Freedom Trail Research Articles

Review: Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston, by Seth C. Bruggeman

Review: <i>Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston</i>, by Seth C. Bruggeman

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Introduction from the Editorial Team

Introduction from the Editorial Team Selima Sultana, Paul Knapp, Ridwaana Allen, and Tyler Mitchell Issue 61.2 marks our sixth issue as an editorial team and is slated for production at the time when we are celebrating Black History Month, February 2021. The editorial team recognizes Black Americans’ range of identities, and their significant role in US history, and acknowledges the systemic inequality and everyday challenges Black Americans continue to experience. We acknowledge their struggles and celebrate their resilience this month and every month. The significance of this month is interwoven throughout this issue, which includes a cover-art essay, four articles, and a book review. The cover art and its associated essay are contributed by Caleb Smith, one recipient of Southeastern Geographer 2020 Cover Art Award. The cover art, which shows an empty Mississippi state flagpole next to an American flag at the Jones County Courthouse in Ellisville, Mississippi, represents a historical moment of the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag canton. Since 1861, this flag persisted as an enduring symbol of racism against Black Americans in the guise of Southern heritage in Mississippi and beyond. Historically, plantation museums have been used to romanticize planter culture and the antebellum South, often by omitting slavery from the narrative altogether. Doron and Jansson’s article argues that effectively transitioning from erasing slavery from the narrative to incorporating it meaningfully requires reflection and reflexive epistemic positionality. Without that critical reflection and self-awareness, there is a risk that the narrative will be changed, but the same tropes will be propagated in the new narrative. “Epistemic positionality” here is understood to mean how knowledge is shaped by a subject’s position in relation to systems of power. The authors focus on the Oak Alley plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana as their case study of a museum currently undergoing the transition and juxtapose that briefly with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has successfully undergone this transition. Oak Alley has evolved from the “annihilation” of slavery from its narrative, to a segregated knowledge regime, to attempting to be more inclusive and integrate slavery in the narrative – a “balancing act” that appreciates the beauty of the place while acknowledging its ugly past. However, these efforts may ultimately be limited by the fact that visitors’ comfort is still prioritized over meaningful engagement with history and how that continues to manifest in the present – including through harmful narratives illustrated by plantation museums. While Monticello experienced the same transition, part of their success has come from acknowledging positionality and embracing the discomfort rather than trying to avoid it. [End Page 107] Lovelace uses Black Feminist Hauntology to investigate why Nat Turner’s freedom trail has been denied memorialization. Black Feminist Hauntology has been posited as “a theory that the memory of violence and trauma can haunt.” Lovelace underpins Black Feminist Hauntology with rememory and re-membering. “Rememory” can be thought of as “a place where images of the past can be stored,” while “re-membering” refers to “the act of using memory to reassemble that which has been broken apart.” Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place in 1831, and despite it being the largest slave rebellion to take place in the US, no official sites exist to commemorate it. Those sites that have been restored or maintained present a specific and white-centric narrative. Particularly disturbing are the normalizing and centralizing of whiteness and intentional exclusion and othering of Black people in the memory of this rebellion, which in turn shape its geography. Historical markers, Blackhead Signpost Road, and the Rebecca Vaughan House support these findings. Lovelace’s journey through Southampton County, Virginia to various sites affiliated with the rebellion reveals a “freedom trail” buried by unequal memorializations and traditional memory. These work in tandem to erase Black people from the geographies they helped to create and present a narrative of white innocence despite the inherent cruelty and brutality of chattel slavery. To combat this false narrative, these places are instead resituated through rememory and re-membering. They center Blackness and emphasize how Black spatial acts have shaped the landscapes in and beyond Southampton County. Schuch et al. investigate the concept of Latino receptivity from the...

Creating a More Inclusive Boston Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail: An Intersectional Approach to Empowering Social Justice And Equality

This article is a form of activist archaeology in taking a feminist intersectional approach to suggest additional information and sites to increase the inclusiveness of Boston’s Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail. First a critical feminist approach is taken to analyze the biases of these trails. Critique of the dominance of elite white heterosexual men in Freedom Trail sites is needed to open the space for more inclusive intersectional information. The inclusion of more information about Native American men and women is suggested for existing sites on the Freedom Trail, and a statue commemorating their settlements in the area. Inclusion of more information about women of various intersectionalities is suggested for existing sites on the Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail, as well as some additional women’s sites from the Boston Women’s Heritage Trails and survey of over 120 women’s public institutions in Boston. Inclusion of greater ethnic diversity is suggested with the addition of information from the Irish Heritage Trail and the addition of sites from Jewish heritage trails. Inclusion at existing Freedom Trail sites of information about non-heterosexuals is suggested from Boston’s Equality Trail.

