Stanley N. Katz served as the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University from 1978 to 1986. He left to become President of the American Council of Learned Societies, the national humanities organization in the United States. When he stepped down from that position in 1997, he returned to teaching and high-level institutional service at Princeton, including as the Acting Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs from 2004 to 05 and 2016 to 17. Katz’s contributions to legal history include, in addition to a vast array of articles and the books cited in the footnotes below, his work as Editor in Chief of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History and of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court. He has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and American Society for Legal History, as Vice President of the Research Division of the American Historical Association, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Center for Jewish History, and many other institutions. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians. President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011.

Abstract This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.

Changing the Subject in the School Wars: An American Historical Association Research Team Perspective - Erratum

The dominance of originalism in contemporary constitutional interpretation gives historians both an opportunity and a responsibility to explain and illustrate how our discipline would resolve questions about the original meaning, intention, and understanding of particular clauses. In response to this challenge, the Brennan Center at NYU Law School organized a Historians’ Council to mobilize how the profession can contribute to ongoing legal and political debates. Four members of the council formed a panel at the January 2025 annual meeting of the American Historical Association to discuss our approaches to the subject and to forecast the agenda going forward.

On January 5, 2025, the attendees at the American Historical Association convention in New York City voted to approve a resolution strongly condemning Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Despite the lack of evidence, the resolution accused Israel of something called “scholasticide” and framed the conflict as an episode of “Settler Colonialism,” an empirically vacuous theory that distorts the past, erases 2,000 years of Jewish history, and justifies the murderous slaughter of Jews, Israel, and all Western nations and people.

Changing the Subject in the School Wars: An American Historical Association Research Team Perspective

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Abstract: This article revisits the debate over presentism in historical writing touched off by American Historical Association President James Sweet in an August 2022 column for the Association’s newsletter. Sweet’s statement, expressing concern that historians motivated by today’s political concerns sometimes distort historical evidence, sparked a flurry of responses, mostly from detractors in public and supporters in private. Leaders in the profession and writers in the popular press articulated in response a mainstream compromise position: present-day concerns are an entirely legitimate point of departure for historians but must be held in check by respect for research integrity. This article challenges the rhetorical binary between presentism and strict empiricism, arguing that framing the issue in this way downplays the most important characteristic of ‘good history’, interpretive originality. Neither political passion nor scrupulous research suffice to produce great works of history which typically originate in creatively counter-intuitive thinking.

Abstract: This issue opens with Bonnie G. Smith's reflection on the life and scholarship of the late Natalie Zemon Davis. Both scholars served on this Journal's Founding Board of Associate Editors and gave shape to the fields of women's history and gender history. Among her many honors, Professor Davis served as President of the American Historical Association and received the National Humanities Medal. Smith considers Davis's profound impact on women's history through groundbreaking, accessible research and dedicated mentorship of generations of students.

The aim of the study is to examine the activities of professional academic associations in the U.S., which are close to the memory institutions in Europe. The author examines the role of professional associations as memory institutions in the development of memorial culture through the representation of the past in contemporary politics, its reflection in public and public spaces of American society. The novelty of the study lies in the comparison of institutions that determine the main vectors and trajectories of historical policy as memory policy in the United States. The article analyses the problems of the activities of institutionalized actors of collective memory policy in the U.S., including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. It hypothesizes that these groups can shape civil society versions of collective memory as alternatives to politically motivated use of the past by political elites. The article deals with the institutional and formal features of historical politics in the United States, the participation of historical associations in memorial conflicts and “memory wars”, issues of politicization of history and the academic community’s attempts at forming a canon of historical collective memory which is formally free from ideological influences. The activities of professional historical associations have supposedly been a factor in the development of revisionism in the interpretation of the history of the American South and the Confederate States of America. Therefore, the author considers the role and responsibility of American historians as public intellectuals who shaped compromise versions of memorial culture that contributed to the consolidation of society. The article highlights the contribution of professional historical associations as memory institutions to the development of mnemonic spaces of American society and its memorial culture. It analyses the attempts of American historians to preserve the “purity” of academic research in the context of the growing ideologization and instrumentalization of history by ruling elites. The research results suggest that memory institutions are an important factor in the development of contemporary identities in the United States in the context of revision of the past and the formation of new or alternative memorial canons in American political culture.

