Historical Society Research Articles

George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered Their Founders by Keith Beutler

Beutler’s Washington’s Hair opens with a provocative question: “Did early Americans have beliefs about the nature of memory itself that, by giving shape to their efforts to remember their nation’s birth, affected foundational patriotic American memory and identity? (ix).” Beutler answers a resounding “yes” in five brisk chapters that chart how ideas about memory—especially a turn toward materialist and physical forms of memory—shaped Americans’ notions of patriotism. Beutler convincingly argues that an array of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas about the very nature of memory shaped how Americans used physical objects to open up possibilities for more “democratic” participation in the Revolutionary commemorations that were so important to national political and cultural life.Beutler maintains that “in the period between 1790 and 1840 … Americans increasingly embraced reductive materialist views of memory,” influenced by “such ideas as physiognomy, brain localization, and their popular combination as phrenology.” Each chapter of his book is organized around case studies of individuals who used memory objects tied to these ideas to connect themselves to the founders and to the American nation in various ways (4). In Part I, Beutler uses the first two chapters—about Charles Willson Peale and Jeremy Belknap—to show how politicized memory in the 1790s led to the founding of institutional repositories of cultural power such as museums and historical societies. Part II shows how less powerful individuals—Black Revolutionary veterans, evangelicals, and female educators—used Revolutionary relics to relate to the founders and therefore to include themselves in the national narrative between the 1820s and 1840s. Beutler argues that cultural elites used memory objects to reinforce their power by connecting to the Revolutionary past and that some “outsider” figures, like Black veteran Hamet Achmet, used them to command social respect. Both groups also used George Washington’s hair and other relics of the founders, at times, to raise money.Throughout the book, Beutler traces how locks of Washington’s hair functioned as physical objects imbuing their owners with personal and political meanings and bonding them to the founding memory at the heart of the American nation. Washington’s hair is a central organizing theme, but Butler’s exploration of materialist memory goes beyond hair to include furniture, portraits, veterans’ bodies, historical sites, and other mementos that connected early Americans to the Revolutionary past. Butler’s extended epilogue traces the “continuing career of Washington’s tresses” from the 1840s to the present day by charting how Washington’s hair was deployed as a memory device in everything from World’s Fairs to the Oval Office (165).Some readers may be left wishing that Beutler had focused even more tightly on the topic of Washington’s hair, so vividly invoked in the book’s title and introduction, in his quest to track Washington’s hair in archives throughout the country. But his interesting and provocative book is more wide-ranging than that. It adds a key component to the ongoing scholarly conversation about Revolutionary memory by examining what historical actors themselves thought about memory and material culture. Steeped in interdisciplinary thought and method, Beutler deftly combines objects, manuscripts, and print sources to say something new about the well-examined topic of how and why early Americans considered their ties to Revolutionary heroes meaningful. At times, his writing relies too much on jargon, but, overall, he manages to incorporate insights from a startling number of academic fields while still engaging with vivid narrative detail. At times he admits that his is a particular “reading” of the primary sources, but it is a reading that should thoroughly convince even the most empirically minded historian that ideas about material memory and objects were linked in the cultural practices and politics of many early Americans. Beutler is particularly insightful about the roles of race, gender, and religion in establishing early nineteenth-century hierarchies that anyone willing and able to connect to the memory of Washington’s embodied greatness could still deftly challenge.

