In the Footsteps of Nat Turner: Interpreting the Southampton Insurrection Battlefield

Reviewed by: Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster Sarah N. Roth (bio) Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. By Thomas A. Foster. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 192. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $22.95.) In Rethinking Rufus, Thomas A. Foster offers the kind of transformative contribution to our understanding of American slavery that comes along once in a generation. Foster takes on the important and woefully understudied topic of the sexual objectification, exploitation, and violation of enslaved men. His book further illuminates the horrific nature of the American slave system and adds to our sense of what it meant to be a man within the bonds of slavery for those who lived that experience. Rethinking Rufus creates a more complete picture of American slavery by exploring the lives and worldviews of enslaved men as men, thus far a rare approach in the literature on slavery. Up to this point, the few historians interested in the masculinity of African American bondsmen have embraced the scholarly trend of emphasizing resistance and resilience on the part of enslaved people, even in the face of their overwhelming oppression. In Rethinking Rufus, Foster touches on this theme but primarily stresses how the severe constraints inherent in the system gave unfree black men little chance to fulfill the aspirations they had of manly independence and autonomy in their romantic lives. “Most, if not all” enslaved men, Foster writes, “experienced the type of sexual violations that devalued and objectified the men, underscoring their status as enslaved men” (9). [End Page 404] This victimization rested in part on contemporary conceptions of black men’s physicality. Foster creatively and effectively uses Western art alongside more conventional historical sources to illustrate how whites “fixated on black male bodies with both desire and horror” (30). The objectification of black men in this manner helped justify the sexual exploitation that occurred when enslaved men were under whites’ control. Because masters sought to maximize profits through the reproduction of their labor force, they regarded the sexuality of black men as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for monetary gain. Relying heavily on federal Works Progress Administration interviews conducted in the 1930s, Foster identifies abundant evidence that slaveholders attempted to manipulate reproduction through forced coupling. Foster argues that this interference in the intimate lives of enslaved people led to trauma for both men and women. He disputes the idea that black men facing this situation should be viewed as “collaborators in the subordination and the sexual abuse of enslaved women” (3, quoting Sasha Turner). Instead, Foster posits that along with the women, “the men were violated, as their bodies were used to violate the bodies of others” (64). Rethinking Rufus also uncovers instances of direct sexual abuse committed by male slaveholders against enslaved men. Although few incidents were explicitly noted in contemporary accounts of slavery, Foster adroitly reads the silences in nineteenth-century slave narratives to make a convincing case that such violations were endemic to the system. Foster’s further contention that valets were especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by their masters seems logical, given the close and constant interactions that characterized those relationships. Such is the nature of the sources, however, that with the exception of one compelling story from Harriet Jacobs’s narrative, the evidence Foster provides for sexual exploitation as a facet of the valet-master relationship is more suggestive than definitive. Foster encounters similar difficulties with evidence to support his conclusion about the sexual abuse of enslaved men by slaveholding women. He asserts that “intimacy between white women and enslaved men” should be “recognized as stemming from the sexual vulnerability of enslaved men and white women’s expression of power and dominance” (69). While this statement may indeed be valid, Foster includes a limited number of documented instances in which slaveholding women had a sexual relationship with, or sexually violated in some way, an enslaved male. Most of the examples he cites involved sexual contact between nonslaveholding white women and black men—many of whom were free or of unknown status. In such a relationship, the power dynamic would have differed considerably from that which existed between an enslaved man...

We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households.

Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts 1700-1830. By Kelly A. Ryan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 288. Cloth, $55.00.)Reviewed by Kara M. FrenchIn Regulating Passion, Kelly A. Ryan has expertly crafted a history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that is fully intersectional in its understanding of how hierarchies of gender, race, class, and age created an enduring system of white male dominance. Her work deftly builds upon the arguments made by women of color feminists such as Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, who have long championed that identity and oppression are intersectional, and reinforces the idea that gender as a category of analysis cannot be understood in isolation. Ryan argues that sexuality and patriarchy are inextricably linked because Governmental, social, and private authority over Indians and African Americans derived from the power that fathers and husbands had over wives and children (59). Regulating Passion also demonstrates that patriarchal control was not a casualty of the War of Independence. Rather it transformed and evolved, the direct of the colonial era replaced by a new standard of sexual reputation promoted by the moral reformers and print literature of the early republic (4-5).The American Revolution is the hinge on which Ryan's analysis of sexuality and patriarchy swings. The first half of the book focuses on how elite white men used their status as patriarchs to control the sexuality of white women, poor white men, African Americans, and Native Americans through the legal system, while simultaneously ensuring that their own indiscretions remained shielded from public scrutiny. The statistical evidence Ryan has assembled from court records is very persuasive, and her analysis of the legal system's regulation of white women's sexuality is a highlight of the book. The court records plainly show that by 1760, only women were facing criminal prosecution for unmarried sex in Massachusetts. Unwed fathers were not, however, subject to the same fines or physical punishments as unwed mothers in the late colonial period. What is striking is that the courts continued to punish white women for fornication even in cases where they married the child's father or suffered a miscarriage. As Ryan notes, the court's interest in such cases had little to do with the maintenance of the child and a great deal more to do with punishing white women for activity outside of marriage.Even more telling is that magistrates did not prosecute Native American women and enslaved women for fornication with the same regularity as they did white women. Such prosecutions would have brought the indiscretions of elite white men with slaves and servants out of the shadows and into the public eye. The courts only seemed to take an interest in cases of infanticide, when the loss of an enslaved woman's child would have resulted in a loss of property for her master. Enslaved men were similarly not prosecuted for interracial liaisons with white women because compelling an enslaved man to support a child would have given enslaved men a right to patriarchy that undermined the slave system.Regulating Passion is also innovative for noting the ways in which white men's and women's participation in the American Revolution was not only gendered but highly sexualized. …

Sweet Freedom’s Plains is a long overdue contribution to African American history and westward expansion. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s ground-breaking study, gleaned from a vast array of archival, primary, and secondary sources, is refreshingly powerful and captivating. Oral histories of descendants and photographs add to the depth of this study. Beginning with the earliest known Africans in what becomes the United States, Moore skillfully weaves black history into the fabric of westward migration. Free and enslaved men and women are included, expanding the history of both. Her three themes, “experiences and skills of African Americans in the jumping-off places and along the trails…black perceptions of the journey, and … African American’s expectations of the West and their new communities” (p. 5) are soundly demonstrated throughout, to the point that all of this previously neglected history makes the mind whirl. Moore writes of how African Americans faced decidedly different experiences before, during, and after they arrived at their destination, if indeed they did arrive. As with others who traveled west, they faced a plethora of problems. Freedoms and human decency extended to whites were not always available to black travelers, especially those who were slaves. Once at their destination, they also had to contend with circumstances that limited their success. Restrictions, prejudices, and abuses, as well as the difficulties of starting life anew on foreign soil, served as barriers for black overlanders. And yet, despite hurdles that should have been unsurmountable, stories of victory included in Sweet Freedom’s Plains speak to the determination and grit of the many African Americans whose place was vital and inclusive in westward expansion. From the triumphs of slaves who worked their way out of bondage and then purchased freedom for others, to enterprising free men and women whose purpose became to help others achieve succeed as they did, the history is enthralling.

