Native American Rights Research Articles

Ritual Roadways and Places of Power in the Chaco World (ca. AD 850-1150)

This paper considers the topic of sacred spaces in North America through the vantage offered by Chacoan roads, monumental avenues constructed by Ancestral Four Corners people of the US Southwest from ca. AD 850-1150. I begin with a critique of the concept of the “sacred” as applied to the Chacoan past, suggesting instead that the Indigenous North American concept of power (in the sense of potent, generative force infused throughout the environment) offers a more culturally relevant framing. Next, I present three examples of locations along Chacoan roads that I argue were recognized as places of power due to the inherent landscape affordances of these locales. I close by briefly describing some of the practices carried out along Chacoan roads and drawing a connection between the understanding of “sacredness” evidenced through the archaeology of Chacoan roads and contemporary Native American activist efforts to protect landscapes of great power and meaning.

Indian Ideology in The Warpath: Lehman Brightman’s Red Power Journalism

The Warpath, the “angry Indian” newsletter founded by the militant but oft overlooked journalist Lehman Brightman, was one of several Red Power publications founded in the late 1960s as part of the social and cultural upheavals of that era. Brightman’s publication deployed several major themes as he argued for Native American rights and against the federal Indian bureaucracy, especially “America’s colonial office,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In The Warpath, Brightman demanded Indian liberation and self-determination, calling for direct political action at places like Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore, a place Brightman and other activists occupied in 1970. Brightman also celebrated Indian history and culture, criticized Indian stereotypes, excoriated moderate Indian leaders and, perhaps most significantly, investigated the appalling conditions at underfunded and understaffed Indian schools. His principal achievement was the articulation of a strident anti-racist and anti-colonial ideology that continues to resonate in Indian Country.

Why the New Deal Matters

Why the New Deal Matters

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Utah History Textbooks and Utah History

Utah History Textbooks and Utah History

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century

In Reproduction on the Reservation, Brianna Theobald orients the history of reproductive justice around Native American women and the history of Native sovereignty around reproduction. In her analysis of the twentieth-century policies that shaped Native women's reproductive health, Theobald emphasizes Native women's stories. This is a conscious—and political—choice, reflecting Theobald's rejection of common narratives where sterilization abuse appears as the defining feature in the history of Native women's lives. Instead, Theobald illustrates a longer and more nuanced history of reproduction, pregnancy, and birthing practices throughout the twentieth century. This history is inextricably intertwined with the history of Native kinship, women's power within their communities, and cultural knowledge.Theobald balances her study between “depth” and “breadth,” alternating chapters between specific analyses of her case study of the Crow Reservation in southern Montana and a wider, national story of policy and activism. Her sources include oral histories of Crow and Northern Cheyenne women, bureaucratic records, government studies, ethnographic reports, memoirs, and the records of activist organizations. An expert at reading colonial sources against the grain, she finds Native women's resistance and negotiation in the words of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents.Theobald identifies links between two distinct time periods: the early twentieth century and the 1960s to 1970s. Both periods were characterized by the “eliminatory logic” of the state and by Native women's activism. As Theobald notes, Native women navigated both periods with “fortitude and creativity,” negotiating, adapting, and refusing the federal government's prescriptions on childbirth and reproductive health (p. 12).Theobald's first chapter primarily focuses on Crow birthing and child-rearing practices, as she explains the system of “flexible childrearing,” where children, who had many parents and grandparents, were raised communally. In her second chapter, Theobald argues that the Progressive-era “Save the Babies” campaign was a “cornerstone of early twentieth-century federal Indian policy,” (pp. 44–45) illuminating the connection between the maternalist mission of field matrons, reformers, and other state agents and the medicalization of childbirth on reservations. In her analysis of the relationships between Native women and BIA personnel in the first decades of the twentieth century, she argues that BIA efforts to “persuade” Native women to conform to Americanized childbirth practices reveal how effectively Native women negotiated with BIA staff in matters of reproductive health.Reproduction on the Reservation has implications for our understanding of how Native people experienced the eugenics campaigns of the early twentieth century. In short, Theobald effectively demonstrates that the widespread coercive sterilization of Native women in the 1960s and 1970s was not an anomaly. In her third chapter, Theobald explores the conflict and interpersonal dynamics among BIA leadership on the Crow Reservation in the 1930s (including the superintendent, Robert Yellowtail, the first Native superintendent of his own reservation), non-Native and Native staff at the agency hospital, tribal council members, and Native women. In the 1930s, Crow women were “far from silent regarding health and politics,” and pushed reproductive health concerns into reservation politics (p. 85).Theobald's treatment of Native women's experiences of relocation in chapter 4 illuminates the dynamics of bureaucracy where assimilative policies and reproduction meet, including how Native women navigated health insurance and urban public hospitals. On relocation, Native women maintained and adapted their ties with reservations, practiced flexible childrearing in new environments, and, through Indian centers, established the infrastructure that the BIA sorely lacked. Theobald's definition of termination as a “host of policies and practices—not limited to the dissolution of a tribe's political status—that affected virtually every aspect of reservation life,” pushes scholarly discussions of termination outside of the political realm and into the everyday experiences of women and their families (p. 124). Specifically, in chapter 5, Theobald considers the role of terminationist policymakers’ decisions to close reservation hospitals—ostensibly as a way of saving money, but really as a way to ensure assimilation—in her analysis of Crow political opposition to termination.Theobald's focus on the activism among Native nurses, including Susie Yellowtail (Crow) provides needed context to the scholarly conversations around sterilization-related activism in the 1970s (p. 157). Her final chapter elucidates the contributions of Native women's organizations like Women of All Red Nations (WARN), the pan-Native women's organization founded in 1978, in the fight for decolonization, which required, “restoration of women's strength and the reclamation of their reproductive control” (p. 165).The definition of Native women's political activism should include reproductive health. For example, Native women have employed midwifery as a response to sterilization abuse and have advocated for access to health care using the language of treaty rights. Reproduction on the Reservation is a rich contribution to the historical fields of twentieth-century Native American activism, women's history, the history of reproductive justice, and Indian policy. Theobald reminds readers that reproductive health was and is a matter of tribal sovereignty.

