45 percent to 65 percent over the same period. Thus, the Mexican American community in the southland developed its ideology of dual identity primarily among young people with working-class roots, if not working-class economic positions. It was this generation, one that came of age during the 1930s, that was destined to redefine being Mexican in Los Angeles. Having reshaped the contours of their American identity to include active union participation and political organizing as Mexican Americans, segments of the American government now sought to define this work as "un-American." Yet despite the McCarthyites' successful campaign to deport Luisa Moreno and other immigrant labor leaders, these young activists managed to root a new ethnic identity among the Mexican-origin population in Los Angeles, an identity which combined ethnicity with Americanism. These new "Mexican Americans," steeped in the strong base of working-class experience and Mexican traditions, immediately involved themselves in directions which reformulated the boundaries of Chicano culture and society.

W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, by David Levering Lewis. New York: Henry Holt,1993. 735 pp. $35.00, cloth.

Year: 1993 Field: Summary: Ultimately, this is not simply a book about a man and his times, but a saga of howone individual influenced his environment. Lewis depicts DuBois as a vital, enduringforce who held the high ground in the African American struggle for human and civilrights until reinforcements came in the form of men like Thurgood Marshall and MartinLuther King, Jr. He fully captures the essence of the DuBoisian vision in his chroniclesof DuBois's literary output from the earliest writings (e.g., The Philadelphia Negro, The Soulsof Black Folk, and Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil) through DuBois's quarter-century ofeditorship of The Crisis, and beyond (Black Reconstruction, Black Folk Then and Now, TheWorld and Africa). Lewis also reflects upon how African Americans prized the portrait ofthemselves served up by DuBois's writings. ewis's greatest challenges in W E. B. DuBois are to paint a clear picture of Du Bois theman and to present a convincing portrait ofthe importance of his work. In my estimation,Lewis succeeds far better at the first of thesetasks than at the second. Thesis: In a profound way, Lewis's book celebrates DuBois's ideal of education as a tool forAfrican American intellectual, personal, political, and economic empowerment. Other: Lewisnotes, Washington, whose promotion of practical and vocational education for Blacks waswidely underwritten by northern industrialists and philanthropists, "held that it wasdangerous conceit to expose black people to literature, history, philosophy, and 'deadlanguages,' thereby 'spoiling' them for the national order of southern society in whichtheir place was as voteless, farm hands, primarily school teachers and occasional mer-chants" (p. 215). Washington was vehemently opposed at the intellectual and philosophicallevel by the highly educated DuBois, who averred: "Race antagonism can only be stoppedby intelligence. It is dangerous to wait, it is foolish to hesitate. Let the nation immediatelygive generous aid to Southern common school education" (p. 221). As DuBois saw it:"Washington would have his people renounce three means of empowerment: politicalpower, civil rights, and higher education" (p. 288). From his own class perspective, DuBoisfelt that the African American educated elite, that "talented tenth" from whose ranksDuBois believed a critical mass of Black leadership and skilled professionals would rise,was being routed. Lewis's book reveals that DuBois so strongly believed in the role ofliberal arts education for African Americans that he engaged in a titanic power struggle with Washington, to the extent that he felt no hesitation about impugning Washington'scharacter in order to counter the prevailing tide Du Bois's tangled and sometimestroubled family roots is undeniably the great-est scholarly achievement of this volume. Lewisalso persuasively sketches Du Bois's impressiveacademic precocity from high school throughFisk, Harvard, and Berlin and successfully cap-tures Du Bois's deep frustration with the in-tense academic racism of the 1890s and 1900s,which left him with insultingly few employ-ment opportunities. Slowly at first, and then more frequently indiscussion of the years after Du Bois left his At-lanta University professorship in 1910 to jointhe staff of the nascent National Associationfor the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), Lewis focuses upon the unpleasantbut inescapable fact that Du Bois could bethoroughly dislikable. "He would never beable to make friends easily, especially withmen," Lewis observes early on, and even in hisgraduate school years, Du Bois "was so quickto anticipate condescension that chance inter-racial encounters usually fizzled." But it wasDu Bois's "deep-seated elitism" and "aristo-cratic proclivities," Lewis emphasizes, not ra-cial defensiveness, that characterized Du Bois's"perverse arrogance" and "imperial personali-ty." Sympathetic NAACP associate Mary WhiteOvington chided Du Bois for exhibiting such''an atmosphere of antagonism" that "evensome of your most intimate friends feel towardyou a mingled affection and resentment," andafter NAACP colleague Joel Spingarn rebukedDu Bois for being "childish and difficult," evenDu Bois himself acknowledged that his per-sonality was "a difficult one to endure. ewis does anexcellent job of detailing how important DuBois's creation and editing of the Crisis was instimulating black activism during the 1910s,but when it comes to Du Bois's scholarly andquasi-scholarly works such as The Souls ofBlack Folk (1903), Lewis's presentation oftenleaves much to be desired. Du Bois's reputa-tion and importance rest largely if not entirelyupon his published trove, and for Lewis tomake good on his grandiose estimation of DuBois's importance that is explicit in his sub-title, he needs to have devoted far more atten-tion to the content and impact of Du Bois'spublications than he does. Only in passingassertions "the ten or more years when the lifeand destiny of Africans in America merged in-separably with his own" does Lewis attemptto advance his "biography of a race" claim, andat more thoughtful moments Lewis speakswith acerbity of Du Bois's "certitude" that"there was no real distinction to be drawn be-tween what was important to him and whatwas of value to those he claimed to speak f Lewis nicely highlights the importance ofDu Bois's August 1897 Atlantic Monthly essay,"Strivings of the Negro People" (later re-worked as the opening chapter of Souls) in thedevelopment of Du Bois's national reputation,but his inadequate treatment of Souls itself,and especially of the public impact of Souls,is one of the most disappointing aspects of thisbook. Lewis asserts that the publication ofSouls "was one of those events epochally divid-ing history into a before and an after," but henot only fails to devote any attention what-soever to some of the most moving and sub-stantively intriguing sections of the book (suchas chapters 7 and 8 on Dougherty County,Georgia), he also fails to mount an adequateeffort to depict the book's "epochal" impact.Indeed, Lewis's footnotes seem to indicate thatrather than examining the contemporaneousreviews of Souls in full, he has relied insteadupon characterizations and quotations drawnfrom them by Du Bois scholar Herbert Ap-thek 1 cent:

The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina,1860-1870. By Julie Saville. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 221pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-521-36221-0.

Year: 1994 Field: Summary: Julie Saville's The Work of Reconstruction is a wonderfully nuanced look at the central economic transformation of emancipation. In a short work with insights far too numerous to detail here, Saville penetrates the daily concerns of former bondsmen and women without missing the large structures that shaped their experiences. For Saville, emancipation was a "dual struggle" in which ex-slaves collectively renounced both slaveholders' "personal sovereignty" and capitalist notions of freedom that stressed management and market forces. Freedpeople refused to sever politics and economics and envisioned "the planting of a new social order to be the work of Reconstruction" (p. 4).!! Thesis: , Saville argues, opened a "dualstruggle" for the former slaves: "They gradually mounted public and collective repudiations of the personal sovereignty on which their masters* and mistresses' rights to command human property had rested. At the same time, they challenged emergent claims that subjection to landowners* management and to the discipline of an abstract market constituted freedom" (p. 2). In theirdual struggle, Saville argues, the freedpersons really had a single goal. They sought to limit the power of their former owners in order to shape the nature of the free labor system that would emerge from the end of slavery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! stresses the ways in which slavery's variations and the war's exigencies shaped emancipation. For instance, while all slaves sought autonomy, the slave culture of the low country prompted freedpeople there to act more collectively than those in the interior. Once war disrupted plantation routines, she points out, slaves refugeed to the interior left the peculiar institute?tion differently than those left on the home place. land. Freed people rejected capitalistconcepts of ownership that saw land as an abstract, market commodity d, they linked land to community and desired to hold parcels withconnections to family history. Even when freedpeople lost access to land, they continued to fight for command of its products. She notes, for example, that freedpeople reorganized by age and kinship the demand for steady labor that northern entrepreneurs brought to the Sea Islands during the war. Other: Saville insists, ex-slaves acted as workers, formalizing "ongoing if unconscious attempts to forge a disciplined solidarityacross plantation boundaries" and styling "a corporate identity advanced incomparison with other American agricultural workers ofthe time" (p. 150).In local Republican clubs, ex-slaves turned kinship ties into political alliances, yet the organization of propertyless laborers exposed critical contradictions in free labor ideology and created conflict between work and politics. The "freedpeople andtheir employers," Saville insists, "did not measure freedom by the samegauge" (p. 70). Like many artisans and petty commodity producers in theNorth, the freedpersons resisted being transformed into a wage laborproletariat aville argues, the former slaves envisioned that their freedom wouldenable them to build a premodern, precapitalist economy and society. Thefreedpeople' s efforts to develop an understanding of this goal and how toachieve it, explain their actions during the war and after!!!! he families, maintained or reconstituted after emancipation, became thebasis for the "household economy" that former slaves considered necessary foreconomic independence. This notion of the household economy createdtensions between freedpeople and their employers over "work for an employerand work for the household" (p. 1 10), creating conflicts over tenure forms andover control over production. Employers, whatever the method used to payworkers (shares or money) sought to control work, but the former slavesadamantly opposed this: "freedpeople accepted neither money nor share wagesas precluding their control of production the negative side, she often portrays planters, militaryofficials, northern entrepreneurs, and Freedmen's Bureau agents as un-complicated oppressors. Sh 1 cent: labor hsoitry of reconstruction

THOMAS J. SUGRUE. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. (Princeton Studies in American Politics.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996. Pp. xviii, 375. $35.00

Year: 1996 Field: Summary: 1 cent: The Structure of Urban Crisis Thomas Sugrue's well-researched and incisive portrait of postwar Detroit offers readers important insights into debates about the contemporary urban crisis and its relationship to race and post-industrial decline.[1] Sugrue implores historians and social scientists to rethink their assumptions about the "origins" of the urban crisis. He persuasively argues that those phenomena usually associated with deteriorating cities--particularly de-industrialization and white flight--were not "responses" to the urban rebellions and social discord of the 1960s. Rather, they were the structural circumstances which "created" anger and frustration among African American residents and ultimately inspired the red hot summers of the 1960s. De-industrialization and white flight, Sugrue demonstrates, changed the contours of Detroit well before 1967. In fact, these processes began in full force in the 1940s, and by the 1950s they had already affected the city's geography and reshaped residents' understandings of race and urban politics. Sugrue is not the first historian to suggest that the structural roots of urban poverty and inequality precede 1960. However, his work goes beyond this relatively bland assertion. He demonstrates that plant closings, automation, chronic waves of unemployment, and the movement of industry to suburban, rural and other hard-to-unionize areas in the late 1940s and 1950s detrimentally effected the economies of urban centers in the North. Furthermore, he shows that neighborhood based struggles against residential integration exploded in these decades, arguing that in order to understand national politics in this era, historians need to spend more time focusing on local struggles. "Housing," Sugrue explains, "became a major arena for organized political activity in the 1940s, where Detroiters, black and white, fought a battle that would define Detroit politics for decades to follow" (55). Sugrue thus attacks the notion implicit in social scientists' accounts of urban decline that race relations in Northern cities were relatively harmonious before the black power movements and urban rebellions of the 1960s, arguing that explosions of racial antagonism were central to Detroit's culture as early as the Second World War. Sugrue separates his book into three sections: "Arsenal," "Rust," and "Fire." He uses the first section to lay out the economic, racial, and physical geography of the city in the 1940s and to expose its relationship to electoral politics, arguing that white Detroiters lost confidence in liberalism and the New Deal state as a result of their experiences "defending" their neighborhoods against black homebuyers. While Detroit had far more single family houses than any other large city, and while it was comparatively spread out, overcrowding and a rapidly expanding population put enormous pressure on Detroit's housing stock by the beginning of the Second World War. No areas were more crowded than black neighborhoods, whose boundaries were far better defined--and enforced--than any other part of the city. This strain forced black residents to push on the geographic constraints imposed on them by greedy landlords and a racist culture. Black Detroiters devised numerous strategies to manage their community's expansion. Sugrue argues that white Detroiters experienced these tactics as threats to their own economic and social stability. Any suggestion of imminent integration, he suggests, left white homeowners desperate, afraid that their single most important investment--their house--would become worthless. The redlining practices of the Federal Housing Authority reinforced and reflected white homowner's anxieties, for the FHA refused to insure mortgage loans to improve or purchase houses in black and integrated areas. Sugrue is quick to point out, however, that FHA redlining practices cannot fully explain the defensive hysteria, the white violence against black residents, or the lightening-paced abandonment of block-busted areas. These trends can only be understood as part of an emerging political identity based on white homeownership and forged in opposition to liberal politicians and the New Deal state. White homeowners, he suggests, understood the defense of their neighborhoods as a defense of their rights as citizens and their freedom as individuals to make choices about their lives. Thus, white homeowners developed a political language to define themselves as a political interest group whose struggles were antithetical to the rights of African Americans. Sugrue connects these trends to electoral politics, demonstrating that conservative politicians swept into the city's administration by deploying caricatures of racial anarchy, miscegenation, and integration as the decisive outcome of liberal policies. Sugrue further argues that this was the pre-history to Michigan voters' overwhelming support for George Wallace's presidential campaign in 1968 and 1972, and to the emergence of Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. In the second section of his book, which he calls "Rust," Sugrue chronicles the disparity between the experiences of Detroit residents and popular images of postwar affluence and harmony, paying particularly close attention to the disproportionate impact of economic restructuring on African Americans. Labor shortages combined with black activists' work on a local and national level forced employers to hire African Americans into previously segregated sections of factories during the Second World War. However, discrimination from the city's increasingly conservative unions meant that black workers had many fewer opportunities to achieve upward mobility than their white ethnic counterparts, even when Detroit's industrial economy was healthy. Thus, while the integration of factories and neighborhoods was not particularly numerically significant--the city remained largely segregated, and black workers continued to be shut out of the majority of well-paying jobs--Sugrue demonstrates that integration had an enormous impact on the attitudes of black and white residents and on their relationships with each other and the city. Black Detroiters, bolstered by civil rights successes and by the anti-fascist rhetoric of the war, successfully organized activist groups and displayed a new sense of entitlement to equality on the streets. White Detroiters took a defensive posture towards these moves by black residents, intent on holding on to whatever privileges they already enjoyed and seeing any gains made by Africans Americans as a threat to their own well-being. Sugrue's integration of economic and social history helps us better understand the decisions of Detroit residents in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, his attention to the material conditions within which Detroiters made choices about housing, politics, and race, sheds new light on the complicated relationship between white and black residents. In his third section, "Fire," he closely examines those white neighborhoods whose residents actively participated in Neighborhood Improvement Associations and which were the sites of violent clashes with black "pioneers." He concludes that the three most "defended neighborhoods"--those neighborhoods which mobilized the "fiercest resistance" to integration--shared certain demographic similarities. These three neighborhoods were all "bastions of single family homeownership" with "predominantly blue-collar populations" and "lower rates of female labor force participation than the city as a whole." They shared a "quasi-suburban atmosphere," were all "within a few miles of large auto plants" and "all but one was ethnically heterogeneous, with sizable Roman Catholic populations" (235-7). Furthermore, it was this segment of the white working class which was most actively defending its exclusive domain over the ever shrinking pool of skilled and semi-skilled work in the city's factories. This demographic portrait of white resistance is central to Sugrue's argument about the political shape of white homeownership for it supports his claim that the most virulent defenders of white neighborhoods were the relatively stable segments of Detroit's working class population. These residents, he explains, were on the "front lines" of grassroots struggles against integration. White working class homeowners did not have the same recourse to mobility as their middle class and less economically stable counterparts; they could neither afford to buy a new house--especially if the value of their current property were diminishing--nor could they simply pick up and abandon their homes. Sugrue thus concludes that white Detroit residents were increasingly disenchanted by the postwar liberal coalition because of their experiences and frustrations in their own neighborhoods. He argues that it is only after we understand the politics of homeownership in the 1940s and 1950s that we can understand why stable, white, blue collar workers came to equate liberalism and the New Deal state with blind allegiance to the rights of African Americans and with indifference to the plight of white workers. On the front lines of battles against integration, they saw themselves as the foot soldiers in a struggle for individual rights and for freedom from tyrannical and coercive liberal government. Sugrue frequently reminds his reader that deindustrialization, white flight and urban decline were neither "inevitable," nor "immutable." Rather, they were products of "political and economic decisions, of choices made and not made by various institutions, groups, and individuals" (11). Thus, part of the reason that Sugrue attempts to integrate structural analysis with social history is because he is trying to understand the relationship between the conditions which shape experiences and human agency. However, his interest in structure often comes at the expense of a more intimate understanding of how people experienced the statistical realities that he highlights and can make his portrait seem like it was the only possible avenue. For example, in the last section of his book, he outlines black residential mobility in the 1940s and 1950s, offering an extraordinarily compelling statistical look at white neighborhood defenders. While each of these three chapters is rich in detail and attentive to the complexity of Detroit's geography, they all offer a relatively anonymous portrait of the city and of political action. Thus, instead of animating the concerns of individuals Sugrue discusses the actions and anxieties of Detroit residents in the aggregate. Too often, the historical agents in his book are "African American leaders," "open housing advocates," "white church groups," "civil rights organizations," members of the "Catholic Interracial Council," etc. Thus, relatively face-less groups seem to be making decisions and holding opinions. This anonymity also means that the connections Sugrue makes between residents' experiences in their neighborhoods and their workplaces are based on statistical observations, since he does not follow any individuals from home to work. This makes it difficult to understand how white and black Detroiters understood the complicated connections between their work experiences and their experiences as urban residents. Furthermore, as other historians have noted, the work cultures in each factory were quite distinct, with different policies and practices about race and integration. But, because Sugrue talks about work experiences in the aggregate, he misses how different work cultures may have cultivated different relationships to integration at home. The categories that Sugrue develops and uses, and the groups that he discusses, are extremely useful for understanding the city and for making sense of urban politics and race relations. In fact, as I have suggested, Sugrue's insights are fresh, innovative and invaluable. However, it is hard to get a feel for grassroots politicization through the brief anecdotes that he offers which seem secondary to his structural observations. While Sugrue was clearly constrained by his sources, he could have spent more time animating the sources that he did find and building on these observations. While he does explain that "hundreds" of white residents wrote angry letters to politicians about integration, and cites some of these communications, he seems to use these sources only to support his larger observations, rather than finding new paradigms or ideas from the letters themselves. Furthermore, while he does use oral history collections housed in the Labor Archives at Wayne State University, he does not seem to have conducted his own interviews, and while it may have been difficult to find white "defenders" to talk about their experiences, he may have been able to find some contemporaries to discuss their impressions of the impact of these struggles on city politics. (It is difficult to be sure about this, since Princeton University Press did not include a bibliography). Ultimately, the strengths of Sugrue's book far outweigh its weaknesses. His meticulous structural analysis of Detroit's transformation from a wartime boomtown to a city struggling with postwar recession combined with his detailed account of white homeowners' often violent efforts to maintain control over the racial composition of their neighborhoods makes this an invaluable book for scholars interested in the twentieth century city. Private-sector discrimination was neither the reflection of the invisible hand of the free-market, nor the consequence of blacks acting in accordance with a preference to live in segregated neighborhoods. Rather, it was a direct consequence of a partnership between the federal government and local bankers and real estate brokers. In fact the boundaries between the public and private sectors were blurry in the postwar period. Leading developers, bankers, and real estate executives frequently traveled the road between private practice and government service (p. 43). Part two carries the provocative heading "Rust." Here, Sugrue's expertise in analyzing industrial history, and especially the history of organized labor, is most evident. Unlike others' accounts of the rapid growth and equally rapid demise of Detroit's industrial base, Sugrue weaves a powerful tale of discrimination in the labor market. He convincingly argues that this cannot be explained by any single theory but is the result of a complex layering of exclusion: by employers, by labor unions, by coworkers, and by consumers. Sugrue's key point is that this workplace discrimination had a direct impact on the city by holding down the wages, skills levels, and opportunities for an increasingly large proportion of the population. Working-class black workers and their families had fewer choices than their white counterparts, and their inability to move as jobs left the city for the suburbs had a pernicious effect on the central city. In the third and final part of his book, "Fire," Sugrue pulls together the impact of residence, status, and class on the increasingly black population of Detroit. He makes a convincing case that class separation within the black community stemmed from the 1950s or even earlier. He highlights the impact of real estate brokers on white flight and indicates that not all of these agents of community fear are white. Class division, organized and systematic white flight, and the inability of so many families to invest in much of Detroit's housing stock created the conditions that now characterize Detroit as the city of industrial waste.

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. By Tera W. Hunter. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. x, 311 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-89309-3)

Year: 1997 Field: Summary: Thesis: To Joy My Freedom is a new depanure in therecent written history of African Americanwomen. Here, working-class women take centerstage while black middle-class and elite womenare peripheral. For those who fear tackling thehistory of women whose personal records arefew to nonexistent, Tera W. Hunter's book isat once instructive on how to write such a his-tory and an example of a sophisticated blendof labor, social, and cultural history. To Joy My Freedom is a new depanure in therecent written history of African Americanwomen. Here, working-class women take centerstage while black middle-class and elite womenare peripheral. For those who fear tackling thehistory of women whose personal records arefew to nonexistent, Tera W. Hunter's book isat once instructive on how to write such a his-tory and an example of a sophisticated blendof labor, social, and cultural history. However, Hunter's reconstruction of blackwomen's struggles unfolds, not in the Southas a whole, but mostly in the context of Atlanta,distinguished by Hunter herself as the jewelin the New South's crown. Since the book drawsfew parallels to black women in other southerncities or in rural areas, we are left wonderinghow black women's lives in Atlanta comparedto those elsewhere. era W. Hunter has written a superb study of the livesand labors of some of the African-American womenwho struggled through the violent upheaval of eman-cipation and the crushing imposition of racial segrega-tion in the American South from the Civil War to the1920s. Hunter's sparkling prose, extensive reading of awide range of texts, and layered, complex and incisiveanalysis reveal the work of an impressively humane,imaginative, and mature historian. Her acute descrip-tions of local conditions and cogent insights into thelarger historical context stunningly illuminate the dy-namics of race, class, and gender as they played out onthe frightening, brutal terrain of southern segrega unter portrays the racism and male supremacy of thissystem in all its ugly details, while at the same timehelping us to understand, identify with, and celebratethe small victories and the larger triumph of blackcommunity survival that its supposed victims achieved.Her text constantly engages and re-engages the reader,helping us to imagine the lives of dozens of individualswho walk through the pages of this histo Other: 1 cent: Hunter argues that Atlanta's domestic "black female majority"tried to achieve self-sufficiency by demanding autonomy and fair wages. Black womenresisted employers by quitting, "pan-toting," and forming mutual aid societies, such asthe Atlanta Neighborhood Union. Employers responded by appealing to the Freedmen's Bureau in an attempt to halt black workers' mobility and the ensuing "revolvingdoor" frequented by dissatisfied workers. espite massive constraints, black women nonethe-less sought to create a space for themselves and theirfamilies to "enjoy freedom," and Hunter's success inhelping us to attain a new sense of how they did this isthe central achievement of her book!! In attempting togain some control over their own labor, black washer-women and domestic workers-the single largestgroup of workers in Atlanta-organized themselves toraise their wages through strikes and demonstrations.They boycotted the worst employers, appropriatedfood and clothing from the white folks' homes for theirown families, and set up individual businesses freefrom restrictive white oversight. By dressing up, ca-rousing in juke joints, singing and dancing, and amus-ing themselves in other ways, black working-classwomen produced a culture of pleasure that counteredthe efforts of employers to turn them into perpetualwork machines. While the black urban working classrefused to fit into the cultural paradigms of racializedcapitalism, the small black middle classes largelysought to emulate bourgeois respectability. Yet better-off and more educated African-Americans also strug-gled impressively to organize, sanitize, and clean upneighborhoods; to improve health conditions; to stopdrunkenness; and to encourage education, capital ac-cumulation, and family stabilit Hunter artfully weaves seemingly disparate andmundane daily survival struggles into a larger portraitthat shows how black women created a space forpersonal freedom, advanced their families' fortunes,and found meaning and pleasure amid the blight ofracism and poverty. She explains how working-classand poor people created a labor history based not somuch in the workplace or the union as in the commu-nity, the family, and in a people's culture. This study isa triumph of research, astute analysis, and engagingimagination that deserves to be widely read by studentsof African-American, labor, and women's studies andof American history. is insightful. Heretofore, historianshave been preoccupied with black middle-classwomen's concern with respectability and theways they linked their morality to racial pro-gress. Although Hunter makes passing refer-ence to middle-classconcernsand blackwomen'sreform efforts, her focus stays on the wage-earning woman's psychic need to own herself,to glorify and celebrate a standard of beautyand sexuality that wasdefined by her and com-pletely divorced from white and black middle-class control Community institutions provided a space for black workers to transform theirneighborhoods into sites where they could determine the quality and quantity of laborand leisure time and th Urban slaves in Atlanta set the stage for renegotiation of labor and social relations suring recnstuction and the New South Agebcy and domijnation in the new south atlanta -This agency and resistance to white labor upended tradiotanl class and economics in ATL -Aggressive action was need to secure rights as workers and human beings. Relied heavily on community -large scale politcal action amoiungst domestic labors w/ class consciounesss\ -WHITES CONTROLLED THE TYPES OF JOBS BUT NOT HOW THEY WERE PERFOMRED -RESULT WAS MORE JIM CORW AND VIOLENCE -NEW SOUTH BUILT ON THE BACKS OF EXPLOITED BLACK WOMEN -Black women built private places to help others in a public sphere defined by Jim CROW - GtHEY HAD FUN AND MADE SOCIAL PROGRESS AND COMMUNITY THAT WAY -Black racistly blamed and studied for Tbuberculsous - Uswd to hurt balck women labor itnrests -moved up north -237-238 is the biggest

The World Split Open: How the ModernWomen's Movement ChangedAmerica. By RuthRosen. (New York: Viking, 2000. xxxiv, 446pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-670-81462-8

Year: 2000 Field: Summary: he book jacket describes Ruth Rosen as an historian and journalist, a splitidentity that captures both the strengths and weaknesses of this new book.Based on two decades of research and interviews with leaders as well as follow-ers, The World Split Open presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of a movement thatspanned the country and eventually touched women of every class, religion,race, and ethnicity. Rosen begins her story with a discussion of the constraintson women's lives imposed by cold war politics. She then proceeds to trace therise of the National Organization for Women out of President John F. Kenne-dy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (1961-1963), the prolif-eration of younger women's groups, and the creation of a feminist culture thatenabled women to see injustice in experiences that had once been accepted.All of this is accomplished with balance and fairness to the bitterly competingfactions that the movement produced. Rosen shows how a welter of feministgroups posed basic challenges to thinking about gender but at the same timeallowed an obsessive fear of hierarchy and power to undermine their effective-ness. In the book's most interesting section, she reveals how the Federal Bureauof Investigation contributed to this process through its confused efforts to infil-trate and destroy the movement whose subversive force the agency suspectedbut never began to understand. Throughout, Rosen seeks to explain how thewomen's movement changed America. Thesis: Ruth Rosen has written a deeply researchedand engaging, but also highly selective, historyof second-wave feminism. Because the ideasand experiences of young, white, educated,left-leaning women-such as Rosen, herselfan activist in the Berkeley area-drive the nar-rative, a more instructive subtitle would be"How a Critical Element of the Women'sMovement Helped Change America."Rosen paints a picture of the 1950s evenbleaker than Betty Friedan's. "A virulent strainof antifeminism saturated the culture," shewrites, creating bitterness, depression, and a"private nightmare" for more than a fewwomen, at least according to their daughters,themselves experiencing "quiet desperation."Although she follows the standard narrativeexplaining the origins of two feminist streamsin the mid-1960s, Rosen offers important re-visions. She delineates differences betweenwomen involved in the National Organizationfor Women (Now) and those in the localwomen's liberation groups, while also demon-strating that they do not neatly fit the catego-ries of liberal versus radical or integrationistversus transformative. Moreover, she docu-ments the working-class origins and race-con-scious perspective of many activists in bothwings and notes that NOW "targeted the prob-lems of ordinary working women, not those ofprofessional women." hroughout the 1960s and 1970s the women's movement dramatic changed cultureand attitudes in America. Ruth Rosen's book, The World Split Open: how the modernwomen's movement changed America, focuses on the 'hidden injuries of sex' and mis-construed 'personal' problems—abortion, prostitution, rape, sexual violence, andpornography—that eventually became political issues. Rosen explains how con-straints were imposed on women's daily lives due to Cold War politics. Furthermore,the book emphases how technology and science played a critical role in the move-ment—primarily due to the limitations and possibilities of the 'Pill' and abortion Perhaps most startling is Rosen's investigation regarding the FBI's sur-veillance, Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), of feminists in the1970s. Agents infiltrated and spied on feminist activists and organizations,while characterizing the women as 'paranoid'. The FBI was able to recruitwomen informants to attend meetings and report back to them with information.The government was convinced that feminists—those campaigning for equality—were intimidating enough to monitor. Other: Perhaps most startling is Rosen's investigation regarding the FBI's sur-veillance, Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), of feminists in the1970s. Agents infiltrated and spied on feminist activists and organizations,while characterizing the women as 'paranoid'. The FBI was able to recruitwomen informants to attend meetings and report back to them with information.The government was convinced that feminists—those campaigning for equality—were intimidating enough to monitor. Rosen uses the 'feminine mystique' to measure the progress women made regard-ing strictures. Looking at the various ways in which the mystique was prolonged andcelebrated by society, Rosen argues 'that American superiority rested on its boomingconsumer culture and rigidly defined gender roles' (p. 10). By applauding women'srole as wife, mother, and purchaser of consumer goods, the responsibility of a house-wife became professionalized: 'turned the act of consumption into a patriotic act'(p. 14). She goes on to explain how the famous 'kitchen debate' between Vice Presi-dent Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev in 1959 where Nixon'boasted of the labor-saving devices that gave American women time to cultivatetheir charms as wives and to care for their children' solidifies her argument (p. 11).Rosen clearly points out that a variety of women, from various walks of life, tookpart in a multi-faceted movement that brought significant changes to all women—debunking the myth that the American women's movement was supported byupper-echelon white women who wanted sex and careers, while working women,especially those of color, rejected it as irrelevant to their lives. 1 cent: Feminsim made strides through its ability to become indiviudal and coumser the superwoman over the sisterhood; having it qall /This is a collectivist and labour focused work //history from the bottom up //focused on the conformity of the world the feminsits were in //woman started to use their identity as a cudgel against the opprwesive soceiety //the daughters of the women of the 50s needed something different //women insipried by the crm //2nd wave comes from these factors //lliberalism is limited //women used labor, cared about minority women, and etc. to get their point across //the liberal left that was anti war and pro crm failed women //The histoircal connection between sex and reproduction had ruptured and that was big //The revolution ofn the pill led to the male sexual revoltuion of sexplotiation //this leads to the sexual objectification of women like miss america //lgbt history //the recoil from hetoroseual was severe //the state had to dstep in a defend women from rape which was somewhat a biproduct of the pill and stuff //the superwoman kills second wave

Bruce J. Schulman. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Free Press, 2001. xvii + 334 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $26.00

Year: 2001 Field: Summary: Thesis: According to Bruce Schulman, the American public largely views the 1970s as a "lost" decade, remembered more for cultural icons such as pet rocks, Saturday Night Fever, and platform shoes than for any events of significance. In The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, Schulman aims to correct that view, arguing that the decade was more than a wasteland of silly pop culture fads caught between the social activism of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s nstead, Schulman, the director of American Studies at Boston University, draws from a wide range of primary and secondary sources to argue that the decade transformed American politics and culture in two critical—and several lesser—respects. Most significantly, the South "rose again." During the 1970s, Schulman explains, the balance of political power shifted to thriving Sunbelt states in the South and the West and "the South's historic policy prescriptions—low taxes and scant public services, military preparedness and a preference for state and local government over federal supremacy—came to define the national agenda" An explosion of public spirituality accompanied this political and ideological shift, especially as conservative Christians emerged as an effective influence outside time-honored denominational spheres. In addition, a wide array of popular forms of entertainment, all of which had their roots in southern culture, gained broad appeal outside the region. According to Schulman, this "southernization" of the United States was closely related to the second great shift of the decade: the triumph of the market as "the favored means for personal liberation and cultural revolution" (p. 257). The 1970s saw a marked decline in trust in the federal government, as many Americans turned instead to the private sphere and what Schulman calls "an unusual faith in the market" (p. 5). In addition to these two major shifts, Schulman also identifies several other important developments during the decade—such as the rise of feminism, the development of new voices in music and film, the [End Page 333] growth of identity movements around ethnicity, sexuality, race, and age, and the rise of New Age religious ideas and personal growth—that do not always jibe with his larger conclusions. To his credit, however, Schulman creates a coherent and lively synthesis without ignoring the sometimes messy contradictions of the period. For Schulman, "Nixon's indirect, underhanded strategy" was an ongoing and calculated effort to create a new majority coalition in the United States. Nixon paid close attention to political consultant Kevin Phillips's book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which recognized the emerging importance of the Sunbelt region in national politics. Nixon also learned to broaden the Republican appeal with a message that would resonate with traditionally a Democratic Catholic population, or what Pat Buchanan called "the forty-seven-year-old Dayton housewife," particularly around social issues of racial unrest, rapid social change, and "safety." By attacking black militants, forced integration, and students protesters, Nixon sought to reshape national consensus and proved to be a critical player in the "southernization" of national politics. Nixon's policies and speeches signaled the beginning of a decisive transformation in American public life, redirecting political power away from the traditional eastern establishment and the Democratic party. he concept that southern attitudes came to dominate national policy debates is not new, but Schulman explores the concept of "southernization" beyond its political impact, looking at emerging cultural and social manifestations, particularly in a chapter on the "reddening" of America. Most fascinating in this chapter is Schulman's argument about the meaning of disco, which he claims "held out the allure of integration" to disenfranchised groups, especially African Americans, Latinos, gay men, and urban youth and allowed for easy crossover to white audiences eager to shake their booties (and to white artists ready to capitalize on the genre's success). This throwback quality "celebrated the last gasp of an idealistic, unrealistic innocence in race relations that American politics and most popular cultural expression had cast aside" (p. 74). For Schulman, the intense hatred of disco signaled the final end of a commitment to liberal universalism. Instead, he argues, the 1970s proved to be the moment when many citizens, not only minorities, turned toward a politics of identity which emphasized the wonders of diversity, but made it more difficult to find common ground between Americans. Other: According to Schulman, Watergate provided a boost to conservatism and conservative Republicans because the basic lesson was that Americans could not trust their government. Despite the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, the scandal proved a powerful argument for a smaller federal government and, combined with Nixon's "nut-cutting" measures to trim the federal budget, lay the groundwork for the tax revolts of the late 1970s, the rise of an organized and powerful New Right, and a public ready to hear Ronald Reagan's message of "small government" in 1980. [End Page 336] n addition, the book is hampered by its focus on "rehabilitating" the image of the 1970s. By concentrating on a decade history approach, Schulman sells his analysis short. Though he very effectively demonstrates that there were important political and cultural developments during the period, it is never clear why readers should care about the 1970s as a cohesive decade, or why it should be important to argue that the seventies had a particular "legacy." Similarly, I found myself arguing with both the starting and ending points of what Schulman labels the seventies—why do the sixties end in 1968 while the eighties do not begin until 1985? These are quibbles that would never have come up if the book had focused on its analytical themes rather than working hard to prove that the seventies were important as a discrete unit. Indeed, Schulman's forceful arguments about "southernization" and a growing faith in the forces of the market sometimes get lost in the need to prove that the seventies "mattered," that they were equal in stature to the mythic 1960s. 1 cent: Efvertything up top + acknolwdgement that this was a gwneration that eschewed the community for the consumerist capialst self Cultuyral hoatry approach Ethnciity become indivudulaized too 3 The subelt won and beccame the most oowerful poltical force which sought to eroded american public life as it was what allowed the sixtie to happen 6 Conservatism was the answe to the politcal turnoiil, appatently Reagsan is the culmination;' Period of upheavel but just not as dramtic or maybe we haven't triest to make it so ++southernixation and the forgotten decade and cultral history and the new right and infivusaldim and the disulltion of a untied public sphere.