The Origins of the Buckeye Nickname

The Origins of the Buckeye Nickname Raymond D. Irwin (bio) Others have called Ohioans—and Ohioans have called themselves—"buckeyes" for nearly two centuries, but the origins of that appellation have been the subject of limited thoughtful debate, unfounded assertions, and uncritically accepted assumptions. Three related issues frequently appear in the literature regarding the buckeye nickname: the length of time the title has been in use, where it comes from, and how it became affixed to human beings. Although many have asserted that the moniker has been commonly applied to persons since the 1780s, that it was derived only tangentially from the tree of the same name, and that it owes its existence to a quaint tale involving friendly indigenous persons, the evidence suggests otherwise. The real story involves the changing image of the buckeye tree, and thus, the altered status and broad acceptability of the word "buckeye," which only occurred in the early nineteenth century. One of the most common explanations for Ohioans' bearing the nickname "buckeye" comes from antiquarian and physician Samuel Prescott Hildreth in his 1852 description of the opening of the first judicial body in the Northwest Territory on September 2, 1788, in Marietta. There, the leader of the ceremonial procession for the local court of common pleas was the community's sheriff, Col. Ebenezer Sproat, "a man six feet and four inches high, and large in proportion," who carried "a drawn sword in his right hand, and wand of office in the left." His "imposing appearance" elicited "the admiration of the friendly savages, a number of whom were loitering about the new city." The "tall, commanding" Sproat, having attracted rapt attention, earned from natives "the name of Hetuck, or Big [End Page 9] Buckeye." "From this," Hildreth confidently asserted, "originated the name of Buckeye, now applied to the natives of Ohio, as the phrase was familiar to all the early settlers of Marietta."1 In relatively short order, Hildreth's account became a standard origin story for the buckeye sobriquet. The 1857 edition of The American Biographical Dictionary repeated the tale in the conclusion of its entry for Sproat,2 and a decade and a half later, the hetuck narrative appeared nearly verbatim in the editorial notes for the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio edition of the journal and letters of early Marietta settler Col. John May.3 The 1881 History of Washington County speculated that the byname "buckeye" came from one of three possibilities, all related to the founding of Marietta: a woodcutting contest among those who had landed at the mouth of the Muskingum and who had felled several buckeye trees; from the flowers of the tree that would have been in bloom in the spring of 1788; or from the Sproat story. The authors cited unnamed pioneers' explanations that "agree with, rather than contradict, Dr. Hildreth's statement," which put Sproat and the indigenous observers at the center of the narrative.4 Four years later Harper's Magazine repeated both the woodchopping and "hetuck" stories, adding the detail that Delaware tribesmen compared Sproat "with the stately, symmetrical tree which grows by the Western water-courses."5 As the nineteenth century came to a close, Hildreth's narrative flourished, bolstered by often inexplicable and usually uncited details. In his centennial history of the Marietta settlement, William H. Venable offered a brief version, noting that Sproat's nickname "was extended to other white men, and finally to Ohioans in general," but that "it is certain that the term Buckeye became attached to Ohio and its citizens at a very early period in the history of the [End Page 10] Northwestern Territory."6 In his centennial address before the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society, William Farrar repeated the Hildreth story, declaring that the use of "buckeye" to describe Colonel Sproat "was certainly its first known application to an individual in the sense now used," but Farrar immediately conceded that "there is no evidence that the name continued to be so used and applied from that time forward, or that it became a fixed and accepted sobriquet of the State and people until more than a half a century afterwards."7 Others were less critical...

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: <i>The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson</i> and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson

Reviewed by: A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson Eric Arnesen (bio) A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice. By Jenny Carson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 289. $125.00 cloth; $28.00 paper) Over the past half century, historians of race and labor have produced a substantial body of scholarship on various occupations, unions, and race relations that collectively reveals the complexity of working-class race relations, traditions of Black activism, and labor movement practices. While fewer such studies have appeared in recent years, Jenny Carson's new book reminds us that this historiographical genre continues to have much to offer. Focusing on the greater New York City laundry industry, A Matter of Moral Justice brings to life the on-the-job conditions experienced by a largely female labor force and its struggles for dignity and economic advancement. It also explores just how profoundly unionization transformed life on the job for the better and, at the same time, underscores just how limited that transformation proved to be. [End Page 436] New York's early twentieth-century laundry industry relied on a heterogeneous labor force that became increasingly African American and female. Despite low wages, poor working conditions, and abusive treatment, unionization efforts were sporadic and unsuccessful. Only in the late 1930s and early 1940s did sustained trade unionism finally take off, the result of efforts of Black women shopfloor activists, women reformers, and various Communist and Socialist organizers. Under the banner of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) during the upsurge of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), laundry worker unionization brought significant improvements to workers' lives. But, Carson insists, those gains were limited—laundry work remained poorly paid, racial and gender inequality persisted in the workplace, and the disproportionately male and white union bureaucracy resisted sharing power with women or African Americans. Advances notwithstanding, Carson argues that the outcome proved "disappointing" (p. 8). At the heart of her story is the activism of Black workers like Charlotte Adelmond, a Trinidadian immigrant, and Dollie Robinson, a migrant from North Carolina, whose aspirations and struggles Carson carefully reconstructs. As leaders of the "democratic initiative," they tenaciously but only sometimes successfully challenged their employers and union leaders with an agenda centered on racial and, to a lesser extent, gender equality (p. 127). Her considerable attention to intra-union battles that pitted these Black women activists against ACW officials makes clear that the union prioritized the preservation of "white male privilege in all its forms" (p. 197). As important as the "democratic initiative" was, however, the degree of rank-and-file Black workers' participation in this oppositional culture remains unclear, as does the extent to which the civil rights unionism pursued by these activists extended beyond union affairs. The story Carson tells is an important one that highlights the obstacles to successful organization and the role played by grassroots activists in overcoming them. She effectively draws out the complexities of [End Page 437] a powerful CIO union which, while ostensibly committed to interracialism, often blocked the efforts of its Black women activists to overturn entrenched racial and gender hierarchies. Her restoration to the historical narrative of the previously little-known efforts of Adelmond and Robinson suggests that the ranks of Black grassroots activists is larger than historians generally realize and that their inclusion into the history of American labor genuinely enriches our understanding of race, civil rights, and protest in the first half of the twentieth century. Eric Arnesen ERIC ARNESEN is the Teamsters Professor of History at the George Washington University. He is currently completing a biography of A. Philip Randolph. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society

Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War by Ted Glick

Reviewed by: Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War by Ted Glick Eric Martin Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War. By Ted Glick. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020. 203 pp. $20.00. "I believe that we can change the world. I really do." These words close the stirring personal testimony and valuable historical documentation of the Catholic Left in Ted Glick's Burglar for Peace. Told with first-hand stories, journals, old letters, and court transcripts of many who made up the draft board raid movement to stop the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Glick's book acts as a memoir of a period in his life as well as a snapshot of the American Catholic underground's most visible offensive against the war. Compelled to action in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Glick threw himself into the campaign of Bobby Kennedy before turning to what became known as "the ultra resistance." His first action came in 1970 with the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives group of eleven, including two nuns and four priests, who destroyed thousands of draft files. He provides details that are rarely noted about these [End Page 65] actions, such as how they broke in (planting someone at the top of the stairs during the day who would open a door after closing) or cased the buildings (having fake couples in a parked car observe late-night light patterns in the building for weeks ahead of the action). This allows for the movement's dramatic lore of theft, liturgical pyres, and prison witnesses to be complemented with the tedium of long hours in preparation, captured in poems Glick wrote while hiding in the building. "The sun is coming down slowly, casting window frame shadows upon the wall a half flight down. We wait for the time" (33). Accounts like these let us see more clearly the ingredients that made up the splashy morning headlines. Among recent releases on major figures in the movement like John Loughery and Blythe Randolph's Dorothy Day, Bill Wylie-Kellermann's Celebrant's Flame (on Dan Berrigan), and William Marling's Christian Anarchist (on Ammon Hennacy), Glick's book is a refreshing view from one of the many lesser-known voices in the Catholic Left. One of its significant contributions is providing detailed court transcriptions not just of those in the movement but also of their interrogations of the FBI on the stand, giving space to the words of unfamiliar names along with the attention given to Liz McAlister and the Berrigans. Teachers looking for concrete descriptions of what resistance in the Catholic Left entailed will find Glick's treatment of lengthy prison fasts and solitary confinement to be valuable resources for undergraduate students, laid out in straightforward journal form. For those looking beyond the canon for treatments of the Catholic Left (from someone who was not Catholic and details reasons for leaving the movement), nonviolence in the American anti-war movement, or a convicting call to action in our present from a veteran in peaceful rebellion, Burglar for Peace is, to borrow from Glick's opening words in the preface, a way to "find oneself going deeper and deeper" (xiii). Eric Martin University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Justice Betty Roberts’s Work for Equality in Oregon: Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series Post-Lecture Discussion

On April 13, 2021, Amanda L. Tyler spoke about her book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union in a virtual presentation as part of the Oregon Historical Society’s (OHS) annual Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series. In this virtual roundtable discussion held on Thursday, April 15, 2021, following the lecture, the Oregon Historical Society organized the panel to share stories about Betty Roberts’s influence in the courts, as a state senator, and as a mentor to women. Tyler also joined the conversation to reflect on how Roberts’s work in Oregon mirrored the work of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s work nationally.

Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett

Reviewed by: Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett Alison K. Hoagland, Professor Emerita Sarah Fayen Scarlett. Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 291. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Photographs. Table. Hardcover: $55.00. Power and hierarchy are expressed in residential neighborhoods in myriad ways—for example: lot size, street trees, architecture, landscaping, proximity to desirable things, and distance from offensive ones. Viewers read these signals and many more in order to assess a home and the status of its occupants. Sarah Fayen Scarlett takes on this social sorting in Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier, her study of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Michigan’s Copper Country. Scarlett explores the neighborhoods, specific houses, and public spaces of people who were engaged with maintaining power in an inequitable mining industry. Company Suburbs is a fascinating study of how the built landscape reinforces social difference. To understand the residential landscape that the mining industry spawned, Scarlett takes two well-studied systems—corporate paternalism and suburbanization—and examines their intersection in the Copper Country. Initially, companies provided housing for their elite managers and mining captains, just as they did for miners and unskilled laborers. But, at the Quincy Mining Co., [End Page 130] mine officers moved away from their free housing into the elite neighborhood that became known as East Hancock. While suburbs usually connote picturesque surroundings and distance from workplaces, these neighborhoods did not afford the separation of workplace and home that residents might have desired. The mining companies controlled the available land—accommodating their managerial elite but controlling them nonetheless. Hence the term “company suburb.” Scarlett’s close study of specific houses gives depth to her argument about status and architecture. James Pryor altered his house on the east side of Houghton repeatedly. While meticulously documenting a quarter century of alterations, Scarlett relates his changing circumstances in terms of his business, family size, and wealth. Beginning in 1875 with a modest house built for a manager at Shelden-Columbian mine, Pryor produced an elaborate Queen Anne-style dwelling that faced both Main Street (later College Avenue), which was emerging as a prestigious boulevard, and Portage Lake, where his expanding lumberyard contributed to his wealth. Inside the house, room functions changed as well, finally becoming a fashionable wood-paneled interior with wall paintings and beveled mirrors. This is surely the only occasion of a historian using the room designations written in a fuse box as evidence for her argument! While Pryor’s house illustrated overlapping landscapes of the industrial and the domestic, Scarlett turns to East Hancock to examine overlapping social landscapes. To understand the world of the Finnish servant who lived in one house in 1900, Scarlett explores how she might have moved through the house—where she was in her domain and where was she on her employer’s turf—as well as how she moved through the neighborhood and town to get to and from the Finnish area. Scarlett similarly looks at movement when she shifts her attention to the Calumet area, where she tracks the construction of houses for the enormously wealthy investors of the Calumet and Arizona Mining Co. In the first decade of the twentieth century, they clustered in a few blocks of the newly developing village of Laurium. But, in 1913, strikers paraded past these very houses on their way to the Palestra, the only building on non-company land that was large enough to accommodate strike meetings. The dissonance between the strikers and the idle wealthy, the street and the mansion, serve to illustrate Scarlett’s point about contentious social geographies. In this thoroughly researched work, Scarlett combines two areas of study usually kept separate, by scholars as well as geography: industry and suburbs. Her examination of the two together reaps benefits, bringing new insights into the relationship between landscape, people, and power. [End Page 131] Alison K. Hoagland, Professor Emerita Michigan Technological University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan

Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen

Reviewed by: Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen Robert J. Norrell (bio) Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality. By Benjamin R. Justesen. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 368. $55.00 cloth; $17.75 ebook) This work is a hagiography of a president, William McKinley, and a Black congressman, George White, who the author pairs on the basis of a common commitment to Black political rights. Justesen insists that the historical record has given each man short shrift, and he sets out to correct that wrong. In so doing he exaggerates the accomplishments of each, especially McKinley, and he fails to develop the full picture of White's career. In a 2001 biography of White, Justesen rationalized a five-hundred-page book on the insistence that White was one of the most important African American political leaders during the last decade of the nineteenth century but one of the least remembered. The latter claim is true no doubt, the former is certainly not. From modest beginnings in North Carolina, in 1896 he became the only remaining Black member of the U.S. House of [End Page 438] Representatives. He served until 1901, the last African American in Congress during the post-Reconstruction period. His departure left a void that would go unfilled for nearly thirty years. He was outspoken in his challenge to racial injustice, but, as Justesen shows, he was no extremist as white Democrats charged. After Congress, he remained active in politics and civil rights and enjoyed a career as a banker. Sometimes historians get more than one chance at the biography of a great historical figure, but it rarely happens in the case of an obscure provincial congressman. Forgotten Legacy is really a re-do of White, notwithstanding Justesen's occasional focus on McKinley's presidency, lauding his dedication to the advancement of African Americans, including their appointment to the federal bureaucracy. McKinley also acted to stiffen federal penalties for lynch mobs. Indeed, Justesen claims that McKinley was the first "civil rights president," especially when compared to his five successors in office. He maintains that historians have long minimized or overlooked McKinley's cooperative relationships with prominent African American leaders like White. In fact, civil rights leaders in McKinley's own day believed he and his political guru Mark Hanna had sold out Black Republican voters to white southern Republicans who were determined to have a "lily-white" party. The author's bibliography is thin and out of date. He has ignored David Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. Justesen casts Booker Washington as a malign influence on politics and civil rights, relying on Louis Harlan's malevolent half-century-old interpretations and ignoring the revisionist works that have since significantly rehabilitated Booker. The writing is sometimes clumsy, e.g. a "fictional novel" (p. 1). Another instance of this is the following sentence: "Jeter Pritchard, the only Republican southerner in the Senate and a powerful ally, probably provided the White House with status reports, but strained relationships between state and national party leaders were plagued by infighting, and the state party's [End Page 439] gradual split into quarrelsome factions, further clouded by collapse of Populist fusion" (p. 103). Readers deserve better. Robert J. Norrell ROBERT J. NORRELL is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society

Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard (review)

