More Complicated Than Meal, Meat, and Molasses: Historicizing Enslaved Rations in the Southern United States

Reviewed by: Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South* Paul B. Hensley (bio) Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. By Mark M. Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xx+303; illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $45 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Over the last decade or so historians have increasingly turned their attention to the impacts that concepts of time and its use had on Americans during the United States’ transformation from a colonial, preindustrial society to an independent nation moving inexorably along a continuum toward industrialization. Most of those studies focused on how that transformation played out in the North, especially in New England. Of the relatively few historians addressing issues of time in the South, several appeared to agree with David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]) that southern attitudes toward time and work reflected at best only a pale replica of the well-developed time ethos emerging in the North. Mark Smith challenges this view in his fascinating book, Mastered by the Clock. He is the first to construct a comprehensive study of time throughout the plantation South, aiming to discover “how clock time came to be in the South, its impact on master and slave, and its meaning for our assessment of the Old South” (p. 2). Yet his research goes beyond simply masters and slaves. He brings urban artisans, nonslaveholding farmers, and freed blacks into the mix as well. Smith begins his study by confronting modernization theory and the theoretical debate over what constitutes capitalism to explain why “the historical study of time in the South still rests on the tacit assumption that clock time was alien to the region” (p. 9). He suggests five reasons why historians [End Page 406] have viewed colonial and antebellum southerners as imbued with a premodern and largely natural time orientation. First, some have presumed that slave resistance to the imposition of time work made clock time irrelevant for southerners in general. Second, historians have tried to fit the South too neatly into modernization theory, which sees capitalism and a modern time sensibility marching forward hand in hand, resulting in an ingrained time consciousness for both factory managers and workers. Third, many historians have assumed that few if any mechanical timepieces existed in the antebellum South. Fourth, the tendency to overstate the influence of nature and seasonal rhythms on antebellum southern time sensibilities has tended to blind many historians to the emergence of a clock-driven time awareness that was present in the eighteenth century and escalated during the nineteenth. Fifth, historians have failed to recognize that natural time and mechanical time are not mutually exclusive, but are indeed complementary. Smith challenges these misconceptions in his assertion that “the slave South was one of the few rural regions of the nineteenth-century world to be affected by a modern clock consciousness with only parts of the rural North having a similarly advanced understanding of time” (p. 16). This was true, he argues, because the slave South embraced all the forces promoting time discipline in other nineteenth-century societies. Moreover, the absence of free wage labor in factory or agricultural contexts did not diminish the formation of that time discipline. The evidence presented in Mastered By the Clock makes it difficult to refute Smith’s assertion. In chapter 1 he traces the development of public and private time in the South. Public sources of time, such as church clocks and bells and sundials, appeared in both rural and urban areas throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And privately owned clocks and watches made in the North or imported from England were purchased by a significant number of white southerners, including urban merchants and nonslaveholders as well as plantation masters. After the 1830s, as is described in chapter 2, clock time became an increasingly powerful partner in its triad relationship with sacred and natural time. The result was crucial: “Planters from the 1830s on inherited not only colonial merchants’ imported clocks and watches, but perhaps more important, an equation of time with money and an attendant...

Environmental controls on soil respiration across a southern US climate gradient: a meta-analysis

Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll edited by Joseph P. Ward, with essays by R. J. M. Blackett, Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Holly Brewer, S. Max Edelson, Franklin T. Lambert, Michael O'Brien, Brian Ward, Hugh Wilford, and Marcus Wood. In this volume of collected essays, historians analyze central aspects of the cultural exchanges between Britain and the American South. Along with the Spanish and the French, the British were among the first Europeans to have contact with the native peoples in what would come to be known as the American South. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British were intensively engaged in colonizing much of the region and developing its economy. The American Revolution severed the governmental links between Britain and its Southern colonies, but economic, social, religious, and cultural ties persevered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume illuminates Britain's evolving relationship with the South over a period of four centuries, an era that witnessed Britain's rise to imperial dominance and then the gradual erosion of its influence on the wider world. It considers the British influence upon, and often critical responses to, Southern institutions and cultural formations such as religion, gentility, slavery, and music. Two essays focus on Britain's response to the Confederacy, while others look even further into the past, concentrating on the English legacy in colonial times, its influence on Southern religion, and Britain's relationship with the Creek Indians. Moving into the twentieth century, the book features analysis of the South's relationship to the British Left from 1930 to 1960, and an investigation of the South's role in 1950s British popular music. With an engaging afterword that explores the difficulties in comprehending both Britain and the American South in the present day as well as in the past, this book shows that the relationship between the two has always been and continues to be complex, subtle, and meaningful. Joseph P. Ward is chair of the history department at the University of Mississippi.

