Basic Books Research Articles

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships

George Weigel: Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St John Paul II. New York: Basic Books, 2017; pp. 368.

George Weigel: <i>Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St John Paul II</i>. New York: Basic Books, 2017; pp. 368.

Rachel Devlin. A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 384 pp.

Rachel Devlin. A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 384 pp.

Diachronic equivalence: an examination of the international news network

Barabasi (Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life. Basic Books, New York, 2014) argues that a significant proportion of nodes can be randomly removed from any scale-free network without it breaking apart. Gao et al. (Nature 530:307–312, 2016) suggest that three additional properties of networks, density, heterogeneity and symmetry, facilitate their ability to adjust their activities to retain functionality in times of stress. Barnett and Jiang (Anal Soc Netw Anal Min 6(1):1–15, 2016) examined the World Wide Web and found that while there are changes in the use of individual websites in this scale-free network due to weekly cycles in viewing specific websites, extreme events as well as other social and cultural events, the overall network is remarkably stable. This paper suggests an additional property, the structural equivalence of nodes that facilitates network stability. Further, it differentiates between two forms of equivalence, synchronous or structural equivalence, and diachronic equivalence, which indicate that two nodes’ position in a network change over time in a similar manner. A subset of the World Wide Web, the international news network is examined to demonstrate these notions. Daily data on the use of the world’s 44 most frequently visited news websites by 118 countries were mined over the 17 month period September 1, 2015 to January 30, 2017, to create a longitudinal two-mode network (countries and websites). The results suggest that individual structurally and diachronic equivalent nodes may be removed from both the international and website networks without impacting how the network changes over time.

MEDIA REVIEW: Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night's Rest by Henry Nicholls

Henry Nicholls' Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night's Rest, published by Basic Books in 2018, is an intriguing book that reads quickly, unlike a textbook, yet imparts the reader with gener...

Bringing (The History of) Capitalism Back In

Bringing (The History of) Capitalism Back In Noam Maggor (bio) Bhu Srinivasan. Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. 576 pp. $30.00. Peter Kolozi. Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 264 pp. $60.00. Harry S. Stout. American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism. New York, Basic Books, 2017. 432 pp. $32.00. William J. Novak and Naomi R. Lamoreaux. Corporations and American Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 528 pp. $35.00. Ten years after the financial crisis that announced the arrival of the "history of capitalism," the impact of this new scholarship remains uneven. "Capitalism" has certainly caught on as a focal point of debate, generating a steady stream of monographs, edited collections, conferences, manifestos, and critical assessments. This lively debate, however, has failed to crystalize any methodological consensus. It has also struggled to broaden the scope of inquiry beyond a few, and mostly U.S.-centered, topics. The effort to foster a broad conversation that would bring together scholars from separate fields and backgrounds, at least thus far, seems to have generated more friction than cooperation. The four works under consideration here, hailing from the subfields of business history, intellectual history, social history, and legal history (or history of the state), demonstrate why continued fragmentation is deeply unfortunate. Each one of the books offers insights from the vantage point of a well-defined subfield. Each exploration brings attention to a neglected topic, deepening and complicating our historical understanding of the American political economy. As works in discrete areas of study, however, the books are nevertheless powerless to more fundamentally dislodge traditional meta-narratives and analytical frameworks. They demonstrate why the pursuit of greater synthesis—of the type historians of capitalism have called for—remains a worthwhile goal. [End Page 140] Bhu Srinivasan's Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism, the least scholarly of the four books, is also most symptomatic of the tendency to use the history of capitalism as a new bottle for very old wine. A tech entrepreneur-turned-author, Srinivasan is an informed and lively narrator. He builds on work in business history to offer a fast-clipped narrative, moving through thirty-five "Next Big Things," from the Virginia Company, through Standard Oil and Henry Ford, to Apple and Facebook. As with many popular histories, the past in this account is emphatically not a foreign country. With terms drawn from the corporate world, capitalism is insinuated into American history as folklore, hence the book's title. The Virginia Company, we are told, was formed via "adventure capital" and had "an unlimited upside" (pp. 6–7). Slaves in the antebellum South were "the single most valuable asset class in America" (p. 126). Federal regulation under Theodore Roosevelt was not anti-business but merely helped "correct for excesses" in the market (p. 275). Capitalism in the U.S., in this rendition, did not emerge over time but has been integral to American society from its inception. All major pivots or collisions in this history are subsumed under a relentless but ultimately benign process of invention and reinvention. The dark chapters—racial slavery, violent labor conflict, residential segregation—are not ignored, but neither are they allowed to cast more than a passing shadow on the overall arc of progress. The result typifies the sensibility of what Nancy Fraser has called progressive neoliberalism: forward-looking, pragmatic, and optimistic about markets. It tells an exceptionally American story of how entrepreneurs, with the helping hand of government (always in a supporting role), transformed the world time and time again. The only real enemy, it proposes, has been misguided dogmatism of any sort, of the libertarian or the socialist variety. That Srinivasan so easily and unproblematically assimilates capitalism into the American past suggests that political economy and cultural methods have not yet made their way into the core of business history, despite considerable efforts to this effect in recent years. The notion that capitalism has always been as American as apple pie, not a historically specific and controversial formation, remains firmly in place. The attempt to rethink U...

