The Old World and the Intellectual History of American Slavery

Civil War and Reconstruction Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Subscribers to H-PCAACA, the listserv of the Popular Culture Association and the Culture Association, will remember that one of the founders of the organizations, Ray B. Browne, posted a call for book proposals concerning American Popular Culture Through History sometime in 2000. overall plan was to publish through the Greenwood Press a series of books covering the vital relationship between popular culture and the experience. Evidently, Dr. Browne received a number of proposals, because the Greenwood Press Web site lists a number of current books from the series on New Nation (Anita Vickers); Westward Expansion (Sara E. Quay); 190Os (Bob Batchlor); 1910s (David Blank); 1930s (William H. Young); and 1960s (Edward J. Reilly). Future volumes include 1940s (Robert Sickels) and 1990s (Marc Oxoby). Each volume concludes with Suggested Readings. When completed, this series of books will make an excellent survey for any public or research library, emphasizing the everyday life and culture of Americans from colonial times to the present. Civil War and Reconstruction is a representative work that follows a template of topics explored in all of the volumes. opening section contains a Timeline of Popular Culture Events in which such phenomena as tent shows and petroleum production take their place along with speeches by Abraham Lincoln and such developments as exercise theories and the abolition of slavery. This approach yields fascinating counterpoints and gives a special spin to the familiar history of a painful era in history. simultaneity of political, social, and technical developments can reveal unexpected insights; when I produced my Will Rogers: A Biobibliography, I constructed such lists and learned quite a bit in the process. body of the volume is divided into general categories that I assume are explored by all books in the series; advertising, architecture, clothing and fashion, food, leisure activities, literature, music, the performing arts, travel, and the visual arts all receive a chapter. This division should prove useful for researchers with a narrow interst, an interest that could be pursued through the volumes. There is an index for more detailed searches. organization of the book reads like a poster for the national meeting of the PCA/ACA, with each chapter representing a major area of research appropriate to the period between 1852 and 1877. Anyone who has been to a national meeting of the these professional groups will know the eclectic flavor of such an intellectual menu. And anyone familiar with Russel Nye's Unembarrassed Muse will understand the difficulties of such a survey; there is tension throughout the book between the depth of the topics and the need to cover much territory. strengths of the book are obvious. Most students of culture have familiarity with the canonic narratives of the experience, and many know something about the popular culture highlights. Because of our training in graduate programs of a traditional bent-and this is not a criticism, just an observation-the interrelationships among elements of high and low culture are either unstudied or not perceived. virtue of this book, and I assume of the series as a whole, is that it ties many obscure elements of popular culture to each other in a synergy that will inspire a better understanding of ordinary people and their lives. There is a whole territory of life in America that eludes the grasp of many scholars. What kind of technology was coming to market, and how was it advertised? What did the advertising say about audience expectations and the level of ethics in the marketplace during what Mark Twain called The Gilded Age? Domestic architecture and public buildings were being constructed in new styles; how did the innovations reflect the contemporary sensibility? …

Reviewed by: Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young Aaron Sachs (bio) Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 414. Cloth, $34.95.) When I think of the overlap between Civil War history and environmental history, I conjure destructive thoughts. I think of industrialism and Native dispossession and barren fields. I think of the excellent chapter "Battle Logs: Ruined Forests" in Megan Kate Nelson's book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012). Yes: I think of stumps. Happily, Phoebe S. K. Young offers an alternative framework for us to consider. In her new study, Camping Grounds, Young uses a broad-minded version of cultural history to offer a sweeping view of the politics of camping out in the United States over the last 160 years. Her history's origin story constitutes a fresh take on the significance of soldiers' experience in the Civil War. While the men in blue and gray may have ravaged any number of forests, they also imprinted on comradely campfires under the forest canopy. The nature of encampment in American history turns out to be thought-provokingly complex. Readers of this journal will be most drawn to the compelling first chapter of Camping Grounds, which covers both wartime camp experiences [End Page 419] and the ways in which the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) used nostalgic campouts to build membership and stake its claims in the postbellum period. During the war, encampment usually signaled a break from battle that offered welcome comforts, as well as its fair share of challenges (tedium, pests, social hierarchies, weather). Camping was mostly just another military obligation: it was, in Young's useful terminology, functional, just as it had been in the antebellum period, when migrants camped out on the Overland Trail, gold miners camped out in California, and potential converts attended spirit-moving camp meetings. What the GAR accomplished in the 1880s was the transformation of camping into something that could be both recreational and political. The GAR had started lobbying the federal government on behalf of veterans almost immediately after the war. But of course most Americans—and even most veterans—were initially inclined to forget the recent unpleasantness at all costs, and GAR membership was so low in the mid-1870s that the organization almost folded. It was only when GAR leaders invested more seriously in reunion encampments that veterans started joining in significant numbers, such that during the 1880s camping started to define the GAR's identity, and the GAR began to determine the new meanings of camping. Far more than the occasional hunting camp established in, say, the Adirondacks, the GAR's massive campouts in highly visible public spaces shaped national perceptions of the value of sleeping under the stars. In the 1880s, camping was less about individualism and wilderness and more about solidarity and citizenship. Civil War veterans camped out to lobby for pensions and health care. They were successful, because their encampments embodied patriotic brotherhood, manly virtue, and even modern progress, thanks to their commercial sponsorships, tourism packages, and, in some cases, electric lighting. Camping appeared an all-American pursuit. Like the other chapters in this book, the opening one carefully balances close readings of a few key primary sources with broader analysis and thorough contextualization. It homes in on a Union veteran named John Mead Gould, who not only kept a diary of his military experiences of outdoor camaraderie, but also wrote a guidebook called How to Camp Out: Hints for Camping and Walking (1877). Overall, I found that the case studies in Camping Grounds, like most academic case studies, got a little too detailed and repetitive, but Gould is an engagingly cranky New Englander who proves an admirable anchor for Young's opening argument. Gould's writings suggest quite powerfully that when we think about environmental history and Civil War history, we ought to remember, in Young's cogent phrase, "the shared etymological roots of 'camp' and 'campaign'" (20). [End Page 420] Of course, there...