“This book is mostly a meditation, a personal look back,” Sidney Mintz confesses, “not weighty scholarship” (p. 24). Despite the modest disclaimer, the text sheds light on the characteristics that set the Caribbean apart in world history while also highlighting the diversity within the region. Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico each followed distinctive historical trajectories, Mintz tells us, which intertwined and overlapped economically, socially, and politically.What distinguished the region, Mintz argues, was the development of large-scale sugar plantations and the use of African slavery to cultivate the crops—what he calls the “plantation complex” (p. 12). This oppressive system encouraged the development of regimented and hierarchical conceptions of race, skin color, and social difference. Plantations and slavery shaped the colonies in ways that would last even after the collapse of these economies.Mintz combines anthropological and historical methods seamlessly to “make my own sense out of the past” and to learn how the past continues to be experienced in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico (p. 22). To understand the specificity of these societies, he focuses on church-founded peasant villages in Jamaica, rural market women in Haiti, and workers on American-owned sugar plantations in Puerto Rico. This comparative approach reveals key distinctions among the three societies and therefore how the chronology of economic development was central to both the similarities and differences across the region. The rise of plantation economies in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set them on a different path from Puerto Rico and the Hispanic triad (which also included Cuba and Santo Domingo). Sugar only became a core feature of the Hispanic triad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under the ownership of American investors.The development of the sugar plantation complex in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was paired with the emergence of a secondary economy in which masters forced slaves to cultivate their own subsistence crops. These crops provided the basis for the creation of a local market economy that shaped the future of the societies in important ways. The cultivation of these small plots of land produced what Mintz calls a “proto-peasantry.”Where Jamaica and Haiti differ, as Mintz highlights, is in the postemancipation period, during which the determining factor was access to land. Since Jamaica remained a colony long after emancipation, the state and the elite were able to continue to extract labor from the ex-slaves who were prevented from gaining access to land. This system therefore blocked the development of a peasant society. On the other hand, Haiti, as a result of the government’s inability to exert power, progressed in the nineteenth century into a peasant society in which the government extracted taxes but was otherwise unable to prevent the occupation of the land by laborers.In contrast to both Jamaica and Haiti, Puerto Rico remained a largely undervalued colony in the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, when sugar cultivation boomed. By this time, however, slavery was in decline and Puerto Rico already had a poor white laboring class; the labor force, therefore, was a mixture of white, black, and mixed-race people. This meant that the strict racial hierarchies that existed in Jamaica and Haiti did not develop with the rise of sugar in Puerto Rico.Throughout the book, the uniqueness of the Caribbean experience is a consistent theme. In the concluding chapter, Mintz revisits the uses of the terms creole and creolization to argue that the terms reflect the specificity of the Caribbean experience. “Creolization, as the process by which slaves dealt with the immediate postenslavement trauma they faced,” cannot, he argues, be applied to cultural contact and change elsewhere in the world (p. 205). Creolization, Mintz reminds us, was the result of violence against and control of heterogeneous groups who “responded creatively to the condition” (p. 197). The social institutions that they built in response to the plantation complex have remained central to Caribbean societies ever since.Since Mintz offers compelling overarching arguments about the region while also leaving room for debate, expansion, and further comparisons, this book will be an excellent choice for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Students will gain a deep appreciation of the centrality of the Caribbean in world history and especially of the roles of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the increasing globalization of the early modern period. Moreover, readers will learn about the distinctiveness of the region, such as the differences between slavery in the Caribbean and the US South. Along the way, they will see the enduring connections between the past and the present and will understand the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship.

The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Comelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg. New Directions in Southern History. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. [vi], 307. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-4308-8.) Coming out of a conference at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, this collection of essays by an array of international scholars presents a different view of the American South. Instead of seeing the South as an isolated or unique region of the United States, this work views the South from an international perspective and emphasizes the ways that American southern ideologies and events were linked to, and frequently had influence on, other parts of the world--in this case, Europe--during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Going beyond the obvious international connections of slavery, these essays explore a wide range of links and influences that demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of the South with Europe. The editors hope that this volume will broaden an existing historiographical current that deals with the U.S. South in transatlantic history with more subtle and fine-grained perspectives on encounters between that region and Europe and offer readers a multifaceted view of the political, cultural, and religious dimensions of this transatlantic relationship (pp. 3-4). They succeed on these points, as all the essays show that the variety of interactions and influences of southerners and Europeans played key roles in how each group conceived of their own cultures and their place in the world during these centuries (p. 5). For example, Daniel Nagel explores the group of German immigrants, known as the Forty-Eighters because of their role in the revolutionary movements of 1848, who regarded the American South as a despotic threat to their new homeland and believed that German republican values could transform the Republican Party and save American society. Similarly, Lawrence T. McDonnell proves how antebellum South Carolinians' incorporation of Elizabethan rituals and history went beyond the pleasures of participating in jousting tournaments to helping them define who they were and what they wanted for their future, even if it meant war. Don H. Doyle's examination of Confederate diplomacy during the Civil War goes beyond the usual understanding of its failures and stresses the important role European views of moral and political issues played. Stefano Luconi reminds readers that Italian immigrants to the American South also paid a price for not having light-enough skin and, more important, for competing economically with whites, as some were lynched alongside blacks. Melvyn Stokes examines how the English and French made sense of the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton discuss how the racist White Citizens' Councils criticized European, particularly British, decolonization plans that abandoned the ideas of white rule. Yet, not all the essays are equally strong. Too many, especially those dealing with the perceptions of southern and European travelers in the nineteenth century, are thin or weak in their arguments. A handful of essays in this volume stand out from the rest and really shine, however. Looking at the impact of Ida B. …

Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According to the pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged that Joseph Smith claimed to have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad Stowell claimed that he used seer stones to see lost, stolen, and hidden things and to seek treasure.1 An additional disorderly person hearing followed in 1829 in Lyons, New York. In 1830, a disorderly person charge brought Joseph Smith back to court in Bainbridge, New York. In the same year, a final disorderly person charge took him to court in Colesville, New York.2 Since these events, there has been a vigorous discussion over whether Smith's implication in these practices should disqualify his prophetic claims. This framing of the charges has sometimes overshadowed the legal debates.3Previous attempts to understand these legal events have assumed that these cases were built upon early examples of anti-fraud legislation.4 The basis of this interpretation is the use of the word "pretended" and allegations of "juggling," or sleight-of-hand, which appear in both New York's 1813 disorderly person statute and the accounts of Joseph Smith's court proceedings. However, reading these cases in terms of fraud may result from a cultural misunderstanding between modern researchers and their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Dan Vogel noted that Justice Neeley, who oversaw the 1826 case, was interested in allegedly pretended powers not economic deception.5This article proposes that Joseph Smith's early trials were about "pretended witchcraft and magic"6 and the related thoughtcrime of "pretended religion," categories of crime generated during the Enlightenment to categorize unorthodox religious traditions as witchcraft while negating their claims to miraculous or supernatural powers. Smith's defense that he really was a seer was irrelevant because the legal system categorized the spiritual practice of treasure seeking as pretended witchcraft and magic.To understand Joseph Smith's interactions with New York's 1813 disorderly person statute, historians must evaluate the historical and cultural trends associated with the legislative precedent that contributed to the 1813 statute. This comparative method has been a standard in witchcraft studies for decades.7 Throughout the analysis of these laws and charges, I use evidence from Joseph Smith's life outside the courtroom to demonstrate that fear of witchcraft motivated these charges while expressions of that fear were suppressed in the later narratives of these legal persecutions. Evidence outside the courtroom demonstrates that the conspiracies and persecutions endured by Joseph Smith were echoes of the witchcraft belief exemplified more than a century earlier in Salem, Massachusetts.The New York disorderly persons statue belongs to a specific legislative history aimed at magic and witchcraft. Legislation aimed at policing treasure seeking, the use of seer stones, and finding lost and stolen items through a gift from God or other supernatural means was meant to curb the influence of "the cunning-folk."8 Cunning-folk were folk-Christian healers whom religious authorities conflated with "diabolical witches" in early modern Europe, an imaginary category of people who were alleged to renounce their baptism and swear loyalty to the devil and his war on Christendom.9 Folk-Christian beliefs covered a range of magical practices. The King Henry Witchcraft Act of 1542 marked the earliest Anglophone legislation aimed at curbing treasure seeking. Queen Elizabeth's Witchcraft Act of 1563 repealed and replaced King Henry's Act and was subsequently superseded by the King James Witchcraft Act of 1604.10 All three intended to control the diabolical witch, but their language reveals their intent to penalize the cunning-folks' spiritual practices. This was also true of other acts passed throughout the British Isles.11 In 1692, the Massachusetts colony passed a witchcraft act based on the King James Act of 1604, explicitly targeted cunning-folk practices, including treasure seeking.12 This was the cornerstone upon which all Anglophone witchcraft legislation was founded, including the pretended witchcraft legislation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.The cultural conversation around demonology informed this legislation's development. Early modern demonologies began in a Roman Catholic environment obsessed with controlling heresy.13 These works fused ideas from the Bible, Patristic writings of the early church, the Lives of Saints, Greco-Roman literature, and classical poetry to construct a historical foundation of the "witch" stereotype. This stereotype combined with diabolized depictions of popular fairy belief, folk-Christianity deemed superstitious by religious authorities, heresy, and popular concerns about maleficium. Continental believers' demonologies targeted the folk-Christian observances of the cunning-folk as examples of superstition and a living tradition of witchcraft.14 This tool could be abused against a wide variety of people regardless of the content of their beliefs and practices. For example, demonologist Nicholas Rémy claimed that a woman whose practices were completely orthodox could still be guilty of witchcraft, that witches were guilty of imitating Elijah and Elisha, and that witches were guilty of using religion to mask their alleged diabolism.15 Thus folk-Christian practices were easily distorted into diabolical witchcraft by religious and legal authorities.English demonologies appeared in the decades after the English Reformation when religious leaders led "a Henrician assault on popular religion."16 Fear of cunning-folk carried over to North America, where Cotton Mather attributed the rise of witchcraft in New England to the arrival of Quakers, cunning-folk, and Native American shamans.17 When Richard Boulton wrote one of the last significant believers' demonologies in England, paraphrasing Exodus 22:18, he asserted, "wise Women are not fit to live," without elaboration.18 He fully expected his eighteenth-century audience to understand that the cunning-folk were the witches targeted in English demonology and anti-witchcraft law. At the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, Ezra Stiles would preach a sermon conflating cunning-folk activities and Native American spiritual practices with witchcraft. He did so to "lay this whole Iniquity open, that all the remains of it might be rooted out."19 Concerns over the diabolical witch and the cunning-folk would continue in the Anglophone world into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20Belief in the "diabolical witch" was the orthodox position between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were also detractors. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued that the devil took advantage of imbalances in the humor of black bile to produce a mental illness (melancholy). He argued that the devil did so to generate illusions that deceived people into believing that witches were real and that magic was efficacious.21 Weyer still targeted cunning-folk practices and conflated them with necromancy, but he denied their efficacy. English skeptic Reginald Scott argued that the sorcerers of the Bible, the religious authorities of the pagan world, Catholic priests, and cunning-folk—whom he called "cozening witches"—all utilized sleight of hand and deception, not actual demonic powers, to lead people into idolatry or to deceive them.22 These skeptical demonologists described the beliefs and practices of pagan religions, Catholicism, Christian enthusiasts, and the cunning-folk as false prophecy, legerdemain, juggling, and pretended powers. They remained a vocal but marginalized position within demonology throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the eighteenth century, skeptical demonology replaced believing demonology as the dominant view, and unorthodox spiritual practices came to be defined as pretended by those in power. In the Anglophone world, this included the practices of cunning-folk, gypsies, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples. However, it also included the beliefs and practices of charismatic Christians pejoratively labeled "enthusiasts." For example, Reverend Francis Hutchinson cited the beliefs and practices of radical Protestants known as the French Prophets as pretended. In his book on this religious minority, he consistently defined charismatic Christian claims to spiritual power as enthusiasm, pretended, legerdemain, and juggling.23 The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended diabolical witchcraft as a legal category in England and Scotland and made "pretended" the legal standard in Enlightenment England.24The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 developed within a broader legal environment that had produced similar statutes throughout Europe.25 The first of these was the French Edict of 1692, which reclassified witchcraft into crimes like poisoning, sacrilege, and pretended powers. Notably, a similar law produced in the same environment defined Protestantism as a pretended religion and penalized Protestant leaders for advocating pretended religion.26 In colonial America, the state used anti-vagrancy legislation to control religious deviants like Jesuits, Quakers, and Enthusiasts by labeling them vagabonds and disorderly persons, then penalizing them for breaking vagrancy law.27Skeptical witchcraft legislation continued to be developed in the American colonies and then the United States into the nineteenth century.28 When New York drafted the 1813 disorderly person statute, it continued this trend by utilizing the language of early European witchcraft legislation. The relevant portion of the law addresses vagrancy and defines a disorderly person as "all jugglers [those who cheat or deceive by sleight of hand or tricks of extraordinary dexterity], and . . . all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found."29 This statute had much in common with the anti-vagrancy and pretended witchcraft legislation of the Anglophone world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a product of a larger legal environment that employed the King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 as a model.30 This model preemptively defined religious and spiritual unorthodoxy as pretended witchcraft, magic, or religion. By categorizing people's beliefs and practices as pretended this legislation allowed the state to discriminate against unorthodox spiritual traditions by deliberately conflating them with criminal deception.Legislation based on skeptical demonology continued in nineteenth-century England with the 1824 Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.31 This act criminalized "every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Means, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose."32 According to Owen Davies, the clause was "widely used in prosecuting rural cunning-folk."33 Throughout the British Empire and its former colonies, the government used anti-vagrancy legislation and skeptical witchcraft legislation to categorize people's genuine beliefs and religious practices as "pretended" as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.34Besides Joseph Smith, only one other well-known example of disorderly person prosecution for treasure seeking in early America employs the word "pretended" to describe alleged supernatural gifts—the disorderly person charges against Dr. Luman Walters.35 Walters's case is only known due to newspaper articles discussing a documented case in New Hampshire.36 Because the notes from Luman Walters's trial are not available, it is impossible to explore how the court used "pretended" in disorderly person trials in the nineteenth century. But through Walters's alleged conviction in New York we can see how this legislation was used to penalize Walters for cunning-folk practices.37 Later allegations that Walters was a necromancer reveal the underlying religious bias which conflated cunning-folk with witches.38Although it is tempting to read "pretended" as fraud, there is reason to be cautious. According to Lynne Hume, in Anglophone witchcraft legislation "'pretends to exercise' means something else. The presumption is that people are not able to do these things and therefore whoever says they can is acting in a fraudulent manner."39 In previous generations, legal authorities and religious authorities superseded the cunning-folks' beliefs and practices by presuming that the cunning-folk were diabolical witches. After the Enlightenment, the same psychological process allowed Anglophone legal authorities to recategorize genuine belief and practices as pretended witchcraft. In both cases the legal system deliberately conflated unorthodox spiritual traditions with another crime to enable the policing of unorthodox spirituality. This tells us more about the beliefs of those in power than it does about the traditions these legal categories were designed to punish.Despite legal skepticism, belief in diabolical witchcraft continued into Joseph Smith's lifetime and beyond.40 The nineteenth-century repeal of Ireland's 1586 witchcraft statute inspired the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Antipas, which conflated Catholicism and Dissenters with witchcraft and urged Parliament to restrict both groups' religious activities. The pamphlet would have had a broad audience. As Andrew Sneddon has explained, "for the vast majority of those placed lower down the social ladder, especially those living in small, close-knit rural areas, the existence of the malefic witch continued to be regarded as a threat to their property and persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for North America."41The diabolical witch doctrine still had its believers in Joseph Smith's early nineteenth-century environment, although the law no longer recognized diabolical witchcraft as a reality. Smith's critic Alexander Campbell argued for a synthesized demonology that allowed for pretended necromancy and diabolical necromancy to coexist as two different kinds of witchcraft.42 Campbell's use of necromancy charges in witchcraft allegations was a standard pattern within the Second Great Awakening.43 Likewise, treasure seeking became a primary target of witchcraft fear and belief during this period.44 People who feared cunning-folk, alleged false-prophets, Catholics, Atheists, non-white spiritual practices, and