Course Of American History Research Articles

Teaching nineteenth-century American history with music: leveraging the possibilities through technology and Universal Design for Learning

ABSTRACT This article explains the value of music for applying the UDL framework to university-level history instruction and highlights practical ways to integrate music in history teaching. It uses content analysis of convenience samples of degree program learning outcome statements and syllabi from American history courses addressing the nineteenth century to assess the suitability of musical materials. It explains how instructors can incorporate musical materials to provide learners with multiple means of representation and expression when working with course concepts. Relevant technologies discussed include repositories of digitized music and apps facilitating instructor and learner engagement with musical materials in history courses.

Teaching about racial violence in a place of historical trauma

PurposeThe authors describe an original unit plan that draws from local and national concerns for truthful history education about the history of racial violence in the United States. The unit plan contextualizes one impetus for truth and reconciliation in a community with a history of anti-Black violence.Design/methodology/approachThe participants partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative to pilot the unit in their district’s new African American History course. The unit drew on historical research and cultural memory to situate local history within a broader context of racism and violence.FindingsThe teachers identified eight goals for the unit so that students could understand racialized violence, acknowledge racism as the lived experience of many of their students, and participate in a collaborative learning environment with productive discussions. Speaking from their own experiences with racism, and creating opportunities for students to do the same, the teachers aided the community in voicing long-silenced memories.Research limitations/implicationsBesides bridging some of the gaps between local, regional, and national histories, more research is needed to further examine historical trauma and its implications for both the past and present, in order to amplify and humanize experiences of racism. Additional research is a critical step in developing more thoughtful, empathic and holistic discussions of history and racism at the local level.Practical implicationsIn the wake of the recent past, the authors have learned that teaching about the history of racial violence can be enhanced and empowered by reference to relevant current events. The resurgence of racially charged language and violence over the past few years makes this goal more urgent than ever. This unit gives practical guidance to teachers who face this challenge.Social implicationsThe sociopolitical reality of historical trauma and racism must be confronted, and proximity to key events is important in conveying the urgency of racial violence and the need for history education that addresses it. Teachers are making difficult decisions about their options for teaching about race, and they are understandably concerned about any perceived missteps. Nonetheless, inclusive, truthful history education is an appropriate and essential response to narratives of exclusion and silence as the authors help students to develop deliberative skills concerning difficult topics such as racial violence. Teachers and students, together, can do the crucial work of remembering.Originality/valueThe stripping away of narrative agency, identity and history can cover up stories about the stripping away of life and dignity. In the unit plan, the authors recognize truth and reconciliation—especially in the education of people who have relatively little exposure to topics of race and racism—as elemental to a restorative stance against racism.

Examining Virginia’s African American History Course through the Lens of Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge

During the 2020–2021 academic year, Virginia piloted a state-designed secondary African American history elective in 16 school divisions. Using the framework of Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge (RPCK), this study examined the treatment of race in the new course by analyzing the state-created curriculum materials and interviewing three teachers that were part of the pilot program. Findings suggest that the curriculum challenged problematic traditional historic narratives, addressed issues of identity and structural racism, and applied racial knowledge through civic action projects. Teachers felt prepared to teach the course due to sustained racially conscious professional development facilitated by the Virginia Department of Education. The curriculum of the state-designed course and its implementation by teachers align with the core tenets of RPCK, such as its interrogation of power structures and inequalities, examination of intersectionality, and empowerment of students to resist racism and injustice through informed social action. Our analysis found the course does not use “inherently divisive concepts” as they are portrayed in Executive Order No. 1.

Notes on Contributors

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

Review: Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego, by Sandra E. Bonura

Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego, by Sandra E. Bonura Sandra E. Bonura. Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 440 pp. Hardcover $34.95. Rowena Gray Rowena Gray Rowena Gray is an economic historian who researches crime, housing markets, and technological change over the course of American history. She works at the University of California at Merced, and earned a PhD in economics at the University of California, Davis. She is now working on her first book, on housing affordability in New York City. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2021) 98 (4): 120–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.4.120 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rowena Gray; Review: Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego, by Sandra E. Bonura. California History 1 November 2021; 98 (4): 120–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.4.120 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cinco Dedos: A Mexican American Studies Framework


 
 
 Mexican American Studies (MAS) courses have been criticized for many years. Legislation in Arizona and Texas have attempted to ban the content. This article pushes back on this attempt of oppression and offers MAS teachers a framework to apply when teaching the content. Using a timeline to depict the years of attempts for Mexican American Studies to be approved, we offer practitioners and researchers an Ethnic Studies framework particularly with MAS courses. Using cultural art, poetry, and literature, MAS teachers can benefit from using the Cinco Dedos framework especially at the secondary (6-12) grade levels. This framework prepares MAS teachers to utilize various Chicanx histories to tell the stories of Mexican American heroes not talked about in traditional American history courses. This article also provides tools to use in secondary MAS classrooms that highlight Mexican American culture for students provided by a MAS teacher. One of the founders of the framework uses this in his MAS course at a high school located in San Antonio, TX. 
 
