States History Research Articles

Content Analysis of Textbooks via Natural Language Processing

Purpose: Advanced methods from the field of data science have the potential to shed fresh light on basic concerns in the field of educational research. Natural language processing tools, such as lexicons, word embeddings, and topic models, are used in 15 United States history textbooks that were extensively used in Texas between the years 2015 and 2017. Material and Methods: This study aims to analyze these textbooks for their portrayal of historically oppressed populations. Latinx individuals are rarely mentioned, but renowned white men are almost always mentioned. People of African descent are characterized as behaving in ways that imply helplessness and lack of control, according to lexical methods. Women are most often addressed in the contexts of the home and the workplace, according to the word embeddings. Issues of a political rather than a social nature are highlighted by subject modeling. Findings: We also found that textbooks with a smaller representation of women and people of African heritage are more often purchased by conservative nations. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Our computational toolkit has a rich history of textbook analysis and has recently been distributed as part of our efforts to support new fields of study.

Pengaruh Revolusi Amerika Terhadap Pembentukan Identitas Nasional di Amerika Serikat

The American Revolution (1775-1783) was a pivotal event in United States history that ended British colonial rule and initiated the formation of a strong national identity for the new nation. This research aims to explore how the American Revolution contributed to the formation of national identity in the United States. Through historical and contextual analysis, the study identifies key factors such as the influence of Enlightenment ideas, the role of revolutionary figures, and the development of political and cultural institutions that became the foundation of national identity. The study also examines the social and political impacts of the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the United States Constitution, which served as the legal basis and symbol of national unity. The findings show that the American Revolution not only achieved political independence but also inspired values of freedom, egalitarianism, and democracy, which are central to the national identity of the United States. This research provides insights into the historical process of national identity formation and its relevance to contemporary national dynamics.

Power to the People

In the fall of 2022, two professors from two different academic disciplines launched an interdisciplinary undergraduate course named Power to the People: Social Movements in United States History (Power to the People henceforth) at a small private religiously affiliated liberal arts college in the southern United States. The goal of the course was to provide students with a comprehensive background of historical social movements and the strategies and tactics used by the people to make change. In an era and climate where critical race theory, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Two Spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) identities, citizenship status, and other social identities and issues have become political flashpoints, the faculty developers knew this course could incite controversy, yet they also believed it could welcome critical dialogue needed by students preparing to enter careers a society plagued by binaries and divisiveness. Furthermore, the students in these two disciplines expressed interest in this subject matter as it related to their professional pursuits. This article explores a rationale for this course, the experience of teaching an interdisciplinary, team-taught course, the design of the course, pedagogical strategies employed, and it concludes with reflections on challenges and successes from the first year of teaching this course. This article seeks to provide educators with information and ideas for how to broach difficult topics in the college classroom with a collaborative, interdisciplinary course.

Migrant selection and sorting during the Great American Drought

America’s worst drought spanned the 1930s, coinciding with the most extensive environmental migration in United States history. Nearly 100 years later, we know little about who moved and who stayed. This paper studies heterogeneity in migration from drought by relating migration decisions recorded in the 1940 census to county drought conditions. Drought increased migration primarily for individuals with a 12th-grade education or higher. Drought migrants, both women and men, left rural and urban locations and most often relocated to rural destinations. These findings highlight the importance of individual-level characteristics for adaptation to climate shocks, challenge the perception that rural-to-urban is the dominant environmental migrant channel, and document the central importance of drought for internal migration during the 1930s.

Wikipedia’s Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world’s largest encyclopedia

ABSTRACT This article details settler colonial erasure of Native American and Indigenous histories, knowledges, and philosophies on Wikipedia. I show that long-time Wikipedia editors follow the settler colonial logic of elimination to omit Native histories from Wikipedia’s American history pages; block Native and allied editors from adding scholarship that centers Native experience; and ban Native and allied editors from the website so that settlers can lay claim to digital space. To do so, I concentrate on Wikipedia’s United States and American history pages, and I detail editor discussions regarding Native histories on Wikipedia’s talk pages, noticeboards, and off-Wikipedia message boards where editors congregate. I supplement this information with interviews of Wikipedia editors engaged in editing these topics. I argue that digital erasure on Wikipedia is done in the service of claiming digital space, much like settler erasure in physical space is done to claim land. I ultimately provide suggestions for the Wikimedia foundation to combat settler colonial erasure on Wikipedia. This study contributes to recent work in the digital humanities that clarifies historical manipulation for public consumption by Wikipedia editors, and it provides key insights into the ways that settler colonialism manifests in digital space.