Reviewed by: Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret Tyler D. Parry Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. Jeff Forret. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8071-6111-1, 544 pp., cloth, $65.00. Jeff Forret's Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South ignites another paradigm shift in the expanding historiography of American slavery, arguing that slave communities were privy to the same volatility as other groups, displaying instances of envy, resentment, and often violent disagreement. While past histories have analyzed black bodies subjected to violent attacks, most have viewed violence as an interracial affair and largely overlooked instances of intraracial violence. By historicizing questions of "black-on-black" violence and simultaneously overturning the overly romanticized histories of the "slave community," Forret has successfully tackled "the arresting juxtaposition between the media's widely reported epidemic of modern-day intraracial homicide and historians' long-held assumptions of a peculiarly harmonious slave community" (394). Though historians have previously asked similar questions, none have amassed the same volume of evidence to prove their cases. In a shrewd maneuver, Forret includes a detailed bibliography that reveals his herculean [End Page 208] efforts in uncovering the voices of enslaved people. In reviewing his footnotes, one is immediately impressed by the depth of his research. Relying on volumes of slave narratives, court records, and manuscripts from seventeen archives, Forret analyzes countless examples of violence heretofore overlooked. Avoiding a strictly chronological or geographical approach, the book's eight chapters are divided into themes that reveal how gender, honor, religion, economics, and the law intersected with violence in unique ways. His first three chapters provide an impressive breakdown of slave laws and the utility of legal records for analyzing violence in the slave quarters. Importantly, he notes the "South" was not a homogenous region in legislating slavery and prosecuting slaves, as legal codes were unique to each state. Subsequent chapters explore the economic and sociocultural aspects of intraracial violence, showing that violence cannot be collapsed into a single explanation and scholars must be cognizant of various factors that contributed to slaves' violent outbursts against one another. Each page displays impeccable research, but Forret's writing skills are best displayed when he conducts a philosophical exploration of a single source. In one rather interesting example, he details the experiences of a twelve-year-old slave girl named Harriet, who was gang-raped by Ben Green, a white teenager, and an enslaved man, named Coleman. Relying on Harriet's testimony, Forret provides one of the few documented instances of an "interracial slave rape" in the Old South (353). Coleman was eventually punished through sale, but Forret notes that the local white community attempted to appeal on his behalf, citing his previous good behavior and claiming he was simply "following the orders of a white teenager who . . . did not suffer any consequences for his role in the incident" (354). Harriet's story, one of the more compelling sections of the book, is where Forret's analytical skills are put on full display. Despite the book's achievements, Forret displays one limitation in his approach to the subject of violence. Though the work brilliantly interrogates the intricacies of violent actions, it does not tackle the subject of sexual violence against men. Though the sources may not directly show clear instances of enslaved men enacting sexual aggression toward their male counterparts, this form of violence is much broader than the actual act of sex; it is interlinked with dominance and the ownership of bodies. Returning to the aforementioned example of Harriet, one wonders about Coleman's position in this entire scenario. While he committed an egregious act, questions surrounding his own agency are left unanswered. Coleman receives no voice in the text. Was he coerced into [End Page 209] joining his white contemporary? Would he face repercussions if he refused? We know that enslaved men throughout the South were forced to "breed" with enslaved women, allowing the slave owner to sexually dominate both of their bodies simultaneously. One might claim these questions are outside Forret's immediate interests, as Green's ability to force Coleman's participation blatantly...

