Epic Story Research Articles

Roundtable: The Past, Present and Future of New Netherland Studies

446 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Roundtable: The Past, Present and Future of New Netherland Studies Introduction The study of the Dutch West India Company’s holdings in the New World, in particular New Netherland, is no longer a marginalized field among historians. This is a recent development. As late as the 1990s, historians often focused only on North America’s English colonies, overlooking New Netherland. Scholars who developed an interest in the Dutch colony were required to justify the subject of their research or cast the colony simply as a precursor to New York. Recently, some historians began setting aside the traditional assumptions and stereotypes that shielded New Netherland’s past from serious inquiry. Their work has not only advanced our understanding of this colony; it has required historians of other regions to justify their neglect of this complex and diverse region. Scholars have injected a good deal of intellectual excitement into the field, attracting graduate students and young researchers from disciplines ranging from history and linguistics to literature and material culture. As a result, historical scholarship on New Netherland is one of the fastest growing fields in early American studies.1 Three interconnected events helped drive scholarly interest in New Netherland’s history. The first was the 1974 partnership between the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York, which sponsored the New Netherland Project (now the New Netherland Research Center). Since then, the Center’s staff, notably Dr. Charles Gehring and Dr. Janny Venema, has translated and published nearly seven thousand pages of primary documents once tucked away in the archives of the New York State Library. The new trove of primary sources generated a good deal of excitement among academics, but it was not until 1999 when Joyce Goodfriend published “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History” in New York History that the field took on its own life. In her essay, Goodfriend challenged scholars not to see New Netherland as simply the precursor to 1. As late as 1993, Karen Ordahl Kupperman acknowledged that American historians had ignored New Netherland far too long, and that most considered “Dutch colonization and the continuing Dutch presence has constituted an uncomfortable, somewhat indigestible, lump in early American history”; see her “Early American History with the Dutch Put In,” Reviews in American History 21:2 (1993): 195. Documents and Interpretations 447 England’s colony, New York. Such an “Anglocentric rendering” of history, she argued, “reduced the Dutch to comic figures . . . instead of portraying them as actors in the drama of empire.” Goodfriend was not the only one researching New Netherland’s history, but she was the first to urge scholars to use the recently translated documents to strip away “misinformation and misrepresentation” of the colony’s history.2 Finally, much of the popularity the field enjoys today is connected to the 2004 publication of Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Shorto’s book brought the colony’s history to life for general readers.3 Once, historians of colonial America dismissed New Netherland as a failed colony, which allowed them to move on to subjects they deemed more significant, such as the settlement of New England or Virginia. However, recently scholars have ably demonstrated that New Netherland was a complex colonial society—one worthy of study. While Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World remains the only popular history on the Dutch colony, a number of accessible guidebooks and historical atlases bring part of its history to a broad audience.4 The New Netherland 2. Joyce D. Goodfriend: “Wrighting/Righting Dutch Colonial History” New York History 80:1 (1999): 4–28. This was not Goodfriend’s first work on New Netherland; she had completed a pathbreaking study on slavery; see, Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History LIX (1978); Goodfriend’s full-length study on ethnic diversity covered only part of New Amsterdam’s history; see, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992...

White Whale in Moby-Dick

Herman Melville is a famous American novelist during the romantic period, and an influential figure in the world literature history. Moby-Dick , his representative work, has been a “bright pearl” in the literary treasury of the world. Moby-Dick , or The whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its “ungodly, godlike man”. Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick, leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whale and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations. Melville uses the symbolic methods in the novel and makes the novel full of the permanent artistic charm and the literary value above time and space. This paper focuses on the analysis of the main characters—Captain Ahab and the whale Moby-Dick.

There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media

Juan González and Joseph Torres, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media

<i>Juan González and Joseph Torres</i>, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media

America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (review)