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America. By Alice Kessler-Harris (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001) 374 pp. $35.0

Year: 2001 Field: womenz Summary: In 1984, three employees of Johnson Controls, a manufacturer of automobile batteries, filed a Title VII sex-discrimination suit against their employer. Batteries contain lead, which irreparably harms fetuses and reduces the reproductive abilities of both men and women. Johnson had a "fetal-protection" policy that barred women from occupations that exposed them to unacceptable levels of lead unless they were infertile. In International Union v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187 (1991), the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision that Johnson's policy was discriminatory. Modern labor law required that firms heed the discrimination repercussions of their employment policies. The Court thereby reversed its long history of protecting women and the unborn. Thesis: In Pursuit of Equity examines the ways that the state created a gendered (and racist) legislative agenda. The ostensible purpose of the legislation was often to protect women, their children, and the family. But its real purpose, according to Kessler-Harris, was to keep women in the home and protect jobs for men. ly calls "the gendered imaginary"-that she argu most white American men and women shared for much of the twentieth centu relating to gender, work, family, and rights. In this mindset, men were rights-beari individuals and one of the rights that marked them as men was the right to wor Women, on the other hand, were defined not as persons, but as family member Their wage work-even in the early twentieth century, millions of American wom en were engaged in wage work for some part of their lives-was seen as a mat of family necessity, not individual right. This part of the argument will sound miliar to readers; Kessler-Harris relies here on both her own previous work a that of many other scholars. And, indeed, as she acknowledges, the gendered im inary was not that far from the reality of most white men's and women's lives early twentieth-century America. During the last quarter of the nineteenth centu and the first two decades of the twentieth century, the gendered imaginary w inscribed in state protective labor legislation and effectively locked into place b the Supreme Court through 14th Amendment Privileges and Immunities and Eq Protection jurisprudence, in cases like Bradwell and MullerThe argument is still on familiar ground at this point. It's what comes next th makes the gendered imaginary and its persistence so troubling. As Kessler-Harr explains, the programs of the New Deal in the 1930s-including protections f labor organization, expanded maximum hours legislation with provisions for ov time pay, unemployment and old-age insurance-effectively expanded the "right of American citizenship. In contrast to European welfare provision, in the Ame ican model these new rights, what Kessler-Harris aptly labels "economic citize ship," were tied not to families, or individuals, but to a particular definition of wor White men effectively became the beneficiaries of expanded rights white women and the vast majori "workers," or not the right kind same rights. Moreover, law sancti tices that continued to exclude wo rightsyielding domains of "work" ried women and married women w 1940s and 1950s The heart of the book lies in Kessler-Harris's skillful uncovering of the power of this racialized, gendered imaginary (man = worker/individual; women = wife and mother/family member) in the crafting and administration of social policy over the full sweep of the twentieth century in everything from labor policy, to social security, to tax law. For example, the reader listens in as members of Congress rationalized why married men should receive higher old-age benefits under Social Security than single men; why the widow should receive less than the single man ("she is used to doing her own housework whereas the single man has to go out to a restaurant") (137); and, why she shouldn't continue to receive benefits if she remarried (lest widows become a "prize" for enterprising m With breathtaking clarity, Kessler-Harris analyzes the myriad ways in which what she calls the "gendered imagination" shaped twentieth-century social policy. Most Americans, men and women alike, envisioned a nation populated by idealized families headed by (white) male breadwinners, ignoring evidence to the contrary. They constructed women primarily in relation to families, as wives and mothers who deserved protection but not individual economic rights. The gendered imagination justified a sex-segregated labor market and the attendant miseries it visited on female wage earners: low pay, limited opportunities, and exclusion from skilled trades and prestigious professions. More important, positioning women within imaginary families categori-cally denied them "economic citizenship." Conferring the right to work in one's chosen pursuit, economic citizenship (a revivified version of the nineteenth-century "family wage") also offered "customary and legal acknowledgment of personhood" and key political rights. Kessler-Harris's signal contribution is to show not merely, as have several scholars, that social policies were gendered. But by granting economic citizenship to white male breadwinners, such policies implicitly and sometimes explicitly rendered others less than "persons" under the law. This definition of citizenship fixed a pattern that discouraged alternative visions of justice and fairness, for it encouraged the dispossessed to voice their claims in the language of individual economic rights. Indeed, Kessler-Harris argues, the importance placed on economic citizenship does much to explain the distinctive character of the American welfare state, a polity in which the status of "worker" entitles one to a generous array of social benefits.!!!! Other:These privileges are just a few of those that define economic citizenship: the independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity. 1 cent:definition of citizenship rights, which includes the civil, political, and social arenas, Kessler-Harris argues that more at- tention must be paid to what she calls "economic citizenship." The as- sumption that women, as mothers or potential mothers, ought to be treated differently from men when it came to assuring work rights un- dermined their ability to secure not only civic rights but social and political ones as well. For, as she tells us, without the ability to be self- supporting, one cannot "attain that independent and relatively autono- mous status that provides full access to power and influence that defines participation in democratic society" (p. 12 ' This book aims to explore how particular ideas of fairness became embedded in American social institutions in the twentieth century. It investigates how these institutions came to reflect claims to normalcy and to shape them. It argues that gender— racialized gender— constitutes a central piece of the social imaginary around which social organization and ideas of fairness are constructed and on which social policies are built. 4 And it tells the story of how gendered habits of mind— which I sometimes call "the gendered imagination"—framed discussions of what was possible and shaped the boundaries of the politically plausible. I do not argue here that gender is the only, or even the most important, source of legislative change. Instead, I suggest that, at a moment in time when the federal government assumed greater authority over the distribution of resources, gender constituted a crucial measure of fairness and served a powerful mediating role. Appeals to gender could enhance the public appetite for some policies and silence resistance to others. They legitimized, rationalized, and justified policies that could and did serve many other ends, including maintaining a stratified and racialized social order and undercutting radical threats. Gender seems to me always to contain hierarchical racial and class components just as the reverse is always true. I cannot imagine a gender system that is not already racialized nor one that is not rooted in class; b Rather, it suggests that the voices of female wage earners, especially those who questioned the dogma of the family wage, had minimal impact on public policy. Kessler-Harris readily acknowledges that she focuses on the "central actors," men and women in a position to influence social policy, and that she emphasizes "not outlying thought but the mainstream." When she moves beyond policy circles, she emphasizes—perhaps overempha-sizes—her subjects' conservatism. It is patently unfair of me to ask her to have written a different book. Still, I wonder what a fuller account of what "most people" thought would reveal. I suspect that it would verify the fundamentals of Kessler-Harris's argument—that the gendered imagination conceded to demographic realities only when overwhelmed by them. I also suspect that it would reveal more subtle negotiations between husbands and wives, breadwinners and "dependents" than In Pursuit of Equity's broader sweep is able to capture. There is also another story that might have been explored: the impact of the continued erosion of the bases for economic citizenship by union busting, deindustrialization, and downsizing, processes that render the claims even of white men increasingly tenuous. In chapter 1, I outline the particular gendered conception of rights to work that emerges in the turn-of-the-century United States and persists during the economic depression of the 1930s. In the early twentieth century, newly adopted social policies like protective labor legislation for women only tended to institutionalize and reward familiar gender patterns. Protective labor legislation channeled popular conceptions of social order (men in the workforce and women in the home) into rules and regulations that affirmed the sexually segmented structure of the labor force. As we shall see, this effectively reinforced family relationships; not coincidentally, it expanded the expectations of consumers and focused racial antagonisms as well. This chapter traces the gendered nature of rights to work as they emerged in late nineteenth-century ideas around masculinity and the family. It describes how these putative rights came to mark the independent status that provided entry to fuller economic citizenship and signaled access to the political process. And it suggests how, in consequence, rights to work became carefully gendered, a corollary of widespread beliefs in the ideology of family and in the necessary privileges of the male breadwinner in whose justice women and men concurred. I argue that by the early twentieth century few people believed that women had rights to work in the same sense as men and that, as a result, women's constitutional liberties were severely circumscribed. Women, in the eyes of many, deserved state protection for fair and equitable treatment at work (equal wages, suitable working conditions, reasonable hours) precisely because they possessed few rights to work. In chapters 2 and 3, I pursue changing conceptions of fairness in the unfolding social policies of the New Deal period. I pause at length in the depression because the development of national welfare systems— using welfare in its broadest sense— has exercised such a powerful influence in the modern world, encompassing the lives and influencing the expectations of ordinary people in every industrial country. In the United States, the transfer of authority and voice from state governments to a federal bureaucracy beginning in the 1930s provides a pivotal moment for charting gendered habits of mind and observing how they shift over time. In order to illuminate the broad influence of what is considered fair, I have chosen key policies in which women were not the particular objects of legislation, and sometimes only its peripheral subjects: these include fair labor standards and unemployment and old age insurance. We will see in these chapters how ideas about which wage earners constituted "workers" shaped the differential access of all citizens to important social benefits. Because the conception of "work" encompassed primarily the jobs done by white males, that of "worker" excluded black men almost as fully as it omitted employed women of any race. This chapter traces the gendered nature of rights to work as they emerged in late nineteenth-century ideas around masculinity and the family. It describes how these putative rights came to mark the independent status that provided entry to fuller economic citizenship and signaled access to the political process. And it suggests how, in consequence, rights to work became carefully gendered, a corollary of widespread beliefs in the ideology of family and in the necessary privileges of the male breadwinner in whose justice women and men concurred. I argue that by the early twentieth century few people believed that women had rights to work in the same sense as men and that, as a result, women's constitutional liberties were severely circumscribed. Women, in the eyes of many, deserved state protection for fair and equitable treatment at work (equal wages, suitable working conditions, reasonable hours) precisely because they possessed few rights to work. I have gratefully built on this work and much more as I seek to discover how commitment to a particular gendered vision has informed ideas of what people can and ought to do. 38 And yet I seek to turn it on its head, altering our perspective from the rights denied to women when they are deemed to be primarily attached to the household to those that are meant to accrue to men and women as part of the obligation to engage in wage work. goals. By providing economic security in particular ways and to particular people, old age insurance defined a new category of economic citizenship; at the same time, as this chapter reveals, it fueled the desires of the excluded for fuller participation Chapter 4 explores the notions of fairness embedded in early federal income tax policy. It focuses on the discussion of a mandatory joint income tax for married couples that consumed much energy in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally achieved a compromise resolution in 1948. The discussion captured a sharp division between those who assumed that male-headed families constituted a desirable norm and those who preferred more flexibility in their definitions of family. And it enables us to see how readily words like breadwinner, household, and family assumed political meanings. This chapter traces the conflict over who should pay the federal income tax and suggests how particular gendered imagery became the measure of fairness in the tax code. After reading Alice Kessler-Harris's important new book, I realize that my students' pronouncements reflect more than inattention or historical amnesia. The problem was not that they refused to believe that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women worked. Rather, it was that they had difficulty conceiving of past women as "real" workers. Rather, it suggests that the voices of female wage earners, especially those who questioned the dogma of the family wage, had minimal impact on public policy. Kessler-Harris readily acknowledges that she focuses on the "central actors," men and women in a position to influence social policy, and that she emphasizes "not outlying thought but the mainstream." When she moves beyond policy circles, she emphasizes—perhaps overempha-sizes—her subjects' conservatism. It is patently unfair of me to ask her to have written a different book. Still, I wonder what a fuller account of what "most people" thought would reveal. I suspect that it would verify the fundamentals of Kessler-Harris's argument—that the gendered imagination conceded to demographic realities only when overwhelmed by them. I also suspect that it would reveal more subtle negotiations between husbands and wives, breadwinners and "dependents" than In Pursuit of Equity's broader sweep is able to capture. There is also another story that might have been explored: the impact of the continued erosion of the bases for economic citizenship by union busting, deindustrialization, and downsizing, processes that render the claims even of white men increasingly tenuous. In chapter 1, I outline the particular gendered conception of rights to work that emerges in the turn-of-the-century United States and persists during the economic depression of the 1930s. In the early twentieth century, newly adopted social policies like protective labor legislation for women only tended to institutionalize and reward familiar gender patterns. Protective labor legislation channeled popular conceptions of social order (men in the workforce and women in the home) into rules and regulations that affirmed the sexually segmented structure of the labor force. As we shall see, this effectively reinforced family relationships; not coincidentally, it expanded the expectations of consumers and focused racial antagonisms as well. This chapter traces the gendered nature of rights to work as they emerged in late nineteenth-century ideas around masculinity and the family. It describes how these putative rights came to mark the independent status that provided entry to fuller economic citizenship and signaled access to the political process. And it suggests how, in consequence, rights to work became carefully gendered, a corollary of widespread beliefs in the ideology of family and in the necessary privileges of the male breadwinner in whose justice women and men concurred. I argue that by the early twentieth century few people believed that women had rights to work in the same sense as men and that, as a result, women's constitutional liberties were severely circumscribed. Women, in the eyes of many, deserved state protection for fair and equitable treatment at work (equal wages, suitable working conditions, reasonable hours) precisely because they possessed few rights to work. In chapters 2 and 3, I pursue changing conceptions of fairness in the unfolding social policies of the New Deal period. I pause at length in the depression because the development of national welfare systems— using welfare in its broadest sense— has exercised such a powerful influence in the modern world, encompassing the lives and influencing the expectations of ordinary people in every industrial country. In the United States, the transfer of authority and voice from state governments to a federal bureaucracy beginning in the 1930s provides a pivotal moment for charting gendered habits of mind and observing how they shift over time. In order to illuminate the broad influence of what is considered fair, I have chosen key policies in which women were not the particular objects of legislation, and sometimes only its peripheral subjects: these include fair labor standards and unemployment and old age insurance. We will see in these chapters how ideas about which wage earners constituted "workers" shaped the differential access of all citizens to important social benefits. Because the conception of "work" encompassed primarily the jobs done by white males, that of "worker" excluded black men almost as fully as it omitted employed women of any race. Yet, through higher prices, all the excluded contributed indirectly to paying the costs of these special benefits without accruing the social rights they conferred. Ultimately, then, the racialized and gendered language of work created inequities, isolating the excluded, placing them in dependent positions in relation to the state, and devaluing their rights. This chapter traces the gendered nature of rights to work as they emerged in late nineteenth-century ideas around masculinity and the family. It describes how these putative rights came to mark the independent status that provided entry to fuller economic citizenship and signaled access to the political process. And it suggests how, in consequence, rights to work became carefully gendered, a corollary of widespread beliefs in the ideology of family and in the necessary privileges of the male breadwinner in whose justice women and men concurred. I argue that by the early twentieth century few people believed that women had rights to work in the same sense as men and that, as a result, women's constitutional liberties were severely circumscribed. Women, in the eyes of many, deserved state protection for fair and equitable treatment at work (equal wages, suitable working conditions, reasonable hours) precisely because they possessed few rights to work. I have gratefully built on this work and much more as I seek to discover how commitment to a particular gendered vision has informed ideas of what people can and ought to do. 38 And yet I seek to turn it on its head, altering our perspective from the rights denied to women when they are deemed to be primarily attached to the household to those that are meant to accrue to men and women as part of the obligation to engage in wage work. goals. By providing economic security in particular ways and to particular people, old age insurance defined a new category of economic citizenship; at the same time, as this chapter reveals, it fueled the desires of the excluded for fuller participation Chapter 4 explores the notions of fairness embedded in early federal income tax policy. It focuses on the discussion of a mandatory joint income tax for married couples that consumed much energy in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally achieved a compromise resolution in 1948. The discussion captured a sharp division between those who assumed that male-headed families constituted a desirable norm and those who preferred more flexibility in their definitions of family. And it enables us to see how readily words like breadwinner, household, and family assumed political meanings. This chapter traces the conflict over who should pay the federal income tax and suggests how particular gendered imagery became the measure of fairness in the tax code. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to issues of equal employment policy in the 1950s and 1960s and the reframed discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. In this period of rapid and dramatic change in women's workforce roles, older notions of protection for women workers began to crumble and occupational segregation by sex became the target of attack. We observe how the battle for access to jobs generates sharp divisions over gender roles and how a bitter debate over the meanings of independence and equality comes to a head. We watch how, informed by the African-American movement for civil rights, a new consensus emerges among women leaders. duces powerful political arguments for equality but only faltering public commitment to the social changes that gendered equity implies. Not everyone was convinced, even by the early 1970s, that what was fair (politically necessary) was socially desirable. In this chapter we watch as the gendered imagination grapples with demographic changes until, by the early 1960s, the notion of sex discrimination begins to inflect the vocabulary of ordinary women. Bound by legislative and customary restrictions that continued to limit her economic choices and hedge her expectations, the 1950s white woman, like the female electrical workers who reluctantly gave up their jobs, hesitated when asked whether she was a victim of sex discrimination. Asked the parallel question, her African-American counterpart immediately acknowledged race discrimination. A decade later, astute wage earners could clearly see gendered limits that had earlier passed unnoticed, and they particularly noted how effectively the growing civil rights movement deployed the language of discrimination. Still, discrimination against women remained a contested venue, lacking the powerful cudgel of individual rights to give it force. The lesson should not be lost on us. For generations, American women lacked not merely the practice but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom. Neither most men nor most women could fully conceive a genderencompassing form of individualism; nor could they imagine a right to work that was not conditioned by gender. In the early and mid-twentieth century these gendered habits of mind, these notions of fairness, were inscribed into the social policies that have framed our lives. They were then, and still remain, contested. But no one who has lived through the end of the twentieth century would argue that the gendered imagination remains what it once was. Our own social policies, like the proposals of the Taiping rebels, have carried a complicated and continually changing set of messages, which have themselves participated in the changes that engulf our lives. Uncovering the web of discourse in which they have been embedded may be a first step toward admitting women to full economic citizenship and ultimately to altering the meaning of democratic participation. This book tells a tiny piece of the story of how gender has shaped the rules by which we live and leads us into the moment of change in the 1970s that exposed an outdated gender system and placed women on the threshold of economic citizenship. Keeping discrimination within this narrow framework, equal pay for equal work effectively distinguished rights at work from any effort to end discrimination in jobs and occupations. And yet it had an important effect in opening up a dialogue about justice for women and revealing to an increasingly impatient network of political activists and women workers how the boundaries of justice remained gendered. It also helped to bring the word discrimination into more general usage with respect to sex. A year later, when Title VII entered the public vocabulary, it built on this stilted discussion to alter forever perceptions of sex discrimination and provide the basis of a full-scale legal assault on that notion. This chapter illuminates how the sometimes ironic and always complicated effects of these powerful shifts in imagination intersected with policies that affected race and class to set the stage for the dramatic changes that would come in the 1970s. à ERA them. They warn us that constraints on the choices women and men make govern the possibilities for securing equity and achieving the goal of full economic independence for women. And they suggest the complicated ways that informal as well as formal rules constrain options in tension with a historical process that has yet to reach its conclusion.

Estelle B. Freedman. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future ofWomen. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. 446 pp. Appendices, Bibliographicnotes, index

Year: 2002 Field: Summary: The most impressive feature of Freedman's scholarship,however, is linking such developments with the international dimensions of fem-inism. Drawing upon various disciplines such as anthropology, religious studiesand economics, Freedman traces how patriarchy was established and then chal-lenged in Western and non-Western societies. The longer historical perspective, crucial to Freedman's argument, shows how capitalism, individual rights, and representative government "create both the need for feminism and the means to sustain it" (2). The revelation in this book is that feminism has not spread from the United States outward, but from place to place, becoming more flexible and inclusive as it goes. As Freedman brilliantly shows, each time feminism is reframed to meet a group's needs, it nourishes another group. A century ago, Russian Socialists moving to New York brought their communitarian feminism; today Latin American feminists bring lessons in family and community, while people of color expose the complex intersections between gender and race. ith this expansive vision, Freedman wisely chooses to speak of "feminisms" in the plural, highlighting distinct timelines that often run at odds. Decades ago, "some suffragists even tried to bolster their unpopular cause by exploiting racial stereotypes directed at both African Americans and the masses of Catholic and Jewish In spite of disheartening antifeminism and crude prejudice, despite disinformation about feminists blaming white men and disdaining traditional women, despite U.S. opposition to U.N. charters protecting women, or past and present rollbacks of women's rights around the world—feminism keeps spreading globally. As Estelle Freedman argues in No Turning Back, "a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth" persists in expanding (7). "At a time when it would be easy to dwell on resistance to feminism, we need a longer historical perspective. . . . I find that the prospects for women have never been brighter" (xiii) Thesis: Other: The book never backs away from "political" issues that divide women and feminists, such as race and nationality, or reproduction. In many examples these divisions strengthen feminism: for instance, Native Americans placed sterilization abuse on the map of reproductive rights (chap. 10). Other divisions run geologically deep—divisions over racial privileges, pornography, colonial legacies, and reproductive technology—but Freedman works hard for balance. For instance, she says, "Recent medical technologies offer greater reproductive choices, but they also have the potential to exploit women's reproductive labor" (230). Although she casts a doubtful eye on reproductive technology, implying that infertility should concern feminists less than other reproductive problems, here as elsewhere the book resists one-sidedness, achieving astounding clarity and tolerance. . At first they may find it hard to believe there is no turning back—especially when the book proves that women worldwide face gender violence and reproductive strangleholds, that men still insist on "the right to discipline women and children" (279), that "one in five women" have experienced rape or attempted rape in our country (285), that 84 percent of American counties provide no abortion, and abortion seems to threaten "those who have depended on men to take care of them" (241). Read the book. The larger perspective that distinguishes it shows feminist pressure bringing concrete results. On one issue alone, the treatment [End Page 167] of female bodies, remarkable results are analyzed in the book: medical coverage for childbirth, inclusion of women in clinical drug trials, government funding for breast cancer research, attention to AIDS, over half the world's population living in countries permitting abortion (237), most Americans calling themselves pro-choice (leaving our present regime out of step), the International Criminal Court prosecuting "not only rape but also sexual slavery, and forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and forced sterilization" (277). Even the certainties of biological difference have broken down. Freedman insists that "a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, might best describe the range of human sexes" (204), since four percent of human bodies contain both sexes, and since female athletes have narrowed the gender gap in speed, as "their access to athletic training did the trick" (226). There is no turning back because political systems on every continent now must "take into account once-private issues such as abortion, domestic violence, and lesbian rights" (327). "Feminists from Beijing to Cairo to Moscow now argue that addressing women's special health needs can vastly improve the quality of life and help reduce the economic inequalities among regions" (220). It is worth rereading that sentence to absorb the amplitude of Freedman's argument. Wherever feminism redefines standard prejudice, violence, or neglect toward female bodies, nothing in a society stays the same. With this book in hand, anyone can convince others that "historic changes in labor, reproduction, and culture provide a momentum powerful enough to survive a recurrent antifeminism," and that feminism grows stronger by aligning gender injustice with "inequalities of race, class, and nation" (346). What makes the book a must-read, for policy-makers and homemakers alike, is the depth of research proving human problems are women's problems, that disease and illiteracy, starvation and terror, war and racism, ecology and survival, decimate women first, and therefore require feminisms to shape solutions. This is the message for an introductory class or advanced seminar, for a young man or woman graduating high school or college, so they'll be able to argue that women's progress is world progress. This book is bound to change this world, one reader a //read and highlight this section Readers will get a sense that women's history isprogressive, rather than a litany of the wrongs done to women. 1 cent: n No Turning Back I explain why and how a feminist revolution hasoccurred. I argue that two related historical transitions have propelledfeminist politics. First, the rise of capitalism disrupted older, reciprocalrelations within families in ways that initially enhanced men's economicopportunities and defined women as their dependents. Second, newpolitical theories of individual rights and representative government thatdeveloped alongside capitalism extended privileges to men only. Inresponse, feminist movements named these disparities as unjust, insistingon the value of women's economic contributions and the justice ofpolitical rights for women. In short, the market economies and democraticsystems that now dominate the world create both the need for feminismand the means to sustain it. Indeed, women's politics have developed organically insettings so diverse that the plural feminisms more accurately describesthem. Two kinds of alliances, however, remained most elusive: those betweenwomen of different races and nations. In response to challenges from women throughout the world, Western feminists have had to reconsidertheir partial visions of justice in light of a history of racial and culturalinequalities. In the long run, these challenges would redefine feminismand make it more flexible, more heterogeneous, and more durable.

At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. By Erika Lee ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 331 pp. $55.00 Cloth $19.95 Paper).

Year: 2003 Field: Summary: At America's Gates, offers a detailed examination of the motives and methods of immigration officials, a moving portrayal of the experiences of Chinese immigrants, a provocative argument that Chinese exclusion fostered the turn-of-the-century growth of the American nation state as well as its budding imperial projects, and a fascinating analysis of the transnational business of illegal immigration as it developed over the six decades, from 1882 to 1943, during which exclusion laws were in effect. All this scholarly substance is wrapped up in such a well organized and clearly written package that At America's Gates is, in a nutshell, the single most useful book on the history of Chinese exclusion. Thesis: At America's Gates opens with a relatively brief, but nonetheless intriguing, discussion of the perennial question of the motives behind the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Political historians are currently debating whether the white workingmen in San Francisco who first proposed excluding the Chinese did so out of gut-level racism or because they objected to contract labor, but Lee wisely shifts this discussion to new ground. Rather than emphasizing the "labor" aspect of Chinese exclusion, she emphasizes the "western" part of the equation, arguing that the late 19th-century U.S. West became the birthplace of anti-Chinese legislation because of the "history of extending and reinforcing white supremacy in the region and its unique relationship with the federal government." (p. 29). Lee's overarching argument is that Chinese exclusion transformed "the United States into a gatekeeping nation, in which immigration restriction—largely based on race and nationality—came to determine the very makeup of the nation and American national identity. "(p. 6) In other words, she assigns Chinese exclusion laws the kind of significance historians have usually reserved for the immigration quotas of the 1920s or recent crackdowns on "illegal immigrants" from Mexico. Other: Erika Lee's book analyzes three aspects of the short and long-term consequences of Chinese exclusion, from its inception through sixty-one years of enforcement. First, she examines how the Page Act of 1875 and the Exclusion Act of 1882 established the first legal limits on free migration (as opposed to the 1807 prohibition against the importation of slaves) into the United States. These exclusions then led to the imposition of policies and procedures for admitting properly qualified aliens and for interdicting those deemed to be unfit for entrance. Finally, Lee discusses how the specter of exclusion redounded negatively on those who did manage, by what ever means, to get into the United States. Instead of fostering assimilation, Lee demonstrates how Chinese exclusion tended to ostracize the Asian Americans. Laws exempted certain classes or types of immigrants, such as merchants and U.S. citizens, but even these faced daunting hurdles, essentially having to prove that they qualified for admission. Those who did gain entrance saw themselves and their kinspeople as the targets of ethnic persecution, and they also faced an ongoing threat of deportation, based on the popularly held belief that most Chinese residents had entered the country through fraud or evasion. Many Chinese did in fact resort to extralegal means of entry, such as becoming the "paper son" of a Chinese American merchant, which thereafter forced them to live fictional lives \ The campaign to limit European immigration, for example, focused on restriction, not exclusion. Unabashed nativist Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, might privately write of his wishes to keep out all aliens, but few shared his extreme stance. Most argued that their preferred method, the literacy test, would be a selective test of immigrant fitness for assimilation, and would serve to winnow the good from the bad migrants. "Desirable" foreigners still would be able to come to the United States. \ At America's Gates first reconstructs the lives and relationships of exclusion-era Chinese and documents the various strategies they used to adapt to exclusion. But it also examines the centrality of race in immigration restriction and the ways in which the Chinese exclusion laws set in motion drasticpolitical and legal changes in American immigration regulation. Combining the social history of Chinese Americans with a critical analysis of race, immigration law, and the state, this book offers a strikingly different narrative from the usual story of immigration and settlement, one that identifies the implementation of the Chinese exclusion laws as the main catalyst that transformed the United States into a gatekeeping nation. Angel Island marked a new chapter in the government's enhanced control and containment of Chinese immigration. Illegal immigration began in this period but flourished in the next. The question of immigration restriction reached center stage, as the United States grappled with additional "floods" of allegedly inferior and unassimilable immigrants from other parts of Asia, Mexico, and southern and eastern Europe. The 1924 Immigration Act, which perfected Asian exclusion and placed restrictions on immigration from southern and eastern Europe, marked what historians have characterized as the "triumph of nativism." 28 Part II probes the dynamic interaction between Chinese immigrants and immigration officials in San Francisco and on Angel Island, exploring how Chinese immigrants understood, experienced, and challenged their exclusion from the United States as well as why and how so many continued to immigrate. Despite its intent, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act failed to end Chinese immigration altogether . It raises questions about the efficacy of restrictive immigration laws and demonstrates the power of immigrant resistance and agency. In reconstructing the world that these individuals and groups inhabited and shaped, this section takes as a central starting point two primary goals of Asian American history to focus on both the excluded and the excluders and on the acts of resistance as well as the acts of exclusion. 30 Chapter 3 explains how the enforcement of the exclusion laws by American immigration officials not only resulted in additional exclusion acts that further hindered Chinese immigration but also helped to define and reinforce understandings of Chinese as "Orientals" and foreign "others" who endangered the American nation. 31 The Chinese adapted to the increasing number of barriers they encountered by drawing upon a wide range of legal, political, and migration strategies. Increasingly, they also articulated and insisted upon claiming their own place in America. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, Chinese migrants did maintain significant socioeconomic, cultural, and political ties with their families and homeland despite the legal barriers that placed limitations on Chinese immigration. Scholars have pointed out that Chinese "lived their lives across international borders." 32 However, it is also clear that the exclusion laws and the growing power and efficacy of American immigration regulation strained these transnational linkages Part III traces the growth of illegal immigration during the exclusion era and shows its consequences for both the Chinese community and U.S. immigration policy and border enforcement. Chinese continued to challenge their exclusion from the United States, but they often did so covertly, as illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration has proved to be one of the most significant consequences of the Chinese exclusion era. But while contemporary illegal immigration to the United States has been the focus of much attention, illegal immigration during the exclusion era has been largely ignored. 34 Chinese became, in effect, the country's first "illegal immigrants," entering the country through the back doors of Canada or Mexico or engaging in a highly organized interracial, transnational business of fraudulent immigration documents. Although Chinese were just one of the immigrant groups entering the country illegally during this time period, they nevertheless became the primary public symbol of the "illegal immigrant." As a result, U.S. immigration officials focused a disproportionate amount of time and resources on preventing Chinese entries and arresting Chinese suspected of being in the country unlawfully. These policies laid the foundation for later government campaigns to control other illegal immigrants. Moreover, U.S. immigration policies and prerogatives "migrated" across U.S. borders and had significant repercussions both outside of the United States and beyond the issue of Chinese exclusion. Part IV addresses the consequences and legacies of exclusion during this last period and beyond. Chapter 7 illustrates how American gatekeeping moved from the gates and borders into interior cities and towns, thereby affecting the entire Chinese American community. The epilogue examines how Chinese exclusion cast a shadow upon the entire United States during the twentieth century, in the form of gatekeeping policies that admitted, deported, and This book does more than merely remember and document the history of Chinese exclusion. It captures the struggles of a community and a nation during one of this country's most divisive and destructive eras and explains how and why the United States became transformed from a nation of immigrants into a gatekeeping nation. 1 cent: 7 Chinese exclusion, however, also introduced gatekeeping ideology, politics, law, and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States' identity as a nation of immigrants. It legalized

The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. By Gregory James N.. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005. xvi, 446 pp. Cloth, $59.95, isbn0-8078-2983-8. Paper, $19.95, isbn0-8078-5651-7.)

