American History Research Articles

Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, written by Kathryn Gin Lum

Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, written by Kathryn Gin Lum

The difference multiplicity makes: The American Civil War as passive revolution

Abstract This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

Expectations and Understandings of Critical Work in School Libraries

Libraries are tied to an American history and current context that oppresses, demonstratesprejudice, and embodies injustices. Preliminary findings suggest (1) school library standards insufficiently address schoollibrarians' roles in engaging in critical work and (2) school librarians need additional learningopportunities to develop the knowledge, skills, and desire to engage in critical work.Although the study is limited to one school district, findings may offer insight into andpotential guidance for evaluating school library programs, and strategies providing supportfor anti-oppression work in school libraries.

The Interplay of De-historicizing and Colored Narratives in 1970s America

This paper examines the intricate interplay between the processes of de-historicizing and the emergence of colored narratives during the 1970s in America. The decade witnessed a dynamic shift in the collective consciousness of the nation, as it grappled with its complex history of race, identity, and representation. De-historicizing refers to the deliberate distancing from historical contexts, often leading to the erasure of historical narratives and the subsequent silencing of marginalized voices. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the American society attempted to move forward without fully reconciling its past, leading to an inclination towards de-historicizing certain aspects of the nation’s history, particularly concerning race and discrimination. Conversely, the 1970s also witnessed the emergence of colored narratives, as minority communities sought to reclaim their historical identities and share their unique perspectives through literature, music, film, and other forms of artistic expression. These narratives served as powerful vehicles for voicing the struggles, triumphs, and aspirations of marginalized communities, challenging the de-historicizing trends prevalent in mainstream discourses. Through a comprehensive analysis of key cultural artifacts, literature, and historical events from the 1970s, this paper explores how de-historicizing and colored narratives intersected and collided. It delves into the ways in which colored narratives disrupted the dominant narratives constructed by the mainstream, challenging the established power structures and encouraging a more inclusive representation of American history.

Redressing Archival Harm: Ownership, Access, and Indigenous Knowledge

ABSTRACT Institutions that house Indigenous oral histories are often ignorant to the harm they perpetuate by treating these materials without rooting curatorial considerations in Indigenous approaches to knowledge. Issues of categorization, attribution, and access, among many others, often go unaddressed, causing serious harm to Indigenous peoples and their cultural resources. It is imperative that Western archives, libraries, and museums seek out alternatives to systems that perpetuate settler-colonialism, and work to place control of oral histories back in Indigenous hands. In this paper we present several considerations for working with Indigenous oral histories in Western archives, provide case studies that promote the ethical curation and sharing of Indigenous materials, and close with an overview of our current work to revitalize and redress a large collection of Native American oral histories presently housed at the University of Florida.

A Wall of Respect: A Visual Survey of African American Art History

A Wall of Respect: A Visual Survey of African American Art History

Designing for diverse museum visitors’ identity exploration around inventiveness

IntroductionThis paper describes an initial phase of research to inform the design of Change YOUR Game—an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) that aims to promote visitors’ inventiveness in STEM and in other life domains. The exhibition’s content focused on the history of inventions and innovations in sports. The research was framed by the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) and by a set of design principles for promoting visitors’ agentic identity exploration: The PRESS Principles.MethodsFive data collection sessions engaged participants in a virtual, simulated visit to an early rendition of the exhibition. Diverse groups of participants were prompted to consider the self-relevance of the exhibition content to their identities and how they have been and can be inventive in their lives.ResultsFour themes captured participants’ museum visitor role identities, varied readiness to engage in identity exploration of their inventiveness, and how these provided affordances and hindrances to participants’ engagement in identity exploration in the context of the simulated visit. The themes served as bases for design recommendations.DiscussionThe study highlights the potential of the DSMRI and PRESS design principles to address conceptual and methodological challenges of research that aims to inform environmental design of a context that is not yet in existence and that will be relatively fixed. The findings suggest recommendations for design as well as theoretical insights about museum visitor role identities and the contexts that may promote visitors’ active and agentic engagement in exploring their identities.

