Rethinking the Jewish Public Sphere: The Case of the Imperial German Trade Journal ‘ Der Confectionair ’

IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been

The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

The Women's Ordination Movement in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Journal Article 'Imperial Reason', National Honour and New Patriarchal Compacts in early twentieth-century India Get access Janaki Nair Janaki Nair Janaki Nair is Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. She works on the social, cultural and political history of Modern India, with specific reference to Mysore/Karnataka. Her research interests include law and feminism, labour and urban history, and visual cultures of modern India. Her recent books include A Question of Silence? (co-edited with Mary John; Kali for Women, 1998); and The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2005). A book of essays entitled Mysore Modern: Essays in Social, Political and Cultural History is forthcoming. In 1996, she received an award from the Lippman/Miliband trust to make her film After the Gold (1997; 60 mins) on the miners of Kolar Gold Fields. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 66, Issue 1, Autumn 2008, Pages 208–226, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbn043 Published: 19 September 2008

Reviewed by: Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age Jeffrey O’Leary (bio) Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age. By Christopher McKnight Nichols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 446. $35.00 cloth) In Promise and Peril, Christopher McKnight Nichols challenges traditional historiography regarding the emergence of isolationism in the United States which argues that the era after World War I provided the catalyst for Americans to question global interaction, especially militarily. Nichols’s thesis, however, rests upon the premise that “isolationism had Progressive origins in the imperialist/anti-imperialist [End Page 127] disputes of the 1890s, a generation earlier than previous historians have noted” (p. 8). By concentrating exclusively on prominent figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jane Addams, Nichols provides readers with the intellectual scaffolding that supports his Progressive-oriented examination of the debates surrounding major events of the era, including the 1893 depression, the Venezuela boundary dispute, the Spanish-American War, the ensuing crisis in the Philippines, and, eventually, World War I. This book positions the concept of isolationism within its proper framework; advocates of isolation did not desire complete withdrawal from the rest of the world but instead supported, to varying degrees, economic, political, and cultural interactions with other nations. The persons examined in this work wrestled with the concept of modernization and its implications for the United States and the world. According to the author, two main strands of isolationism, political and protectionist, existed from the 1880s to American involvement in World War I. Political isolationism was “often aligned with liberal market-oriented economic views” while protectionist isolationism adhered to a concept of “inward focus” and was critical of “foreign economic ties” (pp. 347–48). Nichols provides readers with an extended essay titled “Strains of Isolationism” after the conclusion that delves deeper into these two strands of isolationism; however, integration of these concepts should appear more prominently at the beginning of the text rather than in a separate section at the end of the book. Nichols relies on the isolationist sentiments of Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe in his bid to examine the thought processes of influential Americans; it is from this top-down historical perspective that he begins his analysis of the representative figures of the era and their respective ideologies concerning American interaction with other nations, particularly those in Europe. Divided into seven chapters, Promise and Peril begins with a discussion of isolationists with an expansionist political philosophy, including Senator Henry Cabot [End Page 128] Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alfred Thayer Mahan. “Voices of the People,” the fifth chapter, is the most original. In this section, Nichols dissects the “tensions among regionalism, nationalism, isolationism, and internationalism” as these pertain to the American South and the activities of the most prominent socialist of the era, Eugene V. Debs (p.180). Nichols presents a cogent argument that the South was not against Debs’s antiwar ideology but rather, Debs “found approving audiences widely throughout the South and the Midwest” in addition to “the urban bastions of socialism” because he spoke to these citizens in the language of the common man and not as a radical intellectual (p. 226). Promise and Peril has nearly seventy pages of endnotes; many of these provide extended discussion and analysis of sources. It is evident that Nichols has a firm grasp of the writings of the persons analyzed as well as the vast secondary literature for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A separate bibliography would have been helpful for readers to acquire ready access to the source base. In addition, the monograph contains sixteen images that include photographs of the political and intellectual elites examined and cartoon editorials from prominent newspapers of the era. In sum, Nichols presents a convincing argument concerning the emergence of isolationism in the United States. This tome should provide scholars, especially Americanists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with much to debate and contemplate. Promise and Peril would be an excellent text for a graduate seminar on American foreign relations or American intellectual history. Jeffrey O...

