American Republic Research Articles

George Washington's Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic by Adam Costanzo, and: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka

Reviewed by: George Washington's Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic by Adam Costanzo, and: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka Andrew Diemer (bio) Keywords George Washington, Washington DC, Baltimore, District of Columbia, Peter Charles L'Enfant, policing, emancipation George Washington's Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic. By Adam Costanzo. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 264. Cloth, $74.95; Paper, $29.95.) The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. By Adam Malka. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) Despite a number of important and influential works published in the last few years, the border south cities of Baltimore and Washington have received far less scholarly attention than their northern counterparts. In these two compelling books, George Washington's Washington and The Men of Mobtown, Adam Costanzo and Adam Malka help to remedy this deficiency. These are two very different books that nevertheless both [End Page 140] explore complex struggles for power on the streets of burgeoning border cities in the early republic. Costanzo's study of Washington begins, appropriately, with General Washington himself, surveying the land that he had chosen as the location for the new permanent capital of the United States. This decision is fitting as Costanzo uses national politics as a framework for the book. As he notes, the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, making it "a laboratory for the ideological experiments of politicians and federal officials" (4). At the same time, these ideological visions were complicated by the sometimes competing visions of residents of the District who also exerted a significant influence over the development of the city. Washington envisioned the city that would come to bear his name as a metropolis that would "convey the authority of a powerful and dynamic American empire" (12). He enlisted a French-born engineer and architect, Peter Charles L'Enfant (only later to be known as Pierre), to translate that vision into reality. The wide avenues of the city continue to pay tribute to L'Enfant's commitment to the symbolic power of the capital, but he and Washington were convinced that the nation's capital also needed to thrive as a place of commerce, making sure that the wide avenues and stately public buildings were accompanied by canals to promote the city's economic development. As Costanzo shows, sometimes these national visions complemented local ambitions; at other times they conflicted. L'Enfant's inability to compromise with local leaders led to his departure from the project. Washington's grand ambitions were also thwarted by a chronic lack of funds. This lack of funds was exacerbated by the ascension to power of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Deeply skeptical of the Federalist vision of a grand national capital, Jefferson sought to limit the growth of the city, especially the sort of commercial growth that Washington and L'Enfant had envisioned. Here the president found himself at odds with residents and local leaders who remained committed to the Washingtonian vision of a commercial city. Some of these local leaders took matters into their own hands, promoting improvements of their own, but without the aid of the federal government they were constrained in what they could accomplish. This is not to say that Jefferson had no interest in the development and symbolic importance of the capital. As Costanzo shows, as president Jefferson remained involved in the construction of major building projects, including the capitol; he [End Page 141] remained committed to the power of neo-classical architecture in expressing the spirit of the new American republic. Those Washingtonians who continued to support Washington's vision of a grand national capital soon faced two challenges. The first came in the form of the British invasion of the city during the War of 1812, which led to a serious debate about moving the capital once again. After Washington boosters beat back this threat, they then had to face a Jackson administration, which seemed ideologically committed to Jefferson's vision of a more modest...

Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. By Tom Cutterham. Princeton University Press. 2017. x + 191pp. £32.95.

Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. By Tom Cutterham. Princeton University Press. 2017. x + 191pp. £32.95.

The Judicial Bookshelf

The Judicial Bookshelf DONALD GRIER STEPHENSON, JR. Reflecting about a century ago on elec­ tions in the United States, James Bryce observed in The American Commonwealth that Europeans “are struck, by the faults of a plan which plunges the nation into a whirlpool of excitement once every four years, and commits the headship of the state to a party leader chosen for a short period.” However, he continued, there is another aspect in which the presidential election may be re­ garded, and one whose importance is better appreciated in America than in Europe. The election is a solemn periodical appeal to the na­ tion to review its condition, the way in which its business has been car­ ried on, [and the] conduct ofthe two great parties. It stirs and rouses the nation as nothing else does, forces everyone not merely to think about public affairs but to decide how he judges the parties. It is a direct expression of the will of voters, a force before which everything must bow.1 As the quadrennial “whirlpool of excite­ ment” began to swirl well in advance of the 2020 elections, Americans were reminded of a notable silence in the Constitution: While the framers were careful to include methods for electing representatives (by the people), senators (by state legislatures), and the President (by the virtual assembly ofwhat has come to be known as the Electoral Col­ lege), they included nothing about selecting candidates for those offices. Elections have thus given rise to vari­ ous devices to supply names for the ballot. At the presidential level, early nominating procedures were vastly different from what one sees today. By 1800, party caucuses in Congress recommended presidential nom­ inees to the state legislatures, which in most states directly chose members of the Electoral College. In 1832, the new AntiMasonic party tried an alternative nominat­ ing device—the convention. In this instance, necessity was truly the mother of invention in that with no substantial congressional representation, Anti-Masonics resorted to a meeting outside Congress and convened in a Baltimore saloon. Members of the new Whig 86 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY party did the same thing and even met in the same saloon. A gathering composed of state party delegates who had been selected by local party leaders impressed many as an ideal way of choosing a candidate who could in turn command widespread support. Democrats were convinced and so also con­ vened in Baltimore to re-nominate Andrew Jackson for a second term.2 Although the convention as a nominating device has persisted, it has been only since the 1970s that ordinary voters in most states have had a major say in the selection of presidential nominees. By the 1860s, for ex­ ample, delegates to the national conventions were selected by state party chieftains, a practice that persisted into the early twentieth century. It was in reaction to this situation that the presidential primary emerged. Pro­ gressive era figures such as Senators Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson of California demanded a larger role for the people in the nomination process, whereby the voters would be empowered to select delegates to the national party convention and in the process to express a preference for their party’s presidential nominee. The idea was contagious. As early as 1912, nearly one-third of the states provided for some kind of popular election of con­ vention delegates. By 1916, half the states had a Democratic or Republican presiden­ tial primary, and a few had both. In that year, among Democrats, fifty-four percent of the convention delegates were chosen by primaries—a figure that would not be sur­ passed until 1972. For Republicans, fifty-nine percent of the delegates were the products of primaries, a proportion not exceeded until 1976.3 However, popular participation went only so far in that most primaries did not generate binding results, as party leaders often dictated how delegates voted. As the Progressive movement itself de­ clined nationally after 1920, states began to abandon the primary as a delegate-selection device, so that, by 1936, only forty percent of the convention delegates of the two ma­ jor parties were chosen in primaries...

