The City as the Enemy? Anti-urbanism in Art and Politics

When Victorian critics like Margaret Oliphant and Henry Mansel reacted negatively to the popular “sensation novel” in the 1860s, chief among their concerns was that these novels “preach[ed] to the nerves” instead of engaging readers’ cultivated reflective judgment (Mansel 483). Scholarship on sensation novels has sought to identify the unique features that allowed these texts to directly engage readers’ bodies and do certain kinds of cultural or ideological work. In a brief but significant moment in chapter 3 of his ambitious book The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan asks us to rethink both the nature of Mansel's critique and the singularity of sensation novels. A lifelong idealist invested in metaphysics, Mansel bewailed specific features of these “morbid” fictions: their melodramatic subject matter, their emphasis on plot over character, their responsiveness to market demand. But Morgan reads Mansel's review as a reaction against a much broader set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects). In the compelling story Morgan tells, sensation novels come to look less like unique sites of physiological stimulation and more like popular literary instances of a new aesthetic theory that was reimagining the relationship between humans and objects in their environment. Rather than focusing on the specificity of particular aesthetic objects (artworks, music, literary texts), Morgan turns our attention to how multiple discursive fields in the nineteenth century intersected as they rethought the nature of looking, hearing, reading, or otherwise engaging with objects in the world.With thoughtful, nuanced explication of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts, Morgan advances two interconnected claims, both supplemented by encyclopedic notes and references (which comprise a quarter of the book). His first argument is that the aesthetic experience we tend to value as the “highest” human capacity—because it appears to be a spiritual or transcendental property of autonomous, deliberative, inward-turning selves—was instead imagined within a range of nineteenth-century discourses (physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, art history, literature, even interior design and color theory) as a function of bodies and the matter that comprised them. The book's second contention is that this “materialist strain” in Victorian aesthetics displaced the agency of aesthetic response from individual human persons to nonhuman matter, resulting not only in the expansion of aesthetic experience to nonhuman animals (think of Darwin's discerning birds) but also in conferring consciousness to inanimate physical objects. Whereas scholarship by Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance) and David Wayne Thomas (Cultivating Victorians) associates aesthetic experience with the cultivation of critical detachment and self-reflective individuality, Morgan reads such liberal ideals as reactionary responses to an increasingly materialist account of the self. His argument thus resonates with and broadens the scope of Nicholas Dames's approach in The Physiology of the Novel. Taking a cue from other scholars who have charted a nineteenth-century erosion of mind-body dualism (Allan Richardson, Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth), Morgan shows how this erosion took on radical forms, not just by affording material properties to minds but also by identifying the “enminded” properties of matter. The “outward turn” of Morgan's title refers to the “active and animating” properties of mind that extend to other material substances: matter itself can have properties of consciousness (19).Morgan divides his book into two sections, the first of which traces a mid-nineteenth-century empirical science of beauty that runs counter (but also parallel) to the kind of anti-industrialist and socially attuned aesthetic theories we associate with John Ruskin, who serves as the implicit antihero of Morgan's story. Chapter 1 charts a shift from natural theology to scientific materialism in accounts of beauty and harmony by examining a network of intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club in the 1850s, including interior decorator David Ramsay Hay, physician John Addington Symonds, physiologists Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, and critic E. S. Dallas. At the center of this chapter is a pair of linked paradoxes in the science of aesthetics. Aesthetic form was conceived of as both geometric (ordered, harmonious, and identifiable) and ambient (experienced by non-conscious corporeal processes). And so, while beauty and taste could supposedly be explained with mathematical precision, those thinkers who were invested in such explanations increasingly found that aestheticism's physiological mechanisms evaded rational modes of thought brought to bear upon them. Morgan's method in The Outward Mind is to take up a series of such paradoxes, oppositions between seemingly contradictory modes of thought: humanistic inquiry and scientific positivism, abstraction and materiality, phenomenology and epistemology, aesthetics and politics. He insightfully reads these as dialectics animating new Victorian ways of thinking about aesthetic experience at a time when various humanist and scientific inquiries were only just beginning to distinguish themselves as separate disciplines.Having established how medical writers and literary critics developed a neurophysiological account of aesthetic experience, Morgan turns in chapter 2 to texts by five writers—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—all of whom, despite their different idioms, “rescaled and physicalized the primary units of analysis of aesthetic thought” (88). This rescaling happens in two seemingly contradictory directions: by narrowing in on the immediate moment of response as something that disaggregates both art objects and experiencing selves into their component parts (nerve fibers, organs, colors, shapes, words) and by expanding the register of aesthetic response to encompass the deep time of evolution. In both directions this rescaling “tends to suspend or sideline the human as a unit of analysis” (124). Responses to aesthetic objects are not located within discrete human selves but in the local actions of nerves or the evolutionary development of the species. Hardy's novels feature here as literary manifestations of scientific theories. Where Pater and Allen describe scales of aesthetic response, Hardy “adapts” these theories for use in fiction: he expands moments of physiological intensity with almost lyric detail (Henry Knight clinging to the cliff in Desperate Remedies); disintegrates characters into neurological responses (brains and nerves); and locates aesthetic experience in an expanded time of evolutionary adaptation.While section 1 considers how aesthetic response spreads out across the material properties of the body and the scale of the species, section 2 (“The Outward Turn”) considers how nineteenth-century intellectuals expanded consciousness even further, beyond human observers to the objects in their environment. Environments themselves became sentient. In chapter 3 Morgan examines a cluster of writers who coalesce around Walter Pater and developed Lucretian theories of atomic agency. In a somewhat surprising association of Pater's fiction with sensation novels, Morgan argues that both produce somatic responses in readers. In his imaginary portraits and in Marius the Epicurean Pater applies the materialist theories of psychologist James Sully and Allen by imagining reading itself as a physical experience. Reading Pater's literary texts as enactments of materialist aesthetic theories, Morgan argues that Pater's writing makes language tactile and sensuous; his sentences “imprison” readers (164); his “densely accretive style returns language to bodies” (157).Scholars of the novel might wish here, and elsewhere, that Morgan would expand his literary analysis: Just how, for instance, does the accretive quality or the “semantic density” of Pater's literary language operate (157)? Morgan reads literary texts as applications of material aesthetic