religious movements like the Quakers, the Shakers, and the Wilkensonians saw the practices they feared most as both pretended and diabolical, often describing these groups as practicing necromancy.45 In the early nineteenth-century environment of legal skepticism and the common suppressed belief that diabolical witches existed, one would expect to find the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft used to label Joseph Smith's folk-Christian practices of treasure seeking in 1826 as well as charismatic expressions of Christian belief in 1830.When Joseph Smith, a young treasure seeker, had his first visionary experience, local religious leaders reacted negatively in ways that Smith family members considered surprising.46 At the age of fourteen, an unnamed assailant fired a bullet at Joseph Smith as he returned home.47 In 1823, Joseph Smith experienced an envisioned visitation of an angel, who declared that Smith would be a prophet and uncover a buried scripture. Within a year of this experience, rumors began to circulate that someone had disinterred and dissected his older brother Alvin's body.48 Dan Vogel and Michael Quinn believe that these were allegations of utilizing part of Alvin's body to acquire the golden plates. These rumors portrayed the act of acquiring the golden plates as a form of necromancy.49 These allegations may have been an initial, failed, attempt to charge Joseph Smith with a crime. As William Morain points out, "violating a grave" was "a felony offense for which, in 1824, he could have been incarcerated in the New York state prison for five years."50 A year later, in 1825, Josiah Stowell heard about Joseph Smith's gift for using his seer stone, perhaps tied to rumors of Joseph's 1823 vision of an angel who led him to the gold plates. Josiah Stowell requested that Joseph reside at his home as a farmworker who would aid Stowell in his treasure seeking. Joseph's parents agreed, perhaps to remove him from a dangerous environment. However, trouble followed Joseph Smith Jr. to Bainbridge, New York. In 1826, Stowell's nephew took Joseph Smith to court as a disorderly person.51Allegations of witchcraft continued after the trials as well, with some ascribed to Joseph's life in the 1820s. In 1834, testimonies ascribed to Smith's neighbors appeared in the anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed.52 The affidavits in this book describe Smith's activities through the paradigms of pretended and diabolical witchcraft. In one of these affidavits, discussing a period between the 1826 and 1830 hearings, Sophia Lewis, who also served as Emma Smith's midwife, reported that Joseph and Emma's child died horribly deformed at birth. Her affidavit is notable because the diabolical witch's doctrine and folklore viewed deformed births and stillbirth as evidence of witchcraft.53 Shortly after Alvin's death, Emma Smith returned to her parents' Methodist church in Harmony. When Joseph Smith attempted to attend, it sparked a controversy that included church members' allegations of necromancy and other witchcraft practices. In the 1879 remembrances of these events, Emma's relatives made it clear that those involved in this controversy believed Joseph Smith "was a conjurer" and "a sorcerer," clarifying that these were forms of "witchcraft."54 This same Methodist congregation later threatened violence against Joseph Smith, which forced him to move to the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York.55Beginning in 1830, Joseph Smith's restorationism utilized the example of the Christian curses used by Old Testament Prophets, as well as Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Joseph instructed his missionaries and followers to employ ritualized dusting of feet and clothing as a testament against those who persecuted them and rejected their message. This practice continued into the 1890s and would have provided ample material for those who believed that Joseph Smith and his followers were witches.56 Allegations of witchcraft continued in February 1831 with Alexander Campbell's publication of "Delusions," an anti-Mormon article in his periodical the Millennial Harbinger.57 In this article, Campbell uses familiar skeptical tropes and employs demonology to compare Joseph Smith and Mormonism with false prophecy, enthusiasm, and witchcraft. He directly compared Joseph Smith to Simon Magus and Elymas, the sorcerers of the Bible.58 Campbell leaves no room for equivocation: "I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith."59 During the same year, mobs pursued Joseph Smith's followers as they left New York for Ohio.60 In 1832, Campbell's was as a In anti-witchcraft violence can be in the that Joseph Smith and in this Joseph Smith that these which he as a to their As a of a by Smith may have of Joseph Smith to Simon they Joseph Smith, the attempted to his to therefore or Joseph the it . . . us his They attempted to a of into his Joseph claimed that the not to but they would . . . All were and one man on and body with his like a Smith had to the from his to more The easily use of has In the nineteenth century, the was believed to be a means of a witch's powers and was a common of anti-witchcraft of witchcraft belief continued later into Joseph Smith's life. In 1834, the would the affidavits in his Mormonism This like a of skeptical and believers' describing Smith's alleged folk-Christian activities through the pretended and diabolical witchcraft As late as Smith of Campbell's continued witchcraft The year, Joseph Smith's last treasure ended with a that his to the more and of this For there are more than one for in this This treasure took in Salem, that the that had followed Smith to this in could be through a of early American witchcraft belief and In Smith's Joseph of to He claimed that Smith, the of had two who of when they the of the false and to their and are that they were not left to the power of the devil and Smith, to their with a crime so would appear that many of Smith's him of witchcraft and magic throughout his early life and to the by and there are three of in witchcraft The first and most of court and of The is These that the these often the beliefs and of the historians of witchcraft these by controlling for allegations of into these accounts by their The category are In Joseph Smith's 1826, and 1830 disorderly person only the court into the category of do not have the trial notes or sources, only of the used to the 1826 pretrial are known as the and the The only in articles to the pretrial The first of these articles appeared in with in and The is by William as a of his alleged as at the 1826 was in for the 1830 there are accounts by Joseph Smith, his and other a in witchcraft An additional related to the 1830 disorderly person cases is a ascribed to Justice of the George who oversaw the disorderly person of As with all sources, these accounts should be read events they describe may not took in They may also or of these As in all accounts of witch we must for the of in of Joseph Smith's alleged accounts of the 1826 disorderly person pretrial evidence that they into the larger pattern of In the there is evidence about Joseph his and his folk-Christian The Joseph Smith as a a for cunning-folk who compared to Old Testament The addresses the cunning-folk practice of utilizing seer also that these were Stowell and as believed As an the claims that Josiah Stowell's and two . . . or to of Joseph Smith's of his seer stones folk-Christian practices. claims that after a vision of a stone, Joseph Smith to find his seer stone, and the significant about how he the after he found This is