Reviewed by: America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union Erik J. Chaput (bio) Keywords Compromise of 1850, Stephen Douglas, Henry Clay, Texas, New Mexico, Origins of U.S. Civil War America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. By Fergus M. Bordewich. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Pp. 496. Cloth, $30.00) Journalist Fergus Bordewich, the author of five previous books, including Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006), an engaging [End Page 179] narrative history of the Underground Railroad, has produced a richly detailed and beautifully written account of a pivotal moment in American history that all too often simply receives a paragraph or two in broader accounts of the antebellum period. It is important to note at the outset that America’s Great Debate, though engaging, does not alter the traditional narrative of how the compromise measure worked its way through Congress, in terms of the Omnibus Bill that eventually emerged out of Clay’s proposals (against his wishes) to settle the sectional turmoil and Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s repackaging of the Omnibus into separate, more passable bills. America’s Great Debate is the second book to appear in recent years on the Compromise of 1850.1 Bordewich, however, casts his net wider than Robert Remini’s 2010 volume to incorporate a host of characters often glossed over. Indeed, the personalities of the major figures involved matter, and Bordewich sets up to capture this important episode in American history in all its complexity. Using a variety of sources, including the Santa Fe Papers at the Texas State Library; the Zachary Taylor Papers at the University of Kentucky; the published papers of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun; and, of course, the Congressional Globe, Bordewich traces the crisis, detailing the legislative battles in which politicians resembled punch-drunk brawlers. The author paints brilliant vignettes of the proslavery stalwart David Yulee, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Narciso López—a Venezuela-born solider who struck a deal with Mississippi Governor John Quitman to invade Cuba—Pierre Soulé of Louisiana, Mississippi’s Henry Foote, Texan frontiersman Robert Simpson Neighbors, Maryland Congressman James A. Pearce, Alexander Stevens and Robert Toombs of Georgia, and Millard Fillmore, who was thrust into the office of the presidency after President Taylor succumbed to a severe intestinal illness in July 1850. In addition, Bordewich provides first-rate discussions of California politics, the contentious speakership battle in the House as the Thirty-First Congress opened, and the Texas–New Mexico boundary dispute, which was “little more than naked empire building steeped in a mumbo jumbo of legalism” (61). Texas had previously claimed that its territory extended to the Rio Grande River, and President Polk’s defense of the [End Page 180] Mexican War rested in large part upon this very notion. However, this line of reasoning meant that the former Mexican province of New Mexico would be sliced in half, giving Texas a vast area that included Santa Fe, which it had never occupied. As Bordewich details, the debates show how “much slavery really had to do with the South’s aggressive posture.” Never “had slavery been defended so explicitly and with such sheer gusto in a national forum” (189). In line with Elizabeth Varon’s most recent book, America’s Great Debate shows how “disunion” was invoked both “as a process and a threat.”2 In terms of the final balance sheet, Bordewich sees many more gains for the slaveholding South, which “obtained the harsh new Fugitive Slave Law . . . as well as the North’s tacit abandonment of the hated Wilmot Proviso.” The bills “to organize New Mexico and Utah were also clear southern victories” because slavery was, at least on the surface, opened in an area that should have been geographically off limits based on the Missouri Compromise (392). Ironically, the compromise measure that was meant to calm sectional tensions “lit the fires of liberty far and wide across the states of the North, awakening Americans to the thing that Stephen Douglas never...

Litigation: “A deal is a deal,” says the fifth circuit

AbstractNot long ago, while suffering through Contracts in my first year of law school, I questioned my attorney‐father about what it takes to create a final, enforceable contract in a business setting. Dear old dad then regaled me with the epic story of the Pennzoil‐Texaco litigation from his younger days, when the former obtained a $10 billion judgment against the latter after a Texas jury found Texaco guilty of stealing away Getty Oil from Pennzoil after Pennzoil had taken substantial and definitive steps to put into writing an agreement to merge. In so many words, the drama of Pennzoil v. Texaco (as further dramatized in Texaco's gargantuan Chapter 11 bankruptcy) exemplified that “a deal is a deal,” especially when it has been fully or substantially executed in a written, signed agreement.

Mapping RMS Titanic With GIS: Implications for Forensic Investigations

AbstractSince its loss 100 years ago, RMS Titanic continues to captivate people worldwide as an epic story of tragedy at sea and as an iconic shipwreck with many mysteries still to be unraveled from its physical remains on the ocean bottom. RMS Titanic, Inc., has completed eight expeditions to RMS Titanic in its capacity as salvor-in-possession. These efforts include the first comprehensive remote-sensing survey of the shipwreck site in 2010. During this time, the company’s focus has evolved from marine salvage to treatment of RMS Titanic as an archaeological site. An important tool in archaeological interpretation of historic shipwrecks is a geographic information system (GIS).In 2006, RMS Titanic, Inc., formally initiated the GIS-based Titanic Mapping Project. Components of the Titanic Mapping Project include data rescue, digital transfer of film media, design of GIS methodology, verification and rectification of positioning data from original field records, preparation of detailed profiles for all recovered artifacts, development of GIS attribute tables for recovered artifacts and key in situ site features, and integration of remote-sensing data from Titanic Expedition 2010. With information on over 5,500 accessioned artifacts organized within the GIS, the company looks forward to making substantive contributions to deepwater archaeological research and forensic investigations of the shipwreck site. In combination with current architectural- and engineering-related knowledge of RMS Titanic, new light can be cast on such topics as the wrecking event during that fateful night in 1912.