The singing Indians of Paraguay: musical practices and dynamics of mobility in colonial Asunción (16th-18th centuries) (Buenos Aires: Editorial sb, 2020), written by musicologist and historian Laura Fahrenkrog, won the 2021 Clarence H. Haring Award » awarded by the American Historical Association every five years to a historical study on Latin America. In turn, the author's doctoral thesis, which gave rise to the book, obtained the Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal Award in 2018 from the Chilean Academy of History. Being very unlikely that a work with such distinctions is of low quality, it is not surprising that it is one of the most relevant investigations in recent years on the musical life of colonial Spanish America.

Abstract This essay engages the dismissal of presentism and identity politics by the former president of the American Historical Association. In doing so, the essay argues that his essay shares a rhetorical style with other intellectuals and politicians that can aptly be called the spectacle of transgression. The essay argues that this spectacle works to obscure the material conditions of higher education in general and of history in particular.

Research Article| May 01 2023 A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District James R. Grossman James R. Grossman JAMES R. GROSSMAN is executive director of the American Historical Association. Formerly vice-president for research and education at the Newberry Library, he has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago. He is editor emeritus of the University of Chicago Press book series “Historical Studies of Urban America,” which he abandoned to his colleagues after fifty volumes. Articles and short essays have focused on urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Daily News, North Shore Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and elsewhere. Grossman’s consulting experience includes history-related projects generated by BBC, Smithsonian, various “Teaching American History” programs, and a wide range of theater companies, films, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on governing boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Center for Research Libraries, National Humanities Alliance, Vivian G. Harsh Society, and Chicago Metro History Education Center. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James R. Grossman; A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 78–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In January 2022, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the leadership of the Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District (California) opposing a proposed Resolution No. 21–12, “Resolution Opposing the Teaching of Critical Race Theory” (see the proposed resolution at https://4.files.edl.io/e3c9/11/22/21/155531-39d91aa4-c235-4949-a1f4-153f76aa17e8.pdf). We were alerted to this agenda item by a resident concerned about censorship and the quality of history education. We immediately noticed that its text resembled bills being introduced in many state legislatures; the AHA had already begun writing letters to members of those legislatures (for the AHA’s list of letters, organized by state—at this writing, eighteen states—see https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/teaching-history-with-integrity/freedom-to-learn). In this particular letter the AHA noted that “the proposal singled out one set of ideas—critical race theory—as a subject that cannot be taught in Placentia–Yorba Linda schools. The letter includes a link to a statement criticizing similar legislative efforts to restrict education about racism in American... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Keepers of the Books Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution I GENERALLY DISTRUST social media, but scrolling through the pages of Instagram offers unexpected musings. Between royalty displays, daredevil feats, and wildlife postings, opulent and dilapidated interiors of castles and villas remind us of the vanity of all things. The photographs of French designer-turned-advertiser Francis Meslet show abandoned libraries while others showcase stately British libraries. Surfing the internet further reveals hundreds of pictures of dilapidated or abandoned libraries and entire warehouses filled with discarded books. Fortunately, throughout history, for every book destroyed, one has been saved, and for every intentional or nonintentional, commercial or accidental destruction of books, there has been a loving devotion to preserve the written word. We must never lose sight of this cycle of book production and destruction. Some book-saving initiatives are respectful of form, content, and use, and some change one or all. After one century of mass production revolutionized the volume, cycle, price, and lifespan of book production, the digital revolution has opened endless possibilities. From selling used or discarded books online to creating worldwide digital book archives, a revolution in attitude has occurred. Reverence for physical copies is out, playful initiatives are in. Adding artistic or whimsical elements and deconstructing books give another visual dimension to the [End Page 66] written word and multiply the ways in which it can be seen and read, understood and used. We have come a long way from the early repurposing of leather spines, gold lettering, and gilded pages stuffed with empty blocks filling nouveau riche bookshelves. A modern reverse ekphrasis is repurposing book form and content with bewildering creativity. From DIY enthusiasts to renowned artists, aesthetic surgery repurposes pages into paper cups, saucers, wall art, or containers for flora sculptures. Laurent Niclot and Kailee Bosch's teapots made of laminated book pages pressed between turned wood pieces inspire a new reflection on the term "vessels of knowledge." UK-based Maisie Matilda draws gorgeous paintings on the edges of hardcover books, creating "magical-feeling settings" for the books. Isobelle Ouzman creates altered book sculptures from hardback novels, journals, and notebooks, creating "a mix of illustrated and carved sculptures" with dreamlike visual scenes, prolonging the storytelling in a fairytale genre. New York-based artist Brian Dettmer cuts into old books to create remixed works of art, carving around whatever he finds interesting. LA-based Mike Stilkey uses stacks of old books as his canvases to make small portraits and giant sculptural installations, and often paints in the margins of books. A spectacular version of the book stack concept is Matej Kren's Idiom book tower. This trend was even featured on the front page of the American Historical Association's February 2023 Perspectives. There is a lot to learn from giving books and readers a second chance to rethink literacy. The proliferation of multispatial, multiuse books raises a question, however: Will future generations no longer know how to turn pages (in the way prescribed by their native traditions), the way they no longer know how to read time on analog watches? Will the digital age find an Esperanto format for books? Turning to the "real" preservation of books, everyone can name private or state foundations with unique collections, from the Mazarin Library in Paris to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello; everyone has a favorite antiquarian bookstore or knows private book collectors, from the proud owners of priceless ancient copies to the managers of more democratic collections, such as Alberto Manguel. But these are local and have limited circulation. The real book preservation today is digital and global. UNESCO's World Book Capital Network, launched digitally in the fall of 2022, is committed to encouraging literacy, lifelong learning, and freedom of expression. A collaborative project with worldwide partner organizations created the World Digital Library to which all major national libraries have access. Its descriptive metadata of world libraries' holdings is available in seven languages including English. It features prominently on the home page of the Library of Congress and includes downloadable maps, texts, photographs, movies, and music as well as conference videos, podcasts, and museum artifacts and exhibits. Several bookstores such...