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

Reviewed by: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan Gabriel Loiacono (bio) Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. By Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 225. Cloth, $35.00.) “Ding! You are now free to move about the country,” Southwest Airlines used to advertise to its passengers. That freedom did not exist in the early American republic, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan demonstrates in Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. Instead, municipal officials tightly controlled how Americans moved about the country. Using settlement laws and vagrancy statutes, local governments denied mobility to significant numbers of poor Americans, which had a chilling effect on the mobility of others. Going by different titles in different states, local officials could stop and interrogate newcomers to town. Then, they could incarcerate or banish the newcomers from town if they thought it appropriate. While other scholars believe that warning out was not practiced much past 1800, O’Brassill-Kulfan finds the practice thriving into the 1830s, and occasionally used in the 1930s. Moreover, she argues, these official responses to mobility among the poor gave shape to citizenship, policing, and poor relief in the early republic and continue to shape ideas about race and immigration today. Vagrants and Vagabonds focuses readers’ attention on important truths about the early United States. Foremost is how circumscribed mobility was for Americans before the Civil War. Another is how important local governments, rather than state or federal, were in shaping the lives and citizenship rights of early Americans. Readers of this journal might particularly be interested in how efforts to control the movement of freed slaves around 1865 were prefigured by northern states’ responses to emancipation in the 1780s and after. Not only that, but the fugitive slave laws of the pre–Civil War period were predicated in part on vagrancy statutes. Chapter 4, in particular, unpacks the connections between slavery, emancipation, runaways, race, and warning out. The mid-Atlantic states provide the geographical scope of this book about geographical freedom. Much of the evidence is drawn from the Philadelphia City Archives, but Vagrants and Vagabonds makes use of an array of local, state, and private archives. Drawing on lots of individual stories, O’Brassill-Kulfan illustrates the big themes of why and where people migrated in this region. Readers meet migrating Americans who [End Page 254] were caught up in the local police systems of Pennsylvania and New York or, less frequently, Delaware and Maryland. Readers also get a sense of how civic leaders and low-level officials responded to these movers about the country. Immigrants, escaped slaves, casual laborers, children, widows, and families with frozen feet all make their appearance. So do inspectors, guardians of the poor, watchmen, and the kinds of social critics who might get published in local newspapers. The result is a collection of individuals moving and institutions responding to that movement. It is a story built from the constituent parts up to the big narrative. This story built from the local up recovers the often forgotten constraints imposed on Americans by local governments. Rightly, Vagrants and Vagabonds hammers the theme of what O’Brassill-Kulfan calls “the state’s largely reactionary efforts to exert social, spatial, behavioral, and economic control on the lower and working classes in response to the social and economic instability that defined the period” (6). Also rightly, the book documents individual migrants’ efforts to move freely in spite of those constraints. In these emphases, Vagrants and Vagabonds follows some of the interpretive trails blazed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Social Welfare, originally published in 1971. Like that work, Vagrants and Vagabonds emphasizes the “social control” aspects of the poor laws. Also like Regulating the Poor, Vagrants and Vagabonds gives little space to the more positive flip side of the settlement laws. In theory, settlement laws meant that everyone in need should be able to find unlimited access to food, housing, medicine, even doctoring, in their own place of settlement. To argue that settlement laws are intended primarily...

Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Andrew J. B. Fagal (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Political economy, Economic history, History of capitalism, National security capitalism, Fiscal-military state Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848. By Lindsay Schakenbach Regele. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 263. Cloth, $59.95, e-book, $59.95.) More than fifty years ago William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin School highlighted the importance of political economy for American diplomacy. Increasing industrial output, coupled with the boom and bust of the business cycle, led the political class to embrace an “open door policy” in U.S. foreign relations. The “open door” then led to a number of ill-thought-out ventures in order to secure foreign markets for American manufactured goods, culminating in the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam. This became, in Williams’s estimation, the “tragedy of American diplomacy.”1 Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s Manufacturing Advantage takes this familiar story of late-nineteenth-century political economy and foreign relations and places it squarely within an early republican context. According to Schakenbach Regele, after the Revolution politicians, military officers, and businessmen all sought to make the United States a manufacturer of small arms and textiles. They succeeded, [End Page 744] and in the first decades of the nineteenth century U.S. officials pursued a vigorous campaign to open up Latin American markets for these American-manufactured goods. Thus, what the Wisconsin School characterized as a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century becomes one of the founding. If there is a tragedy to American diplomacy, it is one that has always been there. Schakenbach Regele’s overarching argument is provocative and well-argued, and her historiographical intervention in the fields of U.S. foreign relations and the new history of capitalism are significant. Her book deserves to be read and engaged with not only by specialists focusing on the early republic but by the larger field of American historians. The stakes for national industrial development were apparent from the beginning of the United States: how to arm and clothe the ragged Continental Army. The answer of the founding generation was “National security capitalism” (164). In essence, this meant putting the fiscal–military state, as explained by Max Edling, into practice.2 Once the federal government received the power to tax, it began a longstanding program of supporting two industries central to collective security: small arms and textiles. These goods were essential for waging war, and the federal government sought their promotion through contracts to domestic manufacturers and a trade policy that aided their export. The economic opportunities opened up by the British crisis (1807–1815) spurred on the development of significant manufacturing in these sectors. Following the peace, the federal government used diplomacy to open up markets in Latin America for these firms to export. The emergence of the American System of Manufacturers likewise helped to spur on an “Industrial Manifest Destiny” as the federal government acquired territory at the point of the bayonet. By the 1850s, the United States was recognized as a world leader in the production of small arms and textiles. This was no mere historical accident, but rather the culmination of two generations of politicians, military officers, and businessmen who aligned their interests in the promotion of American state power. I do have three minor critiques of Manufacturing Advantage. The first is that there are a few times when the terminology obscures more than it reveals. For example, the decision to uncritically refer to this period as a “military-industrial complex” (3) seems out of place. One commonality [End Page 745] of all polities across time and space is collective defense, and the early American republic was no exception. As William H. McNeill pointed out in 1982, the industrialization of war is as old as civilization itself, but only in a “limited sense.”3 While arms and textile manufacturers in the early republic clearly had real political power through their ability to garner state support, there is a world of difference between that and the specific political and economic contexts of...