Review: Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, by William E. O'Brien and What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, by Dell Upton

William E. O'Brien Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, 208 pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781625341556 Dell Upton What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 280 pp., 59 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9780300211757 In late July 2018, someone shot at a historic marker commemorating the place along Mississippi's Tallahatchie River where Emmett Till's mutilated, bullet-riddled corpse was found. Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, was abducted and viciously murdered by two white vigilantes in the summer of 1955. Vandals stole the site's first sign and then shot up a second one. A third marker had been erected and dedicated only five weeks before the 2018 incident by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, located in the nearby Sumner, Mississippi, courthouse where Till's murderers were put on trial. A similar spate of vandalism befell a marker sponsored by the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a historical initiative dedicated to marking important sites of civil rights struggles in the state. That marker is located at the former site of Bryant's Grocery in Money, Mississippi, where Carolyn Jones, a white woman, falsely claimed that Till made sexually explicit gestures toward her while he was visiting the store to purchase candy. Incensed by the child's alleged behavior, which transgressed the code of racial apartheid that kept black residents in fear and poverty—and, more important, separate and in their place—Bryant's husband and brother-in-law kidnapped Till, who was in the area visiting family while on holiday from his Chicago home. The two men beat and shot the teenager, then threw his weighted-down body into the river. Till's killing made national headlines when his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, requested an open casket at his funeral to expose the barbaric treatment of her son. The haunting photographs of Till and his grieving mother stunned the nation. Equally incomprehensible were the acquittals of his murderers four months later by an all-white, all-male jury following a five-day trial. These events proved that racial violence had not abated since the Civil War and the end of slavery, …

Underground Railroads and coyote conductors: brokering clandestine passages, then and now

This article juxtaposes the Underground Railroad with contemporary Central American smuggling practices. Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, seeking to provide safe passage to the USA for Central American refugees, summon the legacy of the Underground Railroad as a normative frame for understanding their mission. In the original Underground Railroad, a loose network of 'conductors' ushered escaped slaves north to freedom. In contrast to immigrant rights activists and slavery abolitionists, for-profit smugglers have been vilified as violent predators. Nevertheless, surprising similarities in social practices and relationships that underpin such dramatically different cases of migration brokerage point to the contingencies, complexities and ambiguous roles of smugglers. A counterintuitive comparison between the contemporary smuggling route and the historical freedom trail shows how normative imaginaries reshape social boundaries and territorial borders in North America.

Marking the Past: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Freedom Trail

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the rhetorical framing of civil rights tourism in Mississippi, a state that has invested considerable resources towards developing an infrastructure for attracting heritage tourists. Focusing specifically on a series of historical markers known as the Mississippi Freedom Trail (MFT), the essay identifies three dominant narratives that shape visitors’ understanding of the state’s civil rights history: (1) representations of violence against Mississippi’s civil rights leaders, (2) the role of agitation and community organizing, and (3) the (dis)connections between the past and the present. Although the MFT increases public awareness of the Mississippi Movement, it under-emphasizes the role women played and privileges modes of activism that embraced the very system that disenfranchised Black Americans. For these reasons, we argue that the MFT is limited in its ability to speak to contemporary racial struggles even as it provides a platform for confronting racist symbols in public memory sites.

Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War by Lowell J. Soike (review)

