Counterfeiting and Michigan: The Territorial and Early Statehood Years

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Reviewed by: Anything of Which a Woman is Capable: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States, Volume 1—The Foundations by Mary M. McGlone, and: Called Forth by the Dear Neighbor: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States, Volume 2—from 1860–2010 by Mary M. McGlone Mary Helen Kashuba SSJ Anything of Which a Woman is Capable: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States, Volume 1—The Foundations. By Mary M. McGlone, CSJ. U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, 2017. 547 pp. $21.99. Called Forth by the Dear Neighbor: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States, Volume 2—from 1860–2010. By Mary M. Glone, CSJ. U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, 2020. 458 pp. $24.99. These two volumes cover a period of nearly 400 years, from the founding of the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1650 to their presence in the United States during the early years of the twenty-first century. Pioneers among non-cloistered religious, the Sisters of St. Joseph originated in Le Puy, France and spread to the United States in 1836. Their story is dramatic, narrated in many gripping details by Mary McGlone. She follows them from their humble beginnings in a French orphanage through the log cabins of the American mid-west to well-established motherhouses across the United States. [End Page 70] Volume I begins with mid-seventeenth-century France and explores both the traditional and newly discovered and somewhat controversial sources of the congregational foundations. After spreading throughout southeastern France, the sisters' work was halted by the French Revolution. Mother St. John Fontbonne restored the congregation in Lyon in 1808 and sent eight sisters to St. Louis, Missouri in 1836. Their story during the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century occupies the rest of this volume. It is a story of courage and determination, along with conflict and frustration. In the mid-nineteenth century, America was mission territory for the Catholic Church. McGlone paints a vivid picture of settlers in need of religious education and clergy determined to offer it to them. The First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 strongly urged the establishment of Catholic schools, and bishops strove to enforce it by recruiting women religious. At their invitation, sisters moved frequently to new assignments. Within the first two decades of their arrival, the Sisters of St. Joseph went to Philadelphia in 1847, to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1851, Wheeling, West Virginia in 1853, and Canandaigua, New York in 1854. From there they continued to move across the United States as far as California in 1912, and eventually to missions abroad. The author notes two major challenges that faced the sisters: personnel and finances. After the first sisters came from France, the American Sisters of St. Joseph were on their own. Local women slowly came to join them, often opening new missions with little training either in religious life or in the classroom. Their numbers were always insufficient to fill the repeated invitations they received. In addition, their accommodations seldom provided the necessities, if at all. Yet these pioneer women rose to the occasion, many becoming leaders in new foundations, establishing schools, orphanages, and hospitals, and attracting more young women to the congregation. Another problem that faced these pioneers was their relationship with the clergy. The Constitutions of the congregation specified the local bishop as their primary superior. However, the degree of his authority [End Page 71] differed according to the various versions of the rule. It also depended on the bishop or pastor's interpretation. Some congregations, notably Carondelet and Philadelphia, obtained papal approval of their Constitutions, which gave them relative independence. Others chose to remain diocesan communities. Some enjoyed harmonious relations with the local clergy. However, the stories of conflicts between superiors and clergy provide suspenseful reading, which McGlone amplifies with numerous quotations from letters and memoirs. The outcome is sometimes surprising! In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for the sisters to move back and forth from one diocese to another. They went...