Testimonies of affect: Native American women’s histories of violence on California’s Pacific North Coast

ABSTRACT From the 1850s and into the 1880s, the Native American nations of the Pacific northwestern coast of California had been wracked by violence perpetrated by settler vigilantes and military forces. Girls and young women, sought for both sexual and domestic labour, were disproportionately represented among the survivors. Decades later, during the 1920s and 1930s, some of those now elderly women delivered their testimonies. Their accounts continue to reverberate in the present day, even as they remain on the periphery of historical consciousness. This article considers the gendered nature of these deeply affective and traumatic accounts, that continues to shape their silencing and their re-telling. It focuses on the transmission of these accounts to, and through, white women. Such consideration suggests that in persisting in recounting these histories of settler atrocities to settler women, Native American women survivors mobilised the politics of affect to advocate for contemporary Native American rights; and asserted their agency as history makers and truth tellers in their own right.

Battling the Hydra: the disparate impact of voter ID requirements in North Dakota.

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

Sanitizing history: National identification, negative stereotypes, and support for eliminating Columbus Day and adopting Indigenous Peoples Day.

Despite the fact that Christopher Columbus did not discover America and was arguably one of the most brutal colonizers in recorded history, the United States continues to celebrate a holiday in his honor. A growing movement by Native American activists and allies aims to adopt Indigenous Peoples Day in lieu of Columbus Day to shed light on historical inaccuracies, acknowledge the legacy of colonialism, and celebrate Indigenous Peoples. Research suggests that national narratives, such as those undergirding Columbus Day, build on negative stereotypes about minoritized groups to help bolster national identities. We examined whether national identification and negative stereotyping of Native Americans shapes support for each holiday. We conducted 2 large-scale national studies (Study 1: college students, N = 4,625; Study 2: adults, N = 2,805). Across both samples, people who endorsed the continued celebration of Columbus Day and people who were least supportive of adopting Indigenous Peoples Day were those high in national identification. In contrast, people who endorsed eliminating Columbus Day and people who supported adopting Indigenous Peoples Day were relatively low in national identification who also believed that negative stereotypes about Native Americans were highly unacceptable (Studies 1 and 2) and/or inaccurate (Study 2). The results suggest that garnering support for eliminating Columbus Day and adopting Indigenous Peoples Day requires interrogating the roots of national identification and rejecting negative stereotypes about Native Americans. Implications for why people continue to hold onto national narratives that reify the continued subordination of minority groups are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A Discussion of California Native American Voting Rights