Year: 2005 Field: Summary: Over twenty million black and white Americans migrated out of the American South between 1900 and 1960, marching northward and westward in two parallel, yet distinct migrations that forever altered the political, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic fabric of the United States. The historian James N. Gregory analyzes and contextualizes those symbiotic migrations in his illuminating and timely (not to mention conceptually original) new book, The Southern Diaspora. Thesis: Gregory argues that the "southern diaspora" changed America by transforming American religion (by spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating both the black and white versions of evangelical Protestantism); American popular culture (especially in music, including blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, and hillbilly); racial hierarchies (by aiding black migrants in the great cities of the North and West develop institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement and pockets of black political power to emerge); American conservatism (by contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics); and the nature of American regions (by fueling the reconstructions that turned the South into an economic and political source of power and by collapsing the huge cultural differences between the South and the rest of the United States). Southern Whites and other ethniitices need to also be considerted when discussing the great migration Whites more often thanblacks entered the reverse migration stream. Bothwhites and blacks tended to migrate in family units, andboth groups were drawn to the North by greater eco-nomic opportunities, although obviously AfricanAmericans had additional motivations to leave the re-gion of their birth ck. "But," Gregory writes, "[black and white migrations] werealso related," and he addresses this potential conundrum by making useof what he calls a "stereoscopic" view of the diaspora - side-by-side ex-aminations of black and white migrations and migrants that whenviewed together present the southern diaspora in a new and fuller di-mension ( , Gregory argues that southern migrants in the North and West byand large did not succumb to cultural barriers and devolve into an un-derclass, that they fared better in their new homes than the writings of The black elite was one of those elements. If the white South was losing some of its "talented tenth," the black South was losing more. Carter G. Woodson long ago demonstrated that black professionals were leaving at very high rates, especially graduates of the Negro colleges who, unless they went into the ministry or teaching, had little chance of finding appropriate work in the South. Other: AfricanAmericans benefited from their concentration in large urban communities and fromthe relative freedom offered by the northern states. The rise of what Gregory calls theBlack Metropolis resulted in a flourishing of black cultural expression. It also laidthe foundations for the civil rights movement. The increasing electoral influence ofAfrican American voters encouraged the national Democratic Party to adopt a moreprogressive stance on civil rights. Moreover, the Black Metropolis nurtured a newgeneration of African American professionals, many of whom took up posts in theSouth, playing a catalytic role in politicizing black communities n whites, Gregory argues that their influence was still con-siderable. The influx of southern black migrants at times almost overwhelmed theindigenous black communities of northern and western cities. By contrast, southernwhites had much less of a demographic impact. Unlike African Americans, they didnot concentrate in a relatively small number of neighborhoods and were thereforemore easily absorbed into the society around them.' I will also make a second argument: bigotry politics was not the only contribution of diaspora whites, and only a portion of the migrant population involved themselves in such projects. Spread across a vast geography, spread across the entire social scale, former southerners were also spread from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In the 1930s, some former southerners were members or leaders of the Black Legion in Michigan and the Ku Klux Klan in California, but others were members and leaders of the Socialist and Communist Parties in those states. Thirty years later, it was no di ff erent; from Students for a Democratic Society ( sds ) to the Wallace movement, the range of voices was huge. The Southern Diaspora contributed to the "Southernization of America" and at the same time to the "Americanization of Dixie." //Diaspora is a word of subjugation, I think to approrpaite it for whites is dangerous, I feel the same about the great migration Chapter 1 is an overview of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography over the course of the twentieth century. It o ff ers a new method for calculating migration volumes and shows the Southern Diaspora to have been numerically larger than previous scholars have understood. Chapter 2 surveys the public meanings surrounding the two exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move. Chapter 3 answers questions about the economic experience of white and black southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that has been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical di ff erences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants. Chapter 4 examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label "Black Metropolis" and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities. Chapter formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities and struggled with confusing issues of social identity. The whites, too, developed cultural institutions of historical import. Both diaspora country music and a white diaspora literary community would reshape understandings of region and race. Chapter 6 explores the diaspora's impact on American religion as both groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America. Chapter 7 develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately became the civil rights movement. Chapter 8 brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions to white working-class conservatism on the one hand and to new formulations of white liberalism on the other. Chapter 9 brings the diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s and summarizes some of the major findings of the book. Black metropolis à ghetto; to show the dillapidation --? Metropolis in this book to show th promise sense. Ottley sensed the third dimension: that these unattractive places turned out to be empowering places. Ghettos for those who lived in them, these spaces nevertheless held the key to new forms of influence and new expressions of identity that would help in the struggle for change. Ottley glimpsed the potential and named it. The Black Metropolis was the future in embryo: a New World A-Coming.\ 1 cent:

Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

Year: 2005 Field: CRM Summary: Spatial, economic, and political descriptors drive this study, as we are introduced to the intricate and interconnected history of postwar urban and suburban transformation: Industrial gardens (a twentieth-century version of the 539 B.C. suburban ideal) and urban "plantations," overdeveloped suburbs and underdeveloped cities, growth and containment, affluence and poverty, apartheid realities and liberal [End Page 297] inclusive ideals, suburban neo populist conservatism and urban black power radicalism. As Self aptly states: "Oakland embodied the seeming contradictions of the postwar American metropolis Thesis: White residents did not flee Oakland, but were drawn to the outlying suburbs by powerful economic incentives. In part two "Race, Urban Transformation, and the Struggle Against Segregation, 1954-1966," Self discusses the capitalist basis for the struggle over urban redevelopment and the redistribution of economic resources from the central city to the suburban areas. African Americans, and low income residents of the central city in general had a different vision about how economic resources should be utilized and distributed Other: The first section, "Urban and Suburban Politics and the California Dream, 1945-1964," discusses the dilemmas accompanying the development of metropolitan Oakland, the assembly and failure of a progressive liberal coalition, and the dynamics and architects of postwar suburbanization. The second section,"Race, Urban Transformation, and the Struggle against Segregation, 1954-1966," examines the redistribution of resources through redevelopment, housing, and transportation programs in cities experiencing instability, and how these programs provoked political struggles for economic rights and opportunities in communities. The third section,"Black Liberation and Suburban Revolt, 1964-1978," focuses on how black power activism in cities and white home-owner populism in suburbs helped to shape Oakland as a modern-day Babylon. Throughout the book Selfemploys a "language for thinking . . . relationally" about "black and white, urban and suburban, rebellion and backlash"—"not just to recover their deep connections but to rethink the stories themselves" (1). Self's study is his conception of space. He seeks to explore "space as property, space as social imagination, and space as political scale" and argues that "space is about the processes through which markets, property, communities, and even class and race are constituted within capitalist urbanization"!! //a story of balcks triying to stop the urban renual and have agency but are tharted //should not be white flight but rather econokmic incentivism // he cares about black leadership but ess abotut he black working class //black freedom stuggle is linked to suburbanization //Issue swith liberalism helped perpetuate the subruban politics Liberal state alllowed for aprtheid All about politcal culture The crm was an interogation of the modern state and showed the flaws of welcfare

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. By Thomas J. Sugrue. (New York: Random House, 2008. xxviii, 688 pp. Cloth, $35.00, isbn 978-0- 679-64303-6. Paper, $20.00, isbn 978-0- 8129-7038-8.)

Year: 2008 Field: Summary: iberty bells, like Philadelphias, had endurisilencing cracks. In Sweet Land of Libertyhistorian Thomas J. Sugrue conveys thiscontrovertible reality outside the South. DrAWing on original research and an impressibody of new scholarship that reperiodizesgeographically expands the history and hiriography of black freedom struggles, Sugrvoluminous study and early attempt at synsis is a welcom Thesis: Joining other scholars who have documen ed the erroneous conception of the North a unassailable stronghold of progressive racial c science, Sugrue documents how white loath and intransigence outside the South barred e access to housing, education, employment, s services, and political office. He underscores h white northerners - as neighborhood reside developers and realtors, elected officials and ernment authorities, social scientists, busin people, and union rank and file - helped inst tionalize black northerners' second-class citi ship. He charts not only the profound and of destructive effects of urban and suburban pol in the North, such as urban renewal and zon and tax measures, but also the broad ideolog scaffolding girding antiblack hostility. Sweet of Liberty is a searing post-World War II hist of the moral and political economy of racial d crimination in the United States. The book is divided into three parts: "Uni and Fight" examines the wartime context civil rights protest in the 1940s; "Hearts Minds" explores the Cold War era and its tendant ideological and moral imperativ and "Freedom Now" sketches myriad po 19505 political, policy, and personal mac nations that set the stage for white and b disquiet. Through these narrative arcs, we ness the ballast of legal campaigns and so movements for racial equality and justice, not just in the South. In making this poi Sugrue brings to the fore known, as well as heralded, white and black people in the No and Midwest (but not as much in the We The array of black freedom activists incl the likes of A. Philip Randolph, Anna Arn Hedgeman, Henry Lee Moon, James Bog Grace Lee Boggs, and Roxanne Jones. In int ducing them, Sweet Land of Liberty begins uncover linkages between 1940s black the ticians and activists and and struggles of the 1960 LOOKS AT CRM ACTIVISM AND BLACK POWER SHOWS HOW LIMITED MORAL PERSUASION IS WHEN ATTEMPTING TO REMEBDY STURCTAL INEUQITY CAREFUL TO NOT SEE BALCK POWER AS A DECLINATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS THIS IS A MOUNT STURCAL INQEUQIRTY OMORE THAN GRASSROOTS Other: 1 cent: The reviewers' criticisms seemed to stem partly from their desires to hold onto a much simpler tale of postwar America with recognizable "good guys" (moral, upstandingsouthern blacks and their northern white allies) and"bad guys" (racist southern whites and alienated northern blacks) and decisive happy endings (the 1964 CivilRights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 2008 election of Barack Obama). Sugrue's text, however, forcesus to move past a morality tale of social change to amore sober examination of the nation's race problem.In the midst of a presidency being hailed by pundits as"post-racial" and in an age awash in public celebrationsof the civil rights movement (including the MartinLuther King Jr. memorial on the National Mall) thatinclude no recognition of northern-based activists,Sweet Land is a book needed now more than ever. (Ichoose to shorten the book's title in part to evoke ToniMorrison's use of Sweet Home in Beloved—to get at thenorthern feign of racial innocence captured by GunnarMyrdal and quoted by Sugrue in the introduction: "Thesocial paradox of the North is exactly this, that almosteverybody is against discrimination in general but, atthe same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs" [p Sweet Land begins in the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting the importance of the black Left and its white alliesin raising the intertwined issues of jobs and racial justice during the Great Depression and World War IIyears. It moves through the heroic period of the civilrights movement with an examination of the manymovements in northern cities and towns that grew upalongside their more famous counterparts in Nashville,Birmingham, Jackson, and Montgomery. It then tracesthe various outgrowths of Black Power and militantprotest in the late 1960s and 1970s. The book proceedswith thematic chronology through some of the key battle issues of the northern movement: jobs, housing,public accommodations, education, policing, and publicassistance. ugrue is strongest in his handling of the variety ofplaces whose movements he chronicles throughout thetext. Like a master juggler, he does not just detail struggles in Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicagobut also adds dozens of small cities, suburbs, and towns(schools in New Rochelle, New York; interracial housing developments in Deerfield, Illinois; lunch countersin Wichita, Kansas; pools in Cleveland, Ohio), therebyshowing the dramatic sweep of the movement for racialjustice across the entire United States. For anyone whomight think the actions of Harlem mothers who kepttheir kids home in 1958 to protest New York's segregated schools were anomalous, Sugrue shows us parentboycotts in Long Branch, New Jersey, and walkouts inHempstead, New York. He also reminds us that themove for community control in New York City in thelate 1960s looks much different after acknowledging thelongstanding movement for desegregation and educational equity headed by black mothers who had beenthwarted time and again in the rth. The chapter offers a devastating rebuttal to the idea that the desire to segregateand the fear of race-mixing was a southern compulsion."For colored only" signs were not needed at manypools, beaches, amusement parks, and movie theatersacross the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast forblack patrons to be barred from these establishments.Sugrue also shows the ways in which local, state, andfederal officials "mixed the gravel of racism into themortar of public policy" (p. 203) regarding schools INTRO: AIMS TO GIIVE US EXAMPLES OF NORTHEN CIVIL RIGHTS SHIT IN PEO[PLE, WHT AND BLK,. And ewvents Book is about northern activits fought for all thierr rights: it's a freedom stuggle North and south influenced each other but not time in this book"\ Is a long crm boo Political hiostory at all levels and hoow the indivudalsz get to powert Part 1 -credits the rasd left and left pf nd/dr=epression with forcing the rights convo Says rthat the activits of the first world war wanted not a rwevolution of structure but a reform of it as the economic power needed to rest on the indivudal. I sassume this changes pg 84 Fought over workpalace and jim corw discrimnination in thew north poitnedly Easier to change thingws on the indivusal level than it was on a sdturctal level; lunch counter to suburbsa comaprison In the north we see that indivusals attitudes towards balcks does not matter in sturctual viuoilence; they like balcks; sure, until their own comfort and power is diminishes They lsot faith in the atomize3d americ A Pgs 354-=55 Bp shaped the ideas of post facto groups Activists took iot right to adminbs Over all a story of what blacks achieved and a mneduitatiopbn o nhpw politucs work nneds a review

Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. By Thomas G. Andrews (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008) 408 pp. $29.95

Year: 2008 Field: Summary: In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in a place called Ludlow, a tent city populated by striking coal miners and their families was raked with gunfire and torched by Colorado state militiamen on April 20, 1914. Eleven children were among the dead in the infamous "Ludlow Massacre." So was the leader of the strikers' camp, a Greek immigrant named Louis Tikas, who was captured alive, beaten, and then murdered in cold blood by the militiamen. The events of that horrific day outraged the nation and focused attention of Progressives on the "labor question" like no other event of the time. But the sensational brutality of the Ludlow Massacre both in its time and afterward has tended to obscure the context that produced it: "Few major events in American history seem so shrouded in misconception, harbored not only by the general public but even by esteemed scholars" (271). In this book, Andrews seeks to dispel those misconceptions by restoring the Ludlow massacre to its proper context, which Andrews extends well beyond the smoldering ruins of the strikers' tent city. The book's historical relational development is focused on the LudlowMassacre which mainly centered on class conflict. The orientation of the book focuses onclass conflict and the related factors of immigration, family and race relations, and socialactivities (i.e. saloon, religious activities, and festivals). Thesis: Indeed, Andrews seeks to write a total history, one that encompasses the environment, energy use, industrialization, global migration, political decision making, and workers actively making their own history The author also promises to demonstrate themerits of a hybrid labor and environmental history, spe-cifically by portraying the particular dangers of workingunderground as one of the key factors that gave rise tounion militancy and strike violence. Using these two in-terpretive angles, Andrews both succeeds and over-reaches. He conclusively establishes the important roleplayed by company housing, company stores, privatedetectives, and the National Guard in provoking minersto armed rebellion, yet he muddies his argument witha tenuous environmental determinism. Andrews goes into greatdetail about ethnic and race relations with immigrants in the open and closed camps,the rise of the unions and strikes, coal towns, and most importantly the 'workscape'.All the topics covered are exemplary of the holistic approach Andrews utilizes toanalyze historically processes and events. Andrews uses the concept 'workscape'which refers to how the landscape is formed through the labor process and in turnhow the landscape shapes workers social relations (p. 125). For Andrews, the'workscape' is vitally important for explaining where many of the problems arise andwhere unity among workers develops. Other: Andrews' book is notable for the three ways in which it contextualizes bloody Ludlow. First, he places the events of 1914 within a protracted pattern of conflict in Colorado that dated back to the earliest coal camps established in the state. The 1914 conflagration had precursors, most notably in 1894, when thousands of colliers marched from one mine camp to another in a failed attempt to force mine operators to accept their union. What happened in Ludlow grew out of a long history of struggle. Second, Andrews portrays the miners not merely as victims caught up in violent repression but as people who brought their own resources with them into this conflict. The colliers of southern Colorado were an extraordinarily diverse lot who were drawn there across great geographical and cultural distances—and not empty-handed. "Those who came brought a tradition of conflict, a volatile mix of trade unionism and rural resistance, radicalism and conservatism—and held fast to memories of ancient struggles against oppressive landlords and of recent strikes" (89). Finally, Andrews relates the Ludlow struggle to the developing fossil-fuel economy that was transforming the American West, where the [End Page 631] "calculus of energy proved inescapable" (108). This point is both the book's most interesting and its least satisfying contribution. Although Andrews illuminates the environmental history of coal mining, he has little to say about the vicissitudes of the coal market and thus about why mine operators were determined to keep their workers unorganized. Yet the book on the whole succeeds in bringing the Ludlow story to life for a new generation of readers who will find the environmental history that it presents particularly interesting. Examining the Ludlow massacre from a fresh perspective, and recounting the miners' story in ways that connect with urgent contemporary concerns, is no mean feat. Indeed, the book should be widely read. \n Andrews's telling, coal served as the vital source of energy necessary to operate the region's railroads, fuel its smelters, refin- eries, and steel mills, light and heat its cities, and even develop and make profitable large-scale agriculture. To dig that coal, mine- owners recruited labor from all across the nation and around the globe, creating an exceptionally diverse labor force in Colo- rado's coalfields. The geology of Colorado's underground mines and the region's insatiable demand for coal and the energy that it produced resulted in an exploitative and dangerous environment for the miners who dug the "black diamonds." Andrews traces the thirty-year effort by miners to resist their exploitation and the mine "accidents" that maimed and slaughtered them, climaxing the 1913-1914 mine war that he characterizes as "the deadli-est, most destructive uprising by American workers since Southernslaves had fought for their emancipation during the Civil War" (p.14). In his version of that conflict, and perhaps borrowing fromJohn Reed's history of the Bolshevik Revolution, Andrews alludesto "ten days of class warfare that brought southern Colorado to thebrink of revolution" (p. 19). The switch from an organic economy (wood and other natural sources) to a mineral intensive economy (coal and fossil fuels) was a necessary condition for maintaining the profitability of industry due to the declining availability of timber. As Andrews highlights, gold and silver mining and processing would not have been possible without the use of coal and other fossil fuels (p. 16). Coal and other fossil fuels became the new driving force of economic growth and maintained the sustainability of capitalism for Colorado and all of America. Explicitly inspired by cronon in his analuysis in the rise of coal colorado 1 cent:This book is about the dialrectic between labor and the enviromostn// they imapct eachother Defines it as a war; not a massacre tot give the workers agency Showw show coal becomes the primary energy csource and hows it power is gained and wielded It did not start as a capitalist hellscape but rather transformed into that Fuel shaped colorados landscape, social character and politcal economy Coal companies had a gross excess of power Paternlait companies built paternalistic towns. These twons were meanty to control labor but itnread creatied communites that woulf foment and consoire against the companies

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. ByKarl Jacoby. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. xix + 358 pp. Maps, photos, il-lustrations, notes, index, and bibliography. $32.95 (cloth)

Year: 2008 Field: Summary: its "multiple of narratives" ap-proach with "multiple meanings" (p. 278) to the various groups of people involved in the brutal Camp Grant Massacre against Apache Indians in Arizona Territoryis comprehensive and enlightening. In her guest foreword for the Penguin Historyof American Life Series, Patty Limerick alludes to how this approach was needed,complete with its "conflicting evidence and clashing interpretation" (p. xvii). Iagree when she writes, "In sitting down to read Shadows at Dawn, you undertakea journey into the deeper reaches of the process that transformed North America"(p. xviii). It is those "deeper reaches," which Jacoby so skillfully researches andinterprets, that make this book so different and important. Thesis: Jacoby explores his central question: "How to understandthe deaths that took place in Aravaipa Canyon on April 30, 1871?" (p. 277). Onthe surface, that seems like an easy enough question. The massacre of nearly 150Apaches, including many women and children, which generated significant nationalattention at the time but not much since, was probably like the tragedies at SandCreek or other cases of frontier violence against American Indians by newcomerAnglo settlers or the cavalry sent to protect them. But at Camp Grant the brutalitywas committed by a party of not only white Americans, but also Tohono O'odhamIndians and Mexicans, working with the suspicious complicity of other Apaches.Thus, Jacoby crafts his study into three parts to reflect the perspective of eachgroup involved. Part I, "Violence," which is over half the length of the book, haschapters on the O'odham, Los Vecinos (neighbors, or Mexicans), the Americans,and the Apache (the Nņēē) and these groups' various records, understandings, andinterpretations of the massacre. Part II, "Justice," is a mere six pages that brieflyexamines the U.S. District Court case on the matter. And Part III, "Memory," returnsto the structure of having chapters on the O'odham, Los Vecinos, the Americans,and the Nņēē, and the way each of those groups have differed in recording the trag-edy. The Americans, for example, instead of trying to cover up the incident, usedit as tool of local boosterism to encourage other Anglos to move to Arizona and toshow that the "Apache problem" had been taken care of. For their part, survivingApaches dealt with the tragedy in their own refined, cautious way: "The WesternApache traditions favored not speaking in the face of intense despair and insteadusing nonverbal displays of grief like cutting one's hair or burning a deceased fam-ily member's possessions" (p. 245). These chapters illustrate Jacoby's multilayeredanalysis, which comes together at the end in a concise and well written Epilogue. Other: Intro 4 differetn narrtovces to show the multiple ways history can be interpreted *frontier narrative of turner and the whties How, what, awhy are these stories told //Uses a bordrlands perspective to show the nature of conlgfcit 1. Oodhams archeaolgoy and oral traditon link to the earliest settlements 2. Details the spanish and mexican experiences in the region and attests to the remarkable scope and logenvity of hsipanic 3. American west was construced on the foundation of far older and other societies 4. Recovers the perwsepctive of the western apache Historical truth is murky and hard to find hIStory oftne is used to justigy new forms of domination and rerror. History is about past violence as it pretuates and sets up violence in the present and furute. The borderland between hsitory and story telling. Is tgere a difference? Centraility of violence Part 1 Part 2 Justice moved from the courtroom ti historical memory Part 3 needs a deeper review 1 cent:

Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

Year: 88 Field:colk war Summary: Homeward Bound is an important cultural study focusing on family and the baby boom phenomenon after WWII. May lays out gender relationships since the Depression and carefully analyzes and explains the connection between national security and home in the context of the Cold War. As May shows, American people from both sexes willingly entered into marriage after WW II. Women left the work forces and quit school for marriage. Family and children were the signs of masculinity and success for men, as well. On the one hand, because of the fear of the atomic bomb, Americans became conservative about sex and developed a more rigid definition of the ideal family. On the other hand, the housing policy and the success of consumer capitalism during the Cold War became a force and also a change for "atypical" Americans, such as European immigrants and poor whites, to integrate into the mainstream society during the social reform. By analyzing movies and social science research, such as the Kelly Longitudinal study, May shows a historical consciousness formed and accepted by the people from all levels of society and the importance of understanding sexuality from a broader context Thesis: May draws a parallel between the foreign policy of containment thatcharacterized the postwar stance of the United States and the "contain-ment" of domestic values within the private sphere of family life. Sherelies upon a variety of sources, particularly evidence from popular cul-ture, including film, mass-circulation periodicals, and newspapers, as wellas the writings of professionals in the social sciences. Her most importantprimary source is the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS), which consists ofseveral surveys of 600 white middle-class men and women who formedfamilies during these years. The 300 couples who participated in thestudy were contacted through announcement of engagements in the late1930s in New England local newspapers. E. Lowell Kelly, a psychologistat the University of Michigan, sent them questionnaires every few yearsand took his most extensive and detailed surveys in 1955. Kelly wasinterested in long-term personality development among married persons,but as May points out, the KLS data are a valuable source for findingout why middle-class Americans adhered so strongly to a normative andspecifically defined notion of family life during the postwar ye . But whereasLasch lamented the passing of traditional family values and parentalauthority, May regrets the establishment of values that prohibited thegrowth of personal autonomy, particularly for women. The family of the1950s was something new, but not in the way that it has been traditionallydescribed. "It was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of'traditional' family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was thefirst wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually allits members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personallife" (p. 11) Why did postwar Americans turn to marriage and parenthood with such enthusiasm and commitment?" (pp. 5-6) is the central question underlying Elaine Tyler May's new book. May's opinion of this turn is clear, and "it might have been otherwise" (p. 8) is the refrain of this book. Baldly stated, the question seems to presage an attack on those who threw away the opportunity (created by the disruptions and disloca- tions of depression and war) for a new configuration of gender roles. Instead, May offers a sensitive, nuanced reading of domestic ideology, judging but never blam- ing. Her men are not oppressors, her women not betrayers. But neither are they simply victims of cir- cumstance or of forces beyond their control. May allows her subjects agency; she insists, time and time again, that they make choices. She then carefully ex- plores the institutional, cultural, and historical con- straints that shape and limit their choices. History has a long-and often dark-shadow in this book Other: "As the chill of the cold war settledacross the nation, Americans looked toward the uncertain future withvisions of carefully planned and secure homes, complete with skilledhomemakers and successful breadwinners. The fruits of postwar Americacould make the family strong; the family, in turn, could protect the nationby containing the frightening potentials of postwar life" (p. 90 m. However, May has developed an interesting ar-gument to suggest that the popular culture shaped such a domestic ideologywithin a conservative political context. She observes that we moved fromthe consensus of the fifties to a breakdown of consensus in the 1960s,and accurately points out that the return to domesticity in the 1980s isnot a return to consensus. Rather, the family has become the center ofa hotly contested political debate-ironically, a debate that also reflectsthe intersection of sexual and political ideology in new and complexw!!!!! This, May argues, "is a powerfulimage of the nuclear family in the nuclear age: isolated,sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and pro-tected against impending doom by the wonders ofmodern technology" (p. 3). May looks to foreignpolicy, specifically containment, for what she argues isthe central metaphor of the age. In fact, as Mayexplains and demonstrates, containment is more than ametaphor: it is a strategy. According to contemporarypolitical ideology, domestic stability and unity werecrucial to waging the cold war, but modern Americanlife threatened to undermine that stability. The home,it seemed, could contain the forces that might bedisruptive-sex, affluence, women's aspirations-notonly rendering those forces safe but also transformingthem into sources of strength for the family and thusfor America. "Ratherthan representing a retreat into private life," she ar-gues, the new domesticity was "one way to express civicvalues" and to exert influence on the larger world(p. 136). If the family was the cornerstone of America'smoral strength and thus, indirectly, of its security, thenstrengthening the family was a patriotic act. For all the poignance and eloquence of May's sub-jects as they reveal their hopes and dreams and disap-pointments, the words I will remember most are May's:"They made the choices they believed they had tomake" (p. 207). It is a sympathetic picture, but still agrim one 1 cent: May's thesis is that the 1950s domesticity cult was linked to cold war ideology rather than being separate from it. The story of domestic containment— how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it ultimately unraveled— will help us come to terms with ourselves and the era in which we live. In the postwar years, Americans found that viable alternatives to the prevailing family norm were virtually unavailable. Because of the political, ideological, and institutional developments that converged at the time, young adults were indeed homeward bound. But they were also bound to the home. The chapters that follow explore the reasons why, in the cold war era, it was the vision of the sheltered, secure, and personally liberating family on which homeward-bound Americans set their sights. 1 Like the Butlers, the Burnses demonstrate the powerful determination and the considerable sacrifice that went into the creation of the postwar family. Even if the result did not fully live up to their expectations, these husbands and wives never seriously considered bailing out. It is important to consider the limited options and alternatives that these men and women faced. It was not a perfect life, but it was secure and predictable. Forging an independent life outside marriage carried enormous risks of emotional and economic hardship, along with social ostracism. As these couples sealed the psychological boundaries around the family, they also sealed their fates within it. T HE SEXUALLY charged, child-centered family took its place as the embodiment of the postwar American dream. The most tangible symbol of that dream was the suburban home— the locale of the good life, the evidence of democratic abundance. It did not take long for this consumer-laden dream house to land squarely in the middle of cold war politics. One remarkable example demonstrates the direct link between the suburban American dream and the international dynamics of the cold war. T HE POLITICS of the cold war and the ideology and public policies that it spawned were crucial in shaping postwar family life and gender roles. As Americans emerged from years of depression and war, they yearned for an abundant life freed from hardship. Yet they also worried about the very developments that promised to free them from the constraints of the past: consumerism, women's emancipation, and technological advances. Contained within the home, these liberating but also potentially dangerous trends might be tamed, where they could contribute to happiness. In private life as well as in foreign policy, containment seemed to offer the key to security. Doemstic containment is the whole thing fella

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States Theda Skocpol 1995

Year: 95 Field: Summary: This new book by Theda Skocpol is a major contribution to t on the role of women in the formation of the American we argues that the United States developed a welfare state much e have assumed and that it followed two distinct lines of evolution. The first was paternalist. In the years after the Civil War the forces of late nineteenth century political patronage fuelled the expansion of Civil War social benefits. By 1910 Civil War pensions had become a kind of precocious social security system for US citizens of a certain generation and region. Skocpol examines why this early welfare provision did not develop into a paternalist welfare state like those taking shape in Western Europe. She argues that instead a second line of evolution - a maternalist welfare state - gradually unfolded during the Progressive Er number of factors limited the development of paternalist welfare policies. Among these was the lack of a working class political consciousness, the tradition of judicial review, and anxiety over the corruption which was rife in the administration of Civil War pensions. However, maternalist reforms were able to succeed where paternalist ones failed. This was because American middle class women, inspired by social conventions that insisted that women remain separate sphere of domesticity and moral virtue, developed their own genderconsciousness. Prompted by this " maternalism, " middle class women were ableto achieve great heights of social organization and mobilize to lobby for socialpolicies for women and children. By the early 1920s they had succeeded in gainingprotective labour legislation for women and children, widows' pensions and thefederal Children's Bureau. Thus, argues Skocpol, during the Progressive Era anascent maternalist welfare state began to emerge in the space left open by theabsence of civil bureaucracies and a strong working class movement. However,it was stopped short and turned back during the 1930s and a different path wastaken.This is an impressive book, drawing upon recent scholarship in the field as wellas original research. There are some limitations. SkocpoPs analysis of maternalismis somewhat limited, seeing it as a monolithic ideology without the variations andnuances that recent scholarship has suggested. She also assumes that maternalistideals were common to all women and largely ignores class and racial issues.Overall, Skocpol is rather too celebratory and uncritical of the women reformerswho created this maternalist welfare state, but her book is nonetheless aninsightful contribution to the current debate on the role of women in the creationof welfare polic Thesis: Other:In her new book, Skocpol examines three episodes of policy formation: the extension of pen- sions to Union Army veterans after the Civil War, various efforts to provide benefits to male workers during the early twentieth century, and the cam- paigns for protective legislation for women workers and aid (cash and health care) for some impoverished mothers in the 1910s and 1920s. Taken together, the cases illustrate that the United States was not without social welfare legislation before the 1930s. But state structures and the extent to which policy advocates adapted to them determined the particular course of policy development. When Skocpol argues that women across all social classes shared an ideology, she blurs some important distinctions. While the re- spect for motherhood cut across class lines, the ideology which led Florence Kelley and the Consumers League to support protective legislation was not shared by the vast majority of members of the federated women's clubs. Kelley was a self-styled socialist, and her organization had far more radical goals than did the women's clubs 1 cent:

DANIEL T. RODGERS. Atlanitic Crossings: Social Politicsin a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press. 1998. Pp. 634. $35.00