theories that he locates first in scientific texts. Building upon Gillian Beer and George Levine's “shared discourse” and one-culture approaches, he reads science and literature “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on” (17). His method is therefore to explicate both scientific and literary texts. While his expositions and claims are compelling and clearly articulated, I found myself wanting more extensive close readings of just how novels by Hardy, Pater, William Morris, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde anticipate and direct readers’ physiological responses. The lack of space afforded to close readings in The Outward Mind perhaps makes sense given that Morgan focuses his energy on drawing together an astonishingly diverse array of intellectual fields from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He offers novel scholars provocative new ways of thinking about both the physiological responses referenced within nineteenth-century novels and how novels might themselves act as agents of affect and somatic response. The latter point might lead us to wonder whether the relationship between science and literature is as simple as Morgan's framework of parallel “rhetorics” would suggest. When he turns to E. S. Dallas, William Morris, and Vernon Lee, he shows that these writers made literary language inherently somatic. He thus paints a picture in which literature does much more than apply or extend scientific aesthetic theories; it enacts material aesthetics. What sort of critical method is appropriate to such enactment? Morgan points out that literary texts are complicated aesthetic objects, because “[o]ne cannot see a poetic image in the same unmediated way that one sees a color or hears a sound; novels and poems are therefore less immediately or obviously available to empirical analysis” (253–54). He admits that the way literary texts prompt effects in readers’ bodies—for instance the “somatic forces” conveyed by Pater's prose—are “difficult to talk about” (157). In the case of Pater this is because his prose combines philosophical concepts with a style that is “resistan[t] to thought.” But the difficulty here is also that formalist textual analysis does not have a history of playing well with reader response or cognitive criticism.In his chapters on Pater, Morris, and Lee, Morgan poses the question, What happens to social life when empirical theories root aesthetics in universal physiological responses, making aesthetics the work of nerves and evolutionary adaptation rather than the products of specific social and political circumstances? He answers by assessing how writers imagined matter itself to have social properties. In chapter 4 Morgan takes up the case of William Morris, whose physicalist aesthetics at first glance seem at odds with his socialist politics. But unlike Herbert Spencer, for whom evolutionary theory leads to a competitive individualism, for Morris the same theory makes possible a shared corporeality. Reading Morris's essays, lectures, romances, and News from Nowhere, Morgan explores how Morris aligns aesthetic experience with the pleasure of production, self-expression, and use, experienced by laborers who engage in shared embodied practices. The antithesis of the fin de siècle decadent aesthete, Morris rejects the category of “art” as a privileged, refined domain and locates it in the everyday. When Morgan turns to News from Nowhere, he traces in Morris's construction of character an alternative to realism's reliance on introspection and individualistic sympathy. Morris renders characters physically, promoting an ethics of shared corporeal practices; his characters are distinguished by “their external markers and preferred modes of activity” (207).This expanded notion of sociality—one not based on a community of sympathetic individuals but on sensory reactions to corporeally rendered characters or even to books as material objects—has important implications for how we read. In his fifth chapter Morgan shows how Vernon Lee's theories of empathy describe readerly affect as a feeling with or feeling into objects. Indeed Morgan finds in Lee a precursor to Brian Massumi's affect theory. Empathy was not synonymous with interpersonal sympathy until the mid-twentieth century; instead it meant “unconscious physiological reaction to an object” (220). For Lee and her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, literary language itself is based on this physiological, object-oriented empathy. When we speak of a mountain as “rising,” for instance, the metaphor is not just an act of imagination; we feel our eyes moving upward and our bodies rising. Empathy, Morgan notes, “is rooted in experiences that precede the social domain” (222). I find myself wondering whether Morgan hopes to hold on to a separate, individuated notion of the social domain even as he sees material aesthetics radically expanding sociality to include all types of responsiveness between material things. What are the ethical and political functions of literature—especially in relation to gender, race, or class—in a system of universal corporeality?Despite his statement to the contrary, in many ways Morgan's book is an “intellectual history”—a complex, revisionist, sometimes presentist, and often recuperative one—of an overlooked Victorian mode of thinking (and reading, and looking) (16). His book unearths intricate intersections between a surprising range of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thought. His premise is that a reassessment of the material turn in Victorian aesthetic theory might help us overcome our own entrenchment in methodological and disciplinary divisions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and scientism, empiricism, and positivism on the other. Victorian aesthetic theory might, he says, “reveal some of the ways in which the humanities have long been ‘scientific’” (15). It is in this gesture toward the present, along with steady alignment of Victorian theories with later philosophies and approaches (affect theory, thing theory, distant reading, poststructuralism, neuroscience), that Morgan refuses to engage in a mere intellectual history. He is interested in what his epilogue calls a “nonlinear” method of engagement with the past, one that casts Victorian theories not as merely anticipatory of modern ideas but as sources of alternative, potentially invigorating, less disciplinarily entrenched modes of thinking about aesthetics, reading, and interpretation (261). This is especially apparent in his final chapter, in which he challenges a story we tell of literary critical history: that New Criticism's analytic modes of close reading made a clean break with Victorian modes of “moral-aesthetic evaluative criticism,” and that distant reading's quantitative approach was made possible by digital technologies (244). Not only is distant reading not new, he shows us; twentieth-century New Critics (following I. A. Richards) were “haunted by” the quantifiable methods of reading that preceded them, methods they sought to caricature as scientifically reductionist and naive (237). Morgan uncovers in Lee's empathetic literary criticism a distant reading avant la lettre (Lee was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable, objective methods of literary formalism. In one of his most provocative moments Morgan asks what literary studies might have looked like if, instead of rejecting the phenomenology and physiology of reading, New Criticism had followed Lee's lead and “embraced corporeality rather than cognition” (253). The critical investment of The Outward Mind is that we might benefit from revisiting nineteenth-century materialist theories of aesthetics at a time when we face our own methodological questions about how to read, how disciplines can intersect, and whether “scientific” approaches to literary analysis (cognitive criticism, digital humanities) impinge upon or invigorate traditional hermeneutic methods of inquiry. As Morgan puts it, Lee's brand of scientific humanistic inquiry, in its refusal to pit the affects of reading against statistical analysis, might help us reunite the phenomenological and the quantitative, the humanistic and the scientific.

