End Page Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara This issue opens with Shana L. Redmond's presidential address delivered at the 2022 ASA annual meeting held November 3–6, 2022, in New Orleans, the first in-person conference in three years. The devastating deaths, violence, pain, mourning, policing, and confinement that filled the world during the intervening years only highlighted what Blacks have lived through for centuries. Redmond's powerful, beautiful, and heart-wrenching address, "The Dark Prelude," frees from capture the Black lives that were arrested, suspended, or terminated with a "routine" traffic stop by the police—Sundiata Acoli, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Assata Shakur on May 2, 1973; and Sandra Bland on July 10, 2015—by listening, accompanying, amplifying, and conversing with the sonic everyday of Black living. By turning our ears, eyes, hearts, and brains to the life before terror, Redmond urges us to imagine otherwise and be better. Kimberly Juanita Brown re-creates and joins the Black chorus Redmond called forth by pointing to the inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose of Black study and tracing Blackness that upends temporality. Erica R. Edwards responds to Redmond's invocation of "thick emotion" and "thick camaraderie" of Black study by beholding and listening to the Black anterior that lies in advance of and surrounds Black death and taking the reader through Redmond's act of indictment, not of the state of the field but of the world and our hearts. "Abolitionist Worldmaking" is a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's muchanticipated collection of essays, Abolition Geography, published in 2022. In his introduction, convener Alyosha Goldstein situates Gilmore's decades-long contributions to the prison abolition movement in the history of abolitionism and elucidates the mode of critique that abolition requires. Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis each reflect on the significance of the collection from a variety of perspectives, ranging from everyday movement building to the historical conditions of possibility for worldmaking as well as Gilmore's theoretical and methodological contributions. The first two essays examine settler cosmology, knowledge, and relationship to Indigenous lands and the environment. Nadia Chana's "On Eating, Critical Distance, and Qallunaat Cosmology" critically reads filmic texts that are purportedly about the Inuit and the hunting and eating of seals, showing that the tensions between eating and critical distance indeed illustrate Qallunaat (non-Inuit) cosmology. In "A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community," [End Page v] the study of the impact of settler colonialism on Menominee land and their understanding of "energy," Gregory Hitch and Marcus Grignon show that the Menominee consistently adapted and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while also appropriating dominant science and technology for their goals. The next two essays bring contrasting approaches to the racial meanings of iconography. Sharron Conrad's "More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination" uses a public opinion poll conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center that illuminated African Americans' deep veneration and mourning for the slain President John F. Kennedy. Through the analysis of the poll and Black families' practice of hanging his portrait alongside images of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr., Conrad challenges scholarly assessments of Kennedy's civil rights accomplishments. In "Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent," Najwa Mayer traces the production and mass circulation of a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman clad in hijab in the style of the United States flag and argues that the aesthetics of racial and secular liberalism converge on gendered Muslim American iconographies while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion. Finally, in "Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy," Naomi Greyser offers an innovative look at the American academy. Focusing on the felt impacts of institutional oppression on writing and learning, Greyser reframes writer's block less as a psychological syndrome than as a symptom of nationalist investment in academic writing as a means of managing knowledge, labor, and subject formation. In Book Reviews, Kristin...

Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong (review)

Reviewed by: Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong Ryan Hall (bio) Keywords Indigenous peoples, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Native American history Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021. By David H. DeJong. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 510. Cloth, $70.00.) Until relatively recently, government administrators exercised an extraordinary degree of power over Indigenous people. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials could dictate almost every aspect of Indigenous people's lives, including where they lived, how and what they bought and sold, what they owned, what they wore and ate, the languages they spoke, how they received and managed money, how they organized their governments, and even how and whether they raised children. Indigenous people resisted, but these policies had undeniably important, and often disastrous, consequences for generations. Yet historians still have an incomplete understanding of the BIA and its inner workings, and in recent decades there have been disappointingly few studies of the Bureau (and of its pre-1824 antecedents in the War Department). Bureaucracy is, after all, an unattractive and intimidating area of study. By design, bureaucracies perpetuate [End Page 352] themselves by producing enormous piles of bloodless and abstruse documentation, the sheer volume of which make them frustratingly difficult for historians to use or comprehend. Paternalism to Partnership seeks to bring some clarity to the study of Indian affairs bureaucracy by focusing on specific individuals. Using separate chapters for each, it offers historical sketches of the sixty-three men and two women who held the highest administrative position in the federal government's Indian affairs system from 1796 through 2021. It typically provides a two- to four-page biographical sketch for each administrator, along with several pages of primary-source excerpts that demonstrate his or her "personal philosophy" (xv). By structuring its analysis in this way, the book contends that individual administrators played essential roles in determining the course of Indian affairs, and by extension, the history of Indigenous people in America. These chapters illuminate the major questions and controversies that preoccupied generations of administrators: for instance, whether the BIA should be under civilian or military control; to what extent the government should manage Indigenous trade; whether treaties should be the primary mechanism for dealing with tribal nations; whether Indian agents should be political appointees or career civil servants; to what extent the BIA should force or advocate for cultural assimilation; and how the BIA should manage Indian lands and money. The chapters also show substantial change over time. While administrators in the nineteenth century generally came to the job with little experience in Indian affairs and were committed to policies of forced assimilation and land dispossession, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries top administrators mostly came from Native communities themselves, and advocated policies of economic development and limited tribal sovereignty. In DeJong's telling, the paternalist BIA of the nineteenth century gave way, bit by bit, to the BIA of today, which is ostensibly focused on serving tribes in a spirit of consultation and partnership. This book gleans these observations from a modest source base. The biographical sketches draw heavily from Robert Kvasnicka and Herman Viola's volume The Commissioners of Indian Affairs (Lincoln, NE, 1979) and a relatively small number of other primary and secondary sources. The primary-source excerpts, which make up about half of the book's total length, come mostly from the annual reports that administrators made to their superiors. These excerpts would not be difficult for historians to find on their own—the commissioners' annual reports are all online and [End Page 353] familiar to any historian of the subject—and the author never introduces or contextualizes them, their intended audience, nor the specific moment when they were written. Still, compiled together they provide snapshots of each administrator's views at a particular point in time. This approach shows what individual commissioners believed and sought to achieve during their tenure, but it also limits the book's perspective on how Indian affairs operated. For example, one of the shortest chapters (just a page and half) discusses William Clark, the famed Corps of Discovery co-captain...

Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney

Reviewed by: Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney Kurt Hackemer (bio) Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. Caroline E. Janney. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-4696-7430-8. 344 pp., paper, $22.00. The current generation of Civil War scholarship has done much to blur the artificial boundary between war and peace that is so often represented by the surrender [End Page 96] of Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox Court House. An expanding literature makes it clear that the passions, ideological beliefs, and experiences of soldiers and civilians alike, but especially soldiers, played an important role in defining postwar politics, social constructs, race relations, westward expansion, and economics. For many, the war was omnipresent long after its final shots were fired in anger. Acknowledging the fluidity between war and peace is one thing, but it is quite another to demonstrate in some significant way exactly how the transition happened on a personal level for soldiers who were about to become veterans. Caroline Janney’s important new book uses the Army of Northern Virginia’s experience during and after the surrender at Appomattox Court House to do just that, and the end result interjects welcomed nuance into a conversation that has been more generalized up to this point. The surrender at Appomattox was hardly a complete surrender in two important ways, which immediately created ambiguity. First, in an effort to accelerate the reunion process, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant paroled Confederate soldiers so they could more quickly return to civilian life. Second, in the chaos associated with the pursuit and parole of the Army of Northern Virginia, Janney conservatively estimates that twenty thousand or more Confederate soldiers straggled, escaped, or otherwise avoided capture and therefore were never paroled. Paroled Confederate soldiers were still technically prisoners of war. As those soldiers returned home, or tried to return home—in the case of border states that never left the Union—concerns about their status and potential culpability for wartime actions revealed that “many of the legal, social, and political questions that had plagued the war from the beginning” had not, in fact, been resolved by the cessation of hostilities (3). The lack of a peace treaty, which would have required acknowledging the legitimacy of the Confederate States of America, resulted in the inconsistent treatment of parolees by military and government officials. Local officials who recognized there had been no formal end to the war feared what these parolees might do as they passed through communities or tried to restart their lives after reaching their home. They were even more fearful of those veterans who had never been paroled. The absence of an efficient pardon system kept the parolees in a state of limbo and presented resolution of those fears. As a result, local military and government officials often reacted harshly to maintain order and stability, driven by their immediate homegrown concerns rather than a unified national context that simply did not exist. The ambiguity and inconsistency of the parole and pardon process reinforced an emerging Lost Cause ideology built around the idea that the Confederacy had never truly surrendered and that its ideals remained intact. Acceptance of the Lost Cause was even easier for those Army of Northern Virginia veterans who avoided the parole process entirely. While that historical interpretation of the transition to the Lost Cause is nothing new, Janney’s unique contribution is to [End Page 97] better explain the chaos that catalyzed the transition. There was more to the surrender of Lee’s army than a stacking of arms and furling of the colors. The demo-bilization process took place over a much greater time and space than historians have hitherto appreciated. Because it extended well beyond Appomattox Court House, it also involved more than just Lee’s soldiers. Civilians of all types, including Union sympathizers, Confederate sympathizers, former slaves, and citizens who just wanted to be left alone, all found themselves caught up in the ensuing drama. Janney convincingly argues that “in surrender as in battle, the war proved to be as much about those at home as...

Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 by Adam Fairclough

Reviewed by: Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 by Adam Fairclough John C. Rodrigue (bio) Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876. By Adam Fairclough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 311. Cloth, $45.00.) The disputed presidential election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877, which decided the outcome and ended Reconstruction, have generated a [End Page 268] wealth of historical scholarship. In this exhaustively researched, engagingly written, and brilliantly executed study, Adam Fairclough makes a welcome addition to this literature, focusing on the Louisiana dimension of this extraordinarily complicated affair. Fairclough’s title refers to Louisiana Republicans, who, although themselves no saints, were “bulldozed” by Democratic intimidation, violence, and fraud during the campaign and election and then subsequently “betrayed” by Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they had risked their lives to put into the presidency only to be abandoned with the collapse of Reconstruction. As scholars have long known, the election was a sordid affair, with virtually no heroes. “The Democrats stole the election,” as was said at the time, “and the Republicans stole it back.” Yet the election that Republicans stole back was the presidential one, and the theft was predicated on betraying Republicans in Louisiana and South Carolina. While Fairclough offers an overview of the 1876 presidential and state elections in Louisiana, the book centers on the workings of the Potter Committee, the congressional committee chaired by New York House Democrat Clarkson N. Potter. The committee was charged in 1878 with investigating only certain aspects of the 1876 election: in effect, to disprove Republican allegations of electoral fraud in Louisiana and Florida while precluding any substantive inquiry into Democratic irregularities. The goal was not necessarily to remove Hayes from office, though some Democrats still clung to that delusion, but rather to discredit further the Hayes presidency and to strengthen the prospects of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden for another presidential run in 1880. Yet, as many Democrats feared, relitigating the 1876 election in any way would potentially open a Pandora’s box, given the whole history of Radical Reconstruction in general and of the 1876 election in particular. If Fairclough’s analysis focuses on the Potter Committee, the committee’s investigation would ultimately hinge on two key questions. The first was the allegation by “Republican” (in name only) election official James E. Anderson that longtime congressman, and Hayes’s secretary of the treasury, John Sherman had promised in writing patronage jobs to Anderson and his confederates for their roles in securing Louisiana’s disputed electoral votes for Hayes. The so-called Sherman letter most likely never existed, Fairclough concludes, although it generated no shortage of “copies” or of theories as to its origins and ultimate fate. The quid pro quo implicit in the Sherman letter may have discredited Republicans, but the discovery of the “cipher dispatches” that Tilden’s agents wrote during the tumultuous aftermath of the 1876 election was a political catastrophe for Democrats. Fairclough traces the circumstances surrounding the [End Page 269] creation and discovery of these dispatches and the breaking of the code that allowed for their translation and publication. The dispatches clearly proved that some of Tilden’s closest confidantes were involved in attempts to bribe presidential electors in Louisiana and Florida. Strictly speaking, the dispatches lay beyond the Potter Committee’s writ, but public opinion forced the committee to look into them, and thus to address the second key question: whether Tilden knew of these efforts. Tilden eventually testified before the committee and categorically disavowed any knowledge of the dispatches’ contents. But his denials were so implausible, even some Democrats had to concede, as to destroy what little was left of his political career. Indeed, as Fairclough argues, the Potter Committee could not have backfired more badly for Democrats, paving the way for the 1880 presidential victory of James Garfield, who had been deeply involved in the shenanigans of 1876–77. Fairclough meticulously disentangles the complicated circumstances surrounding the 1876 elections in Louisiana and their resolution, and he details the equally byzantine maneuverings of the Potter Committee in conducting its investigation. He offers lucid descriptions that bring to life the many colorful characters involved...

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll Diane Miller Sommerville (bio) Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. Dillon J. Carroll. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0807169667. 368 pp., cloth, $45.00. [End Page 88] Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history, and military history has yielded valuable works on Civil War soldiers and their families that expose the horrific and damaging consequences of war on the psyches of combatants. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers is an important addition to this literature. Carroll’s ambitious agenda is to examine “how the Civil War damaged the minds of its participants” (10). In eleven chapters, he touches on the experience of soldiering, institutional care of soldiers and veterans, the impact of war on Black soldiers as well as US and Confederate veterans and their families, and the rise of the field of neurology. Throughout the book, Carroll identifies myriad ways the Civil War affected the mental health of its participants. He makes good use of both published and archival sources: letters, diaries, memoirs, asylum records, and pension applications. And he is exceedingly cautious, as he should be, about overstating links between war-generated trauma, like PTSD, and aberrant behaviors of Civil War soldiers and veterans. Carroll’s thesis, that participants in the Civil War suffered psychological damage, mirrors those of Dean and authors of recent studies including this reviewer, Jeffrey McClurken, and David Silkenat (Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018]; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009] and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011]). Carroll’s original intervention is to consider not merely those who suffered from psychological distress but those who did not. He raises a new question: what of those who emerged from war with their minds intact? Carroll identifies coping mechanisms, like religion, humor, and camaraderie that, he believes, allowed some soldiers to resist succumbing to psychic disorders. Whether he can then claim that Civil War soldiers “were not as psychologically traumatized as some historians believe,” however, remains an open question, perhaps even unanswerable (5). Scholars will no doubt grouse about the skimpy coverage of relevant historiography and Carroll’s reluctance to explicitly situate his own work in a number [End Page 89] of these debates. He makes clear his work rejects the “triumphalist narrative” and aligns with the so-called dark turn in Civil War literature. But he misses important opportunities to inform his readers about myriad conversations historians have engaged in about many of the subjects he raises. For instance, he might have more effectively used the debate about death and the Civil War spawned by Mark Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust to elevate his own argument about war trauma and death (Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008]; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]). Carroll has ample goods to challenge Schantz’s assertion that Civil War soldiers were insulated from the shock of death because it was so prevalent and familiar in the nineteenth century and to instead fall into the Faust camp, which asserts that...

Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

Reviewed by: Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote Clayton J. Butler (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. By Lorien Foote. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 312. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $22.95.) Adapted lectures often make for great books. Faced with the presence of a very real audience, the author has an added impetus to deliver a compelling story and a convincing argument. Derived from a series of Brose Lectures given at Penn State University in 2019, Lorien Foote’s new monograph certainly achieves both goals. Foote makes a strong case that during the Civil War the development of military policies of retaliation—officially sanctioned penalties imposed by one belligerent on the other for going beyond the brink of what it considered “civilized” warfare—had a marked impact on the nature of combat, the experiences of prisoners, and the outcome of the conflict itself. Foote contends that the Civil War represented a contest in which both sides saw nothing less than civilization itself at stake and that both sides used the threat of retaliation to assert the vision of civilization for which they fought. They were, in effect, setting the rules of the game. Though recent works, such as Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s Calculus of [End Page 258] Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (2018) and D. H. Dilbeck’s A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War (2016), have investigated the Civil War in the context of international laws of war and just-war philosophy, both engaging incidents of retaliation, Foote’s argument that retaliation served as a legitimate and widely sanctioned method of directly influencing conduct in the field sets her book apart. Foote situates her study in the Department of the South, comprising the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which became the site of intense controversy over the deployment of Black troops, mis-treatment of prisoners, and the summary execution of combatants during the war. Two starkly divergent visions of civilization and civilized society promptly collided there, visions that cut to the heart of the sectional conflict. Proceeding chronologically, Foote’s narrative benefits from the early introduction of several dynamic and articulate figures, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Gould Shaw, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and David Hunter. Hunter’s unhesitating organization and deployment of Black troops, almost from the outset of his tenure in command of the department, initiated a showdown between seemingly irreconcilable Union and Confederate policies. Confederates saw Hunter’s actions as tantamount to leadership of a slave rebellion, a barbaric act aimed at the destruction of southern civilization. Hunter saw the practice of enslavement, for all intents and purposes the Confederate raison d’être, as itself barbaric and the antithesis of civilized ways. Indeed, these clashing conceptions of civilization hold the key to understanding how nonslaveholding southerners and nonabolitionist northerners found the motivation to fight in the first place. Nonslaveholding Confederates fought to protect southern civilization as they understood it, which they perceived as gravely menaced by the so-called Black Republican administration. Nonabolitionist northerners fought for a civilization of free labor undergirded by the Union, even if that vision paid little to no heed to Black Americans’ rights. Foote rightly notes that once one begins to look for the language of “civilization” in the parlance of the Civil War era, it becomes ubiquitous. The debate over the Union’s use of Black troops offers Foote her best example of how military leadership turned to policies of retaliation to influence the direction of the fighting. Jefferson Davis, she writes, “was convinced he could shape Federal policies through the threat of retaliation” (43). Confederates proposed to reenslave or execute the Black soldiers they encountered in battle. It seemed to them an eminently justifiable position. The only thing that ultimately gave them pause was the prospect of retaliation. The thought that Confederate prisoners might suffer the same fate as Black soldiers forced them to reconsider their policy and generally, though [End Page 259] by no means in every case, stayed their hand. By treating Black soldiers as equals in the...

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards (review)

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Emily J. Arendt (bio) Keywords Clothing, Textiles, Property rights, Legal history Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 433. Cloth, $34.95.) As material displays of identity, markers of class and status, or symbols of political persuasion, clothing's power to convey a variety of cultural messages has been of increasing interest to historians. Certainly, the economic significance of clothing and textiles for both trade and manufacturing in early America is widely recognized. Vastly underappreciated, however, is the place of law in those dynamics. As Laura Edwards demonstrates in her [End Page 357] newest work, both the social and economic value of textiles derived from the legal principles that attached to this form of property: "the legal principles associated with textiles involved foundational cultural values and social customs that defined the good order of society" (20). Everyone knew the value of clothing and textiles, generally knew who the owners of those items were in their communities, and recognized that court protections of those possessions were necessary to uphold public order. Clothing, cloth, linens, drapes, and even accessories like hats thus represented a unique type of property that allowed the people who produced them, traded them, and wore them to make claims to property, even if they lacked strong claims to other legal rights. For dependent persons, including married women, free Blacks, and enslaved peoples, textiles could be owned and traded, used as currency, credit, and capital. Proceeding in three parts containing thematic chapters while charting a chronological narrative, the book demonstrates how marginalized people could rely upon the legal principles that attached to textiles to both engage in the economy and access the governing institutions of the new nation, at least for a time. The legal principles attached to textiles, as shown in the book's first part, pre-dated the American Revolution and were minimally altered by the establishment of the U.S. federal system. In line with recent scholarship demonstrating the extent to which people on the margins were engaged in commercial exchange, Edwards elucidates how the legalities of textiles superseded the laws of coverture and slavery to allow people with no formal rights to enter the textile trades in the decades following the Revolution. Rebecca Coles, for instance, established a successful textile business in Virginia around the same time as the Revolution, producing fabric to be used not only by the household on the plantation, but for sale. That Coles might be considered a manufacturer defies the assumptions many of us hold regarding the power of a rights-based legal framework: How could a married woman with no legal claim to the things she produced be a successful manufacturer? The answer resides in the legal qualities of textiles, qualities lodged especially in public law where concern for the public good had long allowed claims to textiles by those whose property rights would not be recognized under private law. Non-rights holders adopted an array of creative strategies to obtain the legal recognitions that allowed them to tap into textiles' full economic potential as currency and capital to trade, pawn, lend, or save. From the tale of prisoners at Philadelphia's Walnut Street jail selling the clothing they had been gifted to obtain alcohol between 1789 and 1820, [End Page 358] to the story of Rosenah Gray, an enslaved woman who invested in fabric for resale and saving but was accused of theft in 1802, the rich examples in the book's second part demonstrate the various ways textiles functioned as financial instruments as well as consumer goods. Careful to note that racial and class privilege structured the range of opportunities available to marginalized peoples, Edwards nonetheless demonstrates the extent to which people facing structural inequalities could use the creation and circulation of textiles to their own benefit within the legal order of the republic. Ultimately, Edwards argues, a series of shifts in the decades leading up to the Civil...

Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era by Kiara A. Jorgenson

Reviewed by: Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era by Kiara A. Jorgenson Marit Trelstad Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era. By Kiara A. Jorgenson. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press/Fortress Academic, 2020. 176 pp. In a time when major news channels report that we already are experiencing the results of climate change, can Christian ethics or theology offer insights or grounding to guide our response? Kiara Jorgenson's book is an excellent resource for understanding current scholarship in ecological ethics. Beyond this, she reframes a Christian understanding of vocation in order to add theological and ethical depth and urgency to our earthly calling in this era. She explains that "a dialogical approach to ecological ethics vis-à-vis the Protestant doctrine of vocation provides practical help for the North American church seeking to better fulfill its shared ecological calling" (2). This book attends to both the meta-ethical theories, helpfully coined by Jorgenson as "terrologies," and the importance of concretely contextual ethics. Challenging the short-sighted equation of vocation with work, Jorgenson seeks to retrieve and recast early Reformation ideas on vocation. For John Calvin and Martin Luther, in particular, vocation connects "… concepts of redemption, which center upon themes of kenotic relationship, reparation, and restoration. As a lynchpin doctrine, vocation, holding space between creation and redemption respectively, speaks less about doing the right thing or being the right thing and more about relating in a right or appropriate fashion" (127). In chapter one she recounts the main epistemologies and methods in current Christian environmental ethics. This chapter would be excellent reading for a course focused on ecological ethics as it provides a detailed and systematized review of many key scholars [End Page 242] and approaches. Jorgenson's second chapter works extensively with H. Richard Niebuhr's "germinal responsibilist framework" that connects ethics to epistemology and ontology (6). Chapter three dives into early Reformation history with Luther and Calvin's contextualized understandings of vocation. She retrieves two vital connections in their work on vocation: 1) the connection between individual and communal or corporate callings; 2) their linking of creation and redemption through the bridge concept of vocation or calling into the world. Chapter four continues this strand and recounts the history of Reformed and Lutheran theologians and how individualist and pietistic understandings of redemption, justification, and vocation led to the church's passivity on social and ecological issues of justice. Chapter five elucidates the work of three prominent ecological thinkers: Paul Santmire, Sallie McFague, and Wendell Berry. It outlines their methods, aims, concepts and contexts, with a focus on their insights on ecological interrelatedness, wisdom, and restraint. Chapter six offers additional insights on such matters as rest, joy, dignity, justice, and hope within particular individual and corporate/communal contexts. Deep interconnectivity, embraced so well by deep ecology, calls for a wider net of responsibility and awareness. Jorgenson's epilogue points to areas that she is committed to developing further, for example, the nature of work and how it is so easily coopted to support a capitalist system rather than the well-being of humans and the rest of creation (159). On other issues, she includes a brief two pages on eco-justice and environmental racism (52–53) and touches on this again in later chapters (for example, 150–151). Considering our times, it would have been helpful to develop these issues further even though one book cannot address every ethical context. I would have appreciated Jorgenson's further reflection on a deeply interrelational theological anthropology of human and divine relationship as well as human-creation relations. Jorgenson lifts up some theological models that reflect a one-way relation between God and humans where humans are "vessel(s) of God's work" (67) or simply recipients of Christ's gift and power (141). These could be further nuanced to align with the non-dualistic and deep interrelationality [End Page 243] lifted up across the book. The theological anthropology in process theology or Luther's "happy exchange," and works such as Elisabeth Gerle's Passionate Embrace: Luther on Love, Body and Sensual Presence (Cascade Books, 2017) may be constructive conversation partners due to their more dynamic understanding...

