Twentieth-century American History Research Articles

Watering Environmental History's Roots

Watering Environmental History's Roots Karl Boyd Brooks (bio) Paul Charles Milazzo. Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006. xii + 340 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. Temperate grasslands mature over time as complexity displaces simplicity until, paradoxically, equilibrium obtains. Environmental history, like natural habitats, also displays successional patterns, typified by Paul Milazzo's Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972. Descended from hardy precursors in political, legal, and economic history, this book indicates environmental history has now attained sufficient equilibrium to complement the American historian's central task: studying power and its application. Showier, but more fragile, recent exotics probably led Milazzo to paste "discourse" and "narrative" labels onto political rhetoric and action (pp. 11, 91). Nevertheless, Unlikely Environmentalists' methodology, evidence, and argument owe more scholarly debts to path-breaking legal-environmental historians Paul Wallace Gates and J. Willard Hurst—who wouldn't have known a discourse from a dissertation—than to Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams. The beholder's eye will determine the proper shelf for cataloguing this protean book. Although Milazzo classifies Unlikely Environmentalists as a product of the "new policy history," his "effort to reinsert Congress into the post-1945 political history of the United States" yields a fine environmental history of the American law of water quality (p. ix). Viewed from another angle, Milazzo's first book offers a superb legal history of the American environment's aqueous domain. On whatever shelf it rests, Unlikely Environmentalists confirms Adam Rome's 2002 judgment that "what really matters in American history" should incorporate environmental history's insights.1 Theda Skocpol's and Stephen Skowronek's works on "modernization" in the 1980s inspired Milazzo to analyze creation of the "environmental-management state," a central thread that Rome has argued runs throughout twentieth-century American history. Incited by his mentors Brian Balogh and Julian Zelizer, Milazzo has challenged policy history's reflexive, unwarranted emphasis on the executive as a motive force behind state growth.2 Unlikely Environmentalists contends instead that, because "the institutional exigencies [End Page 126] of the legislative branch often prescribed the ideas, interests, and values that informed environmental policy and law, . . . the roots of environmental policy . . . drew inspiration from more varied sources than either political or environmental historians realized" (p. x). This fine-toothed account of Congress and the Nixon presidency crafting one of environmental law's keystones, the 1972 Clean Water Act, offers legal historians important insights into legislators' translation of constituent demands and their own sentiments into statutes. Milazzo also gratifies political historians' curiosity about not only how a bill becomes law, but then a campaign commercial. Environmental historians, seeking a fuller treatment of federal water-quality law's postwar evolution than Richard Lazarus's and Richard N. L. Andrews's somewhat cursory accounts, will relish Unlikely Environmentalists' gritty engagement with science and culture.3 And all three fields will benefit from its careful sifting of the sawdust left on Congress' floor: public committee hearing transcripts as well as the equally interesting and often more significant minutes of closed markup and conference sessions; committee and agency research papers; staff correspondence with bosses and each other; and detailed scrapbooks kept in members' offices that document changing bill drafts. Future disputes about the legislative intent behind one of the Clean Water Act's many hundred sections are likely to be resolved partly by citing Unlikely Environmentalists. Milazzo claims the Clean Water Act complicates one of environmental history's "big stories," the emergence of citizen activism (p. 13). Unlikely Environmentalists analyzes enactment of the four major federal water-quality laws during the postwar period and detects no national passion for environmental quality pushing a reluctant Congress. In fact, for nearly the entire quarter-century, water pollution remained the preserve of technocrats, both locally and nationally. They framed the problem neither ecologically nor esthetically, but as one of supplying enough water to keep American business humming and American cities growing. "The groundbreaking 1972 statute," Milazzo maintains, "represented both the culmination of a policy process that began in the fifties and a synthesis of various discourses policymakers engaged in during that time. Although environmentalism exerted an undeniable influence on the...

Nylon and bombs: DuPont and the march of modern America

What do nylon stockings and atomic bombs have in common? DuPont. The chemical firm of DuPont de Nemours pioneered the development of both nylon and plutonium, playing an important role in the rise of mass consumption and the emergence of the notorious military-industrial complex. In this fascinating account of the lives and careers of Du Pont's chemical engineers, Pap A. Ndiaye deftly illustrates the contribution of industry to the genesis of a dominant post-World War II model connecting prosperity with security. The consumer and military dimensions of twentieth-century American history are often studied separately. Ndiaye reunites them by examining Du Pont's development of nylon, which symbolized a new way of life, and plutonium, which was synonymous with annihilation. Reflecting on the experiences and contributions of the company's engineers and physicists, Ndiaye traces Du Pont's transformation into one of the corporate models of American success.