It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolidation of the power of the liberal US nation-state. The federal government emerged from the Civil War a powerful, muscular entity capable of crushing challenges to its authority across the nation. It quelled the slaveholder rebellion and installed free labor in the South, subdued and incorporated the Native peoples of the West, and crushed worker dissent in the North and Midwest.In the past ten years, however, Civil War and Reconstruction historians have begun to dismantle this image of the postwar American state. Their focus has instead been on the continuities between the pre–and post–Civil War United States: the uneven and ineffectual power of the federal government, the persistence of unfreedom after the end of slavery, and the hierarchy and violence that still structured social relations in a republic (allegedly) dedicated to liberal individualism and equality before the law. The picture of post–Civil War America that emerges from this new scholarship is much more chaotic and ambiguous, and more eerily similar to the antebellum era, than we have often imagined.3Gutman's delineation of workers’ struggles and working-class formation between 1843 and 1893 anticipated this new interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. More importantly, his arguments suggest that a renewed focus on labor history—which many Civil War and Reconstruction historians abandoned after the 1980s—can help us trace the threads of continuity that bound together the antebellum and postbellum eras.First, Gutman's focus on workers’ persistent resistance to the ethos of liberal capitalism, which he highlights in both “Work, Culture, and Industrializing Society” and “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” undermines any notion that the US victory in the Civil War was also a victory for the Republican Party's vision of liberal citizenship. Scholars often blame the failure of Republican policy on recalcitrant former slaveholders in the South who refused to adopt free wage labor or acknowledge Black Americans’ equality before the law. Gutman reveals, however, that the nation's working people were themselves often rightly skeptical of a Republican liberalism that emphasized individual acquisitiveness over communal good, as well as Republicans’ vision of citizenship rooted firmly in the defense of private property over the right to economic justice. Workers’ resistance clearly shows that a liberal consensus did not triumph after the Civil War. Instead, the post–Civil War era saw the continuation of a battle over the legitimacy of liberal capitalism's cornerstone concepts that started long before the war and lasted long afterward.Second, and relatedly, the essays in the volume speak to Civil War and Reconstruction historians’ current emphasis on the inefficacy and unevenness of state power in the postwar era. Gutman's two lesser-known early articles at the end of Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America—“Trouble on the Railroads in 1873–1874” (1961) and “Two Lockouts in Pennsylvania, 1873–1874” (1959)—are especially worth revisiting because they show how the strength of workers’ community ties derailed (sometimes literally) industrialists’ efforts to harness the power of the state.4 Gutman's intensely local community studies reveal that the image of a muscular postwar state intervening on the behalf of capital to squash workers’ protests does not always resemble reality. In the smaller railroad towns of the Midwest and the coal towns of Pennsylvania during the early years of the Long Depression, the relationships that working-class people forged with middling shopkeepers, white-collar professionals, and small manufacturers often diluted the coercive power of the state. Middle-class leaders in local and municipal governments, who were often bound to their working-class neighbors through long-standing ties of friendship, common working-class origins, and a shared hatred of corporate autocracy, might side with protesting workers against large industrial operators or refuse to deploy state power against them. Together, working- and middle-class residents could frustrate capitalists who wanted to bring down the heavy hand of the postwar state on workers in the name of defending private property. Gutman's community studies remind scholars always to be attentive to the contested and highly contingent nature of state power over and in workers’ lives in the postwar era.Finally, Gutman's emphasis on the incomplete imposition of capitalist labor discipline on working people across the entire nineteenth century can transform our understanding of emancipation. Civil War and Reconstruction historians, including myself, frequently portray the abolition of slavery as a massive social, economic, and cultural transformation. The federal state tried to remake the lives of formerly enslaved people (and the lives of enslavers) by installing free wage labor, along with all of its coercive features—contracts, at-will employment, and time discipline—in the South. This interpretation of the postwar period rests on the assumption that free wage labor and all its disciplinary trappings were already fully developed in the North and that enslaved people had to be acclimated to ways of life that northern wageworkers had already been living under for at least one generation. Gutman's insight that capitalist labor discipline was still very much contested and in flux across all of the nineteenth century forces scholars to reevaluate both the significance of emancipation and the experience of the formerly enslaved. In particular, former slaves’ postemancipation labor struggles seem less disconnected, and less radically divergent, from those of northern wageworkers when we discover that both groups were actively shaping an incomplete, fluid, and contested capitalist vision of labor discipline still very much in the making. In this context, then, emancipation could be read as a continuation of pre–Civil War struggles over worker autonomy rather than as a complete break with antebellum labor history.On the whole, my rereading of Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America in my academic middle age convinced me that I needed to revisit classic works in labor history more often. My work does not fundamentally focus on working-class formation, identity, or culture. Still, Gutman's distinctive periodization of the nineteenth century presents a different way of looking at the questions that concern me the most, including the meaning of freedom in the age of emancipation, the character of the post–Civil War state, and the policies and practices of labor coercion. Returning to labor history generally, and to Gutman specifically, may well be one of the most fruitful paths for revising our understanding of the world that the Civil War made.

Reviewed by: America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem by Owen Davies Richard B. Latner (bio) America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem. By Owen Davies. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 304. $34.95 cloth) It is widely believed that the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692 was the final chapter in the history of American witchcraft. After Salem, witch-hunting, trials, and executions evaporated, replaced by Enlightenment assumptions of toleration and progress. But how true is this story? In some ways, it is certainly accurate. Salem was the last witch-hunt in American history, and trials for witchcraft virtually disappeared in the early eighteenth century. After 1692, witchcraft trials lost the endorsement of the state. Once officials refused to sanction accusations in Salem and elsewhere, witch trials ceased. But the story of witchcraft in America is more complicated. Social historians have properly located witchcraft beliefs not only in theology but also as part of a broader, popular world of magic and the occult. Many ordinary people thought they were victims, not of the Devil’s disciples, but of harmful magic practiced by malicious neighbors. Belief in witchcraft and the occult, whether inspired by religious or magical notions, outlived 1692. This alternative understanding of witchcraft forms the basis of Owen Davies’s examination of witchcraft after Salem, America Bewitched. Davies contends that after 1692, “witches remained a real and terrible threat” in America, particularly to African Americans and Native Americans, immigrants, and those living in more remote areas (p. 3). Davies claims that witches “were integral to the cultural fabric of America” and that in the more than three hundred years since 1692, “thousands of Americans, Native, European, and African, were persecuted, abused, and murdered as witches” (pp. 21, 226). To make his case for the persistence of witchcraft, Davies researched legal records, newspapers, folklore sources, and census and other archival material to document witchcraft incidents across the continent. The resulting evidence is laid out topically rather than chronologically. Among the subjects surveyed are the persistence of [End Page 285] magical beliefs, such as healing and amulets; the complex and shifting legal status of witchcraft as it disappeared as a punishable crime, but continued as an aspect of fraud, slander, and defamation; the different types of witches, such as stereotypical outsiders and participants in personal conflicts; witchcraft practices, such as the use of image magic; rituals used to identify and deal with witches, whether by counter magic or by violence; and the efforts by doctors, educators, clergy, and police to suppress witchcraft beliefs. The book closes with a discussion of recent changes in the standing of witchcraft in American life. Since the 1960s, assaults against suspected witches have largely disappeared, and with the emergence of Wicca and of popular entertainment depictions of witches as nonthreatening, attractive, and comical (the TV series Bewitched, for example), the concept of witchcraft has become considerably more positive than its traditional historical meaning. Readers willing to follow Davies’s sometimes disjointed and digressive discussions will be rewarded with an array of information relating to American witchcraft and occult practices, be it hex signs or mesmerism. His book serves as a useful reminder of the persistence of occult thinking in the patch-quilt of ethnic, racial, and immigrant diversity that constitutes American society. Yet, despite its hyperbole about the prevalence of witchcraft, the book neglects to sufficiently distinguish between witchcraft belief and actual practice, or between witchcraft incidents and those just involving magic and the occult. Furthermore, these post-Salem incidents were relegated primarily to groups outside the cultural mainstream and were not countenanced by authorities. This is not so much witchcraft as witchcraft “lite.” [End Page 286] Richard B. Latner Richard B. Latner is professor emeritus of history at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has published essays about Salem and is the author of the website “The Salem Witchcraft Site.” Copyright © 2014 Kentucky Historical Society

