“Un-Southern”: Buffalo Bill, the Texas State Centennial, and Texas’s Western Turn

Remembering Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell Andrew J. Torget (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Randolph B. Campbell pictured with the manuscript for Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, which was published in three editions by Oxford University Press. Photo courtesy of the Campbell family. [End Page 290] Among Texas historians, there was no one quite like Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell, the first Chief Historian of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), who died on August 13, 2022. Born on November 16, 1940, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Campbell grew up on a hardscrabble farm in Nelson County, Virginia, the only child of John Landon and Virginia Lyon Campbell. He attended the University of Virginia, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1966. In 1962, he married Diana Snow, and together they raised two sons, James Landon and Jonathan Clay. Mike and Diana moved to Denton, Texas, in 1966, when Mike took a position in the history department of North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas, usually shortened to UNT). During the fifty-three years that followed, Campbell became one of the most prominent faculty at UNT, where he held both the Regents Professorship and the Lone Star Chair in Texas History when he retired in August 2019. Campbell’s prominence centered on his pathbreaking work on the southern heritage of Texas and his focus on exploring the lives of everyday people living through momentous times, which transformed how modern historians understand the Texas past. His first single-authored book, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880 (Texas State Historical Association, 1983), became such an iconic work on the Civil War that it was reissued thirty years after its original publication. Even more influential was An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (LSU Press, 1989), which traced the deep influence [End Page 291] of slavery in the development of nineteenth-century Texas and remains the most authoritative work on the subject. His numerous other scholarly works—including books on the era of Reconstruction and the life of Sam Houston, as well as dozens of scholarly articles—culminated in the publication of Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, first issued by Oxford University Press in 2003, one of the most authoritative histories of the state, which is now in its third edition and serves as a standard in college classrooms. For his many achievements, he was honored by colleagues with numerous awards and a series of influential positions in historical associations and societies. He served as President and inaugural Chief Historian of the TSHA, as well as editor of the Association’s Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He was a Fellow of the TSHA, the Texas Philosophical Society, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the East Texas Historical Association, among others. The University of North Texas bestowed its Eminent Faculty Award on Campbell in 2012. Yet Campbell’s greatest legacy may have been his teaching and mentoring. Virtually no one could hold a lecture hall in rapt attention like Campbell, and his massive sections of U.S. history were frequently oversubscribed with eager students. His local history seminars and famous biography classes were must-take courses for graduate students. Throughout his career, moreover, he selflessly offered his time, insights, and support to students, colleagues, and friends, always working in tireless dedication toward helping others achieve their best. I recognize now how much I was a beneficiary of Mike’s deep knowledge and generous heart. When I arrived at UNT in 2009, I ended up with the office next to Mike’s, which turned out to be one of the most fortunate alignments of my professional life. Mike and I both liked to arrive at the office early, which meant that weekday mornings usually began with me sitting in his office asking Mike about teaching, departmental politics, and anything else bewildering me. Even more valuable was the reality that any time that I had a question while writing my first book, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), I only...

Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky Crystal N. Feimster (bio) In spring 1862 when General Benjamin Butler arrived in New Orleans with Union troops, he was greeted by a mob of men and women dismayed by defeat and outraged by the prospect of Union occupation. White New Orleanians challenged and resisted the authority of Butler and his 2,500 soldiers at every turn. Confederate women were the most openly hostile and resistant to Union occupation. When women met Union officers or soldiers on the sidewalk, some contemptuously gathered up their skirts and walked to the other side of the street. When federal soldiers boarded streetcars or entered churches, Confederate women got up and left with great to-do. They wore Confederate flags pinned to their hats and dresses and hummed Confederate songs within earshot of northern troops. One woman, draped in a Confederate flag, walked up to a Union soldier standing guard, stared at him, and spat in the gutter before walking away in disgust; others spat directly in the faces of men dressed in federal uniforms. Some went so far as to empty their chamber pots onto passing Union soldiers. Of displays like these, General Thomas Williams remarked, "Such venom one must see to believe. Such un-sexing was hardly ever before in any cause or country so marked and so universal. I look at them and think of fallen angels."1 [End Page 301] As far as Butler was concerned it was not enough to merely look at them as fallen women. On May 15, only two weeks into his command, he issued "General Order No. 28," declaring, "hereafter when any female by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any office or solider of the United States," she will be treated like "a woman of the town plying her avocation."2 In other words, women who resisted federal occupation would be treated as prostitutes, as women not only unworthy of protection, but as women who invited sexual advances. The mayor of New Orleans, John T. Monroe, the first to condemn General Order 28, clearly understood its implications and accused Butler of insulting "the honor of the virtuous women of the City" and giving "license to the officers and soldiers . . . to commit outrages . . . upon defenseless women."3 Butler, however, argued that the order did not "contemplate any virtuous women," and insisted, "if obeyed, it will protect the true and modest woman from all possible insult—the others will take care of themselves."4 He was adamant that women who resisted federal occupation by insulting and assaulting federal troops, behaved like prostitutes. As prostitutes, they not only forfeited male protection, but invited sexual attention, wanted or unwanted. While Butler's "Woman's Order" clearly exposes how one officer exploited long held beliefs about prostitutes, it also brings into focus the connection between wartime prostitution and sexual violence. By sexualizing women who resisted Union occupation, Butler exploited ideas that justified violence against women who publicly stepped outside the bounds of respectable womanhood. While Butler's order was unique to New Orleans, the ideas about prostitutes and sexual violence that it mobilized to police women who dared to challenge the authority of Union soldiers and officers were [End Page 302] hardly new.5 In the context of war and occupation, the blurring of lines that separated respectable women from so-called "fallen women" functioned to justify the threat of rape. Most scholars have focused on the implications of Butler's order for elite white women of New Orleans, while overlooking what the order meant for women who were indeed prostitutes or perceived as "fallen angels."6 Moreover, most scholars have accepted that the Civil War was [End Page 303] "a low rape war," even as they have argued the war marked the most "dramatic leap in the number of American prostitutes" in the nation's history.7 Yet, few historians have explored the link between sexual coercion and the exponential expansion of the sex trade during the [End Page 304] Civil War. Indeed, we know very little about the lives and experiences of Civil War prostitutes or women who were treated as "a woman of the town...