Year: 98 Field: Summary: Daniel T. Rodgers has reconstructed American socialpolitics from the Gilded Age through the New Dealalong an axis that stretches across the North Atlantic."Tap into the debates that swirled through the UnitedStates and industrialized Europe over the problemsand miseries of 'great city' life, the insecurities of wagework, the social backwardness of the countryside, orthe instabilities of the market itself," he writes, "andone finds oneself pulled into an intense, transnationaltraffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices"(p. 3). Historians, he claims, neglect this distinctivetransatlantic moment in America's past The originality of Daniel T. Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings is evident from its unconventionalopening. Whereas most studies of social policy would commence with a portrait of urban blightor working conditions in Chicago's packing houses, proceeding then to a study of the socialreformers' attempts to ameliorate such conditions, Rodgers chooses to begin his study guidingthe reader through the stalls at the Paris Exposition humdrum displays erupts an array of proposals for social change. Commencing thus, Rodgersinvites the reader to think anew about the Progressive era and to cast aside assumptions, someof which may even have been shaped by his own earlier work. Further, placing the reader atthe heart of the exposition and mentioning Henry Adams in doing so, Rodgers teases the readerinto recognizing that he may actually be turning the pages of his own autobiography - TheEducation of the American Progressive. Thesis: Rodgers stresses the importance of ideas and indi-viduals. Ideas set the agendas for politics; individualscarried ideas back and forth across the Atlantic andurged their implementation. Rodgers weaves his tap-estry of interconnections through multiple biographi-cal narratives of idea and policy brokers: the humanlinks that composed the transatlantic social politicscable. Moving in and out of government, betweenpositions in the world of social reform, publishing, andacademic life, they were "self-taught experts workingon the intellectual margins of imperfectly profession-alized fields" (p. 26). Rodgers not only transforms the history of socialpolitics in the crucial years between 1870 and 1945; healso recasts welfare state history. (He points out,rightly, the anachronism of applying the label welfarestate to the aspirations of the social policy brokers ofthe Progressive era.) A variety of theories contend forprimacy among explanations of the welfare state; ofthese, the "institutional-political process" approach isthe latest. Although abundant evidence supports eachof them, observes Rodgers, none alone is adequate.Each explains some developments, not others; each fitssome time periods, not all. No single factor dominatesthe untidy history of relief, social insurance, or thewelfare state. The story remains sorted out best byhistorians unencumbered by theoretical straightjacketsand unwilling to flatten causal variety and multipleprocesses into a false consistency. Other:The industrial revolution had by 1900 created an "Atlantic economy," in whichthe policymakers of various nations confronted similar problems and designed solutionsthrough an international borrowing process. Rodgers focuses on the work of a cast ofcharacters he calls "transatlantic brokers" of social policy, primarily but not only Ameri-cans, who ransacked what they considered to be the sociopolitical laboratories of Europe.Truly comparative in scope, this book contains detailed descriptions ofthe political historyof everything from zoning in Berlin to municipal ownership ofutilities in Birmingham, folkschools in Denmark, socialist housing in Vienna, and the policy histories of urban plan The theoretical basis of Rodgers's argument is even more unsettling. In a quick surveyof the political science literature, he rejects all "monocausal" theories of social policy(p. 25): national income, the social democratic and welfare capitalist versions of classanalysis, the state-centered institutionalism advanced especially by Theda Skocpol, and thesocial-discipline view identified with Piven and Cloward and, by implication, MichelFoucault. Rodgers admires G0staEsping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capital-ism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), using its idea of"decommodifica-tion" effectively, especially to describe municipal service decisions. In place of theory,however, Rodgers insists on historical contingencies in each case. "Precedents were notmerely exchanged; they were sifted, winnowed, extracted from context, blocked, trans-formed, and exaggerated" (p. 198). Social politics was a "chain of crises, impasses,borrowings, and improvisations" (p. 250) through which "hybrid reassemblages were builinto the very structure of the international exchange" (p. 407). The key variable explaining"the politics of borrowed knowledge," Rodgers thinks, is "timing" (p. 254). The UnitedStates was a social-policy laggard primarily because it waited too long to begin. This madethe opponents of social policy (for example, the private insurance companies that opposedpublic social insurance) stronger political contenders. While this insistence on contingencymay seem a simple historian's conceit, its logic rests on two social-science approaches from the 1960s: modernization theory and pluralismtions develop, which lets them act more effectNevertheless, it seems clear that Atlantic Crogenerations of students, just as Rodgers's influsivism" he way it ends is also part of this problem. Rather than coming to some sort ofgrand conclusion, it just peters out. After the Second World War, the Americansthought they had nothing more to learn from Europe and the transatlantic connectionwas broken in an intellectual sense. Surely the big issue here, the development of Amer-ican social policy in its larger Atlantic context, does not end in the forties. And given,most recently, the persistent example of Canadian health insurance (a stand-in forEuropean-style precedents) in American discussions of such matters, or the continuinginfluence of British policies on heroin use, crossoceanic influences are not a thing ofthe past. Oddly enough, Rodgers is willing to take at face value the policy experts'claims of American exceptionalism after 1945, while rejecting similar claims made bythe domestic politicians who resisted the European blandishments held out to them bythe Atlantic crossers during the previous seventy years. If his point is only that thepolicy experts had been influenced by European precedents (whatever the politiciansthought) from the 1890s up to the 1940s, but were less so thereafter, he need hardlyhave written so massive or detailed a study. His book is much more than that, but timeand again his narrower starting point inhibits its potential. Only because the little themeof the volume has suddenly swung itself into the saddle again after five hundred bigpages, does an otherwise so spectacular book end with a whimper 1 cent: he making of the Atlantic era in social politics hinged on a new set of institutional connections with the industrializing nations of Europe. It required new sorts of brokers to span that connection. It required, finally, an intellectual shift, a sense of complicity within historical forces larger than the United States: a suspension of confidence in the peculiar dispensation of the United States from the fate of other nations. Against the pitchmen for made-in-America-only ideas and politics, the cosmopolitan progressives fought across a hundred fronts. But in their defeats as well as their victories, in the connections they tried to forge with progressive ideas and movements elsewhere and the battles those efforts precipitated, their endeavors shaped the era more than the conventional wisdom-preoccupied with the Americanness of American progressive politics-has yet comprehended. 1 Paris Worlds fair is the perfect example for his thesis Transnational nature and reach of socail politcs This, then, is the importance of the mass of documents gathered in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower-so eclectic, outwardly confused, and international. From these and similar wells of proposals, American social progressives were to draw not only much of the distinctive language of social politics but also a disproportionate amount of their own social-political agenda. Their politics was full of borrowings. The processes of importation and adaptation, rejection and transformation so central to the Atlantic-wide reckoning with the new world of commodities profoundly shaped their own practice as well. The Americans were latecomers at Paris, outsiders looking in Read A review

ORIGINS OF THE NEW SOUTH, 1877-1913. By C. Vann Woodward. [AHistory of the South, Volume IX.] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress. I95I. PP. xiv, 542. $6.50.

Year: 1951 Field: new asouth Summary: These are the years of the "Redemption," of the "New South" slogans which covered the industrialization of the region, of the embattled and eventually disarmed farmers of Populism, of the peculiarly southern varieties of progressivism, of cultural progress and literary change-but they do not add up to a coherent, unified period of southern history. At the end, 1913, most of the forces which Professor Woodward so skillfully dissects are still operating and have not yet reached their fulfillment. Professor Woodward wisely refrains from attempting to impose a nonexistent unity upon his material. Thesis: he "Redeemers" of the South after Reconstructionwere middle-class heirs of the old Whig tradition. He repeats, in summary, hisown recent exposition of the compromise of I877 which was a combination of"reunion and reaction" in the South. He examines the alleged solidarity of theSolid South, and discovers a democratic versus Whig conflict hidden in the in-ternal revolts of independents against the redeemers. He Woodward's sympa- thetic treatment of Southern populism and blacks, and criticism of conservative promoters of the New South Creed; and his optimistic assessment of the possibilities for achieving racial equality in a post-Civil Rights New South, inspired the works of liberal (and New Left) scholars who dominated the historiography in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, the scholarship has continued to reflect Woodward's liberal sentiments, but the optimism has faded, and with it, historians have tended to focus more on the weight of tradition than the possibilities of revolutionary change in the present and in the past. Other:Following Populism there are chapters on race relations, on twentieth-centuryprogressivism ("for whites only"-but antedating the more publicized reformnsof midwestern progressivism) on educational reforms and literary renaissance.The volume ends, inconclusively, with a discussion of the southern aspects ofWilsonianism While admitting thatthe South's extreme poverty and need for capital made their programappear benevolent, Mr. Woodward, in viewing their work in theSouth as a whole, is inclined to disparage the motive of benevolencein carrying out their program. The Redeemers-and their spiritualsuccessors-had more permanent influence on the South than theRepublican Radicals or the leaders of the Confederacy because they'laid the foundations in matters of race, politics, economics, and lawfor the modern South." A long list of defalcations and financial loose-ness on the part of the Redeemers in various states causes the authorto feel that their reputation for scrupulous honesty in the handlingof public funds is hardly deserved. They, in most cases with honestintentions, promised "pure government first, free government after-wards," but failed to give either. The farmer and the common man were "unredeemed." "If Recon- struction ever set the bottom rail on top . . . Redemption seemed to leave little doubt that the bottom rail was still on the bottom." In making this observation the author does not ignore other causes for the poverty of the lower classes. He demolishes the persistent idea that the end of slavery brought landholding and freedom to the poor whites. "The evils of land monopoly, absentee ownership, soil mining, and the one crop system, once associated with and blamed upon slavery, did not disappear with that institution but were instead, ag- gravated, intensified, and multiplied." The lien system and share- cropping were "not a plot but a makeshift" that "grew out of the ruins of the old regime." This new system, "together with the heritage of military defeat and pillage, would have been enough to keep genera- tions of Southern farmers in a slough of depression." The convict lease system, the desertion of the Negro by his old Republican friends and even the northern churches, the widespread use of women and children in the new factories, and the frequent alliance between em- ployers and state governments to defeat the efforts of labor to organize are other topics treated under "Mudsills and Bottom Rails." The idea of "caste as a method of social control" evolved as thecommon whites came more and more into conflict with the Negroesfor wages and opportunities and as the whites of the upcountry roseand demanded the vote to protect themselves, especially during andafter the time of the Farmers' Alliance and Populism. This intensifiedhostility to the Negro reached its height in the decade at the turnof the century. The "Mississippi Plan" to eliminate the Negro as avoter was followed by all the states, and segregation laws and cus-toms became more general and rigid. The "Atlanta Compromise,"advanced by Booker T. Washington, had much influence in its pur-pose to "resolve the antagonisms, suspicions, and aspirations" of theNegro and the two groups of whites, North and South. Washingtonbelieved that if his fellow Negroes would quietly pursue education,personal worth, and material advance rather than political and socialequality they would win the respect and co-operation of southernwhites he "Redeemers" of the South after Reconstructionwere middle-class heirs of the old Whig tradition. He repeats, in summary, hisown recent exposition of the compromise of I877 which was a combination of"reunion and reaction" in the South. He examines the alleged solidarity of theSolid South, and discovers a democratic versus Whig conflict hidden in the in-ternal revolts of independents against the redeemers. He examines the industrialrevolution of the I88o's, and concludes that with all the achievements, the Southremained rural. He discusses the unredeemed farmer and the "mudsills andbottom rails" of southern industry, and traces the national origins of Populism totheir southern home. Step by step, swinging the sharp scythe of critical scholar-ship, Professor Woodward clears away the brambles of misconceptions to revealan impoverished and rocky soil core of the book is a penetrating discussion of southern Populism-itsrise from the rural protest against urban and eastern exploitation, its betrayal byits leaders, and its aftermath of discrimination, disfranchisement, and disillusion.Following Populism there are chapters on race relations, on twentieth-centuryprogressivism ("for whites only"-but antedating the more publicized reformnsof midwestern progressivism) on educational reforms and literary renaissance.The volume ends, inconclusively, with a discussion of the southern aspects ofWilsonianism While admitting thatthe South's extreme poverty and need for capital made their programappear benevolent, Mr. Woodward, in viewing their work in theSouth as a whole, is inclined to disparage the motive of benevolencein carrying out their program. The Redeemers-and their spiritualsuccessors-had more permanent influence on the South than theRepublican Radicals or the leaders of the Confederacy because they'laid the foundations in matters of race, politics, economics, and lawfor the modern South." A long list of defalcations and financial loose-ness on the part of the Redeemers in various states causes the authorto feel that their reputation for scrupulous honesty in the handlingof public funds is hardly deserved. They, in most cases with honestintentions, promised "pure government first, free government after-wards," but failed to give either. The farmer and the common man were "unredeemed." "If Recon- struction ever set the bottom rail on top . . . Redemption seemed to leave little doubt that the bottom rail was still on the bottom." In making this observation the author does not ignore other causes for the poverty of the lower classes. He demolishes the persistent idea that the end of slavery brought landholding and freedom to the poor whites. "The evils of land monopoly, absentee ownership, soil mining, and the one crop system, once associated with and blamed upon slavery, did not disappear with that institution but were instead, ag- gravated, intensified, and multiplied." The lien system and share- cropping were "not a plot but a makeshift" that "grew out of the ruins of the old regime." This new system, "together with the heritage of military defeat and pillage, would have been enough to keep genera- tions of Southern farmers in a slough of depression." The convict lease system, the desertion of the Negro by his old Republican friends and even the northern churches, the widespread use of women and children in the new factories, and the frequent alliance between em- ployers and state governments to defeat the efforts of labor to organize are other topics treated under "Mudsills and Bottom Rails." The idea of "caste as a method of social control" evolved as thecommon whites came more and more into conflict with the Negroesfor wages and opportunities and as the whites of the upcountry roseand demanded the vote to protect themselves, especially during andafter the time of the Farmers' Alliance and Populism. This intensifiedhostility to the Negro reached its height in the decade at the turnof the century. The "Mississippi Plan" to eliminate the Negro as avoter was followed by all the states, and segregation laws and cus-toms became more general and rigid. The "Atlanta Compromise,"advanced by Booker T. Washington, had much influence in its pur-pose to "resolve the antagonisms, suspicions, and aspirations" of theNegro and the two groups of whites, North and South. Washingtonbelieved that if his fellow Negroes would quietly pursue education,personal worth, and material advance rather than political and socialequality they would win the respect and co-operation of southernwhites ashington's compromise was a modusvivendi in time and place. Practical, he simply did not emphasizeultimate aims. His philosophy was severely challenged by W. E. B.Du Bois, but Washington's influence with his race was impregnableuntil after his death in 1915. The volume ends with an account of the part played by theSouth in the electing of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and the new posi-tion occupied by southern political leaders in national politics as aresult of that election. From his findings it becomes obvious why the Southremains subservient to Northern finance as developing hydro-elec-tric power, migrating textiles, heavy industry, centers of commerce,and awakened labor organization rise below the Ohio and the Poto-mac. Moreover, Woodward cites the alliances of conservativeSoutherners cooperating with Northerners engaged in essentiallyidentical designs. Cleavages of Southern Democrats, Populists,Republicans, and Dixiecrats pass in bold relief posing economicand ideological interests which have no sectional bounds. Veryprobably no previous American historian has interpreted the NewSouth with as complete freedom from bias and guile as Woodwardhas done. . The industrial revolution whichthey promoted, largely as agents for northern capitalism, went far beyondtextiles and was not benevolent in character. In agriculture, although laborand capital were greatly changed, the plantation system did not break up.For a generation the southern people -white as well as colored -endureda numbing poverty, starved of education and of their share in the nation'sprosperity until the present century. Perhaps the most remarkable chapters in this book (VI and XVI) aredevoted to the southern mind and spirit. The tragic ambivalence which af-flicted the South is exposed without any bias. For this work has a theme, nota thesis, and the author discovers it in the divided mind of a section thatglossed the present with dreams of a dead past or a romantic future as economic forces pulled it into the Yankee pattern It was the Redeemers, not the radicals or confederates, who laid the lasting foundations in matter s of race, politics, economics, and law, in the New South!! Area of political possibilty. Economic histroy to some degree on industrialization Industrialization is fast Farmer is left behind; would not go down quietlyà populism\ Reaction to reddemers forgetting about the lower class and shitting on them to build the industrial south Populist south was more prevlant than the planter confedares or carpetbagger sputh Many southerners did enjoy the roots of the new southern economy in idustry—it was a tributary economy Tells the story of dubois and washington as a power stuggle over blsvk whee dubois lsoes and washington wins as the speaker of blaks South was bodied politcally for 50 years after 1960 but stated to have antional importace again around the time of wilson 1 cent: Of one thing we may be certain at the outset. The durability of Origins of the New South is not a result of its ennobling and uplifting message. It is the story of the decay and decline of the aristocracy, the suffering and betrayal of the poor whites, and the rise and transformation of a middle class. It is not a happy story. The Redeemers are revealed to be as venal as the carpet- baggers. The declining aristocracy are ineffectual and money hungry, and in the last analysis they subordinated the values of their political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population. The poor whites suffered from strange malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness, and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement. The most sympathetic characters in the whole sordid affair are simply those who are too powerless to be blamed for their actions Phrased baldly, the thesis of Origins of the New South builds from the perception that though the Civil War deflected the course of southern history and altered the nature of southern so- ciety, there was considerable continuity between the policies of the Radical Republican governments of Reconstruction and the Conservative Democratic regimes established by the Redeemers. Regardless of who was in power, railroads and other special interests continued to enjoy privileges granted by government. The final act of Redemption itself took place as part of the electoral crisis of 1876-1877 when a Whiggish alliance between southern Democrats and national Republicans arranged to swap the Presidency for home rule, political patronage, and in- ternal improvements, an arrangement made possible through the good offices of that selfless public servant, Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Railroads were the only national force strong enough to bring the warring sections and parties together. s. The history of the New South period, according to this view, is largely the story of how the Redeemers ruled in a manner that was against the interests of the mass of common people. Debunking the Redeemers was one of the most important con- tributions of Origins of the New South. In their previous incar- nation, they had been seen often as heroic statesmen and at worst as a trifle shortsighted because of their policies of mini- mum government and maximum financial stringency. Now it is clear that Redemption was no moral demarcation Woodward ar- gued that populism was stronger and more radical in the South than in the West and that southern Populists made a sincere, though doomed, effort to effect a political alliance with blacks on the basis of economic self-interest . The ingrained racist feeling of white populist led to its downfall beardian

THE POPULIST VISION. By Charles Postel. New York: Oxford University Press. 2007.

Year: 2007 Field: pop Summary: In a splendid contribution to Populist historiography, Charles Postel revisits the farm reform movement and asks us to consider their largely successful reconciliation with the changing modern world around them. While previous historians have examined what the Populists opposed, notably monopolistic power, Postel is instead interested in what farm reformers were for. Rather than typifying a backward-looking traditionalism skeptical of modernity, he argues, Alliance members and later Populists embraced the contemporary and progressive policies, thoughts, and values that surrounded them as the nation moved toward the twentieth century. The Populists believed that the challenges facing their farms and homesteads required national solutions. In that populistic spirit, this book covers a wide territory. It looks at Populism as a national movement, focusing on farmers but also including wage earners and bohemian urbanites. It examines topics from education, technology, women's rights, and business, to government, race, religion, and science. Each of these topics deserves further scrutiny. Looking at the Populists with a wide lens points to the need for a many-sided reevaluation of what Populism meant. Hopefully, this book will contribute to such an effort. A note to the reader: Populist men and women often lacked formal education. Except in those places where the meaning was unclear, quotes with unusual spellings and constructions have been left as in the original. Thesis: Rescued from the various streams of rural and urban reform that fed into the great uprising of the 1890s from the deterministic historical platitude that they failed because they were revolting against modernity, or progress, or history This is a book about power and interest. More precisely, it looks at how American Populists engaged ideas about power and interest, because these ideas were central to their concerns. The men and women of the reform movement focused their attention on what they understood to be the economic underpinnings of political influence, wealth distribution, and commercial advantage. But were they? This work of historical excavation suggests otherwise. And that is what makes the experience of the Populists so relevant. The Populists challenged the corporate frameworks. They protested the inequitable distribution of wealth. They demanded more responsive government. But they, too, were modern. They embraced the Enlightenment notions of progress as firmly as their opponents did, and this allowed them to shape the weapons of protest out of the modern materials of technological, organizational, and ideological innovation. It gave the Populists confidence to act. Postel argues that farm reformers embraced education and science as means of bettering their lot. In Part II, Postel examines the rise of the Populist Party of the 1890s. Inspired byantipartyism and political forefathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson thatfought "the interests," Populists hoped for unparalleled regulation of America's railroadand banking systems, as well as an extension of democracy in the form of direct elec-tion of U.S. senators and the Australian ballot. Yet as Postel explains, both a Populistoligarchy ran affairs and the race issue plagued the young party. The Populist Party was,after all, for whites only and while many African-American farm reformers optimisti-cally sided with the party, Postel reveals the trepidation many Populists held at the ideaof racial mixing and how black hopes for a truly egalitarian party were quashed. . In this fresh look, Populists were not unrealistic in theirgoals. In fact, as we know and Postel rightly reminds us, many of their reforms cameto fruition by the Progressive era. For the forward-looking Populists, and in Postel's as-sessment, even attempting to change parts of the political and economic system within amodernizing America was valiant enough He explores how and why farmers, like later Progressives, regarded academic and vocational education as essential tools in moving agrarians toward a modem, more productive, and presumedly better life. And he argues that farmers recognized the necessity of shifting from the nonpartisanship of the Farmers' Alliance to the formation of the Populist Party at both the state and national levels in order to lobby more effec- tively for fair and profitable agricultural competition through the unprecedented expansion of federal regulatory intervention in the economy. Postel highlights how these dynamic Populist politicians cloaked their calls for state-centered reforms, like railroad regulation and an expanded currency, in a Christian mes- sage, even as they were imbued with corporate politicking behaviors. Other: Although some Populists challenged gender ideals, Postel reveals that more tended to exclude black farmers from their local organizations, ignored lynchings, and accepted social Darwinist ideas of racial ranking. Simultaneously drawing on and challenging preeminent works by Richard Hofstadter and Lawrence Goodwyn, Postel's investigation pro- vides a new narrative of Populism in which agrarian activists responded to the expansion of international business politics in seemingly rational and intelli- gible ways. In his view, the Populists were neither premodem farmers trapped by a pastoral myth nor overly virtuous democratic thinkers. Instead, Postel's Populists were products of their age, offering modem solutions to economic problems even while upholding traditional notions of social hierarchy.** Richard Hofstadter would not recognize Postel's Populists. Far from being captives of a "yeoman myth," they were often entrepreneurs eager to emulate business strategies of efficiency and centralization. Their atti- tude to the state was similar: they wanted it to be re-formed or reorga- nized and modernized and given the energy to right the balance of economic forces in the m Even in race relations the Populists fell into step with evolving and "progressive" formulations of white supremacy. For a long time historians have recognized various Populist initiatives to bring African-American farmers into their political coalition, with the slogan political equality not social equality. But Postei resolves this previously glass half-full/ half- empty discussion with a persuasive case that reform-minded Populists, with few exceptions, departed little from the emerging New South doc- trine of strict segregation and white supremacy. Indeed, the white Farm- ers Alliance "was the driving force behind the new Jim Crow segregation laws adopted across the South in the 1890s" (p. 176). In upholding caste too the Populists were " ostel's revisions of previous literature are in some instances heavyhanded. To give one example, he rightly challenges Lawrence Goodwyn'sdepiction of the Populists as opposed to the "creed of progress." But hissuggestion that Goodwyn attributed the defeat of the Populists solely tointernal weakness and the so-called "shadow movement" slights Good-wyn's entire argument. Rather, Goodwyn also took into account what hecalled "the received culture" and the hold on politics of the two majorparties. In Goodwyn's narrative, too, fusionist deal-makers and theshadow movement were not the same thing, as Postei Such has been the fate of the Populists. In his celebrated 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the historian Frederick Jackson Turner described Populism as representing a "primitive society" incapable of appreciating the complexity of a "developed society." Since that time, "traditional" and similar adjectives have replaced the word primitive, but the essential narrative endures. 4 1 cent:

Feminism's Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. By Kirsten Swinth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 339 pp. $35.00).

Year: 2018 Field: Summary: In Feminism's Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, historian Kirsten Swinth explores the illusion of women having it all by engaging the persistent struggle that continues for social, economic, and political change. Swinth examines the second wave of feminism, the progress made toward women's equality and the challenges that still persist, including a lack of equality for non-white women and women in poverty. The focus of the text highlights the journey of women seeking to attain a healthy balance between home and work. Additionally, the author notes that the "motherhood penalty" does truly exist, as women pursuing this illusive balance have greater stress and lower wages (251). Thesis: Kirsten Swinth's Feminism's Forgotten Fight is an important addition to the historiography of the second-wave feminist movement. Focusing on activism between 1963 and 1978, Swinth challenges the notion that feminists neglected or ignored the issues of work and family. Swinth argues that this line of thinking overlooks feminist efforts to disrupt traditional social constructs of the self, domestic relationships, labor, and the law to create an egalitarian society where women could "have it all:" a career and a family, without neglecting one for the other. Feminists sought to redefine what "having it all" meant. After all, women could not "heroically be everything to everyone." Instead, feminists argued society needed to separate womanhood from motherhood and equally redistribute the responsibilities of home and family between men and women. Although these activists faced resistance within their own movement and the growing New Right, their efforts resulted in the passage of key legislation that marked important victories for women, men, and children. "It's not that feminism failed American women, but that society failed to deliver on the promise of fairness for which feminists fought" (12). The failure is part of history, but the promise could be the future. But urging women to squeeze additional hours out of already exhausting days, while workplaces, marriages, families, and political institutions remain frozen in time, will not get us there. For them to "have it all," we must change it all r. As Swinth writes, "it became feminism's legacy to produce stressed-out superwomen"(237), a reality that should lead readers to recognize the need for further reform. In sum, Swinth presents feminism's successes in achieving some forms of equality for working women while also pinpointing areas that still need improvement. The conflict of work and family remains a major challenge of working women, and the incremental approach to policy development continues to fall short in fully addressing women's equality and an appropriate balance between work and family obligations Other: 1 cent:

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story ofAmerica's Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson.(New York: Random House, 2010. x, 622pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-679-444

Year: 2010 Field: Summary: . Buildingòn the proliferation of specialized scholarshipon the subject, recent studies not only placemigrants at the center of black populationmovements from old to new worlds but alsoseek more comprehensive treatments of blackmigration over time. With greater detail thanmost existing studies, The Warmth of OtherSuns deepens our understanding of the twenti-eth-century Great Migration from the insideout. uisiana. WhileWilkersons book reinforces existing interpre-tations of the black population movement as aset of collective decisions in which blackwomen often played determinant roles, it alsohighlights the role of black men as prime deci-sion makers in southern black migrant cades. The title, taken from Richard Wright's novel Black Boy, reflects the yearningfor a brighter life through jobs and freedom. A migrant himself, Wright journeyed toChicago from Mississippi. Wilkerson, a child of that migration, is a journalist andprofesso Thesis: refugee crisis //No storng thesis, she is just trying to show the subjective experience of the great migrations and how each are can be different and how it was a choice //rearely in th foeground and the second migration is especially underexamined //This book is a bout that omission, the stories in this book are based on the account of people who told her. //This is about larger emotional truths //about motivations //correcting the myth that blacks were always on welfare and introduced chaos to the north //They were actually more likely to be married and avoid welock than sotuehrsn; better on most metirics. //Story of automoy and isolation //To her this isnt about responding to structure, rather it is about the untenabliulity of the south and they did the human thing and left //I have doubts .. //North was better, but a really hard road to toil //Great igration was about getting far away and ressembled a refugee crisis more than a immigartion At the same time, she seeks to illu-minate the complicated relationship betweenmigration, the transformation of black urbancommunities, and the emergence of grassrootsmovements for social change, but these latterprocesses are occasionally less developed than thejob-, housing-, and family-building facets of theblack migration experience. Nonetheless, TheWarmth of Other Suns establishes a remarkablefoundation for a broader, more complete portraitof the Great Migration and its impact on AfricanAmerican Wilkerson sees the white South as the personification of evil, while euphemisticallyabsolving the North, where mean streets or "the outside world" are blamed for horrificghetto conditions and an intractable black underclass (p. 458). Wilkerson ironicallyccepts the view that migrants reared in the southern racial caste system could bestcope with the northern racial caste system. These newcomers, she explains, had morestable marriages, were "more economically successful," and were harder working thanthe African Americans already in the North (p. 530).Wilkerson has a keen journalist's eye for detail and narrative, but she is blind to someof the complexities of history. Her use of Richard Wright's hopeful words is belied by hisown actions "It was the first big step the American servant class took wit hout asking" Other: //Laid the foundations for laster international and southern balcks to make lives in the cities!! //Argues against cottom ecomimic determinism //A central argument of this book has been that the GM was an unrecognized internal immigatytion and the people in it did not see it as that because they were citizens //We hould not ask if it was good or bad for the cities we should look at how everyone feld about it and the courage it took. They didn't ask to be accepted but rather announced their defintion of an american 1 cent:

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. By Jefferson Cowie

Year: 2010 Field: 70s Summary: Stayin' Alive shows that in the right hands labor history can connect to politically engaged audiences beyond the cloistered precincts of academia, and make for stimulating, even exciting reading Thesis: he "working class" died in the 1970s.As a cultural and political force, JeffersonCowie argues that the relatively shortlived phenomenon of a unified idea orideal of the working class came undone inthe 1970s from not just external factorsbut also its own inner struggles. Repletewith engaging cultural references, political discussions, and a continual emphasison the social realities for working Americans, this is an important book for historians of labour, the working class andpostwar politics more generally. Other: Cowie's purpose is to show how the hopes of the early 1970s, when a number of labor-focussed insurgencies seemed to herald a new age of working-class politics, were remorselessly eroded as the economy stumbled, conservatives turned to cultural issues and patriotic symbolism to woo the disaffected, and the business class mounted a powerful antiunion offensive. But the evisceration of the workers was in large part the result of internal weaknesses. The old New Deal coalition, in this reading, always was a "fragile juggernaut." Unions which had emerged apparently powerfully in the 1930s came to be controlled by entrenched and sometimes corrupt establishments un responsive to the changing conditions of the labour market, while the demands unleashed by the civil rights, gender and identity politics movements could not easily be reconciled with those of white male workers in an age of economic retrenchment. the term refers toa specific historical formation that existed between the New Deal of the 1930s and1980: a unified concept of a "working class" that had emerged out of industrialcapitalism and was socially and culturally legible between 1945 and roughly 1973.Scholars recognize that the decade of the 1970s was a period of realignment as thenation transitioned from an industrial to a service-based economy, as New Dealinstitutions began to crumble, and as the postwar economic boom came to an end.Cowie's challenge here (one that he more than meets) is to give readers a feelingfor how these realignments were lived by workers like Burton; to explore the com-plicated reasons why so many white male workers pivoted to the right in the midstof these realignments; and finally, to document how the dissolution of a coherent"working-class identity" was refracted through the lens of popular culture. Indeed, one of his most powerful insights is that the 1970s broughtforth a dual movement: a revolution in minority and women's occupational rightsoccurred at the moment when labor rights were diminishing. In other words, actu-al workplaces—and unions themselves—were becoming more integrated alonglines of race and gender at the same time that labor power was going into decline. . First, he argues that, "Class ...died a slow death of a thousand cuts in the 1970s, butfew problems sliced as deeply as how race and classwere set against each other." Although the New Dealhad linked "black and white working people politically. . . in popular discourse 'working class' still meantwhite. In the 1970s race and class were often at odds,trumping any possibility of... an interracial class identity" (p. 236). Second, when economic changes undermined significant parts of the old industrial workingclass, replacing them with a new service-based workingclass of "Women, immigrants, minorities, and, yes,white guys," there was "no discursive, political place forthem comparable to the classic concept of the industrialworking class" (p.!!!

Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism

Year: 1987 Field: Women's Hisotry Summary: he argues that thisperiod is best understood not as the temporarycollapse of a now-revived women's move-ment, but as the replacement of a unifiedsuffrage movement by a new movement,which she calls modem feminism. Thesis: She argues that the new, twentieth-century feminism was grounded on aset of paradoxes, especially in the seeking of the abolition of sex hierarchy in thename of both equality and difference, and in the claiming of the genderless humanright of individual self-fulfilment, which could only be won with the collectivismof gender-solidarity. As she points out, the tensions between these componentsof feminist thought have structured its development ever since, with their owndouble-edged contribution of momentum and inhibition - the stimulus to seekconsistency and the divisive hostilities which have frequently broken out over thealternatives. Cott offers not just an organizing framework for her narrative of the"teens and twenties," but for the whole of this century, and her set of paradoxesfits well with the complexities of feminist thought and experience. In particular,it offers a way round the trap which has caught too many students of this history,of taking sides among the factions. Thus, Cott's analysis of the bitter fightduring the 1920s over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment gives credence andrespectability to both the National Woman's Party and the coalition whichopposed them. Both sides were operating within her framework, but theirdifferent patterns of beliefs exposed its internal contradiction begins with the nineteenth-century womanmovement's "perception that the gender hierar-chy of male dominance and female submission wasnot natural but arbitrary," . Feminism asks for sexual equality that includes sexual difference. It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It posits that women recognize their unity while it stands for diversity among women. It requires gender consciousness for its basis yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles. These are paradoxes rooted in the actual sit- uation of women, who are the same as men in a species sense, but differ- ent from men in reproductive biology and the construction of gender. Men and women are alike as human beings, and yet categorically differ- ent from each other; their samenesses and differences derive from nature and culture, how inextricably entwined we can hardly know. Other: is in her choice of these dates, disregarding 1920 as an appropriate end or beginning. Usually treated as a watershed, with different terrain on either side, for Cott the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment resembles more the breaking through of a temporary obstruction by a continuous stream, whose waters find their way on into new and varied channels. One of her most interesting chapters recounts the coming of the term " feminism " into common usage around 1913, to represent a "revolution of rising expectation" which by then allowed women to see beyond the nineteenth century singular Woman Movement to a plurality of possibilities emerging in their lives and their visions. Cott argues convincingly that the suffrage victory did not create a vacuum. It cleared the decks of the main item of the agenda from the past century, allowing undivided attention to continuing effort to define women's place and rights in the twentieth century. : themore women gained the rights and access it had pressed for, the lessoperable its premise of unity. Rather than strictly marking 1920 as theend of an era, we should recognize the surrounding decades as a periodof crisis and transition. The modern feminist agenda—to enable female individuals with several loyalties to say we and to achieve sexual equality while making room for sexual difference between women and men—was shaped then. What historians have seen as the demise of feminism in the19208 was, more accurately, the end of the suffrage movement and the early struggle of modern feminism. That struggle was, and is, to find language, organization, and goals adequate to the paradoxical situation of modern women, diverse individuals and subgroups who "can't avoid being women whatever they do," who inhabit the same worlds as men, not in the same way.!!!!!!!!!!!! She argues that "feminist intents and rhetoric were not ignored but appropriated" by more powerful forces that were packaging "individuality and modernity for women in commodity form." The best part of an excellent book is Cott's analysis of the contradictions between profes- sionalism as an ideology and feminism, and the way that the women of the period were caught in the conflict. The conventional interpretation of the gradual exclusion of women from the professions blames the weakness of organized feminism for its inability to protect women. But Cott notes that women were still organized and active when the exclusions began; it was at the peak of the suffrage movement that women were first being pushed out of medical schools. Cott sees the problem as more ideological than organizational: adherence to feminism was perceived as a nonmeritocratic and thus nonprofessional stance. Antagonism to femi- nism was encouraged as "part of a larger process of purging politics, advocacy or reform from within the professional defini- tion" in favor of supposedly empirical, rational, and objective standards of judgment. The paradox was that many feminists saw such "objectivity" as their route into opportu- nities historically closed by prejudice and capriciousness, and actively embraced a self-definition that dissociated their profes- sional aims from the aims of women as a group modern feminism is based on gender concisouness rights --> individual liberation

FJT thesis

Year: Field: Summary: The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Prof. von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion. n this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected. Thesis: The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. The Frontier Thesis or Turner's Thesis (also American frontierism) is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that a settler colonial exceptionalism, under the guise of American democracy, was formed by appropriation of the rugged American frontier. He stressed the process of "winning a wilderness" to extend the frontier line further for U.S. colonization, and the impact this had on pioneer culture and character. In essence, Indigenous land possesses an "American ingenuity" that settlers are compelled to forcibly appropriate to create cultural identity that differs from their European ancestors.[1] Turner's text follows in a long line of thought within the framework of Manifest Destiny established decades earlier. He stressed in this thesis that American democracy was the primary result, along with egalitarianism, a lack of interest in bourgeoisie or high culture, and violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," said Turner.[2] Other: According to Turner, American progress has repeatedly undergone a cyclical process on the frontier line as society has needed to redevelop with its movement westward. Everything in American history up to the 1880s somehow relates the western frontier, including slavery. In spite of this, Turner laments, the frontier has received little serious study from historians and economists. The frontier line, which separates civilization from wilderness, is "the most rapid and effective Americanization" on the continent; it takes the European from across the Atlantic and shapes him into something new. American emigration west is not spurred by government incentives, but rather some "expansive power" inherent within them that seeks to dominate nature. Furthermore, there is a need to escape the confines of the State. The most important aspect of the frontier to Turner is its effect on democracy. The frontier transformed Jeffersonian democracy into Jacksonian democracy. The individualism fostered by the frontier's wilderness created a national spirit complementary to democracy, as the wilderness defies control. Therefore, Andrew Jackson's brand of popular democracy was a triumph of the frontier. Turner sets up the East and the West as opposing forces; as the West strives for freedom, the East seeks to control it. He cites British attempts to stifle western emigration during the colonial era and as an example of eastern control. Even after independence, the eastern coast of the United States sought to control the West. Religious institutions from the eastern seaboard, in particular, battled for possession of the West. The tensions between small churches as a result of this fight, Turner states, exist today because of the religious attempt to master the West and those effects are worth further study. American intellect owes its form to the frontier as well. The traits of the frontier are "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom." Turner concludes the essay by saying that with the end of the frontier, the first period of American history has ended.[5] 1 cent:

T SUYOSHI H ASEGAWA . Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Tru- man, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 382. $29.95.