 

America, the Bordered: A Review of Charles A. Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World

America, the BorderedA Review of Charles A. Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World Rachel Li (bio) Like any other facet of United States politics, American foreign policy varies from one presidential administration to the next: from “the Monroe Doctrine” and “the Roosevelt Corollary” to “dollar diplomacy” and “moral diplomacy.” In recent years, the America First grand strategy has reflected a sudden push for isolationism following decades of worldwide American intervention. However, isolationism itself is rooted in the starting years of our nation, dating back to George Washington’s admonishment in his 1796 farewell address of “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”1 From Washington’s speech to the start of World War II, the United States mostly stayed in its own geopolitical sphere. While the second half of the 20th century saw a dramatic shift towards internationalism, prolonged American commitments around the globe eventually led to recent calls for retreat. Charles A. Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World thoroughly details the complete trajectory of past, present, and future American isolationism for the first time in scholarly literature on American foreign policy. Kupchan presents a nuanced thesis for strategic isolationism and selective engagement in order to remedy previous interventionist overstep, but not to overcorrect. In his work, Kupchan recognizes the flaws in the reasoning historically used to justify isolationism, yet he stays hopeful that the United States can one day share a better version of the American experiment of democracy with the world. While Kupchan presents a strong case for current judicious retrenchment, he holds steadfast to his goal of objectively presenting isolationism as a continual trend throughout American history. A professor of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and former member of the National Security Council under President Clinton and President Obama, Kupchan not only speaks from his extensive research but also his first-hand experience with recent domestic politics.2 The lessons garnered by Kupchan from the course of American history offer policymakers, practitioners, scholars, students, and general readers deep insight into the future of the United States in an increasingly globalized world. Kupchan begins the first section of the book by briefly describing the current context of American foreign policy. This contextualization not only familiarizes the reader of the place of current policy in American history but also allows Kupchan to circle back to current events at the end of the book, thus mirroring the cyclical resurgence of isolationism in the United States. Kupchan then links today’s global political landscape of today back to George Washington’s “great rule” of non-entanglement.3 But before laying out the specific origins of isolationism, he emphasizes a key concept that has always served as the foundation for U.S. grand strategy: American exceptionalism, defined as the doctrine that “the United States represents a unique experiment in political and economic liberty that it is destined to share with the rest of the world.”4 The question that has always been at hand is whether the United States should share its ideals by serving as an example or by actively spreading American ideals to other countries. Although American exceptionalism has manifested itself in policies motivated by diametrically opposed political ideologies, it has regularly been touted by politicians including both President Obama [End Page 134] and President Trump, demonstrating that at least one area of common ground remains in our increasingly partisan modern-day politics. After establishing the role of American exceptionalism, Kupchan outlines six distinct principles of American isolationism: “1) capitalizing on natural security; 2) serving as a redeemer nation; 3) advancing liberty and prosperity at home; 4) preserving freedom of action abroad; 5) protecting social homogeneity; and 6) promoting pacifism.”5 While Kupchan recognizes that these principles are often contradictory or just fundamentally flawed, his discussion of provides the reader with a greater understanding of the historical context and confronts the less-than-exceptional parts of America’s story. For example, in his analysis of the War of 1812, Kupchan highlights the patriotism in...