The paper is based on the assumption that modern art centralises aesthetic experience in a specific way, why it as well be may regarded – in contrast to the rather forced interpretation of art already opposed by Susan Sontag (Sontag 2001, 10) – as an appropriate mode for encountering art. However, the theoretical discourse on aesthetic experience is characterised by opposite poles, which will be examined in the first part of this paper. On the one hand, there is the utopian conception around 1800, in which the reflection on aesthetic experience originally is rooted, in Friedrich Schiller’sOn the Aesthetic Education of Man(cf. Noetzel 2006, 198) or Friedrich Schlegel’s imaginations of a life in art inLucinde(cf. Dziudzia 2015, 38sqq.). On the other hand, the reflections in the German discourse at the beginning of the 20th century are marked in a conspicuously negative way, which can still be seen until the 1980s.In the theoretical first part of the essay, a few cursory positions on the ›problem of the aesthetic human being‹ will be considered initially, which reject aesthetic views in everyday life and evaluate such tendencies as forms of social decay. Concerned about morality on the surface, these positions indeed aim at criticising individual lifestyles in a modern world, which, in particular, are opposed to conservative and collectivist ideas of society and morality. These discourse positions, which are ultimately ideologically grounded, then lead to the deliberate reflections on aesthetic experience, as they unfold most notably from the 1970s onwards, where they form the implicit background.As will be shown, the explicitly negative evaluation expressed in the earlier positions then shapes the assessments of aesthetic experience of Hans-Robert Jauß (cf. Jauß 2007), Peter Bürger (cf. Bürger 1977) and Rüdiger Bubner (cf. Bubner 1989) as a fundamental, rather implicit scepticism. For the most part, their positions seem to make it impossible to think of the aesthetic experience as enrichment or to evaluate it positively, as is common in the US-American discourse, for instance.The latter stance, which is, in essence, initiated by John Dewey and his consciously non-strict separation between art and everyday life as well as his decidedly anti-elitist understanding of art and aesthetics, is more in keeping with the utopian concepts of around 1800. However, his writings only find late distribution in Germany (cf. Dewey 1980). In contrast to Dewey’s position – and Susan Sontag’s explicit rejection of the interpretation as a violent act and the omittance of the sensual experience of the artwork (Sontag 2001) – the critical condemnation of aesthetic experience, which ultimately remains unfounded in the German discourse (because of its implicit ideological origin), now appears challenged.In fact, attentive observation in an aesthetic stance becomes part of the aesthetic programme in modern art across the board (cf. Dziudzia 2015b). Bürger reflects on this and offers – especially in the examination of Marcel ProustIn Search of Lost Time – a productive proposal to grasp the ›aestheticizing perception‹ (as he calls it) as a literary technique. In his conception, Bürger refers to media as a specific ›projection area‹ of aesthetic experience, especially in literature around 1900. The ›imaginary fadings‹ (cf. Schmitz-Emans 2001) in modern literature are, following Bürger, to be further thought of as ›exponentiated‹ aesthetic experiences, which find their form not only around 1900 but also in more recent literature.Therefore, in the second part of the paper and the exemplary reading of a contemporary German novel, Martin MosebachsDer Mond und das Mädchen(The Moon and the Maiden), published in 2007, it is to be shown how aesthetic experience finds complex forms. In the specific shaping of imaginary fadings in the interplay of figure and narrator level, especially in recourse to the medium film to be observed therein, the ambivalence of the theoretical concept of aesthetic experience insinuates as will be argued.

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

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Brexit and Trump’s victory in the United States has sparked renewed academic interest in far-right populism. However, this academic discourse remains remarkably orientalist in its tenor and rhetoric. The focus of academic debates remains restricted to dissecting the rise of far-right populism in the Global North West, while similar movements in Global South East remain largely ignored. We argue that the contemporary academic discourse about the far-right populism is based on the fundamental assumption that the ‘normal’ Global North West is becoming ‘abnormal,’ while the question of abnormality or lack thereof of the proverbial Orient is not taken up because in such othering discourse, the option of normality is foreclosed to the Global South East. Using the rise of the Bharatiya Janta Party in India as an example, we contend that far-right populist movements in the Global South East have developed and intersect with businesses and government in unique ways. The embrace of neoliberalism by the Indian far-right, a stark contrast to similar movements in the Global North West, further suggests that we might be witnessing a global reorientation of the capitalist order. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of far-right populism must account for and pay attention to the heterogeneities of these movements across the Global North West and the Global South East.