The level of exposure of science undergraduate students to primary literature is varied, despite evidence that it is a useful tool to teach factual information and critical thinking skills1. Reading and interpreting primary literature is a skill that is required in many scientific careers and these skills which are developed when analyzing primary literature are transferable to many areas. In an undergraduate Human Anatomy and Physiology course we incorporated weekly discussions and presentations of primary research articles as a tool to accomplish our course goals. These course goals included exploring current research in the physiology of organ systems being studied as well as developing critical thinking on a topic. In our course students were required to read a total of five primary research articles selected by the course instructors. Students were then required to write a brief 100‐word synopsis of each article prior to class. Then each week in class, students took turns in small groups to be responsible for leading a class discussion of the article. Students were responsible for discussing articles five times during the semester and leading the article discussion once during the semester. Students perceptions of the complexity and usefulness of the exercise were surveyed at the beginning and at the end of the semester.We observed that at the start of the semester 50% of students felt confident in presenting and leading a discussion on a primary research article, compared with 67% at the end of the semester. Just 17% expected to enjoy the exercise, whereas at the end of the semester 32% reported having enjoyed it. At the start of the semester 85% of students believed that developing skills in reading primary research literature was important for their future careers. We found the level of understanding of primary literature and quality of discussion to vary greatly between students.In conclusion we propose that the development of skills in reading primary research literature in undergraduate students enrolled in a Human Anatomy and Physiology course are valuable. We found that the students felt that the skills developed during this exercise are useful for their intended future careers and they enjoyed the exercise more than they expected. Our future plans include finding ways to improve upon student satisfaction and enjoyment of the activity.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Reviewed by: Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan Anna Mae Duane (bio) Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America kelly a. ryan New York University Press, 2019 400 pp. When Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember the ladies" as he drafted the laws for the new nation, John Adams scoffed, arguing that loosening the controls on one aspect of "our Masculine systems" threatened to set off a dangerous chain reaction. Already, he worried, there were reports that children and apprentices had grown disobedient, that schools had become turbulent, that Native Americans disrespected their guardians, and that enslaved people had grown rebellious. If even one group was to advance, Adams suggested, the shift in power would topple the order of society. In the years surrounding the American Revolution, a large part of the population was included in one of the legally disempowered groups that Adams describes, and it is this population that Kelly A. Ryan analyzes in Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America. As Ryan uncovers the multiple tactics people in these groups deployed in order to escape the violence that dominated their lives, the book chronicles how the sporadic and uneven advances made by one group sometimes emerged in competition against, but often came in tandem with, others who also sought to convince the public that the brutality they endured was unacceptable. Ryan has gathered a remarkable archive of legal records from New York and Massachusetts, supplemented by print literature, diaries, and letters of people seeking relief from abuse. Even as the geography of the study is largely circumscribed to New York and greater New England, the demographic scope of the inquiry itself is ambitiously diverse. Ryan draws from several different, but sometimes overlapping, categories of legally disempowered [End Page 580] people in this capacious study, including white wives, child servants and apprentices, and enslaved African Americans. As Ryan leads us through a harrowing archive of court cases and newspaper accounts, we learn the names of people like Katherine Naylor, a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife who sought help to escape marital violence so severe it threatened her life (47). We are introduced to an enslaved eighteenth-century trio known only Mark, Phillip, and Phoebe, who conspired to kill their brutally cruel enslaver (77). We are confronted with the fate of a fourteen-year-old white servant boy named John Walker whose abuse at the hands of his employer did not merit any judicial notice until his beaten and frostbitten body scandalized the town (30). As extensive as Everyday Crimes's collected archive of cases is, Ryan readily admits its limitations. Not everyone suffering as Naylor, Phoebe, and Walker did sought outside help in ways that would become legible. People isolated in rural environments and people prevented by mental or physical disability from making powerful allies rarely appear in such records. Even as we read of the horrific violence visited on individuals like Katherine Naylor or Mark, Phillip or Phoebe, Everyday Crimes reminds us that there were thousands upon thousands whose situations were still more dire, and whose stories we will likely never know. Drawing from such a wide swath of the population is a bold and, arguably, a risky strategy. Scholars have often separated the study of enslaved people from the study of white women and children to avoid the possibility of diminishing the unique atrocities attributable to slavery by conflating it with other disempowered positions. As nineteenth-century authors including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs demonstrated, white women often deployed their (admittedly circumscribed) power to harm the enslaved people under their control. Ryan's own case studies indicate that white children were fully capable of doing the same. In one striking case Ryan documents, an enslaved man was pushed to retaliatory violence as his enslaver's young son mimicked his father's cruelty, taunting and hitting the enslaved man as he went about his work. In recent years, critics including Karen Sánchez Eppler, Martha Jones, and others have demonstrated how white women made metaphorical alliances with Black people for political advantage, while refusing to include Black women in the gains. While there...

Slaves were not initially involved in the U.S. Civil War, as white men were presumed to be the ones to settle the momentous issues that had divided the Union. Federal officials believed that the black population would not affect the outcome of the conflict, and few in the Confederate States foresaw how enslaved African Americans would contribute to the overall mobilization. But even fewer advocated the arming of slaves in pursuit of Confederate independence. In the end, about 100,000 or 200,000 free and enslaved men likely provided direct support to Confederate armed forces as servants, teamsters, and military laborers and contributed significantly to the war effort. For the Union, about 200,000 African Americans were recruited in the army and the navy and played a key role in the Union's victory.