The Polish American Historical Association Continues its Mission: Somethings Old, Somethings New

In 2022, one hundred and fifty years after Charlotte E. Ray was certified as the first Black woman lawyer in the United States,1 Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed as the first Black female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. During confirmation hearings, Jackson faced hostility over her purported embrace of critical race theory,2 echoing antagonism faced by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Senator Lindsey Graham had earlier questioned Sotomayor about whether she was “a disciple of the legal realism school,”3 bringing the arcane legal movement to public consciousness. Like literary realism, legal realism began to materialize in the aftermath of the Civil War, and its credo became Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s assertion that “[t]he life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”4 Both realist movements linked disciplinary reformation after the Civil War to debates about what citizenship meant amidst a second founding that included the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments.5 The quest for racial, gender, and economic justice that motivated many realists continues,6 moreover, as reflected in a recent ALR forum about teaching American literature from 1860 to 1910.7 Understanding the first Reconstruction's intellectual roots is crucial in the Third Reconstruction.8Over the past quarter century, law-and-literature scholarship has analyzed postbellum legal and literary developments through the lens of citizenship studies9 but discussions of legal realism's relationship with literary realism remain underdeveloped.10 Tapping into research for my book project, An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship, this essay first historicizes and conceptualizes the two realist movements. In summarizing and comparatively evaluating the realisms, I note points of contention among practitioners and scholars seeking to define and historicize the movements. Next I show how our history of literary realism would be enriched by engaging more deeply with legal realism, referencing my archival work and other obscure finds. Benefits could include better comprehending realist intellectual networks and literary realists’ influence on legal theory, reassessing the criteria by which we deem literary texts canonical and discerning literary realism's afterlives. Charting the interactions of disciplines “that shape and are shaped by an everchanging cultural idiom of justice”11 can help scholars constitute a more inclusive intellectual history of the realisms as a means of ultimately constituting a more equitable society. Both realisms arose from the Civil War's embers with the founding of the “Club” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the late 1860s. W. D. Howells, Henry James, and Holmes were among the attendees at the Club's interdisciplinary monthly soirées.12 The Club's emergence occurred not only in the shadow of an existential national crisis, but coincided with legal and philosophical revolutions. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, which were ratified between 1865 and 1870, expanded constitutional rights by respectively abolishing slavery (except when imposed as a criminal punishment), establishing federal citizenship, and prohibiting the denial of voting rights based on race. For trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, the amendments “formalize[d] the great moral issues underlying the Civil War.”13 During the early 1870s, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce inaugurated pragmatism, which emphasizes the practical consequences of hypotheses.14 The foundation of professional organizations like the Modern Language Association (1883), the American Historical Association (1884), and the Association of American Law Schools (1900) later in the century began to solidify disciplines as higher education burgeoned. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, women's disfranchisement, the rise of the peonage system, and the Supreme Court's upholding of Jim Crow laws exemplified the failure of ideals embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments.15 Realist intellectuals thus often cast themselves as disciplinary dissenters seeking to demystify the public about inequalities.16Henry James in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) diagnosed the malady scholars of literary and legal realism would suffer in attempting to theorize the movements in this complex context. He attested: “It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being.”17 The opacity of the terms “literary realism” and “legal realism” was evident to both movements’ proponents; James, Howells, and Mark Twain ascribed different meanings to literary realism and Karl Llewellyn would in the twentieth century maintain that legal realists constituted “no group with an official or accepted, or even with an emerging creed.”18 Preliminarily, challenges defining literary and legal realism arise because “realism” is an evanescent term of art.19 Reality was perceived as destabilized in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, resulting in a paradox for intellectual movements