"The Wisest Counsel of Conservatism"Northern Democrats and the Politics of the Center, 1865–1868 Erik B. Alexander (bio) Reflecting on the state of national politics in early 1867, John A. Dix confessed to erstwhile Republican senator James R. Doolittle that he had lost faith in both political parties. Dix, a longtime Democrat from New York, was a former senator and Treasury secretary and had served as a Union general during the Civil War. By 1867, however, Dix had concluded he had "no hope except in the formation of a conservative party, with loyal men, & preferably, republicans at its head."1 Dix was certainly not alone in his desire for a new "conservative party," especially among Northern Democrats. Yet, surprisingly, in this context, "conservative" did not necessarily mean Democrats. Indeed, in the years immediately after the war, politicos in both parties, and among Democrats especially, spoke continually of the importance of what former Michigan governor Robert McClelland called "the conservatives of both parties" and securing "the entire conservative vote" to achieving their political goals.2 As the war ended, the desire of Dix and other Northern Democrats to form new political coalitions around "conservative" voters—independent of the Democratic Party—was constant, and this raises several questions about postwar politics and the nature of partisanship during the Civil War era. What did conservative mean in this specific political context, and why were these Democrats' views of conservatism divorced from the Democratic Party? After all, was the Democratic Party [End Page 295] not the conservative party in the United States during the nineteenth century? It would seem strange indeed that if Dix was suggesting the Democratic Party had not been conservative enough to his liking, his solution would be a more conservative party led by, as he proposed, Republicans. What was going on? Unraveling this problem requires a more nuanced understanding of Northern Democrats and the problem of conservatism during the Civil War and particularly Reconstruction than we currently have. We have, for example, many excellent finegrained studies of the politics and ideology of the Republican Party; until recently, however, Northern Democrats had not received a comparable level of study. Even now, while there have been several recent reappraisals of the role Northern Democrats played in the sectional crisis of the 1850s and during the war, we lack a complete understanding of what Northern Democrats were up to during the postwar years.3 Similarly, there is a growing body of scholarship that takes seriously the politics of conservatism as a distinct ideology or mode of thinking during the Civil War era—what Adam I. P. Smith has recently labeled "a disposition."4 Yet, that literature has not fully examined the shape conservatism took after the war. In fact, many of the same tenets that defined conservatism before the Civil War would continue to inform the approaches of self-styled conservatives during Reconstruction, such as the determination to avoid questions of sectional conflict in favor of restoring the Union as quickly as possible, while simultaneously ensuring the fruits of the war—namely the destruction of slavery—remained intact.5 This essay uses [End Page 296] Northern Democrats as a lens through which to understand conservatism and the politics of the center during the early years of Reconstruction, when efforts by some Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans to redefine the political center culminated with the ill-fated National Union Convention of 1866. It argues that, rather than constituting a specific policy agenda or ideology, conservatism often lacked a concrete definition. Rather, as a political identity in the mid-nineteenth century, the label conservative reflected the desire of political actors to occupy the center—what New York Democrat George Bancroft referred to in early 1865 as "the wisest counsel of conservatism."6 Part of the conundrum of defining conservatism in the postwar years is in squaring the meaning of conservative to actors like Dix in the mid-nineteenth century with our own modern conception of conservative as a political label. Conservative was a constant of the political lexicon of the mid-nineteenth century, invoked frequently by contemporaries and later historians alike, yet often without a delineation of its precise meaning. In modern parlance, political...

