Race History Research Articles

Palimpsestuous Manifestations of Slavery-Inflicted Somatic and Psychological Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)

My essay explores Toni Morrison’s Beloved ability to map out the often irrepresentable consequences of slavery-inflicted trauma on the survivors’ bodies and souls. In particular, it discusses the inextricability of the physical and psychological element in the changing same of the African American condition in the U.S.A. With references to the Middle Passage, slave scar-branding, freed slaves’ infanticide and inability to escape the vortex of somatic and psychological trauma, Beloved provokes its audience to reflect on the history of racism and slavery-inflicted trauma in the U.S.A. Morrison’s fictional testimony may therefore be approached as a reparative attempt to American history by unveiling how the U.S. has always constituted a nation founded on systemic and systematic exclusion of African Americans who were continuously regarded as second-class citizens.

Sex Differences in Racing History of Recreational 10 km to Ultra Runners (Part B)-Results from the NURMI Study (Step 2).

Sex differences in anatomy and physiology are the primary underlying factor for distinctions in running performance. Overall participation in recreational running events has been dominated by males, although increasing female participation has been reported in recent years. The NURMI study participants filled in a survey following the cross-sectional study design with questions on sociodemographic data, running and racing motivations, training behaviors, and racing history and experience. Data analysis included 141 female and 104 male participants aged 39 (IQR 17) with a healthy median BMI (21.7 kg/m²; IQR 3.5). Statistical analyses revealed sex differences with the males performing faster at half-marathon (p < 0.001) and marathon (p < 0.001) events but no difference at ultra-marathons (p = 0.760). Mediation analyses revealed no significant sex differences in the performance of half-marathon and marathon when considering training behaviors (p > 0.05), racing history (p > 0.05), or racing experience (p > 0.05). Differences in recreational performance may be more closely related to social constraints and expectations of females rather than the physiological advantages of the male athlete. Health professionals who guide and support recreational runners as well as the runners themselves and their coaches may benefit from this study’s results in order to improve the best time performance through a deeper understanding of the areas that mediate sex differences.

The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru

This monograph uncovers the fascinating story of the textile workshop (obraje) in Pomacocha, located in the Ayacucho region, Peru. After its foundation in 1689, the workshop developed into a thriving hub of textile production fueling the vibrant cross-Andean cloth trade. More than a hundred working families lived in Pomacocha, subjugated to the colonial regimes of debt slavery, forced labor, bondage, and prison labor. The Fabric of Resistance is a compelling, rich, and provocative study, based on a wide range of evidence and a dazzling mix of methods—ranging from archaeological analysis, political geography, social network analysis, archival research, and demographic studies to spatial analysis. The volume situates textile production at the heart of processes of identity formation in the colonial Andes. The obraje, Hu shows, was the arena where identities, communities, and social cohesion took on shape, and where colonial rule, as well as opposition, got negotiated. The volume knots together the history of labor, resistance, race, and colonialism, narrated through the lens of the changing social conditions of textile production.

Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference”

In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward.

Cannabis and criminology: A history of race, addiction, and inconvenient research

While efforts to restrict the use of cannabis are more than a century old, policy liberalization is more recent. History suggests that the growing tolerance for cannabis will continue to be met with opposition. Cannabis policy has been trapped in a recurrent rotation from acceptance and increased use to hostility and expansive efforts to control those who consume it. This paper considers how historical criminology can uncover criminological artifacts to conceive, frame, and clarify cannabis criminalization, decriminalization, and liberalization. As a subject, cannabis was shaped by forces that had little to do with the plant itself, which led it to be socially constructed as evil, dangerous, or otherwise risky. We consider the history of cannabis through the lenses of race, addiction, and research and explore reports from five different countries on cannabis and criminal justice policy.

East Asian Population.