Journal of American & Comparative CulturesVolume 23, Issue 2 p. 91-108 Book Reviews First published: 22 March 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.2000.2302_91.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Forgotten Americans: Footnote Figures Who Changed American History. Willard Sterne Randall and Nancy Nahra. Creating Online Media. Carole Rich. Predecessors: Intellectual Lineage's in American Studies. Rob Kroes. A Portrait of the American Jewish Community. Norman Linzer, David J. Schnall, and Jerome A. Chanes, eds. Not Like Us. Richard Pells. American Mobbing 1828-1861 toward Civil War. David Grimsted. Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. John Seelye. Wagner Nights: An American History. Joseph Howowitz. Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History. B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley. A History of Popular Women's Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995. Mary Ellen Zuckerman. Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power of Television. Christopher Owen Lynch. Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Everett F. Bleiler, with the assistance of Richard J. Bleiler. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. S. Craig Watkins. Women's Sport and Spectacle: Gendered Television Coverage and the Olympic Games. Gina Daddario. The Road Ahead. Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. The Illustrated Price Guide to Scandal Magazines, 1952-1966. Alan Betrock, ed. The Tabloid Poster Book, 1959-1969. Alan Betrock, ed. Cult Exploitation Movie Posters, 1940-1973. Alan Betrock, ed. Unseen America: The Greatest Cult Exploitation Magazines, 1950-1966. Alan Betrock Laughs, Luck … and Lucy: How I Came to Create the Most Popular Sitcom of All Time. Jess Oppenheimer, with Gregg Oppenheimer. Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks. Larry E. Sullivan and Lydia Cushman Schurman, eds. Creating Born Criminals. Nicole Hahn Rafter. Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds. Whores and Other Feminisrs. Jill Nagle, ed. A Whole Other Ball Game: Women? Literature on Women's Sport. Joli Sandoz, ed. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Mule Trader: Ray Lum's Tales of Horses, Mules and Men. William R. Ferris. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen. Citing Literature Volume23, Issue2Summer 2000Pages 91-108 RelatedInformation

The Early Indicators ProjectUsing Massive Data and Statistical Analysis to Understand the Life Cycle of Civil War Soldiers Earl J. Hess (bio) In the 1980s, Robert W. Fogel initiated what became the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death, a database consisting of information drawn from the military service records, medical records, and pension records of nearly 40,000 Union soldiers. In addition, his collaborators linked these veterans to census data to reveal more information about them. The result was the creation of the largest database on Civil War soldiers we are ever likely to see. It provides unparalleled access to the life cycle of Union veterans well into the twentieth century. At least 158 publications have been produced from this database by scholars working in American economic and social history, by economists, medical professionals, and legal scholars, but most Civil War historians seem unaware of this opportunity. The purpose of this essay is to describe how the Early Indicators project has already rejuvenated the study of Civil War soldiers and to encourage Civil War historians to become part of the process. In 1989, Civil War historians were impressed with the appearance of an article published in the Journal of American History. In it, social historian Maris [End Page 377] A. Vinovskis argued that his colleagues had lost the Civil War in their view of American society. He knew that Civil War historians had begun to pay attention to the social history of the conflict but they concentrated only on the war years and used qualitative methods to analyze personal accounts and official documents. What Vinovskis wanted to do in his article was to awaken his fellow social historians to the fact that the Civil War produced two huge armies, that the opposing governments compiled a massive base of data about those soldiers, and that this data could be extremely useful in understanding the life stories of 3 million Americans extending decades beyond Appomattox. The key here was that veterans of both armies received pensions. Combining that information with their military service records and census data, scholars could study their life stories well into the twentieth century. By ignoring the Civil War, social historians were missing a marvelous way to get at "the lives of ordinary Americans." "The failure of social historians to study the impact of the Civil War on the lives of those who participated in it is not an isolated phenomenon," Vinovskis concluded. "In general, we have ignored the effect of wars on the life courses of citizens."1 Coming only one year after the appearance of new qualitative studies of the Civil War soldier by Earl J. Hess, Randall C. Jimerson, and Reid Mitchell, Vinovskis's article was timely. At the same time, he tended to exaggerate when arguing that the social history of Civil War soldiers was underappreciated; Civil War historians were already well on the path toward studying that topic before his article appeared. But the Civil War historians who were inspired by Vinovskis to study the social history of soldiers completely failed to do what he said ought to be done. Vinovskis did not issue a call for Civil War historians to conduct qualitative research into the war experiences of Civil War soldiers; he issued a call to his fellow social historians to use massive data as their source, employing sophisticated computer programs such as LISREL and SPSS to statistically analyze that data. He also issued a call for understanding the entire lives of Civil War soldiers, not just their wartime experiences. While many Civil War historians proclaimed that Vinovskis was right and cited him as a justification for what they did, they conducted their work along paths divergent from what he proposed. This is one of the most interesting cases of cognitive dissonance one can find in the Civil War literature.2 [End Page 378] Ironically, Civil War historians tend to be resistant to computer-assisted statistical analysis; Joseph T. Glatthaar is one of the few to use it well to examine a sizeable database of information about Civil War soldiers (and his gaze is fixed on the war years rather than the life cycle of the soldiers). Many...