A Discussion of California Native American Voting Rights

Retour aux sources ? Circulation et virtualités des savoirs amérindiens à l’ère du numérique

« As the Internet, electronic mail, compact discs, and digital telephones sweep through much of the United States, Native American activists are asking themselves whether and how the new technology can empower Native communities. Or will the new technology of telecommunications and computers serve only as a modern-day version of the telegraph and railroad that ran right through Indian lands with little benefit to the tribes? » (US Congress 1995) Des le debut des annees soixante, dans un essai...

From home base to database … and back? The circulation and virtualities of Amerindian knowledge in the digital era

As the Internet, electronic mail, compact discs, and digital telephones sweep through much of the United States, Native American activists are asking themselves whether and how the new technology can empower Native communities. Or will the new technology of telecommunications and computers serve only as a modern-day version of the telegraph and railroad that ran right through Indian lands with little benefit to the tribes? (US Congress 1995) In the mid-1960s, in an essay that reverberated wid...

The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis by Richard Reichbart

The Paranormal Surrounds Us is a tied-together collection of essays by Richard Reichbart, a practicing psychoanalyst whose several strong interests and lifelong love for the mystery of psi, and sense of adventure and ethical sensibility, give the collection several points of focus. In addition to his current analytic practice of many decades, he has also been a student of literature, a playwright, a Yale-trained attorney, and an activist for Native American and African American rights. The book is as scattered as he has been, but it is so full of insights and pleasing prose, that it doesn’t lose much for that. In this time when we prefer our intellectual material in bite-sized chunks, like sparky TED Talks and internet articles, this may feel especially friendly to many. If there is an implicit, underlying focus to the work, it may be implicitly biographical: one curious man’s study of, to paraphrase Freud, the vicissitudes of psi – its expression in our finest literature, in our private and shared unconscious processes, in our different subcultures, in the deepest privacy of intensive psychotherapy, and in the legal and cultural presumptions that implicitly structure our thinking and behavior. There are three main sections to the book: Psi Phenomena in Western Literature, Psi Phenomena and Psychoanalysis, and Psi Phenomena and Culture.

Networked publics in #NoDAPL protests: Interactions among activist publics and influence of locality and proximity on socially mediated networks

Hashtag “#NoDAPL” was used by environmental activists for a series of protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beginning in early 2016. Utilizing 2 million tweets with the main hashtag, as well as the auxiliary hashtags, from around 550,000 unique users between November 2016 and February 2017, the study investigated the interactions among four groups—regular activists, Native American activists, reporters, and organizations identified based on their bio information, and the effects of physical location on network attention. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on the retweet network showed that Native American activists occupied the most prominent positions and that different groups assumed different network roles. Location analysis based on Poisson regression showed that physical proximity’s effects on attention depended on group status, and the effects were moderated by users’ authority. Implications of the study results on networked publics and the influence of locality and proximity on socially mediated networks were discussed.

Genocide in the sculpture garden and talking back to settler colonialism

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I explore how Native American rhetoric of resistance exposes the settler colonial logics that constitute a hegemonic force in the greater social imaginary. Focusing on two sites—the Minneapolis Walker Arts Center’s Scaffold exhibit and The Landing, a historic settlers’ village located twenty miles from the Walker—I assess both how settler colonialism is enacted in these spaces and how Native American activism represents a talking back to settler colonialism. I argue that examining places as networked arguments reveals the ways in which they can speak to each other and unsettle dominant ideologies. To better understand the settler colonial logics that Native American resistance rhetoric seeks to unsettle, I advocate for critical examination of how scholars and activists are constituted by those very centering logics.