when one the writings of a modern Dutch In his book on his folk-Christian practices, provided a for the of miraculous stones to God and for upon the This a larger pattern of Joseph Smith his other seer stones, as by This may be a of Joseph his first seer The also the powers within a folk-Christian that when Joseph had the stone, one of the of an an earlier of Joseph Smith's alleged as a seer as an According to this Joseph Smith Sr. his alleged gift and many of his finding hidden and stolen and that he that both he and his were that this power that God had so him should be used only in of or its in and with a he his to his was to this power. He that the of would some the of the and enable him to see testimonies of Smith's powers were a in the The was Josiah who the testimonies of Joseph Sr. and Joseph examples of the Joseph Smith's Stowell many other not to that Smith the he and many to his The then that Justice Stowell's belief in Joseph Smith's alleged as a treasure I believe says I believe it is not a of I it to be claims Joseph Smith his treasure that the treasure not be by by after with and they to the by These are a of the folk-Christian utilized by treasure of which Joseph Smith Sr. is believed to have According to both the and these were to a placed on the treasure by the person who buried When their attempts to acquire the treasure the at the folk-Christian for the treasure a against the devil over the of seeking from some five feet in had been without a of war against this of was and they that the of or of some mental was the of their between folk-Christian and for Joseph Smith's and depictions of these practices as When demonologists argue against of cunning-folk beliefs and practices, they described the common that practices were by the Christian would then attempt to by that folk-Christian practices were forms of false an with the For those who believed demonologists than evidence of folk-Christian was evidence of the is on this of the 1826 it Joseph Smith's seer use and treasure seeking, it does not a of power he ascribed these to that would us to compare his alleged practices to the In of these it Joseph Smith's and activities

Reviewed by: Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza Kieran Quinlan Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. By Bryan Giemza. [Southern Literary Studies.] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 361. $49.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8071-5090-0; $39.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8071-59091-7.) Our understanding of the Irish Catholic presence in the American South has substantially changed over the last couple of decades due to scholarly investigations in a number of areas. The presumption of a solid “Scotch-Irish”—the usual term—hegemony has been modified by awareness that Catholic and Protestant identities in the north of Ireland and in Scotland were often fluid in the eighteenth century, that over the decades many nominal Irish Catholics morphed into Scotch-Irish Protestants because of the unavailability of churches of their own denomination in the Southern states, and that there were hosts of other migratory forgettings and anomalies. Of course, one should always have been a little suspicious of a solid South thesis in a world shaped by Father Abraham Ryan, the region’s hugely popular poet laureate in the nineteenth century; Kate O’Flaherty Chopin, disruptive feminist and unconventional Catholic; Scarlett O’Hara, iconic Southern belle; and Flannery O’Connor (a distant relation of Margaret Mitchell, as it turns out), a writer who dominated the genre of the Southern short story. In the past, an American Catholicism that was both defensive and triumphalist occasionally drew attention to some of these matters, whereas the idea of a “Celtic South” enjoyed surprising (and disturbing) popularity in the 1980s. Albert S. Foley’s challenging 1950s study of the biracial Healys of Georgia—one of them the “second founder” of Georgetown University—introduced a complication in the received narrative of minimal Irish Catholic Southern presence but without changing the overall understanding of the matter. What is new now is the emergence of a more mature and less belligerent examination of tangled histories. Brian Giemza is one of the most active scholars in this area with a previous study of Ryan (Poet of the Lost Cause [Knoxville, 2008], with Donald Robert Beagle) and an edited collection (Rethinking the Irish in the American South [Jackson, MS, 2013]). His present study recapitulates and greatly extends this theme with a wealth of material both secondary and archival on writers of Catholic Irish background in the South over the last two centuries. Some of these names will be unfamiliar even to those engaged with the subject; others are more canonical but here presented in a new light or with a reinvigorated analysis. In particular, Giemza’s sections on Lafcadio Hearn, Joel Chandler Harris, Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces, Baton Rouge, 1980), Cormac McCarthy (based on extensive archival work), Pat Conroy, and Anne Rice (an interview) offer new material. Again and again, Giemza presses his argument in engaging ways—not, for example, too readily accepting O’Connor’s dismissal of her Irish roots but teasing out her many evasions, omissions, and contradictions on the subject. Giemza’s book also acknowledges the changing context of Catholicism in the modern world and is by no means a pious reiteration of orthodoxy, even if his own religious position seems to vacillate at times. His overall argument, then, is not that persons of Irish Catholic background invented the American South but [End Page 641] rather that they have contributed more to its formation than has been acknowledged and, in closing, that the Catholic element at least will continue as the Hispanic population of the region grows. If the book has a problem, it is because the author has so much to present that the narrative occasionally becomes overwhelming. Indeed, as Giemza acknowledges, “Space constraints have left more than one hundred pages of this manuscript on the cutting-room floor” (p. 273). We can expect to hear more from this investigative author. Kieran Quinlan University of Alabama at Birmingham Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Since the mid-1970s, the United States (US) South has been a net destination for African American migrants. We analyzed data from 1976 to 2015 to highlight major characteristics of migrants to the US South at the Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA) level. Grounded in neoclassical and social network migration theory, we propose there are concurrent streams of migrants—those searching for economic opportunity and those returning to homeplaces. Here, we show that the overall percentage of migrants moving to rural areas has declined from 30 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 2015. Our results suggest the stream of migrants moving for economic opportunity has always been larger and has grown proportionally larger with time. Along with a decrease in rural-bound migration, we demonstrate an overall decrease in migration, a concentration of migrants in a shrinking number of urban centers, and an unexpected increase in the human capital of rural migrants. Our findings have forced us to reckon with assumptions that professionals leaving cities for rural communities is a uniquely white phenomenon, challenged us to consider the importance of social ties to urban areas, and raised questions about the role of technology as a deterrent to moving home.