The Americas

Jim livingston’s essay on “Why the Left Needs America” in this issue of Tikkun is a classic expression of American liberalism, which holds that America has no need for a Left since it is already radical, free, democratic, participatory, self-correcting, and so forth. The Left needs America but America does not need a Left, he argues. Madison, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers are terrific; Marx is irrelevant.Having written Why America Needs a Left — the book that provoked Livingston’s response — to dispel these all-too- familiar bromides, I am happy to have the opportunity to rebut his claims and explain why liberalism, as we see it today, without a Left is spineless, and why the country desperately needs an ongoing, self-aware Left.My conception of the Left is a stringent one. It has nothing to do with alliances between workers and intellectuals, Leninist cadres, political party organizations, and Livingston’s other flights of fancy. I called my book “Why America needs a Left,” not “Why America needs the Left,” because I do not believe America has a self-aware Left at present, and because I do not pretend to prescribe what form any future Left should take. Whatever its form, moreover, my view is that a Left represents but one element of a solution to the nation’s structural problems, not the solution as such. After all, the history of the American Left is episodic and discontinuous, flaring up only during thirty or forty years of the country’s existence, and it was only in 1926 that the term “Left” in its political sense even appeared in a book title. Nonetheless, the rebirth of a Left will prove indispensable to any reversal of America’s palpable present-day unwinding.To understand my core argument, think of American history as a suspension bridge that rests on three pillars. These pillars are not stable concrete pylons, however, but rather the three great long-term crises of American history — those concerning slavery, industry, and finance. Just as there have been three crises, so there have been three Lefts: the abolitionists, the Popular Front (an anti-fascist alliance of socialists, liberal Democrats, and union activists in the 1930s), and the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s. Each of the first two crises ended with a structural reform: the abolition of slavery and the creation of the welfare state. In those cases, the role of the Left was to bend structural reform toward the goal of equality. The third case is somewhat more complicated, as we shall see. But taken together, the three Lefts constitute a tradition, one that we need to revive today.The broad differences between Livingston’s view and mine stem from the fact that he is primarily concerned with extending liberal values to those who are excluded from them, whereas my analysis derives from Marx, who argued that progress is blocked by the same internal capitalist dynamic that created progress in the first place. Livingston takes a progressive, linear view of U.S. history, whereas my view stresses discontinuity, conflict, and regression. According to Livingston, the revolutions that launched the modern world were about self-government and the consent of the governed. Capitalism, he informs us, was not even an issue. I argue, by contrast, that there were two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England — one that succeeded and one that failed. The revolution that succeeded removed all impediments previously suffered by men of property. The attempted revolution that failed to win its goals had promised communal property, a wide democracy, and the disestablishment of the state church. The conflict between democratic, lower-class radicals and people of property was intrinsic to the democratic revolutions, even though this did not take the form of capitalists vs. workers until the nineteenth century.A proper conception of capitalism is critical to the idea of a Left. Capitalism cannot be reduced to the market because it also comprises the exploitative social system that organizes social labor into two classes, one of which appropriates a surplus from the labor of the other. The exploitative, deceptive, and dual character of capitalism — market and class — installs ambivalence at the center of liberalism. On the one hand, liberalism’s formal or procedural understanding of equality serves to disguise exploitation. On the other, it can serve as the departure point for struggles to build a deeper, more substantive equality. The latter requires a Left. To be sure, there are thinkers, such as Ronald Dworkin or Michael Walzer, who hold that a consistent, vigorous liberalism can itself resolve this ambivalence. But they make their arguments on hypothetical grounds whereas my argument is historical and can only be refuted by a historical counter-argument.Just as capitalism has a dual structure, one dimension of which is formal equality, the other exploitation, so the history of the United States has a dual structure. On the one side, the Revolution established national independence and enshrined the ideal of freedom, as Livingston well states. But with the abolition of slavery, America had a second birth. One national story begins in 1776 and stands for national independence and individual freedom, including the freedom of the slaveholder to own slaves, or the freedom of the property owner to exploit the property-less. The second national story begins with Emancipation and stands for equality, without which freedom devolves into tyranny. Like a double helix, the two strands — liberal and leftist — became entwined with one another in our history. Although neither stands alone, it is only during periods of crisis that their interdependence becomes fully clear. A sequence of three long-term or secular crises provides the best lens for grasping the internal conflicts that drive American history.The first American crisis was over slavery. Indeed, the whole Madisonian apparatus of factions, horse trading, and pluralism was created to keep the slavery issue out of politics because it was seen as “too divisive.” It took the first American Left to disrupt the pluralist, “democratic” framework, and to put not just slavery but also racial discrimination against “free Negroes” on the political agenda. In the course of doing so, the abolitionists invented much of the repertoire of the subsequent American Left, including nonviolent resistance, democratic agitation, cultural and sexual experimentation, and unremitting attempts to shame the liberal, hypocritical majority. Most importantly, and this is the main reason I call them the first American Left, they went beyond the abolition of slavery to racial equality. They cultivated Black leadership, actively incorporated escaped slaves and ex-slaves into their organizations, and developed interracial friendships, sexual relations, and marriages. No comparable sensitivity to the problems of equality between individuals across racial lines can be found anywhere in the Founding Fathers’ many weighty tomes. The idea of racial equality is a unique contribution of the first American Left.The Civil War was a crisis that arose from a tectonic shift in the organization of capitalism from slave labor to free labor, and could be resolved only by a structural transformation: the abolition of slavery. But abolition had a built-in ambivalence: Pursued in one way, it could justify exploitation in its market capitalist form, while in another it could serve as a spur toward greater equality. America needed a Left to resolve the ambivalence of abolition in favor of equality. But the Civil War was also a crisis in U.S. identity. Abolitionists made it impossible for Americans to respond to slavery with equanimity and indifference, inspiring them to center their national story on the pursuit of equality, not just independence.An analogous dynamic played out in America’s second crisis, during the Great Depression and World War II. This was the crisis of industrial capitalism, manifested in a series of depressions that had begun in the 1850s and were recognized as systemic in the 1890s, when such terms as “overproduction” and “glut” entered the language. Not economic problems per se, these depressions were taken as social and political crises that could only be resolved through a structural transformation, in this case the building of a modern state. The Great Depression of the 1930s, then, was the turning point in a long-term crisis just as the Civil War had been a turning point in a long-term crisis.Just as slavery would have ended without the abolitionists, so a modern, administrative state would have been created without the socialists. Such a state was necessary to reform capitalism, but capitalism could have been reformed without advancing social equality. What the socialists and Communists added was a broad-based series of social democratic movements, including those among industrial workers, African Americans, immigrants, and women, which infused the New Deal with egalitarian goals. Thus, if the first American Left helped insure that the abolition of slavery would be imprinted with the ideal of racial equality, the second stamped the ideal of social equality on the welfare state.It was only during the thirties that the idea of the Left as a permanent, ongoing radical presence was invented. To be sure, the idea had existed in Europe, which had a parliamentary system, and placed “ideological” conflict — left, center, right — at the core of its politics. But American radicals reformulated the European idea to fit the two-party system. They connected union movements, movements of the unemployed, and civil rights struggles of their day with abolitionists, early feminists, and Debsian socialists of the past in an effort to create a tradition. Inseparable from the then-new idea of a Left was the idea of crisis. The counterpart to the idea of crisis was the idea of an organized working class, i.e., an agent capable of transforming capitalism. While twentieth-century American reformers inspired by John Dewey stood for democratic participation and dialogue, they had not before attempted to organize a counterweight to capitalist power. This is why C. Wright Mills, asked to define his politics on the eve of the New Left, called them “to the left of Dewey.”In addition, the New Deal launched a social and cultural revolution, which spelled the end of an older, status-bound, WASP-dominated America. The Popular Front — the anti-fascist alliance of liberals and the Left — embodied everything that “offended the pieties . . . of Middle America,” according to Steve Fraser: gaudy cosmopolitanism, “Jewishness,” flirtations with radicalism, elevation of the new immigrant, intellectual arrogance, and racial egalitarianism. The seeds of the sixties were sown there.The success of the New Deal in creating a modern, democratic state and in unblocking capitalist productive forces established the context in which the New Left emerged. Of the three Lefts I have discussed, the New Left was at once the most short-lived and the most enduring. If it seemed like an explosive burst of