Reviewed by: Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell Debbie Cottrell Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 336. Photographs, maps, notes, index.) Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi is an ambitious work that seeks to fill a gap in both Civil War and Texas history, while demonstrating both the similarities and differences between women in Texas and women in other parts of the South during the Civil War. The book represents another milestone in the maturation of southern women’s history and brings into focus the specific experiences of Texas women, putting them center stage whereas most other works, at best, have noted them in passing. It won the 2017 Liz Carpenter Award for the best book in Texas women’s history. Featuring a helpful introduction and eleven essays that are more contextual than biographical in nature, Women in Civil War Texas ties its broad subject matter together by focusing on the diversity of Texas women’s experiences in the 1860s. Some chapters consider public activities and writings of women, while others use race or politics as the lens to analyze [End Page 104] women’s lives. Unionist women are represented in chapters on German women and women in North Texas, by Judith Dykes-Hoffmann and Rebecca Sharpless, respectively, both written with insight and perspective that provide useful interpretations and reinforce the complex nature of Texas during the Civil War. The book’s final chapter, by Deborah Liles, adds to this sense, building on the frontier narrative and demonstrating the multiple layers of women’s lives during this time period. Liles shows how the Texas frontier was a world away from much of the war’s milieu, noting that in this part of the state, “women adapted out of necessity for survival, which had little to do with Victorian ideals and standards of living” (266). In a book rich with detail of women’s lives, Linda Hudson’s impressive analysis of Texas Supreme Court decisions that affected black women in the Civil War era is particularly insightful. Drawing on some 297 court decisions, Hudson demonstrates the changing nature of legal decisions for black women on issues ranging from freedom to divorce to murder. A more personal case study is Dorothy Ewing’s biographical piece on Caroline Sedberry, which shows how an ordinary woman responded to her husband’s long absence during the Civil War and the intertwined emotions of fear, confidence, and grief that she lived through as she ran the family’s Bosque County farm. Taken as a whole, Women in Civil War Texas successfully demonstrates how several factors made the experiences of Texas women during the Civil War different from women in other parts of the South. Sharing a border with Mexico and featuring a vast western frontier, Texas was the newest and least-settled state in the Confederacy. It was also the state most distant from most of the war’s military encounters. The bright side of being removed from the battlefields was offset by the complications of distance when family members entered the war; the less invasive presence of Union forces for Confederate women was more complicated for those women who supported the Union. Women in Civil War Texas is a welcome addition to southern women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history. Similar to other important recent works such as Jesús F. de la Teja’s Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) and Catherine Clinton’s Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), this collection emphasizes the complexity of Civil War history and the important issues still deserving of historians’ attention. By putting Texas women at its center, it also demonstrates the diverse range of women’s experiences that deepen our understanding of this unsurpassed national conflict. [End Page 105] Debbie Cottrell Texas Lutheran University Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

Front Porch Jocelyn R. Neal, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution In "The New Masters of Eloquence: Southernness, Senegal, and Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities," Ali Colleen Neff reveals how the sounds of the Dirty South and West Africa continue to evolve in tandem. Sister Anta (here) is a member of GOTAL, an all-woman Senegalese music group that draws inspiration from Akon and other famous Dirty South artists. Photograph by Ali Colleen Neff. [End Page 1] For more than a century, non-southerners have headed South on a series of musical quests and pilgrimages. At the core of their motivations sat a paradox: they sought music that was quintessentially southern, forged in a particular place—with all its intrinsic meaning—and carrying the essence of the South within its reverberations. Yet, at the same time, they were searching for the threads of connection, lineages, pipelines of influence, and trails of sonic breadcrumbs that led out of the South and back to other, faraway sourcepools as a way of explaining southern music. In many instances, they came with well-formed notions of what they thought they would find, and throughout its chameleon appeal and mystical ability to tantalize its seekers, southern music did not disappoint: it yielded both a deep-rooted portrait of the region and a tapestry of global connections, sometimes simultaneously. The musical pilgrims, in turn, found and heard what they came to hear. Those ideas—that a listener's engagement with southern music involves a great deal of reflexivity, and that the compulsion of southern music lies in part in its multiplicity of meanings—are at the core of this collection of writings, in which we explore music and the global South. Music that could claim to be of or from the South has long carried a cachet of authenticity in many different settings: southern Soul stood as a foil against the pop sheen of (northern) Motown; Kansas City jazz injected new life into the slick (northern) big bands; honky-tonk singers claimed twang as a southern birthright denied to (northern) transplants. In line with those notions of regional roots, record producers in the 1920s sought African American performers, whose repertory represented the outsider's ideas about what country blues sounded like, and white performers whose repertory represented old-time tradition, even if the material was in fact newly composed on the models of pop songwriting. These producers knew what they wanted the region's music to sound like, and the music obliged. On the