Reviewed by: Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War by Lowell J. Soike Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) Keywords Iowa, Slavery, Bleeding Kansas, Underground Railroad, Border wars Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War. By Lowell J. Soike. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. 306. Paper, $30.00.) Busy in the Cause documents the involvement of Iowa and individual Iowans in events related to the struggle over slavery in Kansas Territory in the 1850s, events generally known as ‘‘Bleeding Kansas.’’ The work seeks to recover the story of Iowa as ‘‘a forgotten friend’’ in antislavery struggles related to Bleeding Kansas (209). Soike recounts the stories of Iowans who moved to Kansas as well as those of individuals who made [End Page 192] a name for themselves in Kansas but also spent time in Iowa. Occasionally Soike also touches on Iowans’ broad reactions to events in Kansas and the way Iowa shifted from being a solidly Democratic state to a staunchly Republican one in the wake of events in Kansas. In Iowa, as in other northern places, Bleeding Kansas altered whites’ attitudes about slavery and its expansion. Drawing on coverage of Kansas events in 1850s newspapers, local histories published in the late nineteenth century, and recent scholarship on Bleeding Kansas, Soike presents a narrative account of Iowa’s involvement in the turmoil and violence of the Kansas-Missouri border wars of the 1850s, the emigration of free-state settlers to Kansas, and the Underground Railroad. The book begins by detailing events in Bleeding Kansas and by offering sketches of individual Iowans who moved to Kansas and participated in free-state struggles, notably John Wakefield, Charles Lenhart, and Pardee Butler. In fact, Iowa contributed more Kansas settlers than almost any other state (16). Though New Englanders have gotten most of the credit for shaping antislavery struggles in Kansas, Midwesterners constituted the most significant portion of Kansas settlers and played important roles in the territorial struggles over slavery. As the free state closest to Kansas, Iowa helped to funnel antislavery emigrants and arms into the new territory. Guns from the Iowa state armory were secretly sent to Kansas; free-soil emigrant trains resupplied in Iowa; and an overland route to Kansas through Iowa was developed to help free-staters safely move into the embattled territory. This overland route became the major free-state emigration path to Kansas after the traditional steamboat route up the Missouri River—and through the slave state of Missouri—was closed following repeated harassment of free-state migrants by proslavery ‘‘border ruffians.’’ The overland route was specifically developed in collaboration with Kansas aid societies in Chicago, New York, and New England. The advent of ‘‘this alternative route made [Kansas’s] Free-State success achievable to settlers at a time when they most needed the help’’ (214). Though the river route reopened in short order, the overland route morphed into a primary path out of slavery for Missouri slaves. At this point in the book, ‘‘stories of Iowa’s part in the Kansas struggle’’ shift toward ‘‘events of Iowans and Kansans cooperating to help enslaved people flee western Missouri via Kansas and Nebraska’’ (90). In his role as historian for the State Historical Society of Iowa, director of the Iowa Freedom Trail project, and author of another recent book titled Necessary [End Page 193] Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery (Iowa City, IA, 2013), Soike has significantly contributed to recovering and documenting Iowa’s involvement in the Underground Railroad. Underground Railroad activities also figure prominently in Busy in the Cause, though only when they explicitly connect to Kansas. For example, Soike details John Brown’s dramatic 1859 liberation of a dozen Missouri slaves—an event that took the group from Missouri to Kansas, across Iowa (including stops in Tabor, Des Moines, Grinnell, Iowa City, Springdale, and Davenport), and then on to Chicago, Detroit, and ultimately Windsor, Ontario. Soike next turns to the stories of individual Iowans who became radicalized following their encounters with Brown and other Kansas players like James Henry Lane...

Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery by Lowell J. Soike (review)