Analyzing social media reactions to the FTX crisis: Unraveling the spillover effect on crypto markets

AbstractIn this study, we analyzed social media conversations during the unfolding of the FTX crisis, the biggest cryptocurrency scandal in United States history. Drawing on the accessibility‐diagnosticity framework, we examined the negative spillover effect of the crisis using a natural language processing approach. We specifically assessed whether there was a negative spillover from FTX to other crypto entities with different levels of diagnostic attribute similarity. We collected a large corpus of Twitter conversations related to the FTX collapse in 2022 and used the association rule analysis to determine the association between FTX and other crypto entities. Our analysis revealed that the number of tweets mentioning FTX and other crypto entities changed in line with a series of real‐world events during the FTX crisis. The negative spillover of the FTX crisis occurred primarily during the first 10 days as the FTX scandal unfolded. The results indicated that the FTX crisis spilled over to highly accessible and diagnostic crypto entities, such as Binance, Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrency industry in general. On the other hand, less accessible and less diagnostic crypto entities/currencies like Ethereum and Coinbase did not experience negative spillover from the scandal.

Network, Cryptography, and the Next World to Come: An Everlasting American Techno-millenarianism?

To understand the nexus between networked cryptography and American religiosity, it is essential to embed this inquiry within the broader context of religious imaginaries associated with communication networks in nineteenth-century North America and their evolution into the spiritual landscape of the twentieth century. Throughout United States history, network imaginaries have exerted a substantial influence, engaging in a continuous dialogue with the evolution of religious thought, attributing eschatological expectations to networks, and ascribing them with a profound sense of ultimate purpose and significance. This investigation finds its ultimate context within the early techno-libertarian communities of 1990s California, pivotal in shaping the design, development, and objectives of networked cryptography online, ultimately giving birth to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain protocol.

How do we know what they know? A case study of classroom-based assessment with multilingual learners

ABSTRACT We employed qualitative research methods to examine student learning in context during a teacher’s unit on 1920s-Great Depression in an 11th grade United States & Virginia History class in a standards-based setting with a high-stakes end-of-course test. We focused on four focal students (all of whom were classified as English learners at some point during their education) and collected extensive data to investigate whether these students learned and how they experienced and described their learning from regular classroom instruction. Despite receiving the same instruction, student learning, as measured by the summative assessment, differed greatly, and it was unclear if students learned the historical content. Teaching to the test (e.g., lecture-focused, didactic, narrow fact-focused instruction) did not yield improved results on the multiple-choice test. These findings problematize the use of multiple-choice testing, emphasize the need for explicit academic vocabulary scaffolds for multilingual learners, and highlight the importance of formative assessment. We argue that the conception of teacher as curricular-instructional gate-keeper needs to be expanded to curricular-instructional-assessment gate-keeper.

The Battle Over Memory: The Contestations of Public and Familial Narratives in Remembering 9/11

On September 11, 2001, the four plane crashes marked the three sites of trauma that, to this day, sit in the heart of United States history. The paper examines the contested and often conflicting public and familial narratives at sites of memory and the recurring themes behind commemoration narratives. Drawing on newsletter articles and seven interviews with members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and The Peace Abbey, the paper concludes that national and public remembrances of 9/11 adopted a top-down approach that has repressed familial remembrances in three main ways: by glorifying the victims, co-opting the version told of 9/11 stories, and erasing distinct voices that did not fit the national narrative. By contrast, familial remembrances of the victims built a bottom-up approach to memorialize 9/11 and its victims that valued the holistic representation of their lost loved ones in remembrances.

Weathered remains: Bioarchaeology, identity, and the landscape

AbstractThis article explores the making of identity for two sets of human skeletal remains, labeled 1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2 Belle Glade. The remains are so poorly preserved that traditional bioarchaeological analysis to explore their perimortem identity is not possible. However, an exploration of their postmortem identity allows us to examine the relationship between landscape, soil, memory, and bodies in bioarchaeology. This article challenges us to consider how bioarchaeology “makes” identity. It does so against the backdrop of one of the worst natural history disasters in United States history, the 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane in Belle Glade, Florida. The loss of some 2,000 to 3,000 individuals in one night, primarily Black migrant farm laborers, is little remembered in national history, but it profoundly shaped the region, and contributes to an ongoing creation of a category of skeletal remains found in the area even today and labeled hurricane victims.