The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta

Reviewed by: The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta April Langley (bio) The Writings of Phillis Wheatley vincent carretta, ed. Oxford University Press, 2019 226 pp. From start to finish, Vincent Carretta's The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (Writings) is the book I wished had been available when I taught my first course of early American literature more than twenty years ago. It is one that will quickly become a standard for instruction at all levels, [End Page 635] from K–12 teachers to undergraduate- and graduate-level professors to postgraduate instructors in early Anglo-, Euro-, and African American literature and history courses. For those instructors most familiar with Carretta's 2001 Penguin Classics version, you will recognize some subtle but important differences: timeline, extended introduction, and prefatory details that bring the most current historical context to her published and variant poetry and her life, freedom, marriage, and death. Of course, of critical significance is Wheatley's 1776 letter to Obour Tanner, discovered in 2005. Far from being a reprint, the 2019 Writings provides the fullest recovery of the early Black revolutionary poet and her works published, to date. Carretta brings the best of all archival and secondary resources available to this text. To begin with, the timeline contextualizes Wheatley for students to gain a better understanding of her works and her position within the political milieux of eighteenth-century Boston as it provides dates for such watershed events in colonial American history as the Seven Years' War, the Stamp Act (passage and repeal), the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Mansfield ruling, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the timeline also locates Wheatley geographically in such a way that instructors and students can consider the cultural and national contexts within which her publications and responses, especially variants, can be analyzed. Importantly, seemingly small details such as John Wheatley's death and the disposition of his estate, having left "PW nothing in his will" (xvii), and Wheatley's marriage, death, and that of her husband John Peters provide a handy reference point that permits quick reviews of dates, names, and publication sources of relevance to the poet's life and works. Writings also provides in one accessible text a correction of previous errors in the Wheatley bio-bibliography, as well as a rich selection of verified sources of Wheatley scholarship from which instructors and students alike can peer into the crevices of the extra textual and companion works as they glean from the insights provided by the diverse scholarly works listed in "Further Reading" section (including but not limited to an excellent supplemental work, Carretta's own Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage [U of Georgia P, 2011]). Indeed, the scholarship identified is as varied as Wheatley's own muses, and instructors will appreciate the foundational works therein as ones that will put students on a secure footing in their study of Wheatley as well as engage them in a deeper learning [End Page 636] experience of the poet's varied use of genres and writing style (e.g., elegiac, neoclassical, biblical paraphrase, occasional, and epistle) to address diverse contemporary and historical issues (personal, political, and religious)—underscoring the truly inclusive nature of Wheatley's Poems and Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—for a twenty-first-century student of American literature. The introduction engages students and enables rich class discussions about prevailing questions in early American literary history with regard to the enslaved African poet's agency and her "network of associations … in London … North American and Britain" (xx) and details the "terms" under which Wheatley "compelled" her manumission (xx), her "business acumen," and "anti-slavery stance" (xxi). Importantly, Writings allows a study of this author that is not so overly laden with references that it obscures the literary works. At the same time, prefatory details about "manuscript versions" and revisions invite consideration of the poet's "developing skill" (xxiii) and her "proto-national" strain. Additionally, insights regarding audience and reception of her published works in publication and prepublication records are invaluable to the novice and expert alike. Such features also offer concise historical, political, religious, and personal contexts...

Delaware Corporate Law and the 'End of History' in Creditor Protection

In this Chapter, we briefly survey the common law’s adventures with creditor protection over the course of American history with a special focus on Delaware, the most important jurisdiction for corporate law. We examine the evolution of the equitable doctrines that judges have used to answer a question that arises time and again: What help, if any, should the common law be to creditors that suffer losses due to the purported carelessness or disloyalty of corporate directors and officers? Judges have struggled to answer that question, first deploying Judge Story’s “trust fund doctrine” and then molding fiduciary duty law to fashion a remedy for creditors. In Delaware, the appetite of corporate law judges to protect creditors reached a high point in the early 2000s as judges flirted with recognizing a “deepening insolvency” tort cause of action. Suddenly, though, a new course was set, and Delaware’s judges effectively abandoned this project in a series of important decisions around the time of the financial crisis. In this “third generation” of jurisprudence, Delaware’s corporate law judges told creditors to look to other areas of law to protect themselves from opportunistic misconduct, such as bankruptcy law, fraudulent transfer law, and their loan contracts. However, as this Chapter illustrates, the same question of whether the common law ought to protect creditors has arisen time and again and today’s “settled” law is unlikely to represent the end of history in creditor protection.

In the shadows between slave and free: A case for detangling the word “slave” from the word “chattel”

ABSTRACT The phrase “chattel slavery” evokes a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade as people with African heritage were stolen, forced to labour under abhorrent conditions, and were powerless to prevent their children being sold away generation after generation. However, slaves were not the only people held in a chattel status through the course of American history. Both Indentured Servants and Convicts were held as chattel, albeit a temporary form. This essay suggests that historians of both slavery and unfree labour need to untangle the word chattel from the word slave – for a person who is chattel is not always a slave (and a slave is not always chattel). I argue that terminology is crucial, and that analysis of the semantics of the word chattel shows how current word usage does not match with actual word meaning, which has repercussions in the current political climate.