invoking the term as realism became both “an imperative and a problem.”20 Observing how literature has historically developed from one generation of authors revolting against their predecessors’ representations of reality, Stuart Sherman suggested that “[t]he real distinction between one generation and another is in the thing which each takes for its master truth—in the thing which each recognizes as the essential reality for it.”21Given this epistemological relativism, definitions of literary realism have abounded, but they tend to be more tautological than edifying. The most common keywords are variants of “fact” and “truth”; Howells defined literary realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” and he enjoined authors to “[l]et fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are.”22 More instructive is considering the genres literary realists defined themselves in opposition to: popular sentimental literature and, depending on their form, romances. Realism was seen to reject “the fantastic, the fairy-tale like, the allegorical and symbolic, the highly stylized, [and] the purely abstract and decorative,” qualities associated with American Renaissance literature.23 Literary realism diverged from romance along dimensions including form, ideology, and content. Formally, literary realists employed “[g]raphic scene-painting, recognizable characters, and plausible dialogue and narration” to create what Henry James deemed an “illusion of life.”24 Regarding literary realism's content and ideology, Vernon Parrington—in a Howellesian passage—connected literary realists’ commonplace subject matter with their advocacy of progressive democracy.25 Parrington associated romantic literature, rightly or wrongly, with a non-democratic (i.e., unAmerican) political system, harnessing debates about literary genres to political debates.As with literary realism, legal realism's periodization and conceptualization are fluid; the movement is generally recognized as fluorescing in the interwar period, namely after the high period of literary realism in the late-nineteenth century, but the “long” legal realist era has been said to span from 1870 to 1960.26 While a more moderate version of legal realism akin to early literary realism prevailed before World War I, an arguably more iconoclastic jurisprudential philosophy that some critics see as bearing parallels with literary naturalism emerged later. The term “legal realism” was popularized by Karl Llewellyn, whose 1931 manifesto “Some Realism about Realism” catalogued the movement's premises.27 Llewellyn had studied realist literature as an undergraduate at Yale and he apparently used the term literarily.28 While Llewellyn and other twentieth-century legal realists often cited Holmes as an intellectual forefather, legal realism was conceptualized in the late-nineteenth century by several other important legal and literary figures, including Justice John Marshall Harlan, Albion Tourgée, and Charles Chesnutt.29 Drawing upon their predecessors’ intellectual activism, in the twentieth century, realist lawyers would be pivotal forces behind the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.30Legal realists’ characterization of formalism in law parallels how literary realists associated the romance genre with abstractions divorced from reality. Howells’ grasshopper analogy for a literary realist aesthetic distinguished between an idealized, veneer-laden “cardboard grasshopper,” an apt metaphor for legal realists’ view of classic legal formalism, and a “commonplace,” “real” grasshopper, which could be equated with the multi-dimensional, bottom-up perspective on law that legal realists sought to delineate.31 For legal realists, formalism could imply the inexorability of legal interpretation, thereby cloaking a decisionmaker's exercise of power. Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900) illustrates a key formalist tenet that legal realists strove to countermand, i.e., that legal rhetoric reflects reality. Cedars portrays a fraught encomium to North Carolina's antebellum history: “On almost every page of this monumental work could be found the most ardent panegyrics of liberty, side by the side with the slavery statistics of the state,—an incongruity of which the learned author was deliciously unconscious.”32 A retrospective on legal realism reflected a similar critique of legal language and identified other “common points of departure” for realists: the conception of law and society in flux, with law typically behind; the notion of judicial creation of law; the conception of law as a means to social ends, and the evaluation of law by its effects; insistence on objective study of legal problems, temporarily divorcing the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’; distrust of legal rules as descriptions of how law operates or is actually administered, and particularly of their reliability as a prognostic of decision; insistence on the need for more precise study of legal situations or decisions in narrower categories, and for sustained programmatic research on these lines.33Describing the law in action along these dimensions could help close the chasm between ideals about social justice and the realities of legal justice,34 a leitmotif of realist literature.Legal realist