other hand, musicians and writers alike have also occupied themselves for decades with tracing lines of transmission that challenge the native grounding of this same music. In the early twentieth century, song collectors descended on Appalachia in search of preserved specimens of ballads from the British Isles. Although they had to wade through versions of pop songs and radio hits that had been absorbed into the oral tradition, they managed to find what they were looking for. A few decades later, blues scholars expounded on the African connections in blues and R&B traditions and located the sonic evidence to bolster their interpretive claims. In each of these cases and many more, the lines of influence fit into larger narratives of meaning that the writers were advancing, narratives that gained significant traction by locating the sources of southern musical identity far beyond the region's borders. The writers in this special issue all connect to the paradoxes that characterize southern music within a global lens: the relationship between southern music's [End Page 2] perceived native identity and narratives of its far-flung origins. But what trumps these ideas in many instances is the mystique of its performance: how southern music puts on a show for its audiences, entertains their imaginations, and feeds them what they want or need to hear with spectacle and illusion. It is no small coincidence that two of our essays highlight lyrics about payday, a musician's reward for the performance that satisfies the audience. These three ideas—the music's southern roots, its global connections, and its performative nature—form the nodes around which all our authors write. Click for larger view View full resolution...

Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 128 KATRINA PHILLIPS Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly University of Oklahoma Press, 2012 IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES, thousands of audiences across America and Europe thrilled to the horsemanship, marksmanship, and historical reenactments on display in Wild West shows that, according to numerous academics, are largely responsible for the romanticized, nostalgic view of the American West that “produced stereotypes and reproduced colonial relationships” (4–5). American Indian performers added an aura of authenticity and exoticism, whether they were performing traditional dances or reenacting famous battles and attacks on stagecoaches. The “winning of the West,” as shown through the theatrical lens of Wild West shows, showcased the prowess of white America and celebrated the promises of Manifest Destiny by relying on the “otherness” and exoticism of American Indians. Ironically, as anthropologist Linda Scarangella McNenly argues, Wild West shows—despite their use of Indians as static, one-dimensional pawns in the inevitable conquest of the American West—served as stages of power for Indigenous performers. Showmen like William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, encouraged Indians in these traveling shows to keep dancing and wearing their regalia, even as Indian agents and government officials sought sweeping bans on the practices of Indigenous cultures. McNenly contends that Wild West shows not only highlighted the struggles between government officials bent on assimilating American Indians and the Indians intent on sustaining their traditions but also allowed for Native resistance in public contexts and preserved, rather than destroyed, many elements of Indian culture. Similarly, even though Wild West shows purportedly presented authentic (read: stereotyped ) imagery, Native performers adapted and altered dances and regalia to more accurately reflect their own identity (e.g., 124). McNenly focuses on the experiences and perspectives of American Indian performers in historic and contemporary iterations of Wild West shows. While other scholarship has examined the negative effects of stereotyped Native performances, the control and coercion of Indigenous participants, and the commodification, appropriation, and exploitation of American Indians , McNenly uses the lens of agency to question how Indigenous performers navigated and continue to navigate attempts to pigeonhole them in the performative representations and storylines of Wild West shows. NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 129 McNenly analyzes American Indian performers in three major Wild West shows—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, and Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show—from 1885 to 1930. While the Office of Indian Affairs sought to regulate Indian employment in Wild West shows, promoters used Indians to satiate audiences’ demand for authenticity . Rather than painting Indians as victims, she uses the historical record to argue that Native performers often took control of their careers or actively sought such employment. Next, she examines three Mohawk families from Kahnawake, Quebec, who capitalized on these constructions of Indianness in the early years of the twentieth century, including a family that produced its own Wild West show. Lastly, she moves to the twenty-first century to investigate why, and under what conditions and circumstances, contemporary Indian performers work at Buffalo Bill Days in Sheridan, Wyoming, and Dis­ neyland Paris’s recreation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Academics studying Indigenous populations must take care when attributing agency to actions wherein one merely hopes to find it, and it is often difficult to ascribe motivations to Native performers without falling into the trap of the “romance of resistance” (15). However, McNenly offers several hypotheses, acknowledging that American Indian performers in Wild West shows may have simply been seeking economic survival rather than purposefully circumventing government attempts to repress Native cultures. She notes that there is a fine line between exploitation and agency—while the lowering of performers’ wages in the 1900s could be seen as a sign of exploitation, for instance, at the same time it corroborates the notion that a large number of Indians pursued work as performers rather than subsisting on reservations. Similarly, Native resistance to government interference may have been evasive rather than oppositional. However, the most captivating chapters, particularly those that analyze the motivations of contemporary performers, make the most valuable...