A Brief History of Nebraska by Ronald Naugle

Reviewed by: A Brief History of Nebraska by Ronald Naugle Bill Hayes A Brief History of Nebraska. By Ronald Naugle. Lincoln: History Nebraska Press, 2018. 135 pp. Figures, further reading, index. $14.95, paper. This volume is an introduction to the exciting past of the land, people, events, and institutions that make up the history of the territory and the state of Nebraska. Authored by emeritus professor of history Naugle of Nebraska Wesleyan University, this study starts with an examination of the prehistorical past, a description of the land for the last 12,000 years, the early inhabitants, the coming of European and American explorers, territorial settlement, and the conflict between natives and settlers. The wildlife of that early period was made up of now extinct animals including mammoths, mastodons, sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Spear points found in Nebraska have been dated back to 11,500 to 10,500 years ago, indicating the presence of human hunters. Little is known about these early inhabitants who lived mainly by hunting. Pottery remains have been found dating back to about 2,000 years. There appears to have been a drought that led to the lack of an archeological record from the late 1300s to 1500s. A people known as Village Farmers lived in parts of Nebraska between AD 1000 and 1500, but the relationship between them and modern native peoples is unknown. Attention is given to the native peoples, mainly Otoe and Missouria, Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota that lived in the region prior to Jefferson's acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. After the description of territorial beginnings, the American Civil War, the politics surrounding the location of the state capitol, the conflict with Native Americans, and the coming of the railroad, emphasis is placed on the role of cattle drives from Texas and the spread of ranches in the Sandhills. In succession, Table Rock, Nebraska City, Plattsmouth, Schuyler, Kearney, and Ogallala became cattledrive towns where meat on the hoof was sent back East. Politically, Nebraska is still operating on the State Constitution drawn up in 1875, although it has been amended many times. The most significant changes came in 1917 when women were given the right to vote in local elections, and in 1934 when Nebraska adopted the Unicameral (or one-house) legislature. Populism had a big influence on the state of Nebraska. Its goals included a graduated income tax, old-age pensions for Union Civil War veterans, the Australian secret ballot, eight-hour workday, and the direct election of US senators (previously picked by the state legislatures). At about the same time, the state's first irrigation laws were passed. Unique in Nebraska history was the role played by William Jennings Bryan in state and national politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he ran for president three times and lost, he is forever remembered for his role in the Scopes Trial of [End Page 169] 1925 dealing with the teaching of evolution in the public schools. World War I brought about significant tension in Nebraska between residents of German ancestry and those of other backgrounds, over such issues as loyalty and the teaching of German in public schools. State Councils of Defense were created to make Nebraskans more patriotic. George Norris was another consequential politician in state and national politics who led Nebraska to becoming the only state with a unicameral form of government. He also played a major role in creating public power in the Tennessee Valley as well as in Nebraska (that is, in 1929 about 6 percent of Nebraska farmers had public power, but by 1951, 87 percent had it). More recent history has been affected by the location of the Strategic Air Command Base near Bellevue, the civil rights struggles of the sixties to the present in Omaha and elsewhere, and the tensions of the war in Vietnam. Conflicts continued regarding the rights of Native Americans, the Equal Rights Amendment, Mexican American employment in meatpacking plants, how to control the state's water resources, what to do with nuclear waste, how to encourage economic development in Nebraska, and whether or not to allow the TransCanada pipeline to...