The Man with Jane: Another Look into Bellamy’s Kitchen

The Man with Jane: Another Look into Bellamy’s Kitchen William F. Long (bio) “The House” and “Bellamy’s,” two sketches by Boz published in the Evening Chronicle on 7 March and 11 April 1835 respectively, contain short, vivid descriptions of some dozen unnamed parliamentarians.1 Their subjects are likely to have been readily recognized by many contemporary readers.2 Seven “originals” were named in 1954 (Carlton) and the identity of a further three suggested more recently (Long). In the present paper, another of the subjects and the circumstances in 1835 which made him noteworthy are considered. The Man with Jane The subjects of Boz’s descriptions, in addition to members of parliament, included the staff of Bellamy’s kitchen, the refreshment-room which served both Houses of Parliament.3 Here, in the second of the sketches, he remarks [End Page 239] on Jane, the “Hebe” of the establishment, who is attending a man the identity of whom has not previously been established: Have you observed the delicate flirtation she has been carrying on with that young man, who displays a large quantity of hair under the back of his hat? He is a constant visitor here, possesses an enviable facility of dispatching brandy and water, and is nearly related to the noble leader of a “section” of the House. Observe the glee with which she listens to something he mutters somewhat unintelligibly in her ear (for his speech is rather thick from some cause or other), and how playfully she digs the handle of a fork into the arm with which he detains her; by way of reply. The man glimpsed flirting with Jane, then, is described by reference to a near relation, who is “the noble leader of a ‘section’ of the House.” This description deserves attention. Characteristics of the Near Relation First, Boz uses the term “the House” in the two sketches to signify specifically the House of Commons. Second, his use of “section” to denote a grouping within it is unusual. “Party,” “faction” or perhaps just “group,” depending on the context, are more common usages. Boz gives some emphasis to the name chosen, perhaps with a hint of irony, by placing it in inverted commas. Third, Boz refers to the head of this group as its “noble leader.” In the parliamentary context of the sketch, this descriptor is not a complimentary comment on the leader’s character. Instead it implies that he is a nobleman. The English nobility, then and now, comprises immediate families of peers. The latter are those who bear a title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount or baron) inherited from an immediate antecedent or bestowed directly by the monarch. Until recently all peers were eligible to sit in the House of Lords.4 In contrast, members of the nobility generally, then and now, have courtesy titles, or honorifics, and are eligible to be elected to sit in the House of Commons. With these points in mind, we may now consider the possible identity of the near relation of the young man glimpsed with Jane. [End Page 240] Groups and their Leaders in the Commons Readily discernible parliamentary groups in the mid-1830s comprised Whigs, Conservatives, Tories, Irish members, and Radicals. The Whigs and the Conservatives/Tories were led in the Commons by Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel respectively. The small but influential group of Irish members was led by Daniel O’Connell. The Radicals’ particularly vocal members, for example, Joseph Hume and William Cobbett, might arguably be said to have “led” opinion within this group of otherwise independently operating individuals. Of those mentioned, only Russell and perhaps Peel, as nobleman and near-nobleman respectively, qualify as possible candidates for the role of “near relation” of the man in Bellamy’s. Russell bore the courtesy title “Lord” by virtue of being the son of a peer (the sixth Duke of Bedford), and was formally referred to in the Commons as “the noble lord.” Peel had inherited the baronetcy of his father and was therefore a member of the “gentry,” a grouping at the lower border of the nobility. He was usually referred to as “the honourable baronet,” but also, very occasionally, as...

A Harvest of Lutheran Dogmatics: The Life and Work of Twelve Theologians 1960–2020 by Carl E. Braaten

Reviewed by: A Harvest of Lutheran Dogmatics: The Life and Work of Twelve Theologians 1960–2020 by Carl E. Braaten Gregory Walter A Harvest of Lutheran Dogmatics: The Life and Work of Twelve Theologians 1960–2020. By Carl E. Braaten. Delhi, New York: ALPB Books, 2021. 288 pp. Carl Braaten has written this book "for the sake of the next generation of dogmaticians" (276). In it, he offers theological biographies of twelve theologians and ethicists, dating from the 1960s to 2020: Robert W. Bertram, Edward H. Schroeder, Gerhard O. Forde, William H. Lazareth, Robert Benne, Paul R. Sponheim, Philip Hefner, Ted Peters, George A. Lindbeck, Robert W. Jenson, and Paul R. Hinlicky. Braaten concludes with a chapter about himself. He puts [End Page 240] Bertram and Schroeder together in a single chapter. A brief introduction and conclusion frame the work. Braaten revisits each theologian's life and work. Readers can learn much about each theologian, though in a way affected by Braaten's own relationship with each. Braaten identifies many of the important problems that still confront Lutherans in the United States: the nature and purpose of theology, the role of justification by faith alone in the church's work and life, and the mission of the church. Offering some evaluations of each theologian's contributions, Braaten mostly presents digests of their publications. Because so many other theologians, ethicists, and Lutheran scholars of consequence labored in this period, it is important to consider why Braaten chose these figures. He does not fully explicate his criteria for selection and the rationale he does offer is not exhausted by the figures he presents. So many more scholars are important for the development of the networks of Lutheran church and academic life in which these theologians flourished: historians, biblical scholars, ethicists, translators, and many others. By including Benne and Lazareth, Braaten expanded the book to include theological ethicists, leaving figures like Larry Rasmussen aside. Because Braaten includes Hinlicky and Peters, who are from another generation than most of those he includes, the absence of scholars like Mary Solberg, Vítor Westhelle, or Ronald Thiemann is noticeable. Dogmatics, as Braaten defines it, concerns the doctrines of the Christian faith and the task of handing them on. This act of tradition is always a translation undertaken for the "present situation" and for the "whole Christian church" (276–277). Braaten further specifies that the center of this faith is Jesus Christ, the revelation of the Triune God in the Bible, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone (277). He concludes, soberly, that Lutherans have no close or strong consensus on these important matters, the identity of God, or even the person and work of Jesus, ending the book by stating that the tasks now lie in the hands of others (282). Lutheran theologians in Braaten's and in subsequent generations differ in their education, audiences, and projects and because of those differences may not actively engage the theologians treated here. This [End Page 241] book should help Lutheran theologians now at work to recall part of their tradition and thereby stimulate their work by revisiting the work of these twelve consequential theologians. Gregory Walter St. Olaf College Northfield, Minnesota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell (review)

