Twentieth-century American History Research Articles

Rust Belt Problems, Sunbelt Solutions: St. Louis, Dallas–Fort Worth, and the Migratory History of the “Metroplex” Concept

Rust Belt Problems, Sunbelt Solutions: St. Louis, Dallas–Fort Worth, and the Migratory History of the “Metroplex” Concept Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Texas Metro factual guide for Dallas and Fort Worth, Southwest Metroplex. Lester Strother Texas Metro Records (AR0327), University of North Texas Special Collections. [End Page 304] The Dallas–Fort Worth region is commonly known as “the Metroplex.” Residents and visitors to the United States’ fourth-largest metropolitan area are familiar with the name, and to call another city a metroplex would probably be confusing, if not quite inappropriate. A popular origin story says that in the 1970s, Harve Chapman of Dallas-based Tracy-Locke Advertising fused “metropolitan” and “complex” into the distinctive portmanteau. As of 2021, the website of the North Texas Commission (NTC), an agency established in 1971 to promote the region, claims it “coin[ed] and copyright[ed] the term ‘Metroplex’” in 1972.1 “Metroplex,” however, did not originate in Dallas or in a 1970s ad campaign. Rather, it originated in 1950s community-education projects exploring urban problems, especially in the congested and seemingly declining urban centers of the industrialized Midwest, the area that would eventually become known as the Rust Belt. Scholars initially used [End Page 305] the term to educate people about issues of transportation, race, land use, governance, migration, and pollution, before North Texas then repur-posed the term for its own, up-and-coming metro area. Dallas–Fort Worth employed “metroplex” to market itself as a unique and diffuse metropolitan region with scarce problems, a place where corporations and people escaped urban chaos by embracing a good life characterized by sprawl and leisure. The migration of the metroplex concept—from Midwest to Southwest, as well as from social science to marketing—exposes a significant moment in twentieth-century American history. Historians of the so-called Sunbelt often focus on the role of federal and state governments, religion, and grassroots politics in the quickly growing and influential region stretching from California to the Carolinas, including Texas. They also discuss broader shifts in urban space. John Findlay, for instance, portrays the post–1940 American West as a place of “magic lands”—theme parks, industrial parks, and residential subdivisions—that “seemed less troubled by urban problems and more open to improvements in metropolitan design, social relations, and styles of living.” In complementary studies, Andrew M. Busch and Alex Sayf Cummings show, respectively, how Austin, Texas, and Raleigh–Durham, North Carolina, based their postwar identities on technology, leisure, and the knowledge economy.2 The story of Dallas– Fort Worth’s embrace of the metroplex concept shows not only how a major Sunbelt metro area embodied innovative urban spaces and production, but also how it drew upon existing discourses created by postwar social scientific research to advertise itself as an exceptional place offering Sunbelt solutions to Rust Belt problems. As historian Andrew Highsmith observes, distinctions between Rust Belt and Sunbelt are based more on “narratives of regional development” than upon actually marking either place as “a coherent geographic region.”3 “Metroplex,” which started out [End Page 306] in the 1950s as a term connoting urban problems, assumed utopian connotations in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, it was relatively easy for North Texans to use the term to promote their region’s many purported advantages, such as cheap land, a state-of-the-art airport, low cost of living, and cultural amenities. The intellectual history of “metroplex” casts new light on Texas urban history. Scholars often write about either Dallas or Fort Worth, the twin transportation and commercial hubs of North Texas, rather than the conjoined metro area. Harvey Graff, perhaps controversially, says Dallas is defined in popular culture by the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Dallas Cowboys National Football League (NFL) team, and the television show Dallas. It is a city seemingly with no limits, characterized by the pro-business Dallas Way and the bold emulation of other cities. Yet it is important to note that urban planning, civic boosterism, and conservative politics are also important aspects of Dallas history. The Dallas Citizens’ Council was an important factor driving the city’s growth after 1937...

Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America by Thomas Aiello (review)

Reviewed by: Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America by Thomas Aiello Wade Davies Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America. By Thomas Aiello. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2022. ix + 271 pp. Bibliographic essay, index. $34.00 cloth. Sports historians have long hoped for a grand basketball narrative that appeals equally well to scholarly and popular audiences and centers the game at the heart of the American experience, alongside baseball and football—two sports that have elicited far more scholarly attention. Thomas Aiello has finally written that book. It comes in the form of a concise yet sweeping narrative that traces basketball's evolution, both at the college and professional levels, from its origin and early development in the 1890s, through its mid-twentieth-century maturation, and to its ascent as a premier professional sport, embodied by the post-1970s National Basketball Association (NBA). Aiello strikes an effective balance between in-depth scholarly analysis of basketball's evolving social significance, particularly relative to struggles for gender equality and racial justice, and inspirational stories about all-time great players and teams. Casual readers will particularly appreciate later chapters featuring Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, LeBron James, and, of course, Michael Jordan. The book serves almost as well as a survey of twentieth-century American history as it does a basketball history, in that extended sections are devoted to detail ing broader societal developments—including the Civil Rights Movement, AIDS epidemic, passage of Title IX, COVID-19 pandemic, and Black Lives Matter—before relating these topics back to the sport and its players. Basketball is presented as equally reflecting and influencing the society around it. Aiello so deftly weaves these varied and weighty discussions into his narrative that his book would be as equally well placed as a text for a United States history survey course as for a more focused sports history course. Aiello's otherwise comprehensive narrative does, however, fall a little short in fully capturing basketball's widespread significance to a diverse population. He devotes primary attention to basketball's significance to African Americans and to race relations affecting Black athletes and communities, and deservedly so, but rarely mentions how important this game has been for other athletes of color or of diverse ethnicities, apart from brief mentions of Native American boarding-school teams and longer sections featuring early twentieth-century Jewish teams. More could be said about the intense hoops passion many Indigenous, Asian American, and Latino/a athletes have demonstrated through the years; and there is more to say as well about the game's early importance to American Catholics and other religious communities. These criticisms aside, this is still the most comprehensive and all-around best historical overview yet written about American basketball and is a volume that no sports historian or basketball enthusiast should do without. Scholars will also appreciate the extensive bibliographic essays Aiello includes for each chapter subject. [End Page 110] Wade Davies Native American Studies University of Montana Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Contributing Authors

Other| April 01 2022 Contributing Authors Women, Gender, and Families of Color (2022) 10 (1): 103–104. https://doi.org/10.5406/23260947.10.1.06 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributing Authors. Women, Gender, and Families of Color 1 April 2022; 10 (1): 103–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/23260947.10.1.06 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressWomen, Gender, and Families of Color Search Advanced Search AISHAH SCOTT is an assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies at Providence College. She received her PhD in twentieth-century American history at Stony Brook University, specializing in history of race and medicine. Her manuscript “Respectability Can't Save You: The AIDS Epidemic in Urban Black America” focuses on the impact of respectability politics on the Black community during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She previously earned her Master's Degree in Public Policy from Stony Brook.VERONICA POPP is a visiting professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Chicagoland. Popp has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Peitho, Bitch Media, Films for the Feminst Classroom, Gender Forum, and The Last Line. Her creative dissertation, Sick, was longlisted for the New Welsh Review (NWR) AmeriCymru Prize. She served as the graduate assistant for the Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership and Center... You do not currently have access to this content.

Teaching Twentieth Century American History Topics Through the Rearview Mirror of Motorsports

Over the last forty years, motorsports has grown to become one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States, second only to professional football. Often motorsports reflected the narratives of the times. The authors of this article, one a historian and one a business professor, teamed up to teach an interdisciplinary history course at a Midwestern university that combined aspects of U.S. history and motorsports. The university offered an interdisciplinary program in motorsports management housed in the College of Business. The course earned foundational studies credit under the historical studies category and was available to all undergraduate students. As a result of enrolling and completing the course, students often demonstrated an even higher level of interdisciplinary learning and American history recall than expected by the two instructors.

Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau

Reviewed by: Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau Cesar Suva OLIVER CHARBONNEAU Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 282 pages. Oliver Charbonneau’s Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World is a welcome addition to the relatively sparse literature on US imperial rule in the southern Philippines, an episode in twentieth-century American history that is too often ignored. Charbonneau challenges the still lingering undercurrents of exceptionalism in American imperial histories of this period by taking a “transimperial” lens, which considers the complex interplay between their rule in the southern Philippines and factors on a global scale. Civilizational Imperatives is the first book of the author, who is also a lecturer of American history at the University of Glasgow. This book considers the story of Moros and Americans between 1899 and 1941, backgrounded by a Spanish legacy of overrule stretching back to the seventeenth century. The Muslim locals of the southern Philippines, known as Moros, were also part of a complex and interconnected Islamic world. While many colonial tropes of Moros sought to portray them as untouched by civilization, isolated from the influence of modernity, Charbonneau outlines their extensive transborder kinship and commercial relations with the rest of Southeast Asia. In addition to contending with colonial forays into their world, with reactions ranging from acquiescence to resistance, the Moros were also subject to their own internal shifting power structures, which Americans often misinterpreted as indicative of their lawless and chaotic nature. Charbonneau describes how American imperial exceptionalism centered on a transformative vision of colonial rule. The US adopted the forms and practices of other empires but still felt inherently better equipped to civilize subject peoples. Upon returning from the Philippines in the early 1900s, Hugh Scott, former governor of the Sulu Archipelago, told the attendees of the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of Indians and Other Dependent Peoples in upstate New York that the US was more “altruistic” in their colonial aims than any other colonizing nation in the Orient (40). Americans at this time saw Muslim people in general as a challenge unlike other subject peoples, and the imperialists deemed Moros as being particularly difficult. While the colonizers saw Moros to [End Page 315] be even less civilized than their Christian counterparts to the north, their martial spirit and stubborn independence made them “redeemable” in the American imperialist imagination. This redemption became a centerpiece of the Americans’ self-styled role in the imperial endeavor. Occupation, subjugation, and suppression became necessary tools in the tutelary process, resulting in a tension between pacification and the remaking of Moros in the American image. The reality, however, when taken in the transimperial context that Charbonneau weaves, was that despite the moral fantasy of their occupation the Americans accomplished very little in the four decades that this book covers. After reviewing a short history of the Moros in the introduction, Charbonneau considers how the American imagination regarded Moros in the first chapter, how colonial policies purported to bring about modernity into the Moro region of Mindanao and Sulu in the second chapter, and how education and Westernization sought to render permanent positive change in the third. The fourth chapter examines how American imperialists also saw repression as tutelary, “corrective” violence, and the fifth chapter discusses how the colonizers controlled and shaped the physical environment to draw clear lines between civilized Anglo-Saxon imperialists and uncultured Moro “fanatics.” Chapter 6 considers how the American tutelary mission over the Moros was imprinted into pop culture, and the seventh chapter provides fresh emphasis on the continued interconnectedness of the Moro world with the rest of the globe throughout the forty years of colonial rule. As they began their occupation, Americans imagined the southern Philippines as a conceptual extension of the continental US and their experience with indigenous peoples there. Governors general Leonard Wood, Hugh Scott, and John Pershing all spent the early years of their military careers on the western frontier. John Finley, district governor of Zamboanga, was keen to develop the link between native Americans with Moros, advocating for the study of the western frontier to avoid the same mistakes...

