States History Research Articles

Violent Divisions and New Directions

Violent Divisions and New Directions Joshua Canale (bio) Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, eds., The American Revolution Reborn Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 2016. 411 pp. Figures, tables, notes, and index. $55.00. Holger Hoock. Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth. New York: Crown, 2017. xiv + 559 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. While the violent events of March 5, 1770 on the streets of Boston are well known to every American, as Holger Hoock notes, for many this episode is the extent of the Revolution's chaotic nature. Less etched into the annals of history are stories such as the exploits of the intrusive committees of safety as they investigated loyalty or the destruction of towns like Norfolk. Vanished are the experiences of individuals like wagoner John Becker who, rather than glorify the era, recalled years later how he hoped to avoid the turmoil of war and disdained the culture of suspicion the conflict fostered. However, violent stories of a divisive civil war are not the only new direction scholars of the American Revolution are forging. Seeking to reinvigorate the field, both Hoock's Scars of Independence and Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman's edited collection, The American Revolution Reborn, challenge historians to re-conceptualize this defining period of United States history. Contributors to the edited volume and Hoock all hope to avoid a teleological approach. Instead, they encourage researchers and readers alike to focus on the lived experience of Americans during a period of violence and upheaval. Both works challenge the old paradigms that past scholars have utilized to illuminate the American Revolution's origins and significance. Arguing that historians must abandon the strict traditional interpretations, such as the neo-Whig, neo-progressive, and neo-imperial schools of thought, which obscure more than they reveal, Spero reminds scholars that we should not feel bound to an "obligation to clarify the past" (Spero and Zuckerman, p. 4). Complicating the past is important, too. Similar to other scholars' approach in recent years, the contributors to The American Revolution Reborn and Hoock have grown frustrated with an insistence of the importance of ideology. Rather than stress ideology and synthesis, The American Revolution Reborn encourages [End Page 183] historians to "embrace the diversity of experience[s]," while Hoock reminds us that the Revolution was indeed a violent civil war (Spero and Zuckerman, p. 4). In fact, both works refrain from glorifying the narrative. Resurrecting and adapting John Shy's assertion in A People Numerous and Armed (rev. ed., 2004), Zuckerman rejects the notion that a majority of Americans supported independence during the war years. Far from a unifying force, the Revolution was a "nest of civil wars" fought for a variety of reasons (p. 313). Rather than a triumphal tale, the Revolution is a story of a vocal, and even hostile, minority willing to engage in coercive means to achieve their goals. One of the major strengths of these works is the authors' insistence that selective memory of the American Revolution has obscured our understanding of the period. Soon after the conflict concluded Americans began downplaying its divisive and brutal side. By doing so, they popularized a narrative of unity and American exceptionalism that has continued to inform our consciousness. Hoock and the contributors to The American Revolution Reborn are in dialogue with a rising tide of historians who foreground disunity and conflict. While these historians might differ in the degree of severity or the Revolution's legacy, Michael A. McDonnell's The Politics of War (2007), T. H. Breen's American Insurgents, American Patriots (2010), Charles Patrick Neimeyer's America Goes to War (1996), and Alan Taylor's American Revolutions (2016) each exposed a chaotic moment of uncertainty and disunity. Similarly, in American Leviathan (2007), Patrick Griffin illuminated the brutal experience on the frontier. Others such as Sarah Purcell, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Carol Berkin have uncovered the difficulties Americans faced when forging an identity in the new nation. In Purcell's Sealed with Blood (2002), this effort sometimes included expunging the violence and discord while in This Violent Empire (2010), Smith-Rosenberg contended that the artificial creation and exclusion of 'the Other' fostered an American identity. Berkin...

The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History by James W. Ely Jr.