It's Party Time

It's Party Time David Duhalde (bio) Over the past four years, I've had the privilege to work for two of the national organizations that took advantage of the political energy unleashed by Bernie Sanders's 2016 run for president. I first served as deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and then as political director of Our Revolution. The two groups take quite different approaches to the critical question of how, or whether, to work inside the Democratic Party to turn it into a principled, social democratic force. Our Revolution, which was created by the energy and core staff of the Sanders campaign, is dedicated to transforming the party. DSA, on the other hand, avoids engaging with internal party processes in any organized way. Our Revolution is following a more long-term and more promising approach: if you want to elect leftists to office across the nation, you have to take part in the internal workings of the mass organization that can make that possible. Strategically and realistically, if you do not engage in the Democratic Party, its apparatus will easily and continually be turned on you. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky: you may not be interested in the Democratic leadership, but they're interested in you. Our Revolution Bernie Sanders launched Our Revolution via a livestream from Burlington, Vermont, a month after the end of the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The nonprofit eventually grew to a handful of state committees, several hundred local affiliates, and over a quarter-million members. It focused on three arenas of struggle: passing transformative legislation such as Medicare for All, supporting progressive candidates up and down the ballot, and gaining a measure of power in the Democratic Party at all levels. After the contentious and sometimes nasty contest for the 2016 nomination had ended, convention delegates established a Unity Reform Commission (URC) to bring more transparency to party affairs and open the primaries to more voters. The URC was born out of a resolution that addressed the [End Page 119] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in October 2019 (Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images) concerns of many Sanders delegates that closed primaries, superdelegates, and party financing, among other issues, had unfairly slanted the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. One of my first duties at Our Revolution, under the leadership of our chair, Larry Cohen, was to facilitate grasstops support—often but not solely consisting of pro-Sanders organizations—for the reform effort to codify the URC recommendations into party rules. After a nearly two-year-long internal campaign led by Sanders supporters, the DNC voted to retain superdelegates but only allow them to vote if the nomination battle goes beyond the first ballot. In addition, state parties were encouraged to open their primaries to independents, and fiduciary oversight was increased. Beyond reforming the national party, Our Revolution began to compete for state and local party offices. Jane Kleeb, an Our Revolution board member, was one of the most successful cases. Raised a Republican, she began voting Democratic in the 1990s but became a dedicated environmentalist during the George W. Bush administration. This decade, she joined the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline that threatened the water table in her home state of Nebraska. Kleeb was impressed by Sanders's strong backing of this movement effort by green and Native American activists against corporate power. In the spring of 2016, Kleeb helped him win the state's caucuses by nearly fifteen points and then got elected chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. [End Page 120] In December 2016, members of Our Revolution began a series of similar campaigns to take power in the infrastructure of local Democratic parties. The effort in New York state was one of the most extensive. After the 2016 convention, a group of Sanders delegates decided to form the New York Progressive Action Network (NYPAN). One of their primary goals was to reform the state's voter registration law that forced residents who had been independents to switch their registration half a year in advance to vote in the Democratic primary. Under pressure from NYPAN and other progressive groups...