Analysis of an Open Textbook Adoption in an American History Course: Impact on Student Academic Outcomes and Behaviors

Textbook costs can have a significant impact on the purchasing behaviors and academic success of higher education students. Open textbooks promise significant cost savings, yet perceptions about quality and efficacy still linger. This study explored the impact of an open textbook adoption in an American history course on student academic outcomes and behaviors. Using a mixed-methods design, significant savings were realized with no decrease in student academic outcomes. Further, students reported having a positive experience using the open textbook, perceived the textbook as being of high quality, and expressed gratitude about the free cost. The authors describe the respective roles of the librarian/instructional designer team and note the importance of working collaboratively with instructors to ensure successful implementation of open textbook adoptions.

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era is the first in which we appear as coeditors. We enter this job with deep respect for what the journal has accomplished and enormous excitement for what we might help it do over the next five years. Our goals remain those that our friend and mentor Bill Blair articulated in his editor’s note for the founding issue. The new journal would bring, he wrote, “fresh perspective to the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while tying the struggles that defined the period to the broader course of American history and to a wider world. In this way, we hope to attract scholars across the many subfields that animate nineteenth-century history, providing a place where they can engage with each other.”1 This remains a powerful statement of the journal’s ambitions. It aims to be fresh, expansive, deeply engaged in historiography, and committed to advancing new perspectives, all at once. Indeed, the journal’s articles and essays vary in method, approach, and argument. The journal has been a site where scholars from many subfields engage to shape our understanding of the Civil War era through innovative research articles, widely read historiographical essays, probing book reviews, and eclectic posts on Muster. As we build on these strengths, we intend to use our term to press farther. We aim to incorporate the history and historiography of slavery more fully into the journal. We want the journal’s offerings to reflect the diversity of scholars working on the mid-nineteenth century United States and the multiplicity of topics they are investigating. We recognize that broadening the journal’s scope requires outreach and openness, and we intend to reach out every way we know how. We hope the journal will stand as evidence of how much is gained when we approach the past from a wide angle, determined to consider the full range of social, economic, political, cultural, and global forces that shaped the period and its people. We build on the extraordinary work of Bill Blair, the founding editor, and of the many others who have kept the journal vibrant and flourishing. While our names are on this issue’s masthead, the issue represents the extraordinary dedication of a group of interim editors who worked hard to sustain the journal in a period of transition, develop coherent systems for managing submissions and correspondence, and keep the journal [End Page 295] thriving while the Richards Center conducted the search for permanent editors. As this issue demonstrates, those interim editors—Rachel Shelden, Stacey Smith, and Luke Harlow—did far more than keep the journal afloat; they kept it a model of fresh, provocative, and deeply researched historical work, work of the very best kind and work that everyone associated with the journal and the field can be proud of. The journal and the field owe a great deal to the three of them and the journal staff, especially Managing Editor Matthew Isham and Editorial Assistant Megan Hildebrand. Careful readers will note other changes to the masthead, as well, and we look forward to celebrating those new additions in our editors’ note in the December issue. This issue includes three fine research articles that in different ways speak to the field’s creativity across the antebellum, wartime, and Reconstruction periods. Bennett Parten’s “‘Blow Ye Trumpet, Blow’: The Idea of Jubilee in Slavery and Freedom” examines the evolution of the idea of Jubilee in antislavery thought, as abolitionists turned to Jubilee to explain why and how society might change. Angela Zombek’s “The Power of the Press: Defining Disloyalty at Old Capitol Prison” analyzes the role of the popular press in policing disloyalty and shaping national discourses of loyalty and treason during the war. Catherine Jones’s “The Trials of Mary Booth and the Post–Civil War Incarceration of African American Children” studies how the postbellum court system in Virginia constructed African American children, especially girls, as criminal subjects and denied them presumptions of immaturity that helped shield white children from the full force of the law. As former review essay editors, we...