This article explores the ways East Asian American (EAA) children and adolescents have experienced disparities in the United States throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The history of racism toward Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and the complexities of acculturation are reflected through this contemporary lens. Traditional East Asian (EA) values were disrupted during this period. Implications for children and families are discussed. Persistent underlying xenophobia and racism, such as the model minority myth or perpetual foreigner stereotype, rose to new prominence, furthering emotional distress in EA and EAA youths beyond those already experienced universally by AAPI families during the pandemic.

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

Evaluation of facilitators and barriers of timely breast cancer care in North Carolina (NC): A qualitative study.

134 Background: Early detection and timely treatment of breast cancer using multi-disciplinary therapies often contributes to a goal of curative intent along with improved overall outcomes. In prior studies, Black women compared to non-Black women are at a higher chance of treatment delay (&gt; 60 days) in NC. The care team factors that contribute to these treatment delays are unclear. Methods: This qualitative study utilized content analysis. The 30 participants included community stakeholders involved in breast cancer care delivery, including breast cancer clinicians and community resource providers. Participants were selected through purposive sampling. Three Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) regions (Northwest, Charlotte, and Area L) that represent the diversity of the state of NC were selected as sites for data collection. Each participant completed a one-time semi-structured interview which was audio-recorded and transcribed. Inductively derived codes were created from the previously established interview guide leading to the production of the codebook with each code conceptually defined. Transcripts were coded by 7 coders through the method of consensus coding leading to the identification of emergent themes. Code reports were generated from each code leading to the production of a narrative summary. Results: All participants identified perceived both facilitators and barriers to the timely initiation of breast cancer treatment. Barriers fell into several categories: geographical, financial, healthcare system related, and patient related (non-financial). Most barriers were perceived as more common among Black patients. Additionally, participants emphasized incidents of historical racism in medical care that limited Black patients from having trust in the healthcare system. Facilitators identified included: outreach through community partners, healthcare navigation, supportive healthcare providers, provision of social support services, transportation, integrative services, and raising the overall quality of cancer care. Conclusions: Despite the diversity of participants regarding region, years of employment, and role, stakeholders identified important common themes when reviewing the perceived facilitators and barriers of breast cancer care delivery. Perceived barriers were largely related to patients’ social determinants of health, and participants perceived that Black patients had more adverse social determinants impacting their care timeliness, highlighting that structural racism contributes to delayed cancer care delivery. Future initiatives aimed at improving the delivery of timely breast cancer care must focus on evaluating marginalized communities’ overall access to adequate care along with effective community engagement to build a higher level of trust from such patients and target the social determinants of health.

The "aquiline race". The Etruscans between Fascist racism, Nazi racism and the Catholic Church

This article aims to demonstrate that the debate about the origin of the Etruscans can help identify the scientific and ideological inspiration behind Fascist racist theories and explain their relationship with the Catholic Church and Nazi forms of racism. In particular, I argue that the disagreements about the racial identity of the Etruscan people are exemplary of the distinction between "biological" racism and anti-Christian, non-biological racism. The article thus shows that Alfred Rosenberg's negative representation of the Etruscans - aimed at denying the racial legitimacy of the Catholic Church - was adopted, in Italy, by anti-Christian Fascist philosophers such as Julius Evola and Giulio Cogni; the "biological" racist group behind the journal La Difesa della Razza, instead, promoted Eugen Fischer's "Etruscologist" theory of the "aquiline race" to include the Etruscans in Italian racial history and avoid an ideological struggle with the Church.

Thurgood Marshall, Hero of American Medicine.