The Inhabited Universe

Toby Lester. The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave its Name. New York: Free Press, 2009. xii + 463pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $16.99 (paper). Sometime around the year 1500, a Spanish mariner named Juan de la Cosa, who had sailed on the second and third westward voyages of Christopher Columbus, created a chart of the Atlantic basin, including much of the At- lantic coast of the Western Hemisphere. The details are incorrect, at least in comparison to later maps of the area. But La Cosa understood, in a way that modern satellites cannot, that one can use a map to do more than present certain geographical forms. Near the western edge, he inserted a small pic- ture of St. Christopher carrying the baby Jesus Christ on his shoulders over a portion of the mainland beyond the Caribbean. The device served three pos- sible functions. First, he used the image to illustrate Columbus' central role in introducing Christianity to the presumptively heathenish natives of the Americas. Second, he obscured geographical information that he might have known, perhaps to keep some information secret so that his patrons could take advantage of it before others. (Other cartographers of the sixteenth century did the same thing, presumably to keep their rivals at bay. 1 ) And third, the image hid his imperfect knowledge of part of the hemisphere. La Cosa's map, then, revealed not only his geographic knowledge but also perhaps his politics, an observation that will come as no surprise to historians who have benefited from the insights of the late cartographic historian J. B. Harley. 2 Toby Lester's wonderful Fourth Part of the World is less obviously concerned with the politics of cartography than with telling the story of a great map: Martin Waldesmuller's world map of 1507, the earliest known to use the name America in a depiction of the Western Hemisphere. In Lester's hands, the rediscovery of the map—which had disappeared from sight for almost four centuries—becomes the centerpiece of an often-riveting narrative, punctuated with tales about the efforts of medieval and early modern European scholars to understand the shape of the Earth and to plot its parts, as can be seen in the many maps (including La Cosa's) dispersed through the text. He interweaves moderns into the narrative too, including the scholars who found the map and

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War

What Fresh Hell Is This?: Revisiting Reconstruction

What Fresh Hell Is This?Revisiting Reconstruction Mark Wahlgren Summers (bio) Mark L. Bradley , Bluecoats & Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Pp. xi, 370. $25.00 paper) Judkin Browning , Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 250. $37.50 cloth) Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America's Continuing Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. xv, 268. $35.00 cloth) Gregory P. Downs , Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 346. $39.95 cloth) Philip Dray , Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Pp. xiii, 463. $15.95 paper) Gary Gallagher , The Union War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 215. $27.95 cloth) [End Page 559] Benjamin Ginsberg , Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 219. $21.95 cloth) Suzanne Stone Johnson and Robert Allison Johnson, eds., Bitter Freedom: William Stone's Record of Service in the Freedmen's Bureau (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. 177. $29.95 cloth) Chandra Manning , What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007 Pp. v, 350. $16.95 paper) James Marten , Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 339. $39.95 cloth) Kate Masur , An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. x, 364. $39.95 cloth) Jerry L. West , The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor, and the End of Reconstruction (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2011. Pp. 216. $35.00 paper) To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, writers must love Reconstruction—they make so many of them. Once the poor stepchild of Civil War histories, Reconstruction studies have become something of a growth industry with popular accounts of massacres and injustices, promises unfulfilled, and possibilities denied. In the last decade, there have been at least two books about the Colfax massacre, several more about the months at the end of the war, a lively potboiler about the president's impeachment, and three studies of the "stolen election" [End Page 560] of 1876. A very clever, challenging monograph by Gregory P. Downs uses Reconstruction as the starting point for his discovery that emancipation and the desolating need bred by devastating war created a new kind of politics, one based on those with power dispensing personal favors: contracts, jobs, services—and this "patronalism," as Downs calls it, created constituencies that saw government as their likeliest hope and the men in power as their personal friends. By his alchemy, the begging letters that every politician, north and south, saw, before and after the war, turn into one of the proofs of a very different statism, fostered by a government endowed with new and burgeoning responsibilities. There are even two books about "the great task remaining before us," one of them with that very title and the other actually showing what it may be. New scholarship explores the feminine side of Reconstruction, traces it outside of the reconstructed states into Kentucky and the District of Columbia, follows it down to the crossroads, and chases it all the way through to century's end and beyond. No reviewer could do justice to the scholarship; this one will do as little justice as it possibly can. Publishing markets love a ripping story, and for those who write with sales in mind, Reconstruction provides blood-and-thunder stories, free from the dangers of too many notes or too-complicated thought. That does not make them untrue. Some of them make terrific reads. All they need are antidotes or, perhaps, sedatives, to be administered with them to let...