American Legal Realism and the Revitalization of Literary Realist History

In these documents, an enslaved man named Jethro Boston requests that his marriage to an enslaved woman named Hagar be dissolved on the grounds that she had sex with a white man and gave birth to his “Molatto Bastard Child.” Whatever the reason for Hagar’s relationship with Kelly, she could not escape the stigma of interracial sex. Marriage was widely recognized as an institution incompatible with slavery because as long as individuals were enslaved, they lacked the legal standing to enter into contracts. Accordingly, enslaved persons generally lived together in common-law marriages, rather than in unions formalized by the law. Thus, enslaved persons rarely made formal petitions for divorce; the first and often the only recourse for enslaved men and women living in a common-law relationship was an appeal to their enslavers. Legal systems rarely worked to the advantage of enslaved Africans. However, both the marriage and the presumptive divorce of Jethro and Hagar are the exceptions that prove this rule.

Reviewed by: Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendby Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White Carina Hoffpauir Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend. By Ron J. Jackson Jr.and Lee Spencer White. Foreword by Phil Collins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 325. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4703-1.) Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendrecounts the story of Joe, an enslaved man who was one of the few Texian survivors of the Alamo siege. Joe provided “the clearest and most complete account of the final assault on the Alamo,” one that solidified his name in Texas history (p. xvii). Despite his acclaim, little has been known about Joe other than what could be found in scant primary source fragments. Authors Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White intervene in this deficient history with an impressive examination of Joe’s experiences before and after the Alamo. The result of a seventeen-year investigation, their book takes into account legal documents, newspapers, slave narratives, travel logs, census records, journals, and letters. “We opened and closed county courthouses, state archives, and university collections,” the authors write, “often skipping lunch to read old documents until they were blurry from our exhaustion” (p. xvi). Jackson and White posit that this labor of love was necessary to overcome the particular difficulties in researching enslaved people. Their approach has resulted in hard-won breakthroughs in Joe’s story, which simultaneously fills important gaps in the scholarship on the Alamo and on slavery in the state of Texas. The text begins with a tense imagining of Joe’s actions and mood on March 5, 1836, the night preceding the final assault on the Alamo. From there, Jackson and White backtrack to consider the events that led to Joe’s presence at the battle. The second half of the book is devoted to the incidents that took place once Joe’s owner, William Barret Travis, was drawn into the Texas Revolution along with his slave. Scholars of Texas military history will appreciate the detailed tracing of the pair’s route along the Texas frontier from Joe’s perspective, which brings new life to a likely familiar narrative of the revolution. Along the way, Jackson and White provide a comprehensive view of the debates over slavery that raged in Texas in order to portray Joe’s legal status as a bondman and his complex relationships with his owners. Linking Joe’s story with the story of Texas implicitly suggests that slavery is central to what W. Fitzhugh Brundage refers to as “Texas’ mythic past” (Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas[College Station, Tex., 2007], xiii). The rendering of this past in earlier accounts has too often silenced enslaved voices and minimized slavery in favor of mythologizing and glorifying Texas as part of what Randolph B. Campbell calls the “romantic West” ( An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865[Baton Rouge, 1989], 1). [End Page 925]Jackson and White’s text provides an important counternarrative for these partial narratives that have overlooked the perspectives of people of color on the Texas frontier. Jackson and White, however, overreach in their somewhat novelistic renderings of Joe’s interactions and innermost thoughts. Indeed, the text occasionally provides intimate details that would be difficult for a researcher to obtain without resorting to imagination. For example, Jackson and White write with descriptive emotion about Joe’s possible responses to seeing his mother whipped and his family divided; elsewhere, there is the problematic claim that “given their perilous position,” Travis and Joe “likely spoke as equals, as two souls standing on the doorstep of eternity” (p. 5). Flowery and romanticizing inferences aside, these moments of fictive liberty function not as detraction but ultimately as invitation to understand the story of Joe as central to the drama of the Texas Revolution. By approaching Joe’s life in this manner, the authors also open the text to audiences both scholarly and popular. Though Joe’s story is engaging, equally entertaining is the story of the authors’ own research and obsession with their subject...