John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix

Reviewed by: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix Mark Massa S.J. John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith. By Patrick Lacroix. [Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law] (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback $34.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-3049-3.) Patrick Lacroix has written an important work of revisionist scholarship. Indeed, he argues—for the most part quite convincingly—that scholars of American religion (and of U.S. Catholicism in particular) have largely gotten the "secular sixties" completely wrong. As Lacroix argues the case, most previous scholars studying the contours of twentieth century American religious history have taken it as axiomatic that the famous "religious revival" of the 1950s ended with Dwight Eisenhower, and that the election of JFK in 1960 ushered in both the end of anti-Catholicism as a mainstream American pastime and the beginning of the era of waning religiosity during the 1960s and 1970s. But according to Lacroix, there was no "secular sixties." And Lacroix points to the person Kennedy himself and his presidency for understanding the quite important intersection of religion and politics at the beginning of the 1960s. He argues that scholars studying American [End Page 636] religion have tended to echo (far too uncritically) the Christian right's own assertion that the "secular sixties" were a decade of waning religiosity in which faith-based groups largely eschewed political engagement. In this quite mistaken periodization, the naked public square that Kennedy's presidency ostensibly ushered in itself helped the forces of conservative religion to build up steam to emerge in the 1980s as the "New Religious Right." But from Lacroix's vantage, "the Kennedy years represent an important moment in the arc of U.S. religious history, connecting the religious revival of the 1950s to the conservative religious activism of the last quarter of the twentieth century" (2). As Lacroix shapes the story, both Kennedy himself and his presidency were key factors in a decade when "progressive religion"—far from staging a retreat—played a key role in politics and the public square. Indeed, the author constructs a narrative that seeks to displace most previous histories of U.S. religion that have largely ignored Kennedy's impact on faith-based activism. The creation of the Peace Corps, as well as his growing appreciation for the social vision of Pope John XXIII (documented in papal encyclicals like Pacem in terris) illustrate Kennedy's growing commitment to utilizing inter-denominational faith-based groups in realizing his social vision in civil rights and economic aid initiatives, both in the United States and abroad. And the author is at pains to document how Kennedy's own commitment to the causes of civil rights and the work of young people in the Global South were rooted in his own "progressive" Catholic values and moral sense, values seemingly given official church approbation by the "other John." Lacroix argues that religion was "repurposed" during the Kennedy presidency: religion certainly had been instrumentalized at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 940s in the U.S. battle against "godless communism." But both the tone and location of that marshaled faith was relocated after 1960: the religious faith of the American mainstream was utilized under JFK to promote liberal reform both domestically and abroad, specifically around the issues of racial justice, arms control, and U.S. contributions to developing countries in organizations like the Peace Corps. And the author argues that it was Kennedy himself who functioned as the center of gravity for this new ("progressive") religious activism, all the while espousing a firm commitment to a high wall of separation between church and state, the latter rising more from Kennedy's own deeply-held understanding of constitutional principles and from his "realist" recognition of anti-Catholic impulses on the Protestant right, rather than from his ostensibly secular values. [End Page 637] Lacroix's study is rife with historical ironies, not the least of which was that it was the Catholic candidate in 1960 who played a key role in uncovering and deepening the rift between the "Seven Sister" mainstream Protestant groups affiliated with the National Council of...

Presence and exhibition of African film in Harlem

Throughout the twentieth-century American history, the circulation of African arts in the New York City runs parallel with African American activism. The African on-screen presence in Harlem needs to be examined in this broader context in order to better grasp the historical trajectory of its development in the neighbourhood and also the encounters and exchanges between Africans and African Americans. Today, the increased interest in African screen media productions result from the confluence of two phenomena: the current Black renaissance and the reconfigurations of African cinema under the influence of migration. Harlem is once again playing a pivotal role in the dissemination of African culture, specifically African cinema in the New York City.

John Philipp Baesler. Clearer than Truth: The Polygraph and the American Cold War.

The lie detector holds up a dark mirror to twentieth-century American history. While the polygraph has flourished in the United States, it has rarely been adopted in other countries and is largely banned from U.S. criminal courts. After all, scientific experts have repeatedly shown that the technique is unreliable, and they have disavowed it in everything from a poll of academic psychologists in the 1920s to the damning report of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Why then has the technique been so widely deployed in criminal investigations, in national security screening, and (until 1988) in commercial employment? How can we explain this uneven pattern of adoption? John Philipp Baesler’s book Clearer than Truth: The Polygraph and the American Cold War attempts to answer this question for the second half of the twentieth century, when lie detection expanded from a method of assessing guilt in individual criminal suspects to a mass-screening technique intended to safeguard national security by monitoring citizens’ inner thoughts. But in shifting the battle lines of the Cold War to the human psyche, the lie detector also drew objections for violating individual conscience in ways that mimicked the mind-control techniques of America’s totalitarian enemies. These objections eventually gathered enough political support to partially curtail the technique’s use. The book suggests that these debates over the lie detector’s trade-off between collective security and personal autonomy expose a central tension of the American Cold War. It is a persuasive argument.

Introduction: Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis Redux

The death of American historian Arnold Hirsch, in 2018, generated multiple reexaminations of his profoundly influential “second ghetto thesis.” Hirsch’s landmark Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 - 1960 (1983) is considered among the most important books on twentieth-century American history published in the past half century. In 2003, contributors to a special issue of the Journal of Urban History reflected on the twentieth anniversary of Hirsch’s second ghetto thesis. More recently, a new generation of urbanists have emerged who build upon and challenge Hirsch’s work. This forum highlights this new generation.