In 1900 the global average life expectancy at birth was thirty-one years. By 2000 it was sixty-six. Yet, alongside unprecedented improvements in longevity and material well-being, the twentieth century also saw the rise of fascism and communism and a second world war followed by a cold war. This book tells the story of the battles between economic systems that defined the last century and created today's world. The nineteenth century was a period of rapid economic growth characterized by relatively open markets and more personal liberty, but it also brought great inequality within and between nations. The following century offered sharp challenges to free-wheeling capitalism from both communism and fascism, whose competing visions of planned economic development attracted millions of people buffeted by the economic storms of the 1930s. The Age of Equality describes the ways in which market-oriented economies eventually overcame the threat of these visions and provided a blueprint for reform in nonmarket economies. This was achieved not through unbridled capitalism but by combining the efficiency and growth potential of markets with government policies to promote greater equality of opportunity and outcome. Following on the heels of economic reform, rapid catch-up growth in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Poland helped to reduce global inequality. At a time when inequality is on the rise in nations as disparate as the United States and Egypt, Pomfret's interpretation of how governments of market economies faced the challenges of the twentieth century is both instructive and cautionary.

Financial crises, bank failures, and collapse of credit were recurrent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United Kingdom, the United States, as well as in many other European countries. During the nineteenth century, bank runs and collapse of banks became inherent features of the banking system and even appeared as unavoidable. Financial crises may have been even more severe during the twentieth century, more widespread and frequent, with numerous developed and underdeveloped countries experiencing bank failures and stock market crashes. Inferring from historical experiences, Minsky (1986) maintained that conventional finance was inherently unstable in the developed world. Periods of prosperity alternating with periods of depression and massive unemployment (Siegfried 1906); and an inevitable and vicious cycle of debt crises that push the economy into recession or depression and wipe out much of the real income gains achieved prior to the crisis. Significant wealth is redistributed to debtors who default on their loans. Moreover, it is inflationary and, therefore, again inequitable. Famous politicians have been critical of conventional finance.1 Eminent economists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,2 witnessing financial crises occurring during their lifetimes, proposed reforms that establish 100% reserve commercial banking and an investment banking system that channels investments essentially on a pass-through basis.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

In recent years, there has been a notable rise in the electoral success of far-right populist movements in various Western countries, coinciding with an alarming increase in far-right terrorist attacks. While far-right populists seek to attain power through democratic means, their rhetoric has inadvertently fostered an environment conducive to the growth of extremist ideologies. This article delves into the manifestos published by far-right extremists from the United States, Germany, Norway, and Australia, illuminating how these manifestos mirror and amplify the narratives espoused by far-right populists. Beyond sharing common conspiracy myths, these terrorists often reference one another and populist politicians in their manifestos, further showing the entanglement between far-right populism and extremism. This paper undertakes a discourse analysis of these terrorist manifestos, probing into how right-wing extremists make use of conspiracy myths promoted by the populist right-wing. As far-right terrorism increasingly threatens peaceful coexistence, it becomes imperative to conduct new research that assesses the role of conspiracy myths in fueling terrorism and devises strategies to avert further radicalization.

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

This chapter examines how the internal rise of ultranationalism and far-right populism is eroding the foundations of the Western liberal order, and that ideological shifts within liberal democracies are the primary drivers of democratic backsliding and global power realignment. Populist movements, grounded in nativism, anti-elitism, and authoritarian rhetoric, have undermined institutional checks and pluralistic norms, weakening democratic resilience from within. The United States serves as a key case study. The resurgence of “America First” nationalism under Donald Trump illustrates how internal political transformations can have profound geopolitical consequences. Rhetoric targeting immigration, globalization, and multilateralism has strained alliances, emboldened authoritarian regimes, and diminished US credibility as a democratic model. Similar trends are evident across Europe, where populist leaders in Hungary, Poland, France, and Italy have normalized illiberal governance and challenged the authority of supranational institutions. This chapter also explores the transnational spread of illiberal norms through digital platforms, ideological alliances, and strategic funding. These networks link far-right actors across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, advancing exclusionary narratives like the “Great Replacement” and fostering global resistance to liberal norms. As liberal democracies retreat from multilateral commitments and normative leadership, authoritarian states like China and Russia fill the vacuum by promoting alternative governance models. The erosion of democratic values, institutional legitimacy, and global engagement from within Western states threatens to permanently reshape global power structures. Whether liberal democracies can recover will depend on their ability to confront internal polarization, restore institutional trust, and reaffirm pluralistic commitments in an increasingly multipolar world.