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Linda English Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 345. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-707-1.) Angela Boswell’s Women in Texas History is a narrative account of Texas history told through the experiences of women, spanning from the prehistoric period to Senator Wendy Davis’s marathon filibuster for reproductive rights on the floor of the Texas legislature in 2013. Throughout the book, Boswell’s gendered focus intersects with racial, ethnic, and class categories of analysis, providing an ambitious and highly inclusive examination of the state’s history. [End Page 130] On this approach, Boswell notes that “this book pays special attention to the differences in the lived experiences of Native Americans, Tejanas, African Americans, Anglos, Germans, and Asians. Other categories that shape women’s identity, such as class, religion, political ideology, and sexuality are also explored” (pp. xii–xiii). Recasting a state’s narrative history through the lens of sex and gender is not entirely new (see Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque, 1999]); however, Boswell tackles the entirety of Texas history, shifting the focus away from overly familiar characters and events from the state’s past. Downsizing male-centered topics, like the Texas Revolution, the Texas Rangers, and the oilmen behind the Spindletop oil strike, to mere paragraphs or even sentences allows more room for Boswell to highlight less-covered historical terrain. For example, she details the intricacies of frontier farm life, from soddies to captivity threats, detailing the types of work women conducted inside and outside the household. She contrasts plantation elite women’s responsibilities with those of yeoman farmers’ wives and, further still, with the work of black slave women. In the early chapters, the rigors of the Texas landscape are ubiquitous. As the book progresses, Boswell spends a great deal of time tracing women’s activism in all its forms—from more muted church activities to marches and protests—beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present day. In developing her narrative, Boswell relies on existing scholarship, which, she acknowledges, leads to uneven coverage of some periods and persons. For example, there are ample studies of southern women’s experiences during the Civil War (especially plantation mistresses’), but there is much less scholarship on the frontier perspectives of Native American women, especially regarding life-jarring events like warfare and dislocation. In contrast, Boswell ably draws on the extensive publications on women’s activism during the Progressive era (focusing on clubwomen, suffragists, and heritage preservationists) to provide an in-depth examination of both well-known and unknown female activists. In terms of presentation, the author winnows broader discussions of women’s experiences, both regionally and nationally, to very specific Texas examples, seamlessly weaving her narrative from the macro to the micro level. In addressing family reunification during Reconstruction, for instance, Boswell includes the touching story of Lou Turner, a young black girl “who did not know her mother” and resisted being reunified by authorities with her (p. 100). In another example, Boswell narrows a general discussion of the post–World War II pressures put on women to leave their well-paying factory jobs to Anne L. Baker, a machinist from Waco, who remembered “men implicitly or explicitly asking her what she was doing there: ‘You are taking a man’s job’” (p. 208). The inclusion of these on-point quotations from Texas women transforms Boswell’s survey text into something very special. The last chapter, “Taking Charge: Women to the End of the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the impact of the feminist movement in Texas and its ensuing backlash; Boswell also examines new opportunities for women in the workplace and politics, including the groundbreaking campaigns of Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards. [End Page 131] Ultimately, Angela Boswell’s synthesis of women in Texas history is expansive, rich, and thoroughly refreshing. Linda English University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Manifest Wendel A. White (bio) Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, quotidian material of black life. This project is concerned with the physical remnants of the American concept and representation of race. The histories of slavery, abolition, the U.S. Civil War, segregation, oppression, accomplishment, and agency are among the narratives that emerge in these photographs. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. While the artifacts are remarkable as visual evidence of lives and events, I also intend the viewer to consider this informal reliquary as a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory. Various projects have occupied my attention during the past two decades; in retrospect, each has been part of a singular effort to seek out the ghosts and resonant memories of the material world. I am drawn to the stories "dwelling within" a spoon, a cowbell, a book, a postcard, or a partially burned document. The photographs are made with a 4 × 5 view camera, using film or digital capture. The prints are pigment-based inkjet. [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution Lunch Box, Larkin Franklin Sr., Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 15] Click for larger view View full resolution Slave Bill of Sale, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, 2009. [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution Door Knob, Maye St. Julien, Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Spoon, Harriet Tubman House, Auburn, New York, 2009. [End Page 18] Click for larger view View full resolution Iron, Great Plain Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 19] Click for larger view View full resolution Tintype, Fenton History Center, Jamestown, New York, 2009. [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution Zora Neale Hurston Sketch Book, Smathers Library Special Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 21] Click for larger view View full resolution James Baldwin Inkwell, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution FBI Files on Malcolm X, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Poster of Angela Davis, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Drum, Dan Desdunes Band, Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Cab Calloway Home Movies: Haiti, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Radio Raheem's boombox from the movie Do the Right Thing, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution New Orleans Door, Hurricane Katrina, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Quilt (W. Black), Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 29] Wendel A. White Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has received various awards, including fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in...