American Slavery, American State: Rethinking Slavery and the Creation of British North America

American Slavery, American State:Rethinking Slavery and the Creation of British North America Kristalyn M. Shefveland (bio) James Horn, 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2018. ix + 256pp. $28.00. Ryan A. Quintana Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xi + 254pp. $29.95. The 400th anniversary of the year 1619 in the Virginia colony has given the public and professional historians an opportunity to reflect on the importance of that year: the development of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first elected legislative body in the British American colonies; and the arrival of 20 Angolans for sale, stolen for slavery by the Portuguese on their slave ship San Juan Bautista before English privateers stole them in an attack in the Gulf of Mexico and brought them to Point Comfort, Virginia on the White Lion. Another privateer ship arrived a few days later, the Treasurer, which likely sold an additional 7–9 Angolans to English settlers. By March 1620, Virginia records indicate at least 32 Africans lived in the colony. It is this latter event that has become a point of serious inquiry and debate for historians of the American South and the Atlantic World. In August 2019, The New York Times magazine published the 1619 Project, a series of essays exploring the legacy of slavery accompanied by a special section in the Sunday edition of the paper along with an essay in the Sports section and plans for a 1619 Project Curriculum for classroom use. Public and scholarly response to this project is ongoing but many historians of Early America counter that we must not obfuscate the years of settlement and slavery that preceded the Jamestown endeavor. In a February 2019 public interview, Virginia governor Ralph Northam parroted an older historical viewpoint, that the Angolans who arrived in 1619 were indentured servants and not slaves. Historians, most notably Rebecca Goetz of NYU, responded immediately on social media to challenge his claims with a series of posts on the long history of the study of slavery and how Northam's position represents an antiquated viewpoint that [End Page 534] is not only wrong but represents an attempt to maintain Virginian innocence while ignoring the facts of slavery.1 The lack of laws regarding slavery present in 1619 has posed an issue for scholars of the British Atlantic, however in recent decades many have rightfully turned to the greater Atlantic world to consider the influence of the Spanish and French colonies on British aspirations and to chip away at Anglocentric notions that the Virginia colony was the first time Africans were present in an English colony, or that the English settlers were not already inheritors of the Atlantic slave trade via the four slave-trading expeditions of John Hawkins in the 1560s. Interested scholars should consult Michael Guasco's Slaves and Englishmen (2014) and a 2017 article written for the Smithsonian Magazine. Goetz has rightfully pointed out that the Africans-as-servants narrative is "no longer tenable" once serious inquiries into the greater Atlantic world are considered. Scholars such as Guasco have proven that the specter and presence of African slavery were already present in the English Atlantic by the time that English colonists arrived in the South at Roanoke. Thus, English colonists likely brought beliefs about Africans' place as slaves and as inferior to Europeans with them as they settled Jamestown. Another point to consider about 1619 is that the English settlement and occupation of Tsenacommacah was by no means certain. Framing the events of democracy in 1619 as a step in the inevitable has been argued against by Guasco: "When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion." By not challenging that idea, Guasco argues that it is an insidious logic, that "reinforces the illusion of white permanence necessitates that blacks can only be, ipso facto, abnormal, impermanent, and only tolerable to the degree that they adapt themselves to someone else's fictional universe."2 James Horn's...