The Aesthetics of Representation:Dramatic Texts and Dramatic Engagement Kathleen Gallagher (bio) Staking the Territory There are several ways in which aesthetic discourses might be positioned in the field of drama education. While some might locate "aesthetics" in the cognitive or interpretive realm of learning, and others the affective or philosophical realm, I have chosen to speak of the discourses of aesthetics as they relate to both cognitive and embodied responses to the (extra)ordinary events of a drama classroom. I am already unsatisfied with the recognizable distinctions implied in this binary, but I persist in the hope that the relationship between these learning functions will become clear as I proceed with what I have termed the sociology of aesthetics in drama practice. In drama, we attempt—collectively—to represent our lives through art as we come to know the world and our sensuous responses to it. Fenner's brief history of aesthetic experience and aesthetic analysis will further help stake the territory about which we are speaking in a drama classroom.1 Calling aesthetic experiences the "raw data" that aesthetics is meant to explain, he helpfully distinguishes between Kantian understandings of the conditions of aesthetic judgment and the emergence of those thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who began to focus on the psychology of aesthetic experience. Following these thinkers and further developments in the early part of the twentieth century, the work of John Dewey explored the psychological nature of what he called "an experience" in the field of education more generally.2 This article will also privilege the notion of aesthetic experience but will, more specifically, focus on an exploration of ideas borne out of aesthetic experiences that cultivate sociological questions about representation and the nature of cognitive and embodied engagement in classroom drama. Key to my view of dramatic representation is the notion of a provoked imagination. [End Page 82] In the nineteenth century, Archibald Allison claimed that it was the imagination that was responsible for what we term "aesthetic experiences."3 Earlier philosophers of aesthetics had determined that the mere presence of beauty could create an aesthetic experience, but Allison insisted upon the "exercises of the imagination" in his understanding of aesthetic experiences. Contemporary writers in the field of arts education have also favored this more active conception of aesthetic responses, such as the formidable Madeleine Grumet and Maxine Greene. They and others will be cited here in support of a conception of "aesthetic experiences" in the drama classroom as active, selective, and highly framed experiences. Dramatic Texts and Aesthetic Knowing: Framing the Experiences One can hardly discuss the idea of aesthetic exploration without first engaging with the rather unwieldy idea of "creativity." Radford, citing Margaret Boden, puts forward a very helpful notion of creativity as "conceptual space."4 This "conceptual space" is what I will refer to as "the frame" carefully placed around dramatic learning, usually by a highly skilled teacher. Frequently because of this frame, something entirely forgettable to students is shaped into something worth considering. The "frame," therefore, consists of both careful pedagogical planning and, in many cases, a piece of text that ignites the conceptual space and inspires a deliberate probing. This deliberate probing, or what Radford might call creative thought, invites co-creators to "play at the boundaries of sense."5 Bruner speaks about the "creative act" as bringing about a "shock of recognition,"6 or what Radford equally describes as something speaking to something "within us." This idea is particularly helpful in deconstructing what is often at work in a collaborative piece of improvised drama activity in a classroom of young people. To this end, I would like to offer three brief episodes as examples of textual and improvised drama engagement that speak to Bruner's and Radford's ideas of "recognition," or resonance with "something within us," and to my own understanding of how ideas of representation or mimesis are operating in moments of aesthetic knowing for young people. The other principle at work, seemingly at odds with these ideas, is the notion of distance or alienation from an event, in effect a dis-identification. What I would especially hope to demonstrate in the following brief, empirical...

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

Chicana/o history has witnessed a number of historiographical debates that date back to its emergence in the 1960s. Paradigms and periodization once again emerge as important themes in González and Fernández’s A Century of Chicano History. The authors challenge current historiographical trends concerning the formation of the Chicana/o community, structure and agency, the importance of gender as a category to analyze labor and Bracero programs, and the ideological forms of colonialism—both past and present—deployed in Mexico as part and parcel of U.S. empire building. They especially believe that scholars need to reconsider the role of early U.S. imperialist activities in Mexico during the nineteenth century. The origins of U.S. domination in Mexico can be traced to the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a period that signaled the economic subordination of that country to U.S. capitalism (p. 29). Consequently, “the rise of the Chicano national minority was not an event marginal to U.S. history; quite the opposite, it was central to the construction of a U.S. neocolonial empire” (p. 59). The cozy relationship between Porfirio Díaz and U.S. capitalists spurred Mexican migration. The coming of the railroads, the exploitation of minerals, and the sprouting of an agricultural economy in the Southwest further facilitated this trend. The formation of the Chicano community in the United States, therefore, “reflects Mexico’s economic subordination in the face of U.S. hegemony and the limitations placed on its national sovereignty by that domination” (p. 29).This monograph challenges current Chicana/o historiography in focusing on Mexican migration to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the bulk of the Chicano community in the U.S. is descended from these migrations. That is, the nonmigrant community residing primarily in the American Southwest is a small percentage of the overall Chicano community, one composed predominantly of more recent migrations beginning in the late nineteenth century. Thus, with the exception of New Mexico, “the small number of Mexicans annexed by the conquest are inconsequential compared to the much larger number of late nineteenth-century Mexican migrants to the region” (p. 13). Most scholars argue for a continuity of Chicano history from 1848 to the present and overlook the impact of later Mexican migrations on the formation of Chicano/a communities. In the words of González and Fernández, most Chicana/o historians “nearly unanimously emphasize a continuity of Chicano history from that point to the present” (p. 11). But by comparing the periods of increased Mexican migration with those of increased American investment in Mexico, it is easy to see how the creation of the Chicano community is due to immigration. As such, “Rather than the commonly held belief that the Mexican American War of 1848 led to the construction of the Chicano minority, this study proposes that the origins of the Chicano population evolved from economic empire led by corporate capitalist interests with the backing of the U.S. State Department”(p. 59).González and Fernández also incorporate some important ideological and cultural components in their economic interpretation. Two chapters are worth noting: “The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The United States, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants” and “Denying Empire: The Journal of American History on the Ideological Warpath.” In the American imaginary of Mexico and Mexicans, as viewed through the extensive production of travel literature in the nineteenth century, the authors see something similar to the “Orientalism” that Edward Said described in his pathbreaking postcolonial study of the East in the European imaginary. This knowledge was employed alongside U.S. economic policy and later combined with Americanization programs imposed upon the Chicano community. As a result, the “interconnections of the Chicano historical experience with the economic and political hegemony exerted by the United States over Mexico and of the ideology that that domination inspired need to be placed on the research agenda” (p. 93)A few experts in Latin American history will probably see the residual elements of an earlier dependency theory model, while postcolonial critics will perhaps read this interpretation as another effort to impose European categories of analysis à la Marx. These points aside, however, A Century of Chicano History will more than likely stimulate a healthy level of discussion within Chicana/o studies itself and should be required reading for scholars of U.S., Latin American, and borderlands history.