Social Networks and the Bank Run of Silicon Valley Bank

On March 10, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was closed after a 40 billion dollar deposit outflow and a predicted 100 billion dollar deposit outflow. This paper first describes the causes of this incidence chronologically from the aspects of Macroeconomics policies, flaws in portfolios, and a large proportion of uninsured depositors based on a Fed report. Next, based on previous literature and speeches about bank runs in the United States history, the 2008 crisis in particular, this paper connects the panic in social networks to bank runs. Then, based on past experiments, this paper sets up a model to illustrate how social networks influence depositors decisions. Following this model, this paper subsequently presents a recurred model based on the Diamond-Dybvig model. With the finding in the first two models, the paper shows how herd behavior could lead to bank runs through two models. Last, this paper connects the findings in four models back to the case of the bank run of Silicon Valley Bank.

Treating Delinquent and Feebleminded Juveniles at the Beloit Industrial School for Girls in Early Twentieth-Century Kansas.

This study explores the troubling and unintended consequences of public health efforts to address the problem of juvenile delinquency and feeblemindedness. Health care professionals, superintendents, and other authority figures equated undesirable juvenile behaviors such as keeping "bad company" or "falling in with the wrong crowd," truancy, and petty theft with poor breeding, low intelligence, and inheritable criminal tendencies. This article interrogates historical documentation culled from the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS) and focuses on a few specific cases to reveal the ways a patriarchal political and medical state system both protected and alienated young woman accused of a myriad of behavior issues including delinquency, incorrigibility, and feeblemindedness. I highlight the lives of juvenile women sentenced to the Beloit Industrial School for Girls not simply to better understand an isolated period in United States history but also reproduction. The broader implications of the narratives of girls housed at the Beloit Industrial School for Girls throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Kansas reveal troubling and unintended consequences of public health efforts to fix the problems of delinquency, contagion, and the generational inheritance of undesirable characteristics.

Supporting multilingual learners’ reading competence: a multiple case study of teachers’ instruction and student learning and motivation

Supporting students’ reading competence (i.e., their comprehension and vocabulary) is complex, particularly when working with multilingual learners, and involves implementing instructional practices to support their behavioral engagement in reading as well as their reading motivation. The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to examine changes in multilingual learners’ reading comprehension, academic vocabulary, reading engagement, and reading motivation after participating in a 7-week intervention called United States History for Engaged Reading (USHER) and then examine qualitative data to explain why these changes may have occurred. We found changes in the reading comprehension of MLs across all four teachers’ classes, and variable changes in academic vocabulary, reading engagement, and reading motivation. We highlight specific instructional practices that may have led to these changes, including engaging students in discussions during explicit vocabulary instruction, allowing students choice and the opportunity to collaborate, and making the content relevant by relating it to students’ lives, among others.

Wald's leadership: Public health nurses' response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

COVID-19 pandemic brings to light similarities to the 1918 influenza pandemic, one of the deadliest outbreaks in United States history. The work of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service also referred to the public health nurses for that time, was a critical part of the New York City response. This case study examined Lillian Wald's leadership in directing the public health nursing response in New York City during the second wave of the influenza pandemic, from September through December of 1918. A historical social framework was used. Primary sources included the Lillian Wald Papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in New York, Wald's (1934) Windows on Henry Street, medical, public health and nursing documents, journals, and newspaper articles published during the early 20th century. Secondary source material include works by historians Sarah Abrams, Arlene Keeling, Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, Sandra Lewenson, John Barry, and Alfred Crosby. Key findings included developing a community wide strategic plan, using data driven decisions, implementing visiting nursing services, teaching in the home, and maintaining a diverse workforce. Lessons learned can guide leadership in emergency planning, system change, infection control and disease prevention, all familiar practices of public health nursing.

Institutional Historical Acknowledgement: What Does It Hurt to Embrace the Past?