American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism by Harry S. Stout

Reviewed by: American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism by Harry S. Stout Justene Hill Edwards American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism. By Harry S. Stout. (New York: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. xx, 411. $32.00, ISBN 978-0-465-09898-9.) The rise of American capitalism has become a dominant theme in the history of the early U.S. republic. From parsing the connection between capitalist enterprise and territorial expansion in the nineteenth century to investigating the relationship between slaveholding and land speculation, historians have begun to consider seriously how capitalism evolved in the new nation. Historian Harry S. Stout adds to this growing body of literature, offering an in-depth exploration of one family's ties to the founding of the American republic. In American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism, Stout traces this family's quest for wealth, prosperity, and political influence. Stout argues that American Aristocrats is not a microhistory. Instead he proposes that it is a generational saga of individual members of the Anderson family, a clan with tethers to major events and actors in the history of the early republic. American Aristocrats begins in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia with the Anderson family patriarch Richard Clough Anderson Sr., and Stout tracks the financial trials and tribulations of Anderson's children and grandchildren as they sought to secure power and prosperity from the colonial period to the end of the American Civil War. The Andersons, as Stout explores, were one of the most well-connected families in early American history. With ties to presidents, Supreme Court justices, politicians, and military leaders, the Anderson family was among the first generation of the American aristocracy. The Anderson men held prominent positions in local, state, and federal governments. Richard Clough Anderson Sr. fought in the Revolutionary War and was appointed as a land surveyor in Virginia during the late eighteenth century. His responsibilities included distributing land to veterans of Virginia's military who had served in the Revolutionary War. This position, according to Stout, allowed Anderson to acquire prime plots of land for himself and his family and catapulted Anderson and his children into a new economic and social position within American society. The [End Page 423] Anderson children gained membership in the educational elite, attending institutions such as Harvard University and West Point. The Anderson sons and daughters married well, expanding and strengthening their bonds within the political aristocracy. Richard Clough Anderson Jr. was elected to Congress as a representative of Kentucky and subsequently served as the United States' first diplomat to Colombia in the early 1820s. Robert Anderson fought in the U.S.-Mexican War and for the Union in the Civil War's first battle, at Fort Sumter in 1861. The Andersons made continued westward moves in the nineteenth century, purchasing land in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas during the antebellum era. While American Aristocrats chronicles the Andersons' involvement in many of the major events in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history, it is also a story of struggle: fears of debt, threats of disease, and, most important, financial insolvency. Members of the Anderson clan lived through the booms and busts that characterized capitalist enterprise and avarice in the nineteenth century. They traveled westward in search of land on which to expand and secure their wealth. The Andersons made calculated gambles, leveraging land and slaves to safeguard against the vagaries of the American economy in the nineteenth century. The Anderson sons invested in and benefited financially from the horrors of American expansionism, even fighting on the frontier during the 1830s to enact President Andrew Jackson's violent Indian removal policies. The biggest challenge with American Aristocrats is the surprising silence of the enslaved people owned by the Andersons. At the beginning of the book, Stout proposes that, as members of America's founding elite, the Anderson family was complicit not only in the horrors of Indian removal but also in the proliferation of slavery in the early republic. And though Stout argues that "slaves make regular appearances in Anderson's diary and correspondence," referring to Richard Anderson Jr.'s accounting...

Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire. Leslie Peirce. New York: Basic Books, 2017. viii + 360 pp. $19.99.

Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire. Leslie Peirce. New York: Basic Books, 2017. viii + 360 pp. $19.99.