“Caring for Our Affairs Ourselves”: Stockbridge Mohican Women and Indian Education in Early America

Indian education has long been acknowledged in American historiography and American Indian Studies as the primary conduit for the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The rise of federal Indian boarding schools looms large over the long narrative of Indian education in America, often shading the way scholars interpret earlier Indian engagement with Anglo-style education. This is particularly evident in scholarship that traces the roots of American education and civilization policies to Henry Knox in the 1790s. The emphasis scholars have placed on white men and their initiatives toward "civilizing" Indian people have inadvertently erased indigenous agency and power within the early education system. Informed by indigenous feminism, this article utilizes ethnohistorical approaches to piece together how Mohican women advocated for the prioritization of girls' education in the 1790s. Their emphasis on female education resulted in greater prosperity for the nation, but their work to establish this model was quickly hijacked by white missionaries and Indian agents who took credit for the idea and Stockbridge success. The female-first strategy that was originally deployed to aid in the securing of Stockbridge land and sovereignty was later adopted by white architects of Indian education as a tool of tribal destruction. Drawing upon Mohican women's never-before-analyzed letters, Mohican craft works, and a careful reevaluation of War Department and missionary records, this piece contributes to the growing body of literature on indigenous women and power in early America while complicating the narrative of the decline of indigenous women's authority in the early years of the American Republic.

Coin, Currency, and Constitution: Reconsidering the National Bank Precedent

Review of Eric Lomazoff's Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic.

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

Reviewed by: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan Richard D’Von Daily Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. By Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. 235 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Hardcover, $35; ebook, $20.) Studies of policing and incarceration often miss the continuities in legal practices that span from Elizabethan laws, through the Jim Crow era, and into the creation of Stop and Frisk policies. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan rectifies this in Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, which argues that “indigent transiency” shaped poverty laws, the evolution of [End Page 237] policing, and penal codes. Vagrants, vagabonds, hobos, widowed women, released indentured servants, formerly enslaved persons, many free Blacks, and paupers feature as indigent transients, searching for work, food, or shelter in urban centers. O’Brassill-Kulfan shows that political, social, economic, and legal anxieties regarding indigent transients played a significant role in limiting, or sometimes forcing, the mobility of these populations. Citizenship, she argues, is influenced by sociopolitical understandings of race, gender, class, and settlement. Drawing on legal depositions, prison registers and vagrancy dockets, almshouse system records, and examinations of paupers, O’Brassill-Kulfan argues that the rise in racialized-capitalistic ideologies sought to incarcerate, rather than alleviate, indi-gent transients’ situations. Chapter one considers how officials sought to manage the mobility of the poor, often limiting access to voting with settlement laws. In chapter two, O’Brassill-Kulfan uses examinations of paupers records to reveal the narratives of women and Black people, populations who were more likely to be indigent earlier in the nineteenth century. Chapter three addresses the ways in which populations were forced to migrate through pauper removal and the increased policing of vagrancy by authorities and everyday citizens. O’Brassill-Kulfan makes an important intervention in chapter four, linking fugitive slaves, manumitted Black people, and enslaved people to impoverished populations. Government officials limited the mobility of these populations. She argues that the ability to move or stay in place has been a cornerstone for African American conceptions of freedom. Further, she contends that authorities used race, gender, class, and labor status throughout the Mid-Atlantic to control mobility. O’Brassill-Kulfan notes that Black men could be arrested for wearing expensive clothes and women could be cited for walking without a chaperone. A thorough analysis of Black surveillance from vagrancy laws and respectability politics, both of which affected black mobility, would further strengthen the argument. Chapter five interrogates the policing of vagrancy and the power governing officials had in condemning vagrants to incarceration or the almshouse, often resulting in a stay at both. O’Brassill-Kulfan closes the text with societal and governmental understandings of vagrants as carriers of disease. The 1832 cholera epidemic, like Elizabethan laws regarding poverty, crossed the Atlantic and had devastating results in Philadelphia’s vagrant prison population at Arch Street. As a result, officials recognized that vagrants deserved treatment at least equal to what criminals received, including basic access to cleanliness. Overall, Vagrants and Vagabonds proves the critical importance of considering poverty and mobility for analysis of the early American republic and beyond. Scholars of policing, incarceration, and poverty and both undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from this important text. [End Page 238] Richard D’Von Daily The Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2020 Historical Society of Pennsylvania

In Word or Deed: Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S.