In this commentary, Purdy calls independent schools to grapple with their complicated and full institutional histories. Offering examples of schools and individuals doing this work, Purdy contends that independent schools need histories of diversity, equity, and inclusion that span the entirety of United States history, like those being uncovered by higher education institutions that are delving deeply into the relationship between their institutions and legacies of enslavement. Purdy presents a concise history of what we know now about how independent schools have reflected the racism embedded in United States society, how the civil rights movement pushed independent schools to desegregate and admit more Black students, and how Dr. William Dandridge, the first director of Minority Affairs for the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) in the 1970s, challenged independent school leaders on their thinking about race. This commentary concludes by encouraging independent schools to ask the hard questions, because even with all the progress that has been made to make independent schools more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, Black students continue to shed light on the institutional and interpersonal racism that they contend with today.

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Reviewed by: Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser Lauren Brand (bio) Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. By William S. Kiser. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $24.95.) Could slavery in any form expand into the American West? Was it realistically possible? Did the U.S. government have the right to regulate the expansion of slavery? These are some of the massive questions that dominated the political discourse of the antebellum United States. William S. Kiser’s Borderlands of Slavery explores how the reality of Native captivity and debt peonage in New Mexico played a crucial role in the answers that both northern and southern politicians offered to these questions. New Mexico not only shaped national conversations about slavery’s expansion in the antebellum era, but also influenced national policy makers’ decisions regarding the definition of unfree labor during the Reconstruction era. Kiser argues that the existence of a different form of slavery in New [End Page 248] Mexico “forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South” and that this realization “informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country” (21). The prologue provides a concise overview of the history of New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the territory’s integration into the United States in the mid-nineteenth century in order to quickly familiarize readers with this complex period. Indeed, scholars from many subfields of nineteenth-century United States history will find much of interest in this short book. For example, historians studying the various forms of enslavement endured or practiced by the Indigenous peoples of North America (or “the other slavery,” as Andrés Reséndez describes it)1 will appreciate Kiser’s description of the widespread prevalence of Native captivity in New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the Civil War. Additionally, historians of the antebellum U.S. South will be interested in Kiser’s dissection of how southern politicians used New Mexico and the various forms of captivity there as a foil to compare to the southern system of enslavement. Although debt peonage was not a racially based system of enslavement, it was a structure that “nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage” (16), leading many southern congressmen to view New Mexico as a valid point of comparison to demonstrate the compatibility of slavery with peonage in the American West. Kiser shows throughout that such comparisons were not unwarranted. For example, he explores comparisons between the ways captive women in the Southwest were described as “likely girl[s]” and valued for their attractiveness and sexual availability in the same way that African American women were in the South (61). However, despite some similarities that prompted these comparisons, Kiser notes that, in the end, there remained “widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage . . . among federal lawmakers” (52). State and local historians will also appreciate Kiser’s attention to the perspectives of people actually living in New Mexico during this period. Kiser explains how residents of New Mexico themselves thought about these issues. For example, he notes that local people were somewhat ambivalent about chattel slavery and the comparison to the U.S. South but remained just as concerned about retaining their rights to captives and peons as they always had. Kiser also explores how, after 1846, local New Mexico law-makers purposely kept quiet about the issue of debt peonage, because they often personally benefited from it. Thus Kiser notes how challenging it can [End Page 249] be for historians to study the ways captivity and debt peonage impacted the lives of people in New Mexico. The sources have to be carefully mined to reveal what was really going on behind the surface. Kiser is very open about these challenges and how he reads the available sources. As time passed and sectionalist sentiment increased in both the United...

Exploring the Use of Digitally Archived Folk Music to Teach Southern United States History

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social studies U.S. history curriculum. The vast offerings of folk songs can allow students to listen, read, and analyze the lyrics to gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. South, shed the hillbilly stereotype that Southerners have been historically subjected to, understand why and how Southerners spoke out against injustices through song, and analyze the lyrics that portray the history of southern folklife. Based on the National Council for the Social Studies’ Themes of Social Studies and integrating folk songs from such online sites as the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute, curriculum implications are presented for students to reflect on the Southerners’ settings, perspectives of events and issues, and methods of protest. Modern technology’s preservation of folk songs that would otherwise be absent from history not only has the power to educate, but also to keep southern folk music alive.

The Obama effect? Race, first-time voting, and future participation

AbstractDid the 2008 United States presidential election produce stronger future mobilization for Blacks than non-Blacks? First-time voting influences long-term political behavior, but do minority voters see the most powerful effects when the formative election is tied to their group's political empowerment? I test this hypothesis in the context of the election of the first Black president in United States history, using voting eligibility discontinuities to identify the effect of voting in 2008 on future voting for Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Voting in 2008 caused a greater increase in the likelihood of voting in 2010 for Blacks than for other new voters, but there is no evidence of a sustained mobilizing advantage in subsequent elections. Furthermore, 2008 was not a unique formative voting experience for new Black voters, but rather produced similar effects on future voting as other presidential elections. These results signal that group political empowerment does not drive habitual voting.