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles

Reviewed by: Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles Randolph B. Campbell Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty. By John B. Boles. (New York: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. 640. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) On April 29, 1962, while hosting a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners from the western hemisphere, President John F. Kennedy memorably remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” John B. Boles’s biography brilliantly attests to the accuracy of Kennedy’s comment. It is no exaggeration to say that during his eighty-three years (1743–1826), Thomas Jefferson sought to know everything about everything, and he came as close as seems humanly possible to that goal. Yet, while he was primarily an intellectual who loved ideas and books, Jefferson also contributed mightily to the “real-world” business of creating the United States. Boles deftly explains how Jefferson shaped the new nation in ways so numerous that only two of the most vital can be mentioned as examples in a brief review. First, the Declaration of Independence, by stating that the protection of individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the proper purpose of government, gave the United States undying liberal ideals. Jefferson would have been the first to admit that his nation, and he himself, did not live perfectly up to the ideal of equal human rights. But over the years, his eloquent promise has led the United States to advance a great deal toward making that idealistic goal a reality. The Louisiana Purchase as described by Boles provides a second example. New England Federalists strongly opposed the 1803 agreement with France, arguing that the Constitution did not authorize adding new territory to the United States, and Jefferson, a proclaimed strict constructionist, worried about the constitutionality of the action. The purchase, however, doubled the [End Page 120] size of the nation and assured control of the Mississippi River, so the president argued that the power to make treaties implied the right to use them to acquire new territory. Only a fool would have passed up such an opportunity to secure the future security of the United States because of what amounted to a constitutional quibble; fortunately, Jefferson was no fool. The Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a boundary with Spanish territory in the Southwest and led to Jefferson’s most important contacts with Texas. Boles briefly discusses the Dunbar-Hunter and Freeman expeditions on the Red and Arkansas Rivers in 1805–1806 and Zebulon Pike’s explorations in 1806–1807, but he notes that they received far less attention than the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery’s adventures in the Missouri River Valley and the Northwest. Boles also describes how Jefferson, always the expansionist, considered the possibility that the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase extended to the Rio Grande but due to complications, both domestic and foreign, was unable to acquire from Spain even the small area centering on Baton Rouge called West Florida. As should be expected of a Jefferson biographer writing in the early twenty-first century, Boles emphasizes issues related to slavery. Jefferson, he writes, “has seen his reputation wane due to his views on race, the revelation of his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his failure to free his own slaves” (2). Boles points out that Jefferson considered slavery an evil and often suggested stopping its spread, but that he was unwilling to rid himself of the institution as did an Albemarle County, Virginia, neighbor, Edward Coles, who freed his slaves in 1819. Of course, Coles had to move to Illinois to emancipate his slaves, and the action changed everything in his life. There is no record that Jefferson ever considered such a step; moreover, he never accepted racial equality and always feared that blacks and whites could not live together in peace. He saw no urgency in ending slavery, preferring to believe, Boles writes, “that in God’s good time, emancipation would somehow be effected. In no other aspect of his life does Jefferson seem more distant...

Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal by Eric Rauchway

Reviewed by: Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal by Eric Rauchway Elizabeth Fones-Wolf Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal. By Eric Rauchway. (New York: Basic Books, 2018. Pp. viii, 294. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-465-09458-5.) Over the past thirty years, there has emerged a large and increasingly sophisticated historiography that seeks to explain the origins of modern conservatism. Explanations initially homed in on the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on [End Page 949] the popular reaction to the social and cultural conflicts of that era or emphasizing the role of middle-class Sun Belt suburbanites, who used rights-based language to fight higher taxes and integration. Recently, historians have emphasized the role played by businesses and evangelicals in creating the values associated with modern conservatism, especially individualism and a deep suspicion of the state. Eric Rauchway’s book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal pushes the origins of modern conservatism back to a time that he sees as a critical moment in American history: the months between Herbert Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 presidential election and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933. In making his argument, Rauchway challenges historians who claim Roosevelt had no specific economic plan for recovery, just a commitment to action. In sharp contrast, Rauchway contends that Roosevelt, during the 1932 campaign, clearly articulated the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism, including an active government that sought to provide security for workers and the aged, and economic stability for farms and businesses. Moreover, as the economic crisis rapidly worsened during the interregnum, he portrays Roosevelt as moving forward in a quiet effort to begin implementing elements of the New Deal. Meanwhile, Hoover, whom Rauchway depicts as a strict laissez-faire conservative, made an almost pathetic and futile attempt to persuade President-elect Roosevelt to publicly endorse his orthodox economic policies, including retaining the gold standard, collecting foreign debts, balancing the budget, and opposing public works and aid to the unemployed. At the same time, Hoover continued to condemn Roosevelt’s proposed New Deal as “a dangerously alien program” that posed “a fundamental ‘challenge to liberty,’” which charted the future ideological struggle between conservatives and liberals (p. 13). Hoover thus planted the seeds for the “unremitting opposition to the New Deal” that became the Republican Party’s “‘Arc of the Covenant’” to this day (p. 13). Rauchway writes with clarity and energy, revealing deep research into an impressive array of private and presidential papers, diaries, and oral histories and making his narrative of the interregnum struggle between Roosevelt and Hoover come alive. After a beginning chapter sets the scene on Election Day of 1932, subsequent chapters move roughly chronologically, each focusing on the conflict between Hoover and Roosevelt over a series of crises and issues, including European debt payments, farm relief, the virtual collapse of the banking system, the trade war, and rising fascism. Upon his election, Roosevelt demanded immediate action on farm relief, and he and his team actively lobbied for a domestic allotment bill, which Hoover declared a threat to liberty and helped defeat. Similarly, as the bank crisis intensified in February and March 1933, Hoover squirreled away cash to protect his family but kept the banks open to purge the system, privately hoping that, if the system crashed, it would be under the new president’s watch. In contrast, Roosevelt, seeking to save the remaining banks, was exploring the president’s legal authority to declare a bank holiday. Finally, Rauchway argues that Roosevelt also actively began charting a foreign policy that featured international cooperation to address the growing threat of fascism and the world’s economic crisis. [End Page 950] Winter War is a truly engaging read that provides new perspective on a significant moment, but it harks back to a great-man interpretation of history in which Roosevelt alone can be credited for the New Deal and Hoover for the rise of modern conservatism. Both played significant roles, but history is never that simple. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf West Virginia University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Sans Titre - No Title ]WHITBY, A. 2020. The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age. Basic Books, 338 p.

Sans Titre - No Title ]WHITBY, A. 2020. The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age. Basic Books, 338 p.