In Word or Deed:Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S. Nathan Jérémie Brink (bio) THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP: BLACK POLITICS AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. A LITERATE SOUTH: READING BEFORE EMANCIPATION. By Beth Barton Schweiger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. The third chapter and seventeenth verse of the book of Colossians encourages its readers that their word and deed must be unified practices of faith. The scripture mentions shared songs and teachings, but also suggests the ethical model of Jesus demands peace and mutual concern overriding the marks of religion, people groups, and states of freedom or bondage. This scripture would be familiar to many of the antebellum urban Black activists and rural White female southern readers explored in new monographs by Derrick R. Spires and Beth Barton Schweiger. Both Spires' The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States and Schweiger's A Literate South: [End Page 7] Reading Before Emancipation consider not only the words their subjects' read or wrote, but rather examine their literary activities as culturally and politically significant practices. For their subjects, word and deed were not distinct categories but enmeshed practices demonstrating what they thought, how they encountered ideas, and the ways they enacted them in the world. However, these books reveal that readers of the nineteenth century did not uniformly interpret what this text's proposition that in Christ there is neither slave nor free meant in their own context. They show the divergence between communities of interpreters, with some who celebrated Black humanity and fostered revolutionary social restructure, and others whose tacit or overt support upheld ideas of white superiority and the institution of slavery in the early United States. In the early nineteenth-century United States, to read, talk about, recite, or share printed material sometimes took on significant civic meaning. Spires and Schweiger each contribute to an expanding field of studies on the practices of literacy and print culture during this period that push the field beyond the literary and print culture of White cosmopolitan elites. The Practice of Citizenship and A Literate South both problematize the view that literary culture was a normative, uniform, or straightforward building block for citizenship and public virtue in the early American republic. Neither relies upon discussion of the public sphere initiated by Michael Warner that serves as a dominant paradigm for understanding the broader subject of literacy and print culture in this period.1 Spires examines the practices and agency of African American thinkers and activists and Schweiger explores the access and agency of rural, mostly White women in Southern states. Each show how their subjects' reading, writing, and participation in print culture represented important cultural and political practices. The Practice of Citizenship was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. It offers an exceptional balance between recovery of under-examined sources and a powerful framework for understanding the significance of Black ideas and practices of citizenship in the early-nineteenth century United States. Spires, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, takes care to recognize literary historians such as Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Carla Peterson, and others, on whose work he builds. In contrast to asking where Black print culture of the nineteenth century fits within theorization of the early American public sphere so commonly considered since Warner's application of Jürgen Habermas' theory, or as creating a what Joanna Brooks has theorized as a Black counterpublic in print, Spires method of "black theorizing" takes Black writers of the nineteenth century at their word.2 Instead of considering how Black ideas of the period fit scholarly paradigms "in a largely white-defined discourse," Spires pays close attention to primary sources, textual details, and social practices of Black writers, preachers, authors, and their communities whose thought and action developed "a practice of citizenship." Spires offers a refreshing suggestion to "base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work."3 This method of "black theorizing" in Spires draws upon the [End Page...

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan

Reviewed by: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan Nicole Schroeder (bio) Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. By Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 280. Cloth, $35.00.) In 1820, the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York remarked, "public attention has been awakened: the sources of poverty and crime are becoming subjects of daily inquiry" (184). The very same contentions over community and welfare services flash across our headlines every day. Travel bans, issues of immigration, the future of Social Security, and rights to accessible health care are amongst the most debated topics in the current political scene. Studying the very emergence of these crises in early American public life, as well as their legal, political, and economic underpinnings, O'Brassill-Kulfan offers a seminal example that pushes the boundaries of the history of welfare and poverty in Vagrants and Vagabonds. Focusing on the Mid-Atlantic as a space of meeting and migration, O'Brassill-Kulfan centers her narrative on the city of Philadelphia, which houses her most complete record set, while tying in sources from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland to counterbalance her predominantly Pennsylvania-based narrative. She grounds her study in the decades of the early republic, reaching back to English and colonial precedents in order to contextualize changes occurring throughout the early nineteenth century. Vagrants and Vagabonds covers a range of individuals who partook in illicit mobility in the early republic. Coining the term "indigent transiency" as an "epistemologically inclusive term" for those deemed vagabonds, idlers, vagrants, tramps, and hoboes, O'Brassill-Kulfan groups individuals together across racial, ethnic, gendered, and labor-status lines. She argues that this mode of existence, along with individual identity politics, "determined how the poor lived, interacted with, and were [End Page 577] viewed by the local and state governments and their representatives, both under the law and by law enforcement" (2). O'Brassill-Kulfan argues that a study of indigent transiency, as regulated by the state, experienced by individuals, and rhetorically discussed in mainstream society, offers a clearer understanding of poverty and class in the early republic. Vagrants and Vagabonds asserts that transiency was at the heart of everyday public issues and that "indigent transiency defined community membership, and, by extension, American citizenship at the street level" (6). Reclaiming voices of vagrants, O'Brassill-Kulfan reanimates official documents by detailing positions from those on both sides of the welfare process. In a style reminiscent of Seth Rockman's Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2008) or Simon Newman's Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003), O'Brassill-Kulfan breathes fresh air into an archive of government records that are too often read as mere instruments of surveillance and control. While paupers were coerced into interviewing with government agents about their residency status and previous movements, O'Brassill-Kulfan argues they manifested a degree of agency by which paupers "resist[ed] the definitions assigned to them … in order to assert their own, self-defined identity" (133). Vagrants and Vagabonds offers a lens into both the theoretical underpinnings and the everyday processes of America's early welfare system. Most charged with vagrancy lived highly mobile lives, moving frequently to follow harvest cycles, public-works projects, and trade networks. Despite the natural mobility of wage labor, vagrancy laws demanded restricted movement in an effort to limit social welfare provisions to those who had supported their local system for years. Indigent transients were viewed with distrust, as their very mobility subverted the norms of "capitalistic morality." Individuals were expected to pay into their community, a capitalist expectation that prevented the withdrawal of labor from the local economy. In a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing landscape, however, this residency expectation was not possible for those looking for "amenable circumstances both in employment and in the availability of assistance" (38). The characters of Vagrants and Vagabonds traded residency for the possibility of climbing out of poverty. Relocating to a new place was fraught with peril. If an individual was perceived as...

Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory 17861866 by Arun Sood

MLR, .,   In this way—and impressively, given the amount of scholarly ink that has been spilled on this topic—Yahav advances understandings of both Richardson’s technique of ‘writing to the moment’ and his interactions with readers, such as Lady Bradshaigh, who proposed alternative endings to Clarissa. It is not (or not simply) that Richardson had a monomaniacal need to control interpretations of his works, but that the long-term process of judging, on the part of both characters and readers, was central to his literary project. Focusing also on musicological treatises, elocutionist writings, and aesthetic theory, Yahav demonstrates that duration was both individual and shared—based on patterns originating in the human body—in a manner that the novel genre was uniquely able to take advantage of. While the duration of a single reading is necessarily finite, collective engagement with a work endures. As she writes of Tristram Shandy’s deployment of patterns of embodied rhythm, ‘[a]s long as there are readers who can get Sterne’s rhythmic prose [. . .] qualitative duration will continue to be felt and human time will continue to endure’ (p. ). Feeling Time capably integrates a thorough understanding of eighteenth-century theories of temporality—from those of major figures such as Locke and Hume to less famliar figures such as the musicologist Roger North—with incisive readings of canonical novels to offer a new view of the particular purchase of the novel genre in the eighteenth century. While a variety of writers may have been concerned with the question of how we know time, it was through novels that readers could not only contemplate but also experience duration as a qualitative moment that offered an alternative to the relentless forward march of the clock. U  C, S B R S K Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory – . By A S. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . viii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Such is the international popularity of Burns Night that no one can doubt the global reach of Robert Burns, especially in places touched by the Scottish diaspora. But what will astonish readers of Robert Burns and the United States of America is the extent to which the poet’s name and words were visible in the early decades of the American republic. ose opposed to slavery cited his works in defence of their cause, and so did those who propagated it. He was invoked by Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain; and, as Arun Sood reveals in a highly informative subchapter on ‘James Lowell and American Vernacular Verse’ (pp. –), he was the model on which many less familiar writers attempted to create an American dialect writing tradition. It is a great strength of this book that it does not treat the question of reception in a unidirectional way, preferring instead to chart the ways in which Burns both drew from and contributed to the emerging idea of America. Sood’s study does an impressive job of charting the different forms of exchange that connected Burns before and aer his death to a country he had never seen at first hand. roughout,  Reviews Sood reads a diverse body of texts by the light of memory studies and transnationalism : two theories which allow him to emphasize the movement of Burns’s work across borders both temporal and national, where traditionally Burns has tended to be read through an overdetermined sense of his time and place. Among the source materials he draws on, we find (alongside more expected texts) pirated editions of Burns’s work, the ‘constitutional documents’ (p. ) of the Ku Klux Klan, and the proceedings of the first American ‘Burns Supper’ (p. ). e resulting picture is both panoramic and highly detailed. Following an Introduction, Chapter  offers a well-researched account of the poems Burns composed on American topics, contextualizing them in relation not only to contemporary events across the Atlantic, but also to British parliamentary politics and Burns’s own social networks. e succeeding chapter traces in depth the patterns of trade and circulation that facilitated the early dissemination of Burns’s work in the United States. Particularly notable here is Sood’s consideration of the ways in which the...

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs

Reviewed by: The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs Don H. Doyle (bio) The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic. By Gregory P. Downs. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 212. Cloth, $27.95.) In the preface to this provocative book, Gregory Downs confesses he set out to take risks, and that he has done. The result is a genuine intervention in historical debates that for ages have remained confined to a nation-bound narrative sealed off from the fascinating world stage on which Civil War–era history played out. [End Page 419] Downs invites readers to see the American Civil War as a revolutionary event whose causes and consequences were linked to Cuba and Spain in ways few have imagined. He is dissatisfied with the way historians have “whitewashed” the conflict as a brothers’ war and celebrated the Union’s survival and the emancipation of four million enslaved as a self- congratulatory narrative of national success. The problem, Downs explains, is that “assumptions about continuity shape how people see the country and how scholars analyze its past. These assumptions constrain our political history and our political imagination” (15). The book begins with a strong argument for the war as a violent revolution that, instead of preserving the Union, overthrew it. The old Constitution of the Founders, having proven inadequate to the challenge of slavery, was effectively replaced, not just amended. This marked the death of America’s First Republic and the birth of its Second Republic. No sooner does his interpretation of revolutionary change settle in, however, than Downs insists the revolution failed for lack of nerve. Instead of a sweeping transformation to set America right, Republican leaders settled for a “reluctant, managerial revolution.” The author calls it “bloody constitutionalism,” a halfway revolution that sought to limit violence, return to peace and national unity, then “whitewash” its history as an optimistic narrative of national perseverance (6). There was “no greater example of this whitewashing than the Gettysburg Address,” in which Abraham Lincoln portrayed the war as a fulfillment of the nation’s founding ideals and the means to a “new birth of freedom.” The Civil War “was defanged long before it was completed,” Downs protests (51). Chapter 2, “The Civil War the World Made,” decenters the familiar national focus on the causes of the war to locate its origins in Cuba. Downs wants to do for the Spanish Caribbean something like what Edward Rugemer did for the British Caribbean by linking turbulence in a neighboring slave regime to the heightened tensions inside the United States.1 Although events in Cuba “seem a world away from the Civil War, the road from Santiago to Fort Sumter . . . reveals the political and ideological fractures in global affairs that turned isolated rebellions into interconnected revolutions, a general American crisis that disrupted the Gulf World and the surrounding Caribbean” (59). Cuba experienced nothing so dramatic as the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–32 or Britain’s subsequent decision to abolish slavery, which served Rugemer’s case for the Caribbean origins of the war. As a site for southern imperialist ambitions, however, we see Cuba playing a crucial role in mounting sectional tensions within the United States. [End Page 420] In chapter 3, “The World the Civil War Might Have Made,” the author returns to Spain and Cuba to illustrate the failure of the U.S. Civil War to transform the world. Spanish liberals were elated by the U.S. victory in 1865. Men like Emilio Castelar, an ardent republican (and brilliant historian), admired America as a model Spain might emulate. The chance to do so came in September 1868, when a revolutionary cabal of generals and politicians drove Queen Isabella II into exile and set about building a new liberal state. At the same time, Cubans, fed up with Spanish exploitation, seized their chance to break with Spain. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy sugar planter imbued with revolutionary ideals, proclaimed independence in October 1868 and issued vague promises of freedom to slaves...