Reviewed by: The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History by James W. Ely Jr. Joseph Mello The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History. By James W. Ely Jr. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. Pp. viii, 376. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-2307-5.) "Constitutional Questions are not decided in a vacuum" (p. 2). Perhaps no provision more clearly illustrates this point than does the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution (art. 1, §10). This oft-overlooked clause is rarely litigated today, but it was once regarded as one of the most important provisions in the Constitution. In his newest book, The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History, James W. Ely Jr. explores how this clause ebbed and flowed with the times, falling in and out of fashion at various points in United States history. While Ely spends a considerable amount of time discussing the legal reasoning jurists used to interpret the contract clause, he is also careful to document how larger social and economic forces shaped the way it was interpreted, ultimately leading to its downfall. The book is organized chronologically. Ely begins by discussing how the contract clause was included in the Constitution largely in response to debt-relief measures taken by states in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Some feared that such measures would inject uncertainty into the economy and discourage future investments. Ely points out that many of the U.S. Supreme Court's earliest cases pertained to the contract clause, a testament to its importance at the time. Perhaps the most famous of these cases was Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), in which the Court ruled that a "corporate charter was a constitutionally protected contract" that the state could not alter ex post facto (p. 36). While many have seen the Dartmouth College decision as a barrier to government regulation of business, Ely argues [End Page 429] convincingly that states could and often did easily circumvent the decision by including clauses in their corporate charters that preserved their right to alter these agreements in the future. Ironically, the contract clause began its decline in importance during the Gilded Age, an era most noted for its celebration of liberal economic principles. At the time, many Progressive reformers began to argue that the contract clause prevented states from breaking up monopolies and placing much-needed regulations on businesses. They successfully used the police powers doctrine to further limit the scope of Dartmouth College, arguing that states could not barter away their ability to protect the health and welfare of their citizens in perpetuity. Ultimately, corporations responded by moving away from making contract clause arguments, instead reaching for the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to protect their economic rights. The contract clause was undermined further during the New Deal era. With its decision in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), the Supreme Court eviscerated the contract clause, arguing that it should not be read literally and that states could violate the right of contract if it was in their economic interest to do so. Many have argued that this case effectively wrote the contract clause out of the Constitution, but Ely argues otherwise. He finds that many state courts have chosen to view their own state constitutions as more protective of contract rights than the U.S. Constitution and sees continuing contract clause debates in current budgetary disputes between cash-strapped state governments and public-sector employee pension holders. There is much to like about this book. Ely offers a necessary update to the existing literature on the contract clause, which has not received significant scholarly attention since Benjamin Fletcher Wright's The Contract Clause of the Constitution (Cambridge, Mass., 1938). The big question hanging over this book, however, is why write about a clause that has such limited significance to Supreme Court jurisprudence today? To his credit, Ely takes on this question directly, arguing that the story of the contract clause provides a window into Americans' shifting concerns and assumptions and that its demise has been exaggerated. Ultimately, I was intrigued by his argument but only partially convinced of the contract clause's significance. Ely avoids taking a normative stance on the...

“She is the beauty of this place”: Elizabeth Velora Elwell and the Role of Prisoner Participation and Deviance at Eastern State Penitentiary

Elizabeth Elwell represented nineteenth-century reformers’ worst fears: a woman fallen from grace who maintained an exceptional understanding of social norms and an ability to manipulate those norms to meet her needs. While imprisoned at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Elwell documented the extensive web of relationships she managed within the prison. Incarcerated during a transformative period in United States history—the Civil War—Elwell maintained a romantic relationship with a black inmate, in direct opposition to the racial prejudices of the era. Elwell’s experience demonstrates that, though often abused and neglected, women used their lower position in nineteenth-century prisons to undermine the system that sought to control them.