The Strange Career of Judge LynchWhy the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century William D. Carrigan (bio) The systematic reporting and analysis of lynching began as a way to shock ordinary white Americans, both northern and southern, to reconsider the system of racial oppression and segregation that dominated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The impact of such antilynching work on the lives of African Americans in the South is open for debate, but there is no doubt that the efforts of early lynching specialists shaped the scholarly study of lynching all the way to the turn of the twenty-first century. While applauding this foundational work, this essay nevertheless argues for a broadening of lynching as a field of study. The history of mob violence in the United States is for not only those interested in race relations in the postbellum South but all historians interested in the evolution and transformation of ordinary people's attitudes toward crime, punishment, the law, and the state over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The role of discrimination and racial prejudice remains central to any understanding of this history, but there is much to be gained from disentangling the history of lynching from the relatively narrow framework that gave birth to the field. In 1955, in the introduction to his iconic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote that southerners should understand more than all other Americans that social institutions are not fixed and immutable. In echoing Woodward's title, I hope to underline an irony at the heart of the study of lynching in the United States. Historians of the nineteenth-century United States should be the ones leading the exploration of the subject, because the mid-nineteenth century was the key period in the history of mob violence in the United States, the period that proved pivotal in creating a culture that nourished extralegal violence and defined racial minorities as perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet, relatively few historians [End Page 293] of nineteenth-century America have published monographs on the history of lynching and mob violence; instead, they have largely left the field to historians of the early twentieth century. This essay has two goals. First, I argue that the history of lynching should occupy a greater space within the larger body of work on the history of violence and crime in the United States. In particular, I suggest that the study of lynching in the mid-nineteenth century holds great promise for historians interested not just in American race relations but in fundamental issues such as the history of law, crime, and the development of the state. Second, I want to try to explain why the literature itself has been part of the problem, one of the reasons the study of lynching was for so long the domain of journalists, sociologists, and historians of the early twentieth century. Understanding how the field developed should give clarity as to why there are still many opportunities for historians to study mob violence as a means for understanding the nineteenth-century United States. ________ Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate the value of the study of lynching for a longer history of violence is that of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, a topic I know well from years of research with my co-author Clive Webb. Historians of the border have long known about violence against Mexicans in the Southwest, and they have made this violence an important element of their history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest. Yet, these historians did not make connections to existing scholarship on lynching, while historians of lynching paid scant attention to extralegal violence in the Southwest. Webb and I saw clear advantages to a comparative approach; from our research, we drew four conclusions that we think illuminate the history of racial violence across regions. First, we found evidence that the chronology of lynching varied greatly by ethnic group and followed no standard timeline. Second, murder remained the most frequent charge of lynch mobs across time and space, but secondary justifications varied greatly; Mexicans were rarely charged with...

The Plat of Zion and Urban Development in Salt Lake City

SINCE THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, women have been an important part of the historic preservation movement in the United States. As amateurs and professionals, as individuals and in groups, women have worked diligently to protect the country's historic properties. Although women have been the driving force in preservation efforts, their role has sharply changed over the past century and a half. Much of their work in the early years was done through all-female organizations; a long and sturdy amateur tradition stretched from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II. Today that amateur tradition continues, but women have also moved into the professional ranks of those who protect and interpret the nation's historic buildings and landscapes. Their professionalization parallels that of the movement itself, which has increasingly come to rely on the professional expertise of architects, planners, and historians, particularly following the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. This essay traces this double evolution and reports on the new professional roles which female historians have in the last few decades assumed.'

In this occasional series we record the views and personal experience of people who have especially contributed to the evolution of ideas in the Journal's field of interest. Raul Caetano qualified in medicine in Brazil. While retaining close academic and cultural links with his native country, he has developed a career as an alcohol epidemiologist with research positions first in Berkeley,California and then at the University of Texas. He has contributed very widely to epidemiological research on drinking but with a sustained ability to develop the important ethnic dimensions of such studies.