Year: Field: Summary: Will we ever really know why Japan surrendered inWorld War II? Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has found one well-supported answer after all these years of research anddebate by some of the best scholars in the historicalprofession. It is just one answer, however. In this ju-dicious and meticulously researched study of theendgame of the conflict, he internationalizes (by a thor-ough look at American, Japanese, and Soviet literatureand archives) the diplomatic and political maneuveringthat led to Japanese capitulation, but in the end, hisinterpretation—though a very important one—contin-ues down the interpretive road regarding the causes ofthe surrender rather than reaching the end of the route Thesis: In his trilateral view, Hasegawa argues that the Rus-sians, Americans, and Japanese raced to end the war.That "race" took on different meanings for the threenations but all three contests were interrelated and, inmost ways, mutually incompatible. The clear winner ofthe race was the United States, which managed to dropthe atomic bombs, preempt much of Joseph Stalin's ter-ritorial ambitions, and emerge from the war as the rulerof Japan. Second place went to the Soviets, who suc-ceeded in taking some ground after finally declaringwar on Japan and positioned themselves as an able rivalto the United States. Dead last came Japan, which is notsurprising because it lost everything but the emperor,and even his throne was conditioned on American pol-icies. The Japanese did preserve the kokutai, or the po-litical and spiritual centrality of the emperor system,but in pursuing this ultimate goal, they permitted theSoviet Union to make headway in east Asia. The major contribution of this book regards the So-viet Union, Hasegawa's key theme being that Soviet en-try into the war had a greater effect on the Tokyo de-cision makers than the atomic bombings. This issupported convincingly with abundant evidence fromthe Japanese side, particularly the discussions and jos-tling among the peace and war parties in Tokyo. Thatthe Japanese placed all their hopes on Soviet peace bro-kering gave Stalin's sneaky declaration of war in mid-August immense shock value. Thus, the Nagasaki bombcan be viewed as even more pernicious than ever be-fore, for the game was up. Hasegawa's central argument seems to be: "Despite their destructive power, the atomic bombs were not sufficient to change the direction of Japanese diplomacy. The Soviet invasion was" (p. 298). He argues that Japanese leaders, even after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hoped for Soviet mediation. The shock of the Soviet invasion was therefore so devastating that it prompted the Japanese government to surrender. Since the cold war, such narrative has been unacceptable for some American pundits who believe American nuclear weapons expedited Japan's surrender and brought much-needed peace. So Hasegawa, perhaps aware of such American patriotic sensitivity, compromised and credits the atomic bombs as well.2 In the conclusion, he writes: "Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would never have accepted surrender in August" (p. 295). Other: 1 cent:

The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. By Jefferson Cowie. Princeton University Press. 2016. 273pp. $27.95/£19.95

Year: Field: ND Summary: Sanders's failure to unite the Democratic Party,let alone the nation, around New Deal-esque social democratic ideas highlightedtwo keys to Franklin D. Roosevelt's reforms: the coalition it rested on and theNew Deal as an exception in American history. These are the issues historianJefferson Cowie tackles in his new book The Great Exception. Thesis: owie forcefully argues, it was 'too brief and too anomalous an episode in American history to be the norm' (p. 183). The argument isthe titular renegotiation of the New Deal as the anomaly of American history,rather than the traditionally understood restructuring of politics, society andculture. Developed from a joint article with Nick Salvatore ('The long exception:rethinking the New Deal in American history', International Labor and Working-Class History, 74 (2008), pp. 3-32), the idea of the New Deal as the great exceptionis laid out convincingly with a historical perspective. These important questions are answered in this book by Jefferson Cowie. His fundamental argument contends that: the political era between the 1930s and the 1970s marks what can be called 'a great exception' - a sustained deviation, an extended detour - from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural out- look (p. 9).! Other: . The New Deal was not simply economic; the legislation was not just the result of the economic crash, it was political. By moving the New Deal out of the realm of economic fluctuations and instead focusing on the political context, the unique circumstances stand out more clearly. The Great Depression was, of course, the main cause of the political reforms driven by FDR. However, while it certainly is the most devastating example, economic depressions or recessions are a common feature in American history. Instead, it was the political context that made the reaction to the Great Depression unique. Race and ethnic identity was a constant hindrance for broad working-class organizing throughout history. Due to severe restrictions on immigration in the 1920s, however, the Great Depression coincided with 'an illusion of homogeneity that surpassed any seen in generations' (p. 81). Similarly, religious strife receded in the 1920s, especially with the retreat of fundamentalism from political life following the Scopes Trial, giving way for a unity previously unseen. At the same time, the New Deal was built on Jim Crow. The reforms were possible only by accepting the ideology of white supremacy in the South. Both race and religion re-emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, to become the death knell of the New Deal order. The inherent contradictions of the New Deal coalition could not withstand the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement and the identity politics of the New Left, nor the growing strength of the conservative forces opposed to it. The New Deal should not be seen as a continuation of the Progressive Era reforms that preceded it. In fact, Cowie argues that the reforms of Roosevelt might never have come to pass without fear. The political climate following the stock market crash of 1929 and the years of relative inaction by the Hoover administration instilled the people with a sense of emergency that Cowie calls '[t]he most extraordinary element in the creation of the new liberalism' (p. 97). The sense of emergency is why Roosevelt was able to push through such extensive yet 'chaotic' remedies to the crisis. Both the limitations and the success of the legislation are important for understanding the New Deal as a great exception. While far-reaching and powerful, 'the New Deal never fully transformed American political culture' (p. 123). It pushed the interests of labour and the working-class within the structures of the American capitalist order, without overthrowing the existing system. The successes, however, guaranteed that future economic crises, including the Great Recession of 2008, would not reach the same level of peril as the Great Depression. In post-war America, programmes like Social Security made sure the same dire sense of emergency would never return en masse, thus dashing hopes for a new New Deal. The Great Exception is a compelling new narrative of the New Deal within a broader historical frame, from the Gilded Age to Obama's presidency. The titular argument of the book is an engaging one, which provides a new understanding and historiographical overview to the long debate of the role of the New Deal in American history. It is also an appealing history of the push and pull between business and workers in the capitalist arena of American politics in the long twentieth century. It is bound to become a staple for teaching and understanding modern political, and especially working-class, history. For this brief time, arguesCowie, Americans opted for a set of reformspremised on collective economic rights. Thismoment had reverberating consequences, en-abling several decades of income and wealthcompression, with the newly empowered labormovement leading the way. But soon enough,Cowie tells us, the United States revertedback to its norm, embracing a political cul-ture of individualism that privileges the eliteover the working classes and obviates the verynotion of class. Cowie has written this book,he reports, to explain why would-be reform-ers might do well to acknowledge the realityof the essential limits of American politics."There is more hope to be found in histori-cal clarity, after all, than there is in chasingghosts," he concludes (p. 229).In advancing his argument, Cowie doesconjure the ghosts of earlier consensus histo-rians who believed that an inherent commit-ment to individualism trumps any prospect ofa more social democratic order. Yet, as a laborhistorian, Cowie points out that the Nation-al Labor Relations Act (1935), which grantedworkers the right to engage in collective bar-gaining and join unions, indeed restructuredcapitalism. Still, for Cowie, only the excep-tional circumstances of the 1930s made thisdeparture possible. Cowie points not only tothe dire economic downturn but also to otherunusual circumstances, including the suspen-sion of immigration in the 1920s that madethe working class briefly more homogenousand the absence in the 1930s of religious reviv-alism and culture wars that, too, would haveserved to separate rather than unite differentgroups In that incarnation, the two labor historians suggested that the 1930s was a deviation from the norm of American history not just because of the window that opened for reform but also, and more so, be- cause of the nature of labor activism. Even as they pointed to strikes and labor unrest, they In this book ver-sion, which Cowie authored himself, he hasbacked away from the assertion of the workingclasses as always inherently conservative. Butremnants of that argument remain. On manypages, Cowie affirms his fundamental beliefthat a commitment to individualism is an age-less, timeless condition of American politicalculture. Even as he pays tribute to the impor-tance of politics and contingency, he still givesthe impression, as his subtitle suggests, that nofundamental reordering of the American capi-talism system and the politics that sustain it isever possible. n this slim, sweeping, and intentionally provocative vol-ume, Jefferson Cowie asks us to rethink one of the mostdeeply studied eras in American history: the New Deal.Scholars have long argued that Franklin D. Roosevelt's do-mestic policies culminated decades of reform strugglein the U.S. and permanently transformed American lib-eralism. Cowie rejects both arguments. // 1 cent:The New Deal,he contends, was a rhetorical and legislative "big bang"(4), distinct from all earlier reform and policy tradi-tions. For the first and only time in history, the federalgovernment used its vast resources to ensure a measureof economic security for non-elite Americans. The gov-ernment's embrace of "collective economic rights" (9)lasted only from the 1930s until the 1970s, a period of-ten referred to as the New Deal order. Cowie considersthis era "a 'great exception'—a sustained deviation, anextended detour—from some of the main contours ofAmerican political practice, economic structure, andcultural outlook" (9) In contrast to all three of these approaches, I argue that the New Deal can more accurately be understood as a positive but unstable experiment. The New Deal was a triumph of redistributive policy, not the failure that the New Left would have it. It was hardly the unnecessary intervention that the conservative right claims, since it fostered what many still see as a model for our own time. Yet the New Deal was also far from being a revolution that permanently vanquished the savageries of the labor market, as old-school liberals would have it. The New Deal reforms played a transformative role in working people's lives, fostering what many call the "golden age" of American capitalism for the white, male industrial working class.!!!!!!!!! My argument can be stated boldly and succinctly: the political era between the 1930s and the 1970s marks what might be called a "great exception"—a sustained deviation, an extended detour— from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook. During this period, the central government used its considerable resources in a systematic, if hardly consistent, fashion on behalf of the economic interest of nonelite Americans in ways that it had not done before or since. The depth of the Depression and the crisis of World War II forced clear realignments of American politics and class relations, but those changes were less the linear triumph of the welfare state than the product of very specific, and short-lived, historical circumstances. American liberalism has had many "protean" forms, but the version generated by the trauma of the Depression and World War II proved extraordinary because it was not about morality or individual rights or regulation alone, but about collective economic rights Finally, Cowie's portrayal of today's "Gilded Age" overlooks the very real—and lasting—legacies of the New Deal. The last thirty-five years have unquestionably seen "tremendous political activity . . . to roll back existing government [programs] that did not simply serve busi- ness's interests" (213). Despite this, unemployment insur- ance, agricultural price supports, federal deposit insur- ance, and other New Deal programs remain intact. Social Security now covers many left out of the original legisla- tion, particularly women and racial minorities. If the Great Recession of 2008 proved less devastating than the Great Depression, it was partly due to the safety nets cre- ated by the New Deal.!!!!

The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, I890-192o. By Aileen S. Kraditor. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1965. Pp. xii, 306. $8.75

Year: 1965 Field: womens history Summary: Miss Kraditor has written anintellectual history of the movement from 1890 until the adoptionof the 19th Amendment in 192o, concentrating on the ideas whichguided women along a rough road lighted only by their drea Thesis: . Sometimes they lthemselves, allowed expediency acon of universal suffrage; yet they cult as it often was, until they reThe first pioneers to flaunt the eqidealists. Educated middle-class wdiscuss their unconventional belietime, however, the movement grconservative. As it became more awould extend the vote to illiteratdians, the National American Woman Association re-examined itstenets. This resulted in many heated debates on the issue.It was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who in 1894 first proposed aneducational requirement in the pages of the Woman's Journal.This aroused much opposition, even her own daughter, HarriotStanton Blatch, differing with her. Three years later, the Woman'sJournal carried another piece on the subject. The simmering cameto a boil in the 1903 convention of the Association when a sym-posium presented the arguments pro and con. When the Presidentasked for an expression of opinion from the delegates at the con-clusion of the debate, almost the whole audience rose in favorwith only five dissenting. It seems incredible today that many ofthose doughty champions of the suffrage movement could take soilliberal a stand on immigration, the Negro, and organized labor,each of which they considered threats to democracy, while at thesame time upholding the equalitarian preamble to the Declarationof Independence.The Negro question rocked the conventions of the Associationmany times but was kept undercover to some extent. Carrie Chap-man Catt, whose organizing ability continued the magnificentwork of Mrs. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, declared in the 1894convention that "it is little wonder that the North is beginning toquestion the wisdom of indiscriminate enfranchisement of theNegro in 1868," and as president in 1901 she expressed regret thatCongress had "with possibly ill-advised haste, enfranchised theforeigner, the Negro and the Indian." Even the former abolition-ist, Henry Blackwell, soothed his white sisters in the South by say-ing that there were more white women in that section tha Other: his is a first-rate piece of research. The papers of the woman suf- frage leaders are a gold mine of social and intellectual history, and, though they have occasionally been tapped, Miss Kraditor is the first to make full use of them as she is the first tp offer a thorough study and clear delineation of that complex and disturbing phenomenon, the suf- frage movement. As a result of her work, the textbooks will have to be revised, and much of the oversimplification on the subject now in print will quietly fade from sight. this, muchof the interest of her book derives. A particularly useful chapter relatesthe changing ideas of suffrage leaders to the nation's reaction to the"new" immigration and to the post-Reconstruction "Negro question."Among the women who worked for suffrage there were manyvarieties of personality and thought, and they are here classified tosome degree. Antisuffragists are not neglected, although there is as yetno adequate psychological analysis of those women to whom the votewas a fearful rather than a desirable thing.The author has mastered the intricate but not insignificant conflictsthat shaped the various suffrage organizations. For the first time wehave an examination of the splinter movement led by Laura Clay ofKentucky and Kate Gordon of Louisiana (who is here rescued fromundeserved obscurity).A detailed chapter on the "Southern question" is illuminating thoughnot wholly satisfactory in its analysis. It will, nevertheless, be a neces-sary starting point for anyone wanting to go more deeply into thepsychological underpinnings of the Southern version of the womanmovement. I should like to state explicitly what Miss Kraditor acknowl-edges by implication: that while some Southern women were, inAlice Stone Blackwell's words, "full of the race question and boiling onthe subject," many others not only refused to follow Laura Clay andKate Gordon to their states'-rights conclusion, but recognized the issueof "Negro women voting" for the red herring it was. Southern congress-men, to be sure, did not (and do not) like federal tampering with vot-ing rights, but their opposition to woman suffrage was compoundedalso of ancient mores and a realistic fear of child labor reform.The relationship of the suffrage movement to political parties provedto be very significant to women's political development after the Nine-teenth Amendment was adopted, and it is useful to have it clearlyanalyzed here. Only the final chapter, "Woman Suffrage in Perspec-tive," is disappointing. However, this book is so far superior to the usualPh.D.-dissertation-become-monograph that I have no inclination tocomplain, but hope, instead, that we shall hear more from this promis-ing young scholar. 1 cent:

Michael McGerr: A Fierce Discontent

Year: 2003 Field: Progressive Era Summary: Identify the goals and mindset of the progressives. It sees them as a group interacting with different issues in American society: wealth, race, etc. Thesis: They were cultural Victorians who were trying to shape the world the way they thought was best through an middle-class image to eliminate class-conflict. Cultural ideas derived from social status. Other: Four goals: to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; to segregate society

Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform

Year: 1995 Field: New Deal Summary: "where liberalism went wrong." There seemed to Brinkley to be a "missing chapter" (p. 14) in the transition between the "reform liberalism of the first third of the twentieth century and the rights-based liberalism that succeeeded it." He Thesis: "In the late 1930s and early 1940s, American liberals began a broad retreat from many of the commitments that had once defined their politics: concerns about the problems of production and about the limitations of the market. They did so with confidence, certain that their new consumer-oriented approach to political economy had freed them at least from the need to reform capitalist institutions and from the pressure to redistribute wealth and economic power. The industrial economy, most liberals now believed, could take care of itself. Intelligent fiscal policies and a generous welfare state would be sufficient to sustain economic growth and ensure at least minimal levels of social justice. For nearly three decades, an unprecedented, largely uninterrupted prosperity seemed to justify these assumptions. reform liberalism of the New Deal years gave way to the consumer-oriented liberalism of the postwar era, new issues ?some of them already becoming visible by the end of World War II ? became a part of liberal discourse and the liberal agenda, joining the Keynesian-welfare state approach to political economy around which liberals had coalesced during the war. The first, and for a time most important, was a fervent commitment to internationalism, and to the global struggle against communism, a commitment that at times seemed to overshadow all else. But liberals embraced other new goals as well, most notably a growing interest in the expansion of rights for individuals and groups. . . ." (p. 269) //lib paradigm shift Other: . Today's rights-based, interest-group-based, entitle- ments-oriented liberalism was not the agenda of 1933-1937. The shift began with the set- backs suffered by the Roosevelt administration in 1937-1938. The abortive Court packing and government reorganization plans, plus the "Roosevelt recession," triggered a struggle for the soul of the New Deal In his book, Brinkley charts a LIBERAL move away from a "critique of modern capitalism" to an accommodation to it Brinkley's New Dealers became disillusioned with state planning, adisillusionment that the examples of Stalinism and fascism reinforced during thewar. But, more significantly, they became convinced that the problem of the Amer-ican economy was underconsumption and that increased consumption would healthe country's economic woes. For the New Dealers of the 1940s, Brinkley explains,full employment was necessary, "not just to spare individuals the pain of jobless-ness, but also-and more important-to provide the nation with the largest possi-ble body of consumers" (229) Moved from the producer oriented economy of the early new deal (pre'37) to a cosumer oriented econokmy where mass consumption ruled and changed liberalism à libs were responding to the change - Most importantly this was the paradigm shift for liberlaism - Reform of economy à the rights of individuals and groups - Unions believed in abundance as the answer and could resolve class and power

Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modem Immigration Law. By Lucy E. Salyer. (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1995. xix + 338 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, cloth; $17.95, paper.)

Year: 1995 Field: immigration Summary:\ Salyer looks at how restrictions against the Chinese affected other immigrant groups (and vice versa) while weaving into the tap- estry the activities of nativist groups, the growing power of the immigration bureau and its officials, the protests by Chinese orga- nizations and their non-Asian supporter and the changing moods of the nation. The effect of these developments resulted in im- migration laws and practices that were "harsh as tigers" regionally and nation Salyer's book is divided into eight chapters and two sections. Chronologically it covers from 1891, the year Congress passed the Immigration Act authorizing the creation of the Bureau of Immigration, whereby the federal government took control over immigration policy, to 1924, the year Congress passed the Quota Act placing stringent legal restraints over all immigration Thesis: The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service holds the dubious distinction of being widely regarded, in the words of Steven 0. Ludd, as "almost . . . a free agent in American government." Lucy Salyer offers an explanation of how it got to be that way in this exhaustive study of early immigration law. According to Salyer, founding doctrines of immigration law "arose out of struggles on the West Coast among Chinese immigrants, government officials, and federal judges over the enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws" (p. 247). These particular historical circumstances, she argues, put immigration law on a different "trajectory" than other branches of administrative law. The courts' inability to protect society from the intrusion of Chinese and "undesirable" aliens provoked nativists to seek to remove jurisdiction over immigration cases from the courts and to place sole discretion over immi- gration policy in the hands of administrative officials. By 1905, the jurisdiction of courts to hear Chinese and immigration cases was sharply curtailed. The author states that the officials achieved their goals by undermining "one of the most esteemed Anglo-American legal principles," the rule of law Part 2, "ExecutiveJustice," analyzes the rise of administrative discretion in immigration policy between 1905 and 1924 and its conse- quences for the immigrants. The Bureau of Immigration's power grew, and the summary procedures the bureau had developed to ex- clude Chinese became the norm after 1905. After the courts abdicated their role in immi- gration policy, the bureau continued to take effective measures to attain restrictive objec- tives. Thus, the author concludes, the conse- quence "was the growth of an agency and a body of law that have never been fully assimi- lated into American jurisprudence."!!!!! Other: But, Salyer argues, the expansion of aliens' procedural rights ulti- mately strengthened the power of immigration officials. For example, "in extending the (right to subpoena witnesses) to aliens, the bureau appeared to be expanding the boundaries of due process.... Yet the bureau undoubtedly expected the power of subpoena to work primarily to its own benefit, improving the ability of inspectors to obtain the necessary evidence to exclude or deport aliens" (p. 230). Despite decades of litigation and political lobbying by and on behalf of Chinese and, increasingly, the "new" European immigrants, Salyer concludes, "the bureau emerged in 1924 virtually unscathed and fundamentally unchanged" (p. 244). Laws Harsh as Tigers is meticulously researched and presented with nuance, if at times dense. Those interested in immigration history and policy, Asian American studies, and administrative law will find it an important work, as should anyone concerned about the rise of nativism and the legal challenges to the status and rights of immigrants today.!!! 1 cent:Chinese resisted exclusion with legal challenges that charged immigration officials with acting arbitrarily and inhumanely in their enforcement of the exclusion laws. In doing so, they claimed rights to core principles and practices of Anglo-American jurisprudence-habeas corpus, due process, rules of evidence, judicial review. But, rather than grant those rights to the "unassimilable" Chinese, immigration officials argued for full discretionary authority over immigration policy. Part I, "Judicial Justice," traces the genealogy of court decisions that increasingly freed the immigration bureau from interference from the federal courts and the constitutional requirements of due process. Chinese won some concessions, notably the right of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment (Wong Kim Ark, 1898), but they were few. In a series of landmark cases the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had "plenary power" over immigration (Chae Chan Ping, 1889); that immigrants entered and remained in the United States "except by the sufferance of Congress" and that immigrants in deportation proceedings had no protection under the Constitution (Fong Yue Ting, 1893); and that administrative rulings on admissibility were final (Ju Toy, 1905). These and other decisions had far-reaching consequences not only for Chinese but all aliens; indeed, the principle of plenary power still undergirds immigration law today.!!! The way in which they succeeded "undermined the very princi- ples they accused the Chinese of subverting," such principles as rights to counsel, judicial review, habeas corpus, due process of law, and evidence rules in a legal proceeding-"the heart of Anglo-American juris- prudence" (pp. 247-48). This excellent book, carefully and thoroughly re- searched and engagingly written, represents some of the finest recent scholarship in the history of American law. Salyer argues that immigration law remains beyond normal due process requirements of other American legal institutions because of the way it developed historically Intro: Laws against chinese effect the entire immigration legal structure It moved from judicaial to excutive justice and has neber gone back, allowing for the abuses of ice The focus is the influence of structure on the enforcment of policies It is an instituonal approach not as much an agency one The excutive apaprtus has never been fully assimilated into American jurisprudence Part 1: Nativism crafted racist laws against the chinese 1891 imigration act created the poer to regulate immigration to the fed gov Thus the nativist movements ran into this and the dialogue around the chinese affected everyone else The chinese resisted, critiwued and lititgated agains thtee racist laws The coursts were a boon and price for immigrations The courts were larely postive for the chinese, so theymoved to excuiive administration They were able to remove the chonese element of the law as exclusinaty byt it moved to admin Part 2: The Bureua of Immigtration Left to regualte itself and chose the rights of immigration law ov]er those of aliens They reformed in way that benefited their power Due process and legal prcedings are given unevenly to immigrants and are focused thorigh the bureuau Few adminsitrators were those allowed to create the rules for immigrants If aliens got the due rprocess they deserved, the immigration enforcement system would collapsse Immigration law is ony barely recognized in Amerfican law

A New Deal for Blacks

Year:1979 Field: New Deal/CRM Thesis: Sitkoff's thesis is that the foundations for the post-World War II militancy that projected civil rights into a major national issue were laid during the 1930sDepression decade: "the New Deal years are a turning point in race relations trends. They constitute a watershed of developments" which must set apart that decade from all that had gone on earlier "Negro expectations rose,; black powerlessness decreased; white hostility diminished" 30s--> Black inferiority 40s--> social condition //big change Other: 1930 were a turning point because of the agitation of groups, like blacks who forced the govt to act. Too often the March on Washington Movement and Executive Order8802 of 1941 have been seen as the starting point for black protest and white response. //Could have a a wider net, too new york and not grassroots enough

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. By William Cronon. (New York: Norton, 1991. xxiv + 530 pp. $27.50.)

Year: 1991 Field: Summary: Thesis: several extremely well developed chap-ters (3-5), Cronon works out in detail the ac-tivities of Chicago mercantile leaders as theyremolded trade in wheat, meat, and lumber.He traces step by step such mundane mattersas grain grading, the changing places wheregreen lumber was dried, and the relative costof shipping live beef and dressed beef. Suchdetails as these Cronon ferrets out as crucialelements in the reorganization of commercebased on Chicago.Customarily we feature new forms of pro-duction in the nineteenth-century economyand leave the revolution in commerce andmarketing to the years after 1897. But thatrevolution was an integral piece of the wholefrom the beginning of economic take-off inmidcentury. To focus on Chicago rather thanthe old factory belt to the East sharpens thisargument. Entrepreneurs remade production,but so also commerce, to shape new forms oforganization that bound the whole together.In short, Nature 's Metropolis is a major contri-bution to the role of cities in forging linkagesin the new economy.Two other chapters (6 and 7) provide subor-dinate but integral parts of the story. To estab-lish the far-flung influence of Chicago, Crononadeptly uses evidence about bankruptcies inthe 1873 depression. Who owed money toChicago firms, and to whom did these firmsowe money? The network of capital flows wasextensive, concentrating in Chicago's immedi-ate region but extending far into the East aswell. At the same time Cronon describeschanges in the more immediate world of mer-cantile institutions and ends up with an ac-count of the "busy hive" of MontgomeryWard's mail-order offices in a chapter that givesa welcome human content to the atmosphereand workings of a highly organized "modern"mercantile system.These five chapters are surrounded by threeothers (1, 2, and 8) that are far more difficultto follow as an integral part of Cronon's analy-sis. The introductory chapter, "Cloud overChicago," identifies not so much a historicalproblem as it does Cronon's own early negativefeelings about the city as a backdrop for a bookin which his attitude now is far more positive.In another section, Cronon emphasizes thatChicago did not follow the Frederick JacksonTurner pattern for historical development; thecity grew almost overnight from the frontierwith no significant stages in between. And ina later chapter, "White City,' Cronon describesthe 1893 Columbian Exposition in a paean ofpraise that adds little to past accounts save toexpress Cronon's personal enthusiasm for thecity's achievements. This melange of collateralsubjects seems to be held together, not by theirinherent connection as historical subjects, butby Cronon's own personal journey through theurbanization of modern American life.This personal journey gives rise to somerather curious terminology. Cronon is fond ofthe terms "first nature" and "second nature which he uses repeatedly to contrast ruralAmerica and urban America, and of the terms"rural nature" and "ecological by which herefers to the world that the Chicago merchantsand their rural allies modified. These are new Other: II, "Nature to Market," contains three chapters, one each on the grain trade, the lumber market, and meatpacking. With impressive detail, Cronon shows how Chicagoans gave these activities their modern form-how the grain traders, for example, "invented a world of second nature in which they could buy and sell grain as commodity almost independently from grain as crop" (p. 146). Trees also became lumber; cattle and pigs became meat. As an environmentalist, Cronon takes pains to show that wheat, cattle, and the corn-hog economy led to monocul- ture, and white-pine lumbering denuded the North Woods. By 1900, southern yel- low pine had invaded much of Chicago's hinterland, the meatpackers opened plants in Omaha and Kansas City, and milling fled to Minneapolis and elsewhere, although the Chicago Board of Trade remained the commodity markets' central mechanism. The three chapters of Part III discuss Chicago as the gateway city, as a mar ing center, and as the "natural" site of the Columbian Exposition. As the gate city, Chicago was the place where "a new human order [was] superimposed on ture until the two became completely entangled," creating "a hybrid system least as artificial as it was natural, that became second nature to those who li within it" (p. 264). To chart capital and credit flows and to demonstrate Chic importance compared to St. Louis, Milwaukee, and other midwestern cities Cronon ingeniously employs bankruptcy records involving thousands of peo just after the panic of 1873. The bankruptcy maps and the explanations of t take up only about twenty pages of the book, but represent a huge amount of d collecting and manipulating. An appendix explains how this labor-intensive w was done. The last two chapters cover ground often familiar to historians of Chicag and the Midwest-e.g., the impact of railroads on marketing, the early years o Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, the 1871 fire, and the "White City" 1893. That extravaganza "marked the climax-and the beginning of the end-o Chicago's role as gateway to the Great West" (p. 372), and of the "growing incu sions of [its] market economy into ever more distant landscapes and communiti (p. 378). The terms "first nature" and "second nature" appear many times throughout the book. "First nature" is referred to variously as geography, ecology, or nature; "second nature" usually as "economy" and at least once as a "new capitalist geogra- phy." Thus, some fuzziness exists. Yet, the distinction between them remains clear. A harsher name for "second nature" might be "capitalist expansion," but this is not a polemical book. Exploitation and imperialism lurk beneath the surface of har- mony and symbiosis, but Cronon emphasizes the latter. Nowhere does he ventur o say whether all these changes should or should not have happand he shows how. The book is filled with invitations to reflect onin which "second nature" transformed "first nature," and how and shaped its hinterland. But Cronon neither condemns nor prsays, be aware: economics changes ecologies in complex ways thatlook, because they have become "second nature."The book succeeds, as the author hopes, in showing why "thtween human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoun(p. xvii). It does this by choosing one very major nineteenth-cenand demonstrating in detail how it related to nature-how Chicagture's Metropolis." The real story about Chicago and the Great Wscribed here, is indeed the shift from "first" to "second nature," table transformations and processes. The continuing thread was thpenetration of city and country-the creation of the metropolwhich hardly any American experienced before 1850 and from wnone escape say whether all these changes should or should not have happand he shows how. The book is filled with invitations to reflect onin which "second nature" transformed "first nature," and how and shaped its hinterland. But Cronon neither condemns nor prsays, be aware: economics changes ecologies in complex ways thatlook, because they have become "second nature."The book succeeds, as the author hopes, in showing why "thtween human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoun(p. xvii). It does this by choosing one very major nineteenth-cenand demonstrating in detail how it related to nature-how Chicagture's Metropolis." The real story about Chicago and the Great Wscribed here, is indeed the shift from "first" to "second nature," table transformations and processes. The continuing thread was thpenetration of city and country-the creation of the metropolwhich hardly any American experienced before 1850 and from wnone escapes tod 1 cent: read a review essay fpr studying

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. By Matthew D. Lassiter. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, c. 2006. Pp. xviii, 387. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-09255-3.)