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell William D. Adler (bio) Keywords State-building, Early national state, Role of Government The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 392. Paper, $34.95.) Scholars of the early U.S. have long been interested in how state-building occurred, but a massive revival of attention to the subject in the past twenty years has produced a wave of important research. The Paradox of Power enters this conversation with an impressive contribution to our understanding of the early national state through a synthetic analysis of how [End Page 340] government grew, not only nationally but at the local and state levels as well. Ballard Campbell argues in this book that American state-building has been characterized by a paradox between theory and action: a strong commitment to anti-statist values on the one hand, with a practical necessity for enhanced state action on the other. Those immediate needs, such as physical infrastructure, security, education, and others, led over time to increased state capacity as an administrative apparatus was built to handle these various functions, he argues. The anti-statist values continued apace in our culture but ultimately could not arrest the growth of government. Campbell traces these shifts from the colonial period all the way through the early twentieth century, covering well-trodden soil on how government expanded at the local, state, and national levels. The book contains a wealth of information on what government did and how it did it, including an original collection of state-level actions (contained in the Appendix) that will be of much use to scholars. The greatest contribution of this work will be for those looking for a general treatment of the subject material, as it covers a wide range of time and a similarly wide range of governmental activities. Students in advanced undergraduate courses or graduate students who need an overview of state-building throughout early American history will benefit from reading this work. As for its contributions to the scholarly literature, since it is a work of synthesis, scholars will most benefit from the above mentioned dataset on state actions as well as wrestling with its argument about the "paradox" of American state-building, although even this is familiar to students of these questions. For example, in his work Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2015), Gary Gerstle makes a similar contention about the tension in the Constitution between personal liberties and limited government on the one hand, versus the notion of "the public good" that was more prevalent at the state level. In the field of American political development, political scientists have long debated these questions as well; most recently, in Stephen Skrowronek's Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford, UK, 2021), the authors home in on the noteworthy friction between the "unity" in executive strength within the constitutional framework as compared to the large administrative apparatus that undermines that theoretical unity. No doubt, Campbell's thesis must be situated alongside these others and is one scholars must contend with. [End Page 341] Campbell has produced an important work that should be read by scholars of the early republic who are interested in continuing to explore these fundamental debates. In particular, Chapters 3–6 will be worthwhile for readers of this journal as Campbell moves from the founding of the republic through to the cusp of the Civil War. We will likely continue debating the nature of state-building in early America for many years to come. William D. Adler William D. Adler is associate professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of Engineering Expansion: The U.S. Army and Economic Development, 1787–1860 (Philadelphia, 2021) as well as articles on the early United States, the American presidency, and American political development. Copyright © 2023 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron (review)

Reviewed by: Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron Eran Zelnik (bio) Keywords Western history, Alternative history, Daniel Boone, Indigenous people, Lewis and Clark, Oregon Trail, Dodge City Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West. By Stephen Aron. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth, $29.95.) Alternative histories of the west that attempt to complicate, or flat out contradict, declension narratives have been at a premium for several decades [End Page 349] now. Perhaps most famously, after Richard White wrote The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), in his next book he sought to frustrate this account of Native American decline, and the result was one of the most influential histories of the west, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). In recent decades, perhaps the most noteworthy histories in this vein were Pekka Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2009) and Kathleen DuVal's The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006), which related narratives of indigenous strength and dominance over European and other Native adversaries. In Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West, Stephen Aron brings his deep familiarity with western history to tell a story that differs markedly from traditional narratives of "bloody ethnic cleansings and even genocides" (4). Yet, this study is something of an inversion of DuVal and Hämäläinen's stories of Native power. Instead, Aron "seeks out sites and situations in which colonialism wore a different face and relations between Indians, settlers, and states deviated (for a time) from the monolithic logic of elimination" (4). Even as it attempts to retrieve episodes that challenge the violent framing of most western histories, Peace and Friendship also steers clear of "wishtories": fictionalized "stories about the past" that "cater to contemporary yearnings," such as Disney's Pocahontas or any other "'kumbaya' version of colonialism" (6), for that matter. To do so, Aron takes us on a stroll across the continent that begins with Daniel Boone; Chapter 1 takes place in Revolutionary Kentucky, while Chapter 2 follows Boone down the Ohio River to the region surrounding Apple Creek. Here around the turn of the eighteenth century, Shawnees and Anglo settlers like Boone led something of a peaceful coexistence. This is probably Aron's strongest chapter, in which he provides a good amount of compelling and relatively less familiar evidence regarding the genial relationships fostered between Anglos and Shawnees under Spanish auspices. In Chapter 4, however, we learn that these relationships soured by the War of 1812. Chapter 3 follows Lewis and Clark's famous Corps of Discovery expedition that set out from St. Louis in 1804, while Chapter 5 examines the relationships between Great Plains Indians and settlers on the so-called Oregon Trail from the 1820s through the 1850s. In both cases, Aron sorts [End Page 350] out myth from reality, contending, for example, with the legacy of the famous computer game The Oregon Trail in shaping the memory of the period. Lastly, Chapter 6 explores the history of Dodge City during its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, first as a depot for Buffalo hunters, and later as the end destination of cowboys driving cattle up from Texas. As before, Aron contends that violence, in this supposedly notorious hub of gunslingers, was not as ubiquitous as mythologies of the west would have us believe. Aron's study is an intriguing proposition, while his deep familiarity with the materials and his easy and nimble prose make the book an engrossing read. However, by prioritizing narrative flow and a cast of familiar characters and episodes from American history, the book runs into two considerable shortcomings. First—and this is a pitfall many historians (including myself) often fall into—too much of the narrative conveys the historical context in which such fleeting moments of "peace and friendship" first emerged and then disappeared. As a result, far too little of the book relates episodes and evidence of peace and...

Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (review)

Reviewed by: Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman M. Scott Heerman (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Jay family, John Jay, John Jay II, William Jay Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. By David N. Gellman. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 519. Cloth, $36.95.) David Gellman's Liberty's Chain is an elegantly written study of slavery across several generations of the Jay family of New York, which offers an important intervention into several literatures on race and slavery in U.S. history. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on one generation of the Jay family from the 1770s to the 1870s. Its main subjects are John Jay (1745–1829), William Jay (1789–1858), and John Jay II (1817–1894), allowing Gellman to focus on the history of slavery in the founding generation, through the era of gradual emancipation in the U.S. North, and [End Page 337] ultimately into the Civil War era. Across this long arc Gellman "shed[s] new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force for liberation" (4). Each of the three sections is a masterful study in its own right, and by putting them together Gellman narrates the history of slavery and emancipation between U.S. independence and its Civil War like only a skilled scholar can, probing complex dimensions of gradual emancipation, immediate abolitionism, and the meaning of race in the nation at large. Gellman opens with the observation that "the enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound" (2). He builds on a generation of scholarship on slavery in the founding generation and in the North, but charts new territory by foregrounding both the lives of the Jays and of the Black workers, free and enslaved, in their New York households. Using this framework he shows how relationships across race and gender lines in the domestic sphere shaped, or clashed with, the wider political landscape. His model approaches the history of slavery in the Jay family as a series of "concentric circles" and the "personal relationships with actual slaves and former slaves formed the core," followed by the regional conditions, national policy, and then international forces and intellectual and cultural trends (74). This approach shows that the great national paradoxes were also personal ones, and it reveals how enslaved, indentured, and formerly enslaved African Americans shaped the wider political landscape across generations. Gellman opens his analysis in earnest in the Age of Revolutions, where John Jay stood out as one of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He charts both Jay's marriage into the Livingston family, affording him access to a powerful family network, and his rise in New York politics. Jay was an enslaver in these years, and enslaved people helped propel his upward mobility. Gellman foregrounds a paradox between "the moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation's founding ideals" stressing they clashed in ways that "the Jays found impossible to ignore" (5). Readers follow Jay to Paris where he helped broker the Treaty of Paris (1783), which required British agents to return enslaved people to their owners, or to provide compensation. During these critical years, Jay's father died, leaving him an inheritance of enslaved people, which only heightened the tensions between liberty and slavery (51). [End Page 338] That kind of political and personal paradox is not all that remarkable, except for the fact that Jay was a committed abolitionist. Jay was at the leading edge of gradual emancipation, and Gellman unpacks how the war years gave him the language to contemplate and articulate and alternative to a slaveholding world (29). In 1785 Jay became the president of the newly minted New York Manumission Society and supported the eventual passage of the 1799 Gradual Emancipation Law, which freed children of enslaved women after they served a twenty-eight-year indenture. In these chapters, Gellman gives us a picture of how northern...