Reviewed by: Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard Katrina Phillips (bio) Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard University of Minnesota Press, 2019 THE CITY OF GRAND MARAIS, nestled along the North Shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, sits two hours north of Duluth, less than an hour south of Grand Portage and the Grand Portage Reservation, and an hour and a half south of Thunder Bay. It is often called the gateway to both the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and to the Gunflint Trail. Grand Marais has been a popular destination for tourists, particularly those from the Twin Cities, since the early twentieth century. As someone who grew up in the region, I should note that the less charitable among us might say it's overrun with tourists, especially during the summer months. However, as Staci Lola Drouillard explains, not many of the people driving along Highway 61 would notice as they drove though Chippewa City, the small town just to the north of Grand Marais. In the nineteenth century, though, Chippewa City was an Anishinaabe community where its residents lived and worked, celebrated and mourned, worshipped and played. The Chippewa City Church—formally known as St. Francis Xavier, now under the domain of the Cook County Historical Society—played a central role in the community, a long-standing fixture alongside what locals called the "Old Shore Road," a well-trodden path to and from Grand Marais (10, 17, 1). Walking the Old Road includes a mixture of oral history and memoir, tracing Drouillard and her family's connections to the area while also including the voices of elders she began interviewing in the late 1980s. Her first interview with artist George Morrison, part of a class assignment at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, led to more questions and interviews and research. Drouillard's research, driven by the oral interviews, is like her search to find the road between Chippewa City and Grand Marais (2). Her goal, as evidenced by the book's subtitle, is to tell the story of the people of Chippewa City through the voices of those who lived there. The book reads like a conversation, the kind of conversation you have when you're sitting around a bonfire along the shores of Lake Superior, the words intertwined with the crackle of the firewood and the rhythm of the waves on the rocks. From recounting the history of the Ojibwe arrival [End Page 175] at what is known as the Pigeon River and intermarriage with French fur traders, through treaty signings and the Dawes Act to the Nelson Act and eventual Ojibwe dispossession, Drouillard underscores what Chippewa City meant to those who lived there. While its title might suggest that the book is simply a hyperlocal history, Drouillard draws on broader narratives of federal Indian policies while highlighting the devastating effects those policies had on the residents of Chippewa City. Drouillard and her sister do not meet the blood quantum requirement the federal government forced upon the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and so they could not inherit their father's parcel of reservation land at Grand Portage. "Not unlike our ancestors before us," Drouillard muses, "we had land only to have it taken away" (50). Drouillard's interviews—and the way she weaves them throughout the book—offer a rich recollection of Chippewa City. Jim Wipson, born in Chippewa City in 1918, shared stories of his grandmother, Kate Frost, and how the two of them would walk the Old Road. "Everybody in Grand Marais knew Kate Frost and her little grandson," he recalled (100). Others shared stories of old traditions like "Happy New Year-ing," of church services sung in Ojibwe and visits to medicine men, of selling homemade crafts to tourists along Highway 61 or in local shops and stands. People who lived in Chippewa City worked in Grand Marais or went to town for medical services, while Grand Marais proprietors relied on Chippewa City labor and wilderness skills to keep their businesses running. "So where...

Montana Historical Society Members

Montana Historical Society Members

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Deadly Aim: The Civil War Story of Michigan’s Anishinaabe Sharpshooters by Sally Walker

Reviewed by: Deadly Aim: The Civil War Story of Michigan’s Anishinaabe Sharpshooters by Sally Walker Matthew Pacer Sally Walker. Deadly Aim: The Civil War Story of Michigan’s Anishinaabe Sharpshooters. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019. Pp. 304. Appendices. Bibliography. Glossary. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $19.99. Deadly Aim is another entry in Civil War literature, but it is one that also contains a pre- and post-conflict history. The interested reader or Civil War scholar will learn much about the reasons, the history, and the context that compelled Anishinaabe men to volunteer for war. While the book’s targeted audience is the younger reader, anyone interested in Michigan’s contribution to the Civil War will enjoy it. The early chapters discuss the formation of the Company K, an infantry regiment consisting primarily of members of Indigenous tribes of Michigan, including excellent and detailed descriptions of army life such as training, drills, and endless marching. The reader learns about the multiple struggles these men endured—not just the physical and psychological struggles associated with conflict, but also their continual battles with racism during and after the war. Their hardships and perseverance are important themes woven throughout the narrative. Another theme is the significance of Anishinaabe culture, particularly its warriors, called ogitchedaw. These roots are what the men drew from to help them excel as sharpshooters and soldiers. Throughout the book, Sally Walker includes many image callouts that provide context for the reader. These are both the greatest strength of the book and its primary weakness. The callouts not only provide context and history but also help the reader grow attached to the men’s stories. I wanted more such callouts [End Page 133] as I progressed through the book; however, they could also distract reader from the narrative. One would likely want to continue reading the main narrative—but would also want to follow the stories or blurbs contained in the callouts. Walker has crafted a wonderful and engaging story about the sharpshooters. She concludes with a profoundly satisfying final chapter and epilogue in which the reader learns the fate of numerous young men that the book follows. Though some of these conclusions are sad, they do provide closure for the men’s stories. After the epilogue comes an illuminating author’s note in which Walker provides just a hint of her research journey—including her consultations with groups such as the Eyaawing Museum and the Ziibiwing Center, sites she visited, and interesting vignettes she learned during the research. After that, Appendix A lists each Michigan Sharpshooter’s name and enlistment age. I suggest reading this first because knowing their ages will help the reader understand the struggles the soldiers faced and the horrors they witnessed. The remaining appendices provide additional information on several treaties, a timeline of Company K, a fully translated letter home from one of the soldiers, and a fascinating story about an eagle. Matthew Pacer Library of Michigan Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan

The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes by Lynne Heasley

Reviewed by: The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes by Lynne Heasley Nicholas Cunigan Lynne Heasley. The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Black and white illustrations. Index. Notes. Paperback: $27.95. Lynne Heasley beckons the reader of The Accidental Reef to see the Great Lakes through a kaleidoscope. And through her kaleidoscopic vision, the world of the Great Lakes is reflected and refracted through stories of evolution, biology, geology, ichthyology, etymology, walleye taxonomy, scuba divers, and more. This is not simply a case in interdisciplinary research. Heasley is calling out the compartmentalization of higher education, and her work illustrates what can be achieved when one practices what they preach. (30–31) [End Page 118] Heasley blends art, science, and history to illuminate what she refers to as the “accidental reef.” This reef—located in the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair and forms part of the international border between Michigan and Ottawa, Canada—formed as an “accident of history and ecology” when steamships dumped their coal waste into the river and created a spawning reef for lake sturgeon. (x) In vivid, poetic, and often humorous prose, Heasley tells the stories of the lives lived on and in the St. Clair River. She weaves together a menagerie of stories ranging from industrial pollution, the deep history of zebra mussels, the sex lives of sturgeon, and the lost lures of fishers recovered by an intrepid scuba diver seeking to restore broken relationships both in and out of the water. All this reimagining, though, is not without purpose. These seemingly random anecdotes are deeply intertwined. Heasley is arguing through these stories that the “care and protection of the Great Lakes demands different ways of seeing and knowing.” (ix) Heasley joins a growing cadre of historians and reporters (such as Nancy Langston in Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World and Dan Egan in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes) who are plying the depths, shallows, and shores of the Great Lakes to reveal the troubled past of these waters in hopes of ensuring the lakes a better future. Heasley is making important points about the region’s past, including the exploitation of both the Great Lakes’ natural resources as well as cultural knowledge that has been appropriated through extractive biocolonialism. Her most poignant contribution, though, might be in her account of the Great Lakes’ “paradox of abundance;” the Great Lakes are filled with North America’s largest supply of freshwater and are home to the world’s largest lake. This abundance, Heasley cautions, should not be taken for granted. The histories of bison, passenger pigeons, and monarch butterflies show that abundance often give humans a false sense of inexhaustibility. And as climate change is projected to dry out the American West and extend in time and space the current megadrought, the seemingly inexhaustible Great Lakes might be tapped to quench America’s thirst. This warning makes Heasley’s contribution more than a regional history of a forty-mile-long river and the industries, businesses, tribes, and individuals who rely upon it. Instead, Heasley’s work is a lighthouse—warning all those who rely on the steady supply of freshwater that we are too close to shore and without immediate action, we risk crashing into it. [End Page 119] Nicholas Cunigan Calvin University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan

We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong

Reviewed by: We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong Sharon Carlson, Professor Emerita Phyllis Michael Wong. We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022. Pp. 196. Images. Glossary. Paperback: $19.95. Phyllis Michael Wong’s We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula offers a glimpse into the lives of working-class women who earned a living by performing piecework in the Gossard Company factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn, Michigan. The H. W. Gossard Company had its origins in Chicago beginning in 1900, with the first plant built in 1904 in nearby Belvidere, Illinois, about 70 miles northwest of Chicago. Other plants followed, including the construction of two in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula— Ishpeming in 1920 and Gwinn in 1947. Wong provides compelling stories based on nearly one hundred interviews with former Gossard employees and their family members. Many of these women were first- or second-generation immigrants with few options available to them other than working as a clerk in a store. The Gossard Company employed women of all ages and life circumstances. While some employees worked to provide extras or earn money for a few years before marriage, most of the women needed employment at the Gossard factories to support their [End Page 134] families. The company paid higher wages than other limited job opportunities available to these women. Gossard’s labor force was consistently 85 to 95 percent female, and over the decades, the more than 1,500 women employed by the company came to be known as “Gossard Girls.” The steady employment and camaraderie described throughout the book demonstrate the value of the company to the employees, their families, and communities. Accounts by former employees who began working at Gossard at age fourteen or fifteen—lying about their age to gain employment—may make their situations seem exploitative, but many of these young women were grateful to find employment and earn desperately needed income for their families. For single and widowed women, as well as married women whose husbands had more precarious employment in the mining industries of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, employment at Gossard not only kept their families afloat but also sustained the economies of Ishpeming and Gwinn. These women also felt a sense of pride in the lingerie they produced, including bras, girdles, and corsets that were sold across the United States by major retailers such as J. C. Penney and Montgomery Ward. The stories raise more questions that fall beyond the scope of this work. There are frequent references to “favoritism” by female and male supervisors. Did any of the female employees experience sexual harassment? There is one reference to employees terminated because of pregnancy, but with a primarily female workforce, this must have happened frequently. Workers were split on whether to organize, and it took seven years before the Ishpeming women voted to unionize. The factory in Gwinn did not vote to unionize. The Ishpeming women went on a sixteen-week strike in 1949, resulting in pay raises and mandatory union membership for nonmanagerial employees. By the 1970s, fashions were changing, and garment work was moving overseas to reduce production costs. Both of the factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn closed in 1976. Wong’s account reminds readers that the history of women’s work outside the home is long and complex. Women worked out of economic necessity and found other benefits and personal enrichment too. She ends the book by encouraging readers to seek out community stories and contribute additional histories. One hopes that readers take up this mission because of the numerous examples in the garment and textile industry alone in Michigan. The corset factories in Kalamazoo and Three Oaks and the silk mills in Belding are just a few examples, not to mention the numerous other industries where women worked. [End Page 135] Sharon Carlson, Professor Emerita Zhang Legacy Collections Center Western Michigan University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan

World War II and the Making of a Journalist

World War II and the Making of a Journalist Owen V. Johnson (bio) and Jon Paul Dilts (bio) In early 1945, Sgt. Ralph Holsinger, in a reflective mood, wrote to the editor of the Piqua (Ohio) Daily Call to tell him what the war was like "in the rain and mud and mountains."1 We captured Naples, he wrote, and: had come to expect an advance of 25 miles every week. And then in November, in the mountains, around Venafro, something happened. Maybe the rain was heavier and the mud thicker, maybe the mountains were higher and more rugged, maybe the Germans were tougher. . . . Whatever it was, we made no more weekly moves of 25 miles. As a matter of fact, many weeks passed and we made no moves at all. We ate our Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's dinners in the same muddy olive grove on the side of the same hill overlooking the same valley. While we were there the rains turned to snow and the mountains became white-capped. On New Year's Day a terrific blizzard swept through the valley, blowing down all our tents and covering the mud with six inches of ice cold slush. It was a miserable day.2 [End Page 28] Ralph had started writing to his hometown editor after hearing some of his letters home were being shared and occasionally published. He had written hundreds of letters since he was drafted—letters to his parents in Ohio, to his friends from school, and, more recently, to his hometown newspaper. He wrote about the war, the tiredness, the boredom, the dead, the fighting at Salerno and Anzio. Many of those letters today can be found preserved in the archives at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where Ralph spent his later years teaching. They tell the story of a young soldier from Ohio, a story of a life-changing adventure, a story still best told in Ralph's own words. ________ The writing of letters was at its peak during World War II.3 Advances in communication and postal delivery gave letter writing a boost at the beginning of the twentieth century. High school curricula began to include the how-tos of letter writing. The first US war that saw extensive writing of letters was World War I.4 While the use of telephones was growing, the cost of long-distance calls was prohibitive of extensive use until the 1960s or later. Troops were encouraged to write home often, a process facilitated by the use of V-Mail.5 Dozens of articles and books of World War II letters have been published, but many of them are of significant interest only to the soldier's family and a small circle of friends. Some constitute collections of letters by multiple individuals.6 Among the more interesting collections are those that have appeared under the auspices of university [End Page 29] presses, state and local historical societies, or reputable trade publishers.7 A few publications focus on the letters of well-known individuals.8 ________ Ralph was six months into his first job out of Ohio Wesleyan University when the war came. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Victor Company had brought him to Camden, New Jersey, to the center of American technology, and to the Nipper Building. For Ralph, the RCA job meant a future of stability and security. The Holsingers of Covington, Ohio, had survived the Depression because Ralph's father, Fred, was good with his hands and Ralph's mother, Mary Vannas Inman Holsinger, was smart and careful. Ralph was the oldest of four children, two boys and two girls. Mary brought Ralph into the world during the Great War in 1918, Evelyn came the following year, Perry arrived in 1922, and Thelma June was born in 1927. Together, they learned the values of thrift, grit, self-discipline, and positive thinking. They believed that if one worked hard, [End Page 30] stayed focused, calculated risks, and took care of friends, good things were bound to happen. And they mostly did for the Holsinger family. Ralph finished high school and went to work for his father as a carpenter's helper...

:Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBrian Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 248. $95.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Frank J. CirilloFrank J. CirilloMassachusetts Historical Society (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 4Fall 2022 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721583 Views: 10Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Changing Understandings of the Dodgers’ Move to Los Angeles and the Value of Archival Sources

Changing Understandings of the Dodgers’ Move to Los Angeles and the Value of Archival Sources Seth S. Tannenbaum (bio) Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner who in 1957 moved his franchise from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, is one of the most influential figures in all of American sport. His reputation, however, is varied. Some authors, particularly in the decades after the move, cast him as one of the sport’s most greedy villains because, in their eyes, he stole a profitable team away from Brooklyn to make even more money in Los Angeles. More recently others argued O’Malley wanted to stay in New York but was stymied by government officials like Robert Moses who refused to help him acquire his choice site for a new ballpark.1 There was not a single moment in which the understanding of the move shifted; as early as the 1970s, some writers blamed Moses, and as recently as 2017, others blamed O’Malley.2 That said, fans’ emotions and sportswriters’ frustrations at losing their beat covering one of the best teams in the National League colored many of the early narratives that blamed O’Malley. Authors who looked to fans and sportswriters to understand the move faulted O’Malley, as did many writers who grew up in Brooklyn. When scholars gained access to archival material documenting the move and especially to O’Malley’s private papers, however, they tended to discuss the move with far greater complexity. Although access to professional baseball team papers is rare, as analysis of the Dodgers’ move demonstrates, such access allows for nuanced scholarship that highlights some of the ways baseball can be used to understand themes in broader American history.3 Blaming O’Malley was essentially the norm until some of his papers were made public because it was hard to understand the actions of the somewhat reticent owner without that material, especially for fans and journalists who felt personally wounded by his decision. When some of his communication with Moses became available in the 1980s, understanding O’Malley got easier, and more writers highlighted Moses’s role in the team’s relocation. This trend continued in the 2000s when O’Malley’s family donated some of [End Page 34] his papers to the Brooklyn Historical Society and posted others to the web-site www.walteromalley.com. His family also let a select few authors access the bulk of his private papers that were not online, allowing scholars to better comprehend his intentions and make connections beyond the game. The changing understandings of the Dodgers’ move show that although archival work is often painstaking, difficult, and expensive, looking beyond the sports pages, fan memoirs, and popular perceptions of pivotal moments in baseball history allows scholars to display more complexity. Before this kind of archival research was possible, the story of the Dodgers’ move was a simple narrative blaming one man, but with those sources, baseball historians used the move to understand a host of other aspects of American history. Other sport historians have made related arguments about the general value of archival documents, but the Dodgers’ move is an oft-discussed event whose broad narrative arc is well known, making it a powerful example when coupled with detailed analysis.4 Moreover, the Dodgers’ move is an informative and important case study because O’Malley’s papers are some of the very few professional baseball team records explaining off-field decisions that are available to scholars. A few team papers are held at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and others are scattered throughout a variety of archives, but the vast majority are not available. As the Dodgers’ move also demonstrates, however, it is not impossible to display complexity and highlight baseball’s larger implications without team papers, but that access is a boon to crafting nuanced narratives that connect to themes in broader American history. background of the move The Dodgers moved into their famous home park in Brooklyn, Ebbets Field, in 1913. Over the following two decades, a mass transit–accessible, middle-class, residential neighborhood grew up around it. However, in part because team owner Charles Ebbets had to take...

Devising and Disclosing an Autobiographical Self

Abstract Scholarship should attend to the imperative that African identities need to be particularized and explored, and not simply generalized and proclaimed. Thus, this article interrogates the case of the autobiographical self-portrait recently authored and published by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (born 1948), widow of the late J. J. Rawlings (died 2020; Ghanaian Head of State, 1979 and 1981–2001). Nana Konadu strongly identified herself with the cause of Ghanaian women in a broad sense, and became well-known as a formidable sociopolitical actor in her own right. Her autobiographical narrative only covers the period up to 1979, but her treatment of her antecedents, her birth and her young self opens a revelatory window into her own perspective on her personal formation and attitudes, and particularly with reference to her patrilineal ancestry among the Asante of central Ghana. In this article I take the “ideological I” that engineered her text, and situate it within a deep and precise reading of Asante norms and expectations taken in conjunction with the lived historical circumstances that acted upon these in a variety of ways and with a range of consequences. The wider argument being made here is that only deep interaction with and sustained reflection upon the received norms and actual practices of any historical society, African and otherwise, can furnish forth the nuanced contexts necessary to the location and understanding of the “ideological I” that speaks from within it.

A History of Montana in 101 Objects: Artifacts &amp; Essays from the Montana Historical Society ed. by Kirby Lambert (review)

A History of Montana in 101 Objects: Artifacts &amp; Essays from the Montana Historical Society ed. by Kirby Lambert (review)