rebellious energy that burnt out by the early seventies, it also set the contours for what remains the Left of our day. Unlike the first two Lefts, which flourished at the point when an ongoing crisis was being resolved, the New Left emerged during the opening stages of a crisis whose resolution has not yet been achieved. Let us look at the New Left from that perspective.The starting point for understanding the structural crisis confronted by the New Left lies in the huge wave of democratization released by the New Deal and World War II. This wave unfolded both at the level of the economy and at the level of society and culture. At the level of the economy, the New Deal’s elevation of the working class made the shift from industrial manufacturing to a high-tech, knowledge-based consumer society possible, which in turn involved a change in the dynamics of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, based on the accumulation of labor-time, began to give way to post-industrial capitalism, based on the release of labor-time. Whereas accumulation encouraged collective action and state coordination, post-industrialism was centrifugal, dispersive, and even “post-economic,” as suggested by the appearance of such terms as “affluence” and “automation” in the 1950s and “the triple revolution” in the following decade.The shift to high-tech, market-based consumerism did not occur in a linear fashion. The depth of the blockages that had to be overcome is suggested by the explosive burst of McCarthyism, which followed the war. McCarthyism’s intense, all-consuming anti-communism was supported not only by reactionary upholders of middle-class, small-town values, but also by globally oriented capitalists. The Cold War liberals extolled by Livingston created the liberal paradigm of the late twentieth century — the politics of fear and the politics of growth — as a response to McCarthyism.The politics of fear reflected the danger of atomic weapons and held that foreign policy was too important to be left to democratic discussion, which could easily be captured by mass hysteria. Drawing on such precedents as the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, liberals endorsed surveillance, the security state, militarization, and the fetish of secrecy. Madisonian pluralists all, they turned their backs not just on Communism but also on civil liberties and individual freedoms. Throughout this period, there was no Dreyfus case in America, no widespread protest against persecution.The politics of growth complemented the politics of fear. The core idea was that economic growth, as measured by GDP, would allow the country to bypass the divisiveness and conflict that had accompanied New Deal reforms, such as unionization. Economics, so the theory went, was “trans-political.” Rejecting the very term “capitalism,” pluralists argued that business was simply one interest group among many. Works such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center (1949) defined a new politics cleansed of “ideology” and “class struggle,” which were “too divisive.” Defining liberalism as a practical program requiring compromise and technocratic skills, they condemned a politics that served as “an outlet for private grievances and frustrations,” which is how Schlesinger characterized the Left.The Cold War era strengthened U.S. civil rights efforts, as the Russians publicized lynching, Jim Crow statutes, and anti-Semitic discriminations. The popularity of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) (1966) demonstrated the new political power of women. Thus, liberals were poised to launch an overall set of structural reforms that would bring America into the postwar world: an activist foreign policy including immigration reform, a knowledge economy, the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the family wage.In the 1960s, accordingly, the United States was poised on the cusp of a profound structural transformation. Aimed at freeing the country from backward forms of authority, old-boy networks, short-sighted businessmen, and tradition-bound opponents of change, this transformation was analogous to the previous two moments of structural transformation: the Civil War and the New Deal. As in the preceding moments, however, the transformation was ambiguous in its implications. Would it lead to meritocracy or to equality, to a two-tier society or to social justice, to antinomian consumerism or egalitarian self-organization? The New Left arose to answer this question.The New Left of the sixties — known at the time as “the movement” — is one of the great success stories of American history, although this is little understood today. Its success lay in challenging long-established codes of protest, which had long diverted radical voices into harmless and counter productive channels. Thus, the radical or left wing of the Civil Rights Movement (SNCC) confronted the vilest forms of racial segregation on an existential basis. The radical or left wing of the antiwar movement (originally SDS) forced the American people to confront their odious war, and the imperialist presuppositions that fostered it. The radical or left wing of the liberal women’s movement (“women’s liberation”) forced both men and women to confront the ties between heterosexuality and misogyny.If the New Left was struggling to shape the meaning of the great structural reforms of the sixties, such as civil rights for African Americans and for women, and a shift toward a gentler, more humane foreign policy, it was also shaping the meaning of the cultural revolution. One did not need the Left to see that the sixties marked the first full–scale emergence of mass consumer culture. One did need the Left, however, to expose the alliance between Democratic Party liberals and Mississippi segregationists; to grasp the corporate and military control of the universities; to acknowledge the almost incalculable extent to which the government lies to its people, especially concerning war; to grasp the continuity between racism, colonialism, and the war in Vietnam; to see that schools, prisons, and doctors’ offices were sites of power; to develop critical subfields in every academic discipline; to see sexism as a deep structure of human history, not simply a form of discrimination; and to build ties of solidarity with the poorest people on the planet, and with homosexuals, women, and racial minorities. Like its predecessors, then, the New Left sought to bend a major economic and cultural transformation in the direction of equality.The effects of the New Left on American society and culture have been almost incalculable. An entirely new consciousness of race, gender, and sexuality has transformed language, lifestyle, and institutions. Skepticism meets every proposed American intervention abroad. Academic life has been transformed, not only by the entry of minorities and women, but also by the creation of whole new subfields and by the transformation of canonical knowledge. The press owes whatever willingness it has to challenge authority to the New Left. A host of new political issues including abortion, gay marriage, and ecology occupy center stage. A moral revolution in the treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill, patients, and immigrants occurred. The churches, perhaps especially the Catholic Church, developed liberation theologies. The election of a black president in 2008, whatever his politics, testifies to the impact of the Civil Rights Movement. We are only at the beginning of understanding the full of the on and on and of the of that up in the early its many however, the New Left is a today. To answer that we first two of In one sense the Left will because it stands for that cannot be in the In another however, the New Left failed in that it did not build a radical In my neither this the turn that followed the sixties was have argued that if John had not been he would have taken the country out of including those of and also played a In any the goal of shaping the creation of a post-industrial world in an egalitarian direction became even war in was the turning the late sixties, to the war had the American economy, and in the was by the of and In was forced to take the United States the which to the creation of a national and market by U.S. and As in a century capitalists became as to who to in manufacturing were to labor for with the of to more New terms entered our language, including and Although the country between Left and the seventies, by the end of the the idea of a radical presence in American life had been we the American liberal against the of this shift to the its liberals had already on to the of the — the politics of growth as to structural or reform, and the of anti-communism — they were to a of the an of and In however, the into one of the great periods in American history for those with or i.e., claims on including and Such individuals turned to every out of and a of that of and and At the same of both through and other forms of i.e., The was the series of and crises, which began with the and and the American crises of the and which has in the a huge of to the which the market without my analysis to this story is how the of the Left has been to it. After all, the is to the issue of and of — “class — into the the time of the when to he an on for the left, especially among who in Democratic the The Revolution was and the political Left equality was while and meritocracy were in The the of and . . . was a new more the out of people in what were seen as their by the of the free The was the two-tier society we see today. Livingston this as the of the Left, because we much about racism, and gay But this is because we about these problems in to and not years the that America is in a long-term crisis, requiring a new has the United States has three to itself After the of in the free to the new world with U.S. After when are all the United States launched the invasion of In was to for but failed to change a based on fear and the for civil a to a like is the best of its state. The United States by a invasion and to the of its the Left has not its the of in and in The left wing of the Democratic Party the in 2008, not only because of the involved in an African American but even more because of his that the country needed a new not just new the of class and social into American and the the it needed for To be sure, both of these can be seen as in that they created no reforms, or but that is why we need not just inspired moments but also an ongoing Left. If we do not create such a Left, the will as they have both for be Livingston’s idea of a happy but it is not that of a of Livingston, I the American of individual rights and freedom, which has only a in the Unlike Livingston, however, I also the Left that out of that tradition. of the American Left make it on the of world history. The first is its of racial equality, extending into the of The second is its of a form of social that liberal values, including many of the The third is its profound of and If we to build a politics on a liberal of these great moments, we build on