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a StartToward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America Joshua F.J. Inwood (bio) and Derek Alderman (bio) On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twenty-four hours later in North Carolina. Of the nine killed the oldest was 87 year old Susie Jackson, and the youngest was 26 year old Tywanza Sanders. After his arrest Roof claimed that he assassinated the members of Emanuel AME Church in the hopes of igniting a broader race war. Indeed, photographs later emerged and went viral of Roof engaged in racist exhibitions and hate speech in the past, in particular the flying of the controversial and insensitive Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we saw renewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from across the South’s public spaces, with South Carolina legislators finally voting to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. In addition, the nation witnessed the grace of survivors in forgiving Roof. These were meaningful and symbolic steps that, thankfully, had the opposite effect than the one the white supremacist shooter had intended. While it is undeniably tragic that nine innocent people had to die before political leaders realized what many African Americans have known and lived with for generations, it is also indicative of a nation that whitewashes the connections between the material realities of white supremacy and its grounding in historical memory. The Confederate flag is a highly charged reminder of legacies of racism that have long been employed by racists to intimidate the black community and to oppose those struggling for racial equality. The banner of the secessionist, pro-slavery southern government had largely faded from memory and sight in the years after the Civil War, but it reappeared not coincidentally after World War II as a symbol of [End Page 9] conservative white resistance to what was then the nascent Civil Rights Movement. African Americans who famously protested segregated bussing in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 have vivid memories of being pelted with balloons filled with urine, which were thrown from cars and trucks decorated with Confederate flags. In 1959, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school officials in Fairfax, Virginia named and opened a new high school after Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Shapiro 2015). Many communities carried out similar not-so-subtle strategies of defending white supremacy under the guise of southern heritage and pride. The landscape has retained major traces of these racist symbols and, as a result of the Charleston Massacre, these symbols are being challenged well beyond the removal of the Confederate flag. As activists and others from across the United States recognize, challenging the legitimacy of publicly displaying Confederate flags and other symbols that legitimize the defense of slavery and white supremacy is certainly the right thing to do. Yet these calls should not be mistaken for a solution to structural inequality. In particular, while state legislators from across the South should be applauded for taking down Confederate symbols, that is not the same thing as addressing the deeply entrenched social and spatial conditions that allow white supremacy to permeate not just the Charleston AME church but wider swaths of American life. This contradictory reality—addressing the symbols of a racist heritage without challenging the foundational histories and geographies of racism—raises questions about the relationship between violence, race and memory (Tyner et al. 2014). These questions are seldom discussed in our post-Charleston Nine social world. Recently, Karen Till has argued that progressive change requires a direct engagement with the trauma of “memory work” in which “individuals and groups may confront and take responsibility for the failures of the democratic state and its violences” (Till 2012, pg. 7). In particular, she highlights the place-based practices of local citizens, activists, educators, artists, and even performers in carrying out the physical, political, and...

“They Met Force with Force”:African American Protests and Social Status in Louisville’s 1877 Strike Shannon M. Smith (bio) On Tuesday, July 24, 1877, African American laborers employed to dig Louisville’s sewer system left their jobs in protest. That morning, “some idle negroes, including a strange one from Cincinnati” known as Buffalo Bill, reportedly urged the workers to demand a wage increase. When the supervisor refused their demands, the contracted workers—“mostly colored men”—left the work site and paraded through town. With this action, the black workers joined thousands of striking laborers across the country in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The marching strikers gathered workers from other construction sites until the group numbered approximately four hundred black laborers. After traversing the city and commanding the attention of startled white townspeople, the group eventually dispersed in the late afternoon without incident.1 The actions of Louisville’s black workers were significant for several reasons. Four years into a national depression, and more than a week into the railroad strike, it was not surprising for laborers to protest low wages. Undoubtedly inspired by the working-class solidarity [End Page 1] that prompted a near-nationwide general strike, Louisville’s African American workers made public demands for fair pay consistent with that of white railroad workers engaged in unskilled labor. In Louisville, as in other southern cities, black workers demanded wage equality as vigorously as they sought civil rights. Over the next several days, black strikers were joined by hundreds of white men and women from the city’s tobacco factories, foundries, paper and woolen mills, furniture and plow factories, saddleries, and breweries, culminating in a general strike across the city.2 But unlike the railroad workers who led the strikes in cities across the country, Louisville’s white railmen adamantly refused to join the strike. Instead, they sided with the city’s white business and political leaders by joining the militia that helped to protect railroad property. In an industrializing border city, white railroad employees established their most important identities as protectors of “law and order” rather than joining in working-class action with other laborers. The perceived threat of black militancy led to the creation of an all-white militia that further disrupted possible class collaboration between black and white workers. White men used militia service to reinforce their own economic power and to ensure that black workers did not challenge long-standing class and racial boundaries. Through their actions, the men of Louisville contested who had the right to organize, by what means they could assert themselves publicly, and who was denied those rights—in short, who could lay public claim to being a citizen and a man.3 It is difficult to piece together the story of a strike, even more so [End Page 2] when it is accompanied by violence. Few eyewitness accounts remain from most riots, and police and military records are often scarce. No sources are more valuable than newspapers, yet they present their own challenges. News reporters did not interview the striking black workers to ask about their demands, so African American voices are limited. Nineteenth-century newspapers typically framed class conflicts as wars in which strikers threatened the forces of law and order. Such framing made “violence itself the story” and distracted readers from criticism of the system that created the conflict. Editors and reporters offered politicized viewpoints to their target audience and engaged in heated exchanges with competitors. Through interviews and relaying of selected events, news editors shaped citizens’ attitudes toward each other and a city’s vision of how best to preserve law and order. But newspapers were also beholden to advertisers and readers, and could not risk alienating either. Out of the challenges and confusion of strike coverage, newspapers became participants in molding the perceived reality of an event. Competing Democratic and Republican news reports of the Louisville strike must be interpreted carefully, but they still provide insights into the aims of striking black workmen, white workers who joined their ranks, and the employers who sought to re-establish control.4 The railroad strike in July 1877, the first nationwide industrial strike, began with railroad workers...