Reviewed by: Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery by Lowell J. Soike Don Elder Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery. Lowell J. Soike. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-60938-193-6, 322 pp., paper, $24.95. At the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, eighteen of the thirty-three states in the American political union did not allow slavery to exist within their borders. Six of those free states shared a common border with at least one slave state. Of those six, only Iowa was located west of the Mississippi River. Thus, Iowa was strategically positioned to help individuals trying to escape the bonds of slavery in the western region—if residents were willing to break existing laws to aid the fugitives. As it turns out, some Iowans were up to that challenge prior to the Civil War. Lowell J. Soike has at last told their story, never before examined in a monograph-length work. Thoroughly researched and clearly written, Necessary Courage helps to further our understanding of how and why a small but resolute group of Iowans flaunted laws to help slaves have a chance to attain freedom. Soike is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the part that Iowa played in the Underground Railroad. A mandate by the Iowa General Assembly in the late 1990s led to the creation of the Iowa Freedom Trail Grant Project, a program designed to help identify the locations in Iowa associated with the Underground Railroad; Soike headed this project, and Necessary Courage came out of his effort. While he found that many of the physical structures from the antebellum period no longer existed, he learned that there was a wealth of written accounts that pertained to Iowa’s role in the Underground Railroad. These sources form the basis of his story. In Soike’s telling, the Iowans involved in the Underground Railroad had a number of successes in aiding runaway slaves. Many fugitives were rather mundanely shuttled from location to location, but some endeavors involved armed confrontation, and not every escaped slave avoided capture while on Iowa soil. Moreover, Necessary Courage proves that not every Iowan involved in the Underground Railroad was white. Indeed, an African American businessman from Muscatine named Alexander Clark emerges as a hero for his efforts to aid a runaway. Soike also demonstrates that Iowans could indirectly help the Underground Railroad. The story of John Brown is a prime example; Soike points out that Brown spent a long time traveling through Iowa, where he gained financial backing, and in the community of Springdale trained his band for their raid on Harpers Ferry. Soike’s book shows how a wide variety of Iowans helped slaves escape from servitude. Necessary Courage does suffer from a few minor errors. For example, Lecomp-ton, Kansas, is misspelled, as is Platte County, Missouri. But the book’s merits [End Page 175] far outweigh its drawbacks. In an engaging manner, Lowell Soike has brought to life the stories of Iowans who took a stand against what they perceived to be a great injustice and, in the process, became part of one of the most important movements in the Civil War era. Don Elder Eastern New Mexico University Copyright © 2015 Kent State University Press

Book Reviews

June 01 2014 Curiosities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection Curiosities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection. By Aimee E.Newell, Hilary AndersonStelling, and Catherine ComptonSwanson. (Boston: Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, 2013. Pp. 288. $44.95.) Edith J. Steblecki Edith J. Steblecki Edith J. Steblecki is Curator/Assistant Director for the Paul Revere Memorial Association, which owns and operates the Paul Revere House (ca. 1680), a historic house museum on Boston's Freedom Trail. She is the author of Paul Revere and Freemasonry. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Edith J. Steblecki Edith J. Steblecki is Curator/Assistant Director for the Paul Revere Memorial Association, which owns and operates the Paul Revere House (ca. 1680), a historic house museum on Boston's Freedom Trail. She is the author of Paul Revere and Freemasonry. Online ISSN: 1937-2213 Print ISSN: 0028-4866 © 2014 by The New England Quarterly2014 The New England Quarterly (2014) 87 (2): 355–357. https://doi.org/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00378 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Edith J. Steblecki; Curiosities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection. The New England Quarterly 2014; 87 (2): 355–357. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00378 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by The New England Quarterly2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Women and the Texas Revolution

Women and the Texas Edited by Mary L. Scheer. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012. Pp. x, 244. $24.95, ISBN 978-1 57441-469-1.) Historians have traditionally presented the Texas Revolution from the male perspective, which places women at the periphery. Despite occasional efforts to include women in the narrative, the conventional account has persevered. The continual omission of the female perspective inspired the publication of Women and the Texas which explores how the insurrection affected women. While all of the essays represent important additions to the historiography of Texas, the contributions by Lindy Eakin, Jean A. Stuntz, Angela Boswell, and Dora Elizondo Guerra are particularly outstanding. Texas narratives in general display an Anglocentric slant minimizing or ignoring the ethnic and racial diversity of Texas. Eakin, Stuntz, and Boswell address this oversight by examining the war's impact on female minority populations. In Continuity, Change, and Removal: Native Women and the Texas Revolution, Eakin chronicles the impact Anglo immigration had on the lives of Native American women. Native women tended the crops and had overall responsibility for the land that was central to the tribe's stability and survival. Using the Cherokee, Caddo, and Comanche experiences, Eakin shows how encroachment, often violent in nature, disrupted women's roles as providers and threatened the agricultural economy of tribes. While Eakin explores the native experience, Stuntz focuses on women of Mexican heritage in Tejanas: Hispanic Women on the Losing Side of the Texas Revolution. Stuntz first details the everyday responsibilities and activities of these women, which included hours spent preparing food and making articles of clothing. She then discusses the loss of status and rights Tejanas suffered as a result of the rebellion's success. While English common law deprived women of their property after marriage and failed to bestow on them a legal identity, Spanish legal tradition allowed married women to retain their property, conduct business, and sue and be sued. Under Spanish law, women had greater privileges than their American counterparts. Tejana wives saw their legal privileges vanish under English common law. The success of the revolution proved to be legally devastating for women. Like Eakin and Stuntz, Boswell explores the rebellion's impact on ethnic women in Traveling the Wrong Way Down Freedom's Trail: Black Women and the Texas …