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

Reviewed by: Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. By Judith Giesberg. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 152. $29.95 cloth; $19.99 ebook) While historians have directed substantial attention to the influence of gender in nineteenth-century America, much remains to be uncovered and explained about the history of sexuality during the Civil War era. In this slim volume, Civil War women's and gender history expert Judith Giesberg offers the first scholarly examination of the erotica and pornography circulated among U.S. Army soldiers during the Civil War and connects this story to its antebellum roots and postwar implications. The volume is based on presentations given by Giesberg as part of the Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era in which leading scholars discuss topics that "chart new directions for research in the field and offer scholars and general readers fresh perspectives on the Civil War era" (frontispiece). In four chapters that span a fifty year period bridging the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum periods, [End Page 538] Giesberg shows how the Civil War "bisected" two critically important moments in American sexual culture and "antipornography activism" (p. 100). Chapter one details the antebellum proliferation of erotic publications (made possible by such things as advances in printing and distribution and the prevalence of antislavery literature containing scenes some found titillating) as well as "transatlantic attempts to control … circulation" of erotic materials (p. 9). The sexual culture of the antebellum North contributed to "a wartime explosion of porn," which, as chapter two details, was quite evident in U.S. Army camps (pp. 13–14). Giesberg resourcefully mined the Congressional record, postal laws, court-martial proceedings, regimental order books, letters, newspapers, publishers' circulars, and private as well as public archival collections of erotica to show how yellow-covered novels, cartes de visite, stereographs, and many other items made their way into the camps. Documenting "the sexual culture of the camps" and considering U.S. military policy and congressional action with regard to erotica yields insights into the ways "pornography helped to sustain" midcentury gender roles and gendered spaces (pp. 10, 37, 57). Chapter three focuses on the "profoundly unsettling" Civil War military experiences of Anthony Comstock, the famous crusader for and namesake of postwar anti-obscenity laws (p. 62). Indeed, Comstock "provides the key link between a wartime concern about pornography and the postwar antipornography campaign" (p. 10). Chapter four follows the "postwar surge of interest in … stabilizing a gender order that the war had upset," which came to include legislative measures that sought to regulate marriage and crack down on pornography (p. 84). Though such measures originated in wartime concerns about protecting male soldiers from pornography, they ultimately also suppressed access to birth control and abortion. This volume is a significant contribution to Civil War and nineteenth-century gender and sexuality studies that many will want to consult (though, by nature of its subject matter, it is best suited to mature rather than general audiences). It sheds more light on the sexual lives of Civil War soldiers and the war's critical role in antiobscenity [End Page 539] campaigns and legislation. It speaks to broader questions about the influence of the war on reform movements, gender roles and systems, the expansion of the federal government, and the growth of state intervention in Americans' everyday lives, as well as the ways in which legacies of the war continue to reverberate in the present. In taking sexuality seriously—as a method of analysis and an area meriting study—and in assessing its substantial role in the lives of individual Americans, the Civil War, and the nation, this path-breaking study raises important questions that will assuredly inspire additional work and conversations about the still surprisingly understudied history and significance of sexuality during the Civil War era. Brie Swenson Arnold BRIE SWENSON ARNOLD is associate professor of history at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is the author of articles on gender and sexuality in the print and political culture of the...