Year: 2006 Field: Summary: This book examines the intersection of race, conservative politics, and metropolitan growth in the late-twentieth-century American South. Ma This book examines the intersection of race, conservative politics, and metropolitan growth in the late-twentieth-century American South. Ma In his book's dense, intricate introduction, Matthew Lassiter presents multiple provocative arguments about race, class, and politics in the South of the 1960s and 1970s. His bold revisions are based on an examination of metropolitan politics at the neighborhood level. He challenges the "southern strategy" as a top-down Republican exploitation of a white southern reaction to the civil rights movement, and he rejects the "artificial distinction" between de facto and de jure segregation. He also criticizes "race-reductionist narratives" that neglect class, and he intro duces urban geographical or spatial relationships to the study of race (p. 4). Thesis: he proposes that southern middle-class metropolitan moderates saved public education from massive resistance by "replacing the civil rights agenda of social justice with an ostensibly race-neutral discourse of regional progress and individual meritocracy" (p. 30). The moderate agenda had particular power in suburban Atlanta, where a grassroots movement advocating keeping the public schools open contested Georgia's Black Belt for control of educational policy. Annexation of growing, prosperous white suburbs allowed the city to develop "racial stability through racial apartheid" that left blacks in the segregated downtown area (p. 52). In 1966, when the northside suburbs refused further annexation, Atlanta's bi-racial politics, which had stressed "peace and progress, never justice or equality," finally collapsed and attempts at desegregation failed (pp. 115-116) //SAYS COLORBLINDESS WAS THE ENGINE OF 1970S EWHTIE POLTICS lotte provided an exceptional example of successful integration. The book's third section declares that the "silent majority" started in south ern suburban politics that stressed "a color-blind defense of the consumer rights and residential privileges of middle-class white families" (p. 227). In 1968, Richard Nixon pursued a national suburban strategy, not a southern strategy based on race. When Republicans followed Kevin Phillips's southern strategy in the early 1970s, they lost, but their blurring of de facto and de jure segregation reflected a "regional convergence" and a national suburban consen sus (p. 301). Successful desegregation of schools and suburbs, which depended on "the structural elasticity of the spatial landscape and the metropolitan scope of the desegregation remedy," failed because the federal government rejected metropolitan solutions (p. 300). As a result, "state-sponsored residential seg regation" in the North and South became "a historical wrong without a consti tutional antidote" (p. 315). As suburbanization led to a convergence of the South and the rest of the country, southern and northern conservatives, Lassiter concludes, rallied to a class-based ideology that avoided both racism and civil rights reform D. Lassiter argues convincingly that academics and pundits alike are wrong to point to a top-down "southern strategy" to explain why the South transformed from a Democratic Party base into a Republican stronghold. Instead, internal developments in the suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, and other cities propelled an economic and political reconfiguration of the region and, at the same time, the nation that created a new so-called silent majority. This new form of politics, while hypersensitive to racial issues such as school deseg regation and busing, was also rooted in class divisions. Lassiter joins a growing field of historians such as Kevin M. Kruse and Andrew B. Lewis who argue for a more complex and nuanced interpretation of the history of the white South situated within the emerging field of sub urban or metropolitan studies. The post-World War II South can no longer be seen as distinctive or uniquely obsessed with race, these scholars contend; rather, southern history after 1945 has much in common with larger political and economic developments and demographic shifts within the United States. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South gives equal weight to class and race in exploring how school desegregation occurred while residential segregation seemed to become more entrenched. At the same time, changes in voting laws, the result of court decisions such as Baker v. Carr (1962), not only led to an empowerment of black voters but also helped shift political power to new suburban areas outside the traditional centers of power in the black belt. As civil rights activists gained allies and victories in key court battles during the 1940s and 1950s, white southerners were increasingly called upon to choose sides in the battle over racial segregation. Uncomfortable with both the demands of black activists and the adamant, sometimes violent defiance of die-hard segregationists, many whites eschewed the path of massive resistance and instead attempted to create a moderate path that would accept limited integration if necessary. Part 1 of the book explores this emerging political phenomenon, which for the most part shunned publicity but was nevertheless quite effective in creating a new consensus, particularly in the Atlanta region. In what is one of the book's strongest points, Lassiter argues that white moderates "devised a new class-based desegregation blueprint that discredited the reactionary politics of massive resistance by evading the civil rights vision of good-faith integration" (p. 18). Other: Lassiter's revisionism will provoke debate. His denigration of the de facto de jure distinction, his de-emphasis of race in favor of class and space, his disparagement of southern distinctiveness, and his dismissal of Phillips's south ern strategy will prove controversial. Lassiter's arguments might be more per suasive if they derived from wider research; limited largely to Atlanta and This content downloaded from 132.174.252.67 on Mon, 13 Jun 2022 19:44:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS | 149 Charlotte, his study neglects other southern cities and the nonmetropolitan South. By focusing on school desegregation, it also may miss the impact of other issues and forces, both racial and non-racial, on political change in the South. Further work will have to test his theses. e jure" and "de facto" segregation, has likewise distorted our understanding of the civil rights era by obscuring the ways in which state-financed suburbanization and state-sponsored residential segregation established a novel model of race relations, national in scope. integration." The powerful de facto mythology depended upon a fading regional contrast and a false narrative of national innocence, because public policies in the metropolitan South and North were still in the process of constructing a more intractable landscape of racial apartheid, an ultramodern version of de jure segregation.2 1 cent: lok it over again

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. By William E. Leuchtenburg. New American Nation Series. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Pp. xvii, 393. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $6.00.)

Year: 1963 Field: Summary: Leuchtenburg focuses relentlessly on government and politics (both domestic and foreign); when he turns to other aspects of national life it is usually to illuminate some phase of political history. Thus the story of the struggle to organize labor is told less for its own sake than for its impact upon party coalitions, legislation, and public mood; and the analysis of the recession of 1937-1938 swings quickly to an account of governmental response. By the same token, Leuchtenburg rarely strays for longer than a page or two from the commanding figure of Franklin Roosevelt, who dominates this book, appropriately, as Roose- velt himself dominated the age that bears his name. Other volumes in this series will deal with constitutional and cultural developments dur- ing these years; this book sticks to the central concerns of the Thirties themselves-the depression and New Deal politics. Leuchtenburg has written superbly the book he was asked to contribute-politics in the grand style. Implicitly he has identified it with both the foreign and domestic policies of the Roosevelt administrations from the election of I932 through that of 1940. By including foreign policies he has pro- vided a richer, more realistic treatment of the period than was possible in similar histories, such as those of Rauch, Brogan, Wecter, and Broadus Mitchell, which make only passing reference to foreign policy. However, whether foreign policy should be considered a part of the New Deal is question Thesis: Leuchtenburg, although admitting the usefulness of the concept of the two New Deals and in general supporting Schlesinger, insists that "the extent of the shift from 1933 to 1935" has been exaggerated as has been the influence of both Tugwell and Brandeis. He asserts that the New Deal throughout was pragmatic "in its skepticism about Utopias and final solutions, its openness to experimenta- tion, and its suspicions of the dogmas of the Establishment." However, he con- cludes, Roosevelt's program rested on a basic assumption "that a just society could be secured by impoising a welfare state on a capitalist found oosevelt was essentially con-servative in his economic views. or example, Roosevelt was primarily responsible for the partialfailure of the PWA; gold buying was an "ill-considered" move; social securitywas in many respects "astonishingly inept and conservative"; in rural areas "theNew Deal was not to blame for the social system it inherited, but New Dealpolicies made matters worse." Indeed, few of the noteworthy accomplishments ofthe New Deal receive completely favorable treatment. A brilliant final chapter,however, provides convincing support for those who insist upon the importanceof "the Roosevelt Reconstruction," as Leuchtenburg significantly calls it: Roose-velt, if he gave many wrong answers, "asked the right questions." He "re-createdthe modern presidency," made government more responsive to the will of morepeople, and made possible a more soundly based economy.Leuchtenburg does not make entirely clear where he would place the NewDeal historically. He quotes approvingly Carl Degler's conclusion that the NewDeal "was a revolutionary response to a revolutionary situation." But he commentsas follows in a footnote: "Not merely did the New Deal borrow many ideas andinstitutions from the Progressive Era but the New Dealers, and the progressivesshared more postulates and values than is commonly supposed. Nonetheless, thespirit of the ig3o's seems to me to be quite different from that of the ProgressiveEra." He might have added that he himself has shown that even the 1920'S con-tributed its share of ideas and institutions to the New Deal Other: . Thepresident-elect and his "Brain Trust" had"developed, or familiarized themselves with,a body of theory a good deal more coherentthan is commonly supposed." They drew onthe Populist background of agrarian radical-ism, John Dewey's faith in intelligence, theSocial Gospel ambition to create a Kingdomof God on earth, the New Nationalism ofTheodore Roosevelt (later, Wilson's NewFreedom was to gain ascendancy), and theconcern for the needy and helpless of the"urban social reformers of the Jane Addamstradition." Among the figures close to Roose-velt then and later were Frances Perkins,Harry Hopkins, Adolf Berle, Henry Morgen-thau, Jr., and Herbert Lehman, all veteransof the settlement moveme 1 cent:According to Leuchtenburg, the New Dealaltered the agenda of American politics by focusing on issues; brought hitherto neglected groups such as staple farmers, indus-trial workers, and recent immigrants into the mainstream ofAmerican life; and permanently enlarged the role of the federalgovernment. But at the same time, he makes clear that therevolutionary features were confined to means-the ends wereultimately conservative, and the result was a halfway revolu-tion, "imposing a welfare state on a capitalist foundation" (p!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Intrp -book on the roosevelt revoultion Mid Conclude It's a synthesis;old man history, high poltics with some attention to laborers; noit intersectional,;l good modern interpration on fdr ssaving capitaol and being an economic conservative Fdr created the excutive4 office and createdv the modern presisdebnt Vasrtly expanded prez powersaz //needs more study alot Starting in the early 1960s, historian William Leuchtenburg presented a more complex view of the New Deal, shifting the focus of scholarship away from the New Deal in a historical narrative and moving it into a forthcoming period of New Deal critique. Leuchtenburg is famously quoted for characterizing the New Deal as a "halfway revolution" with its share of successes and failures in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963).[1] Leuchtenburg's sympathetic critique of the New Deal largely highlights its failures to redistribute wealth and to meaningfully change the plights of America's voiceless groups, including farmers, industrial workers, and African Americans.[2] While Leuchtenburg generally praised Roosevelt's economic resiliency and his effectiveness as an administrator, unlike early progressive historians who extolled Roosevelt's virtues, Leuchtenburg defined Roosevelt as an economic conservative whose reactionary New Deal left many problems unaddressed.[3] Leuchtenburg's critique of the New Deal as an incomplete revolution would open the door to a polarizing era of New Deal criticism.

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. By PATRICLIMERICK. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. 396 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $1

Year: 1987 Field: The West Summary: The Legacy of Conquest: TheUnbroken Past of the American West, has provided a central interpretivefocus for the otherwise disparate work of other new revisionists in thefield. In Limerick's western worldview, ethnocentrism, a universalattribute of human cultures, has become Eurocentric racism; frontierhas been replaced with invasion, conquest, colonization, or exploita-tion. Limerick and the revisionists have trumpeted the death of themythical West, killed it seems, by this brave band of younger scholars,eager to unmask the falsehoods of the past as they unmasked the"myth" of American goodness, justice, and invincibility in the sixties.They have become the new prosecutors of the past, but it is a verypeculiar type of justice that they are bent on meting out. Thesis: The Legacy of Conquest is to create a new inter- pretation of thé West to supplant that of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," began the serious academic study of the frontier in 1893. According to Limerick, Turner's emphasis on the frontier as a process set "arbitrary limits that excluded more than they contained" (21). His interpreta- tion was "ethnocentric and nationalistic," did not include women, and really had relevance only to the agrarians of his native Midwest. Indeed Limerick rejects the whole notion of the frontier as a useful interpretive device. She claims that the concept of frontier implies a discontinuity between the western past and present, making the study of the West appear to be irrelevant and obscuring the ongoing issues that stem from our frontier past. Hence her subtitle, "The Unbroken Past of the American West." Limerick hopes to substitute for Turner's vision of the frontier and its synergistic relationship to national development a concept of the West as a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences" (26). Casting the history of the American West "as one chapter in the global story of Europe's expansion" promises no less than "to help knit the frag- mented history of the planet back together" (26). The book is an extended essay rather than atraditional monograph, and Limerick begins by de-claring that, despite nearly a century of work infrontier and western history, many Americans (in-deed, many scholars who are not specialists in west-ern American studies) still imperfectly understandthis aspect of our past. She rightly argues that mythsabout the West crowd out perceptions of its truecomplexity.Limerick proposes that the "history of the West isa study of a place undergoing conquest and neverfully escaping its consequences" (p. 26) and thatconcomitant with conquest was an "ongoing compe-tition for legitimacy-for the right to claim foroneself and sometimes for one's group the status oflegitimate beneficiary of Western resources. Thisintersection of ethnic diversity with property alloca-tion unifies Western history" (p. 27). Limerick thenemploys select examples from the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries to build her case. Her study isbased on her interpretation of the pertinent second-ary works in the areas that she addresses. Limerick isan engaging writer and, for the most part, arguesher case well. Other:The Legacy of Conquest takes as its central themes the impact ofthe European oppressors' past and the continuing conquest of theenvironment and minorities in the West, which reveals the venal,soulless nature of the conquerors. Thus Limerick tells the story of set-tlement twice, once from the vantage point of the conquerors andthen from that of the conquered. The first part of the book deals withthe conquerors, the white Americans; the second part, "The Conquer-,ors Meet Their Match," tells the tale of the intersection of white andminority cultures as well as that of humanity and nature. The chapterson the white West use examples from the nineteenth century to thepresent to demonstrate the prevalence of the "innocent victim" motifamong white settlers, who always seemed to rationalize disastersinflicted on themselves and others by their claims of good intentions;the presence of sheer greed and rampant unrestrained capitalism,rather than the more benign concept of opportunity, as a motive forwestern settlement; and the ongoing inclination of westerners to pro-claim their rugged individualism and independence while holding out . The second section includes chap-ters on Indians, Latinos, Asians, and nature. Limerick continuallyreminds us of important points: that minority cultures were not anyone thing but were diverse and ever-changing, and that the relation-ship among all cultures, both "conqueror" and "conquered," was com-plex. Humanity's relationship with nature has been equally confusedand contradictory, according to her view; the end result is that everycase of conquest, and therefore the entire history of the AmericanWest, has been folly.One of the most frustrating things about this book is the contra-dictory messages it sends. Limerick uses anecdotal evidence to per-sonalize her arguments and provide narrative interest. The peoplewhose stories she tells, however, are caricatured and then pilloried. Inher chapter on the power of the profit motive, for example. Limerickconcludes with the tale of W. W. Brookings, who was crippled for lifewhen he had to have portions of his feet amputated after a Dakotablizzard caught him unawares. He had been hurrying to stake atownsite claim at that time. "Disillusioning?" Limerick asks. "One'sfirst response is that, to court such danger, Brookings should havebeen up to something better than townsite speculation" (77). Risk-taking in pursuit of profit becomes an unsavory prédation 1 cent:Introl Western history is that of the cowboy frontiersmen colonizer mythos West is undersyidoed Turners history was an indiciidua, masculine, eurocentirc vision of prokmise which left out the oppisite incruding labor, govrnment, instituion structure We fetisicized the frontier //THE WEST WAS AN INTERSECTION MEETING GROUND //CONQUEST TIED THESE PEOPLE TO THE SAME STORY //IT WAS A FIELD OF MASS CONTESTING BETWEEN CULUTRES //CONQUEST WAS ECONOKIC GROWTH //It was were the expanded power of the federal government first took hold .// //Western history had a severe economic slant that drove the conquest Part 1: Conquerers -Western females had agency -The women were inspirational a nd brutal, by taking apart the qestern myth we do not destroy western histoy but wnrich it //The west did not have to be conquested the way it was and specualtion was the primary profit driver //Profit was the primary motivation behind the western expansion //mining was the most improtant and the federal govermnet was needed to ensure the western expedition //shows labor and enviromoten issues //admits that the west was "wild" in the sense that it was unstable and was base level for conflict //The west is still untapped and conflicts stilla rise between groups over culture and natural rescources //white supremacy base baby Part 2: thw=e conqerers meet t6heir match // //indians had agency and histo4y is best when every sides perspectives are fully accounted for and seen as contending //the turner myth hurt the perxeption of natives as well as an imbalance of sources //Mexcian americans are on the boderlands of history, they had agency and were crucial to western development but were both the conquered and the conquerer in the west as they oprressed indians and slept with them //issues with race in thewest as thw cheap labor of immigrants and their presecne hurt the attainment of a migration dream, plus it was no longer as simple as blacks are less gthan whies //diverse region //poggers every voice needs to be heard and the west is not a wave crahsing but rather many people/gorups competering and transforming

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai

Year: 2004 Field: Summary: Mae Ngai's thoroughly researched and beautifully written book, Impossible Sub jects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, shows how the restric tions on immigration dating from 1924 created the category of the "illegal alien," someone whose inclusion within the nation was "simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility." Using a variety of sources, including census reports, INS reports and internal memoranda, case law, legal briefs, and legislative his tory, Ngai reconstructs the legal history of United States immigration from 1924, when the Johnson-Reed Act first enacted national origins quotas, to 1965, when the quota system was abolished by the Hart-Cellar Act. Ngai's book fills a gap in immigration history scholarship, which has been more commonly concerned with early immigration, especially the era of Chinese Exclusion, and immigration since 1965. More importantly, Ngai's book does the work of showing how the quota system worked and how it has shaped a racialized image of illegal immigrants in ways that remain with us today. Thesis: ossible Subjects examines the largely ne- glected decades between the passage of the re- strictive Immigration Act of 1924 and the more liberal Immigration Act of 1965. But it goes far beyond just filling a gap in existing scholarship. In this book, Mae M. Ngai con- tends that twentieth-century American immi- gration law and policy created illegal aliens and then racialized them in a manner that had grave implications for non-European immi- grants and their descendants Indeed, the numerical restriction on immigration created a new class of persons. Ngai writes, "Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights" (p. 4). This contradiction challenged the nation to balance its numerical restrictions on immigrants with the recognition of the human rights of illegal entrants. In response, the 1940 Alien Registration Act gave the attorney general the authority to grant discretionary relief, benefiting Europeans considered deserving of legal status and hurting Mexicans. The imposition of border control instituted the racial foreignness of Mexicans, failing to distinguish between the deported and repatriated legal and illegal immigrants, and U.S. citizens. As Ngai concludes, "The exercise of administrative discretion served to racialize the specter of the illegal alien" (p. 90). Other: Such subtle racial exclusions establish alienage, and the important intervention of Ngai to the literature on race and immigration is the illustration in Impossible Subjects that variations of such subtleties figure prominently in the incorporation of Mexicans and Asians in the modern history of the United States. In illustrating the production of the "illegal alien" in modern U.S. history, Ngai draws from a wide range of sources including archival collections, interviews and oral histories, newspapers and periodicals, government serial publications and documents, and other primary scholarship from several decades. She uncovers how racial exclusion is embedded not only in the subtle discretionary processes of the government's enforcement of border control, but also in various immigration laws, including the aforementioned 1924 Immigration Act as well as the 1952 McCarrenWalter Act, noted for abolishing all racial requirements to citizenship, and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which is credited for opening the borders of the United States by raising the annual cap on immigration to 290,000. While the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act still retained the national origin quotas and accordingly maintained the "logic which cast the native-born as the most loyal Americans" (p. 237), the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 still cast certain migration flows as "illegal." For instance, Mexican migration was imposed with a 20,000 annual quota, a significant reduction from the legal flow of some 200,000 braceros and 35,000 regular admissions for permanent residency in the early 1960s. Impossible Subjects offers an important contribution to U.S. histories of race, citizenship, and immigration. This stunning history of U.S. immigration policy dispels the liberal rhetoric that underlies popular notions of immigrant America, as it establishes the designation of Asians and Mexicans as perpetual racial others. Everyone in the field of race and immigration should read this thought-provoking book. Perhaps most interesting from the standpoint of the current national debate over undocumented migration is Ngai's explanation of how a quota system that exempted Mexicans from quotas could result in Mexicans being seen as the prototypical "illegal alien." Since there were no quotas for Mexican immigration, Mexicans theoretically should have been the least likely group to be considered "illegal." But a constellation of factors led to this construction, including geographic proximity, repatriation policy, and the bracero guest worker program. During the 1920s, the United States began to police the U.S./Mexico border aggressively, though invasive and humiliating inspections procedures that included bathing, delousing, medical inspection and interrogation, and through the formation of the Border Patrol, which envisioned its job as the pursuit and apprehension of criminals. The repatriation of Mexicans during the 1930s created a labor shortage that the United States attempted to reverse in the 1940s through a "guest worker" program known as the bracero program. Ngai argues that the braceros filled the same need in the mid-twentieth century that slaves, coolies, and convicts had served in earlier colonial times, with the main difference being that the braceros were theoretically "free." Free labor, however, created the ability to quit. As braceros became frustrated with their working conditions, they began to leave their jobs. By leaving, they became "illegal aliens." Mexican Americans became indelibly marked with the taint of the illegal alien, regardless of their individual status as undocumented, lawful resident, or American citizen. When the bracero program was officially ended in 1964, the United States had an opportunity to reform immigration practices once and for all, by changing the labor standards for agricultural work. But instead of taking on this challenge, lawmakers passed in 1965 the Hart-Cellar Act, which for the first time imposed quotas on Mexican immigration. Ngai refutes the conventional wisdom that the Hart-Cellar Act was unambiguously progressive because it ended the national quota system by demonstrating that by "equalizing" the quotas for each country, it actually discriminated against those countries?such as Mexico?whose people were most likely to benefit from immigration to the United States. Hart-Cellar further marked Mexicans as "illegal," and we still live with this legacy today. As I write this review, Congress is debating what could be the most significant immigration bill of the quarter-century. Various versions of the bill have included an amnesty program for undocumented immigrants, making illegal presence in this country a felony, an extensive "guest worker" program, and dramatically in creased border security. The perceived crisis animating each of these proposals is what should be done with "illegal aliens," whose presence here is contrary to the law on the books but desired by agricultural companies as a source of cheap and disposable labor. Ngai's book is the 1 cent:Intro: //Resitriction not only marked a new regime in the nations immigration policy; it was also deeply implicated in the development of 20th c american ideas and paractices about citizenship race and nation state //the 1924 law johnson reed act, created a boundaries and hierarchy of difference, it also made amaeirca and americans sensitive about thewir borders //Alien and citizen is a soft boundary but the illegal immigrant was a new creation, one deserving of vitriol //racial lines created alien citizens, racial otherness //global approach //soeirgnty does not determine memebership to a nation //reread page 23 for chp summaries //The book refutes the idea that immigrants are external to the nation;;rather illegal or not, they are always a part if the nation Part 1: 1924 hardened the line between legal and illegal immigaration as undesirable americans started to enter the countrry //quotas created a new class of people within a national body, illegal aliens, whis inclusion in the nation was at once a social reality and a legal impossibility. Showed intrest in controlling our borders and created the iudea of eople slippling through //deportaiton was the practical tool of dealing and crweating illegal aliens. Part 2 //colonalism in the american borders //colonial subject to illegal immigrants is a process //Fillipinos and mexicans were brought here an expolited for labor but once the race assimiation didn't work and issues arose, then the American governemnt designated them as illegal aliens //improted colonialism still exsists but now the US has a means to regulate it to the detirment of the work even further\ Part 3 //Asian citixxenship changed after wwii //Chinese immigrabts fought back and stablized their communties through the confession rpogram but this still incurred damages. Part 4 Mationalism infectd liberalism and its pluralist ideas. Handlin has a liberal nationlaist vioew which prviledges immigration and glorifies it as a positve thing moving towards plurlism while the new studies of marginlaized group exposes it as a system of exploitation. Handlins is an assimilationist world not a pluralist one. It is a question as to wheter or not plurakism is possivle or desired Immigrants are supposed to be americans which is a flawed concept Epi This shit is lefitst Its globalist and critiqures the idea of a nation state and soveirgnity as exclusionary

LEON F. LITWACK. Trouble in Mind: Black Southernersin the Age of Jim Crow. (A Borzoi Book.) New York:Alfred A. Knopf. 1998. Pp. xxi, 599. $

Year: 1998 Field: Jim Crow Summary: Describing a world turned upside down, in which black achievers, not black slackers, were far more likely to be singled out by hawk-eyed white supremacists for violent castigation, Litwack has written a masterpiece of historical imagination. Thesis: What Litwack has done, in an unprecedented way, is to link economics, politics, and culture together in one vol- ume to describe a system of racial subjugation crafted by numerous individuals dedicated to white suprem- acy. The complexity of that system and the culpability of individuals is described by Litwack in plain language that hides nothing. From their perspective about them This is the story of what theyconfronted how they struggled worked and tried to educate themselves, and found ways to temper their accomodation to the new racial order. How they wrested meaning and value out of their daily lives. A story of being black in the Jim crow south. Violence is foudnational and not a fuction of victimization. Beause whites didn't care or notice balck life,blacks could continue to exsist and create their counterplay. Other: Running throughout thetext are the voices of black men and women whounderstood what was being done to them by whites andwho sought, somehow, to gain just treatment, or failingthat, dignity in the face of brutality. Alabama share-cropper Ned Cobb analyzed the sharecropping systemand insisted: "You got a right to your part-rent; andI got a right to mine" (p. 123). Author Richard Wright,whose words run throughout the book, probes at thepsychology of oppression: "Indeed the white brutalitythat I had not seen was a more effective control of mybehavior than that which I knew" (p. 416). ChristiaAdair, daughter of a successful small-town Texasbusinessman, proudly remembered that her father,"He didn't act like he was better . .. he respectedwhites, but at the same time he demanded respect forhimself" (363). Litwack has uncovered, recovered, andcollected hundreds of accounts of how black southern-ers crafted lives in the age of Jim Crow. The focus of this volume is not on black leaders and their ideology, whichLitwack characterizes as based largely on unrealistic or mistaken assumptions;rather it is on the experience of ordinary black people, especially the New Negro,blacks of the first generations born in freedom who, unaccustomed to the disci-pline of slavery, were less inclined to render the absolute deference demandedby whites. Through a skillful use of first-hand accounts, Litwack allows blacksthemselves to describe how they were regularly reminded of their inferiority,their "place," and the gross inequality between the races. Such reminders wereomnipresent in everything from personal contact with individual whites to thedual legal standards practiced by the criminal justice system. The imperative ofevery black family, therefore, was to educate children in strategies forsurvival-how to adapt to the racial code imposed by whites without abjectlysubmitting to it and how "to circumvent the system without seeming to do so. No black person of whatever sex, age, or class was immune towhite violence. To lynch a black person was not enough; the execution needed tobe turned into a public ritual and a voyeuristic spectacle of gruesome propor-tions that often involved torture and mutilation. War I signaled what Litwack terms "a radical shift in black thinking andacting." No longer able to tolerate an environment that penalized their ambitionand success and that applied unremitting pressure to stay in their subordinateplace, they launched the Great Migration northward-a move that "exceeded eco-nomics and politics" and served as a "kind of redemption." What blacks discov-ered in the urban North was, Litwack concludes, something both "very different... and very much the same." Whites tried to solve the New Negro problem through containment. So they violently killed etc. blacks and dehumanized them to rationalize the use of violence. Lynching did not quell black resistance, it just silenced it. They went north and faced a litany of differetn problems. Bychoosing a thematic rather than chronologicalorganization, Litwack loses any real sense ofchange over time and place. His South is sin-gular and static, a historical given more im-mutable and uniform than slavery or Recon-struction ever was. The consequences of thatsnapshot approach are heightened by his deci-sion to limit his portrait of the Jim CrowSouth to "the most intense years," the period"between 1890 and the Great Migration."That choice has no compelling rationale. Onecan argue about the precise periodization, butthe Jim Crow era incontestably lasted severalmore decades. Litwack targets the most vio-lent span, "the nadir," as Rayford Logan calledit, but the Jim Crow era was dynamic. 1 cent:

Strangers int the Land: Patternts of American Nativism, 1860-1925. By JOHN HIGHAM. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Pp. xiv+431. $6.00.

Year: 1955 Field: nativism Summary: Nativism is not abnormal it ins intenstely logical and american It isd an american pattern and character. The underlyinhg causes create nativism which is an aggresoive exclusionary nmationalism Thesis: Other:igham's discussion of nativism was balanced and so powerful that a reca pitulation of the book today sounds like an excerpt from some basic text in modern American history; it does not seem possible to challenge his account. Essentially, nativism or an unfavorable opinion of outsiders was a constant attitude in American culture that expanded or contracted depending on a number of economic, political, and psychological factors. Consisting of several major ideas?anti-Catholicism, a fear of foreign radicals, and racism?nativism could be reasonably contained in one decade only to reassert itself with a vengeance in another. Thus, in the decade after the Civil War, for instance, resentment and fear toward newcomers were muted by the knowledge that immigrants had fought to save the Union and by the confidence generated by a period of eco nomic growth. In the 1890s, however, a current of class conflict and depression shook both the confident attitudes and the faith in the future of the nation and fostered an aggressive patriotism (nationalism) that was critical of the foreign born. This critical attitude became heavily racist after 1900 and blatantly intol erant during World War I, when a vision of national unity and solidarity excluded notions of ethnic diversity and tolerance. Americanization programs, based on an abandonment of faith in the natural assimilative powers of American society, and outright exclusionary sentiments, manifested in immigration restriction laws in the 1920s, brought something of an end to this intolerance in part because it brought an end to massive immigration itself. Higham makes clear in his account that he feels nativism was basically a variant of nationalism. variables and allow "a semiautonomous scope for belief and emotion a balance in explaining the causes of nativistic attitudes and to amplify the importance of culture explains the basic structure of Strangers in the Land. A variety of causes intervene in the discussion from time to time. They include class conflict in the 1880s or 1890s; the psychological stress of old Anglo-Saxon elites who feared the decline of their culture with the arrival of Jews, Italians, and Slavs; and, most of all, the persistence of cultural attitudes and perspectives on what the nation should be: non-Catholic, non-Jewish, non radical. One is left with a distinct impression that, despite the effort at balance, in Higham's account culture and cultural attitudes had considerably more to do with the formation of nativistic sentiment than class or stress. Because of the effort to be broadly inclusive in explaining the career of nativism, Strangers in the Land eventually becomes a description of a discourse. It is a discussion that included many parties: organized labor, which took several positions on the immigration question; liberal reformers who tried to American ize the newcomers; Protestant ministers who feared the Catholic and foreign "threat" to their nation; government officials who argued vociferously for 100 percent Americanism; and even ethnic groups that attacked nativist goals. For Higham, moreover, this discourse seemed to consist of a free and open expres sion of attitudes and views. Various groups stated their interpretation of the relationship between immigration and the nation. The strength of the book, in fact, lies in the description of this discussion and the manner in which it was altered by changing economic and political conditions 1 cent: historigohry essya + another review

THE CRABGRASS FRONTIER: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson

Year: 1985 Field: Post War Summary: o the early 19th-century American city-dweller,suburban had unsavory connotations. By 1870,things had changed: Americans yearned for sub-urban homes, although they still wanted the cityto serve as the hub of their activities. Inexpen-sive building materials, cheap transportation,new construction techniques, federal tax bene-fits for homeowners - all helped to ease the ex-odus from the central city. The Federal HousingAdministration, created by Franklin Roosevelt in1934 to insure long-term mortgages, also con-tributed by favoring new-home constructionover inner-city renovations. In 1980, two-thirds CURRENT BOOKSof all Americans were living in "single dwellingssurrounded by ornamental yards." Jackson, aColumbia historian, chronicles America's mas-sive residential shift in illuminating detail,pointing to its effects, including the dispersionof work, family, and friends. Ironically, he ob-serves, "the intelligent compromise" sought by19th-century Americans - to live in a spacious,quiet neighborhood while enjoying contactwith urban culture - has largely been replacedby a "general suburban resistance to ... contactswith the larger society." Jackson notes the re-cent "re-gentrification" of city enclaves, but hepredicts that energy shortages rather than fash-ion will eventually spell the demise of the sub-urban way of living Thesis: Jackson asked why cities in the United States (com-pared to those in Europe) decentralized so quicklyand with so little apparent opposition; he concludesthat "there were two necessary conditions for Amer-ican residential deconcentration-the suburbanideal and population growth-and two fundamen-tal causes-racial prejudice and cheap housing" (p.287). Drawing on an impressive array of familiar aswell as little-used sources, Jackson makes effectiveuse of regional comparisons that illuminate thenational impact of suburbanization and interna-tional comparisons that demonstrate the impor-tance of locating suburbanization within specifichistorical contexts Other: . One of its most important contributions isJackson's masterful analysis of the role of the federalgovernment in promoting suburbanization //Home loans and FHA discriminated to the aid of whte americans //free labor? that me The penchant to leave the Americancity dates at least from the early nineteenth century and, by mid-century, New York leaders were concerned over the "'desertion ofthe city by its men of wealth"' (p Indeed, the phenomenon was one of the most important in the history of society, for it represented the most fundamental realignment of urban structure in the 4,500-year past of cities on this planet //tech and tranprtation created the new sub //cars American housing policy was not only devoid of social objectives, but instead helped establish the basis for social inequities. Uncle Sam was not impartial, but instead contributed to the general disbenefit of the cities and to the general prosperity of the suburbs. //a mix o9f incentivization economically and social safety //it eventually culimiuantes in the rise of the new right int he eartyl 70s

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. (The Fred W.Morrison Series in Southern Studies.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1990. Pp. xxiii,369. Cloth $34.95, paper $12.95.