Asian Americans by Renee Tajima-Peña

Reviewed by: Asian Americans by Renee Tajima-Peña Melissa Phruksachart (bio) Asian Americans. Series Producer: Renee Tajima-Peña. PBS/WETA, 2020. 275 minutes. $29.99 DVD and $12.99 streaming. ISBN: 9781531712099. This five-part PBS documentary series on the history of Asians in the United States will become an essential part of the curriculum for ethnic studies and American history courses from high school to higher education. The team behind Asian Americans has produced a lively history combining archival footage, family stories, animations, and interviews with scholars, journalists, artists, descendants, and history-makers themselves. The series' engagement with knowledge is expository and fact-based, departing from the archival poetics of Loni Ding's documemoir approach in Ancestors in the Americas or the experimental approaches to truth and memory in Richard Fung's Dirty Laundry and Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy. Supplementing screenings with readings and discussions would help disentangle the contradictions and implicit values presented by the narrative. Its five episodes run approximately fifty-five minutes each and are organized chronologically. Episode one, "Breaking Ground," covers the nineteenth century to pre-World War II, and emphasizes that Asian migration to the United States in this period was driven by a demand for labor. It begins not with the construction of the transcontinental railroad, but with U.S. colonial expansion into the Philippines. The Igorots at the St. Louis World's Fair Philippine exhibition are not portrayed as sad, unidentified victims here, but hustling ancestors with their own goals. The episode follows a multilingual young man named Antero as he puts his language skills to use and pursues a transnational life between the United States and the Philippines. The episode then transitions to Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad and the racism and cruelty they faced as they became a threat to the white American workforce. This presents the opportunity to discuss the Chinese Exclusion Act, birthright citizenship in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and racial prerequisite cases such as United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. The remainder of this jam-packed episode addresses the "second generation"—the [End Page 511] children born of these nineteenth-century immigrants, who want to assert their Americanness, play baseball, and be in the movies. Episode two, "A Question of Loyalty," focuses on World War II, the Japanese American incarceration, and Asian American communities' varied responses. In particular, it follows the war's impact on the children of the Japanese American Uno family. One son, Buddy, feeling scorned by his country of birth, starts to investigate the appeal of Japanese imperial ambitions. He eventually travels to Japan to join its army news corps, while other members of his family move in and out of concentration camps across the United States. The episode follows the divided loyalties in the Uno family, as well as the pain and silence that covered up their story for several generations. Refreshingly, the episode refuses Asian American World War II history as simply Japanese American history. It also touches upon Japanese imperialism in Korea and Manchuria, which allied Korean and Chinese nationalists with the United States, and considers the impact of enlisting in the U.S. military for Chinese and Filipino Americans. By way of closing, the episode connects the legacy of the internment to descendants' contemporary activism against the ongoing incarceration of Mexican and Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Episode three, "Good Americans," addresses Asian American communities' reactions to the Cold War and the growth of the model minority stereotype after World War II. Asian American soldiers, having fought for democracy and freedom against fascism abroad, now expect equality at home. The episode notes how both racist policy and racist sentiment prevent integration from becoming a material reality. This impact is worsened by the Red Scare, when any Chinese Americans who contradicted the official U.S. position on China or who were simply contributing to Chinese diaspora newspapers came under FBI scrutiny. The story then shifts focus to Hawai'i and Hawaiian statehood to celebrate it as a platform from which the first Asian American members of Congress gain a foothold. The episode follows the careers of Hawaiian-born Representative Patsy Mink...

Power in Portraiture: Mother Catherine Spalding of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth

Power in Portraiture:Mother Catherine Spalding of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Mitchell Edward Oxford (bio) The motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, located on the outskirts of Bardstown, Kentucky, possesses an impressive archive befitting its proud tradition. Founded in 1812, only a few years after Bardstown was made the see for the country's first Catholic diocese west of the Alleghenies, the community quickly grew in size and reputation. Established with a mission to educate young girls, the sisters soon extended their ministry to encompass care for the sick and orphaned. They also expanded north to Louisville, the region's bustling, riverine hub. The chief architect of this growth was Mother Catherine Spalding. Born in 1793 to a middling Maryland family that had joined the westward stream of Catholic migrants to the American "Holy Land" centered on Bardstown, Catherine Spalding was elected the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth's first superior at age nineteen and held the role almost continuously until her death in 1858. Owing to her significance to the community, and to Catholic institutions throughout the Ohio River Valley, the archives at Nazareth possess a wealth of material relating to Mother Catherine. Perhaps the most extraordinary of these objects is the striking large-scale portrait featured on the cover of this issue. Her portrait offers us a window into how American women religious navigated the delicate politics of religion and gender in the early republic. 1 [End Page 93] We're in a remarkable moment when the wider scholarly community is coming to recognize the significance of Catholic women religious like Mother Spalding to the course of early American history, even for archetypally Anglo-Protestant spaces and narratives. Recently, Catherine O'Donnell's biography of Elizabeth Ann Seton and Ann Little's Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright have each demonstrated the importance of formidable mothers superior not just to the story of American Catholicism, but to early America as a whole. 2 Fittingly, the covers of these works are graced with iconic images of their subjects. Seton's irenic right profile and Wheelwright's compelling forward gaze each seem to capture something of their character. Nearly all surviving depictions of early American women religious were either painted by skilled amateurs, like that of Esther Wheelwright by an unknown fellow Ursuline nun—or, like Seton's profile, created post-mortem from earlier likenesses and descriptions. This absence of professional portraiture contrasted with the practice of leading American Catholic churchmen—Bishop (and later Archbishop) John Carroll of Baltimore, for example, sat for the renowned artist Gilbert Stuart around 1804. And it also differed from the vibrant tradition of commissioned portraits of prominent women religious in the Catholic societies of early modern Europe. 3 This dearth of formal portraiture was seemingly due to widely held misgivings among clerical elites about the prudence of encouraging women religious to play active and visible roles in early North American [End Page 94] society. And so, while images produced after death might venerate the memory of a beloved mother superior to edify the faithful, commissioning a costly professional portrait in life would have held the more dubious implication of celebrating her elevated standing in society. 4 Such concerns were especially pronounced among the Catholic leaders of the overwhelmingly-Protestant early United States, who cautioned American sisters to guard against the trappings of worldliness. In 1828, for instance, Father John David, the chaplain to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, objected to the sisters' describing themselves as "ladies" in their promotional material. Father David not only thought "the modest name of Religious persons" sufficient, he also griped that "women's minds were so weak that even a little appellation of this nature might open them to vanity." 5 The Politics of Material Culture at Nazareth Father David's preoccupation with female fallibility and vanity helps explain why Mother Catherine's portrait is so extraordinary. While its exact attribution remains a mystery, the painter's obvious skill suggests that Mother Catherine may have defied early American Catholic convention and sat for an accomplished artist. 6 The impressive technique of this unknown painter is best demonstrated in the subtlety of Mother Catherine's expression...