Becoming Hallowed Ground

Becoming Hallowed Ground Edwin A. Martini (bio) Micki McElya. The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 395 pp. Photos, notes, and index. $29.95. On his first Memorial Day as President, Barack Obama sent two wreaths to commemorate Civil War soldiers. The first was delivered to the African American Civil War Memorial, near the U Street Metro stop in the Shaw neighborhood, an overwhelmingly black district in an overwhelmingly black city. The second was sent from the White House across the Potomac River to a very specific area of Arlington National Cemetery, Section 16, specifically set aside for the bodies of Confederate soldiers. In the former case, Obama was the first U.S. President to send a wreath memorializing the sacrifice of black soldiers who fought to end slavery. In the latter case, he continued a century-old tradition, dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, recognizing the sacrifice of white, southern soldiers who fought to preserve it (p. 160). Each case, however, as Micki McElya demonstrates in The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, is the product of long, complicated histories, and a range of battles involving race, gender, nation, and historical memory. Throughout this fascinating book, McElya makes a strong case indeed that the struggle over who lived, worked, and was allowed to be laid to rest in Arlington is a powerful window into nearly the full sweep of United States history, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century on. As she writes in her introduction: Since before its inception as a cemetery during the Civil War, Arlington has been the scene of pitched struggles over the use and shape of the place, struggles that have always been about the larger meanings of freedom, sacrifice, citizenship, honor, state authority, and the nation itself and about which bodies, alive and dead, are most representative, most capable and valuable, and most difficult to lose (p. 10). These battles were consistently defined by several themes, including the dominant cultural narrative of sectional reconciliation after the Civil War, the establishment and maintenance of a white, patriarchal, and military definition [End Page 497] of national service and sacrifice, and a powerful shift from the bodies of the dead defining the landscape to the landscape itself defining the bodies. McElya traces these struggles over seven chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The chapters proceed largely by chronology, weaving in thematic elements throughout. McElya makes use of a rich array of sources, including archival materials from several relevant collections in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., a number of historical periodicals, and other, more contemporary cultural texts. The entire project is also very well grounded in the secondary literature on history, memory, and the negotiation of meaning over memorials and other contested landscapes. The first three chapters explore Arlington's long journey to becoming hallowed ground, beginning with land taken from "several Algonquian-speaking Indian communities" and colonized by white settlers to the large plantation bought and maintained by John Custis, stepson to George Washington and father-in-law to Robert E. Lee; from a union-occupied fortress during the Civil War to Freedman's Village; and, finally, from one of a network of national cemeteries to the national cemetery (p. 14). McElya begins her narrative with a long look at the early history of Arlington through the lens of a few key, but lesser-known figures. She takes a number of twists and turns in getting readers there, but ultimately it is worth the wait. McElya makes a compelling case that while Arlington House was made both famous and infamous by memorializing Robert E. Lee (who never actually owned the plantation), it is Lee's wife, Mary, who is a far more intriguing and complicated figure in the struggle over the meaning of the house and its place in Arlington. In tracing Mary Lee's efforts to maintain and recover the homestead during and after the Civil War, McElya effectively deals with Lee's gendered connections to the landscape without glossing over the clear role of racialized hierarchies in Lee's assertions of her rights to Arlington. An angry letter from Lee, written...

Democratic Representation in State Content Standards: Leaving Out Students of Color

Using Critical Race Theory, this paper explores existing narratives within state social studies content standards – specifically secondary United States history and government/civics courses. This paper analyzes how the issue of gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, and modern voter suppression is addressed in content standards from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This paper also seeks to understand how academic content standards address the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016)

In 2016, Beyonce published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyonce locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

Chemically dispersed oil is cytotoxic and genotoxic to sperm whale skin cells

Two major oil crises in United States history, the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, drew attention to the need for toxicological experiments on oil and chemically dispersed oil. We are still learning the effects these spills had on wildlife. However, little data is known about the toxicity of these substances in marine mammals. The objective of this study is to determine the toxicity of Alaskan oil, as well as chemically dispersed oil. Oil experiments were performed using the water accommodated fraction of Alaskan oil (WAF) and the chemically enhanced water accommodated fraction of Alaskan oil (CEWAF). The Alaskan WAF is not cytotoxic to sperm whale skin cells though it did induce chromosome damage; S9-mediated metabolism did not affect the cytotoxicity of WAF but did increase the levels of chromosome damage. Alaskan CEWAF is more cytotoxic and genotoxic than the WAF; S9 mediated metabolism increased both cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of CEWAF. Analysis of the PAH content of Alaskan WAF and CEWAF revealed a forty-fold increase in the total levels of PAHs in CEWAF compared to WAF. These findings show that chemically dispersed oil leads to higher levels of PAH exposure which are more toxic and likely to lead to longer and more persistent health effects.

多文化社会米国における歴史カリキュラム開発 : 合衆国史ナショナル・スタンダードをめぐる論争を手がかりに

多文化社会米国における歴史カリキュラム開発 : 合衆国史ナショナル・スタンダードをめぐる論争を手がかりに

Literacy in Social Studies: The Influence of Cognitive and Motivational Practices on the Reading Comprehension of English Learners and Non-English Learners

ABSTRACTWe examined the impact of cognitive and motivation practices within a social studies literacy intervention (United States History for Engaged Reading [USHER]) on Grade 6 English learners’ (ELs) and non-ELs’ history reading comprehension, cognitive strategy use, reading self-efficacy, and reading engagement. We used a switching replications research design with 2 groups and 2 instructional sequences (i.e., Sequence A and Sequence B) and collected cognitive and motivational measures from all students before and after each sequence. We used propensity score matching to establish groups with baseline equivalence. Findings indicated that USHER contributed to both ELs’ and non-ELs’ increases in history reading comprehension, cognitive strategy use, and reading engagement in social studies.