The objectives of this study were to extend our knowledge of the geographic distribution and rodent host range of arenaviruses in North America. Sera from wild rodents collected from the southern and western United States were tested for antibody against Tamiami, Pichinde, Junin, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis viruses, using an indirect fluorescent antibody test. Antibody to at least one arenavirus was found in 220 (3.1%) of 7,106 rodents tested. The antibody-positive animals included Mus musculus from Florida and Texas; Neotoma albigula from Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico; N. fuscipes and N. lepida from California: N. mexicana from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah; N. stephensi from Arizona and New Mexico; and Oryzomys palustris and Sigmodon hispidus from Florida. Sigmodon hispidus seropositive for Tamiami virus were found only in Florida (156 [27.0%] of 578 tested), although 463 hispid cotton rats from outside that state were examined. High-titered antibodies to Tamiami virus were present in sera from S. hispidus, (geometric mean antibody titer [GMAT] of 1:792), whereas sera from Neotoma spp. reacted at high titer to both Tamiami (GMAT = 1:905) and Pichinde (GMAT = 1:433) viruses. The results suggest that arenaviruses are widely distributed in the southern United States and that one or more indigenous arenaviruses are associated with Neotoma spp. in North America.

ANCIENT: La Tyrannie Dans la Grèce antique. By Claude Mossé ANCIENT: Histoire des Doctrines Politiques en Grèce. By Claude Mossé ANCIENT: Roman Colonisation under the Republic. By E. T. Salmon ANCIENT: Roman Archaeology and Art: Essays and Studies by Sir Ian Richmond. Edited by Peter Salway ANCIENT: The title of Dr. J. J. Wilkes' ANCIENT: Constantine. By R. MacMullen MEDIEVAL: The Carolingian Renaissance and the idea of Kingship. By Walter Ullmann MEDIEVAL: The Twelfth Century Renaissance. By Christopher Brooke MEDIEVAL: The Reign of Stephen, 1135–54: Anarchy in England. By H. A. Cronne MEDIEVAL: The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–94. By John Julius Norwich MEDIEVAL: Frederick Barbarossa. By Marcel Pacaut (translated by Arnold J. Pomerans) MEDIEVAL: The Original Statutes of Cambridge University. The text and its History. By M. B. Hackett MEDIEVAL: England 1200–1640. By G. R. Elton MEDIEVAL: Die Bündisse der Bodenseestädte bis Zum Jahre 1390. Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte Des Einungswesens, Der Landfriedenswahrung und der Rechtsstellung der Reichsstädte. By Jörg Füchtner MEDIEVAL: The Muqaddimah MEDIEVAL: The Last Byzantine Renaissance. By Steven Runciman MEDIEVAL: The Great Schism 1378: The Disintegration of the Papacy. By J. Holland Smith MEDIEVAL: The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century. By Jerah Johnson and William Percy. (The Development of Western Civilization, edited by Edward W. Fox.) MEDIEVAL: English Gascony 1399–1453: A Study of War, Government and Politics During The Later Stages of the Hundred Years War. By M. G. A. Vale MEDIEVAL: The Hylle Cartulary. Edited by Robert W. Dunning MEDIEVAL: Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450. By A. J. Black MEDIEVAL: Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Quibert of Nogent (New York: Harper and Row EARLY MODERN: Scholars and Gentlemen. Universities and Society in Pre‐Industrial Britain 1500–1700. By Hugh Kearney EARLY MODERN: Edward vi: The Young King. The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset. By W. K. Jordan EARLY MODERN: Mary Queen of Scots. By Antonia Fraser EARLY MODERN: The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. By Gordon Donaldson EARLY MODERN: John Stubbs's Gaping Gulf with Letters and other Relevant Documents. Edited by Lloyd E. Berry EARLY MODERN: The Great Debasement: Currency and the Economy in Mid‐Tudor England By J. D. Gould EARLY MODERN: The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660–1688, and its Consequences. By Jennifer Levin EARLY MODERN: The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism. By C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas EARLY MODERN: The Family Life of Ralph Josselin. A Seventeenth‐Century Clergyman. An Essay in Historical Anthropology. By Alan Macfarlane THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Il Cameralismo E L'Assolutismo Tedesco. By Pierangelo Schiera THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Tsardom of Moscow 1547–1682. By George Vernadsky THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917. Compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1783. By Alan W. Fisher THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis: The Imperial Russian Government and Pugachev's Revolt, 1773–1775. By John T. Alexander THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: An Eighteenth‐Century Shopkeeper: Abraham Dent of Kirby Stephen. by T. S. Willan THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The British Establishment 1760–1784. By Alan Valentine THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics. By Ian R. Christie THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Jacques Godechot's account of the Taking of the Bastille THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Maria Theresa and the House of Austria. By C. A. 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A Comparative Analysis of Nineteenth Century Pharmacopoeias in the Southern United States: A Case Study Based on the Gideon Lincecum Herbarium. The Gideon Lincecum Herbarium represents the pharmacopoeia of Dr. Gideon Lincecum, a botanical physician practicing in Mississippi and Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century. The herbarium contains 313 specimens representing 309 species, 242 genera, and 96 families, and includes ethnobotanical annotations for 286 medicinal taxa. The collection data provided by Lincecum indicate that the specimens were collected between 1835 and 1852. With the exception of 22 specimens considered by Campbell (1951), this is the first study to place this pharmacopoeia in a historical context. Taxonomic determinations of the herbarium specimens were confirmed or corrected. Comparative analyses were conducted to investigate the relationship of Lincecum’s pharmacopoeia to those of six other medical traditions practiced in the southern United States during the nineteenth century. Cluster analyses based on Jaccard co-efficient placed the historical pharmacopoeias of medical traditions in the early nineteenth century into distinct Euro–American and American Indian groups. Despite the recognition of distinct allopathic and botanical medical traditions, an extensive overlap in the composition of their pharmacopoeias is observed. This may reflect the reliance of these traditions on allopathic principles and drugs of plant origin during the first half of the nineteenth century. In contrast, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek pharmacopoeias show limited overlap with each other in composition despite a long history of interaction between these groups. Lincecum’s pharmacopoeia shares a larger Jaccard co–efficient value with the Choctaw pharmacopoeia than would be expected based on their placement in distinct Euro–American and American Indian groups in the dendrogram. The large proportion of Lincecum’s citations that reference Choctaw informants provides direct evidence for the incorporation of Choctaw medical knowledge and taxa into Lincecum’s pharmacopoeia. These data suggest that the composition of historical pharmacopoeias is influenced by both contemporary medical practices and the regional and cultural contexts in which the pharmacopoeias are utilized.