The Stubborn Mythology of Andrew Jackson

The Stubborn Mythology of Andrew Jackson Mark R. Cheathem (bio) John M. Belohlavek. Andrew Jackson: Principle and Prejudice. New York: Routledge, 2016. xi + 151 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $43.95. Bradley J. Birzer. In Defense of Andrew Jackson. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2018. xiv + 209 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $29.99. Alfred A. Cave. Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2017. xviii + 241 pp. Notes and index. $58.00. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2018. ix + 433 pp. Notes and index. $32.00. Many people say that Donald Trump has reinvigorated interest in Andrew Jackson, but the scholarly turn toward Old Hickory began earlier this century. Biographies by Hendrik Booraem, Andrew Burstein, and Jon Meacham and Jacksonian-era studies by Daniel Walker Howe and Sean Wilentz marked the beginning of this revival.1 More recently, works by Sean Patrick Adams, Mark Cheathem, Steve Inskeep, and Jason Opal have continued the trend of reexamining Jackson.2 This new scholarship represents a more critical take on the seventh president, one that considers more fully the ways in which Jackson failed to live up to the democratic promise associated with his politics. Since 2016, four new studies of Jackson have appeared. Three of them reflect this trend of critical interpretation, while one trafficks in hagiography. In Defense of Andrew Jackson provides Bradley Birzer's interpretation of Andrew Jackson in light of the criticism levied against Old Hickory by "New Left historians of the 1960s through today" (pp. xiii, 43). Defending Jackson is a difficult task today, but it is made more challenging when an author flouts accepted professional standards of evidence, interpretation, and accuracy, as is the case here. In terms of evidence, Birzer misrepresents or distorts parts of Jackson's life. Examples of this deficiency are several. Presenting Jackson as "utterly alone" and without family at the age of fourteen fails to recognize that he had [End Page 342] extended family in South Carolina who had cared for him, his mother, and his two brothers since Jackson's birth and who continued to look out for him until he permanently left the Waxhaws region of his childhood (p. 24). Birzer also relies uncritically on hearsay evidence contained in a nineteenth-century Jackson biography to contend that Andrew and Rachel Jackson were married by a Roman Catholic priest who also annulled Rachel's first marriage (p. 28).3 Birzer goes on to argue that "every time Jackson stood for election, the press debated" the Jackson marriage and that Rachel had a heart attack as a result of learning about the media smears against her in the 1828 campaign (pp. 28, 29, 101). Neither of these claims is substantiated by contemporary evidence.4 Birzer also exaggerates Jackson's dueling, claiming that "no one knows exactly how many Jackson fought, but they were frequent" (p. 34). In fact, the historical evidence reveals that he fought three duels—against Waightstill Avery, Charles Dickinson, and John Sevier, although one could argue that the latter altercation never fully developed into an actual duel. None of these duels was the 1813 brawl with the Benton brothers, as Birzer claims (p. 35). Birzer's interpretation of Jackson's life is also flawed. He insists that Jackson was "self-reliant" and "self-made," which ignores the assistance that his various kinship networks provided him throughout his life (pp. 8, 18).5 Birzer also argues that "most students of history tend to think of Jackson as a southerner" (p. 41). That will surprise those acquainted with Jacksonian historiography, since most biographies and studies of his era call him, as Birzer does, a westerner and a frontiersman.6 Birzer tells readers that neither Jackson nor his eventual wife Rachel knew that she had not been granted a divorce from her first husband when she and Jackson began a relationship; scholarly consensus today is that they knew exactly what they were doing.7 The rich historiography of Early Republic politics is also noticeably absent from his description of the era's political party development.8 In...

A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools by Rachel Devlin

Reviewed by: A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools by Rachel Devlin Susan K. Cahn A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools. By Rachel Devlin. New York: Basic Books, 2018. xxx + 342 pp. Cloth, $24.99. A Girl Stands at the Door is a moving study of the activism of girls and young women in American school desegregation. Audiences are familiar with names like Elizabeth Eckford and Ruby Bridges, yet until Rachel Devlin, no one had asked the question: Why were African American girls at the forefront of school desegregation? Devlin's answer adds significantly to the historiography of girlhood while also revising standard narratives about school desegregation and the civil rights movement. To begin, Devlin focuses on often overlooked women leaders of the 1940s. She follows Lucile Bluford's crusade to attend the University of Missouri, which ended when the university closed its journalism school rather than accept a black graduate student. The indefatigable Bluford was at once a prospective student, reporter for the Kansas City Call, fundraiser, and litigant. More successfully, Ada Lois Sipuel applied to and eventually graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Sipuel's struggle paralleled that of Heman Sweatt, the plaintiff in the 1950 Sweatt v. Painter Supreme Court case that banned segregation in graduate education. Devlin documents Thurgood Marshall's reluctance to represent Sipuel, despite her reputation as a "famous, universally acclaimed desegregation crusader" who was by all accounts more willing than Sweatt to fight this battle (35). Another chapter recounts the story of Esther Brown, a white Jewish activist whose years of organizing black tenant farmers, attending a southern labor college, and working with the Communist Party preceded her effort to desegregate [End Page 503] a rural Kansas township. Her success laid the groundwork for the subsequent Topeka case in Brown v. Board. Bluford, Sipuel, and Brown all exhibited unwavering commitment, diplomatic skill, and a willingness to stand up to—and sometimes call out—black male leaders. Other chapters focus on the girls who pioneered school desegregation. As plaintiffs they outnumbered boys two to one, and they constituted a large majority of primary and secondary school students who first attended previously all-white schools. Devlin explores the experiences of plaintiffs in 1940s lawsuits, students involved in the Brown decision, and girls who desegregated 1960s southern schools, often as part of the broader civil rights movement. In answer to the question "Why girls?" readers might guess that girls were less frequent targets of violence or that whites imagined black boys "mixing" with white girls as the greater threat. Devlin reminds us, however, that black girls and women never benefited from either a presumption of innocence or gendered protection. To the contrary, racist beliefs about black female sexual promiscuity stoked fears of interracial teenage sex and rising rates of "illegitimate" births in integrated schools. Devlin argues instead that it was girls' training for black womanhood that prepared them to step up as plaintiffs and pupils. Black women's experience as domestic workers and consumers made them practiced in how to "act" with whites. Passing this knowledge on, elders also drilled girls in "proper" comportment, social diplomacy, and verbal dexterity. Well-versed in sexual respectability, black female students used "decorum, poise, and manners as a weapon against white hostility" (xxvii). Decorum did not signify deference, but rather a blend of "sass," strategic dissemblance, steely determination, and verbal parrying. Devlin does not ignore boys but rather shows that they often felt less internal and parental pressure to join desegregation efforts. Both children and adults saw school desegregation as a girls' "call to arms, a mission they felt to be their own" (xv). If mid-century African Americans understood this, historians have not. A Girl Stands at the Door rights the historical record. Devlin also makes other effective historiographical interventions, arguing that recent critiques of Brown's failures effectively erase its radicalism. School desegregation was less a top-down NAACP campaign than a product of grassroots pressure that forced male NAACP leaders to take more aggressive action. And Devlin reminds us that the youth who voluntarily braved...