Hellcats: The Epic Story of World War II's Most Daring Submarine Raid

Hellcats: The Epic Story of World War II's Most Daring Submarine Raid

New Book Notes

New Book Notes George Brosi Lisa Alther. Blood Feud: The Hatfields & the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder & Vengeance. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2012. 236 pages with maps, introduction, acknowledgments, end notes, bibliography, and index. Hardcover with dust jacket. $24.95. Lisa Alther, whose first national best-seller was Kinflicks in 1976, has again risen to near the top of the book sales charts. This book covers the basic chronology of the feud, but it also examines its context—from other nearby feuds to the events before and after the feud era and the facts and myths of the culture of the area. Alther's deft command of style and her keen perceptions of the feelings beneath the facts makes this book a compelling read. It goes beyond supplying knowledge and provides understanding, and a dash of wisdom, on this complex phenomenon. Lisa Alther, a Kingsport native, divides her time between homes in Tennessee, Vermont, and New York. Frederick A. Barkey. Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898-1920. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2012. 271 pages with a foreword by Ken Fones-Wolf and charts. Trade paperback. $16.95. During the second decade of the twentieth century, socialists were elected to public office in nine West Virginia counties, and in five municipalities they held all public offices. They served as mayors of three additional towns. This book chronicles the rise and fall of the West Virginia Socialist Party. Frederick A. Barkey is Professor Emeritus at Marshall University. Patricia D. Beaver and Judith Jennings, eds. Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 263 pages with photos, an index, bibliography, chronology, and introduction by Stephen L. Fisher. Hardback in dust jacket. $40.00 Born in 1924, Helen Matthews Lewis has achieved the status of an icon among Appalachian activists and scholars. She has directed the Highlander Center, worked with Appalshop, and taught for a variety of different academic institutions. This is an important book. [End Page 110] Jenny Bennett. Murder at the Jumpoff. Vilas, N.C.: Canterbury House Publishing, 2012. 214 pages. Trade paperback. $14.95. Hardback in dust jacket. $40. Yes, the "jumpoff" in the title of this book is the cliff on the side of Mt. Kephart in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about three miles on the Appalachian Trail northeast from Newfound Gap. This novel celebrates off-trail hiking, something the Park discourages. Jenny Bennett is a freelance editor who worked for eighteen years for the London Financial Times. David Bottoms. We Almost Disappear. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1998. 63 pages. Trade paperback. $16.00. David Bottoms was born and raised in Canton, Georgia, and has worked as a professor mainly in Atlanta. Until recently he was poet laureate of Georgia. "David Bottoms is brilliant in the clarity and richness of his language, profoundly humane in the breadth and compassion of his vision. He is quite simply one of the best poets writing today."—Jane Hirshfield. "We Almost Disappear rescues memories from oblivion and holds them up to the light—transformed, transfigured. It is a radiant book."—Edward Hirsch. Tess Collins. Helen of Troy. San Francisco, Calif.: BearCat Press, 2012. 211 pages. Trade paperback. $19.95. Tess Collins grew up in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and sets her novel, inspired by the ancient story of Helen of Troy, in the Clearfork Valley of Tennessee. Collins currently lives in San Francisco where she manages the Curran Theatre. Michael Crisp. Murder in the Mountains: The Muriel Baldridge Story. Georgetown, Ky.: Remix Publications, 2011. 196 pages with illustrations. Trade paperback. $29.95. On June 29, 1949, Muriel Baldridge, a seventeen-year-old high-school cheerleader, was beaten to death in her hometown of Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Although a trial was held, no one has yet been convicted of the murder. This book explains the crime and the effort to find the perpetrator in detail. Michael Crisp is a businessman and film-maker who lives in Georgetown, Kentucky, his hometown. [End Page 111] Mark DeFoe. In the Tourist Cave. Buckhannon, W. Va.: Pringle Tree Press, 2012. 26 pages. Trade paperback. $14.00. Mark DeFoe is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia Wesleyan University...