A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America by Janet Moore Lindman (review)

Reviewed by: A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America by Janet Moore Lindman Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) Keywords Quakerism, Society of Friends, Schisms, Faith, Reform A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America. By Janet Moore Lindman. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. Pp. 284. Cloth, $119.95.) Janet Moore Lindman's A Vivifying Spirit examines the increasingly complex world of doctrinal conflict among mid-Atlantic Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book, based on deep archival research, dives into the spiritual practices of American Quakers through a variety of lenses. Lindman argues that Quakers' responses to mainstream evangelical Protestantism shaped their engagement with social reform and their own history. The context Lindman provides for Quakers' debates over reform develops a historiographical thread in both American religious history and the history of antebellum reform examining the connections between reform and religious movements in early America. Despite the details that Lindman adds to the debate over the connections between religion and reform, the book at times struggles to find its footing and audience. The first part of the book examines the spiritual lifecycle of Quakers. After framing the general outlines of American Quaker beliefs in the opening chapter, Lindman takes us into the classrooms and catechism books of Quaker childhood. Quaker educational theory was particularly attentive to both the popular theorists of their time and the need to instill central Quaker values of piety, pacifism, and equality in children from a very young age. The last chapter in the section examines the spiritual practices of Quakers nearing the end of their lives and those of their loved ones. Embracing or easing suffering and grieving together after friends [End Page 355] and family passed—death was central to understanding Quaker faith. As Lindman remarks, "mindfulness dictated recurrent engagement with death to learn how to do it well" (64). These early chapters give a fascinating insight into the mental and religious lives of Quaker families across the spectrum of life stages. The second part of the book examines the impact of the various schisms and divisions within American Quaker meetings. The section opens with a chapter detailing the doctrinal differences between the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers, who split apart over whether scripture or the inner light should drive one's faith. Orthodox Quakers, who cleaved to scripture, were accused of being influenced by evangelical Christianity and the need to fit into the vigorous Christianity of the Second Great Awakening. Hicksites read both scripture and the writings of early Quakers to assert the primacy of the inner light to Quaker devotion. The division between the two groups intensified, and new fractures appeared in the 1840s and 1850s when Joseph Burney began preaching around the United States, splitting the Orthodox Quakers into Burneyites and Wilburites. Burney, a British Quaker, questioned early Quaker teachings and brought Quakerism closer to the practices of evangelical Christian churches. John Wilbur asserted the importance of quietism and other Quaker practices and challenged Burneyite rejection of the inner light. The final chapter focuses on the disputes between reforming Quakers and those who thought that the right path was keeping separate from the larger political and cultural debates in the United States. This section, like the first, does an excellent job in explaining the impact of these schisms on the rank-and-file of mid-Atlantic Quakers. Through the words of Quaker pedestrians, we learn how they navigated the debates and chose their positions within them, even when friends and family may have taken the other side. The third section engages with how American Quakers applied their spiritual and religious teachings to their interaction with the secular world. This last section, along with the rather awkwardly positioned last chapter in the second part, is perhaps the least interesting for scholars of nineteenth-century America as it retreads familiar ground for scholars of abolitionism and other reform movements. The first chapter in the section examines Quaker print culture and Quakers' engagement in the broader reform print culture in early America. Here we hear more often from well-known historical figures including Lucretia Mott and her fellow abolitionists. [End Page 356] The final chapter...

Free in Deed: The Heart of Lutheran Ethics by Craig L. Nessan

Reviewed by: Free in Deed: The Heart of Lutheran Ethics by Craig L. Nessan Ned Wisnefske Free in Deed: The Heart of Lutheran Ethics. By Craig L. Nessan. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022. 165 pp. This book is an introduction to Lutheran ethics written for theology students, pastors, and thoughtful lay readers. It succeeds in that, leaving readers with a coherent vision of the way a Lutheran approach to Christian ethics analyzes issues, illuminates them, and inspires us to act on them. Nessan claims that love of neighbor is the overriding concern of Lutheran ethics. "Neighbor" is interpreted expansively to include all people, especially those who are in danger of being disregarded as neighbors, even encompassing all living things. Nessan owes his formation, he writes, to Bonhoeffer's Christocentric theology and to the Christopraxis of liberation theologians. Eight short, readable chapters lay out key Lutheran insights concerning biblical authority, the authority of tradition, reason and experience, the two kingdoms, justification and sanctification, the priesthood of all believers, the theology of the cross, and Christian freedom. Nessan's exposition of these traditional Lutheran themes is [End Page 244] clear and on-the-mark. Often, he distinguishes a Lutheran point of view from other Christian perspectives, or distinguishes among various Lutheran viewpoints. This helps orient the readers' understanding. For example, he contrasts a Lutheran view on biblical authority with literalism and deconstruction; a Lutheran from an American understanding of freedom; contemporary Lutheran views on sanctification in Lazereth and Mannermaa. He presents how the theology of the cross is misunderstood by both triumphalism and trivialization, and how a privatized view of charitable assistance as well as religious identity politics misconceive political advocacy. By the author's own assessment, his chapter "Luther's Two Strategies and Political Advocacy" offers an original interpretation of how Luther's concept of the two kingdoms contributes to our understanding of Christianity and politics. Wanting to avoid past misinterpretations that led to the subservience of the church to political order, or to the rigid separation of church and state, he proposes that God rules one kingdom with two strategies. What emerges is "neighbor politics." Christians participate in God's left-hand strategy by speaking out and engaging in the political process as citizens who advocate for the well-being of the neighbor, using reasonable arguments that appeal to the consciences and common sense of others, building coalitions wherever possible with those who share a common vision, and avoiding special pleading based on a "Christian" agenda narrowly understood (124). A long-standing problem, the "Achilles' heel" for Lutheran ethics (81), is the move from justification to sanctification. Other ways of stating the "unfulfilled promise" (91) of Luther's Reformation is to see that "freedom from" sin, death, and the devil turns to "freedom for" love of the neighbor, or whether we need a "third-use" of the law in Lutheran ethics to motivate Christian living. In Nessan's view, "Only the retrieval of Luther's robust understanding of vocation and the universal priesthood can give expression to the social holiness that is the final goal of the Christian life" (80). Among his suggestions [End Page 245] in this regard is to reimagine the "priesthood of all believers" as the "neighborliness" of all believers (87), and to utilize worship practices to imprint on us "both a way of being and a way of serving neighbors" (89). Nessan's contribution to this long-standing problem is important and energetically pursued. From this reviewer's perspective, the solution to this ethical problem is finally theological. As he notes, what sets up Luther's thinking on the two kingdoms is his view that the world is a battleground between God and Satan. What sets up Luther's freedom from/freedom for dialectic is the acknowledgement that I am convicted by the law as a condemned sinner. This theological confession likely challenges our contemporaries more than does Lutheran ethics. Ned Wisnefske Roanoke College Salem, Virginia Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635 by Martin Christ