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside Kenneth Kidd (bio) Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future. By Martin Woodside. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Martin Woodside opens his excellent study Frontiers of Boyhood by reflecting on this famous exhortation by Horace Greeley in 1865. Indeed, many young men and even boys did go West, some literally and still more in their minds and hearts. As Woodside emphasizes, the "frontier" of the American West was understood in the late nineteenth century as the place where boys could become the right sort of men: rugged, self-reliant, demonstrably masculine. And, just as important, the presence and activities of boys on the frontier would ostensibly help the nation grow up. Reflecting also on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Woodside emphasizes how boyhood and the frontier thus "develop through exposure to one another" (11). Including seventeen illustrations, Frontiers of Boyhood adds richly to a body of existing scholarship on American literary boyhood across and slightly beyond the nineteenth century: see, for instance, Marcia Jacobson's Being A Boy Again, Ken Parille's Boys at Home, Lorinda B. Cohoon's Serialized Citizenships, David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy, and my own Making American Boys. Woodside is the first to focus on the frontier's particular importance for boyhood and vice versa. The book contributes not only to children's literature studies and American literary studies but also to studies of the American West, which have neglected the importance of youth on and to the frontier. Woodside's volume appears with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of its William F. Cody series on the history and culture of the American West. The book's placement in the series makes superb sense, as the organizing figure of Frontiers of Boyhood is William F. Cody himself, aka "Buffalo Bill," buffalo hunter, Indian scout, and consummate showman—architect of the world-famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West stage show, launched in 1883. Three of the book's five chapters take up Buffalo Bill and his show and their ongoing legacy. Woodside details how Buffalo Bill's persona and show [End Page 286] were fashioned for a child-friendly audience and thus had to navigate concerns about the show's sensationalism. The focus on Cody as a broker of American youth culture is one of the book's key strengths. Another is Woodside's persuasive account of the dime novel as a form of children's and adolescent literature. Woodside also engagingly explores the role of actual children in frontier mythology. That's not surprising, as Woodside earned his PhD in childhood studies from the (dare I say it?) pioneering program at Rutgers University-Camden. Woodside's introduction nicely sets the stage for the entertaining show that follows. Woodside draws on important work about American adolescence and gender norms by Joseph Kett, Kent Baxter, Sarah Chinn, and Gail Bederman. He makes the case that frontier narratives position the West as a space for white male development through a rhetoric of both "peril and promise" and by delineating "proper" from "improper" boyhood (14). The book proper begins in familiar territory, with a discussion in chapter 1 of the Bad Boy book as practiced by Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland and as approximated by Cody in his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1879). Turns out, the bad boy book went West too. The chapter offers strong treatment of both Twain and Garland—and trust me, it's hard to say anything new about Twain. But Woodside does it in his engaging commentary on Huck and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. However, as Woodside stresses, "it is Cody, not Twain, who successfully integrates the dime novel hero with a literary model of successful American boyhood" (42). Building on this insight, chapter 2 reframes the dime novel as a frontier form that walks the same tightrope that Buffalo Bill did with his show. Dime novel authors had to titillate without seeming to endorse violence or glamorize running away, all the more so...