歴史教育課程におけるナショナルな時間的認識形成の分析 : 合衆国史『ナショナル・スタンダード』をてがかりとして

歴史教育課程におけるナショナルな時間的認識形成の分析 : 合衆国史『ナショナル・スタンダード』をてがかりとして

Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, Lebensraum, and Manifest Destiny

President Donald Trump's admiration of President Andrew Jackson evokes a discussion of parallels between their ideologies, including a reluctance to repudiate white supremacy and a disregard for the rule of law. These attitudes are reflected both in Jackson's authorship of the Indian Removal Act (1830) and his refusal to acknowledge a judgment by the US Supreme Court in favor of the Cherokee Nation that might have averted the Trail of Tears. Jackson's advocacy of American exceptionalism (“America first” to Trump) also provokes an analysis of what later was cast in popular discourse as Manifest Destiny. United States history--its “race law” in particular--is described here through the admiring eyes of Adolph Hitler, who likened Germany's expansion before and during World War II to United States “westward movement” during the nineteenth century.

Rationalization and Student/School Personhood in U.S. College Admissions: The Rise of Test-optional Policies, 1987 to 2015

This article examines the rise of ‘‘test-optional’’ college admissions policies since the 1990s. I argue that the rationalization of college admissions policies after World War II contributed to the rise of ‘‘meritocratic’’ stratification (in policy) and standardized tests, like the SAT, but it also led to the expansion and legitimation of the roles of student and school personhood in the admissions process. Schools more committed to enlarged conceptions of student personhood are more likely to adopt a test-optional policy, in order to recruit students who fit the distinctive characteristics of their school identity. To test the argument, I use a comprehensive data set of 1,640 colleges and universities in the United States and discrete-time event history models from 1987 to 2015. I also assess alternative arguments that emphasize economic or prestige-driven motives. Liberal arts colleges and schools committed to several dimensions of student personhood are more likely to adopt test-optional policies, net of other factors.

Evaluating the impact of man-made disasters on imperiled species: Piping plovers and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Even in the presence of environmental safeguards, catastrophic accidents related to anthropogenic activities occur that can result in both immediate and chronic impacts on local biota. However, due to the unplanned nature of catastrophes, studies aimed to identify the effects of these accidents on an ecosystem and its inhabitants often have imperfect study designs that are reactive rather than proactive, resulting in methodological and analytical challenges. On 20 April 2010, following an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a well blowout occurred on the seafloor approximately 80km off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. This blowout resulted in the largest marine oil spill in United States history, which impacted critical migratory stopover and overwintering habitat for many seabird and shorebird species, including species of high conservation concern such as the piping plover (Charadrius melodus). Here, we assessed the potential longer-term demographic impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on piping plovers in a capture-mark-recapture framework. We examined whether a series of demographic processes, including probabilities of remaining at a specific wintering site, over-winter and annual apparent survival, winter stopover duration, and abundance varied among oiled and unoiled habitats. We found that the perceived amount of oiling on land, in water, and on individual birds, as well as numerous demographic processes, were spatially or temporally variable. However, we found little support that piping plover demography was negatively influenced by the magnitude of oil observed at an impacted area, or that demographic rates substantially varied between reference and oil impacted areas. Nor did we find that piping plovers that were observed to be oiled had lower survival probabilities following the DWH oil spill relative to non-oiled individuals from the same winter population. Although we did not find that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill substantially influenced piping plovers, our methods provide an analytical framework to more appropriately address both the near or long-term impacts of an anthropogenic disturbance on a species.

The Impossibility of Muslim Citizenship

ABSTRACTIn this article I ask a seemingly simple question—How can a Muslim be a liberal citizen? In order to explore this question I define who and what was indexed by the term “Muslim” at various points in United States history. I argue that the figure of the Muslim has existed as an existential other upon which otherness, violence, and suspicion was written. I ask how the historic construction of Muslim identities fuels contemporary surveillance programs predicated on an intrinsic fear of Muslim bodies. Drawing upon a decade of ethnographic research with Muslim communities across the United States, I examine Countering Violent Extremism programs. I argue that such policing function re-inscribe and normalize White supremacy and Muslim suspicion of, and within, Muslim communities. Finally, I examine the question of citizenship in neoliberal times and ask how we might understand citizenship rights, particularly for Muslim communities, in the contemporary United States.