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen

Reviewed by: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen Richard Stott (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Sports, Theater, Sporting culture, Horseracing They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. By Kenneth Cohen. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp. 334. Cloth, $55.00.) The “sporting culture” of early America is the focus of this fine book. Not really sports history in the narrow sense of the term, the book uses sports as a lens to examine the cultural history of early and antebellum America. Based on a huge variety of printed and archival sources, including legal records and correspondence, Cohen reconstructs and analyzes the changes that sporting culture underwent from the colonial period to the 1850s. The book is gracefully written, and a large number of well-chosen illustrations add to the narrative. While Cohen defines “sporting culture” broadly, the book mainly focuses on the theater and horseracing. It also pays some attention to billiards. It does not deal with rowing, running, baseball and cricket, cockfighting, or prizefighting—a sport that rose to incredible popularity beginning in the late 1840s. The emphasis on the theater may seem odd, but Cohen notes the broad meaning of “sports” in this era and a number of similarities to horseracing including elite backing and liminal status. The foremost sporting paper of the era, The Spirit of the Times, offered extensive theater coverage. Most of the focus in the book is on New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia. While the colonial sporting scene, as described in They Will Have Their Game, was undeveloped by later standards I think many readers will be surprised at how extensive it was. Horseracing in the early 1700s was informal but widespread—men of all classes gathered at the tavern to race their horses and bet on them. Theatrical performances were staged in miscellaneous spaces. As colonial cities grew in the 1750s and 60s, promoters began to construct racetracks and theaters. This was funded mainly by members of the elite who hoped these sites would reinforce their link with one another and their influence in society at large. These new venues were designed to separate the elite from others with less [End Page 767] status—in stands at racetracks and in boxes in theaters. Less genteel spectators were admitted but would be kept away from the elite. The Revolution set back both activities significantly. After the Revolution, sports were reborn. In the eighteenth century, many wealthy backers had seen viewed their support mainly as way of burnishing their status, but in the nineteenth century both horseracing and the theater emerged as businesses; this trend would continue to develop after the Revolution. One of the strengths of the book is Cohen’s careful tracing through letters and legal records of the financial history of the new theaters and racecourses. Men on the make seem to have been among the most enthusiastic backers, who, Cohen argues, hoped they would gain respect for their financial acumen. Both horseracing and the theater had a cross-class appeal, and the need to make a profit meant opening the doors to ordinary men and women. This began a process of democratization that was not easily controlled. Disorder was often the result, and drinking and fighting routine. Cohen argues that this new sporting-business elite “laid the foundation of for the white male republic as well as the values of capitalism that justified growing inequality within it” (12). Both horseracing and theaters had long faced criticisms. But now cogent defenses emerged. Racing horses, so it was said, improved the breed. Theaters could provide moral instruction. In horseracing, as the commercial aspects developed, thoroughbreds were raised and mated, which gave ordinary horse owners little chance of competing. Professional trainers and jockeys came to be employed by the wealthy men who dominated the sport. White men controlled these sports, but women and blacks were allowed as spectators at horseraces and the theater. African Americans were allowed in segregated sections of the gallery in theaters. Some jockeys were black, and Cohen tells the fascinating story of Cornelious Johnston, one of the leading jockeys of...

Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 by Joseph M. Adelman

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 by Joseph M. Adelman Nora Slonimsky Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789. By Joseph M. Adelman. Studies in Early American Economy and Society. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 255. $54.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2860-4.) In a review published in the American Historical Review, David Paul Nord describes Jeffrey L. Pasley's "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001) as a "historiographical sunrise." This is in no small part, Nord argues, because Pasley situates news in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as "vital" in the larger history of journalism, particularly seen in Pasley's examination of political parties as "communication network[s]" (American Historical Review, 108 [February 2003], p. 191). It is perhaps unusual to begin a review of one book with a quotation from another review. But eighteen years after Pasley's groundbreaking work, Joseph M. Adelman has produced another historiographical sunrise, this time on the subject of networks themselves. Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 is based on the premise that "the connections that printers had begun to develop as part of their trade proved not just indispensable but in fact necessary and vital to the Patriot cause" (p. 3). Beginning his study on the eve of the imperial crisis of 1763, Adelman explains how loose ties among different printers gradually became a formalized and intricate network through creative and physical work. As attempts to regulate the press became more fraught in the 1760s, protests against the Stamp Act (1765) were led by printers, who described the act as hostile to both freedom of expression and the colonies more generally. This instance provided a model for subsequent protest, particularly in how printers "amplified" political agendas using their networks (p. 15). Military conflict, however, provided challenges for printers' commercial enterprises and, as a result, for their ability to engage with the cultivation of public opinion. Both during the war and in the 1780s, while printers struggled to regain financial solvency, they also continued those pre-Revolution networks, which reinforced national and ultimately federal visions of an independent United States. For twenty-first-century readers, networks are enmeshed in everyday conversations, particularly when those conversations involve absorbing the news of the day. Be they social, digital, abstract, or face-to-face, networks are critical to understanding the relationship between information and politics. Exploring this dynamic in the late eighteenth century, Revolutionary Networks puts political and commercial history firmly in conversation with the history of the book and with digital humanities. If "The Tyranny of Printers" expertly centers [End Page 685] partisan politics in the world of printing, Revolutionary Networks unpacks the very notion of a center. Exploring networks as both conceptual and material constructs, Revolutionary Networks grounds how information is communicated and shared in the tangible technological processes and physical labors of the print trade. Benedict Anderson's ideas of "imagined community" and "print capitalism," Adelman shows, are made real by the editing choices printers made across the North American colonies, and, in turn, those choices relied on and formed connections in order to share and circulate patriotic or loyalist content (pp. 14, 13). In Adelman's astute discussion of how networks came together and how they were built, funded, and navigated, Revolutionary Networks makes a foundational contribution to growing studies of media, infrastructure, and the role of information in political engagement. Adelman does this in two distinct ways. First, by emphasizing the material and intellectual labors and commercial actions that printers undertook, Adelman demonstrates how rhetoric became increasingly and tangibly influential. This bridging of the technological components of the print trade with the political messaging also renders Revolutionary Networks a valuable text for teaching. Second, in its integration of digital tools, Revolutionary Networks provides a compelling model for truly interdisciplinary research methods and interpretations. Adelman has created a database of master printers who worked during the chronological scope of Revolutionary Networks, which is visualized in charts and graphs throughout the book and elaborated on in an essay on sources. While...

“In Defiance of Judge Taney”: Black Constitutionalism and Resistance to Dred Scott

“In Defiance of Judge Taney”: Black Constitutionalism and Resistance to Dred Scott TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER In 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the most infamous decision in the history of the United States Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denied that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could be citizens of the United States. In doing so, Taney wrote these memorable words: “It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence.... They had for more than a century before been regarded as being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”1 Decades before the Court’s deci­ sion, African-American leaders in the North had fashioned their own understanding of their relationship to America and its founding documents. Confronted with the Supreme Court’s decision, African Americans refused to surrender. They neither accepted the rul­ ing’s legitimacy nor its claim that they had no place in the national community. In­ stead, African Americans held tightly to their own distinctive vision of equality—black constitutionalism—and in so doing helped redefine citizenship in the Civil War era. Black Citizenship and Black Constitutionalism Citizenship was an elusive concept in the early American republic. The Constitution itself used the term sparingly. The word “citizen” appeared mostly in referring to requirements for holding federal office and in describing the types of suits heard by federal courts. The one part of the Constitution that referred to the rights of citizenship—Article IV, Section 2—seemed to leave the matter of defining such rights to the states: “The 216 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” From the text alone, moreover, the relationship between U.S. cit­ izenship and state citizenship was unclear. Equally ambiguous was whether the Bill of Rights served as a list of rights for all U.S. citizens, or whether it also limited state power and thus related to state citizenship. In some instances, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights seemed to use the words “citizen,” “person,” and “people” interchangeably, a source of further confusion. During its early history, Congress passed no specific leg­ islation to clarify such matters. Given the indeterminate nature of the concept of citi­ zenship, as well as textual ambiguity about the institution of slavery (the word “slavery” was never actually mentioned in the Consti­ tution), the question of black citizenship was an open one.2 At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, apart from an enslaved population of nearly 700,000, approximately 59,000 free black people lived in the United States, which included about 27,000 free blacks who resided in the northern states.3 Soon after the ratification of the Con­ stitution, northern free blacks attempted to craft their own understanding ofthe founding documents and blacks’ relationship to the nation. In doing so, they championed citi­ zenship and rights for all African Americans, free and enslaved.4 In 1799,for example, the free black community of Philadelphia, an emerging center of black protest, submitted a petition to Congress making such an ar­ gument. Led by Absalom Jones, a remark­ able former slave from Delaware who had purchased his freedom and become the first priest of the first black Episcopal Church in the United States, the Philadelphia black community called for the end of the African slave trade and criticized the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The petitioners noted that neither the Constitution nor the Fugitive Slave Act mentioned black people or slaves. Rather, when slaves were referred to, it was Leader of the free black community of Philadelphia, Absalom Jones called for the end of the African slave trade. He argued it violated the Constitution, which referred to slaves as “persons.” always as “persons.”5 For...