TalkingSex: The Rhetoricsof Reproduction, Sex Education, and Sexual Expression in theModern United States Karen Weingarten Books Discussed in This Article Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938. By Laura Lovett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924. By Robin Jensen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940. By Dale Bauer. Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2009. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. By Johanna Schoen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. "The time has come to think about sex," wrote Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."1 At the time, Rubin had to qualify her essay's open ing line with the admission that some might find sexuality a trivial topic amid the world's more seemingly pressing issues. She went on to make the case, all the same, that sex and sexuality were tied to poverty, hunger, violence, race, war, disease, and other problems that FeministStudies39, no. 1. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 235 236 Karen Weingarten ailed the world. Now, thirty years later, Rubin's plea has become com monplace in feminist scholarship, and it is almost unimaginable to dismiss sex as unimportant and not integrally tied to key concerns of feminism such as reproduction, pornography, race, family, labor, and of course, sexuality. Looking back, it becomes apparent that thinking about sex has been at the heart of several different manifestations of feminism, even when it was not explicitly stated as such. This review essay presents a slice of women's history in which sex occupied an ambiguous status in public discourse, when it was both named and not named as a central concern. The four recent books reviewed here help us arrive at a better understanding of how sex was expressed, taught, advocated, and restricted in the United States from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. The conventional narrative about sex in the United States holds that in the late nineteenth century, when social reformers such as the puritanical Anthony Comstock had influence, sex was only dis cussed in whispers and was considered taboo, if not illegal, in public conversation and publications. Then, during the firstfew decades of the twentieth century, the tide turned; the FirstWorld War liberalized the country and allowed for more progressive and open discussions about sex, including issues such as birth control, abortion, venereal disease, and prostitution. Women started viewing their own sexual ity in different terms, especially as suffrage granted them both citi zenship and personhood. The books I review focus on the same broad era of shifting rhetorical possibilities—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but none of them adhere to this simple prog ress narrative. Although they focus on different texts, characters, and movements, they each argue against a linear change from sex-as taboo to sex-as-free-flowing and instead demonstrate how sex in ear lier eras was discussed much more widely than previously imagined. Robin Jensen's DirtyWords explicitly examines the rhetoric of the sex education movement from 1870 to 1924. She argues that women played a much greater role in promoting sex education in the United States than previous historians have depicted. More significantly, she also demonstrates how sex educators found a way to discuss sex using ambiguous language that allowed them to address what were seen as unspeakable topics for public audiences, particularly those that Karen Weingarten 237 contained children and women. Similarly, Dale Bauer's Sex Expres sion shows how US women writers between 1860 and 1940 created a language of expressing sex in literature that reflected changing atti tudes about women's sexuality. Laura Lovett's historical study Con ceivingtheFuture,which spans 1890 to 1938, also argues that pronatal ism—rhetoric promoting sex for the sake of reproduction—was indirectly encouraged through federal and state programs that avoided all mention of sex and reproduction, even as procreation was implicit in the message. Finally, Johanna Schoen's Choiceand Coercion begins in the early twentieth century...

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

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Reviewed by: Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 Derek R. Peterson Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940. By Christopher Gray. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. The cultural and political history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa is being composed as a history of colonial encounters. Sandra Greene’s recently published Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) explores how the landscaping of colonialism reworked Anlo people’s conceptions of sacred space. Sean Hawkins’ Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and “the World on Paper” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) illuminates how colonial courts and British anthropology reduced the negotiable LoDagaa “world of experience” to a set of rules on paper. Christopher Gray’s study partakes of this academic discourse on the colonial encounter. In the second half of the nineteenth century, says Gray, “two very different cognitive maps confronted each other in Southern Gabon” (2). The diverse people who lived south of the Ogooué river practiced a social definition of territory: their political order rested on the control over people, not on the control over geographic space. French colonialism sought to anchor people, as members of ethnic groups, to specific tracts of land, the better to govern them. In the early twentieth century, the precolonial order was destroyed, as French colonists used censuses, maps, labor camps, and roads to rearrange people according to an administrative logic. But elements of the precolonial cognitive system survived, says Gray, making the legacies of colonial territoriality decidedly ambiguous. The strength of Gray’s book is his sensitive analysis of precolonial social order. The standard approach is to treat pre-colonial history schematically, as a static backdrop against which the effects of colonialism can be studied. Gray, in contrast, illuminates the flexible, dynamic nature of precolonial territoriality. While patrilocal villages were the basic unit of residence, matrilineal clans drew people from disparate regions together as descendants of a common female ancestor. Political communities, therefore, were socially defined: they revolved around kinship rather than residence. Districts were the largest political units that people recognized. Organized around trading routes, rivers, or ecological zones, districts were flexible alliances of villages and clans, brought together by intermarriage and sharing a commitment to self-defense. Gray is emphatic that nothing about this precolonial social order revolved around ethnicity. Speakers of different languages lived alongside one another, intermarried, and formed kinship alliances. In the latter half of the book, Gray documents how this social definition of territory was replaced by a territorial definition of society. Paul Du Chaillu, Savorgnan de Brazza, and other European explorers crisscrossed the region in the late nineteenth century, mapping rivers, streams, and mountains. Smallpox followed in their wake, killing tens of thousands of people. But more than demographic disaster, European exploration brought modern conceptions of territory to bear on the people of this region. Gray follows Mary Louise Pratt in noting how explorers appropriated space through their maps, emptying territory of its prior, unwritten significance. The Ogooué River, for example, was not known as a geographic feature before Europeans mapped it. Local people named rapids and pools, or categorized portions of the river as “upstream” or “downstream.” European observers, in contrast, applied concrete names to geographic features that their maps revealed. Colonial censuses similarly appropriated and transformed space. When French officials began counting people in the early twentieth century, they categorized them as members of ethnic groups, as “Eshira,” “Mitsogo,” or “Bapunu.” These ethnic categories were fabrications, products of the French imagination. But they took on real life, as administrators used invented categories to organize and govern people. Road building played a particularly important role in the colonial reorganization of social order. When the state first began to build roads in the 1910s, work gangs were organized on an ethnic basis, giving social form to fictional identities on paper. By the 1920s and 30s, the colonial army was routing people out of their rural homes to live in artificial villages beside new roads. Bound to the land, people could be taxed, policed...