Pursuing a regional approach to history puts twenty-first-century historians in the strange position of unconsciously echoing their nineteenth-century predecessors, though with differing goals. When historian Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the Mid-Atlantic region “typically American,” he was of course intent upon divining an elusive national character, not currently a goal of historians. But Turner's frontier thesis emphasized geography and region in a way that would still be recognizable to environmental historians today. For example, Turner's observations concerning the Mid-Atlantic region hinged upon the physical geography of place, property ownership, and use of land. He noted that the Mid-Atlantic was a doorway for emigrants from all of Europe, who “entered by New York harbor” and were then intermixed; that the residents were “rooted in material prosperity” based on the land; and that the region, “with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled regions, and with a system of connecting waterways,” was uniquely situated as a mechanism for the admixture of peoples. In this way, the Mid-Atlantic served as a microcosm of Turner's conception of the frontier as a churning machine that intermingled people from regions and nations to create an essentially American temperament.1Putting aside the intent behind Turner's “typically American” label, it is still possible to apply that judgment to the environmental history of the Mid-Atlantic. The region possesses the most significant concentration of urban centers in the nation, a long history of extractive industry, the legacies of early water-powered industrialization, and the remnants of some of the worst pollution disasters in American history. Along with those built environments, the region contains extensive forests with a long history of human management, complex river systems and bays, diverse colonial and pre-Columbian pasts, agricultural systems both past and current, and biological complexity in fields, forests, rivers, mountains, and shores. This diversity does not make the region unique—but it does mean that almost all of the major themes of environmental history appear in the places roughly bounded by the Atlantic, the 36th parallel, the western edge of the Appalachians, and the northern reaches of the Adirondacks.The environmental matters covered in this article have long been under discussion by scholars, but the emergence of the Marcellus shale issue has served to refocus attention on these topics, some of which had seemed to slip at least slightly from the attention of the field of environmental history. I am particularly interested in two intertwined approaches: environmental history that details the politics, policy, and popular consciousness that shape decisionmaking; and environmental history that explores the impacts of those decisions on nature and landscapes. I refer to these approaches as the history of modern environmental politics and the history of human impact on place. The distinction here lies in what the scholar initially sets out to study: (a) a political process, philosophy, or force by which environmental decisions are made, or (b) a place, landscape, topic, or species that may be transformed by those decisions. Despite this attempt at differentiation, much of the environmental history of the region remains intertwined: no matter the locale, tugging at any thread in the weave of environmental issues eventually pulls on the entire mess. Whether by examining politicians, activists, legislatures, cities, markets, corporations, landscapes, forests, or fish, the histories examined in this essay demonstrate that studying environmental topics in the Mid-Atlantic region involves a bewildering welter of forces and effects, no matter the label.Multiple works published in the last decade have focused on individual politicians or historical actors with connections to the Mid-Atlantic, with the goal of explaining their connections to larger issues in environmental politics. Char Miller produced an early example of this with his work on Gifford Pinchot, arguing that the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service “was at the forefront of those seeking international agreements to check environmental devastation.” From an outdoorsy rest cure in the Saranac Lake region of upstate New York to the managed forests of the family's “summer castle” in Milford, Pennsylvania, Miller continually links the peripatetic Pinchot to the Mid-Atlantic region.2 Similarly, Thomas G. Smith's Green Republican and J. Brooks Flippen's Conservative Conservationist attempt to explain how Republican politics were once connected to the roots of environmentalism in a way rarely seen today. Flippen locates some of Republican attorney and EPA administrator Russell Train's conservationist impulses in a personal attachment to his farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, while Smith connects Congressman John Saylor's political action to his personal experience of nature in western Pennsylvania.3This attempt to interpret individual actors as bellwethers of larger events also frames recent studies of liberalism. A recent article by Peter Siskind on Nelson Rockefeller, for example, concludes that he “proved the most powerful and influential governor in the nation during the 1960s era, and New York continued in the vanguard of social policy experimentation.” As such, “the unfolding of racial and environmental politics explored here reveal important facets of the evolution of and tensions within post–World War II American liberalism at the state and local level.” In a similar vein, Adam M. Sowards's The Environmental Justice details the life and evolving environmental ethic of the politically active Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, complete with stories of his hearty and physically demanding outdoorsy life, and his mid-1950s public defense of the Chesapeake and Ohio Path in Maryland.4It is obvious that many historians have chosen biographies of individual political figures as a means to narrate historical change in the politics of the environment, but there are a few scholars with the even larger goal of narrating transformations in philosophy and culture. Ben Minteer takes this approach when arguing that Benton MacKaye's cofounding of the Wilderness Society, his writings, and his commitment to creating the Appalachian Trail justifies elevating him into the company of great environmentalist writers such as Lewis Mumford and Aldo Leopold. Similarly, Char Miller's immensely readable biography also argues that Pinchot's “conviction that the power of politics and government … must be employed to expand the benefits of democracy to those often excluded from civic life remains an article of faith among contemporary progressives.” Along the same lines, Adam M. Sowards declares that in increasing public involvement in resource management, Justice Douglas and the larger conservation movement “democratized conservation [as] part of a larger reform process to open up the process of governing.”5These works demonstrate that using the examples of individual actors may certainly be a fruitful route for historians to portray larger stories of environmental politics, but the increasing availability of the archival records of environmental organizations also offers a new path to the same end. Frank Uekoetter's The Age of Smoke compares air pollution control policy in Germany and the United States, with much of the focus on Pittsburgh. Uekoetter ends up analyzing eras of cooperation and confrontation in policymaking, concluding that “the age of smoke emerges as even more crucial: never before or since was the nation-state so well suited to defining and enforcing codes of acceptable conduct and creating institutions to that effect.” My own Citizen Environmentalists fits into this category. This project sifted newly available archival records to more closely examine Pittsburgh's environmental policy in the 1960s and 1970s.6 Dyana Furmansky's 2009 Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy, demonstrates how new archival sources both create and complicate new narratives of movements history. “Before Rachel Carson, Rosalie Edge was the nation's premier example of how one person could wed science to public