Landmarks of American History and Culture (NEH)

Landmarks of American History and Culture (NEH)

Teaching US History through Land-Grant Universities and Agriculture Education

Teaching US History through Land-Grant Universities and Agriculture Education

Abraham Lincoln in the Hollywood cinema

Abraham Lincoln is a towering figure in American popular consciousness, one who acts as a rich and complex motif and metaphor across its cinema history. This essay is broad-ranging in considering Hollywood’s Lincoln but places particular emphasis on ‘classical’ representations. Its primary aim is to consider the cinematic uses of Lincoln (Lincoln as embedded in the style and rhetoric of a range of films) but a minor thread running through is why Lincoln and which Lincoln is called upon at different points of US movie history. The essay distinguishes itself from previous accounts by combining the analysis of the flesh and blood incarnation of the president’s peculiar physicality with a consideration of the literal and metaphoric solidity of the Lincoln memorial. A final section conveys the sixteenth president’s symbolic power by, paradoxically, revealing it in films that are not even about Lincoln. Lincoln is one of the Greatest Men of Vision™ in US history. In It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) and Bigger than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956), a portrait and a verbal invocation, respectively, connect to themes of hubris and the tensions that ensue when the visions of frustrated ordinary men go too far.

American Art Historiography, Slavery, and Its Aftermath

True to its cultural roots in the United States, the field of American art history has been slow to recognize centuries of slavery’s shaping of visual production and has only begun to address historiography’s persistent devaluation of Black lives. This article explores how scholars over the last decade are attempting to integrate discussions of slavery into studies of American art and reflects on the political implications of doing so. Their work invites us to look again at key moments in US history through the lens of art and slavery, holding out the possibility of reinventing the story of American art in relation to the African diaspora.

The Life and Art of Mary Parks Washington (Fall 2018)

This essay presents a critical biography of African American visual artist Mary Parks Washington, with an emphasis on her creative development from 1942 to 1979. Washington's extant art is discussed in the context of her educational background, social network, and political affiliations, as well as the history of activist curation in the wake of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. As an undergraduate at Spelman College in the 1940s, Washington was mentored by muralist Hale Woodruff, who encouraged her to continue her studies at the Art Students League of New York, Black Mountain College, and the Universidad Nacional de México. These experiences introduced Washington to key figures of the international and American avant-gardes, including Josef Albers, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence. In 1958, Washington settled down with her family in the Bay Area, where she met poet Sarah Webster Fabio, a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement on the West Coast. Washington and Fabio's collaborative friendship over two decades culminated in 1979's Offshoots of Roots Unknown, a series of “poem-paintings” that elegize Washington's family in early twentieth century Atlanta and, formally, deal with the technical (and ethical) problem of remembering and representing history. Drawing extensively on archival materials from the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, this essay recognizes Washington's contribution to post-WWII African American art and documents her unique artistic trajectory, traversing aesthetic, social, and political formations from pre-Civil Rights Atlanta to the post-Black Arts Movement Bay Area.

Review: Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist, by Cynthia E. Orozco

Review: <i>Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist</i>, by Cynthia E. Orozco

Realistic Spectacle: Arthur Voegtlin's Nineteenth-Century Stagecraft at the New York Hippodrome

Arthur Voegtlin (1858–1948) designed and oversaw the construction and painting of all the major sets for the New York Hippodrome's first season, from an archway formed by two rearing dragons in the courtyard of a Martian king to the grounds of a military academy at the start of the American Civil War. In this essay, I consider the ways that Voegtlin's sets navigated the distance between fantasy and verisimilitude, bringing together his experience painting sets for immersive, spectacular works with his training as a scene painter for the realistic interiors of the legitimate theatre's comedies and dramas. Voegtlin drew on those techniques to establish the mise en scène of realistic spectacle for which the New York Hippodrome became known. Voegtlin's appeals to photographic accuracy, acute awareness about how he needed to account for the size and scale of the space for which he was designing, and sense of the audience member's embodiment (particularly in relation to that of an amusement park spectator and a viewer of modern paintings) all demonstrate how Voegtlin saw his set designs at the Hippodrome as an extension of the dramatic principles he embraced throughout this period.