Crabgrass Catholicism: U.S. Catholics and the Historiography of Postwar Suburbia

Andrew Greeley's first book, The Church and the Suburbs, emerged from his observations as a newly-ordained associate pastor in a suburban parish of Chicago. Published in 1959, it was the first book-length exploration of post-war suburbanization's impact on the Church in the United States. In the sixty years since The Church and the Suburbs was published, U.S. Catholic historians have largely ignored how Catholics helped create postwar suburbia and how Catholicism was refashioned by the migration from urban ethnic neighborhoods to rapidly expanding suburbs. This essay briefly summarizes Greeley's conclusions, situates his contribution within the earliest responses to postwar suburbanization, and examines how the study of suburbs has evolved since The Church and the Suburbs was published. It also proposes several aspects of Catholic suburbia that might assist historians in better explicating Catholicism's place in twentieth-century American history.

Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order by Jon Shelton

Reviewed by: Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order by Jon Shelton Ruby Oram Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order. By Jon Shelton. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 274 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $95; paper, $27.95.) Few subjects have garnered more attention from American historians in recent years than the nation's political realignment by 1980. Historians have shown how civil rights activists, feminists, student radicals, evangelicals, and southern suburbanites all pushed American politics to the right during the long 1970s. Public school teachers are rarely included in this roll call. But in Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, Jon Shelton argues that hostility toward striking teachers among white urban parents helped break the New Deal coalition in such northern cities as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and Chicago. Teacher Strike! examines a wave of teacher s1zntrikes between 1968 and 1981 that led white urban parents to abandon progressive and prolabor politics in favor of neoliberalism, which Shelton defines as a political ideology equating individual freedom with market freedom. Shelton asserts that as teachers' unions became more militant through illegal striking, white working- and middle-class parents in northern cities increasingly viewed public school teachers as drains on their hard-earned tax dollars. White parents came to associate public sector employees with the problems of the urban poor in general, deploying racialized language to chastise both for being "unproductive." Shelton argues that criticisms of teacher strikes were also gendered by reporters and parents who expressed discomfort with a primarily female workforce demonstrating political power in the streets rather than nurturing children in the classroom. Teacher Strike! is best read as a collection of local case studies highlighting how clashes over teachers' labor rights weakened the "labor-liberal coalition" in a handful of northern cities. Shelton combs through an impressive range of sources to follow shifts in public perceptions of striking teachers, including newspaper and television press, op-eds, political cartoons, letters to the editor, private correspondence, and community forums. The author pays close attention to how unique social and economic tensions in various cities—such as the rise of Black Power in Newark or the shrinking tax base of metropolitan Pittsburgh—helped shift local opinion of public sector unionization from supportive to hostile. Teacher Strike! makes a compelling argument for how economic fears worked with cultural ideas about race, gender, and productivity to push parents toward [End Page 228] privatized solutions for urban schools. However, what makes this "new American political order" distinctly neoliberal rather than conservative or neoconservative is not always clear in Shelton's analysis. Teacher Strike! demonstrates why historians should pay more attention to education in studies of American political economy. State funding for education increased dramatically in the postwar decades, which, as Shelton argues, led many Americans to directly relate their personal tax burdens with public school teachers. Both in the 1970s and in our current wave of teacher strikes, conflicts about education are inherently conflicts about policy, race, gender, family values, and individual rights. Shelton rightfully places teacher activism at the center of America's cultural and political realignment for these reasons, making Teacher Strike! a revealing read for any scholar of twentieth-century American history. Ruby Oram Loyola University Chicago Copyright © 2019 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England