Book Review: The Schoolroom: A Social History of Teaching and Learning

Dale Allen Gyure’s The Schoolroom: A Social History of Teaching and Learning takes an in-depth look at how the structure of schools has changed over the course of American history, starting from Colonial America to the twenty-first century. After its well laid out table of contents, there is a helpful timeline, chronicling major developments in United States education history starting in 1635 with the opening of Boston Latin Grammar School and going up to 2016 with the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the new era of school design (xv-xix). It also includes a helpful glossary that defines specific terms, such as different building plans, types of schools, and educational theories. Throughout the chapters, words found in the glossary are in bold.

Evil History: Protecting Our Constitution Through an Anti-Originalism Canon of Constitutional Interpretation

This review assesses three recent books on the subject of originalism. Each approaches the question of originalism from a different angle. None of the books confronts the raw challenge to the authority of the framers leveled by Justice Thurgood Marshall in his speech upon the bicentennial of the United States Constitution. Marshall argued that the founding generation was too morally compromised, too bereft of information we now have as a result of the existence and experiences of millions of Americans since the close of the 18th century, and too imperfect in their efforts to design a sustainable government, to justify the devotion to their perspective originalism demands. In the face of this critique, originalism, which is a devotional doctrine, and originalists, its devotees, nevertheless insist that we should obey the founding generation and ignore, among other things, the “the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all.” Drawing on this and other more complete descriptions of our history, this review demands that advocates for an originalist methodology confront the full brunt of our past, both good and evil. The failure to do so has deep moral, political, sociological and legal ramifications. “Law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over whom law seeks to exercise its dominion.” To the extent that law writes a past that covers-up, papers-over, ignores or subverts the evil aspects of history, it engages in abuses that we would condemn if perpetrated by other nations as denial. As a methodology, this review rejects originalism as a presumptively justifiable methodology. It goes further. It proposes a canon of constitutional construction that would proscribe the use of originalism in any of its variants unless certain prophylactic historical facts are established or negated by the proponents of any form of originalism. Broadly speaking, this canon would require any party in any litigation or legal dispute seeking to offer or rely upon the perspective of the founding generation in any dispositive fashion to demonstrate that the clause or clauses to be interpreted and the history to be deployed bears no supporting relationship to the evils of our national past and would not further principles underlying those evils. Specifically, such a canon would require proponents of the originalism methodology to demonstrate that adopting originalism in a case would not support or extend original principles that perpetuated the institution of slavery, supported the expulsion and mass extermination of Native Americans as a national policy, buttressed the terrorism of Redemption upon the collapse of Reconstruction, entrenched the political and personal subjugation of women and children, or permitted the use of governmental force to suppress political speech in the forms present during any of the historical periods from which the evidence is drawn. If the proponents of originalism are not able to overcome this burden, they must rely upon the many methodological approaches to constitutional interpretation that are not originalism, that have developed over the course of American history, and have been embraced and incorporated into our law as a matter of historical practice.