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

Reviewed by: Alabama Founders: Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State by Herbert James Lewis Ruth Truss Alabama Founders: Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State. By Herbert James Lewis. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. x, 201 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1983-0. Rarely does a title undersell a monograph, yet that is the case with Jim Lewis’s recent work. The content of Alabama Founders is much broader than indicated by “Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State.” Indeed, the narrative of these fourteen men collectively provides a concise overview of certain aspects of the history of the developmental period of Alabama. Taken together, the reader comes away with a sense of the main political and economic issues, at both territorial/state and national levels, of interest to early [End Page 72] citizens of Alabama—public lands, banks, the militia, apportionment, protective tariffs, and slavery. The author approaches this period via biographies of men who were instrumental in either military or, primarily, political matters from about 1810 to 1840, with a few years on either side of that division. As Lewis notes, he chose the men because he believed that they were “key figures” in shaping Alabama’s history. He makes no claim that the list is all-inclusive. Three, Harry Toulmin, Henry Hitchcock, and Reuben Saffold, participated actively in the territorial stage. Charles Tait, William Wyatt Bibb, Thomas Bibb, LeRoy Pope, and John Williams Walker engaged in the movement for statehood. Leaders in the state constitutional convention of 1819 included John Williams Walker, Clement Comer Clay, Gabriel Moore, Israel Pickens, and William Rufus King. Finally, John Coffee and Samuel Dale represent military figures of importance. One of the themes of this work is the ubiquitous political influence of men from the Broad River region of Georgia. Known variously as the “Royal Party,” the “Broad River Group,” or the “Georgia Machine,” these men wielded substantial influence on Alabama, particularly during the territorial stage and the earliest years of statehood. Lewis demonstrates the tight circle of politicians who directed the course of early Alabama by tracing the ties among these men. Whether by longstanding acquaintance, friendship, political interests, or marriage, the connections are evident from Virginia to Georgia’s Broad River valley and thence to Alabama, and provided the basis for “membership” in the Broad River faction. Eight of the key figures were born in Virginia; of the remaining six, three were born in North Carolina, one in Georgia, one in Vermont, and one in England. The majority of these men moved to Alabama to take advantage of the newly opened, rich agricultural lands in what became Alabama. Another commonality shared by these men is that almost all were men of significant wealth at some point in their lives—wealth either derived from or enhanced by their political connections. (The exception was the frontiersman and military figure Samuel Dale.) [End Page 73] Although unavoidable given the nature of the work, repetition of events and relationships at times gives the reader pause in order to place the new information in context with previous material. The timeline is generally chronological, but again, the interrelationships, as well as the relatively short overall time span, mean that each chapter begins again at some point of Alabama’s territorial period or early statehood. The positive aspect of this organization, however, is that one may use and read the chapters independently. Of course, taking the monograph in its entirety is preferable in order to glean the most complete view possible from the information offered in Alabama Founders. This work is the latest indication of author Jim Lewis’s interest in early Alabama. Lewis, retired from the U.S. Department of Justice, currently serves on the board of directors of the Alabama Historical Association. His previous monographs include Clearing the Thickets: A History of Antebellum Alabama (New Orleans, 2013) and Lost Capitals of Alabama (Charleston, S.C., 2014). Alabama Founders is suitable for the general reader, with its emphasis on description rather than analysis. For primary sources, especially family letters and papers, the author mined collections from the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Duke University...

This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians. In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction. The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior, A Political Nation underscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics. Contributors: Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College - William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University - Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey - William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities - Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia - Sean Nalty, University of Virginia - Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University - Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University - Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University - J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years. Hidden away in a former girls’ school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode more than twenty-five thousand intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the unbreakable Soviet code, a breakthrough leading eventually to the decryption of nearly three thousand of the messages, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; startling proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American industrial, scientific, military, and diplomatic secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide in this book the clearest, most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage and the Americans who abetted it in the early Cold War years.

Land abundance and cheap horsepower in the mechanization of the antebellum United States economy