Andersonville, the Story of Wilson's Raiders

The concluding American Civil War spectacle-drama, announced and widely publicised as Andersonville, The Story of Wilson's Raiders (1905) , was abruptly retitled The Raiders as the New York Hippodrome's management removed the scene depicting the Confederate prison on the pretext of avoiding partisan sensibilities linked to the war, but more likely to shorten the evening's programme by a half-hour. This essay describes the drama as it was written and rehearsed beginning with a West Point graduation and commissioning ceremony as the announcement of war divides the graduates and separates couples whose romance has spanned northern and southern states. The five-scene drama concludes with a fierce cavalry battle utilising the ‘Thompson and Dundy plunging horses’ in the Hippodrome's flooded arenas. The drama enacts the graduation and commissioning of a young Union officer, his enforced separation from his Southern sweetheart, his capture by Confederate forces, and imprisonment in the notorious and filthy Andersonville prison. We witness his ingenious escape, his reunion with his sweetheart, and his return to battle leading a cavalry detachment. This essay documents the effects created in each scene of the entertainment, which concludes with an imagined re-enactment of a conflict fought by mounted Union and Confederate cavalrymen in the Hippodrome's two arenas, now a vast tank, flooded before the audience's eyes as a part of the overall spectacle. The essay also notes the frequent unsubstantiated claims of historical authenticity made by Fred Thompson and Elmer ‘Skip’ Dundy and, where necessary, corrects them.

Teaching American History and Culture in Europe in an Age of Uncertainty

Teaching American History and Culture in Europe in an Age of Uncertainty

Туринский собор в контексте взаимоотношений галльского и италийского епископата на рубеже IV и V вв.

The article is devoted to the Council of Turin in 398 or 399, at which the Italian bishops tried to help resolve a number of problems in the ecclesiastical life of Gaul. In particular, the controversy about the metropolitan status in the province of Vienne between the sees of Vienne and Arles, as well as the metropolitan rights of Proculus of Marseille in relation to the bishops of the province of Narbonensis II, were discussed. In the first case, the council proposed to the bishops of Arles and Vienne that they reach an amicable agreement, dividing the province into two metropolitanates. In the second case, the rights of the metropolitan were retained for Proculus, but they were thought as personal, and not belonging to the see of Marseille. The article critically examines the conception of the American historian R. Mathisen, who assesses both the format of the council and its decisions as non-canonical. The contextual interpretation of the council allows us to consider it as a rare case of horizontal arbitration. This term refers to the mediating participation of the episcopate of one ecclesiastical region in resolving a conflict in another ecclesiastical region. Horizontal arbitration does not imply a subordinate position of the disputing parties in relation to the chairman of the council considering the case. Roman see at the beginning of the 5th century actually opposed this kind of practice on the basis of the principle of hierarchical inter-church relations. The result of this was an attempt to endow the See of Arles with a preeminent position in Gaul, as well as the encouragement of the practice of transferring the most significant issues to the court of the Roman See.

Progressive and Conservative Ideology of Women in Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is a feminist novel set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, in which the author Margaret Mitchell depicts the damage caused by the war and how Scarlett O'Hara, a progressive woman in this particular period, uses her strength to achieve a happy life under the confines of the world. Even so, out of the historical background of the 1870s, Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of this paper, still has some typical characteristics of women in that era, and it is because of these typical characteristics that she is able to realize her various demands and achieve success step by step by exerting her upper-class femininity. In this paper, the progressiveness and limitations of the female characters in Gone with the Wind are listed, and compared from different perspectives. Through the comparison of these progressive limitations, it can be seen the rapid development of feminism in modern times and the necessity of developing feminism in this way.

COVID-19 Vaccination-Associated Spontaneous Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia Syndrome

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has emerged as the deadliest outbreak in recent American history, surpassing the estimated U.S. fatalities from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Since its identification in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, COVID-19 has contributed to the death of nearly six million people worldwide. The United States (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially issued emergency use authorization for three vaccines for prevention of COVID-19, and currently two have received full FDA approval. Herein, we report a case of severe thrombocytopenia in a man following heterologous booster vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine with concomitant presence of a heparin-P4 antibody but without proximate heparin exposure. The degree of thrombocytopenia was severe, but the patient had a natural recovery of platelet count over the next 2 weeks without need for any immunomodulatory therapies. This is the first case report of COVID vaccine-associated heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT)-like platelet disorder without proximate heparin exposure, also called spontaneous HIT syndrome. Keywords: Thrombocytopenia, Cor

Philip Hepburn, Stephen Freeman and the American Context of Sylvia’s Lovers

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.