Matthew E. Stanley. Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War.

Civil War memory continues to be a burgeoning field in United States history, and in Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans and the Meaning of the Civil War, Matthew E. Stanley approaches this topic from an original perspective. Spanning the Reconstruction era through the first decades of the twentieth century, the book traces the ways in which leaders of the U.S. labor movement recruited Civil War veterans by drawing on the language and imagery of enslavement, hoping to turn workers and farmers into warriors against industrial capitalism. Synthesizing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, this monograph offers a compendium of evidence that takes readers through the National Labor Union, the Colored National Labor Union, the Readjusters, Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, various socialist parties, the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and more. Throughout, Stanley proves the resilience of “antislavery vernacular” (a phrase that appears regularly across chapters), a rhetoric that originated with discontented antebellum workers in the North. White men and Black men are the central actors, and while Stanley pays fairly consistent attention to the presence of white women, they fall away toward the end, when he draws conclusions about “workingmen” (226). The place of Civil War memory in Black women’s own labor activism awaits further scholarship.

Loyalty to Empire

Loyalty to Empire Moon-Ho Jung (bio) In May 2003, shortly after George W. Bush launched the US invasion of Iraq, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn held a public conversation at the Riverside Church in Harlem, the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s remarkable speech against the Vietnam War back in April 1967. Zinn seemed to assume that he and Roy shared similar worldviews, on the left and critical of America's latest war. At one point, Zinn attempted to defend US nationalism by pointing out its different iterations. "And when people–and I have been accused of being anti-American, and I respond to that, you know, by saying, 'You know, we must disagree about what America is,'" Zinn said, to much applause. "America is not Bush. . . . America is not the government." After commenting on the Declaration of Independence and "the basic principles of democracy," he inferred a political and intellectual camaraderie. "So, I know–I know, Arundhati," Zinn declared, "that you are pro-Indian in the best sense, and you are pro-American in the best sense. Yes."1 Roy let out a kind laugh, but she refused to play along. "Well, I try not to think in these categories, actually, you know?" she replied. "I'm actually not a nationalist of any kind. You know, I believe that we–I think it's very important to stop . . . our minds coming up short against these artificial boundaries. And I think nationalism really does lie at the root of a lot of the troubles of this century and the last one. And . . . we really need to question that, because . . ." Zinn interjected at that point to suggest and insist that they shared a critique of US wars. If afforded a chance to elaborate, Roy might have said what she said in a speech the next night. "Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state," she said. "So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire?"2 The brief exchange might have appeared jovial and inconsequential, but the difference between Zinn and Roy represented a huge gulf in how we might [End Page 1] approach the United States and US history. Zinn hoped to direct America toward its progressive traditions and inclusive ends; Roy saw no hope in America because it was an empire terrorizing the world. For Zinn, the American nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence, held a universal promise that wayward leaders like Bush endangered. It may be tempting to believe in Zinn's vision of a better America, to imagine working toward a more perfect union and a more inclusive past, but it is based on a fatally flawed premise: that it is possible to disaggregate the American nation from the US empire. That nationalist impulse has made it perhaps easier to insert Asian American history into dominant narratives of US history, but it has rested on erasing and thereby fortifying the colonial roots of US nationalism. In the process, our field has largely reproduced nationalist histories, hoping against hope that such accounts will make Asians finally into full-fledged Americans. SEARCHING FOR A TEXTBOOK When I prepare for a course, I think long and hard about which books to assign because I know that choosing the right books can transform how students see and engage the world. For me, reading Vincent Harding's There Is a River (1981) as a fledgling undergraduate decades ago awakened me to new possibilities. Harding, who had drafted King's antiwar speech, made studying the past exciting and relevant and motivated me to approach US history critically. He laid out the intellectual and political stakes of Black history, in a kind of urgent prose that I had not encountered in a history course.3 Reading Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore (1989) in my very first Asian American Studies course, taught by Gary Y. Okihiro in the fall of 1990, likewise left a deep impression. For the very first time in an academic setting, I read about people whose backgrounds resonated with...