歴史教育における主題学習の教材構成原理 : プロジェクト社会科『合衆国史コミュニティから社会へ』の分析を通して

歴史教育における主題学習の教材構成原理 : プロジェクト社会科『合衆国史コミュニティから社会へ』の分析を通して

What is the Future of the Survey Course?

I want to kick off this discussion with three quotes and a statistic. The first quote is as follows: “The chief purpose [of historical education] is not to fill [someone's] head with a mass of material which he may perhaps put forward again when a college examiner demands its production.” The second—a line from a front page story in The New York Times—reads, “College freshmen throughout the nation reveal a striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.” And the third: We have descended into what some consider the dark age of declining enrollments, professional unemployment, and a growing rejection of history by many students who seem to agree with Henry Ford that history is “bunk.” If we are going to have any real impact on individuals or society, we must do something besides just cover the material. Finally, the statistic: in eight years alone, the number of students majoring in history dropped 40 percent.

The Two Hundred and Fifty Year Transition: How the American Empire Became Capitalist

AbstractThis paper aims to rethink United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction by examining how capitalism and empire joined together as the logic of expansion increasingly became driven by the logic of capital over approximately two hundred and fifty years. Specifically, it argues that (what became) the United States originated as a ‘society with capitalism’ and became a ‘capitalist society’. This transition was a highly complex and uneven process as a variety of social forms developed and interacted, and in which there was not one road to capitalism, but a variety, depending on the historical circumstance. To accomplish this, first, the article reviews the Marx‐Weber debate to develop a theoretical and methodological approach to the historical sociology of capitalism. The remainder of the paper focuses on narrating an empirical interpretation of the transition to capitalism including the diversity of labor forms capital historically utilized.

#NoDAPL: Social Media, Empowerment, and Civic Participation at Standing Rock

The struggle for environmental and social justice within American Indian communities is one that has been ongoing since the beginning of United States history, but the main catalyst to effect change and to promote and disperse the American Indian narrative has emerged through the power of social media in today's hyperconnected society. This article examines the power of social media to effect change, as well as a hyperconnected society's ability to empower historically disadvantaged groups that have often been misrepresented within traditional media outlets. The historic movement occurring at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the #NoDAPL protests illustrates the capacity of social media to galvanize individuals to become change-makers as well as create a vast support network within a population that might otherwise remain uninformed or unaware of media misrepresentations. The role of libraries as support systems within communities and the responsibility of libraries to provide unbiased and freely available information within a hyperconnected society are also discussed.

Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland by Bridget Ford

Reviewed by: Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland by Bridget Ford Daniel W. Farrell (bio) Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland. By Bridget Ford. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xxiii, 424. $45.00 cloth) Borderland studies shed light onto the complex workings of communities that have often been difficult to define in stark geographical terms. While labels such as North and South have continued to maintain their geopolitical usefulness in interpreting United States history, works like Bridget Ford’s Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland have helped to complicate our understandings of the past, reminding us of how regional allegiances, ideologies, and social relations were often messy affairs at the margins of their societies. Focusing on two sites located on the Ohio River, Cincinnati and Louisville, Ford attempts to reconstruct how these two urban centers, separated by slavery and free labor, came to articulate a unified idea of “a Union without slavery, and without racial separation via colonization” (p. xiii). In an era of salient political strife, Ford argues that the rhetoric of the Union expressed a sincere desire to unite diverse Americans for the good of the nation, and that, ultimately, slavery proved to be the most significant roadblock to this vision. Not limiting herself to sharp definitions of Unionist sentiment, Ford employs numerous cultural sources to tease out how the associative bonds between these two cities were forged in practice, and how the emancipationist narrative of the nation’s future emerged triumphant. This was not, however, an easy process. Antebellum social relations, in both Kentucky and Ohio, continued to relegate African Americans to a subordinate position. Yet the process of urbanization, with its emphasis on immigration and economic diversification, helped to foster political support for emancipation on both sides of the river. Through the work of Salmon Chase, Cincinnatians were [End Page 411] instrumental in helping to establish the Republican Party, while Louisville served as the epicenter of abolitionist activity within the South. Antislavery Kentuckians tested their resolve by forcing a statewide emancipation debate during the 1840s, only to see their position lose within their newly ratified state constitution. Soon afterward, the state’s Methodist community initiated a broad southern movement toward religious separation, one that starkly sided with the proslavery interpretation of biblical scripture. Even with Kentucky seemingly devoted to digging in its heels over the protection of slavery, these emancipationist reversals were undermined by the workings of everyday people. African American agency plays an important part in Ford’s book, as positive gains in their education, religious freedom, and economic opportunity invigorated their own self-generated counter-narratives to the era’s prevalent racism, fostering a highly tenuous, but genuinely more inclusive, atmosphere. Fluid ideas about the Union’s perpetuity bolstered this environment as well, as rhetorical transmissions across the Ohio River were not uncommon. On the eve of the Civil War, stalwart Unionists, such as George Prentice, helped to stave off Kentucky secession by making popular appeals to constitutional Unionism and the legacy of Henry Clay. An urban center such as Louisville, with its more diverse constituency, was more receptive to these messages of moderation, and thus it rejected the proslavery demagoguery of the Deep South. While continuously contested within Kentucky, these ideas provided the ideological inroads necessary to encourage black enlistment during the war, as well as to recognize the emancipationist interpretation of reunion. Consequently, as Ford argues, Kentucky faced a difficult and divisive road toward Unionism, but due to its proximity and association with Cincinnati, overcame its sectional loyalties in favor of a national one. In our current political climate, characterized by deeply divisive rhetoric, it is important to remember that Americans in the past have faced worse. In the transregional case of the Ohio River Valley, Americans of seemingly different value systems crossed the aisle to [End Page 412] articulate a unified vision of the future. It may not have immediately been a perfect one, but it had lasting, positive consequences. Daniel W. Farrell DANIEL W. FARRELL is a doctoral candidate at Kent State University. He is currently working on...