Daniel Bell's Dilemma: Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents

Daniel Bell's Dilemma:Financialization, Family Values, and their Discontents Stefan Eich Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976). Melinda Cooper, Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017). Amassing a mountain of etymological conjectures and anthropological reports that ranged from Iroquois family structures to the communal land ownership of archaic Russian villages, in the last years of his life Karl Marx concluded that Charles Fourier had been right. The modern family, Marx explained in his ethnological notebooks from the early 1880s, "contains in itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state."1 Indeed, the patriarchal family itself had developed historically on the back of slavery. "In its primary meaning," Marx excerpted from the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), "family had no relation to the married pair or their children, but to the body of slaves and servants." Just as Fourier had argued, the status of civilization was mirrored by its family structures and the rise of capitalism had gone hand in hand with a patriarchal revolution against matriarchy and common ownership. This meant inversely, as Fourier concluded, that the surest and most rapid path to social progress was the march of women toward their liberty. In 1968, four years before excerpts from Marx's late ethnological notes were first published, Daniel Bell also turned to Fourier. Bell, like Marx, acknowledged Fourier's prophetic quality. Referring to the sexual revolution [End Page 241] sweeping through American campuses and bedrooms, Bell worried about what he dubbed the "psychological utopia of individual release."2 The prophet of such "orgiastic chiliasm," he declared in the American Scholar in the fall of 1968, had been Fourier. "Family life, the key social institution of the civilized state," Bell explained, "was Fourier's most compelling example of an unnatural institution, holding men in its iron grip, bringing misery to all its members."3 As the journal announced, Bell's next, long-awaited monograph would dissect Fourier's untimely anticipation of the utopia of sexual liberation. Bell was far from alone in his concern about the state of American sexual mores and family structures at the time. Already in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" had caused a stir by reframing black urban poverty around "the deterioration of the Negro family."4 Moynihan, a sociologist then serving in the Johnson administration as Assistant Undersecretary of Labor, argued in the report that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."5 By the early 1970s anxieties about the counter-cultural sexual liberation directly echoed Moynihan's account of black family breakdown. It was during these years that the economist Gary Becker began to extend his account of human capital from education into reproduction to develop an "economic theory of marriage."6 Throughout the 1960s Becker had been Bell's colleague at Columbia, but in the wake of the student protests on Morningside Heights in the spring of 1968 both turned their backs to Columbia. Bell moved on to the sociology department at Harvard. Becker returned to the University of Chicago. In his theoretical papers Becker had largely refrained from spelling out the political implications of his theory of family economics, but as the introduction to his unifying Treatise on the Family (1981) made clear, his account self-consciously tapped into anxieties about divorce [End Page 242] rates and single mothers that had been building up in the course of the 1970s. As Becker declared in the book's opening sentence, "the family in the Western world has been radically altered, some claim almost destroyed, by the events of the last three decades."7 ________ Becker's hyperbolic assessment forms the opening epigraph of Melinda Cooper's brilliant Family Values.8 As Cooper shows in her important revisionist account, financialization and neoliberal depoliticization were never opposed to family values...