One of the heroes in American history, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) sought legal remedies against racial discrimination in education and health care. As director of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of NAACP from 1940 to 1961, his success in integrating law schools in Texas led to the first black medical student admitted to a state medical school in the South. Representing doctors and dentists needing a facility to perform surgery, the LDF brought cases before the courts in North Carolina that moved the country toward justice in health care. His ultimate legal victory came in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1964, the LDF under Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor as director, won Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a decision that held that hospitals accepting federal funds had to admit black patients. The two decisions laid the judicial foundation for the laws and administrative acts that changed America's racial history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 that established Medicare and Medicaid. His achievements came during the hottest period of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, black Americans were denied access to the full resources of American medicine, locked in a "separate-but-equal" system woefully inadequate in every respect. In abolishing segregation, Marshall initiated the long overdue remedy of the unjust legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

BECOMING A RACE CONSCIOUS LEADER

AbstractThe author notes that “Race Conscious Leadership is your invitation to unravel the racial narratives you didn’t choose, but for which you are now responsible.” She explains that it is “the practice of cultivating an ongoing, nuanced awareness of racial history, racial identity, and racial justice in one’s organizational life.” In a graphic Figure, she presents “The Insight‐Action Axis for Effective Race Conscious Leadership.” This depicts, for instance, in her words “A culture of the past (low in insight, low in action), A culture of learning (high in insight, low in action).” In further definitions, she says that “Cultures of learning are marked by acquiring information, finding stories, and sharing ideas.” Also: “Cultures of the future are environments where race conscious leaders are committed to expanding their insights and engaging in meaningful actions.” She also outlines 10 habits of race conscious leaders. Some are in her words: #1. Race conscious leaders are peacemakers, not peacekeepers. #2. Race conscious leaders make themselves accountable. #3. Race conscious leaders think collectively and individually. #4. Race conscious leaders are relentlessly self‐aware. #5. Race conscious leaders are truth tellers. #6. Race conscious leaders filter their decisions through the lens of equity and justice.

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, by J. Russell Hawkins

As I write this review, state legislatures across the United States vote to limit the work that public schools and even public universities can do to teach the nation’s history of racism, white supremacy, and Black resistance. J. Russell Hawkins examines the kind of history that many conservative nationalists want neither to hear nor to allow. It is, then, a pressing and timely read. The book focuses on segregationist theology and politics from 1955 to 1970 among South Carolina Southern Baptists and members of the Methodist Church (after 1968, the United Methodist Church). Hawkins makes two central arguments: first, that segregationist evangelicals’ politics followed their theology—that they read scripture and understood Christian orthodoxy in a way that drove their political engagement. Secondly, Hawkins argues that segregationist theology persisted, largely unchanged, even after the civil rights movement forced an outward shift in language and strategy, from segregationist rhetoric to a colour-blind family-values rhetoric.

Gameplay as Foreplay at a Medieval Indian Court

This study focuses on the singular courtly game of phañjikā described in the 12th-century Mānasollāsa attributed to King Someśvara III of the Western Cālukya Empire. It shows that phañjikā belongs to the family of cruciform race games, which also counts the famous games of caupaṛ and paccīsī among its members. Phañjikā, however, predates the earliest evidence for both of those games by several centuries, and should therefore be considered an early indication of the popularity that cruciform race games would come to enjoy in elite and royal households from at least the 15th century onward. The study also shows that phañjikā did not enjoy the same status at court as other board games, such as chess and backgammon, also described in the Mānasollāsa. It was primarily associated with the women at court, and only engaged in by the king for the pleasure of witnessing the passionate emotion that it stirred in them. Based on the low status of the game, and the prevalence of race games in all levels of society, the study argues that phañjikā was likely an elaborate courtly adaptation of a simpler folk game. This would explain its absence from the literature outside the Mānasollāsa, as well as its many correspondences with a wide range of cruciform, square, and single-track race games only documented in more recent sources. The study suggests that more scholarly attention should be paid to the regional literatures of India, as they developed in the first half of the 2nd millennium CE, for a more detailed understanding of the early history of medieval Indian race games to be arrived at.

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman (review).