Reviewed by: Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism by Timothy S. Huebner Ronald E. Goodwin Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism. By Timothy S. Huebner. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. Pp. 576. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) More than 150 years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the Civil War’s influence on today’s racial and political environments continues to be felt. Ongoing controversy over the Confederate flag is just one example of how this country has yet to satisfactorily close what is perhaps its most destructive period. It is in the context of whose constitutional rights should be protected that Timothy Huebner’s Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism seeks to provide a new perspective. This work does not attempt to assign blame or revisit past, or present, racial controversies. Instead, Huebner focuses on the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and their ideological influence in the 1850s and 1860s. [End Page 513] Organized into three sections with eleven reader-friendly chapters, Huebner crafts his argument around the controversy over the overt and implied principles of democracy. He boldly attacks the issue of American slavery in part one and examines the dilemma faced by the Founding Fathers in reconciling the economic, social, and moral justification for slavery with the democratic principles of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The reader will find the examination of John Locke’s influence on Jefferson familiar territory, but skillfully presented in a comfortable prose befitting a talented storyteller. Part two examines military and political leaders as they prepared for the inevitable conflict. Presidents Lincoln and Davis held firm to their particular interpretations of the Constitution, unable to find common ground. The reader may find the discussions of signature battles (i.e. Bull Run, Shiloh, Manassas, Gettysburg, and Antietam) laborious, but will nonetheless see in their complexities a useful and rewarding discourse. The influence of the Emancipation Proclamation in shifting focus to the abolition of slavery is refreshing. Too often it seems our society seldom acknowledges the centrality of the slavery question to the war, choosing instead to focus on other factors. Huebner dives into the political impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and pulls no punches when arguing that many questioned the constitutionality of Lincoln’s ideological pivot. Still, Lincoln stood steadfast in his interpretation that slavery was inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution. An evaluation of Reconstruction and its constitutional precedents is found in the chapters of part three. The narrative of events surrounding the emancipation of slaves and resultant social and economic chaos is well written and engaging. Of particular interest are the events and constitutional wrangling that led to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. The power struggle between the congressional and executive branches illustrates the Founding Fathers’ efforts to prevent the development of a too powerful central government. Additionally, the discussion about black politicians enhances understanding of efforts towards political inclusion, however limited the results may have been. Undoubtedly, the strength of this text is its documentation and organization. Readers will find the bibliographic essay particularly useful as a launching point for further research. The presentation of historical events and analysis followed by their constitutional relevance offers a perspective seldom seen when discussing constitutional interpretation in the nineteenth century. Clearly, academics will find Liberty and Union beneficial in multiple disciplines (U.S. history and government being the most obvious). While some analysis and detail may be overwhelming to a casual audience, Liberty and Union will positively affect Civil War and Constitutional literature. [End Page 514] Future generations will continue to debate the impact of the Civil War on American culture and society. Liberty and Union provides a well-needed glimpse into the ideological foundations of the American Republic and the efforts to satisfactorily reconcile the elusive concepts of democracy, liberty, and sovereignty. Ronald E. Goodwin Prairie View A&M University Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Sara Egge Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. Foreword by Nancy Baker Jones and Cynthia J. Beeman. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. vii + 334 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $37.00, cloth. Angela Boswell offers the first comprehensive narrative of Texas women's history with Women in Texas History. Her primary aim is to challenge the myth of Texas history that omits women and their experiences in favor of independence fighters, cowboys, and oil tycoons. Boswell synthesizes a large number of secondary sources to cover hundreds of years of history, focusing on four guidelines to frame the analysis. First, she concentrates on Texas specifically, eschewing a regional focus. Second, she selects topics relevant to women's history, which allows her to revise the standard periodization. Third, she places her work into the field of women's history, using it to examine the ordinary ways women shaped their own lives and the lives of others. Finally, she strives to include as many women as possible and their racial, ethnic, religious, class, political, and sexual identities. Boswell covers a lot of ground in ten chapters. From the Native American, Mexican, and Spanish women who created a racially and culturally diverse borderlands in chapter 1 to the activities and consequences of the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement in Texas in chapter 10, the book examines a wide range of women's experiences. Chapter 2 traces the influence of southern women in the Texas borderlands in the early nineteenth century while chapter 5 investigates how Native American, white, and Tejana women shaped West Texas and its ranching industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters 6 and 7 delve into the period between the 1870s and the 1920s, assessing women's activisms and women's work cultures, respectively. Within chapters, Boswell often bounces among identity groups to tell the story. For example, when examining women's activism from the 1870s to the 1920s in chapter 6, Boswell engages with religious groups, the Farmers' Alliance, white women's clubs, African American women's clubs, Tejana women's organizations, heritage societies, and suffrage associations. She ends with a brief discussion of post-suffrage activism and the rise of the New Woman. This approach allows for easy comparison while giving an expansive and inclusive assessment of women's activism of the time. But each group receives a short assessment, and the overall narrative is sometimes lost amid the subheadings. Women in Texas History serves as an important [End Page 115] model for writing the history of a Great Plains state. It contributes a broad narrative that describes often overlooked historical contexts and serves as a helpful general reference for Texas history. Sara Egge Department of History Centre College Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Reviewed by: The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil by Ronald E. Goodwin Keith Volanto The New Deal and Texas History: Saving the Past through Hardship and Turmoil. By Ronald E. Goodwin. (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 200. Notes, bibliography, index.) The Works Progress Administration (WPA) played a key role in the New Deal's attempt to combat the nation's chronic unemployment problem during the Great Depression. While many elements of the agency's efforts are well known—its extensive construction projects that contributed [End Page 527] to the improvement of the nation's landscape and infrastructure, and many non-construction initiatives to provide work for unemployed actors, musician, and visual artists—the