Year: 1990 Field: Summary: lley's book raises important questions about the relationship be- tween black rank-and-file activists and social protest movements, demonstrating the inadequacy of older interpretive models. Alabama's white supremacists and black moderates may have accused the Commu- nists of using black workers in their struggles against capitalism; Kelley shows us how black workers them- selves used the party to further their own ends of racial and economic equality. Thesis: A thesis set forthconvincingly here is that Communists responded to local needs andissues. es. Insightful consideration is given the several phases of Com- munist party (CP) activity in Alabama during the 1930s - the involve- ment in organization of the Share Croppers' Union, the pioneering role in the Scottsboro case, participation in the industrial union drives of the CIO, and the shift to Popular Frontism from the mid- 1930s on. Avoiding a narrowly political view of the party, this study focuses upon the blending of Left ideology with the cultural heritage of south- erners, particularly that of blacks who made up most of the CP's Alabama membership. Sprinkled throughout the book are many of the songs and poems that best expressed the spirit of grassroots radicalism. Kelley's work also reflects an awareness of the special ex- perience of women as family members, as workers outside the home, and as participants in organized struggle. The author notes that schol- ars hitherto have underestimated the southern left and the role of violence in suppressing radical movements. His fine book does much to correct this error. Many came from rural back- grounds, were poor, illiterate, and often religious. These men and women, Kelley argues, built Ala- bama's largely decentralized party "from scratch." Possessing no "Euro-American left wing tradition" (p. 93), they instead espoused a "homegrown radicalism" born of their desire to challenge racial domination (p. xii). Alabama's black Communists were never blank sheets on which white Communists could impose their views; rather, they interpreted Marxism from their distinct historical perspectives, drawing on a long and "rich culture of opposition" (p. 93). When party leaders shifted their emphasis away from black issues and toward establishing the party's legitimacy by building bridges to southern liberals during the period of the Popular and Democrat fronts of the late 1930s, many black workers responded by shifting their energies in other directions (particularly toward the CIO). It was the party's stance on local, immediate issues that served initially to attract blacks to its ranks; later in the decade, the party's new stances on local issues prompted blacks to lose interest as well. In Kelley's analysis, abrupt alterations in the party's foreign policy played little role in black workers' decision making!! Party work was determined less by Communist internal machinations than by the conditions on the ground.' Other: That said, I do think that the book proves— again— that antiracism and class solidar ity are not trade-offs or mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. The same holds true for all forms of oppression— sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. Second, the Communists placed what appeared to be local and isolated struggles against "mean" bosses and landlords in a global context, one that exposed the structural dimensions of racial capitalism as a system and offered a different path forward. Third, the movement did, in some ways, lay the groundwork for the next generation of activists who truly transformed the face of the South and the United States as a whole. Fi nally, this work reveals something about how people think and how struggle, changes their ideas about what is possible, why they are poor and oppressed, and what alternatives to Jim Crow capitalism might look like. I've come to realize that this task might have been the most important of all.! Kelley points to the paradox that as the party sought cooperation with liberals and mainstream unions, its base of support within the black community diminished. Individual Communists played an active role in the CIO but could not do so openly as Communi 1 cent: The book is persuasive in explaining why significant numbers ofAlabama blacks were drawn to the Communist party. The CP was analternative vehicle for education, introducing its black supporters toworld and national politics while placing local struggles within aninternational context. Communists coming down from the North wereoften seen as the latter-day version of abolitionists, entering the Southto end the oppression of black people. The author's view that thestruggles of Communists deserve a place in southern history rests ona firm base of evidence. Hammer and Hoe hopefully will stimulate aseries of studies focused on the contributions made by the Left inother states to the shaping of the contemporary South.!!] Alabama Communists raised critical issues and prompted some existing organizations to adopt stronger measures on issues of black equality and social justic In contrast, African Ameri- cans' interest in the party often had less programmatic and more practical roots. In Alabama, the party was the one voice that unequivocally and aggressively stood for black equality. self a "race" organization, the party became a "working-class alter- native to the NAACP" (p By 1930, black and white working people had very little in the way of organizational power, and in the shadow of a decade of Klan violence and racist backlash within the labor movement, the prospects of interracial unity seemed unrealizable. As the effects of the depression began to take their toll, workers, particularly blacks, had few weapons against plant shutdowns and massive layoffs. considered the preserve of black bourgeois or liberal interracial movements. The ILD was not just one additional voice speaking out on behalf of poor blacks; it was a movement composed of poor blacks. It not only provided free legal defense and sought to expose the "class basis" of racism in the South, it gave black working people what traditional middle-class organizations would not— a political voice.

From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. By Vicki L. Ruiz. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xvii, 240 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-511483-3.)

Year: 1998 Field: Summary: Women have played a prominent role in the evolution of the Mexicanand Mexican American communities north of the Rio Grande. That isas true for the early Spanish period as it is for more recent times. In thepioneer days, women participated directly in settling the borderlands,caring for their families, building the economy, and sustaining socialand political structures. In later generations, they migrated en massefrom Mexico to the United States, worked in a wide variety of occupa-tions, founded labor unions, led social movements, and achieved posi-tions of power and influence in society. In other words, they have donemany of the same things that men have done, and all along they havekept families together, nurturing husbands, children, and nfortunately, their enormous contributions have remained "inthe shadows," because, until recently, historical research has emphasizedthe activities of men. Lack of documentation has made it especially dif-ficult to chronicle the lives of women prior to the twentieth century. From Out of the Shadows focuses on the claiming of personal and public spaces across generations. As farm workers, flappers, labor activists, barrio volunteers, civic leaders, and feminists, Mexican women have made history. Their stories, however, have remained in the shadows. Thesis: ss. In Out of the Shadows , Ruiz provides anexcellent synthesis of the experiences of Chicanas and other Latinas invarious areas. She examines migration and settlement patterns, theresponse of Mexicanas to Anglo "Americanization" efforts, the quest forliberation from stifling traditionalism, community activism, feministmovements before and since the 1960s, and the recent struggles for self-expression and equal rights. Throughout the book, we see women work-ing in and outside the home and also centrally involved in labor, social,and political causes and movements. Traditional notions of Mexicanaand Chicana passivity are rendered obsolete by the many examples pro-vided by Ruiz of women firmly in control of their lives and fighting toshape their future. The lives of Josefina Fierro de Bright, Luisa Moreno,Dolores Huerta, and many other women profiled in this book, forceful-ly shatter stereotypes.From Out of the Shadows fills a large void in the historical literatureon Mexican Americans. It is well researched and clearly written. The textis enhanced by illustrations and useful statistics included in the appen-dices. This book should be required reading in Mexican American his-tory courses. General readers, as well, will find it informative andenlighten Recent studies in twentieth-centuryChicano history have increased our knowl-edge of Chicana's agency; yet no full-lengthmonograph has been written about thesewomen's historical experiences. In Out of theShadows, Vicki Ruiz addresses this glaringomission. Moving beyond the traditional gen-erational models, her interest is primarily in"interpreting voice and locating power be-tween and within communities, families,and individuals. Women's lives, dreams, anddecisions take center stage" (p. xiv). By fo-cusing on this cultural coalescence she revealshow, "there is no single hermetic Mexicanand Mexican-American culture, but ratherpermeable cultures rooted in generation, gen-der, region, class, and personal experience"(p. 50). This book addresses issues of interpreting voice and locating power between and within communities, families, and individuals. Women's lives, dreams, and decisions take center stage. It is important to situate this thread of public and private spaces that appears in each chapter. One's positionality inside the home, the community, and the workplace cannot be separated into neat categories of analysis. The feminist edifice of separate spheres need not apply as "the inextricable nature of family life and wage work in the histories of immigrant wives and women of color explodes the false oppositions at the heart of the public/private dichotomy." 8 Integration, rather than separation, provides a more illuminating construct in exploring the dynamics of Mexicana/Chicana work and family roles. A second thread running through the narrative is that of cultural coalescence. Immigrants and their children pick, borrow, retain, and create distinctive cultural forms. There is not a single hermetic Mexican or Mexican— American culture, but rather permeable cultures rooted in generation, gender, and region, class, and personal experience. People navigate across cultural boundaries and consciously make decisions with regard to the production of culture. However, bear in mind that people of color have not had unlimited choice. Race and gender prejudice and discrimination with their accompanying social, political, and economic segmentation have constrained aspirations, expectations, and decisionmaking.!!! Ruiz argues that there is a direct link be-tween the struggles of these women and theChicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.The first Latina/o national civil rights assem-bly in the United States, El Congreso dePueblos de Hablan Espanola, was organizedby Luisa Moreno in 1939. That year, El Con-greso called on United States universities tocreate Latino studies departments and foughtagainst discrimination in housing, education,and employment. The Chicano movementdrew on this heritage, Ruiz maintains; it wasnot a "me too" effort to emulate the black civilrights movement. This long tradition of cul-tural resistance continues to empower ethnicMexican women as they engage in currentstruggles, such as the new social movementforged by the Hotel and Restaurant Employ-ees Union in Los Angeles. From Out of theShadows not only celebrates the lives of Mexi-can women in the United States but provides ablueprint for social justice and human di Other: erall, Vicki L. Ruiz has made a majorcontribution to Chicana historiography.Rather than the definitive work on Mexican/Mexican American/Chicana women in thetwentieth century, Ruiz establishes the firstsignificant step into removing these womenfrom the shadows of American history, truly aremarkable effort. 1 cent:The border journeys of Mexican women were fraught with unforeseen difficulties, but held out the promises of a better life. 2. While one group of Americans responded to Mexican immigration by calling for restriction and deportation, other groups mounted campaigns to "Americanize" the immigrants. Confronting "America" often mean confronting the labor contractor, the boss, the landlord, or la migra. It could also involve negotiating the settlement house, the grammar school, and the health clinic. State and church-sponsored Americanization projects could portend cultural hegemony, individual empowerment, vocational tracking, community service, or all four simultaneously. To get at how Mexicanas and their children traversed the terrain of In challenging chaperonage, Mexican-American teenagers did not attack the foundation of familial oligarchy— only its more obvious manifestation. (It would take later generations of Chicana feminists to take on this task.) Chaperonage, however, could no longer be used as a method of social control, an instrument for harnessing women's personal autonomy and sexuality. Through open resistance and clever evasion, daring young women broke free from its constraints. Their actions represent a significant step in the sexual liberation of Mexican-American women. Self-help, reciprocity, and commadrazgo are woven through the narratives of Mexican-American women. With pickets, baskets, and ballots, they created tapestries of resistance. Representing a range of ideologies from proletarian to seigneurial, they addressed injustice and served their communities. During the 1960s and 1970s, women in the Chicano Student Movement would draw on these legacies to form a Chicana generation that reclaimed, reinscribed, and transformed political and cultural subjectivities —with feminism as the contested frontera. reveiw a review

The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. By Gregory James N.. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005. xvi, 446 pp. Cloth, $59.95, isbn0-8078-2983-8. Paper, $19.95, isbn0-8078-5651-7.)

Year: 05 Field: great mig Summary: Over twenty million black and white Americans migrated out of the American South between 1900 and 1960, marching northward and westward in two parallel, yet distinct migrations that forever altered the political, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic fabric of the United States. The historian James N. Gregory analyzes and contextualizes those symbiotic migrations in his illuminating and timely (not to mention conceptually original) new book, The Southern Diaspora. Thesis: Gregory argues that the "southern diaspora" changed America by transforming American religion (by spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating both the black and white versions of evangelical Protestantism); American popular culture (especially in music, including blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, and hillbilly); racial hierarchies (by aiding black migrants in the great cities of the North and West develop institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement and pockets of black political power to emerge); American conservatism (by contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics); and the nature of American regions (by fueling the reconstructions that turned the South into an economic and political source of power and by collapsing the huge cultural differences between the South and the rest of the United States). //Southern Whites and other ethniitices need to also be considerted when discussing the great migration Other: Southern whites had less impact on northern andwestern cities, despite their greater numbers, becausethey tended not to concentrate in inner-city areas.Many found their way to the suburbs. There, they es-tablished a beachhead for the evangelical explosion af-ter World War II, the rise of conservative politics, andthe nationalization of country music. But this shouldnot be viewed as the southernization of America. Work-ing-class ethnics, especially in the Midwest, led the ex-odus to the Republican Party and the suburbs afterWorld War II. They did not follow the initiative ofsoutherners. The dynamic working here was race andclass, not regi The black elite was one of those elements. If the white South was losing some of its "talented tenth," the black South was losing more. Carter G. Woodson long ago demonstrated that black professionals were leaving at very high rates, especially graduates of the Negro colleges who, unless they went into the ministry or teaching, had little chance of finding appropriate work in the South. \The Southern Diaspora contributed to the "Southernization of America" and at the same time to the "Americanization of Dixie." This chapter does so, making the point that the Black Metropolises provided the base for a sequence of extremely important political developments that were not just prelude but precondition to the southern civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. There was a particular regional dynamic behind the twentieth-century drive for rights and equality, an almost Archimedean logic: African Americans had to leave the South in order to gain the leverage needed to lift it and the rest of the nation out of Jim Crow segregation. It was not just the civil rights movement itself that was important, it was also the way that geography had enabled African Americans to leverage and realign powerful institutions outside their

Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation

Year: 2001 Field: New South/Jim Crow Summary: Harris examines three "Deep South" regions, each of which will be familiar to historians because of previous studies, memoirs, and so forth: the Sea Islands of coastal Georgia; Georgia's eastern Piedmont; and the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta. Harris convincingly shows that these areas were, despite a number of similarities, distinct "Deep Souths." The book is divided into three chronological sections, each covering about twenty years. Part 1, 1876-1896, sets up the regional differences following Reconstruction, emphasizing the variations in labor patterns and land ownership; describes the beginnings of comprehensive systems of legalized segregation; and concludes with the election of 1896. Part 2, 1897-1918, covers culture and society at the turn of the century, especially the influence of World War I. Part 3, 1919-1939, looks at the effects of modernization (in transportation, communication, and so forth), the problems of the boll weevil and the Great Depression, and the role of the New Deal. Thesis: Genralizations obsurece regfion differences. The SOuth or other ghistgories are no monoliths. Other: In the Sea Islands cotton planters were unable to restore their plantations and abandoned the region. African Americans took advantage of land availability to buy small plots of land. These they used for subsistence farming, supplementing their produce with wages from part-time labor on the neighboring rice plantations. Largely insulated from events on the mainland, they were able to retain [End Page 806] considerable control over their labor, their culture, and their communities. Well into the twentieth century, large numbers of African Americans owned their own land, voted in political elections, and used community networks to protect themselves from the worst features of the Jim Crow era. African Americans in the Piedmont were not as fortunate. When Southern whites reestablished their cotton plantations, most African Americans had little choice but to become tenants or sharecroppers. Few acquiesced quietly. During the late 1890s, large numbers of African Americans joined the Populist Party. When the party failed and land prices continued to rise, large numbers left the region for Southern cities and the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta. Those that remained were sometimes able to negotiate better terms for their labor. Even so, the overwhelming majority remained impoverished. Harris shows that Southern Conservatives could not completely control the region because they could not completely control the ideas, technologies, political movements, and people that influenced the region. European and Northern investors entered the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta and tried to rationalize cotton production. Record producers scoured the region for fresh talent. Wealthy Northerners bought up Sea Island properties so that they could recreate the lives of the great planters and cash in on the burgeoning tourist trade. Mobilization during World War I created new opportunities for African Americans to claim equal citizenship. Labor agents tried to induce African Americans to take factory jobs in the North. New Deal investigators descended upon the South to analyze the roots of Southern poverty and the causes of Southern white racism. New technologies like the automobile, the Victrola, the radio, and movie pictures, exposed black and white Southerners to new ideas and to alternative social patterns. The Georgia sea-island culture of long-staple cotton and rice collapsed in the late1 800s, as the extremely labor-intensive work of maintaining ditches and dams could notsurvive a free-labor regime. The eastern Piedmont of Georgia made the conversion fromplantation agriculture to sharecropping and expanded cotton production until 1920. But lowcotton prices and the boll weevil crippled this economy by the beginning of the Depression.The Mississippi Delta, on the other hand, witnessed a major capital expansion as the swam-py wilderness of antebellum times was converted into the South's premier cotton produc-tion center.These differences between the three regions affected black-white labor relations in theagricultural sector. As the sea islands returned to wilderness, African Americans practicedself-sufficient farming, supplemented by fishing and work in the lumber industry. Blacklandownership dominated tenancies, although the absolute numbers of both declined after1900 in the face ofbleak agricultural prospects. Because white landowners did not abandonthe Georgia Piedmont, blacks entered into tenant arrangements in cotton production andhoped for the opportunity to purchase land in good times. Alt

A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. By Lizabeth Cohen

Year: 2003 Field: Postwar Summary: The beauty and relevance of examining the social world from the per- spective of consumption (in contrast to the frequently adopted production orientation, as well as others) is well illustrated in Lizabeth Cohen's es- timable historical study of the politics of mass consumption in post-World War II America (with New Jersey, the state of the author's birth, as a paradigm case). Thesis: Foundation of the conbsumers republic is laid during 1930s //People voted and were activists through consumption; a more powerful form of voting and the idea of a repbulic1 African Americsn, shut out fom larger culture, used consious consumeption as a manner of protest Wwii; The link between citzens and consumption were intensified during ww2 ; New deal and keynesian economics encouraged this. Also, aas were denied consumer citzenhsip by what theyw were allowed to buy. Women were allowed ti particpatie through the homefront 3Private world controlls the marker place, buttressed by the governemtn and linked economic prosperity with a free and moral nation The soceity refocused onto the conusmer as the funda,metla citzen unit //gi bill etc. People were segregated by the suburbs and weree they were allowed to consume//less central amrketplaces and more class specifc shopping areas mass marketing facilitates the consumers republic -this started to infect presidental elections //Cultural consumption experience the same segregation as the marketplace //This makes political movements of the mass much more difficult --these ideas are so good, what the **** Cohen argues that in the last twodecades we have witnessed the emergence of the consumer/citizen/tax-payer/voter, "where self-interested citizens increasingly view governmentpolicies like other market transactions, judging them by how well servedthey feel personally" (p. 9).!!! Other: consumer republic and the citizen consumers , "where consumer/citizens. . . increasingly related to government itself as shoppers in a market-place" consumerism is biased towards indivudialism One of the main conclusions to be drawn from Cohen's argument, then, isthat consumerism was not inherently political in mid-twentieth-century America:it was rather, a blank slate on to which business leaders, politicians, women,African Americans, ethnic minorities, trade unionists, and others could projecttheir own political agendas, and a fluid, interactive process through whichpublic policy, personal identities, and power relations could be negotiated andconstructed.

More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow

Year: 88 Field: Summary: Thesis: Rabinowitz asserted that the Woodward thesis was amorphous, over-emphasized law as opposed to customary practice, and was "wrong" about the degree of fluidity in race relations prior to the 1890s.[3] Yet Rabinowitz also argued in his 1988 reassessment that Strange Career made a crucial contribution in its focus on the history of segregation in the nineteenth-century South, as well as in its emphasis on a sea-change in race relations in the 1890s. Moreover, he praised the book's concluding chapters, which carried the story of the history of segregation and desegregation from the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that overturned the legal basis for the segregation of public schools in 1954, into the early 1970s.[4] In summation, Rabinowitz declared that "Woodward so broadened and modified his initial effort as to make it the best available brief account of American race relations."[5] In a magnanimous but ironic and tenacious rejoinder to Rabinowitz entitled "Strange Career Critics, Long May They Persevere," Woodward acknowledged that he may have erred in stressing the "chronology before the sociology and demography of the subject,"[6] but stressed that he had good reason for doing so. Given the common perception of white Americans and white southerners in the early 1950s that "race relations had 'always been that way,'" the first and foremost goal of Strange Career had to be to prove that "race relations had a history."[7] Other: erhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Woodward's analysis in the first two-thirds of Strange Career was his tendency, as Howard Rabinowitz put it, to see African-Americans as "objects" rather than as "subjects." Woodward did, however, make the transition to seeing African-Americans as full participants in the story of American race relations in the final chapter he wrote for the 1974 edition.[17] As Rabinowitz and many subsequent historians have pointed out, the demands of African-Americans for their rights was crucial to the "origins and development of segregation" as well as to its demise.[18] Assessing The Strange Career ofJim Crow 847precise in his use of evidence. In all editions, Woodward uses Negro journalist T.McCants Stewart's recollections of his 1885 trip along the South Atlantic seaboardto illustrate the absence of rigid segregation. The treatments are identical, exceptthat the 1955/1957 account is introduced by the sentence "More pertinent and per-suasive is the testimony of the Negro himself"; the 1966/1974 account begins,"More pertinent, whether typical or not, is the experience of a Negro."15Yet the fault for missing Woodward's point does not always rest with the carelessreader, for in matters besides the importance of law, Strange Career is often con-tradictory. Often that is to the good, making the book more comprehensive. Wood-ward regularly claims that he is looking simply at segregation, defined as the physicaldistance between the races, but there is a wealth of valuable information about po-litical participation, jury service, and other matters that go well beyond mere segre-gation. Woodward wrote out whole aspects of southern life from thebounds of his argument, thus at the very beginning, depending on your point ofview, either loading the dice or conceding much of the game to his critics.Woodward has obviously fared best within the strict ground rules he had estab-lished. The thesis is particularly true of public conveyances, where segregation lawswere generally of post-1890 origin and where a degree of integration certainly ex-isted, though rarely on first-class railroad cars. Yet the evidence about various formsof public accommodation, most notably the limited impact of the 1875 Civil RightsAct, suggests that segregation by custom was almost certainly more common thanintegration.17 On Woodward's terms, that conclusion might be a victory for thethesis, but a somewhat hollow one. Woodward is also wrong to not look at pre jim crow segregation , Woodward is right about the importance of post-1890 legisla- tion. Those later laws, however, even when coming in new areas, did not create a new system of segregation. Rather, they added the force of additional laws to a system already widespread in practice. Cell reached a similar conclusion, noting that the shift during the 1890s came, not in the reality of racial contact, but in political rhetoric and law. In his recent tour de force, The Crucible of Race, Joel Williamson agrees but adds to the equation the sharp increase in racial violence.22 The question remains: Why did things change in the 1890s? Woodward attrib- uted the altered racial climate to the erosion of northern liberalism and the weakened commitment of southern conservatives and agrarian radicals to defending black political rights. Yet recent scholarship has demonstrated that most Populists were, at best, always ambivalent about having a biracial coalition and that conserva- tives, rather than following, actually led in the fight for disfranchisement legisla- tion.23 Besides, both those groups had already long expected to be segregated from blacks in schools, churches, and places of public accommodation 1 cent:

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. By George Chauncey.

Year: 1994 Field: Sexuality Summary: gave a history to a movement that has transformed contemporary life for all Americans, not just gay men and lesbians. But in a twist of irony, this book, which was possible only because of Stonewall, makes a convincing casefor the relative unimportance of that event in launching gay life and culture. Thesis: hISTORY OF sEXUALTIY IN RPACTICE Chauncey argues that until the 1930s, a gay world flourished quite conspicuously in New York City and that it was only with the repression accompanying the repeal of Prohibition and the conformity of Cold War culture that the "closet" confining gays in 1969 was constructed. "Isolation," "invisibility,"and "internalization" (self-hatred) are myths that we too often have taken as timeless pre-Stonewall realities. Also about how the non-gay world otherized the gay world and defined itself as not Other: The book debunks three theses. The first is the myth of isolation-that oppression leads to solitariness, hence there was little gay subcultural development until the gay libera- tion movement. Not so. Chauncey docu- ments a significant world of gay institutions- restaurants, coffee shops, speakeasies, bathhouses, not to mention "gay spaces" in key streets and locales. The second thesis is the myth of invisibility-that where a gay world did exist, it was hidden from sight (and history). Not so. The world of gay New York was extraordinarily visible, with thousands of men, for instance, attending the city's drag balls. Third is the myth of internalization- that homophobia leads to self-oppression and self-hatred. Not so. These men celebrate their homosexuality in all its transgressive flamboy- ancy, and indeed flourish through it! Here are men who could "come out" into a "homosex- ual society." //Class and gender intersect a lot //middle class started to codify the hetero-homo binary and jjudge it //;aws helped renforce and stamp out public gayness "Men had to do many tjings to achieve the status as "normal man" but heterosexuality was not one of the

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 356 pages, $26.95, hardcover, $16.95, paperback

Year: 2009 Field: Summary: nvisible Hands does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of the intricacies of right-wing politics in the United States. Instead, it focuses sharply on the interplay of ideology, organization, and economic interest that drove the process forward to ultimate, devastating (though perhaps emporary) triumph. In a sense, the author is guided by the adage "fol-low the money." An essential aspect of the story involves the intellectualand political mobilization of the business community—particularly suchhuge corporations as AT&T, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, DuPont, Exxon, Ford,General Electric, General Motors, B.F. Goodrich, Greyhound, Gulf, IBM,Lockheed Martin, Mobil, Pepsi, Sears & Roebuck, Sun Oil, and U.S.Steel. As the author shows us, they bankrolled small conservative pub-lications, right-wing institutes, foundations, think tanks, educationalcampaigns, cultural offensives, political mobilizations, and massive elec-toral efforts. But, in addition to what must ultimately add up to billionsof dollars in contributions from 1935 to 2000, these scions, executives,and well-paid representatives of big business intervened in increasingnumbers with hearts and minds and hands in the struggle to win theirpower back, with a vengeance. Thesis: But as Phillips-Fein shows, the mass mobilizations from the left end of the political spectrum during the Great Depression and again in the wake of the Second World War resulted in a momentous power shift—with radical implications for the working class and other oppressed layers in our society. The militant insurgencies encompassed by, but sometimes bursting beyond, an organized labor movement, which ultimately represented more than a third of the labor force, found reflection in the political arena, particularly in the far-reaching social pro- grams, economic regulations, and Keynesian perspectives represented by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. All of this horrified and enraged a class whose immense wealth and power, while hardly destroyed, were curtailed and "trespassed" upon by what they saw as unruly and insolent employees, union bosses, red- and pink-hued "do-gooders," and a swell- ing legion of government bureaucrats. They denounced these government reforms and regulations over and over and over again, as "socialistic." President Dwight D. Eisenhower, should "prevent or correctabuses springing from the unregulated practice of the private economy."Eisenhower articulated that common, "middle of the road" wisdomwhen he proclaimed: "Should any political party attempt to abolish socialsecurity, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm pro-grams, you would not hear from that party again in our political history."Going against this dominant outlook, the goal of business conserva-tives was to uproot all manifestations of "collectivism," no matter howmild. As economist Ludwig von Mises, advocate of unrestrained freemarket forces, emphasized to Leonard Read (Chamber of Commerceexecutive and founder of the Foundation for Economic Education),"the only thing that really matters is the outcome of the intellectualcombat between the supporters of socialism and those of capitalism." Phillips-Fein introduces us to a small, initially beleaguered corps of "free market conservatives" (those who want to conserve traditional power relations benefitting big business) who organized the utterly unsuccessful Liberty League, the more durable but often thwarted National Association of Manufacturers, and the marginal Foundation for Economic Education, which published the small, Monthly Review-type journal (with quite differ- ent politics, to be sure) called The Freeman. Throughout this study, we see that even modest efforts at cultivating right-wing publications and pub- lic forums—while sometimes demoralizing—had the effect of building up networks and providing experience that would come into play in later efforts, ultimately contributing to victories in the future. And, as Phillips- Fein points out, "at a time when leading liberal intellectuals like Daniel Bell and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. argued that the rise of fascism and Soviet communism had shattered the capacity for faith in ideology in the West, insisting that most conservatives and liberals alike agreed on the welfare state and the limits of government power, these free-market activ- ists understood, in a way that the liberal thinkers did not, the importance of ideas and the need to shape the terms of debate." n this study of business's involvement in the rise of the conservative movement, Kim Phillips-Fein focuses on efforts to "undo the system of unions, federal social welfare programs, and government regulation of the economy that came into existence during and after the Great Depression of the 1930s" (pp. xi-xii). In doing so, she strives to shift scholars' attention back to the im portant role that business has played in the conservative movement. Her book is not a historical narrative per se but rather a series of case studies asserting the central ity of business in various conservative organizations and causes from the 1940s through the 1 ecurity. The author points out thatmore than half of the league's funds for 1935 came fromfewer than two dozen bankers, industrialists, and businessmen. bor. Phillip-Fein shows correctlythat FEE countered Keynesianism with classical freemarket economic thought, although she tends to conflate the economic views of commonwealth economistAdam Smith, Cambridge neoclassicalists Alfred Marshall, and Austrian economists Friedrich von Hayekand Ludwig von Mises. Intellectual differences amongthese thinkers were especially important for conservative economists. (For example, the Economics Department at the University of Chicago refused to appointHayek to a professorial position in its program.) Theauthor astutely notes that business's promotion of freemarket economics was part of a larger political projectto overturn the New Deal //uses new deal to get out just to dismantle it A critical factor in this revival was the expansion of the American Enterprise Institute under its president William J. Baroody. Some conservatives, such as beer magnate Joseph Coors, textile manufacturer Roger Milliken, and Richard Mellon Scaife, believed that a more partisan and aggressive think tank was needed. In 1973, the Heritage Foundation was established. While AEI focused on economics and foreign policy, in its early years the Heritage Foundation was on the cutting edge of the cultural wars of the 1970s. The Heritage Foundation's second president, Edwin Feulner, brought to the organization men like Hugh C. Newton, the public relations director for the National Right to Work Committee. Upon examining the conservative movement's leadership, Phillips-Fein argues that, while the New Right of the 1970s might have had "a new style, it still drew its money and its personnel from the old cadres of the business right" (p. 173). later chapters, Phillips-Fein explores the involvement of groups such as the Business Roundtable incountering the regulatory state, consumer rights, affirmative action, and the Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration (OSHA). Her chapter on business support for the Religious Right is especially revealing. Political victory came with the 1980 election of RonaldReagan to the White House. The Reagan administration sought to fulfill the conservative business agendaof rolling back industrial regulation, pro-environmentalpolicies, worker safety, and civil rights legislation whilepromoting tax cuts for the wealthy and economic policies that benefitted businesses. roughout her book Phillips-Fein focuses her attention on showing how conservative businessmen werecentral to the rise of the conservative movement. Sheis not terribly interested in the ideas that motivatedthese businessmen (and, she observes, they were mostlymen), nor is she interested in the divisions within thelarger business community. (After all, some corporatebusinesses enthusiastically supported the expansion ofthe liberal state.) Instead, she reminds scholars of ern American conservatism that the history of thismovement is not just about grass-roots activism, socialissues, and racial backlash, but also about real economic interest Phillips-Fein argues thatmodern conservatism emerged when a modest-sized group of businessmen reacted tothe economic changes created by the New Deal and the rise of industrial labourunions in the 1930s. Yet she covers a longer period of time, describing how sections of the business community established networks and helped shape policies, labour relations, and public opinion into the 1970s, when renewed forms of labour discontent, campus protestors, civil rights activists, and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader made headlines and influenced politicians. Drawing from many archives, Phillips-Fein describes an impressive list of business-led and business-friendly organisations: the National Association of Manu- facturers (NAM), the US Chamber of Commerce, the short-lived American Liberty League, the American Enterprise Institution, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Mont Pelerin Society, the John Birch Society, the Business Roundtable, the Olin Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation. Leaders of some of these groups reached out to the broader community, winning the support of religious leaders, journalists, economists, and radio personalities. She illustrates that organised businessmen remained anxious about government regulation, labour unions, and consumer rights activism throughout the post-war decades. Many contributed to corporate Political Action Committees (PACs) and warned about the need to defend capitalism. As the Olin Foundation's John Olin put it in 1973, businessmen organised to 're-establish the validity and importance of the American free enterprise system' (p. 162). She convincingly explains how these coalitions weakened the labour movement, legitimised government de-regulation, and elected politicians like Ronald Reagan to office. Oval Office, "I promise you I'll be trying to stir up thebusiness world, including the exhortation to fight back against govern-ment's increasing lust for power over free enterprise."The so-called Reagan Revolution was continued not only by GeorgeH.W. Bush, but also—as Phillips-Fein observes—by DemocraticPresident Bill Clinton, who "accomplished much of what Reagan couldnot: the dismantling of welfare, the deregulation of Wall Street, theexpansion of free trade." Organized labor, ravaged during the Reaganyears, continued to decline, and economic inequality continued togrow. "He's a Democrat, but I do admire him," Barry Goldwater wroteof Clinton. "I think he's doing a good job."The once-marginal perspectives of the late 1940s and 1950s thatbusiness conservatives had, by the final decades of the twentieth cen-tury, become the new political and economic orthodoxy of the UnitedStates. The demolition of the assumptions and programmatic vestigesof the New Deal, and of the once-powerful labor movement, seemedto have been largely a "mission accomplished," even before GeorgeW. Bush took office. The extent to which President Barak Obama willend up doing the same kind of "good job" as the previous DemocraticPresident remains to be seen. But the story told in Invisible Hands sug-gests that the electoral arena is not, in and of itself, the place to look Other: W/hile principled (and sometimes schem ing) conservative politicians and intellectuals have received their due, activists who operated out of the public eye have, until now, remained obscure. Phillips-Fein examines the wealthy men who funded conservative think tanks and formed organizations dedicated to promoting free-market policies. The key players in Invisi ble Hands are the DuPont and the Coors fami lies?not Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The Republican party takes a backseat to the Mont Pelerin Society and the Heritage Foundation. Given the archival evidence Phillips-Fein mus ters and the fact that conservatives have spent the past seventy years decrying the gop for sundry ideological impurities, there is much to be said for her approach. In any work that revises our understanding of the past, there will be provocative passages, some less persuasive than others. For example, Phillips-Fein relates instances of anti-Semitic and anti-black sentiment that occurred among the key players of various conservative orga nizations. Were conservatives' defenses of free enterprise masking their unwillingness to see hitherto marginalized groups moved to the center of the New Deal order? Further, how representative of the post-1930 conservative movement were such individuals? Phillips-Fein excellently documents the anti-union efforts of men such as Lemuel Boul ware. W/hether their efforts were as effective as they claimed, however, is open to debate. Even in the 1940s?the glory years of industrial la bor organizing?large numbers of workers voluntarily chose not to join unions. There were also legions of working- and middle-class Americans who resented having the cost of union wages passed on to them in the form of higher consumer prices. By the 1960s, as American-made goods became both expensive and shoddy, foreign competition sealed the fate of high-paid, low-skilled union workers. Most intriguing is Phillips-Feins discussion of the rhetoric that conservative think tanks and keen politicians such as Ronald Reagan deployed to depict the Right as the populist friend of working families. How conservatives successfully portrayed liberal Democrats as ef fete elitists, however, remains less developed. The class base of the Democratic party shifted in the 1960s, moving away from the factory floor to the college campus. Traditional "bread and-butter issues," as Michael Kazin observed, competed against life-style concerns. By the end of the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation did not have to wage relentless war against liberal ism. The Democrats had torn themselves apart in a civil war, leaving it to an ebullient Reagan to shoot the wounded. Phillips-Fein's insistence that businessmen were the crucial agents in the creationof modern conservatism is convincing, but the same cannot be said about her beliefthat this anti-labour union and pro-free market alliance was fundamentally new after But, overall, this thoroughly researched, well-written, and largely persuasiveaccount will interest readers of Business History. It will undoubtedly force scholarsto recognise more fully the significant roles that businessmen have played in shapingtwentieth-century politics and ideas. For that, Phillips-Fein must be applauded. Specifcally trying to dismantle the new deal because govt constraint capital even though the new deal created their world 1 cent: This is an economic hisory nto a sculturaol one which shows conservative roots befgore 1960 and actuyally sprouting from the enw deal //The conservative bacjklash is directly gform the new deal; this is the big id4ea!!!!!!!!!!! //The du Ponts are major enenmies of the new deal and feel that they were born iun a world of constraint //unmitigated freedom for buisness for political change is the main thrust of the anti new deal order //the buisnessman acvtivist //uniuon busting in the factory was key to the conservative push' //this was fundamentally against the ND //goildwateer wass the protomodfern conservative but failed to win a more pro union middle //recession of 70s solved by consdervatism //free market was the moral thing to do—use chrtisnity