Reviewed by: Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman James Doucet-Battle Arleen Marcia Tuchman. Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020. xvii + 288 pp. Ill. $32.50 (978-0-300-22899-1). In Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease, Arleen Marcia Tuchman presents a comprehensive and engaging account of the ways diabetes has been viewed through racial and ethnic lenses over the last one hundred and fifty years. Tuchman traces how Jewish, African American, Native American, and LatinX categorized groups emerged successively in both the scientific and public imagination as differentially embodied carriers of inherited Type 2 risk. The book conducts a sweeping [End Page 459] interrogation of not only the putative racial and ethnic categories, but also of the nosology of diabetes diagnostic categories as well. In this way, Tuchman offers a persuasive narrative of the tortuous journey to knowledge about diabetes, a journey muddled historically and contemporaneously by the insidious racialization of both science and society. Tuchman charts the history of diabetes science as embedded within the history of racial science. From the late nineteenth century, imagined populations of diabetes risk were grouped racially, fueled by theories of social evolution and civilizational hierarchy. Such attitudes fed directly into eugenicist claims that diabetics had “defective genes,” and that therefore “insulin was harming the race by allowing individuals with defective genes to reproduce” (p. 54). Tuchman deftly contrasts ethnoracial notions of diabetes risk with an examination of how whiteness has served as an index of normative citizenship and a moral economy of care. While some high-risk and diagnosed whites were adjudged to be “defective” genetically, Tuchman illustrates how minoritized populations became seen as reservoirs of diabetes risk. Eugenicist assertions of risk attributed to defective genes in feeble-minded whites were presumed to exist, tout court, in non-whites. Diabetes makes vital connections between the ways ethnoracial groups and communities have been imagined1 and the public health approaches, medical practices, and clinical research efforts targeting these stratified populations. Throughout the book, Tuchman counterposes the seemingly endurable influence of racial thinking, with strident but furtive arguments linking environmental and social determinants of health in ascribing diabetes risk. The root of the debate about diabetes centers on whether the illness is due to either environmental or innate biological factors, and if the “innate” could be linked to race. Regarding the former, racial biology was seen to work in apposition, depending on the rankings of different groups within evolutionary social and civilizational hierarchies. For example, haphazardly categorized white and Jewish sub-populations were viewed as having acutely sensitive physical constitutions that made them more susceptible to diabetes risk. On the other hand, Native and African American groups were deemed brutish, savage, and incapable of abstract thought. Occupying a somewhat liminal position, some argued (and continue to do so) that degrees of Native American/Indigenous admixture among LatinX groups elevate Type 2 risk. Tuchman weaves a counter-narrative that contrasts and pushes against putative theories linking race and biology. The narrative presents a spatial history of nonwhite immigration, African enslavement, LatinX subordination, and Native American dispossession that illustrates the social construction of racial biologies and the political economy of power that misrecognizes the affective drivers of cardiometabolic risk in rural/urban, reservation, ghetto, and barrio environments. In this analysis, Tuchman explicates James Neel’s argument for an environmental, and not racial, contingency for Type 2 diabetes risk.2 [End Page 460] In addition to its rich historiography, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease brings relevant appeal to scholars and students in a wide interdisciplinary range of audiences. Those in public health would benefit from examining the ways demographic change legitimated forms of surveillance based on race and ethnicity, often fed by misinformed theories of Type 2 diabetes risk rooted in perennial iterations of scientific racism. In connection, the book also calls clinical researchers and physicians to rethink putative assumptions that situate Type 2 risk differentially within racially encoded communities and bodies. Scholars in both the history of science as well as science and (technology) society studies will find the book a generative work that links science as history with...

Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities

Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities

Modernizing Royals and Capitalists of Kumase

Abstract British imperialism bequeathed sports to former colonies. In the immediate postwar period, colonial bureaucrats intensified the modernization agenda in many of their colonial territories. The institution of horse racing was associated with the upper echelons of society in many colonies. In colonial Asante, the royals and capitalists of Kumase established the Ashanti Turf Club as the first public limited liability company in the history of horse racing in Ghana. Horse racing in Kumase started with the active encouragement and patronage of the king of Asante (Asantehene). The Kumase royals and capitalists embraced the middle-class culture and bought shares in the Turf Club. The practice of betting linked the working-class to racing. Horse racing played a significant social role in Asante society by keeping residents entertained at the weekends. This article examines the Ashanti Turf Club Limited within the context of the modernization of postwar Asante. It shows how the history of horse racing in Kumase provides a lens to understand how Africans embraced middle-class culture and colonial modernity.