American Adam, American Cain: Johnny Tremain, Octavian Nothing, and the Fantasy of American Exceptionalism

����� ��� Each summer, during Boston’s annual Harborfest, tourists and native Bostonians alike can take a guided tour of key historical sites that figure prominently in Esther Forbes’s award-winning children’s novel, Johnny Tremain (1943). The purpose of the tour, according to the Harborfest brochure, is to allow sightseers the opportunity to walk “the steps of Johnny”—the novel’s eponymous protagonist—in order to learn the “larger tale of America’s fight for freedom.” In preparation for the tour, participants are encouraged to read (or reread) Forbes’s novel, so that they may better appreciate the historical significance of such sites as Copps Burial Ground, Paul Revere’s home, and Old North Church—and so they might most fully relive a beloved childhood classic. Participants can take this excursion in tandem with other similarly literary-themed tours, such as those based on the lives and works of Louisa May Alcott and Henry James, or alongside other Revolutionary War-based tours on Boston’s “Freedom Trail.” 1 The primary purpose of the Johnny Tremain theme tour is didactic, intended to instruct school children (and their nostalgic guardians) in Revolutionary War history. Ironically, however, Johnny Tremain is not, strictly speaking, a Revolutionary War narrative. Indeed, as Eric Tribunella has noted, Forbes’s novel is frequently misread as a story “‘about’ a boy who fights in the Revolution, something Johnny never actually does” (88). Although the novel concludes with Johnny’s decision to take arms against the British, the bulk of its narrative is concerned with his moral development and his maturing political consciousness. Moreover, while the novel is frequently praised for its rich depiction of colonial-era history 2 —Forbes was a historian who also published a biography of Paul Revere—its endur

Triglyceride/High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Ratio

Insulin resistance, changes in lipid parameters, and cardiometabolic adverse events have been reported in some patients during clinical trials of antipsychotic agents. The present study examined whether the triglyceride/high-density lipoprotein (HDL) ratio can be used as a better surrogate than other conventional lipid measures (low-density lipoprotein [LDL], HDL, triglyceride) in predicting insulin resistance and LDL particle size in nondiabetic patients with schizophrenia. Outpatients 18 to 75 years old diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (DSM-IV criteria) and receiving olanzapine, risperidone, or typical antipsychotics participated in a multicenter, cross-sectional study. Fasting blood samples were obtained to determine the levels of glucose, insulin, lipids, and lipid particle size. The study was conducted from July 2001 to March 2002. In the sample of 206 patients, significant correlations were found between various lipid measures (LDL, HDL, triglyceride, and triglyceride/HDL ratio) and the homeostasis model of assessment of insulin resistance (P < .05). However, stepwise multiple regression analysis suggested that the triglyceride/HDL ratio is a stronger predictor of insulin resistance and of LDL particle size than other conventional lipoprotein measures after other potential confounding variables, including age, gender, race, family history of diabetes, body mass index, and antipsychotic agent, were taken into consideration (P < .001). Further, logistic regression analysis indicated that the triglyceride/HDL ratio and male gender predict the existence of a small LDL particle size pattern (pattern B LDL phenotype), with a sensitivity of 75.9% and a specificity of 85.4%. The triglyceride/HDL ratio, a simple, readily available and inexpensive measure, can be a useful surrogate to identify those with insulin resistance as well as those with more atherogenic small LDL particles in nondiabetic patients with schizophrenia.