Reviewed by: Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635 by Martin Christ Susan Mobley Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635. By Martin Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 261 pp. This work re-examines the Reformation in Upper Lusatia (German-Polish border region), focusing on six cities comprising the Lusatian League, and challenges the traditional understanding of the Reformation in Upper Lusatia as a "strictly Lutheran affair" (28). It also qualifies the confessionalization thesis, arguing that the Reformation in Upper Lusatia was far more complex than previously accepted and was shaped not only by influences from neighboring Saxony but also by the distant but acknowledged rule of the Catholic king of Bohemia. The book contains eight chapters, each organized around an individual from one of the cities of the Lusatian League, plus a conclusion. This organizing principle allows the author to illustrate the contours of the Reformation and to feature various aspects of civic life that affected religious change. Christ effectively illustrates that these "stately actors," regardless of their own religious position, found themselves mediating between an increasingly Lutheran population in the region, influential Catholic institutions such as convents, and a Catholic king. Because of the particularly strong position of the towns of the Lusatian League, the king of Bohemia rarely intervened in their affairs, leaving the urban elites to negotiate [End Page 235] and resolve religious conflict. As a result, the religious landscape of Upper Lusatia featured what the author describes as "confessional coexistence" or "religious syncretism." After the Peace of Augsburg, however, only Lutheranism and Catholicism were tolerated; Zwinglianism and Calvinism were not. While the author makes a convincing case for the multiconfessional landscape of Upper Lusatia, his argument for syncretism is less compelling. At times the author does not provide enough context for the reader to be able to see the syncretism. For example, in chapter five he clearly sketches out the differences between Catholic and Lutheran deathbed rituals which allows the reader to see that the people of Bautzen incorporated elements of both. Christ does not provide the same context for other practices such as marriage, baptism, and communion, which makes it difficult to discern distinct confessional aspects. At other times the distinctions between Lutheranism and Catholicism are perhaps overdrawn, because, as the author himself acknowledges, confessional boundaries were fluid for much of the sixteenth century and even medieval Catholicism was marked by a broad range of accepted beliefs and practices. The book is based upon extensive reading in the secondary literature and draws upon multiple, if often fragmentary, primary sources. Citations are plentiful—perhaps too much so, as each chapter contains an average of one hundred footnotes. The book contains helpful maps and illustrations as well as a comprehensive bibliography but is unfortunately marred by careless editing. One sees numerous typographical errors, inconsistent capitalization of the word "Bible," and confusing use of the word "transgression." The writing in some chapters is clunky, while in other chapters the prose is smooth and readable. The author presents a compelling case for the complexities of the Reformation which must be understood not only from the perspectives of the rulers, advisors, and theological combatants, but also from lesser stately actors, like mayors and town councilors, and town populations. Away from imperial politics and intellectual theological debates the urban populace desired "peace, quiet and unity" (227) above all and were willing to compromise to maintain order. While [End Page 236] the region displays perhaps a greater range of beliefs in the sixteenth century than before, one gets the sense that the people of Upper Lusatia in the early modern era acted much as they did before and after the Reformation—owing due fealty to secular and religious authorities, but largely managing their own affairs, both civic and religious, through argument, negotiation, and compromise. Susan Mobley Concordia University Wisconsin Mequon, Wisconsin Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

A Brief Guide to New Testament Interpretation: History, Methods, and Practical Examples by Roy A. Harrisville

Reviewed by: A Brief Guide to New Testament Interpretation: History, Methods, and Practical Examples by Roy A. Harrisville Charles B. Puskas A Brief Guide to New Testament Interpretation: History, Methods, and Practical Examples. By Roy A. Harrisville. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022. 120 pp. The academic study of the New Testament encounters issues like the synoptic problem, the function of parables, the fulfillment of Israel's scriptures, apocalyptic language, and the ending of Mark's Gospel. Since early last century, various methods have been employed from the lower critical methods of textual criticism to the higher critical methods of source, form, and redaction criticisms. Recalling the heuristic figurations of Paul Ricoeur, New Testament study has also focused on the world of the text (such as synchronic narrative, structural, and rhetorical criticisms) and the lifeworld of the reader (reader-response and ideological criticisms), in addition to its attention on the world behind the text (diachronic textual and historical criticisms). This author, a preeminent Lutheran scholar of New Testament studies, has added to the array of books on exegetical methods. This volume is particularly important given his many decades as a professor at Luther Seminary. What sets this thirteen-chapter book apart is his concern for the seminary student and pastor, specifically, regarding kerygma, event, and witness in the initial chapters. Another unique feature is his thumbnail sketch of the history of New Testament interpretation from the ancient church to the present, which is basically a summary of his Pandora's Box Opened (Eerdmans, 2014). Also distinctive are his helpful New Testament illustrations of the method and limits of the interpretative approach found throughout the book. His concise discussions of lower and higher criticisms recall early developments such as the Gutenberg press (22) and some of the earliest pioneers in this field (28). Next, the chapters on source, form, [End Page 195] and redaction criticisms demonstrate the work of an experienced practitioner of the methodology. His illustrations are insightful (see on the textual variants of Rom 5:1, 24–25) as are his caveats of the shortcomings (see on redaction analysis, 45). Still, I had hoped that he would have mentioned how redaction criticism often ignores the storyline of Jesus in its efforts to recover the contextual clues of the post-resurrection community and its author. The final chapters include sections on lexicography, sociological criticism, rhetorical criticism, structural analysis, post-structuralist analysis, reader-response criticism, feminist analysis. More could have been included (for example, genre analysis, canonical criticism). In chapters ten through thirteen on synchronic and post-modern methods the author states, "Over the years, malaise increased over the viability of historical method … The result has been a flurry of methods" (62). Many of his caveats are noteworthy. For example, while acknowledging the marginalization of women in our society and in the patriarchal culture of the Bible, Harrisville points out that "to distinguish Israel's faith … from Canaanite worship in which the goddess Astarte vied for equal status with Baal, or from Greek and Roman religion with their plethora of gods and goddesses … the male pronoun Jahve or El … or 'I am' … was sorely needed." (79). His concluding chapter hearkens back to the first chapters on the historical context of the kerygma, the witness of faith, the living message of God embodied in the text. Unfortunately, I have found some typographical errors: "the gragment-hypothesis of F. D. E. Schleiermacher" (28), "Isaiah 9" should read Isaiah 6:9 (41), and "Rom 12:24" should read Rom 12:21. I also wish that more was written about Bultmann and Käsemann, but they are more fully discussed in his The Bible and Modern Culture with co-author Walter Sundberg. The book includes a short glossary of key terms, a bibliography of works cited, and author and scripture indexes. This brief guide by a seasoned scholar will make an excellent supplemental text to courses on the New Testament, the Four Gospels, New Testament Exegesis, and Homiletics. [End Page 196] Charles B. Puskas Lino Lakes, Minnesota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Robert D. Bland (bio) Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) Freedoms Gained and Lost enters a rich and robust public conversation over the current meaning of the Reconstruction era. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis, the collection of essays emerged from the 2018 Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World conference that commemorated the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s 1868 constitution—a powerful document that expressed a deep faith in the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States. Covering a wide geographical and chronological terrain, the essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost, read together, offer a shift away from the “splendid failure” narrative that has largely defined the field of Reconstruction studies for the last three decades. Far from a story of incremental progress or heroic struggle, Freedoms Gained and Lost highlights the “limits to [the] radical experiment” (2), as well as the “uniquely baleful influences” that doomed the effort (5). In the book’s introduction, Domby and Lewis see the uneven and harrowing nature of the road to freedom as the unifying theme of the Reconstruction era. “Focusing solely on the serial expansion of freedom obscures the way freedoms have been gained and lost repeatedly in American history—and the complex struggles [End Page 271] to maintain them,” they lament. The essays in this volume were written in the shadow of the 2015 Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting and the violent 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and a well-earned weariness permeates the collection and informs the skepticism toward the previous generation’s more hopeful historiographical synthesis. Speaking to both historiographical debates and Reconstruction’s place in U.S. public history, Bruce E. Baker’s thoughtful “Whom Is Reconstruction For?” seeks to tackle the longer history of Reconstruction’s usable past. “The emergence of a ‘Third Reconstruction’ can be seen as an abandonment of the hopes of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” Baker argues, “but it is equally a hopeful marker of the beginning of something” (22). Reflecting on the polyphonic nature of Reconstruction’s memory and the varying interpretations in family lore, local communities, textbooks, digital history projects, and the elite press, the essay turns to the critical question: did any of these usable pasts have a stable center? Drawing from the work of southern labor historians, Baker suggests that Reconstruction’s usable past—especially in its “Second Reconstruction” and “Third Reconstruction” iterations—calls upon working-class people to work across barriers of race and age to build a better world. Most of the essays in the collection diverge from Baker’s hopeful synthesis and, when read in total, present the Reconstruction era as a moment of mixed promise and Pyrrhic victory. Hilary N. Green’s essay on Alabama’s postbellum education system dampens the usual optimism around the rise of Black schools in the South by highlighting the distance between imagined policy and the difficult work of implementation. Michael W. Fitzgerald’s essay on Black militias in Alabama’s western Black Belt finds a culture of Black armed resistance that bolstered local chapters of the Republican Party against recalcitrant Ku Klux Klan violence—albeit in a larger political landscape wherein the statewide Republican Party lost control of the statehouse. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s essay on northern-born soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops demonstrates that, for many veterans, the homecoming experience was fraught with lingering trauma, discriminatory labor markets, and difficulty securing federal pensions at the same rates as their white peers. Examining postbellum infanticide cases in the North and the South, Felicity Turner finds a discriminatory and racist legal system, which demonstrated that the much-heralded new civil rights protections “proved messy and complicated for Black women across the nation” (137). In addition to shifting away from stories that champion the push for civil rights and the imaginative and flexible nature of grassroots democracy, [End Page 272] Freedoms Gained and Lost points to...

Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva David Salkowski Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song. By Adalyat Issiyeva. (AMS Studies in Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. [xxi, 406 p. ISBN 9780190051365 (hardback), $61; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Of the many important terms Adalyat Issiyeva introduces to the nonspecialist reader in this remarkable book, perhaps the central one is inorodets, [End Page 621] meaning literally a person "of different descent" (p. 10). Applied to ethnic non-Russians in the Russian Empire, the term highlights one of the fundamental contexts underlying this study: the vast landmass of the Russian Empire was inhabited by a multitude of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups who were regarded as "others" by European Russians. Issiyeva cites a surprisingly candid Russian military officer who notes the irony that it is the local community (in this case, the Chuvash people), not the minority, governing Russians, who were the "others" (p. 68). This paradox of imperial incorporation and the way Russians negotiated it through scholarly and cultural production animates the pages of this impressive study. While on its surface Issiyeva's work is an investigation of musical representations of imperial "others" in nineteenth-century Russian music, it accomplishes far more, giving a deep, fluid, and incisive analysis of the relationship between empire and ethnographic knowledge. Through meticulous and detailed work with sometimes obscure sources, she provides an account of the development of (musical) ethnography in imperial Russia. This in turn establishes essential context for understanding the better-known names of Russian music, as they are themselves products of a multi-ethnic, expanding empire. The subtitle of the book reflects both its structure and a greater trajectory of knowledge production. Issiyeva's first three chapters concern the representation of the Russian Empire's non-Russian ethnicities within folk song and ethnographic studies about the folk music of Russia's Asian subjects. The second group of three analyzes the ways in which this knowledge of imperial "others" was metabolized by composers and institutions into art song, a genre that, as Issiyeva notes, has often been overlooked by scholars of Russian nationalism and orientalism, in comparison to opera and symphonic music (p. 6). In chapter 1, Issiyeva focuses on representations of imperial others in a number of folk genres, including the bylinas (an epic oral form of poetry), soldier songs, and children's songs. This story rhymes with larger European narratives of seeking national identity in the folk traditions of an imagined past while also speaking to the specific challenges of imperial governance. A particularly compelling example is found in Alexander Nikulin's Collection of Songs Compiled for Children, published in two editions in Polish-speaking Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1870 and 1881 (Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi dlia detei Aleksandrom Nikulinym [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1870] and Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi Alexandrom Nikulinym, odobrennyi Uchenym Komitetom Narodnogo Prosvyashcheniia dlia upotrebleniia v shkolakh Vilenskogo Uchebnogo Okruga [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1881]). Issiyeva notes that from the first edition to the second—which spans a decade of uprisings and repressions in the imperially controlled Kingdom of Poland—an innocuous children's collection expands into an ideological tool (pp. 37–38). These Russian-language songs, approved for use in Polish schools, use stereotypes of Caucasian subjects to demonize the "bad" imperial other (the "evil Chechen" of Mikhail Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby") and model the proper integration of the "good" subject, exemplified by assimilated Georgians in the song "Appeal." Issiyeva notes that the melody of this latter song contains references to both Mikhail Glinka's art song "Do Not Sing for Me Thy Song of Georgia" and an aria from A. Verstovskiĭ's Askold's Grave (p. 39), thus folding these "good" neighbors into an imperial frame on a musical level. [End Page 622] In chapter 2, Issiyeva demonstrates the role of scholars in supplying knowledge of local customs and traditions in Russian Asia to imperial officials as well as the ethnographic work generated by certain military officials themselves. This chapter also shines important light on the history of ethnography outside Europe. For instance...

How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies?

How Can Scholars from Formerly Colonizing Countries Assist in Decolonizing Burma Studies? Rosalie Metro (bio) In 2022, Htet Min Lwin, a graduate student at York University, became cochair of the Burma Studies Group (BSG), a subdivision of the United States-based scholarly organization, Association for Asian Studies. He’s the second person with heritage from Myanmar to hold this role (which Maitrii Aung-Thwin also did) since the group’s formation in the 1970s—and certainly the youngest. The colonial origins of studying “the East” are well known, as are the roots of “area studies” programs in the Cold War national security interests of the United States and Europe. Thus, the term “formerly” in my title only refers to the end of an official governing relationship; coloniality persists in economic, political, and academic dimensions. Therefore, hearing of this positive news about the BSG led me to reflect on my twenty years participating in this discipline—what has changed, and what has not, in terms of who holds power. When I attended my first Burma Studies Conference in 2008 in Dekalb, IL (home of the International Center for Burma Studies), the field was dominated by older white people from formerly colonizing countries including the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, North [End Page 171] America, and Australia. Many of them could not speak Burmese or another ethnic nationality’s language. There was a sprinkling of senior bama men. After decades of military rule that had made field research difficult for many international scholars, and a general lack of interest in a country perceived as not geopolitically significant to former colonizers, Myanmar was not a popular country to study in the United States. Cornell University, where I was pursuing a PhD, was one of a handful of places outside of Asia that taught Burmese language, and there was only one other person in my class. As a white woman with U.S. citizenship, I didn’t fully understand how privileged I was to be studying whatever country captured my interest at an Ivy League institution. I didn’t question why “area studies” institutes are so often located outside the “area” itself, and in former colonizing countries. Fast forward fifteen years: although the discipline, like so much of academia, still skews white, older, and male, important changes have been spurred by the post-2010 expansion of the discipline as well as by broader cultural shifts. Htet Min Lwin’s cochairship of BSG does not mean racism within Burma Studies is over, any more than Obama’s presidency meant that racism in the United States had ended. But it would be hard to get through a humanities or social sciences PhD program in the United States or Europe studying Myanmar these days without learning or already knowing at least one of its languages. One new venue, the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, is devoted to bilingual content and the cultivation of scholars from Myanmar. There are so many researchers and scholar-activists from Myanmar sharing their insights and doing crucial work. More nuanced discourses around race and power have made it possible to pull apart easily conflated yet distinct terms like “foreign,” “white,” “Western/Eastern,” “Global [End Page 172] North/South” (in ways that made me settle on “scholars from formerly colonizing countries” in my title to identify people with similar positionality to my own, even while acknowledging how much that category is striated by race, class, and gender). It feels to me like the balance of power has shifted in long-overdue ways toward the prioritization of local knowledge. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. These changes are evidenced in Tharaphi Than’s (2021) essay, “Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?” In it, she addresses her fellow academics from the Global South and directs them toward “freeing each other from coloniality,” or the colonial dynamics which outlast colonization (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes her own journey into the Western academy, noting that “to be modern and be accepted in the world education scene is to act the way the masters did” (Tharaphi Than 2021). She describes “Orientals adopting Orientalism,” as those who accept the Western canon and choose research...