Goodnight Moon; or, Why We Don’t Know Much about History

Goodnight Moon; or, Why We Don’t Know Much about History Anne Hyde (bio) James West Davidson. A Little History of the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. xiv + 325 pp. Illustrations, maps, and index. $25.00. Lawrence R. Samuel. Remembering America: How We Have Told Our Past. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 195 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, eds. Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xii + 335 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Why is there so much drama around U.S. history textbooks? Honestly, with the exception of people reading a review like this, everyone hates them—students, teachers, and taxpayers. Their weight and impenetrable text guarantee that they will remain unread. Even so, we spend enormous cultural energy defending or attacking them. Teachers, parents, educational and cultural critics on all sides of the political spectrum desperately want students of all ages to know something about the national past and to care about it. What this something might be is, of course, really the source of the drama. What, how, and from whom students should learn history are deeply political questions, tied to the task of nation building. In order to avoid drama and politics, textbooks at all levels have moved in two different directions. Some, in order to be inclusive, have added all the groups, stories, and details left out of the “we the people” narrative, but that has made the texts encyclopedic, expensive, and even harder to read. Others take an opposite approach, creating “brief editions” so spare and so short that all the human actors are gone. Things just happen, but quickly and without suspense or detail. And the result has been that students report they hate history, while tests demonstrate, over and over again, that they don’t know much. Textbooks play a role in history education, but so do teachers, students, and communities, making the problem far more complicated. [End Page 1] Historians Roy Rosensweig and David Thelen covered much of this terrain nearly two decades ago. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life they conducted a large survey of U.S residents and concluded that citizens do care deeply about history. However, Americans view their own personal, family, and local histories as far more accurate and important than the national story, in whatever form it is taught. More worrisome, when the “official” U.S. story of progress and uplift collided with family histories and personal experiences of struggle and isolation, such disjunctures made people distrustful and even bitter toward history classrooms, teachers, and textbooks.1 This raises a bigger, maybe more important set of questions. What is history’s job—to tell a hopeful story of nationhood that makes some version of “us” feel good about the past or to tell a darker, more critical version to trouble another version of “us”? Can a narrative, tasked with bringing a modern nation together, even exist in a postmodern, more globally focused moment? The three books reviewed here set out the challenges and consider some answers. James West Davidson, in his A Little History of the United States, promises to tell a more inclusive history, but also to keep it short and to maintain a strong narrative line about the “us” that makes U.S. history. The book has a warm, inviting tone, although Davidson admits a few historical episodes are “sad” from the beginning—such as violence, epidemic disease, and the dispossession of indigenous people. There is inequality, there are poor people; but all citizens “dreamed of making the United States a freer and more perfect union” (p. 130). All is well because the ideology and heart of the nation are solid; toleration, religious freedom, and a desire for equality are girded by a government designed to uphold such ideals (p. 244). Written without footnotes or sources of any kind, which is supposed to make it more inviting to younger readers, the book operates like a long version of Goodnight Moon...