WPA also created less publicized work to pay the unemployed to preserve state and local history, as well as to probe communities in order to capture snapshots of Great Depression life for posterity. It is these activities that serve as the focal point of Ronald Goodwin's new book. For this undertaking, Goodwin extensively mines the Federal Writers' Project and Historical Records Survey files among the Texas WPA Records housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The book is not an administrative history but rather a chronicle with analysis of the workers' collective findings. The most familiar initiatives conducted by the Writers' Project—its travel guides and slave narratives based on interviews with surviving freedpeople—receive extensive coverage, but so do the agency's "life histories" based on interviews with old-timers remembering their years in Texas; "folklore interviews" seeking to preserve stories of local history, customs, and mythology; "military guides" that provided basic military installation histories; and the "automobile tours" in which writers describe treks along country roads and major highways. The efforts of the Historical Records Survey to catalog and preserve valuable local records such as wills, land deeds, old newspapers, church archives, and birth, marriage, and death records also receive adequate treatment. The work does have some organizational, writing, and secondary sourcing issues. Coverage of different aspects of the slave narratives, for example, appear in three separate chapters rather than in a centralized location. Much of this material was originally published in their entirety as essays elsewhere, and readers would have been better served if an attempt had been made to unite the slave narrative information and analysis into a single integrated chapter. Another quibble is with a tendency to provide too many details from many of the files, such as the list of facts provided for the fort histories, instead of simply summarizing their contents. Such analysis would have offered a more efficient use of space. Finally, a perusal of the book's secondary sources reveals a noticeable lack of recent scholarship on the New Deal in Texas. In many instances, newer works should have been cited (and several missing sources should have been included), especially in an early overview chapter on the Depression in Texas. While the basic facts provided in the synopsis are correct, much has been written on the New Deal in Texas since Lionel Patenaude's Texans, Politics, and the New Deal (Garland Publishing, 1983), which Goodwin uses extensively as a source. Other aspects of the New Deal are explained but accompanied by questionable source choices in the endnotes, notably when Goodwin cites T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Wings Books, 1991) as a source on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration [End Page 528] in Texas (full disclosure: this reviewer published an entire book on the subject in 2005). Although there has been a relative shortage of New Deal Texas scholarship over the years, the past two decades have witnessed noticeable improvement on this front, and authors now publishing need to demonstrate familiarity with this literature. Despite these issues, this volume adds much to our knowledge of the WPA's efforts in Texas and of the greater New Deal determination to guide the Lone Star State out of the grips of the Great Depression, while, as Goodwin reminds us, documenting Texas culture and preserving its history along the way. Keith Volanto Collin College Copyright © 2022 The...

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz Dolph Briscoe IV Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 322. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West [End Page 248] is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.) African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day. In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African [End Page 249] Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality. Dolph Briscoe IV Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Materializing a Gesture of Resistance Sharon Daniel (bio) When the human body, a nation's flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself. It is now in a state of desecration, the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world. —Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative It is an interesting moment to reflect on the processes, strategies, and tactics through which one, as a citizen and an artist, engages in protest. Because protest always occurs in the aesthetic as well as the political register. Protest is an action or gesture—to occupy, to remove, to destroy—that must have an audience. A protest must be witnessed if it is to change the conversation, the trajectory of thought, the law, or the political context. It is a performance designed to be seen and heard. It was just five weeks ago (as I write) that protests turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists clashed with counter-demonstrators over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate [End Page 285] general Robert E. Lee. A car driven by a member of the white supremacist group intentionally plowed into the crowd of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at least thirty-four others. This occurred at a "Unite the Right" rally that was organized against the backdrop of controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the country. Campaigns to eliminate monuments to the Confederacy from public spaces began in response to the 2015 mass shooting of nine African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Traditionalists (and white supremacists) objected to "erasing history," even though the memorials targeted for removal were not built during or immediately after the Civil War. They were created during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement as a means of intimidating African Americans and celebrating racism and oppression. These monuments performed their own version of erasure—concealing the violence of slavery and white supremacy under the cloak of a revisionist history. African Americans, anti-racists, and anti-fascists wanted them gone. And when photos emerged of the alleged Emanuel AME Church shooter (an avowed white supremacist) posing with the Confederate flag, civil rights groups fought to end the practice of flying it on the grounds of their State House. Even the conservative Republican governor agreed, but only the legislature had the power to remove it. While lawmakers debated and stalled, in a powerful refusal of the Confederate legacy of racial intimidation and fear, Black civil rights activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and cut down the Confederate flag. It was a carefully choreographed performance. Newsome and other activists designed the optics. They decided that a Black woman should be the one to cut down the flag and that a white man, activist James Tyson, would help her over the fence "as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides"1—a choice both political and aesthetic. Newsome and Tyson were arrested and the flag was replaced. Weeks later, it was finally removed by vote of the South Carolina House and Senate. In his recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, Michael Eric Dyson states, "The only way to save our nation, and, yes to save yourselves [addressing so called white folk], is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports."2 The removal of monuments and symbols that represent a deeply ingrained, white supremacist historical imaginary is one small step toward this "letting go." But erasure is not the only aesthetic/political strategy. Last week in Central Park, a statue of Christopher Columbus was defaced—its hands stained with red paint and its pedestal scrawled with the words "Hate will not be tolerated - #somethingscoming." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned what he said was a criminal act of vandalism, but Daily Show host Trevor Noah disagreed: "… honestly, I don't know if you can even call this [End Page 286...