Book Review| April 01 2018 Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England. By Robert Macieski. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 296 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Libby Bischof Libby Bischof University of Southern Maine Libby Bischof is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Collaboration and Development at the University of Southern Maine. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American social and cultural history, with an emphasis on photography. She is most recently the author of Maine Photography: A History, 1840–2015 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2018) 37 (3): 130–132. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0130 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Libby Bischof; Picturing Class: Lewis W. Hine Photographs Child Labor in New England. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2018; 37 (3): 130–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.3.0130 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Reviewed by: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser Anne K. Phillips (bio) Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By Caroline Fraser. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2017. In 1976, Donald Zochert published the first biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Written for a general audience, it included an appendix, "The Truth of the Little House Books," which revealed that the fictional series did not always align with Wilder's life. This information surprised fans and challenged narratives perpetuated by the author and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Forty years later, scholars and fans remain hungry for details about the truth of the series, the lives of its author(s), and the process of its composition. As Wilder scholarship evolved, it became clear that to tell the story of Laura must also mean telling the story of her daughter. Biographers—including Janet Spaeth, William Anderson, John E. Miller, Pamela Smith Hill, and Sally Ketcham—have demonstrated the degree to which, in life and art, Wilder and Lane's interactions and collaborations remained fraught. Hill's edited, annotated edition of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl (2014), made accessible to mainstream audiences by the South Dakota Historical Society Press as the initial volume in its Pioneer Girl Project, brought to greater awareness the ways in which the fiction deviated from the facts of the Ingalls family's experience and was constructed and shaped by Lane as well as Wilder. In Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser draws from decades of her own engagement with Wilder scholarship, including her editing of the Library of America edition of the Little House series. One of the NewYorkTimes Book Review's Best Books of 2017, Prairie Fires provides a remarkable breadth of knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history and culture. As Fraser explains, "The truth comes clear when we see Wilder as part of a wider history" (5). That wide-angle approach to Wilder's life and works is a striking component of this beautifully written and highly engaging biography. Fraser opens with the perspective that the United States' approach to colonizing and annexing the Plains and the West should be linked to European American conflict with Native Americans in the 1850s and '60s, particularly the events of the US-Dakota War of 1862. Fraser asserts that these events shaped everything that followed: government policies, enduring psychological and emotional patterns, and, of course, literary reflections. What "opened the far west," as Fraser explains, "was not reasoned debate. It was wrath and righteous retribution" (24). [End Page 346] Building on this assertion, the volume weaves compelling "big picture" themes and events into a rich tapestry. Fraser sees Wilder's storytelling as adhering to the way in which her ancestors told their stories, reaching back to Samuel Ingalls, Laura's great-grandfather, who celebrated American Exceptionalism, found himself "transfixed by natural disasters," and espoused a "belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament" (32). Applying her research and interpretive skills to all phases of Wilder's life and experience, Fraser provides a satisfyingly thorough portrait. In light of Rosa Ann Moore's and others' writings, familiar to academics but less known by general audiences, and most notoriously represented by William Holtz's 1993 assertion that Lane should be seen as the primary author of the Little House books, Fraser's assessment of Wilder and Lane's interactions during the writing of the fiction will be especially of interest. Using an impressive array of resources, she delineates the patterns of Lane's depressions, manic phases, and other suggestions of recurring mental illness. Fraser also tracks with clarity and detail how Lane's "adopted grandson" Roger MacBride, under her aegis and with her encouragement, maneuvered himself into control of Wilder's writings and royalties. "Prairie fires" becomes a controlling metaphor for Wilder's life and works. Literally, it refers to the fires that roiled across vast acreages throughout the Midwest during the drought of 1871. However, "prairie fires" also alludes to the sound of the voracious locusts that devoured everything, not just in southern Minnesota but across 198,000 square miles (74). It is also an apt metaphor for the state of...

Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher by Angela J. Smith

Reviewed by: Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher by Angela J. Smith Lynn Moss Sanders Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher. By Angela J. Smith. Modern South. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 229. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1954-0.) Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher considers the life and work of poet, professor, and social worker John Beecher (1904–1980) in the context of his family history. Angela J. Smith argues that John Beecher, as the great-greatnephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher and great-grandson of their older brother Edward Beecher, was a "twentieth-century abolitionist who carrie[d] his forebears' moral sensibilities into a new era" (p. xi). Parts 1 and 2 of this biography discuss the legacy of the historical Beecher family and John Beecher's childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father worked as an executive for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (a subsidy of U.S. Steel), and his mother, Isabel Garghill, was "'the highest paid and most popular dramatic reader of her time'" (p. 21). Beecher's unconventional childhood included a Catholic upbringing in the South, some years of homeschooling, early graduation from high school, and a close friendship with a young black worker who shared stories and blues songs. The Ku Klux Klan murder of the family priest was another formative childhood event. Part 3 covers Beecher's professional life in teaching and social work, from 1928 to 1955, including his training under Howard W. Odum at the University of North Carolina (Smith mistakenly identifies Odum's white colleague Guy Johnson as African American) and Beecher's substantial publication in Social [End Page 1032] Forces about a biracial labor union rebellion in Alabama. Beecher worked for a number of New Deal agencies, and then, after a wartime stint on a merchant marine ship, he moved to a career in college teaching. Beecher moved frequently, married four times, and often rebelled against the strictures of government jobs. His most famous rebellion was a refusal to sign the Levering Act loyalty oath as a faculty member at San Francisco State College. Smith writes that Beecher's subsequent legal battles were only resolved near the end of his life, when he was rehired to teach at the age of seventy-three. Smith relates Beecher's childhood reaction to hearing his grandmother read Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) aloud: "'My heart was greatly stirred and troubled by the picture of injustice which was unfolded in this book . . . . I resolved that when I grew up, I too would become a liberator of the Negroes like my ancestors'" (p. 5). During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Beecher served as a southern reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle while also writing more radical pieces for the left-leaning publication Ramparts. While Smith does not attempt a literary critique of Beecher's poetry, she does include excerpts from some of Beecher's most well known poems in pertinent chapters, thus highlighting his view of himself as a poet first. Smith's research benefited from a personal relationship with Beecher's widow, Barbara Beecher, and access to her wealth of documents about her husband's life and works. Smith notes that, along with the archive of Beecher's papers at the University of Texas at Austin, one of his most useful contributions for historians is the wealth of material he preserved during his long life relating to many of the important events of the twentieth century. Here I Stand is readable and well organized. Although John Beecher is a somewhat minor figure in twentieth-century American history, his life touched on a number of important events, so this book will be a useful tool for students of both southern and American history. Smith is convincing in her portrayal of him as the intellectual and moral progeny of his famous ancestors. Lynn Moss Sanders Appalachian State University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Corporate Governance and Income Inequality: The Role of the Monitoring Board

Does corporate governance play a role in income inequality? If so, how? This paper pursues this inquiry, beginning with an examination of the causes of significant income inequality throughout twentieth and early twenty-first century American history. The parallel developments of financial practices and board structures over these periods reveal the relatively contemporaneous rises of shareholder valuism and the modern monitoring board, with the latter providing institutional structure and norm propagation for the former, thus serving as a corporate governance channel through which income inequality is perpetuated. History further reveals the monitoring board to be an institutional component of finance capitalism, and the so-called managerial board that dominated during a period of relative income equality to be an institutional component of industrial capitalism.Some cautious reform suggestions are offered, but the purpose of this paper primarily is diagnostic. It also serves as a cautionary tale for developing nations in the process of building their institutional structures.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNancy Christie teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. Her work centers on the cultural, political, legal, and social history of eighteenth-century Quebec, with a particular emphasis on the impact of British colonialism after the Conquest of 1763. Winner of numerous scholarly awards, in particular for Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada, she is the author of a major forthcoming volume, A Northern Bastille: The Formal and Informal Politics of Colonialism in Post-conquest Quebec, 1760–1837.Jason Dawsey is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in modern European history. Currently, he is completing a monograph on Günther Anders’s critique of technology.Michael Gauvreau teaches history at McMaster University. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of Canada and Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is the author of the prize-winning The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, and his new research centers on Quebec in the age of revolutions.Aaron G. Jakes is assistant professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies at the New School. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. He is the author of “Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914,” Antipode (2016), and he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled State of the Field: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism in Egypt, 1882–1914.Ahmad Shokr is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, the political economy of empire and decolonization, and the history of capitalism. He is a contributor to several volumes, including Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (Verso, 2012).Kristoffer Smemo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught courses on twentieth-century American social and political history. His dissertation examines how social struggle shaped the rise and fall of the liberal wing of the Republican Party during the mid-twentieth century. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas.Samir Sonti is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught the history of capitalism and labor studies. His dissertation focuses on the politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States.Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has taught twentieth-century American history, the history of capitalism, and African American history. He is completing a dissertation on the transformation of the labor market and the emergence of the health care economy in Pittsburgh in the second half of the twentieth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691061 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Man of destiny: FDR and the making of the American century