works have methodological, substantive, and ideological qualities that ally them with realist literature, but the realisms never converged fully given disciplinary and generic differences (e.g., novels v. judicial opinions). For example, like literary realists, legal realists championed applying empirical methods to create fact-specific texts; however, unlike literary realists, their analyses tended to focus on abstract, general explanations as opposed to individual cases. Legal realists also probed the relevance of “extralegal” facts for assessing law's actual operation and they were influenced by synchronic cultural and disciplinary developments. Like literary realists, legal realists perceived that the social sciences and sciences provided tools allowing reality to be depicted more objectively. While such representations alone would not be transformative, realists held that a precondition for meaningful reform was clarifying what was to be reformed.35 Despite their interdisciplinarity, legal realists at times had a propensity to reduce complex legal questions to simple judicial ones.36 Realist literature, in contrast, often portrayed law's pervasive spectrality and not as manifested through court cases alone. Many literary realists “domesticated” legal realism by applying its tenets to the intimate sphere and everyday life to demonstrate how no realm could remain immune from oppressive laws.The most notable distinction between the realist groups may have been their exponents and areas of representational interest. While legal realism was largely promoted by white men through courts and at elite law schools that discriminated against women and people of color before the civil rights revolution and were practically inaccessible to much of the working class, literary realists were a more diverse group. Mainstream legal realists were part of an insular institutional and professional network; Llewellyn cited only men and no African Americans in his preliminary list of legal realists, for example.37 Many literary realists, in contrast, came from working-class backgrounds and were people of color or women writing from a relatively disempowered position vis-à-vis law. Several of them had law-related experiences, including through education and practice, but they generally remained outside of the power structures in which legal realists were embedded. Following from that alterity, literary realists explored a broader array of subjects than legal realists. Commercial law and socioeconomic issues preoccupied legal realists while racial and gender inequalities went unaddressed in many now-classic works despite the legal authors writing during a period when women and people of color were mobilizing for rights. Literary realism evidenced reactionary tendencies,38 but a critical mass of literature on racial and gender justice issues was nonetheless published and retains its potency. Realist understandings of law frequently permeate these texts, even by authors lacking formal legal training, suggesting the cross-pollination between legal and literary realism after the Civil War.39 In light of this comparative analysis, applying a disciplinary double-vision to literary and legal realist texts and figures may enable us to craft a more inclusive history of both realisms. The following discussion evaluates a number of artifacts, including a law review article, novel, and correspondence, to demonstrate scholarly and pedagogical benefits of construing the realisms more synergistically than is common in literary and legal studies. Moreover, law and literature movement founder James Boyd White's concept of “integration” from Justice as Translation indicates the wider ramifications of this line of inquiry. White there asks readers: What might it mean to integrate, to put together in a complex whole, aspects of our culture, or of the world, that seem to us disparate or unconnected, and in so doing, to integrate, to bring together in interactive life, as aspects of our own minds and beings that we normally separate or divide from each other? What kind of lives could we make for ourselves, what kind of communities with others?40Interdisciplinary intellectual history is in this view a personally and socially creative endeavor, and it may also serve a corrective function through recuperating figures and works marginalized from conventional disciplinary histories.41 Given that prescience and forthrightness about ongoing inequalities may have caused such marginalization ab initio, recovery efforts assume especial importance in reconstituting disciplinary, academic, and political communities today.Thinking capaciously about realist intellectual networks, including through investigating more unconventional sources, can reform our perceptions of literary realists’ influence on legal theory. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s library, for instance, contains a copy of Charles Chesnutt's Frederick Douglass biography.42 Intriguingly, prior to unearthing this link between the two literary lawyers, I had drafted a book project chapter in which I analyzed Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) in tandem with Holmes’ writings.43 I argued that Chesnutt's developing and applying legal realist tenets in the racial justice context called for scrutinizing traditional histories of legal realism centered on a coterie of white men and debates about theory, economic rights, and purported crises in legal education. Additionally, given scholarship questioning whether Chesnutt was a bona fide literary realist,44 I asserted that thinking of realist criteria more expansively would be productive, especially to the extent that conventional criteria did not fully account for the range of realisms reflected in writing by women and people of color.45 While Howells and Twain are more obvious influences, with Holmes even being invited to be honorary vice-president of the Mark Twain Society,46 Holmes’ conceptualization of legal realism was shaped by other literary realist figures as well.More direct evidence of literary realists’ impact on legal theory comes from a landmark law review article by Roscoe Pound, the Harvard Law School dean who helped spearhead legal realism before becoming a movement critic. Pound began his article “Law in Books and Law in Action” by recounting a scene from Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In the scene, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are disputing about whether to use a case-knife (as books Tom read would recommend) or a pick-axe (as Huck thinks is a more practical instrument) to rescue Jim, an enslaved man. While Huck comments about Tom's being “Full of principle” in avowing to use a case-knife, Tom grudgingly employs the pick-axe; Pound construed the interchange between the boys as emblematic of the formalist/realist debate in law.47Pound's analysis of the episode illuminates how literary realist texts could vivify legal realist concepts and impact the development of legal theory and the law itself, including into the present. Judges continue to cite Huckleberry Finn in a variety of cases, including as authority.48 The episode also depicts how race was central to the realisms even in its apparent absence. Pound's interpretation contains no overt commentary on the racial dynamics of the episode, yet the article's fundamental framing of legal realism derives from a novel engrossed with how antebellum racial inequalities persisted into the postbellum era.49 Legal realism was therefore not without its shortcomings,50 but stories like Houston's championing of Paul Laurence Dunbar attest to more affirmatively intertwined legal and literary realist histories.51 In 1915, upon being selected a valedictorian of his Amherst class, Houston chose to speak on Dunbar. As Geraldine Segal recounts, “Someone objected to this selection, commenting that many people had never heard of Dunbar. Houston replied that by the time he finished speaking, everyone would know about Dunbar. His prediction was correct.”52Foregrounding legal realism in our constructions of literary realist history could relatedly spark new conversations on canon formation, resulting in a revision of literary realist criteria to encompass previously overlooked figures and texts. Furthermore, considering literary realism as an interdisciplinary, cross-racial, and multigenerational movement could create new pairings of authors and works, which may in turn highlight the movement's contemporary resonances. Albion Tourgée, Homer Plessy's attorney in the notorious Supreme Court case upholding “separate but equal” laws, provides a prime example of how legal realism may revise our understandings of literary realist history. While Tourgée's earlier Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880)53 have seen a scholarly revival, research on Tourgée's other literary writings is relatively scant in comparison. Yet as I show in a recent essay, construing Tourgée's late novel Pactolus Prime (1890) alongside one of his posthumously published legal realist essays reveals the novel's importance in literary realist history.54 Additionally, given that the novel portrays professional racism and debates about reparations for African Americans, it has especial significance in the present Black Lives Matter era.55Archival research also manifests Black interest in resuscitating Tourgée's reputation. Citing A Fool's Errand's realistic depiction of Black experiences, Nathan Rogan, an African American man, contacted Richard Wright in 1941 about writing an introduction to a reissued edition with the new title The Puzzle of Americanism; however, Wright declined based on the project's ostensible commercial unviability.56 Rogan perceived Wright and Tourgée to be intellectual kindred spirits but correspondence between Rogan and Wright evidences the influence of pragmatic criteria on canonicity as well. Assigning the correspondence between Wright and Rogan along with texts by Wright and Tourgée could generate a lively discussion about canon formation and the complicated legacies of both literary and legal realism.57 Notably, Tourgée's metaphor of legal color-blindness, which he developed through literary and legal writings, continues to saturate political and legal discourse.58 Judge James C. Ho's concurrence in a recent major voting rights case proclaimed: “The Equal Protection Clause enshrines color-blindness, not critical race theory.”59 Seeing the “other” realism in literary and legal realist texts may revitalize intellectual history to address such paramount interpretive questions today.