Witnessing Oka Apesvchi / Protecting the Water

Witnessing Oka Apesvchi / Protecting the Water1 Bethany Hughes (bio) Oceti Sakowin Land In 2016, water protectors joined together near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to protest the installation of an oil pipeline on tribal homelands. The Sioux, known in their own language as Oceti Sakowin, led what became an international protest movement combining Native American rights and environmental activism. #NoDAPL and "Water Is Life" became hashtags and rallying cries for Indigenous-led protests against resource extraction, environmental racism, and disregard for Indigenous sovereignty. A historic gathering of tribes, nations, and peoples, the water protectors at Standing Rock awakened the United States to ongoing maltreatment and injustice within Native American communities and on Native American lands. Successful in bringing together a multitude of supporters but ultimately unable to stop the laying of underground pipe carrying crude oil from the Bakkan/Three Forks area to its destination in Illinois, these protectors created a movement. Art, performance, music, and story shaped the movement and the ways in which larger non-Native and non-activist communities encountered the #NoDAPL cause. Folksinger Raye Zaragoza (multiracial, Pima) contributed to the protest movement through her song, "In the River." Reminiscent of folk protest songs from the twentieth century, Zaragoza forwards an Indigenous understanding of kinship relations among people and water. She calls on her listeners to recognize their relations in the water itself, singing "[i]n the river are our sisters and our brothers." She calls out the violent suppression of water protectors and pleads for humanity to not "poison our future away." Video: https://youtu.be/I4eosRdP5gQ (courtesy of Raye Zaragoza) [End Page E-1] Three months after the release of her protest song, Zaragoza again performed "In the River" while at the water protector camps near Standing Rock. The Facebook live stream of her acoustic performance in –20°F weather calls again to listeners to locate the stakes of protecting water and the specific location under threat. Filmed with the camp as backdrop, the distance between the live-stream viewer and her live performance reminds viewers of their own distance from Standing Rock, even as it challenges them to take up the cause of their relative, the water. We are separated from Zaragoza by distance and time. However, we are all still in relation to the water that sustains us and requires our care. The multiple flags blowing in the wind behind her live performance remind viewers of the multinational and multi-tribal nature of this fight. At least 280 separate Indigenous tribes supported the water protectors, displaying their flags at the camps as markers of solidarity and scale. The protection of water is not simply a Standing Rock Sioux issue, but a human issue, and it requires us, as Zaragoza's live stream invites us to remember, to come together and care for both our present and future. Video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1374329889304383 (courtesy of Raye Zaragoza) Inuit and Innu Land Only a month after Zaragoza posted her music video on YouTube, farther north and east another Indigenous nation protested the poisoning of their water relative. Inuit and Innu governments in Labrador, Canada, objected to Nalcor Energy, a Crown (government-owned) corporation, building a hydroelectric dam in their territory. Nalcor did not plan to clear the land to be flooded of vegetation and other organic materials. As the organic material decayed in the flooded land, it would create methylmercury, a central-nervous-system toxin, which would negatively impact the water quality of communities downstream of the dam. Methylmercury is a neurotoxin that impairs enzymes, cell-membrane functions, motor functions, vision, and has fatal effects on the brain development of fetuses.2 It accrues as it moves up the food chain, causing larger animals like humans increased exposure and damage. As the Indigenous governments worked with scientists from Harvard to create an environmental-impact study that adequately addressed the downstream impact of the dam's creation, protestors actively shut down the dam's construction site. Thirteen-year-old Allyson Gear joined these protestors at a blockade in October 2016 and performed a drum dance. Captured on video and later in a prize-winning photograph by Ossie Michelin, the...

A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost by Frye Gaillard

Reviewed by: A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost by Frye Gaillard David E. Alsobrook A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost. By Frye Gaillard. Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 2018. 700 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-5883-8344-0. Baby Boomers’ parents always remembered precisely where they were on December 7, 1941, when radio broadcasts announced the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Boomers experienced their own “Day of Infamy” moment twenty-two years later, on November 22, 1963, with Walter Cronkite’s sorrowful CBS news flash: “President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time” (xiv). Since I was in school, I missed Cronkite’s live report. I was a seventeen-year-old senior at W. P. Davidson High School in West Mobile. After the vice-principal broke the tragic news over the intercom in our English class, several students began sobbing loudly, and a fist fight erupted between two of my fellow seniors who held widely divergent views about the slain president. Such aberrant behavior normally would have earned immediate suspensions for the combatants, but not on that day. I seriously doubt that our fiery, red-headed English teacher, Helen Robbins, ever reported the incident. She was devastated by the heartbreak, anger, and sense of irreparable loss that engulfed us. For her students, however, this violent altercation forever haunted and delineated our memories of the day that John F. Kennedy died, along with our adolescent naivete and innocence. For anyone who lived during the Sixties, Frye Gaillard’s A Hard Rain will evoke many visceral, emotional memories like those of that horrific day in late November 1963. “I hope to offer a sense of how it felt” (xi), the author writes about the decade early in his narrative. In this evocative, ambitious book, he clearly accomplishes this goal. A Hard Rain is a brilliant, definitive work in its breadth and depth alone and will attract a diverse universe of readers. Although this book lacks standard footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography, Gaillard’s “Notes and Acknowledgments” incisively reveal how he utilized primary and secondary sources. Stylistically, A Hard Rain’s crystalline prose is as invigorating as a hike in the cool, clean air of Marin County’s Muir Woods in the early autumn. Moreover, Gaillard’s felicitous synthesis [End Page 85] of previous scholarship, trenchant historical context, and his own poignant recollections combine to produce a book that assuredly will stand the test of time. Discerning readers may question whether A Hard Rain is a memoir, narrative history, or a journalistic account of this tumultuous decade, or a creative blend of all three genres. Perhaps anticipating this debate, Gaillard asserts: I have set out to capture in these pages—for those who lived it and wish to remember, and for those who didn’t but still want to know—the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives … For me this is history of a personal kind, the story of a decade in which I came of age, and in which my professional aspirations took shape … I knew as a journalist beginning my career in [1968] I wanted to write about these things, and that the line between history and journalism was thin (xi). Regardless of which genre seems most applicable, A Hard Rain is a panoramic, encyclopedic elegy of the Sixties—the Civil Rights struggle; the Vietnam War; the rise of movements for the rights of women, Native Americans, Latinos, and gays; the Pill and the sexual revolution; the counterculture; the first astronaut on the moon; and the generational schism that shattered and traumatized virtually every American family. The frenetic pace of the saga that unfolds in this book is reminiscent of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Billy Joel’s pulsating 1989 rock ballad. The Sixties, of course, featured its own musical accompaniment— an amalgamation of the blues, jazz, country, folk, and rock and a soaring constellation of artists—Elvis...

Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel

Reviewed by: Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel Daniel Mandell Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896. By Charles Postel. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Pp. [x], 390. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-7963-6.) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 examines the origins, leadership, policies, and evolution of three huge organizations—the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor—that emerged after the Civil War and became prominent national organizations pushing deep egalitarian reforms. Unfortunately, as Charles Postel shows, when these organizations each launched a southern strategy to gain national strength, they and their egalitarian ideals foundered on the rocks of racism and Redemption. Postel begins with the Grange, organized in December 1867 to advocate for farmers' rights against corporate interests. Although it embraced sexual equality, when the organization emphasized politics, women found themselves relegated to kitchens. More significant, one of the Grange founders, Oliver Kelley, sought sectional reconciliation, which meant "white solidarity between the northern farmer and the southern planter, and silence on the question of equality for African Americans" (p. 21). By the mid-1870s, Grange groups in the South were known for Ku Klux Klan activities and helped Democratic "redeemers" impose white rule, and those in the North built anticorporate coalitions with racist Democrats. Equality then delves into the WCTU, organized in 1873 and for decades the country's largest and most powerful women's organization. The WCTU [End Page 925] connected prohibition to sexual equality in the family, community, and workplace, with a liberal wing (led by Frances Willard) advocating woman suffrage. The WCTU similarly pursued white nationalist reconciliation, as Willard traveled to the South and returned to launch a national party that would "weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family" (p. 138). The WCTU incorporated racialist ideas in calls to limit the political rights of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. Postel then examines how the Knights of Labor became the first significant national labor organization after Terence V. Powderly became its head in 1879. It enlisted all laborers regardless of trade, skill, sex, or race (with the glaring exception of the Chinese). But in 1885, Powderly went south, like Kelley and Willard, and endorsed racial separation. Black laborers in the South still joined in large numbers as Knights leadership continued to push for equal wages and conditions, but that egalitarian element was shattered when white Louisianans joined to massacre striking cane workers in 1887. Equality ends by examining how, despite these organizations and the egalitarian writings by Henry George and Edward Bellamy, the United States descended into the Gilded Age and violent apartheid in the late 1880s. The Supreme Court overrode the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect economic and racial hierarchies; the WCTU defended lynch mobs as defenders of white women; and the Knights through Powderly applauded the explicitly "whites only" Farmers' Alliance. These organizations, in combination with other groups, formed the People's Party in 1892, which marked the crest of the post–Civil War egalitarian wave but ultimately failed as racism created fatal fissures. An epilogue brings readers to the present, noting how labor unions played a critical role in forging a more equal nation during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but were dismantled by corporations and their political allies in the 1980s. Postel's view of late-nineteenth-century America spotlights how the efforts of reformers to counter the growing power of wealthy corporations and "bosses" were undermined by the embrace of racism. He emphasizes the role of the South in this process, as each organization went off the rails when their leadership forged alliances with white elites in the region. While readers might want to know more about the nation's racist soil that seemed so receptive to those southern seeds, Postel's deep dig into the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor provides useful lessons about reform efforts during that period as well as about the persistent fissures in the long effort to build "a just and equal society" (p. 318). Daniel Mandell Truman State University Copyright © 2020 Southern...