Is Kim Kardashian White (And Why Does It Matter Anyway)? Of Celebuntanes, Racial Fluidity & the Law

With the world’s most ubiquitous celebutante firmly cast in the starring role, this Article conducts an exegesis on the semiotics of Kim Kardashian’s racial identity. In the process, the Article explores the social construction of race in action, weighs the individual agency possible in the racialization process, and further probes the reality of identity fluidity at a time when society and the law are only just beginning to grapple with more malleable conceptions of race. After presenting an analysis of the social, legal and historical formulation of the concept of whiteness and tracing the dramatic transformation of both juridical and popular notions of racial belonging over the course of American history, this Article draws upon Kardashian’s racial fluidity and recent controversies involving Rachael Dolezal and Elizabeth Warren to question some of our most fundamental perceptions about race and provide a unique spin on issues of diversity, identity, and colorblindness. All told, the Article highlights (for better or worse) the continuing relevance of race in American life and underscores the under-appreciated significance of racial fluidity (in a time when society is growing increasingly ‘woke’ about gender fluidity) and its potentially seismic impact on long-held, but rarely questioned, assumptions in anti-discrimination and equal-protection jurisprudence.

Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era

Remembering Reconstruction is a collection of ten essays, grouped into four parts, on the importance of Reconstruction in white-supremacist, black, imperial, and contemporary thought. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us, for all of its acknowledged importance to the course of American history, Reconstruction is still misunderstood. In the book's first part, E. Stephen Prince discusses the regional character of Jim Crow, and Jason Morgan Ward examines the importance of a conservative view of Reconstruction in resistance to the New Deal. Both make cogent points, though some essential acknowledgements would have provided better balance. The essence of what would be called Jim Crow had been and would remain part of the northern legal structure, from the antebellum era to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and beyond. In southern politics also, segregationists became more ubiquitous in the New Deal coalition than opposing it. Three individual case studies stand in for black memories. Shawn Leigh Alexander's use of the journalist and orator T. Thomas Fortune documents the deeply experienced reality of the memory of violent racial suppression. Justin Behrend on the former Louisiana slave John R. Lynch and Carole Emberton on the Works Progress Administration narrative of Hannah Irwin introduce complexities, yet their significance remains unexplored. The 1913 audience for Lynch's book The Facts of Reconstruction and his priorities shaped a history emphasizing interracial cooperation, while Irwin emphasized affection for whites and the hierarchy and the Ku Klux Klan (Kkk), asserting a process of “self-making” that challenged “historians' expectations.”

Liberation

Liberation Speer Morgan The founding concepts of the United States are based on Enlightenment ideals of equality and freedom. Throughout our history these broad ideals have struggled against anything that might impinge on them, such as government controls, regulations, and taxation. This opposition, along with other forces both internal and external, has resulted in our share of strife, as well as occasional threats of systemic failure. In our nearly 250 years as a nation, we have fought wars and serious conflicts at an average of about one per generation, more than any other major military power. We have repeatedly armed and disarmed. We have also conducted systemic campaigns against perceived enemies—including Native Americans, Irish and other immigrants, blacks, “Leftists,” organized labor movements, and various others— within our own borders based on race and political beliefs. There have been plenty of moments of crisis that, while little remembered now, were real and threatening at the time. Our first real estate, debt, and securities crash as a nation happened less than ten years after the end of the Revolution. Among the notable people who went broke in that crash was Robert Morris. Morris had been the superintendent of finance who’d come up with the money to keep General Washington’s army in the field from 1781 through 1784 to finally win the war. Along with Alexander Hamilton, Morris helped establish the American financial system. Unfortunately, he was also a principal buyer of millions of acres of western lands, as well as real estate in Washington, D.C., which was the immediate disaster that brought him down and got him thrown into jail. Two years after the 1792 crash, the Whiskey Rebellion forced [End Page 5] President Washington—desperate for money to pay off Revolutionary War debt—to send fourteen thousand troops to Western Pennsylvania to quash an uprising over taxes on distilled spirits. Looking at the course of American history, it could be argued that the threats to our nation were apparent from the start and in some ways even foreshadowed by the Constitution. It is fortunate that genuine leaders and larger democratic efforts have arisen and fought back—moral, competent people such as Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King—who have reminded us that we can continue to fight for a practical and resilient liberty. Liberation is a classic theme in literature. It comes in many forms, from bold statements of the free human imagination, such as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” to humble expressions of renewed vision, as in William Blake’s “The Tyger.” In tone, it may be celebratory, or it may be ominous or fatalistic, as in Melville’s Moby Dick, which dramatizes how moralistic quests for deliverance can in certain cases be nihilistic, worse than the evil the protagonist imagines fighting. It can also be angry and specific, as in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 narrative of his own life, in which he speaks of the diabolical hypocrisy of “the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” This issue’s stories include Thea Chacamaty’s “Earthquake Weather,” which portrays the dilemma of a pair of former West Coast rock musicians, Iris and her husband, George. Iris is pregnant with their first child, and they’ve settled in a house, bought with her sister’s money, which has just been leveled by an earthquake. Iris’s relationship with her sister, Patty, is tense, after Patty published a best-selling tell-all memoir about their dysfunctional family. With the house destroyed and no money to get through the short term, the couple has to rely again on Patty, but it doesn’t take long for her to discern things about her sister that paradoxically lead to a certain degree of unshackling from their family’s past. In his short story “Boulder,” Paul Smith’s unnamed narrator is a member of a construction crew laboring on a thirteen-mile addition to the interstate that two other companies are also working on. With sharp comic touches, the story reveals the internal politics and competition among contractors and subcontractors in an industry that doesn’t appear much...

Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding by Andrew Shankman

Reviewed by: Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding by Andrew Shankman Peter S. Onuf (bio) Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding. By Andrew Shankman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 176. Paper, $19.95.) Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison were all good republicans, united in their commitment to American independence. Their collaboration [End Page 557] culminated in the ratification of Madison's Constitution, Andrew Shankman writes in his succinct and engaging account of the founding, only to collapse with the inauguration of the new federal government and implementation of Treasury Secretary Hamilton's controversial financial system. Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson agreed that "the national government had to gain the power to tax, regulate trade, and enact laws that the states would have to obey" (15). But that agreement disguised fundamental disagreements about the constitution and character of a modern republic that would erupt in the 1790s, dividing Shankman's protagonists and nearly demolishing the "more perfect union" they sought to create. The vicious party battles of the 1790s reflected the founders' failure to recognize or reconcile fundamental philosophical differences. Reversing the logic of "originalist" interpretations of the Constitution, Shankman suggests that Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson were not—and could not have been—fully aware of their intentions before conflicts over controversial administration policies retrospectively revealed them. Jefferson and Madison launched a "mighty argument" over the new nation's future as they mobilized opposition to Hamilton's management of the Treasury. Republican critics and Federalist defenders of the administration imagined the worst in their opponents as they staked out conflicting interpretations of the Constitution. Their "battle to impose their original intents provides for us no legacy of singular constitutional original intent," Shankman concludes. It follows that "we should not trust any figure of the twenty first century who claims that the Constitution had one meaning for its framers" (145). Originalists who now focus on the Constitution's "public meaning" will not be troubled by Shankman's conclusion, for they focus on the text, not on its authors' putative intentions, whenever and however they were defined. What matters to them are the generally accepted understandings of the Constitution's language when the document was written and ratified—fixed understandings that constitute the regime's enduring foundation. Shankman and his fellow historians have little patience with such ahistorical formulations: What can or should be enduring about a bundle of sometimes sordid compromises designed, among other things, to perpetuate slavery? And Shankman is quite right to emphasize the ways in which Hamilton's design for an "energetic" fiscal–military state gave rise to conflicting conceptions of political economy and constitutional interpretation that would profoundly shape the future course of American history. [End Page 558] Original Intents will be recognized as a valuable contribution to our understanding of Hamilton's financial system and its impact on party formation. Jefferson and Madison agreed that preserving the union depended on the federal government's credit-worthiness in European financial markets. But Hamilton had more ambitious goals in mind. By assuming state debts, inducing monied men to invest in the government, transforming debt into a circulating medium, and establishing a national bank, the Treasury Secretary sought to secure "durable liberty" and suppress popular licentiousness (47). Enhanced state capacity would enable the new federal government to govern effectively and so restore order in the revolutionary republic. Under the aegis of a loosely interpreted Constitution, Federalists sought to "beat European monarchies at their own game," in Shankman's apt formulation, by "creating its own republican versions of those monarchies' financial institutions" (4). At first Hamilton played his hand well. After securing repayment of "the $13 million owed to foreign creditors," he rebuffed Madison's effort to discriminate between original holders of the domestic debt and the "few thousand people" who in 1790 "owned most of the $66 million" of the once nearly worthless paper (69, 68). Funding in hand, Hamilton leveraged the assumption of state debts, with the eventual relocation of the capital on the Potomac sweetening the deal. The subsequent incorporation of the First Bank raised constitutional issues that illuminated the implications of Hamilton's system. "If the power to tax could somehow...