Reviewed by: A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs Wilma King A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. By Allyson Hobbs. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. [xii], 382. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-36810-1.) An insightful introduction prepares readers for five deeply researched chapters and an epilogue constituting what Allyson Hobbs describes as a history of racial passing in American life. Two well-developed themes in the text add to its significance. First, Hobbs argues that the perceived need for racial passing changed over time. Before the Civil War, slaves passed to escape bondage, not blackness. Later, the promises of Reconstruction encouraged blacks to believe treatment equal to that enjoyed by whites was imminent. Instead, political disenfranchisement, social intimidation, and economic deprivation followed. Racial passing was a viable option to escape those circumstances. However, during the 1920s the Harlem Renaissance expanded conceptions of racial identity and offered alternatives to passing. The elimination of some racial barriers after World War II rendered racial passing passé. Second, the author calls attention to both the intended and unintended consequences of blacks passing as whites. On one hand, passing offered opportunities for economic gains, but on the other hand, there were social losses associated with leaving families and friends behind. “Once one circumvented the law, fooled coworkers, deceived neighbors, tricked friends, and sometimes even duped children and spouses,” writes Hobbs, “there were enormous costs to pay” (p. 5). The author contends “the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from” (p. 18). Passing, a performative, subversive, and tactical exercise, required constant vigilance to protect a newly crafted identity from exposure. Eventually, those who passed, temporarily or permanently, faced questions about gains and losses. A variety of historical and literary sources, supplemented by materials from popular and mixed media, make A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life come to life as readers are introduced to racially ambiguous women and men, including Ellen Craft, Henry Bibb, John H. Rapier, and descendants of Sally Hemings and Sarah Martha Sanders, all of whom were interested in acquiring equal opportunities, suffrage, and citizenship, more so than in actually becoming white. Hobbs is at her best when melding discussions about historical narratives, autobiographies, and biographies with popular literary productions. The deft treatment of works like Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930) and The Big Sea (1940) underscores the absence of a homogeneous identity among blacks. Toomer, described by others as a “Negro” writer, insisted that he was an American writer. Larsen appeared conflicted racially, while Hughes embraced blackness without equivocation. [End Page 465] A Chosen Exile, a highly recommended read, concludes with a discussion about the Albert Johnston family of Keene, New Hampshire, who lived as whites and enjoyed special privileges until their son, who was unaware of his racial identity, made disparaging remarks about a black friend. Those comments prompted the family to examine its rationale for passing, ultimately choosing to tell their children and the world the truth about their racial identity. Popular magazines highlighted their life experiences, which served as the basis for the film Lost Boundaries (1949). Finally, the epilogue reminds readers of the complexities involved in passing and highlights the fluidity of race making. Regardless of the era, old racial ideologies seem to reproduce themselves anew. Such an environment makes it possible for the agile to simultaneously embrace and transcend their race as needed. Demographic shifts result in more racial ambiguity and traction for “hybridity” (p. 274). Citizens may now mark more than one U.S. census identity category. Ultimately, the imagined color-blind and postracial society does not exist. Race continues to matter. Wilma King University of Missouri Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

They read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, but they faced each other in battle with rage in their hearts. The Civil War not only pitted brother against brother but also Christian against Christian, with soldiers from North and South alike devoutly believing that God was on their side.Steven Woodworth, one of most prominent and provocative Civil War historians, presents the first detailed study of soldiers' religious beliefs and how they influenced the course of that tragic conflict. He shows how Christian teaching and practice shaped the worldview of soldiers on both sides: how it motivated them for the struggle, how it influenced the way they fought, and how it shaped national life after the war ended.Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of common soldiers, Woodworth illuminates religious belief from the home front to the battlefield, where thoughts of death and the afterlife were always close at hand. Woodworth reveals what these men thought about God and what they believed God thought about the war.Wrote one Unionist, believe cause to be the cause of liberty and light . . . the cause of God, and holy and justifiable in His sight, and for this reason, I fear not to die in it if need be. With a familiar echo, his Confederate counterpart declared that our Cause is Just and God is Just and we shall finally be successful whether I live to see the time or not.Woodworth focuses on mainstream Protestant beliefs and practices shared by the majority of combatants in order to help us better understand soldiers' motivations and to realize what a strong role religion played in American life throughout the conflict. In addition, he provides sharpinsights into the relationship between Christianity and both the abolition movement in the North and the institution of slavery in the South.Ultimately, Woodworth shows us how opposing armies could put their trust in the same God while engaging in four years of organized slaughter and destruction. His compelling work provides a rich new perspective on religion in American life and will forever change the way we look at the Civil War.

Home to nearly one-half of the world's Jews, America also harbours its share of anti-Jewish sentiment. In a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, with no medieval past, no legal nobility and no national church, the questions arise of how anti-Semitism became a presence in America, and how did America's beginnings and history affect the course of this bigotry? Frederic Cople Jaher considers these questions in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, a history of anti-Semitism from its origins in the ancient world to its first widespread outbreak in America during the Civil War. Comprehensive in approach, the book combines psychological, sociological, economic, cultural, anthropological and historical interpretation to reveal the nature of anti-Semitism in the United States. Jaher sets up a comparative framework, in which American anti-Semitism is seen in relation to other forms of ethnic and religious bigotry. He compares America's treatment of Jews to their treatment in other eras and countries, and notes variations by region, social group and historical period. Jaher shows us that although anti-Semitism has been less pronounced in America than in Europe, it has had a significant place in its culture from the beginning, a circumstance traced to intertwining religious and secular forces reaching back to early Christianity, with its doctrinal animosity toward Jews. He documents the growth of this animosity in its American incarnation through the 1830s to its virulent and epidemic climax during the Civil War. Though Christianity's dispute with Judaism accounts for the persistence of anti-Semitism, Jaher reveals the deeper roots of this pathology of prejudice in the human psyche - in primal concerns about defeat, enfeeblement, and death, or in visceral responses of intergroup and interpersonal envy and rivalry. An in-depth study of all phases of anti-Jewish feeling as it is manifested in politics, economic behaviour, cultural myth and legend, religious and social interaction, and the performing arts, this comprehensive work offers insight into the New World's oldest ethnic and religious hatred.