t is hard to believe that Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? is twenty years old, for the questions it raised about private lives under slavery remain vibrant, resonant, and timely. It is a wonderful text to teach. I direct my students to the clarity of its style—the strong topic sentences, the care- fully built paragraphs, the clearly stated lines of argument. These are not to be taken for granted in this era of complicated writing. One of the most important virtues of Ar'n't I a Woman? for undergraduate teaching is its bittersweet depiction of enslaved people's lives. In my course Slavery in United States History and Culture I immediately expose students, in much greater depth than most have learned before, to the nature of power—in this case, racist power and its impact on individual lives. Told from the perspective of enslaved people, the history of the antebellum South is a daunting one. For many students, the myth of moonlight and magnolias—of Gone with the Wind—holds sway. So after establishing in the first third of the course the truth of the brutality that upheld the plantation South, we then begin to consider how enslaved people, despite the brutality of the conditions they lived under, created family and community relationships that sustained them. Ar'n't I a Woman? provides us with a gendered understanding of the slave community and relationships between enslaved men and women that avoids the competitive tone of the works of the 1970s. White's work focuses on the distinctive role of women in slavery without diminishing the role of men. At the heart of the book is the recovery of the experiences of black women, but that recovery does not occur in isolation from black men. White took to task previous historians of slavery who implicitly, explicitly, and carelessly defined slaves as male and ignored slave women, who are everywhere but nowhere in the literature. 1 When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, Negro Family: The Case for National Action, appeared in 1965, most historical works on slavery had already created a vision of the slave family as dysfunctional and (with the possible exception of Herbert Aptheker's 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts) of slave men as emasculated: deprived of their proper roles as heads of households by paternalistic masters; rendered permanent boys by white owners; unable to protect their wives and children from physical, emotional, and sexual incursions by masters and overseers (mistresses rarely, if ever, figured in these discussions); and limited in their ability to engage emotionally with children or lovers. The 1965 Moynihan report transported to the realm

This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context.

Editor’s Page Daniel J. Burge Historians have long been intrigued by biography. While many historians have written books analyzing wars, revolutions, and the fall of empires, others have sought to understand the past by examining how individuals altered the course of history. Classical historians such as Arrian, Suetonius, and Plutarch helped to establish biography as a reputable genre of historical inquiry and its popularity has only increased with time. In the twenty-first century, bookshelves bend under the weight of the biographies on Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, and the Roosevelts. However, as this issue of the Register reminds us, biographers do not have to exclusively deal with the stories of those who became president or who led armies. Oftentimes, we can learn more from the past by examining the lives of less well-known personages. Angelo I. George and Gary A. O’Dell illustrate the possibilities of biography by helping to recover the story of Stephen Bishop. In their article “Stephen Bishop: The Celebrated Guide of Mammoth Cave,” George and O’Dell explore how Bishop, an enslaved man in Kentucky, became one of the most famous Black men in antebellum America. Unlike Frederick Douglass or Henry Box Brown, who became noted leaders of the abolition movement after escaping north, Bishop garnered national exclaim by his subterranean exploits. Enslaved from birth, possibly by his biological father, Bishop was brought to Mammoth Cave after he was purchased by Franklin Gorin, an attorney from Glasgow, Kentucky. It was at Mammoth Cave that Bishop would rise to national fame, as he conducted underground tours, explored new regions, and entertained guests with his oratory and knowledge of cave lore. Yet, for all the tourists that he drew to [End Page 95] Mammoth Cave, Bishop hardly reaped financial rewards. His last enslaver, Dr. John Croghan, died in 1849, stipulating that Bishop and his family would only be freed after seven years. Bishop and his family were emancipated in 1856, but Bishop died a mere year later. Moving ahead several decades, Lynn E. Niedermeyer focuses her attention on the barriers that white women faced during the Gilded Age. In “‘The Board is Blue’: Kentucky Registers a Woman Pharmacist,” Niedermeier recounts the story of Elizabeth “Bessie” Woods White. Born into a prominent family in Clay County, Kentucky, White received a quality education and enrolled at the Michigan School of Pharmacy. Excelling at her studies, White graduated in 1883 with the degree of pharmaceutical chemist. Returning to Kentucky, White attempted to register with the state board of pharmacy but experienced a setback when the board responded that she lacked the requisite three years of professional experience. Recognizing that the board did not want to register a female applicant, White brought a legal case against them, which she won in 1884, when a judge ruled that the board had overstepped its authority. Although White decided to marry and step away from a career as a pharmacist, her actions opened the door for women in Kentucky to enter a profession that had been closed to them. Our third article pivots from an individual biography to a story about a family. In her article, “Medical Mysteries: Identifying Recipes in the Carpenter Family Papers,” KHS digital archivist Alyssa Ollier takes a fresh look at several recipes within the Carpenter family papers, which are housed at the Kentucky Historical Society. Ollier examines a recipe on curing sweeney, a disease that impacted horses. Ollier also analyzes a recipe on opodeldoc, a plant-based medicine used to treat a variety of ailments. Ollier uses these recipes to shed light on traditional southern folk medicine, as practiced by nineteenth-century Kentuckians. All three authors illustrate how the stories of individuals and families can be used to understand a specific era. Examining Stephen [End Page 96] Bishop’s story, for example, provides us with a different perspective of antebellum Kentucky than we could glean by looking at Henry Clay or Abraham Lincoln, who were Bishop’s contemporaries. In a similar manner, Bessie White reminds us of the extraordinary challenges that women faced as they attempted to enter occupations reserved for men, a viewpoint that is often missing from histories of the Gilded Age. By recovering the stories of...