Reviewed by: Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America by Elaine G. Breslaw Susan Hanket Brandt Breslaw, Elaine G. — Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Pp. 236. News reports are awash with debates on the “healthcare crisis” and strategies to reform the ailing medical care system in the United States. In Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, Elaine Breslaw takes an intriguing backward look at the history of healthcare in early America and finds parallels between the current disillusionment with physicians and the former “gloomy picture of the early state of health care and the medical profession” (p. 193). Breslaw offers an accessible [End Page 537] synthesis of scholarly works on the history of medicine. Her overarching goal is to chart the longstanding tensions between doctors and the public. According to Breslaw, doctors experienced a period of prestige during the colonial years, but their medical authority then declined from the early national period through the mid-nineteenth century. While European physicians were on the forefront of nineteenth-century scientific advances, Breslaw asserts that doctors in the United States resisted change and clung to familiar but outmoded therapies. Breslaw begins with Alfred Crosby’s classic “Columbian Exchange” paradigm that underscores the devastating depopulation of American Indian groups caused by the transfer of pathogens between the Old and New Worlds. European colonists also fell prey to diverse epidemics. Breslaw analyzes publically-enacted early eighteenth-century therapeutic conflicts between medically-savvy ministers who advocated smallpox inoculation and physicians wary of unorthodox practices. Doctors in all colonies faced continued challenges from numerous authoritative non-physician healers in an unregulated medical marketplace. Breslaw concludes that these struggles between practitioners over “traditional” versus experimental treatments “gradually dissolved the magical aura” that had long surrounded physicians (p. 41). In the pre-Revolutionary period, physicians reasserted an aura of authority by employing “heroic” therapies, including extensive bleeding and purging. Breslaw argues that the colonial culture of deference allowed socially prominent, university-trained physicians to claim preeminence in healing hierarchies. Physicians’ authority was also bolstered by the placebo effect—the phenomenon in which the patient’s belief in the efficacy of a drug or therapy prescribed by a reputable practitioner causes physical healing despite the remedy’s lack of actual therapeutic effect. Breslaw’s arguments though intriguing, raise questions regarding the nature of colonial deference and historians’ ability to assess the placebo effect retrospectively. During the American Revolution, public rivalries between Continental Army medical officers dampened public confidence in physicians. In the post-war Republic, doctors’ acrimonious debates over the etiology and treatment of yellow fever during the devastating 1790s epidemics further undermined patients’ trust in the medical community. In the early nineteenth century, “medical nationalist” physicians achieved consensus by arguing that the American health environment was exceptional, causing Americans to experience different medical issues from those in Europe. According to Breslaw, this mentality prevented U.S. doctors from taking advantage of European advances in statistics, clinical studies, and pathology. Medical nationalism devolved into medical sectionalism, as southern physicians argued for a differentiation in southern physiology and remedies, including differences in African American bodies. Breslaw considers themes of personal agency and institutional coercion in chapters on gynecology and mental health. Although male midwives secured obstetrical practices among urban middle-class women by the late eighteenth century, female midwives presided over most American women’s childbirth into the mid-nineteenth century. For enslaved women, childbirth was a site of resistance to [End Page 538] slaveholders’ coercive healthcare practices and sexual abuse. Coercion also shaped alterations in psychiatric care. Leading American physicians like Benjamin Rush promoted humanitarian treatment based on new notions of rational, secular causes of mental illness. However, therapies included physical restraint and incarceration in asylums. By the mid-nineteenth century, asylum-based psychiatric physician specialists asserted professional authority to determine the boundaries between normality and deviancy. In Jacksonian America, the celebration of the common man fostered a popular health movement in which numerous “sectarian” practitioners, including Thomsonian herbalists, homeopaths, and hydropaths challenged “regular” physicians’ authority. In the face of failed regulatory efforts to block competition, “regular” doctors clung more fiercely to their “heroic” therapies. According...

The Early Abstract Years, 1947–1956Gerald NordlandRichard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Volume 1: Essays and References)Richard Diebenkorn, the only child of a West Coast family, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922. Two years later his father, Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Sr.—a sales executive with Dohrmann & Co., a prominent restaurant and hotel supply company—was reassigned to the firm’s main office in San Francisco, where they had lived prior to Diebenkorn’s birth and had always...AuthorGerald NordlandPublisherYale University PressCopyright© 2016 Richard Diebenkorn Foundation https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00300.2 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21747Copy Chapter subject tags:Abstract expressionism--United StatesArt, American--20th centuryArt--Study and teachingPainting, Modern--20th centuryArtists--United States--Biography

Reluctance of elected officials to raise taxes for highways; deferred maintenance due to inadequate investment capital; holding to the promise of private investment to provide needed highway capacity; emerging technologies that make road building more efficient; and a growing national need for transportation professionals who will build and operate the future highway network. Sound familiar? As described by Professor Holley in his book on the emergence of the highway industry in the United States, these same issues that characterize today’s transportation profession were also present in the early highway years in the United States. In a remarkably detailed and comprehensive examination of the first 30 years of the highway age in America, Professor Holley convincingly describes the major factors that have led to today’s highway network and management structure. The book spans numerous topics that a transportation professional will find of interest. Chapters include financing strategies that were tried and failed in the early years, and the rationale for the financing system we have today; the evolving materials and construction technology that allowed the rapid expansion of the nation’s road network following World War II; and the information dissemination and training efforts that promoted the emergence of the transportation engineering profession. The book also describes the early efforts at highway contracting and how the process evolved as experience was gained in the best ways of