Recalling Empire:Anglo-American Conceptions of Imperialism and the Decline of the Nation-State Graham MacPhee (bio) Porter, Bernard . 2006. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. $30.00hc. 224pp. Doolan, Andy . 2005. Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $60.00hc. $20.00sc. 280pp. Boehmer, Elleke . 2002. Empire, The National, and the Postcolonial 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $95.00hc. $29.95sc. 250pp. Muthu, Sankar . 2003. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $80.00hc. $22.95sc. 379 pp. Yet another "Treaty," this time with Mesopotamia, another vast Arab country [End Page 198] coolly annexed by Britain after the world war, under the guise of a "mandate." The Treaty—in actual fact a charter of conquest—for what Mr. Churchill calls the "provisionally independent state of Irak" has been negotiated over the heads of the inhabitants, and Baghdad . . . is in a state of "acute tension" in consequence. (Poblacht na hÉireann, 15 June 1922) Over fifty years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tied the historical disasters of the Second World War, the Nazi genocides, and the rise of police regimes in the Soviet bloc to European imperialism through her account of "the decline of the nation-state" (1973 [1951/58]). Here Arendt traces the paradoxical configuration of the political in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, caught between the irreconcilable demands of the nation-state and economic expansion through imperialism, a configuration that would give rise not only to fascism and Soviet authoritarianism, but also to the current hegemonic position of the Western democracies—meaning principally the US. Notwithstanding the problems in Arendt's approach, her text is worth recalling here because it is radically historical in recognizing the ways in which the history she narrates redraws the parameters of both the future she inhabits and the futures she anticipates (Tsao 2004). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt figures historical destruction as itself powerfully productive or inventive, in the sense that the ruptures she charts will themselves persist or remain operative but in transformed and even unrecognizable ways: in the erosion of the substantive legal freedoms of the nation-state and the marginalization of its formal democratic mechanisms by the concentration of economic power; in the subordination of national sovereignty to global flows of capital which are themselves guaranteed by nonnegotiable supranational institutions; in the rejection by the most heavily armed states of claims to juridical universalism through assertions of "national security"; and in the persistence of "tribal nationalism" and the fantasies of "race-thinking" (1973, 227, 158). For much of the last fifty years this gesture has been unusual within public discourse in both Britain and the US. Indeed, the very phenomena which Arendt had connected to imperialism—the Second World War, Nazism, the regimes of the Soviet bloc, the undermining of formal juridico-political institutions—have been widely understood as marking precisely what separates us from imperialism: it was the war "against fascism" (within British public discourse) and the hot and cold wars "to defend freedom" (for the US) which at once redefined Britain as an imperially-innocent medium-sized nation, and simultaneously elevated the US into the stern but fair global single-parent, replete with soft-spoken demeanor and big stick. Subsequently, the extension of American global power has not only found its justification in the victims of Stalin, but after 1967 has also been conducted in the name [End Page 199] of the six million Jewish victims of Hitler's Final Solution (Novick 1999). And once the languages of revolution and liberation—taken up in the West in the 1960s as an echo of the battle for decolonization across the developing world—were marginalized in the 1970s, then the shibboleth of empire could be redirected back at the collapsing Soviet Union, whose disastrous adventure in Afghanistan allowed Ronald Reagan to cast it Darth Vader-like as the "evil empire." The different experiences of this largely shared mythology have given rise to a divergent awareness of imperial history: for Britain, the deeply ingrained sense of failure incumbent on the processes of decolonization and subordination to the US has...

This book investigates the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In extreme cases, hundreds of these women sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism. Those who stayed home often remained Jewish in name only. The book reconstructs the stories of three Jewish women runaways and reveals their struggles and innermost convictions. Unlike Orthodox Jewish boys, who attended “cheders,” traditional schools where only Jewish subjects were taught, Orthodox Jewish girls were sent to Polish primary schools. When the time came for them to marry, many young women rebelled against the marriages arranged by their parents, with some wishing to pursue secondary and university education. After World War I, the crisis of the rebellious daughters in Kraków spurred the introduction of formal religious education for young Orthodox Jewish women in Poland, which later developed into a worldwide educational movement. The book chronicles the belated Orthodox response and argues that these educational innovations not only kept Orthodox Jewish women within the fold but also foreclosed their opportunities for higher education. Exploring the estrangement of young Jewish women from traditional Judaism in Habsburg Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century, the book brings to light a forgotten yet significant episode in Eastern European history.

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...