Using primary sources in history classes is all the rage. But if teachers are not reflective about the best use of such materials, they may engage students in exercises that are neither historically nor instructionally sound. Mr. Barton points out common misconceptions about primary sources and suggests ways to maximize their educational potential. VISUALIZE the following classroom scene. Students walk into history class and pull out packets of primary sources -- or, in a more technologically advanced school, they log on to a collection of digitally archived documents. History books are used only for reference, and lectures are virtually absent. Instead, the students work in small groups to analyze each source and evaluate its reliability -- determining its argument, establishing who created it and when, and identifying the bias of the author. Later, they compare sources and reach conclusions about the events or time periods portrayed, and they discuss reasons for their differing interpretations. Sounds like good history instruction, doesn't it? Well, not necessarily. For over a decade, I have suggested, along with many other historians and educators, that teachers make use of primary sources as an alternative to lectures, textbooks, and worksheets. Although such recommendations are nothing new, they have recently begun to attract a larger following. Primary sources can be found on tests, in commercially available packets, in archives on the Internet, and even in textbooks. Many teachers use these resources in inspiring and intellectually rigorous ways. Researchers in social studies and educational psychology, meanwhile, have investigated how students (and teachers) make sense of such sources. Thus, even if their use is not as widespread as many reformers would like, primary sources clearly are the order of the day. Unfortunately, the use of primary sources in each of these settings often reveals fundamental misconceptions about history. In some cases, scholars who have little experience with historical methods appear to be passing along mistaken ideas about what historians do. In other cases, the use of primary sources seems to be driven less by a concern with historical authenticity than by demands for standards and accountability. The misunderstandings that arise from these practices, if not addressed, will result in classroom procedures that are not only inauthentic but irrelevant and ineffective. The following are seven common beliefs about primary sources. Some have been stated directly, either in academic manuscripts or in books and articles for teachers; others may not have been articulated so explicitly, but they nonetheless represent underlying assumptions of those who define the curriculum or of other educators. But each one is a myth. Myth 1. Primary sources are more reliable than secondary sources. Perhaps this is not the most common belief about primary sources, but it is surely the most ridiculous. Because primary sources were created during the period under study or by witnesses to historical events, some people believe that they provide direct insight into the past and have greater authenticity than later accounts. Secondary sources, in this view, are corruptions of the originals and are prone to successive layers of error and bias. Some children hold exactly this view. They think we know about the past through oral stories that have been handed down over the generations, and each transmission introduces a new round of mistakes, just as in the game of telephone.1 Few educators would entertain this misconception, yet they may believe that primary sources retain a purity that makes them more reliable than secondary accounts. However, primary sources are created for a variety of reasons, and some of those reasons have nothing to do with objectivity. Sometimes primary sources represent narrow or partisan perspectives; sometimes they were created intentionally to deceive. …