Jerusalem: the biography

The epic story of Jerusalem told through the lives of the men and women who created, ruled and inhabited it. Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women - kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores - who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.

News for all the people: the epic story of race and the American media

White News is a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the Internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation's system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies. The writing is fast-paced, story-driven and replete with portraits of individual journalists and media executives, both famous and obscure, the heroes and the villains. It weaves back and forth between the corporate battles and government policies that built our segregated media system-as when Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover gave a radio license to a notorious KKK organization in the nation's capital-and those who rebelled against that system, such as Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert L. Vann, who led a national campaign to get the black-face comedy Amos 'n' Andy off the air. White News will become the new standard history of American media.

Great Migrations, Great Stories, Great History?

Great Migrations, Great Stories, Great History? James N. Gregory (bio) Isabel Wilkerson . The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. x + 622 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. There have been many great migrations in American history, not to mention global history. But for the last half century the term connects most readily to the twentieth-century relocation of African Americans from the farms of the South to the cities of the North and West. In the six decades following the outbreak of World War I, some six million black Southerners left that region, dramatically altering the nation's racial landscape. By the mid-1970s, nearly half of all African Americans lived outside the South. But the Great Migration was great less because of numbers than because of impact. The black Southerners who moved north and west transformed cities, rearranged political and racial systems, and, as a result, rebalanced the nation's regions, easing some of the distinctions between them. Many historians have tackled this great subject, along with legions of demographers, sociologists, and economists. Not surprisingly, journalists have also taken up the topic. In 1991 Nicholas Lemann produced the best-known of these books, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.1 Now a second journalist, Isabel Wilkerson, has answered with The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, putting forth a different perspective. Lehmann, concerned about the urban crisis of the 1980s, concluded that the Great Migration was a disappointment; Wilkerson sees it as a triumph of hope and new beginnings. Journalists have different aims and methods than academic historians. They look for compelling stories and vivid personalities, preferring to build narratives around biographical subjects. That can be a challenge when the topic involves the experiences of multitudes. They also prefer to do their research through personal interviews rather than using materials, even oral histories, gathered by others. That too can be a challenge unless the history is quite recent. Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while with the New York Times, has written a gorgeous book that demonstrates the art of great writing and great storytelling. It is impossible not to admire the literary qualities [End Page 96] of this near-best seller that has earned glowing reviews in newspaper after newspaper. As history, I have some reservations, mostly because of limitations that derive from the journalistic-historical method. Years of research went into the book, including an extensive bibliography of works by historians and demographers along with an enormous number of personal interviews. Wilkerson talked with nearly 1,200 individuals before deciding to base her book on three people whose life stories give the book not just its spine but most of its bulk. This means that she focuses tightly on the personal dimensions of relocation, not on the great migration's impact on communities, politics, or culture. The three individuals she has chosen represent some of the important class, gender, and geographic variations among migrants. Ida Mae Brandon grew up poor in rural Mississippi, married George Gladney at age sixteen and moved into a tiny sharecropper's cabin. For seven years, she and her husband worked in the cotton fields. She was pregnant with her third child when the family moved to Chicago in 1937, part of a Deep South to Upper Midwest stream of migrants. George Starling and his unhappy wife Inez began in Lake County, Florida, "a place of cocksure southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers, barely a soul you could trust, and a color line as hard as Mississippi's" (p. 48). He graduated from high school, briefly attended college, and then joined his father and neighbors working in the orange groves. In 1944 he tried to organize a union and soon had to flee for his life, catching a train to New York, becoming part of the northbound exodus out of the southern Atlantic region. The son of school teachers, Robert Pershing Foster grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and medical school in Nashville, after which he spent four...