advocacy for the preservation and restoration of the wide natural world,” writes Furmansky, but it was only through using letters and materials from the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, uncatalogued before 1999, that the author could tell this story.7Possibly the best example of a new scholarly focus on political activism within the narrative of a well-known topic comes from Elizabeth Blum's Love Canal Revisited, which re-examines the famous incident through archival records of a variety of environmental groups, producing a topical analysis distinct from that previously offered by the historical actors involved. Shifting the attention from the story of the individual activist displays the complexity of issues, ending with the argument that “environmental activism can be used to measure the acceptance of other social movements and general ideas about race, class, and gender by different groups over time.” Along the way, Blum calls our attention to the multiplicity and complexity of activist groups at Love Canal, extending the story from Lois Gibbs's Love Canal Homeowners Association to include the Ecumenical Task Force and the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association, and placing all of this in context with the contemporaneous group Women Strike for Peace. Re-examining a well-known story through newly available archival sources has yielded a very different history of environmental activism and its meaning.8While neglected overall, activism as a subject of inquiry is still at the center of many historians' work, including Olga Polmar on New Jersey's toxic heritage and unequal distribution of risk, and Heather Fenyk and David Guston on citizen activism and wetlands in Maryland.9 Michael Egan has attempted to locate models for environmental activism in nineteenth-century New York's battles over regulating milk for public health purposes, starting with the undeniably engaging declaration that “this essay is a fraud.” With the reader's attention firmly in hand, he explains that “this essay is a fraud, because it trades on the anachronistic notion that the urban reformers who pushed for quality control and public health were early environmentalists.” Still, he continues, such a mental trick is useful in understanding the roots of activism.10 Explorations of environmental activism can occur in studies of a bewildering array of environmental issues: in thinking about the sources and shapes of popular environmental protest, scholars have explored topics ranging from activists' attempts to ban logging altogether in the Allegheny Forest, to reconstruction of the devastated Nine Mile Run in Pittsburgh, to activism and real estate in New York, and to the century-long battles over development and industry on the Hudson River.11Whether concerned with an individual political actor or a group of activists, the histories of involvement in environmental politics are highly dependent on the available sources. While new sources are prompting revision, a lack of archival documents has left obvious gaps in our narratives of twentieth-century environmentalism. For example, activism that grew in response to nuclear power and weapons seems to have been barely scratched, with Thomas Peterson's book on local activism in Allegany County, New York, a rare example that demonstrates further opportunity for work. It seems odd that antinuclear activism can be such a major part of European Green politics and yet receive fairly little attention in the United States, with several major clashes in the region remaining unexamined by historians using archival sources. For example, further research is needed on Ralph Nader's Critical Mass, a mid-1960s national antinuclear group based in Washington, DC. Other organizations and nuclear plants remain unexamined, including the Indian River site on the Hudson, the Calvert Cliffs site in Maryland, and the formation of the Shad Alliance in opposition to the Shoreham site on Long Island. Calvert Cliffs seems particularly promising for future research, with late-1960s opposition to the site leading to an important 1971 federal case testing the boundaries of the new National Environmental Policy Act.12While the histories of environmental politics discussed in the previous section start with individual politicians, activists, political battles, or organizations, the works in the next category seem to focus on a place and subsequently examine the impact of changing policies on that subject. The works grouped below begin with a locale, landscape, flora, fauna, ecosystem, or region as a subject. By necessity, they also include explorations of the attempts of institutions, organizations, and governments to choose and pursue a certain path in relation to that subject.There are a few trends among these works on the national level. For example, it has become standard practice for environmental historians to adopt a city or a region as a topic, with prominent examples dealing with Seattle, Boston, and St. Louis. The particular advantage here is the opportunity to narrate the long-term impacts of changing policy on a specific environment. Matthew Klingle's account of Seattle, for instance, shows the human alteration of land and water that latecomers to the city might assume were natural formations, while Michael Rawson demonstrates the surprising interplay of science, politics, and culture in fashioning both the city of Boston—built in large measure from landfill—and the expectations of its inhabitants.13Another scholarly trend is the way that environmental historians have been pulled into newly invigorated discussions of the developing powers and responsibilities of governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following William Novak, many scholars outside of environmental history are describing a complex evolution of conflicting and competing forces within a multilayered and occasionally contradictory American state. These historians question the traditionally derided weakness of federal government in the nineteenth century. Many explore the foundations of private property, the police power to infringe upon that property, and alternative locations of power within municipal, civic, or voluntary institutions.14 This has obvious implications for those who are writing histories of human impacts on the environment. A 2012 article by Jessica Wang that is ostensibly about dogs and animal control in New York City, for instance, actually ends up being an example of “one of innumerable areas of everyday public policy in which voluntary associations continue to wield police power, perform public functions, and exercise state authority alongside formally constituted governmental agencies.”15 These words could clearly apply to hundreds of different conservation agencies, sportsmen's groups, county foresters, and state departments of natural resources.Within the Mid-Atlantic, choosing to write about a region, watershed, or metropolitan area can the and impact of government the for example, is a that an wide array of to on the complex at the of the The of this work both with and from their concluding that “the Chesapeake story is a for those who would to on the of a very or understanding of the way the a long of on fish, and William the concluding essay for the that are as many of the past of the Chesapeake as there are and scholars to The here the of any government or decisions based on an understanding of the physical on a the other recent works have attempted the same of analysis on the state and metropolitan with an on government New Jersey's on both the natural and the of the region that have in an that New important for understanding the twentieth-century and their natural Similarly, on and its and the the use of power to or that who from that produced environmental and who the health and on race, class, and work is also to scholars outside of the field of environmental and ends with a essay from that all historians of environmental activism on the of these David The of New York attention in the category of regional environmental While it does not extensive new research, it is a argument for the of regional environmental to a general or it is possible that many could be examined in this way, in history While still that the of human using as a category of argues that