Boston's Freedom Trail Makes Time Travel Easy

Boston's Freedom Trail Makes Time Travel Easy

Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 79 Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South. Edited by Anthony J. Stanonis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. ix, 296 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8203-2951-2. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8203-3169-0. Dixie Emporium is a tour de force by a baker’s dozen of scholars who take readers on a ride through the various Souths of Krispy Kreme doughnut stores, Pedro’s wares at South of the Border, black Christian homes in the Mississippi Delta, “hillbilly” heavens in Missouri, civil rights memorials in Alabama, the Hon Fest festival in Baltimore, and more. The essays derive from a conference and conversations in 2005 and reveal the many new directions of discovering multiple Souths through studies of material culture, folklore, oral history, architecture and industrial design, merchandising , foodways, and the bric-a-brac people have made, marketed, and collected. The book is divided into three intersecting sections, each introduced with a critical essay by a major scholar remarking on the utility of their particular contents. One theme running through the collection is the ways objects both reflect the values of the people who crafted and collected them and project images of particular Souths for both external and internal consumption . Thus, for example, Eric Plaag shows how northerners gathered up a variety of souvenirs and mementos in the antebellum South and came away enchanted with a pastoral South at odds with abolitionists’ renderings . Karen Cox neatly presents white southerners’ marketing of massproduced goods literally and figuratively stamped with the Lost Cause mythic South in the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Such objects not only sold a nostalgic Dixie to the nation but also reinforced regional identity at home. Black Christians in the Delta, John Giggie shows, used beautified churches and homes to build their sense of dignity and belie whites’ depictions of them as uncouth and ignorant people. Most curious is the popularity of the Horny Hillbilly, a Chinesemade plastic figurine sold at tourist stops. As Patrick Huber reveals, the appeal of the Horny Hillbilly is its grotesquely large member jutting out from the body, a statement of raw sexuality and vulgarity. So much for a sophisticated “new” South. Countering such stereotypes of hillbillies, argues Aaron Ketchell, were the tourist sites developed in and around Branson, Missouri, that presented the Ozark mountain people as washed in the blood of the Lamb and offering up wholesome country fare in music and manners. Another section of the book addresses the role that food preparation, sale, and consumption has played in shaping identities and pushing T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 80 interests. Anthony Stanonis, for example, examines the ways southern foods and eating patterns fed white conceptions of a proper racial and social order. Carolyn de la Peña makes a fascinating case for the appeal of Krispy Kreme, deriving as much from the customers’ ability to see the doughnuts made in a clean, sleek industrial process as from the fresh, warm taste of the doughnuts. Thus, eating a Krispy Kreme was as much participation and validation as it was consumption. On a different scale was the success of Alan Schafer, the Jewish South Carolinian who set up South of the Border and made money from selling liquor, then food, and moreso all manner of gewgaws, cheap wares, and anything to meet travelers’ needs heading north or south across the Carolinas. As Nicole King demonstrates well, Schafer used his location and profits to challenge Jim Crow laws and practices by pitching his goods and place to all comers irrespective of race, while also mocking southern pretensions to gentility. Of particular interest to Alabamians is Glen Eskew’s perceptive and provocative take on the selling of civil rights. He notes the shift in heritage tourism from Civil War sites to ones representing key moments in the civil rights movement. Therein, Alabama has a special claim, with its historic sites and museums in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma especially marking the freedom trail. The memory and memorialization of the...

Modafinil for Clozapine-Treated Schizophrenia Patients

Patients with schizophrenia often suffer from cognitive deficits and negative symptoms that are poorly responsive to antipsychotics including clozapine. Clozapine-induced sedation can worsen cognition and impair social and occupational functioning. To evaluate the efficacy, tolerability, and safety of modafinil for negative symptoms, cognition, and wakefulness/fatigue in DSM-IV-diagnosed schizophrenia patients treated with clozapine. A double-blind, placebo-controlled, flexible-dosed 8-week pilot trial was conducted between September 2003 and September 2007, adding modafinil up to 300 mg/d to stabilized schizophrenia outpatients receiving clozapine. Psychopathology, cognition, and wakefulness/fatigue were assessed with standard rating scales. Thirty-five patients were randomly assigned to treatment with study drug and included in the analysis. Modafinil did not reduce negative symptoms or wakefulness/fatigue or improve cognition compared to placebo. Modafinil was well tolerated and did not worsen psychosis. Results of this pilot trial do not support routine use of modafinil to treat negative symptoms, cognitive deficits, or wakefulness/fatigue in patients on clozapine. However, given our limited power to detect a treatment effect and the clear possibility of a type II error, larger trials are needed to resolve or refute a potential therapeutic effect of uncertain magnitude. clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00573417.