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers

Reviewed by: Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers F. Todd Smith Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 260. Notes, bibliography, index.) Employing the voluminous amount of secondary works dealing with southern Native Americans that have been published in the last two decades, Gregory D. Smithers has written a short and accessible overview of the southern Indian experience up to 1840 that will have great value for college students and professors alike. Although the book includes details concerning numerous different Indigenous groups of various languages—Muscogean, Southern Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan—the author has done a fine job in clearly presenting his main theme of Native cultural continuity in times of extreme hardship and change. Smithers defines the Native South as extending eastward from the Louisiana-Texas border to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward from the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. (Although Texas is not included in his definition, the author does provide a bit of information on the Caddo Indians—the Tejas of Spanish Texas—due to the groups that resided in western Louisiana). Chronologically, the book begins with the question of origins and examines how these interrogations relate to issues of storytelling and identity among Native southerners. Throughout the entire work, Smithers intersperses Native oral traditions and viewpoints with the findings of modern secondary research. The author also makes sure to demonstrate how Native southerners coped with fluctuations in climate and local ecosystems, adopting new technologies and agricultural innovations as they saw fit. One of the highlights of the book is Smithers' explanation of the Mississippian chiefdoms that emerged in the centuries prior to European contact, along with concise descriptions of how kinship networks and clan systems functioned while buttressing chiefdom societies, subjects that are often baffling to the modern reader. Smithers also discusses the "Mississippi Shatter Zone" in the early eighteenth century, demonstrating how disease, warfare, and European colonial endeavors that inspired slave raiding caused the chiefdoms to decline and splinter. However, tribes such as the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees built on their communal identities to coalesce during this period, enabling them to overcome the dangerous situation they found themselves in. [End Page 361] The situation became even more threatening for Native southerners during the era of the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. The violence and warfare that resulted between Indigenous polities, combined with their involvement in the various wars, caused small-scale migrations within the Southeast, notably among the Cherokees. The author also charts the history of the development and migration of the Seminoles into northern Florida as a complex story of ethnogenesis, demonstrating how their emergence amounted to something more than a group of Lower Creeks migrating out of the Creek Confederacy. Instead, he shows how these dynamic communities had their ethnic origins among smaller tribes such as the Oconees, Yamasees, and other Florida Natives. The discussion of the Seminole emergence is an example of the author's commitment to investigating the smaller, forgotten Southern tribes, highlighting how the book is not just concerned with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that usually dominate the discussion of Native southerners. Late eighteenth-century wars provided the backdrop for rekindling Native religious revivals and attempts to forge pan-Indian alliances as a means of countering the growing power of the American republic. Although these movements failed, ultimately leading to removal in the 1830s, Smithers shows how the Native southerners were able to hold onto their social and cultural traditions, maintained their Native languages, and worked to nurture bonds of kinship and community in Indian Territory. Native Southerners is a sophisticated overview of the history of the region's Indigenous groups, combining the latest historical research with Native oral traditions to provide an excellent introduction to the subject for students and teachers. F. Todd Smith University of North Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Sentire Cum Brownsone: “Brownson’s Political Philosophy, Republican and Christian”

Sentire cum Brownsone provides an exposition of the political philosophy of Orestes Brownson (1803–1876). Negatively, his disagreements with modern social contract theory and its underlying anthropology are laid out, while positively, his key concepts – the unwritten constitution, territorial democracy, and the American Republic – are unpacked. His thinking about the complex relationship between Christianity and America's constitutional order is also highlighted.

Revitalizing Federalism: A Brownsonian Prescription for Preserving National Unity Amidst Growing Diversity

Historically, the United States has achieved a relatively high degree of political stability. The reason: the Federal Constitution provides a complex architecture that checks and divides political power and compels compromise. In A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty, Richard Reinsch and Peter Augustine Lawler recommend the work of Orestes Augustus Brownson, a Civil War era theorist, to properly interpret the genius of this unique American constitutional order. In The American Republic (1865), Brownson emphasized that America’s written constitution is rooted in its unwritten constitution; the habits, customs, and sentiments of the people. The Founders’ federal division of authority between the nation’s general government and the particular governments of the states simultaneously recognized Americans’ national unity and genuine diversity. Today, that diversity—racial, religious, ethnic—is even more granular. In accommodating that diversity, a revitalized federalism would return greater power to the people of the states over domestic policies. This would not only regenerate democratic decision-making, but would also help to reduce the political polarization by allowing policy outcomes suitable to diverse communities.

Clinical and imaging features of acute histoplasmosis

Objective: To investigate the clinical and imaging characteristics of acute histoplasmosis. Methods: The clinical and imaging data of 10 patients with acute histoplasmosis were studied. Their clinical and imaging characteristics were analyzed. All the patients returned from a South American republic in April 2019 and were treated at the Chongqing public health medical treatment center. Results: All the 10 patients were male, aged 30-56 years old, with an average age of 43.8 years old. Four of them were engaged in soil clearing, 2 in gas cutting, 2 in moving tools, and 2 in inspection. The disease in all the 10 patients was caused by inhaling a large amount of bacteria-bearing dust in a short time, with an incubation period of 9-13 days, and the main clinical manifestations were fever, insomnia, dizziness, headache, cough, poor appetite, rash and diarrhea. One patient's head CT showed extensive thickening and increased density of bilateral frontotemporal, parietal and occipital meninges, while the other 9 patients showed no obvious abnormalities. Chest CT findings were as follows: (1) Multiple nodular shadow: the chest CT findings of 4 patients were miliary nodular shadow with diffuse distribution in both lungs. Most of the nodules were less than 5 mm in diameter and distributed evenly or unevenly. CT findings of 6 cases showed scattered nodular shadows in both lungs, with diameters ranging from 2 to 15 mm, and obvious distribution in subpleural and inferior lobes of both lungs. (2) Consolidation shadow: in 2 cases, the size of the shadow was uneven and the density increased, mainly distributed in the subpleura and the lower lobe of both lungs. (3) Ground glass density shadow: mainly distributed around nodules, halo signs can be seen around some nodules. (4) Mediastinum and/or hilar lymph nodes were enlarged. (5) Pleural effusion: a small amount of pleural effusion was found in 4 cases. (6) Pericardial effusion in 3 cases. Abdominal CT showed splenomegaly in 8 cases and hepatomegaly in 1 case. Conclusions: Acute histoplasmosis has no specificity in clinical manifestations. However, there are still some features in CT manifestations, including multiple nodules in both lungs accompanied by halo, enlarged liver, spleen and mediastinal lymph nodes, and multiple serous cavity effusions.