CHARLES M. PAYNE. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Strug- gle. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 525. $

Year: Field: Summary: Charles M. Payne's interpretation of black resistance in Mississippi is anastute analysis of the significant intellectual contributions of southern blackand white rural culture to the civil rights movement. Payne constructs hisstudy around two major themes, the expansion and subsequent decline of thecommunity-organizing tradition; and that tradition's part of an older, largerintellectual legacy Thesis: outhern black rural culture long included a tradition of community-organizing that politicized the black community through political participa-tion and the cultivation of indigenous leadership. That leadership emphasizedhelping people develop themselves for long-range progress and continuityrather than merely relying on a single event to effect change. The second in-tellectual contribution was a kind of black humanism founded on enforcedgentility and civility in intraracial relationships and diplomatic skills in inter-racial relationships. The black community's formal and elaborate rituals ofcourtesy and genteel etiquette extended to its relations with a broad class ofwhites. This innate egalitarianism was based partly on a recognition of thecommon humanity of the races and partly on the viciousness of Jim Crow.Black humanism also included an ethic of collective responsibility that re-flected a sense of family and extended family within the community. Collec-tive responsibility incorporated the elder generation's responsibility to trans-mit the legacy of organized protest and the younger generation's reciprocalresponsibility to accept that instruction with'deference and humility. This in-herent sense of egalitarianism and community was itself an act of resistance.Finally, black humanism considered a broad range of oppositional tactics inachieving and maintaining political activism. The third intellectual contribu-tion was the importance of black women's networks of kinship and friendshipto the expansion and sustenance of politicization and humanism. Other:Payne makes the existence of the older generation's"organizing tradition" his central thesis, but this is nothis most original or persuasive contribution. The "con-tinuity" of the movement of the 1950s-1960s withearlier "resistance" has become a cliche among histo-rians. Payne pays homage to the idea of continuity, butcompared with other studies that look for continuityextending back to the 1930s, the Progressive era, ormother Africa, his book actually presents a case fordiscontinuity. Payne shows how the generation thatcame of age in World War II was unique, far moreorganized and militant than previous generations. Theonly continuity Payne demonstrates is the unsurprising On top of all this, Payne is the only scholar in yearsto shed new light on why the civil rights movement fellapart in the mid-1960s. Too often obsessed withorigins and precedents, other scholars have left theend of the movement relatively unexamined. In short,this is the most original and imaginative analysis of thecivil rights movement to come along in many years. Itis as careful as it is bold, and its implications extend farbeyond the temporal and spatial boundaries Paynemodestly imposes on his argum 1 cent: Intro: This about how the young civil rightsers convinced the old Local people focus Humanist focus Communites and organizing Chapters 1-6: 1-3 the energy that made the crm possiblke qas wider than we reakzie //about how vicous mississippi is //continuity organizatizationally and intellectually //wwii gneration and before is socially inviiable from an activit pov Partly because of economic change inside the state, partly because of Mississippi's increasing involvement with the social currents of the world outside the state, racial terror was no longer as common or as effective as it had been. If some observers were optimistic about the state's future, we may be sure that many others had to be uncertain. There was no way to tell how meaningful the apparent changes were until someone tested them. Chapters 4 through 9 examine the way the activists in the sixties built on and elaborated that legacy, concentrating on Greenwood between 1962 and 1964 and on the role that local people there played in the process. The period before mid- 1964 is special because it marks a time when the Mississippi movement had only the most minimal resources. The federal government was still criminally lax about protecting the lives of civil rights workers, there were no large numbers of volunteers from outside the state, no consistent interest from the national media even when civil rights workers were killed, no particular reason to believe that the movement was ever going to achieve anything to justify the sacrifices it required. Those who became a part of the movement in that period really were trusting themselves to the air. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1964 Freedom Summer Project signaled a shift to a different kind of movement. She argued that nonviolent direct action and voter registration would in fact complement one another. Attempting to register people was sure to produce the same sort of violent reaction direct action was producing, providing plenty of opportunity for a nonviolent response It could be argued that attitudes toward whites in the movement represent another area where the attitudes of local people restrained those of SNCC workers. By the winter of 1963- 1964 the possibility of bringing in large numbers of white volunteers for the summer was under discussion. (See Chapter 10.) For a variety of reasons, most of the Mississippi SNCC staff were against it. For some of the younger people, there was often an edge of personal bitterness in their reluctance to have too many whites around. Local adults active in COFO overwhelmingly felt that, whatever problems they might bring, the movement needed help, and white students represented help. It was clear, Bob Moses thought, that if the matter were put to a vote, local adults were going to vote the project in. 12 It seems likely that their support of the project helped ensure that it would happen, despite the feelings of the staff.

The Age of Reform, from Bryan to F.D.R. By RICHARD HOFSTADTER.

Year: 1950s; needs another review Field: Pop + New Deal Summary: The book is primarily an essay in political thought and moods. Three of the seven chapters deal with agrarian ideas from the days of populism to those of parity. These discuss the farmer's zeal for reform and his ultimate acceptance of commercial realities. The next three depict progressivism as a legacy of the Mugwumps and a reaction of several professional groups against a triumphant plutocracy. These underline the middle-class moderation of the movement and its ambivalent attempts to grapple with the trusts and the bosses. A final chapter surveys hastily but perceptively the two decades after 1918 with the avowed purpose of demonstrating that the goals and the methods of the New Dealdiffered markedly from those of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom Thesis: My theme then is the conception the paticipants had of their own work and the place it would occupy in the larger stream of our history." A Little racy towards populists - Blamed on a rapid decline of rural america **Populism and Progressivism are not foolish or desturctive but rather are ambiguous; thinks their resistance is important for change This reviewer learned much from the dissection of the agrarian myth which regarded the yeoman farmer as the bulwark of democracy, from the analysis of the folklore of populism and its conspiracy theory of history, and from the true dimensions of the agrarian triumph after the disasters of the Bryan campaigns. His understanding of progressivism has been deepened by the author's exposition of "the status revolution" as a factor in its emergence and by his timely reminder that modern statism was not a foreign importation but the work, in the beginning, of men who were trying to save native Yankee values of individualism and enterprise. In one of themost enlightening sections in his book, Hofstadter interprets this second reformmovement as the result of a status revolution. Relating the Progressives to theMugwumps, he finds that the native American, well educated and earning a livingthrough a profession, was thrust aside by new groups and new forces into a posi-tion where he felt his influence was, compared to the old days, negligible. ThroughProgressivism he struck back. "In the attempts of Populist and Progressive to holdon to some of the values of agrarian life, to save personal entrepreneurship andindividual opportunity and the character type they engendered, and to maintain ahomogeneous Yankee civilization! I have found much that was retrograde anddelusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic," Hofstadterannounces in his introduction. Populism can best be understood, however, not as a product of the frontier inheritance but as another episode in the well-established tradition of American entrepreneurial radicalism, which goes back at least to the Jacksonian era. The Populist entered the 20th century still affected by his yeoman inheritance but with a growing awareness of the businesslike character of his future.!!!! Populists were p nativist Anti-urban Not with postel's arguemt \\ The ferment of the Progressive era was urban, middle-class, and nationwide. Progressvism differed from Populism in the fact that the middle classes of the cities not only joined the trend toward protest but took over its leadership. Consumerism was a main avuenue for progressive politcs to reaching a larger audience;; consumer politcs Prog: Radical crituques from moderate men doing moderate politcs** Other: The key concept he introduces is "the agrarian myth," the representation of the homage Americans have paid to the subsistence, innocent, and yeoman farmer of old. The myth became a stereotype since agriculture became more commercial and industrial. Populism's main cause for formation was the alleged loss of "free land." Many Populist leaders believed that industry and government had a vendetta to destroy the agricultural business. The last chapter on Populism explains the agricultural prosperity after the Populist revolt because city migration lessened competition that had caused farmers to organize for the first time. Hofstadter highlights the foibles in the Populist revolt. The first was its sectional appeal, rather than national. Also, he argues its leaders were incompetent and that there was a perennial lack of funds. However, the single most destructive weakness was lack of silver. By joining with the Democratic campaign of 1896 on silver, Populists lost political ground. Despite their dissolution, Populists were successful because they caused the passage of new laws, years late The New Deal was a culmination of both Populism and Progressivism; however, Hofstadter stresses that for the most part, the New Deal was a "new departure" and despite its continual association with Progressivism, it was quite dissimilar. The reason it was different is that the New Deal was born out of the Great Depression, not prosperity, as were Populism and Progressivism. The New Deal was concerned with not democratizing the economy but managing it to meet the problems of the people. The New Deal had no set plans of reform; it was a chaotic experiment. Old Progressive woes were ignored. Party bosses were left alone. The New Deal did not intercede between the public and big business because the public wanted economic restoration, not regulation. A major disparity between Progressivism and the New Deal was that the latter was not based on Protestant morality and responsibility but was more pragmatic. It did not use moral rhetoric to create changes but physically acted. *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 The Progressives, according to Robert H. Wiebe and others in the "modernization school" were made up not of status revolutionaries from the old guard or disaffected professionals but were in a new class of educated professionals who came of age in the new interconnected modernizing world. They not only understood how to navigate the new bureaucracy by creating symbiotic relationships between government, education, and business but also pressed through "reforms" that did away with the old "local" way of doing business by enacting civil service reforms replacing elected officials with appointed "experts." 1 cent:

America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 Hardcover - Import, January 1, 1967 walter lefeber

Year: 1967 Field: cw Summary: New Left interpreation fo the COld War Thesis: . The rise of the cold war, argues LaFeber,was neither surprising nor remarkable; rather, the rapid decay of US-Sovietrelations in 1945, visible in the uneasy wartime relationship, was rooted in pre-ceding decades of American hostility to the Bolshevik state. Though he seemsambivalent about whether different US actions might have allayed Stalin's fearsof capitalist encirclement, LaFeber argues that American ideology and actionwere chiefly responsible for the cold war. The dominant concern of Americanpolicy makers, he contends, was the need to establish an international economicsystem that would provide expanding markets for American surpluses and con-tribute to international peace and prosper //american exceptionailist take Other: /The cold war was because of two expnasionists soceities with oppoite ideolfies and years of conflict before ww2\ //45-46 was when cold war diplomacy started when truman used economic foces and atomic dipliocmacy to scare the russians //then comes anticommunism //;aments the anticommunism and blames the us for its issues //open door imprialism led to some confluct before ww2 //opne door imperalism States' sphere of influ-ence. American economic expansion, according to policy makers, required orderand stability and entailed opposition to revolution, which was translated easilyinto anti-Communism. The United States, the author emphasizes, tried to useits overwhelming economic power to compel Russia to accept a multilateraleconomy and to open the satellites to American economic penetration. The coldwar, he concludes, emerged directly from this conflict between the world-wideambitions of American diplomacy and Stalin's determination to maintain controlof Eastern Europe, which was vital to the Soviet economy and security. LaFeberdenies that Russia was militantly expansionist in the postwar years and empha-sizes Stalin's generally conservative policies, but he unfortunately never marshalsenough of the available evidence to convince skeptical readers.Perhaps because he focuses on the American "open door" ideology, he alsooverlooks the Roosevelt government's reluctant agreement in late 1944 and early1945 to the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Rather thanthe Truman administration's struggling simply to roll back Communism inEastern Europe, as LaFeber does argue, the government was in effect repudiating this earlier understanding. He concludes that after Hiroshima the administrationincreased its efforts and turned to the practice of atomic diplomacy //critical of the us 1 cent: Preface //Not euro centirc //tries to show both sides //argues that domestic influences foreign policy 1 Goes over argument and taklsk about both nations as e onokmically minded and expansionts 2 Use of atomic negitoating power 3 Ameirican becomes aggressive against the iron curtain with nato anf the marshall plan America was relaigning the world opolitically 4 The atlaintc pact is lthe logical expansion of the monroe doctirne 5 Korea was show of force that showedf americas resistance tonrussian expnasion 6 //america never descalated 7 1954-1957 america and russia saw no reasonsfor neutraility and instead started to think that winning the cold war would happen in the 3rd world 8 9 0 /Lefeber questions the very goals of cold war policy and wheter american aims were correct not that they had power but what to do with it he is reacting to an overly critical demonization of soviets. He tries to show americas respjnsility important but overstated

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction By Edward Ayers

Year: 2007 Field: The New South Summary: Looks at the new south from a wider perspective/ He is trying to looking beyond Woodward's naartive to include more people and vlaue the lives of people. Its a post-stutualist approach. Thesis: Ayers isclear on when the New South began: "The New South era began in the mid-and late 1870s when the biracial and reformist experiment of Reconstruc-tion ended and the conservative white Democrats took power throughoutthe Southern states" (p. 7). Other: C. Vann Woodward,looking at this period, was uneasy with the term "NewSouth," worrying that it might be simply a rallying cry of southern boosters. Ayers attempts to get past thisconcern by going beyond the political deceptions anddelusions that preoccupied Woodward to an under-standing on "what it meant to live in the AmericanSouth" in this time (p. vi). Ayers aims to take hisreaders past the old political maps of this era (markedby "Bourbons," "redeemers," and "Black Republi-cans") to a vision at once broader in scope and moreintimately peopled

sTEVEN HAHN. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformationof the Georgia Upcountry, i850-90. (New York: Oxford University Press. i983.Pp. xi + 340. $29.95.

Year: Field: populism Summary: Hahn's purpose is to trace the values of Upcountry yeoman farmers, and he findsa persistent pattern running from the i85os through to the populists of the i89os. Thesis: Yeomen (especially in the Upcountry where planter influence was weak) were, in Hahn's view, stubbornly independent and yet mutually linked in a co-operativistcommunity. Their values were peasant-like, semi-subsistence, and producerist. The yeoman's view of the world centred on a "moral economy" based on the dignity of labour, on the notion of the "just price" (and the labour theory of value), on strong attachment to traditional time and work rhythms, and on a powerful resistance to the hegemony of market forces. Such values, Hahn argues, reveal some of the latent classtensions upon which slavery rested; and, further, they explain the Upcountry's enthusiasm for ideas of a co-operative commonwealth in the populist years of the i89os. teven Hahn argues that whitesouthern yeomen were transmogrified largelyagainst their will from subsistence farmers in theantebellum era to producers, particularly of cotton,for local, national, and international markets after1865. During the 1880s, many small farmers, inwhat he depicts as an effort to defend their "Revolu-tionary republican heritage" (p. 240), opposed suchlaws as those that required owners to fence in theiranimals, instead of letting them roam freely downvillage streets, or through neighbors' corn fields.Reacting against their changed socioeconomic rolesand against the credit relations that their abandon-ment of self-sufficiency necessitated, yeomen voted"independent" in the 1 870s and Populist in the1890s. These clashes between Democrats and theiropponents reflected not simply material self-inter-est, Hahn asserts repeatedly, but profound culturaldifferences between smallholders who adhered to apreindustrial "republican producer ideology"(p. 283) and the forces of "bourgeois individualismand the free market" (p. 282), here represented bysmall town merchants and a developing "agrarianbourgeoisie" (p. 244). Engagingly written, provoca-tive, fashionably blending simple social statistics withcultural "Marxism," this book, winner of the Nevinsdissertation prize, has already attracted considerableattention.!! The abolition of slavery removed the barrier that had blocked the way to capitalist social relations in the South. The slaves, emancipated without land or freedom dues of any kind, became immediate targets for transformation in to a proletariat. But the yeomanry, still owners of landed property at the end of the war, experienced a more gradual descent to the status of tenants andlandless laborers. Hahn makes perhaps his greatest theoretical contribution inrevealing the concrete historical process by which that transition occurred inthe Upcountry. The process involved a credit system that, unlike its antebellum predecessor, wrested from producers basic decisions about what toproduce and how, turning general farmers into cotton farmers working at thebehest of merchants. It withdrew the law from its role as protector of thecitizen's economic independence: exemption of essential farm and householdproperty from execution for debt fell at the hands of a state constitutional convention. It required extensive (and hotly contested) redefinition of landedproperty rights, abolishing communal privileges of hunting and fishing or ofgrazing animals on unfenced land. Other:During the slavery period, then, the producerism of the yeomen could, in some senses, find common ground with the planter's localism, states' rights, and ambivalence towards market forces and industrialization. And again, in some ways slaveryserved as a buffer against the rigid disciplining of white labour and the proletarianization of the yeomen. Against this, however, was the yeoman's fear of black proletarians, and the small farmer's lively dislike of the planter's haughtiness and anti-democratictendencies. he "cotton vortex" and the fencelaws brought yeomen into sharp conflicts with merchants, urban interests, and large landowners; they brought the spectre of proletarianization, and they produced powerful support for the populist struggle for a co-operative commonwealth. the appearance of a third politicalparty in the South in the early 1890's, a party which called for significant if notrevolutionary alterations in America's political and economic order,"had less to do with deteriorating conditions or spreading poverty than with thetransformation of social relations and particular confrontations ? with the penetrationof market relations into a society of different organization and sensibility, and with theconflicts provoked thereby."These conflicts "in social terms" pitted "town against country, merchants and landlordsagainst yeomen and tenants of both races" and "in cultural terms.. .the values of thefree market against the republicanism of petty producers" inherited from the eighteenth 1 cent:In short, the props that had supported theindependence of simple commodity producers during slavery fell systematically after the war, paving the way for the replacement of simple commodity production by capitalist commodity production. In the conflict between the two systems with their very different values, Hahn argues, lay the roots of Southern populism.!!!!!!

The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. By Richard Hofstadter. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Pp. xviii, 498, xiii. $8.95.)

Year: 1968 Field: historiograhpy Summary: Turner, in developing his idea that American democracy is the outcome of the experience of frontier expansion and the settlement of the West, introduced his fellow historians to a set of new concepts and methods, and in doing so doing re-drew the guidelines of American historiography. Beard insisted upon the elitist origins of the Constitution, crusaded for the economic interpretation of history, and ultimately staked his historical reputation on an isolationist view of recent American foreign policy. Parrington emphasized the moral and social functions of literature, and read the history of literature as a history of the national political mind. Thesis: sees the "conflict oriented" history of the progressives being replaced over the past twenty years by a "consensus" history of conservatives in a society in which conflict is still very much in evidence. His solution is a mixture of the two, with complexity rather than sharp polarization the chief ingredient and the ultimate aim a society which is characterized by comity. In short, Hofstadter seems to be telling us that history, whose only law is the law of continuity and change, must be a mixture of both consensus and conflict and that the best hope for the future is true democracy rather than revolution or repression!! Other:My criterion was, above all, influence; and among writers on American history it was Turner, Beard, and Parrington who gave us the pivotal ideas of the first half of the twentieth century. It was they who seemed to be able to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment. Progressive historiography gave it memory and myth, and naturalized it within the whole framework of American historical experience. The historians of the nineteenth century worked under the pressure of two internal tensions: on one side there was the constant demand of society—whether through the nationstate, the church, or some special group or class interest—for memory mixed with myth, for the historical tale that would strengthen group loyalties or confirm national pride; and against this there were the demands of critical method, and even, after a time, the goal of writing "scientific" history.\

KRISTIN L. HOGANSON. Fighting for American Manhood:How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-Anmericananld Philippine-American Wars. (Yale Historical Publi-cations.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. Pp.xii, 305. $30.00.

Year: 1998 Field: Foreegin Summary: thoughtful, well-researched, and convincingly argued study, Hoganson examines the gender formulations from which American political leaders-all men- derived their moral bearings and developed their political beliefs. Late nineteenth-century domestic pol- itics fused with foreign policy to serve as the stage whereon male players acted out carefully scripted gender roles, central to which was the practice of manliness. Thesis: e imperial project, Hoganson suggests, which in this instance meant war first against thepanish in 1898 and later against the Filipinos in 1899, was driven principally by males concerned about their status as men. Manly character implied a specific set of behaviors and beliefs dealing with the nature of polit- ical power, which carried to its logical conclusion could not but influence the terms by which U.S. leaders took measure of the place of the United States in the emerging world order. War for empire Hoganson argues that anxieties about threats to American manhood led imperial-ists to look to war as a means of producing a new generation of martial heroes. Inadvocating an assertive policy in Cuba, jingoists drew on narratives of chivalric rescuein which they were cast as manly defenders of the nation's honor who would rescue afeminized Cuba. They sought to build manly character, she suggests, not only to ele-vate America's racial and national standing in the world but also to reinforce men'spositions at home against the challenges of the suffrage movement and the NewWoman. Their desire to confirm the manly deeds that were widely celebrated duringthe "splendid little war" continued, in turn, to justify the task of "civilizing" the Philip-pines. Hoganson shows that imperialist justifications for retaining the Philippines as acolony often intermingled gendered and racial arguments, as Filipino people weredepicted as darker-skinned and, therefore, as unmanly, childlike, and lacking in"proper" gender divisions. The equation of manliness with imperialism, however, did not go uncontested. Hoganson points out that, especially during and after the Philippine-American war, anti-imperialists were able elevate their own claims to manliness. As reports of the "uncivilized" nature of warfare in the Philippines swept the country, anti-imperialists argued that manly men could not thrive in the tropics, where they risked reverting to savagery. Arguments on behalf of the manly virtue of restraint became a persuasive theme, as anti-imperialists stressed that the nation should return to honor the republi- can faiths of its founding "fathers" rather than the aspirations of a rash and misguided group of imperialists. Gendered arguments, she shows, reformulated manliness to hel 794 HAHR / Novemberthe anti-imperialists ctoward an informal, economic empire.Within the context of this broad thesis, which is based on research in some privatepapers and many contemporary, published articles, Hoganson offers particularly fasci-nating discussions of the debate over "McKinley's backbone"; of contesting metaphorsof "national manhood"; of the interrelationships between assumptions about race andgender; of the starkly conflicting claims that portrayed imperialism as regeneration ver-sus imperialism as degeneration. She adroitly explores the ways in which advocates ofimperial wars, by elevating the idea of a common fraternity among men, sublimatedclass, sectional, and ethnic differences.However, the book exhibits certain weaknesses. Its argument is repetitious andsometimes lacks in subtlety. In so often collectively describing "imperialists" and "anti-imperialists," it creates aggregate categories that are more discursively complicated thanthis investigation allows. Hoganson, for example, suggests that representations of theera counterpoised a Teddy Roosevelt-style assertion of masculinized "martial spirit"against a feminized advocacy of international arbitration. Yet she does not mention (orresolve) the ways in which Roosevelt's image combined both brandishing a "big stick"and the arbitration for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Similarly, by describing"imperialists" as being opposed to more independent roles for women, she ignores (asAmy Kaplan has shown) the many representations in which the New Woman wasadvanced as complementary to, not threatening to, a certain romanticized view ofchivalric masculinity. In these, as in other examples, the policymakers and opinion lead-ers who are the objects of her study can emerge as too one-dimensional and her cate-gories as too overdetermined. In addition, gender itself is presented sometimes as"motivation" (implying an instrumentalist, causal relationship between culture and pol-icy) and sometimes as metaphor (implying a more complex, dialogic relationshipbetween culture and policy). Although Hoganson invokes the work of Joan Scott, shehas perhaps insufficiently considered Scott's admonition about the need to interrogatecategories and theorize "experience."Some rough edges in style and theoretical clarity aside, however, this book is invalu-able for scholars interested in war as a gendered enterprise, in turn-of-the-century gen-der ideologies, or in the onset and aftermath of the War of i898. In highlighting howmen on all sides vied to assert qualities they identified as manly and to assign these qual-ities to the state, Hoganson raises important questions about the ways in which visionsof personal identity and international politics intertwined in public debates over foreignpolicy. Other: . The belief that "men do not negotiate questions of honor" enabled jingoist congressmen to manipu- late the standard of honor to limit dissent and present war as a desirable ophe coercive use of gender ideals in political debate made war seem imperative to the reluctant congressmen who joined their jingoist fel- lows in voting unanimously for war 1 cent:Fearing for the future of the nation, jingoes regarded war as an opportunity to shore up the manly character of American politics. War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons. Echoing British imperialists' claims that empire built character, jingoes promoted their martial ideas by arguing that war would forge a new generation of manly, civic-minded veterans who would serve as the pillars of American democracy. spanish amnericasn The preceding chapters conclude that a convergence of historically spe-cific factors gave concerns about gender unusual weight in late-nineteenth-century debates over war and empire, but placing late-nineteenth-century im-perialism in a larger context requires systematic investigation of the ways inwhich gender beliefs affected other conflicts. The apparent reverberationsfrom one time period to another point to the need to study not only the waysin which gender beliefs have been brought to bear in specific policy debates,but also the process of transmitting ideas about gender and war from one gen-eration to the next.If the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars are intriguingbecause gender beliefs appear to have played an exceptionally powerful andtraceable role in shaping martial policies, they are important because theywere not unique. Situating the two wars in a larger historical context suggeststhat, like the locusts that lie dormant for years before emerging en masse toravish the landscape, belligerent ideals of manhood have surfaced and scat-tered in cyclical fashion. Yet persistent though they may be in leading succes-sive generations to embrace aggressive policies, militant ideals of manhoodare not inevitable—to the contrary, they must be learned and willfully re-peated. However difficult, what has been learned can be unlearned; what hasbeen taught can be rethought. To foster a more peaceable world, we must ad-dress the gender convictions that have proven so conducive to war.

ALAN BRINKLEY. Liberalism and Its Discontents.

Year: 1998 Field: New Deal Summary: , Brinkley concludes ,"the New Deal is also important for the options it foreclosed, for the way it tried to take certain paths and failed in trying, for how it delegitimized certain concepts of the state even as it was legitimizing other What is liberalism? It chnages. Thesis: Brinkley suggests as his book's thesis that other important ideological challenges to liberalism have always been present in Americans' thinking as evidenced by the conservatism, fundamentalism, or the radical left. Brinkley develops the liberal traditions and policies from the 1930s and the New Deal, which expanded through the postwar eras o fthe big federal and state governments through the late 1990s with the advent of a serious conservative challenge to liberalism. He clearly delineates the arguments of consensus historians and shows how some may be flawed as economic, cultural, and political changes in America through time have questioned the basic premises of liberalism, and he shows how its tenets are contested by various social power groups both from the right and the left //minotirites shaped libveralism //The ND and FDR showed the issues with ND Liberalims that has it coming apoart today it is for the people by the aristocracy and statist run by elites //Through it all is a rejection of the idea, once a commonplace among historians and other observers, that a strong liberal "consensus" reigned during the middle decades of the century, both in the halls of power and out among the people.!!!!! --> tHIS IS NOT TRUE. iT BEING WRONG IS THESIS Other: Liberalism is in disarray, hepostulated, because of two main complaints: one that liberalism is "paternalistic" and a"statist creed" that has concentrated power in the hands of a few "elites at the expense ofindividual liberty" and therefore threatens "freedom and prosperity." Two, that on theother hand, liberalism is "too wedded to liberty" and allows for excesses or the tryrany ofthe majority, thus posing a threat to a stable moral code of ethics and contributing to the"destabilizing whims of fractious minorities and transitory passions" The book suggests, too, that fundamental changes in American opinion such as the change from liberal to conservative periods are often accompanied or tied to similar social, economic, and cultural factors such as poverty or prosperity //nd WAS PRAGMATIC AND THAT ALLOWED FOR TI TO MPOORPH SO QUICKLY //rEREAD CHP 7 FOR HOF

Fitzpatrick, Ellen

Year: 2000s Field: Historiography Summary: Covering the era beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, Fitzpatrick persuasively contends that the historical profession and its scholarship were exceptionally diverse for generations prior to the Sixties. She reconsiders some well-known historians whose work has been discounted through the years and recounts studies by neglected or forgotten scholars who, in retrospect, dealt with important themes. Thesis: Are the cliams of the 1960s historians that they were "new"; no. The poltical landscape of feminism, crm, etc. created an envrimoent for the aestetic of social hsitroy. Fitzpatrick argues that the claims that 1960s historians had discovered the role of class, race, and gender and applied new methods to the study of the past were at best ill informed and at worst false. Other: "many generations of scholars have cared about the ways in which average Americans--working people, the poor, the inarticulate, ethnic and religious minorities, dissenters--experienced and shaped history" (252).causes and the groups that were oppressed by elites. Social history emphasized conflict. Consensus was unity. [this is the flase narrartive] Pg 6: the politcal roots of the 60s and 70s reach deep into the american past The progressives looked for progress but used great men We have an ahistorical historical paradigm*****\\ Recognition of diversity is not an artifact of recent politics; it is in the marrow of modern American history. By taking a stand against consensus history, social historians obscured non-consensus works that were really their predecessors //To me, this is a critique of authority and the dangers of abstraction, but what isn't; it was the major historians who obscured non-consensus history and created "social history. A group of 1%ers squabbling

The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. By Thomas Borstelmann

Year: 2001 Field: Cold War/CRM Summary: Race in Foreign relations...Contextualizes the CRM in an international setting...The Cold War was essential to CRM success. Thesis: Jim Crow—aptly called America's "Achilles' heel before the world" by Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge—undermined U.S. claims of moral leadership since it, too, was a "totalitarian state" for African Americans (p.76). Domestic racism weakened the US relations but also racial hierarchy and subjugation was esstainl to their foiregn policy goals of conquest. It was during the Cold War that one of the central tensions of American history was largely resolved, at least in the public sphere: the conºict between an older vision of an America founded on hierarchies such as race and gender, and a newer ideal of a society free of legalized discrimination and enforced inequality. Other: This racialized worldview helps explain why the U.S. federal government, for the very same reason of preventing the spread of Communism, supported an independence movement for American blacks and sabotaged independence movements of nonwhites outside the United States. Decolonization became, in a sense, the twentieth-century equivalent of emancipation for slavery, doing for nations what had been done a century earlier for individuals. The unfolding of national self-determination across Asia and Africa, in turn, nourished the struggle for equality in America. This is the story of how those racial lenses helped shape U.S. relations with the outside world in the era of American dominance in the international sphere. //Truman supproted civil rights, as did others, because it was athe best weapon and unity against communjsim

The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California,1941-1978. By Mark Brilliant.

Year: 2010 Field: CRM Summary: From his vantagepoint in California, issues of racial hierarchy and inequality could no longer be understood in conventional black-and-white terms. The issues and struggles of Californians of Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino descent, among others, also had to be address Thesis: Brilliant advances a modest thesis that" different axes of discrimination" necessitated "different avenues of redress" for the respective ethnic groups He argues that in the1940s the presumption among civil rights advocates that different racialized groups faced a singular race problem unraveled as they began to confront the ideological and legal architecture of California's myriad discriminatory laws and practices Other: The long Civil Rights Movement roughly in-cludes the three decades of ground-laying activism demonstratedby anti-racists that preceded the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Th is declensionist interpretation of the early civil rights era certainly reflectsdevelopments in the South and in Congress, where a permanent FEPC was,indeed, a dream deferred while dismantling Jim Crow became the focus of somuch attention. A markedly different history, however, unfolded in California.29 where the "race problem" was never singular, never simply synony-mous with, nor reducible by analogy to, the "Negro problem."45 The crm was wide, not just long