Book Review: Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima, 1944. The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire by Fergal Keane

Book Review: <i>Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima, 1944. The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire</i> by Fergal Keane

Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders (review)

Reviewed by: Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders Kent Baxter (bio) Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders. By Joanne Brown. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011. The rich parallels that exist between the transitional nature of adolescence and the often unstable and bifurcated status of the first- or second-generation immigrant (or the colonized other) have not been lost on many writers of children's and adolescent literature. Indeed, characters caught between childhood/ adulthood and between old country/ new (or colonial/subaltern) can be seen throughout literature in general, perhaps because adolescence can serve as a powerful metaphor for the transition between cultures and geographic locations, or because the liminal site of adolescence provides a unique insight into the constructedness of what we call "the nation." Joanne Brown's Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature examines contemporary young adult novels that feature children or teens who have immigrated to the United States. Part of the Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature series, Brown's work provides an overview and historical contextualization of fifteen young adult novels that focus on different aspects of the immigration story. Although, for this reader, it leaves a number of questions unanswered, this brief study is a useful tool for teachers who are organizing a course on the subject of immigration or a good starting point for scholars who are pursuing further research in this pervasive but largely undertheorized area of children's literature. Though Brown offers some preliminary discussion of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century texts, including an interesting glimpse of turn-of-the-century textbook discussions of immigration, she largely concerns herself with contemporary young adult novels, arguing that, in fact, the first young adult novel about immigrants was Laurence Yep's 1975 title Dragonwings. The bulk of Brown's analysis is oriented around five questions she contends are central to young adult narratives about immigration: "What prompted peoples of various nations to leave their native lands and travel to the United States?" "How did they come?" [End Page 482] "What challenges met them as they settled into their new country?" "What effect did their immigrant status have upon families, children in particular?" "What conclusions about young immigrants and immigration to the United States can we draw from the literature discussed?" (17-18). Brown provides plot summaries of fifteen novels that she identifies with each of these broader topics. The summaries are supplemented with references to a number of historical works on immigrants and immigration that help contextualize each novel. Chapter two, "The Beckoning Shores," which addresses the first question about what prompted immigrants to travel to the United States, provides a summary of Patricia Reilly Giff 's Nory Ryan's Song (2000), Linda Glazer's Bridge to America (2005), and Laurence Yep's The Serpent's Children (1984). This chapter is framed with a reference to Roger Daniel's "push-pull" theory of immigration from Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (2002), which Brown uses as a heuristic to discuss the motivating factors of the protagonists of each of the novels. Each summary is supplemented with additional historical information, such as background on the Irish potato famine for Nory Ryan's Song and information about the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States for Bridge to America. Chapter three, "The Journey," is framed by Oscar Handlin's well-known—and quite controversial—work, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (1973), which Brown uses as a way of identifying the various phases of the journey that exist beyond the border crossing itself. Brown summarizes four different novels that focus on different aspects of the journey to America: Maggie's Door (2003), Double Crossing: A Jewish Immigration Story for Young Adults (2005), The Dragon's Child (2008), and Red Midnight (2002). Chapter four, "Strangers in a Strange Land," summarizes four novels that focus on adjusting to the new country, while chapter six, "Immigrant Children: Rebels with a Cause" focuses on three novels that feature second-generation immigrant experiences. Brown also provides a brief look at illustrated young adult texts about immigration in chapter 5...

Memories of the Italian rice belt, 1945–65: work, class conflict and intimacy during the ‘great transformation’

The essay examines the memory of the ‘great transformation’ of Italy from an agricultural to an industrial economy in the postwar years by focusing on the case of the rice belt located around the city of Vercelli in Piedmont. Between 1945 and 1965, a society that for more than two centuries had been organized around the culture of rice experienced abrupt and all-embracing change. The mechanization of farming and the introduction of herbicides overlapped with the exodus of rural workers to the city and factories, transforming a local world – from the natural landscape and built environment to the structures of production, division of labor, and everyday domestic, social and cultural life. Based on interviews with former rice farmers and workers, the essay sheds light on the subjective experience of this far-reaching transition. Its aim is to delineate the contours of a collective representation of historical change. What emerges from these personal narratives of the Vercellese rice fields is a complex, coherent, but ultimately selective public memory. The shared understandings that this memory sustains tend to mute a history of fear and oppression, unresolved conflicts and unbalanced relations of power. In its place, Vercellese public memory offers an epic story of the Italian rice belt in which all historical actors are accorded dignity and social relevance.

Book Review: Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010. xii + 772 PP., USD $35.00 (hbk)

Book Review: Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010. xii + 772 PP., USD $35.00 (hbk)