No president looms larger in twentieth-century American history than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and few life stories can match his for sheer drama. Following in the footsteps of his Republican cousin President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR devoted himself to politics as a Democrat and a true man of the people. Eventually setting his sights on the presidency, he was elected to office in 1932 by a nation that was mired in the Great Depression and desperate for revival. As the distinguished historian Alonzo Hamby argues in this authoritative biography, FDR s record as president was more mixed than we are often led to believe. The New Deal provided much-needed assistance to millions of Americans, but failed to restore prosperity, and while FDR became an outstanding commander-in-chief during World War II, his plans for the postwar world were seriously flawed. No less perceptive is Hamby s account of FDR s private life, which explores the dynamics of his marriage and his romance with his wife s secretary, Lucy Mercer. Hamby documents FDR s final months in intimate detail, claiming that his perseverance, despite his serious illness, not only shaped his presidency, but must be counted as one of the twentieth century s great feats of endurance. Hamby reveals a man whose personalityegocentric, undisciplined in his personal appetites, at times a callous user of aides and associates, yet philanthropic and caring for his nation s underdogsshaped his immense legacy. Man of Destiny is a measured account of the life, both personal and public, of the most important American leader of the twentieth century.

William Dudley Pelley, An American Nazi in King Arthur’s Court

The names of King Arthur and his knights have been invoked by many, perhaps none more infamous in twentieth-century American history than William Dudley Pelley, author of the screenplay for an important 1922 American silent film about the Grail, founder in the early 1930s of Galahad College and Galahad Press, but also a rabid anti-Semite, convicted-swindler, and racketeer, and Nazi sympathizer before, and traitor to America during, the Second World War.

That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South by Caroline Light

Reviewed by: That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South by Caroline Light Sarah Imhoff (bio) That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South. By Caroline Light. New York: NYU Press, 2014. ix + 278 pp. Regional histories often make the case for their importance by arguing that they fill a lacuna in our knowledge, broaden our view, or decenter the geography in our narratives. Caroline Light’s recent book on Jewish charity in the South does each of these things, but what makes it exceptional is that its scholarship is not merely additive, but transformative. That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South reconceptualizes the relationship of gender and race in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Jewish history. It uses the history of organized Jewish efforts at gemilut hasadim (charity) to explore how Jews saw themselves and other Jews and how [End Page 448] they positioned themselves in a society overdetermined by notions of race, gender, and class. The centerpiece of the book is an institutional history of two southern orphanages, Hebrew Orphans Home of Atlanta and the Hebrew Orphans Home in New Orleans. It begins with an overview of their founding in the wake of the Civil War and subsequently presents the stories from both the viewpoints of the caregivers and the cared for. The cared for extended beyond today’s ideas of the orphan. Some “orphans” had widowed mothers, others had living fathers, and others still had no living parents. Some children were institutionalized in an orphanage, while others lived in foster care arrangements; some even (contrary to policy) lived with a parent who received financial support from one of the orphans’ homes. These orphans’ homes even sometimes helped widows, who were adults. Despite sometimes flexible senses of who, exactly, was to be helped, these institutions consistently privileged helping women, especially widows, and children. Jewish men, Light argues, were culturally expected to help themselves and their own families. In this way, the gendered politics of charity become clear. Southern Jews saw benevolence as a duty toward women and children and self-help and productivity as duties of men. But if the book’s goal is to understand the contested place of Jews in broader southern society, especially with respect to race, why look at gemilut hasadim, a practice conducted by Jews for the benefit of other Jews? Here Light is subtle, but her argument convinces. Through a sophisticated analysis of archival documents, Light shows how culturally established (white) Jews established these charitable organizations in the post-Reconstruction era for two purposes: first, to aid Jewish women and children in need, and second, to demonstrate to non-Jewish southerners that Jews were still “exemplary citizens” even in the presence of many new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (57). That is, even though the story of gemilut hasadim is a story of Jews helping other Jews, it was also a very public story about how Jews sought to portray themselves to non-Jews, how acculturated Jews saw themselves as white but also recognized the importance of complying with the norms of social and racial belonging, and how economically advantaged Jews sought to shape the lives—from their very intimate to their most public manifestations—of poor Jews in their region so that non-Jews saw the benevolence and self-sufficiency of the Jews as a people. Light explains that the book “shows how Jewish southerners responded to the precariousness of their lives by instituting a sophisticated network of social uplift organizations” (3). Given the historical background, this account is plausible, but if the argument is that the [End Page 449] precariousness of racial belonging is the driver of benevolent institutions, readers might want more primary source evidence of this racial anxiety. In this sense, however, Light’s scholarship in is good company. When historians describe the reasons behind broad cultural formations, they often describe them as the product of “anxiety” or “precariousness.” Masculinity, if one reads widely in American history, is described as “in crisis” in every historical period. The renegotiation of race, the changing...