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Deanna M. Toten Beard Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. By Jonathan L. Chambers . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006; pp. xv + 268. $55.00 cloth. The epilogue to Jonathan Chambers's rigorous new study of progressive American playwright John Howard Lawson includes the author's uncomfortable memory of an academic conference some years ago when a colleague asked him to defend his scholarly investment in the career of a failed playwright. Messiah of the New Technique, an insightful investigation of Lawson and leftist theatre culture in the United States, definitively confirms the value of Chambers's efforts. The author's "unyielding belief that the study of art and the study of society are inextricably intertwined" (9) has resulted in an illuminating materialist study of both Lawson and revolutionary politics in the United States before World War II. Chambers treats as discursive objects Lawson's plays, manifestoes, letters, and memoirs, along with reviews of his plays and period assessments of avant-garde theatre during the 1920s and 1930s. All of these sources richly record (even as they helped create) the liberal social energy in the country during the interwar years. The strength of Chambers's scholarship is his careful examination of John Howard Lawson as "both product and producer of a larger ideological conflict in the social and cultural spheres in this historical moment" (116), which persuasively shows how "common categorical labels for Lawson such as 'failed,' 'propagandistic,' and even 'left-wing' not only reduce and isolate his remarkable and varied career but also undergird and advance totalizing narratives regarding the theatre and, moreover, the political and cultural left in the United States during the twenties and thirties" (205). Up until now, there has been little work done on the political and experimental theatre career of Lawson, author of Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Loud Speaker (1927), and Marching Song (1937). The recent appearance of Gerald Horne's The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (2006) might hint at a new [End Page 147] wave of interest in Lawson's drama, although that study—like Gary L. Carr's The Left Side of Paradise (1984)—deals exclusively with Lawson's infamous career in Hollywood. Indeed, as Chambers's conference colleague pointed out, most of Lawson's plays were commercial and critical failures, yet Chambers is less interested in the relative success of Lawson's stagework than in the usefulness of that career to a richer understanding of the period theatrically, culturally, and politically. The book offers excellent descriptions of Lawson's infrequently read plays, providing not only important basic details of plot, character, and dramatic form, but also tracking changes in drafts of the plays and including valuable information about specific production choices made in the original productions. Employing materialist historiography and dialectical methodologies, Lawson's plays are read not simply for their formal qualities, but as evidence of both the playwright's changing ideas about political theatre and larger shifts within leftist ideology and subculture. In reaction to the stale habit of framing early twentieth-century American theatre history as a dichotomy between commercial theatre—its allies and exigencies—and noncommercial theatre (read "experimental," "little," and "art"), recent scholarship has sought to complicate our understanding of the discourse in those years. Chambers's study contributes to this reexamination by arguing that there were in fact not simply two modes in US theatre between the wars. Lawson's politically saturated theatre, for example, did not entirely appeal to the goals and values of either Broadway or most art theatres: "Lawson was, in short, neither fish nor fowl, neither 'artist-rebel' nor 'revolutionary'" (118), Chambers notes. The absence of a single, monolithic noncommercial and experimental theatre in the period mirrors the complexity of revolutionary politics during the same interwar years when, as Chambers's study thoroughly describes, "the so-called left in the United States was in truth comprised of many communities" (155). Starting with Lawson's upbringing within a Christian Scientist home and continuing through his formative friendship with...

A concise history of American anti-semitism

A Concise History of American Antisemitism, by Robert Michael, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 256 pp. $24.95. It seems a tautology to assert that negative Christian beliefs about Jews serve as the bedrock on which antisemitism has been built (p. xix), but few have traced those beliefs, and their impact on American Jews, across U.S. history. Such is the purpose of this book. Michael traces Christian antisemitic thought from its early church and European origins through the colonization of North America, the founding of the nation, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Remarkably broad in its scope, the book explores the antiJewish sentiments expressed in the writings and pronouncements of political, civic, philanthropic and business leaders, contemporary literature and poetry, law, and (some) forms of popular culture. Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln share the stage with Henry Ford and Louis Farrakhan in the unfolding drama of American antisemitism; virtually every major event of U.S. history is scrutinized for its antisemitic aspects. In compiling such a comprehensive list, Michael does students of American Jewish history a great service. He also offers an important challenge to historical works that see antisemitism rooted more in social conditions or economic and social competition than in Christian theology. But the consequences of such an approach are sometimes unfortunate. In this case, Michael weakens his arguments by conflating pro-Christian and antisemitic thought, and sometimes skews historical events to make them seem centrally about antisemitism when in fact their antisemitism was part of a greater whole. A few examples should make these problems clear. Michael asserts, with justification, that most Americans and most American leaders have considered the U.S. a Christian country. But beyond the pernicious examples of antisemitism that resulted (and there are many), Michael includes as evidence our use of the Christian calendar and the belief of many Christians that non-Christians were misguided (at best) and in need of proselytizing, or damned. That Christians, who after all believe that redemption occurs through faith in Jesus, might conclude that those who lack such faith are wrong, doomed, or in need of evangelical uplift, may be offensive to non-Christians but hardly equates with the antisemitism of pogroms or even university quotas. Nor is the use by our founders of their traditional calendar over a Jewish or Islamic or Buddhist one necessarily a sign of intolerance. The conflation of both relatively benign and more explicit pro-Christian activity actually weakens the author's argument of the persistence of problematic and dangerous American antisemitism. By evaluating historical events by their antisemitic content, the book also misleadingly implies that antisemitism was at their core. In the American South, for example, Michael suggests that African American slaves provided a substitute target for [white Christian] Southerners to scapegoat (p. 89). But unlike Europe, from the start the primary divide in the United States has been racial and not religious; that is, race has always, in the end, proved the more pernicious and deep-rooted division. …