boundaries often are the physical boundaries of even more that policies have in environmental and in New York the state as a him to examine the specific and long-term physical impacts of state policy on forests, air and urban or preservation of forests, and to be a popular topic for historians. historians have focused on the forests of the Mid-Atlantic region in the last including on and in on and on New York's David on the on activism and the and on the in Many of these are concerned with and preservation and the powers and of organizations and with those project is as argues for the of and New policies in the early twentieth the state of Appalachian forests today. is of the of conservation in New York, an approach that to the that early also how the human and natural of a were to be these there is also significant work on the the of New York and New and in the of process by which private or public into has been particular in the of state and This is a subject that explores in his on the Allegheny while at a popular also G. on the political battles groups, private property and state and federal Similarly, Adam Sowards's The Environmental Justice an of the over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal into a national This in the a prominent for Mid-Atlantic as it the to nature in places were The over often larger policy to who declares that examining the complex history of the Appalachian Trail of the complex conservation and social of water that the Mid-Atlantic seem to have significant attention from scholars, particularly in attempts to explain policy This of takes this approach in Long Similarly, The and examine the histories of Maryland's and battles environmental groups, the industry, and are also of particular with and David works on the River as to a more obvious example of John New York's River as one of its case studies of the of actually an essay that explores both the of urban water policy and a regional understanding of urban environmental David has built on a long of historical writing about New York water the development of the water system from the nineteenth through the the of a regional approach to urban echoing William and Matthew and have all about the and the and environmental legacies of that as with its natural the extensive systems its and past and the impact of political of to historians of the are the in which in the nineteenth had and often on a of and As writes in an of system of water a new built that the emergence of a in the of both and Peter have situated and the of the Canal with the formation of the modern American state. As puts the history of the demonstrates a the of the United as a power and as a in the and focus on the of the private the of federal and state action in the This is as an history by seemed to a in a multiplicity of to the over as to significant urban the Mid-Atlantic would seem to many more for ranging from metropolitan to the of in the and of the Hudson River air pollution is also of to historians studying a region that was once the center of and is still to its urban These historians often out that the impact of air pollution is rarely about the it also the larger and of As David writes about smoke the and could which of urban such as and and which such as the of private property and private and have all on air pollution topics in New York City, Pittsburgh, and the pollution and its control is clearly a significant topic of research, but New York and there is work on the topic, with the possible of Mile of from water to air to the built has significant attention in the The Mid-Atlantic was the of the first and the area is with for historical analysis of the and impact of The topic is immensely at the municipal, and all to the and of and historical subject of the twentieth century. Adam emphasized the of in his work The in the on the New locates a powerful and a activism that from major As he “the was a in a in public in a of private and public many other scholars have examining of in New The of is one of works in that has a book on Pittsburgh's while works on and to topic a decade has an of on that explores the racial and of as have environmental so to or control The impacts of those and policies on and are clearly an area of The Mid-Atlantic has produced significant on extractive industry, with and and being offers into the impact on and culture of an that nineteenth-century that as well as the their very of the its and how those be managed and has examined the of state in producing different in the of nineteenth-century and arguing that the evolution of impacts of major extractive industry in these histories of and make it surprising that has so little for this and political By and in have been the of and many to the and local response in historical For example, while with a land ethic that with also that the region was a for opposition and policy was in the Appalachian that the first state and a for federal of the and had such major is as a to historians because it takes place essay with a to Frederick Jackson Turner and his that the Mid-Atlantic was the one “typically American” region in the historians are not of but there is an of his of politics and place in the works As a regional Turner many of the of historians interested in environmental politics and his thesis on the of upon defining regions by physical and with the of industry, and resource by that and these topics once recent studies of the Mid-Atlantic noted this significant for further work in the region The environmental twentieth-century with topics to the activism of the environmental movement has left explored by scholars in environmental or political but by environmental historians. As such, there are important gaps in the to histories of environmental organizations and The the Mile and the the Shoreham nuclear power in more histories through archival and about Marcellus and the of for histories of land in New York and work on the history of antinuclear activism is as new have been in 2012 for the first nuclear plants to be built in the United since Mile has other western nations to from nuclear of specific also seem at least by environmental has a story as complex as the Hudson has as many stories to tell as the the metropolitan of the Eastern a regional and the subject of could be as as The of from power plants the forests, and of the region for a and to international attention in the and but the subject has not yet been explored through archival sources. For that in the environmental impact of the War could be the in Maryland, of in and even more in the works on the Mid-Atlantic, and environmental policy in there also to be a lack of focus on policy institutions and the of the individual city or and the large of federal David The of New York is an and the way to a new for environmental This of work to a larger while for of different environmental or and within is still much work to be at this of as by recent work the of and federal policy work would with the of many both from within and environmental who are in of the of the American these the larger matter of the of the environmental movements of the twentieth The here is over the of modern environmentalism had any significant impact on the course of history. In the published The of Environmental several historians question the of an environmental For example, Frank Uekoetter upon the of to on policy and “the environmental may one more a In the same declares while “the as an important … never was influential to as a for an in the history of modern the of the of this Adam argues that the environmental and in was a of of and a to make a a of activists, and This is a and any of the political or movements to human action in relation to their change the course of human or are the forces of and of property very the question environmentalism Mid-Atlantic might be an place to any to these and it is that environmental historians be in the region for some to Environmental never to refocus our in a history that explores the foundations and of that and while Marcellus shale is our the next is the with trends in the nature of archival and a in environmental this means that the history of recent environmental politics and the physical impacts of policy is into a more of published research in environmental and most continue to in the