“It Was about Time for Our Children to Learn How to Read”: Ruby Duncan, Operation Life, and the West Las Vegas Library

ABSTRACT The history of the West Las Vegas Library and its inception by the welfare rights group Operation Life, and the organization’s founder Ruby Duncan, has largely been unstudied and overlooked in the historical record. The library was considered a branch of the Clark County Library System but was initially run by Operation Life in the 1970s and 1980s. However, in the mid-1980s the Clark County Library System built a new library, dismantling all the work done by Operation Life and Duncan. An examination of the West Las Vegas Library places Duncan and Operation Life as social actors within a community that had been forgotten by the dominant White culture. By analyzing this history, this work adds to a vibrant conversation on the history of race, poverty, and libraries.

Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks

Reviewed by: Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks Nathan Rees Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music. By Michael Hicks. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. [x, 232 p. ISBN 9781560852865 (paperback), $17.95; ISBN 9781560853855 (e-book), $9.99.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. [End Page 84] Michael Hicks conceived of Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music as the third in a series on music in the belief and practice of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Unlike his earlier monographs—Mormonism and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015)—this volume is a collection of Hicks’s essays on diverse topics spanning the early nineteenth century to the present, ranging from historical studies to personal reflections. Published by Signature Books, a Utah-based press devoted to Mormon studies, the book is aimed at readers who are already versed in Mormon history and culture. Still, the volume offers important research that brings new perspectives to contextualize Mormon music within its historical and contemporary cultural spaces. The book is div ided into three roughly chronological sections. In the first, Hicks focuses on the nineteenth century, addressing many of the same issues discussed in Mormonism in Music but adding numerous findings that he made in the intervening three decades. The section begins with “Joseph Smith’s Favorite Songs (or Not),” a chapter that explores the sundry musical forms circulating in the early LDS Church by investigating a selection of songs favored by the church’s founding prophet. Hicks creates a rich image of Smith’s musical world within contemporaneous US culture, in contexts ranging from militarism to temperance. Chapter 2 is a critical reevaluation of early Mormon music from a feminist perspective, detailing Emma Smith’s work in creating the first LDS hymnal. Emma Smith was not only Joseph Smith’s wife but also an important Mormon leader in her own right as founding president of the Relief Society, the female corollary to Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood. Hicks uncovers the gender dynamics attending the book’s production and reception, as Emma Smith struggled to maintain institutional support for her hymnal against competing publications launched by male church leaders. Hicks explores how Emma Smith’s strategic selection of texts— and deletion of texts in a later revision—supported the intimate personal piety that she espoused, in contrast to her husband’s focus on communal religious experience. Hicks tracks this narrative up to the present, demonstrating how the current LDS hymnal, in use since 1985, bears the traces of this struggle through the erasure of Emma Smith’s imprint. In the third chapter, Hicks offers a case study of the musical eclecticism that characterized the early development of Mormon hymnody, speculating on possible musical sources for one of the church’s most popular hymn tunes, “The Spirit of God.” He convincingly argues that the tune, long assumed to have been adopted from an unknown non-Mormon source, was instead likely composed by LDS musicians by combining melodic elements of several popular hymn tunes. In chapter 4, Hicks returns to cultural-historical analysis by detailing the prevalence of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century Mormonism. He shows how musical representations of Blackness paralleled developing LDS perspectives on race. Limited early openness to African Americans ended in the 1850s with the establishment of racist doctrinal pronouncements denying people of African descent leadership roles or entry into the church’s temples. In unearthing and contextualizing the presence of blackface minstrelsy beginning in early Mormonism and continuing into twentieth century Utah, Hicks makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the history of race in Mormonism. Hicks could go further in theorizing the intersection [End Page 85] of race and music in Mormonism. His conclusions are focused more on the reasons that Mormons embraced black-face minstrelsy than on the impacts of its performance, whether in its direct effect on African American Latter-day Saints or in its broader reinforcement of racist beliefs and practices in Mormon history. The three essays in the second section address Mormon...