THE ARPEGGIO IN DIDACTIC LITERATURE FOR CLASSICAL GUITAR

The art of instrumental performance has a specific purpose - to present a musical work (author's product) to a wide public auditorium - an audience. In order to accomplish this practical activity, the performer is necessary to adopt and master certain instrumental skills. Some of them are universal, others are "tied to" the specifics of the instrument itself, and others refer to certain elements of the musical language. By their nature, the techniques are skills created by the both hands finger movements. Fully studied and perfected, they are part of the instrumental technique, which is a tool of clear, convincing and "picturesque" representation of the artistic content of the musical works. In the process of classical guitar education, techniques are mastered step by step in accordance with their complexity, using didactic approaches outlined/exposed in the books. The review of such editions, which are created in a different period of time, illustrates the development of different pedagogical views in the classical guitar training. This provides practical and applied knowledge to the instructor of a musical instrument as an irreplaceable assistant in the teaching practice. This argues the consideration of arpeggio - a major technique skill in the context of its widespread application in the didactic instrumental literature and its fundamental importance for the development of instrumental technique in classical guitar. Expanded exposure with detailed organization of activities and modern manners of mastering the arpeggio technique, the author presents in the article ‘Innovative approach of mastering the specific arpeggio technique in classical guitar education’ (Miteva-Dinkova, S. ‘Innovative approach of mastering the specific arpeggio technique in classical guitar education, Collection of papers from International Scientific Conference ‘Science, Education and Innovations in the Arts’, Plovdiv, 2018). This text clarifies the origin, development and achievement of the most efficient ways of work that provide rapid and positive results in the pedagogical practice based on a review of basic didactic books (Mauro Giuliani – 120 Right Hand Studies, Francisco Tàrrega – Complete Technical Studies, Emilio Pujol – Escuela razonada de la guitarra, Abel Carlevaro – Seria Didactica para Guitarra, part 3 – Right Hand Technique).

The Equations of Life: how Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles S. Cockell, Basic Books, 2018

The Equations of Life: how Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles S. Cockell, Basic Books, 2018

GEORGE CHAUNCEY'SGAY NEW YORK:A VIEW FROM 25 YEARS LATER

When George Chauncey'sGay New Yorkappeared a quarter century ago, it did so with deserved fanfare. Reviewers celebrated it as “brilliant,” “magisterial,” “exceptional,” “monumental,” “light-years ahead,” “masterful,” “seminal,” “groundbreaking,” “absolutely marvelous,” a “new beginning,” and a “landmark study.” While reviews ofGay New Yorkappeared in the usual American history journals, many of these were uncommonly long, indicating the book's immediate importance. This importance was also felt beyond the discipline of history with reviews appearing in sociological, anthropological, environmental, American Studies, and even speech journals. The Association of American Geographers held a roundtable onGay New Yorkin 1995 in which a participant dubbed it, “one of the more important texts written by a nongeographer to be included in a canon of new social geography.” Beyond the academy, the popular press also expressed considerable interest in the book, with theNew York Times, theNew Yorker, theNew Republic, and theGay Community Newseach taking up the matter ofGay New Yorkin its pages. And beyond the bounds of the United States, scholarly publications in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom also commissioned reviews ofGay New York. A year after its American debut with Basic Books, the parent firm of HarperCollins released it in the United Kingdom, and then eight years later the noted historian Didier Eribon translated it into French for the Parisian publisher Fayard. Within its first few years of publication,Gay New Yorkalso collected a number of notable prizes, including theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for history, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's studies, and the Merle Curti Award from the OAH.

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. By R.Marie Griffith. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. vii + 395. $32.00.

Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. By R.Marie Griffith. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. vii + 395. $32.00.