Economia 3.1 (2002) 89-102 [Access article in PDF] Comments [Return to Article] Miguel Urquiola: In their paper, Engerman and Sokoloff summarize the results of a productive research program, undertaken with the broad objective of understanding why some former colonies in America have grown so much more than others, producing the dispersion of incomes seen today. In seeking to answer this question, they emphasize how different colonies' factor endowments conditioned the early and subsequent development of their institutions and thereby affected their readiness for modern industrial growth. This work is not only interesting in and of itself, but it has also served as a building block for recent influential research that extends these ideas to other regions of the world. 1 This note briefly summarizes the authors' argument and the facts they present and seek to explain. I then raise some identification issues and counterexamples that this work does not fully address, along with a couple of more specific issues to consider in future research. Some Interesting History That Needs an Explanation One of the key points that Engerman and Sokoloff seek to establish is that in the first century or two of European settlement in America, the southern English colonies (such as present-day Jamaica and the southern United States) and many of the Spanish colonies (such as Mexico and Peru) were just as well-off or even richer than northern colonies like the present-day northeastern United States or eastern Canada. 2 The large advantage in incomes that the latter have today did not begin to develop until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Engerman and Sokoloff were among the first to make this point and document its validity across the Americas, which is an important contribution in itself. This assertion has gained wide acceptance, and as [End Page 89] Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson show, such drastic changes in the relative wealth of former European colonies are also a feature in other parts of the world. 3 Accounting for the stark differences in growth experiences is the challenge that Engerman and Sokoloff face in their work. Their main emphasis is on the way colonies' factor endowments affected the development of their institutions, which in turn determined their readiness to take advantage of the industrial growth that started in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Put briefly, their argument is that in places such as the Caribbean or Brazil, soils and climate were suited to valuable crops with ample economies of scale, such as sugar, which stimulated the importation of slaves. This created a large, poor, and disenfranchised segment of the population. In other areas, like present-day Peru, the combination of factors like preexisting native populations, silver mining, and the awarding of large land holdings contributed to a similar outcome: highly unequal societies. While the value of sugar or silver made such colonies wealthy in their early history, the resulting economic and political inequality facilitated the formation of institutions that made these areas ill-suited for more modern economic growth. In contrast, the northernmost colonies, namely, the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, had soils best suited for the production of wheat and other grains, which presented few economies of scale. The authors contend that this led to their settlement by European immigrants working with relatively small landholdings. These colonies therefore developed more egalitarian societies and better institutions, which put them in a position to benefit more from industrial growth. A Strength in This Approach: Geography versus Institutions From an analytical perspective, this approach is interesting because it provides an alternative to pure geographical hypotheses, which assign responsibility for most differences in income to factors broadly related to geography. 4 As emphasized by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson geographical explanations for economic performance generally suggest that differences in income should be quite persistent. 5 Engerman and Sokoloff, [End Page 90] however, show that something rather different is needed to account for differential paths of development in the Americas, and their argument outlines a theory that is consistent with the facts. In their theoretical outline, the key line of causality runs from factor endowments to poor institutions...

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Background: The United States (US) supply of surgical specialty practitioners in 2025 is projected to fall short by 24,340 physician full-time equivalents. The greatest deficit is projected for ophthalmology with the most affected region noted to be the southern US. Aims: To better understand the distribution of our ophthalmology workforce in the southern US and to identify cities with less access to subspecialty-specific vision care. Objective: To determine the prevalence of ophthalmologists as well as rates of ophthalmology subspecialists and practice types in the three largest cities of each state within the southern US. Methods: The American Academy of Ophthalmology’s “Find an Ophthalmologist” online listing was queried on a city-by-city basis from December 2020 to April 2021. The number and location of ophthalmologists were determined in the three largest cities, according to population, in the southern US. Data collected on each ophthalmologist included sex, primary subspecialty, practice type, year of first board certification, and academic affiliation. Results: There were 1,735 total ophthalmologists identified in the three largest cities of each state, 52 cities in total, within the southern US. The majority were male (n= 1,369, 78.90%) and board-certified prior to or during 1997 (n= 913, 52.62%). There were 12,308 persons per ophthalmologist (P/O) in the southern US. Cities with the highest P/O ratio were Rio Rancho, NM (101,475 P/O), Southaven, MS (28,691 P/O), and Houston, TX (27,868 P/O). The lowest P/O ratios included Morgantown, WV (1,587 P/O), Charleston, WV (2,263 P/O), and Wilmington, DE (3,025 P/O). Less populated cities (<300,000 persons) had a significantly higher proportion of comprehensive ophthalmologists in the southern US (p-value=0.007). Conclusion: A total of 550 ophthalmologists were evaluated in southwestern cities and 1,185 were evaluated in southeastern cities. Our results suggest that less populated cities are driven by comprehensive ophthalmology practices. This data suggests greater vulnerability in certain cities with less access to subspecialty-specific vision care.