Reviewed by: The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life by Eli Cook Sean Patrick Adams (bio) The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. By Eli Cook. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 368. $29.95 cloth) These days, Americans constantly measure their lives. They track their steps and calories, college board scores, frequent flyer miles, credit card awards points, and days until retirement. In economic terms, Americans swim in an even deeper sea of statistics. Credit ratings, [End Page 620] income tax brackets, financial goals, insurance metrics, and student loans all take the quantitative assessment of humanity for granted. How did we get here? Eli Cook attempts to answer this very important question in his fascinating book, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. As it turns out, we were not always sized up by statistics; the process evolved slowly, and with fits and starts, from the Colonial Era through the early-twentieth century. In demonstrating the contingency of this process, Cook offers a number of insights that make this work well worth a read for its careful reconstruction of how this quantitative assessment brought the logic of capitalism to everyday life in the United States. Cook's aim is to examine the "capitalization of everyday American life" that came along with the development of American capitalism (p. 5). He begins The Pricing of Progress, however, in England with the enclosure movement of the Early Modern Era, before crossing the Atlantic to use Alexander Hamilton's experience as the first Secretary of the Treasury to introduce the American origins of this drive to measure economic progress. Hamilton failed in his efforts, Cook argues, because the Early Republic was "decisively non-capitalist" in spirit (p. 100). This does not mean a rejection of market principles, but instead a resistance to equate progress with economic growth. The turning point occurs with the rising use of statistical indicators used by religious and social reformers to track the impact of problems like alcoholism, poverty, disease, and slavery—this last factor being the most controversial use of quantitative logic—upon the health of the nation. Moral statistics became an important predecessor to the rampant pricing that accompanied the rise of American capitalism because they "succeeded in injecting quantified measures in to everyday American discourse, newspapers, politics, government bureaucracies, and civil society" (p. 103). Once inured to a blizzard of data measuring moral and social progress, Americans found the pricing of their lives less imposing. Cook traces the efforts of Freeman Hunt, the tireless editor of the statistic-laden Hunt's Merchant Magazine from 1839 to 1858, as well as fellow compilers of economic statistics [End Page 621] such as Hinton Helper, James DeBow, and Archibald Russell, to demonstrate how the normalization of quantitative measures occurred. Following the Civil War, several prominent public figures took up the cause of statistical measure of progress. Carroll Wright and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics measured wages and living conditions, while the industrialist/political writer Edward Atkinson wrote, among many other things, the value of nutritional cost accounting. By 1910, the New York Times used data derived by the Yale economist Irving Fisher to announce that a newborn baby was worth $362 per pound. Americans hardly protested, as Cook concludes, by this time the "the pricing of everyday life—and everyday Americans—was a frequent occurrence, as market productivity became a consensus benchmark of that widely heralded Progressive dream, 'efficiency.'" (p. 223) Cook uses the episodic portraits of individuals to great effect in The Pricing of Progress. This is not a comprehensive study of the role of statistics in American life, but instead an inquiry into how progress came to be wrapped up with economic growth. The culmination of that project came with the popularity of GDP as the ultimate measure of a nation's "worth." Cook deals with that phenomenon in a brief epilogue, but The Pricing of Progress provides much more than a historical precedent to that universal statistic. As a broad inquiry into how the values of capitalism became hard-wired into American life, this book offers a provocative challenge for...

Which Side Are You On, God, Which Side Are You On? Mitchell Snay (bio) George C. Rable . God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Michael T. Parrish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 586 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. The Civil War persists in American history, often unnerving our sense of historical time. My parents, born in 1919 and 1920, recalled seeing Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades in Chicago. The last living solider from the Union army, Albert Henry Woolson of Minnesota, died when I was two years old. Maudie White Hopkins, the "last Confederate widow," had married a man who once fought in a war to preserve slavery. She passed away in 2008, the same year that the United States elected its first African American president. Yet, for the most part, the Civil War lies deeply in the past. The picture of two armies arrayed against each other in open fields with muskets strikes us as ancient history. The level of human carnage remains hard to comprehend. At this writing, 1,461 American soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan since 2001. On September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam, 2,108 Union soldiers were killed. The religious world of the Civil War remains equally alien. Recognizing that an extremely wide range of contemporary beliefs exist, I think it safe to say that a providential interpretation of human events—the belief that God directs the course of human affairs—is no longer a governing majority assumption in American life. Entering the religious sensibilities of the time thus remains a challenge for the Civil War historian. In God's Almost Chosen People, prolific and talented historian George C. Rable has provided us with the best religious history of the Civil War we are likely to see in our lifetime. In this long, thorough, inclusive, intelligent, and sensitive study, Rable seeks to demonstrate how "religious beliefs shaped popular thinking on the conflict" (p. 7). His research in both published and manuscript sources is prodigious. The use of quotations is skillful and judicious. It is hard to imagine a more inclusive history. The book gives as equal and balanced attention to both North and South as is perhaps possible. Rable pays appropriate attention to major Protestant denominations—Baptists, Methodists, [End Page 83] and Presbyterians—yet also includes numerically smaller ones such as Episcopalians and Quakers. Catholics receive considerable space as well. Rable describes a Catholic counter-narrative during the secession crisis that was based on a call for Catholic national unity around faith and a standard liturgy. We see Catholic Sisters working in hospitals as nurses. American Jews appear in more than a perfunctory role. We hear rabbis preaching politics from the pulpit and learn about the Ladies Hebrew Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers in Philadelphia. African Americans of whatever denomination—enslaved, emancipated, and military—receive attention, too. God's Almost Chosen Peoples is topically inclusive as well. Its characters include fire-eating clergymen, abolitionist ministers, army chaplains, Christian soldiers, blasphemers, freethinkers, and nurses. There are more than occasional references to the leading intellectuals among American churchmen, such as Horace Bushnell of the North and James Henley Thornwell of the South. Rable offers a critical discussion of the Confederate deification of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson as the ideal Christian soldier. There are the usual anecdotes of pocket Bibles that saved lives by stopping enemy bullets. We get a glimpse into the religious life of Civil War prisons. We see how the war on the home front, especially in embattled communities like Missouri, divided congregations and denominations. In his discussion of camp religion, Rable debunks the myth of a Civil War fought by Christian armies. While he acknowledges the revivals that spread through the Confederate armies during the winter and spring of 1863, he argues that observant Christians actually comprised a small minority of Civil War soldiers. Rable instead presents a picture of widespread blasphemy, gambling, and drinking in both armies. There were nearly 200,000 cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the...