This issue of Polish American Studies opens volume 80 of the Polish American Historical Association's journal. Volume 1, edited by Constantin Symonelewicz, appeared in 1944 under the imprint of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, PAHA's parent organization. A lot has of course changed since 1944, but Polish American Studies remain a premier scholarly journal with a mission to present and promote the history of Polish diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Polish American Studies is now broadly indexed and available online through JSTOR (past issues) and Scholarly Publishing Collective (current issues). Subscribers to Polish American Studies, both individuals and institutions, come from countries on all continents, and our editorial board as well as contributing authors represent a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and research interests. Volume 80 is certainly a milestone worth celebrating.As tradition dictates, we open the issue with an address by the outgoing PAHA President, Neal Pease, who reflects on his term in office during the challenging pandemic and post-pandemic times. In the first article in this issue, James S. Pula revisits foundational questions of why immigrants from the Polish lands came to America, how many came and when, and where they settled. Taking a long view of the problem, Pula examines both Polish and American circumstances, and uses the most recent research on the topic.In the second article, Thomas Hollowak presents a more focused view of American Polonia's history in a particular place and particular time. Hollowak explores the press chronicles of crime and murder in Baltimore that involved Polish immigrants as both perpetrators and victims, highlighting an understudied aspect of Polish American experience at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An announcement of note follows: John J. Bukowczyk shares news about PAHA Books, a new publishing initiative of our organization.In “Varia,” we present another research institution that focuses on the history of Poland and the history of Poles in America. The Polish Heritage Library and Archives in Panna Maria, Texas, although a relatively new institution, grows out of the tradition of Polish immigrant settlement in Texas, which continues since 1854.Last but not least, the book review section includes reviews of books authored or edited by Magdalena Kubow, Imogene Salva, Joanna Kulpińska, Dominik A. Stecula, Beata Dorosz, and Karen Walczyk Prescott.