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution , and: Revolution in America: Considerations and Comparisons , and: Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. By Alfred F. Young. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. Pp. 417. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $22.00.)Revolution in America: Considerations and Comparisons. By Don Higginbotham. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. 230. Cloth: $49.50; Paper, $19.50.)Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. (DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. 258. Cloth, $39.00.)Reviewed by James S. KabalaTwo of these books are collections of articles written by two of the most distinguished historians of the Revolutionary period, published over the course of several decades, and now collected for the first time. The third is a single volume and the first book of a younger historian. Two common themes, however, link all three books. First, the three deal with the complicated issues surrounding historical memory. Second, to different degrees, the books raise questions about the role of ordinary people in the revolutionary era. This focus is greatest in Alfred Young's book, while the other two seem at first to focus on the elite.Young's essays look at the issue of historical memory from two points of view. First, he takes the perspective of the present day, writing out- standing essays on ways to improve Boston's Freedom Trail and on the memory (or lack thereof) of the liberty trees and liberty poles that were focal points for popular resistance in Boston and several other Revolutionary cities and towns. Second, he looks at some of the ways that Revolutionary-era Americans themselves evaluated the past, devoting a large section of one essay to the image of Oliver Cromwell among the Revolutionary generation and another to the question of how and why Thomas Paine's popularity decreased dramatically within his own lifetime. He also looks at the historical origins of many of the forms of popular protest engaged in by the ordinary people of the Revolutionary era, although in some cases, such as tarring and feathering and the liberty tree itself, Young shows that the methods of popular protest were as much novel as time-tested. Don Higginbotham devotes less space to the subject of memory, but in some essays he examines issues of historical reputation, including how historians' accounts have affected the posthumous reputations of three women in Washington's life (his mother Mary, his friend Sally Fairfax, and his wife Martha). In perhaps his most interesting essay, Higginbotham questions the common belief that the antebellum South had an especially strong martial tradition, provocatively arguing that in fact the militia of many southern states was in shambles and there was an equally strong, perhaps even stronger, martial tradition in the New England states.Peter Messer confronts the subject of historical memory most directly and pervasively, since the very subject of his book is how historians of the Revolutionary era shaped their attitudes toward the past. He postulates that the historians of the colonial era can be divided into two groups, which he calls the provincial and imperial schools. The former gave credit for the prosperity of the American colonies to those who had actually settled the colonies, while the latter deprecated the colonists, often criticizing their mistreatment of the Indians and sometimes even their owning of slaves, while giving credit to the British imperial framework for imposing order on the colonists and saving them from the mess they would have created had they been left to their own devices. The later portion of the book traces the fate of these provincial ideas during and after the Revolution in the hands of writers and historians such as Thomas Paine, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsay, Hannah Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren.Messer himself makes a notable contribution to present-day historical debate through his analysis of the intellectual roots of these two schools of historians, which naturally leads him to the question of who were the primary intellectual influences on the founding generation. …

Liberty Tree: ordinary people and the American Revolution

ContentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Why Write the History of Ordinary People? Part I. The Out of DoorsThe Mechanics of the Revolution: By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand Persons of Consequence: The Women of Boston and the Making of the American RevolutionTar and Feathers and the Ghost of Oliver Cromwell: English Plebeian Culture and American Radicalism Part II. AccommodationsConservatives, the Constitution, and the Genius of the People How Radical Was the American Revolution? Part III. Memory: Lost and FoundThe Celebration and Damnation of Thomas PaineThe Freedom Trail: Walking the Revolution in Boston Liberty Tree: Made in America, Lost in America Index About the Author

Report From the Field: Not the Same Old Freedom Trail—A View from the Paul Revere House

One of the key public history venues in the country is Boston's Freedom Trail. The Trail is a wonderfully confusing collection of public buildings, churches, museums, and historic markers. The manner in which the sites along Boston's Freedom Trail interpret history is a function of many factors, including the impact of evolving scholarship, how the sites are governed, and audience expectations. Over the years, how the story of the American Revolution is related has changed. The Paul Revere House provides an informative example of one site's response to changing times and heightened expectations.

Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions for Public History on the Freedom Trail

The author reassesses the public presentation of history on Boston's Freedom Trail, founded in the 1950s, in light of the reinterpretation of the American Revolution which has brought into focus the multi-sided struggle for liberty and equality within America. In eight propositions, he questions whether the many sites of the trail with a minimum of coordination, do justice to the "popular" side of the Revolution. Boston is at risk in dealing with race and gender, he suggests, of fragmenting the Revolution. In avoiding the "dark" side, it can fall into an exclusively celebratory history. To present a more coherent history, the author points to the need for greater collaborative efforts by the sites which make up the trail.