Black Ecological Vibrations

Black Ecological Vibrations

Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell

Reviewed by: Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell Kevin P. Block (bio) Aaron Passell Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn New York: Columbia University Press, 2021 272 pages, 2 black-and-white photographs, 19 figures ISBN: 9780231194075, $35 PB ISBN: 9780231194068, $120 HC ISBN: 9780231550635, $29.99 EB In cities across the United States, vernacular structures of all kinds—from row houses and churches to vacant factories and schools— exist within urban landscapes of opportunity and decline. Often the preservation of these structures for study, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse depends upon the protections and financial incentives associated with historic district designation. For this reason alone, the relationship between historic districts and neighborhood change should interest readers of Buildings & Landscapes, whether or not they are professional preservationists. In Preserving Neighborhoods, author Aaron Passell compares the effects of historic district designations in Baltimore and Brooklyn, which he views as the polar ends of a contemporary urban growth spectrum. Baltimore is a legacy city in which preservationists and commercial developers have created historic districts to access rehabilitation tax credits and revitalize neighborhoods such as Canton and Locust Point. Brooklyn, in contrast, is now a global city in which members of volunteer community organizations utilize historic district protections and review procedures to fortify their neighborhoods from the adverse effects of intense speculative development and what urban historians now categorize as “super-gentrification.”1 Writing as a sociologist rather than a preservationist, Passell is careful to describe the basic mechanics and implications of historic districting, which should make his analysis accessible to a wide variety of readers, including students in urban studies, architectural and cultural landscape studies, public history, and planning courses. Understanding what exactly constitutes Passell’s sociological framework, however, might be difficult for some readers, although he briefly attempts to address this framework in the book’s introduction. From Harvey Molotch, for example, Passell assumes that the city is fundamentally a “growth machine,” controlled by members of a land-based elite who are interested in maximizing the exchange value of their property, with government authorities serving to coordinate their interests.2 He also follows a lineage of urban sociologists who are interested in the neighborhood as a metonym for all those contextual factors beyond the family that reproduce differences in life outcomes. To define a neighborhood and control its development with a preservation planning tool such as a historic district is thus one way to perpetuate or disrupt the enduring effects that are correlated with a given place.3 Pas-sell’s sociological analysis of historic districts is a welcome addition to the field because— while there are already assessments of historic districts from the perspective of public history and the history of preservation, as well as several in-depth historical accounts of the gentrification–preservation nexus in particular cities (including Brooklyn)—few authors have possessed both the quantitative and ethnographic skills necessary to create a compelling model of the historic districting process as a whole.4 Following a “kaleidoscopic approach” that combines extensive statistical analysis with qualitative interviews, Passell develops his comparison over four chapters that alternate between Baltimore and Brooklyn (212). He highlights the book’s major conclusion in his introduction: Contra the preservation skeptics, the author has found no evidence of a direct relationship between historic district designation and gentrification. “What preservation does,” he writes, “depends substantially on where it is doing it and the particular history and contemporary conditions of that place” (1). Passell characterizes this claim as “radically contingent” (2), with variability depending upon “the age of the city, its demographic composition (and racial history), its redevelopment history, the strength (or weakness) of the real estate market, and who is involved in the preservation process, among other things” (8). For the philosophically adventurous, one might also characterize his account as nominalist. Although municipalities often copy the same preservation legislation verbatim and adopt similar rationales for historical significance, historic districts do different things in different places and thus “the historic district,” in a universalist sense, does not exist, only the social process of historic districting in all its manifold particularity. This insistence upon, or...