The mythical Jim Thorpe: Re/presenting the twentieth century American Indian

This article examines the social significance of Jim Thorpe as a pivotal figure in twentieth-century American history, exploring representations of Thorpe in the context of his life and times, the entities that produced these representations, and the social consequences of their productions. In a century in which attitudes about, definitions of and policies towards Native Americans were dramatically reshaped, Thorpe's life story had tremendous popular appeal and symbolic significance for both Native Americans and non-Native Americans. A closer look at how this story was framed, by whom and for what purposes, offers critical insights into the role that representations played – and continue to play – in producing, legitimating and occasionally challenging systems of power and privilege in the United States.

Marsden Hartley: race, region, and nation

At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), author Donna M. Cassidy brilliantly appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark late art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region-the North Atlantic folk, the coast, and Mount Katahdin-producing work that demands an interpretive approach beyond art history's customary biographical, stylistic, and thematic methodologies. Cassidy, sensitive to the psychological and gender analysis traditionally central to interpretations of Hartley, becomes the first scholar to reassess his late work in light of contemporary American perceptions of race, ethnicity, place, and history. This remarkable new book resonates not only as a seminal Hartley study and a complex art and cultural period history, but as a superb example of applied early twentieth-century American intellectual history informed by an impressive command of primary and secondary interdisciplinary literature. Numerous and rich illustrations, as well as transcriptions of several key essays by Hartley, some never before published, includingThis Country of Maine (1937-38), round out this insightful, nuanced, and revolutionary treatment. Donna M. Cassidy's Marsden Hartley will engage general readers as well as scholars and students.

:Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law.

This is a relentlessly interesting book, one that cannot help but change the way the reader understands twentieth‐century American constitutional development. As Ken I. Kersch persuasively argues, for much of the late twentieth century American constitutional history was dominated by a whiggish narrative in which progressive forces consistently supportive of civil rights and civil liberties triumphed over the dark forces of reaction. This whiggish narrative, however, is full of holes. For example, progressives of the early twentieth century fought mightily against privacy rights protected by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, in the name of the right of publicity. More specifically, the state‐building project supported by progressives required that American businesses be subjected to intrusive and unprecedented inspection by regulatory and other legal authorities. Even future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's famous 1890 article supporting a constitutional “right to privacy“—later cited as the progenitor of modern “right to privacy” cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)—actually did not advocate a right to privacy that modern civil libertarians would even begin to recognize. Quite to the contrary, the article advocated recognition of a tort for invasion of privacy as a means of censoring even rather tepid tabloid journalism. Only after progressives had soundly defeated the “old” right to privacy in the economic sphere and established the modern bureaucratic state did they reimagine the right to privacy in terms congenial to modern liberalism, as an island of personal autonomy in a sea of statism. This victory also allowed them to revive the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in the service of protecting street criminals.

Herbert A. Simon: the bounds of reason in modern America

Rarely does the world see as versatile a figure as Herbert Simon. A Nobel laureate in economics, he was an accomplished political scientist, winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association, and founder of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In all his work in all these fields, he pursued a single goal: to create a science that could map the bounds of human reason and so enlarge its role in human affairs. Hunter Crowther-Heyck uses the career of this unique individual to examine the evolution of the social sciences after World War II, particularly Simon's creation of a new field, systems science, which joined together two distinct, powerful approaches to human behavior, the sciences of choice and control. Simon sought to develop methods by which human behavior, specifically human problem-solving, could be modeled and simulated. Regarding mind and machine as synonymous, Simon applied his models of human behavior to many other areas, from public administration and business management to artificial intelligence and the design of complex social and technical systems. In this informed and discerning study, Crowther-Heyck explores Simon's contributions to science and their influences on modern life and thought. For historians of science, social science, and technology, and for scholars of twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history, this account of Herbert Simon's life and work provides a rich and valuable perspective.

Presidential Tapes and Historical Interpretation

Max Holland's book is important for two key reasons. First, it increases our understanding of the impact and legacy of one of the most searing events of twentieth-century American history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Second, the book raises significant questions about listening to and transcribing presidential tapes. Any scholarly assessment of this book that fails to address these methodological issues would be, at best, incomplete, or at worst, pointless. Holland's work proves, in a level of detail never before possible, that Lyndon Baines Johnson's succession to the presidency on November 22, 1963, was the most traumatic in American history-more so than earlier presidential assassinations (1865, 1881, and 1901) because television permitted the American people and the world to become virtual participants in the event. An American born in 1850 could, by age 51, personally remember the assassinations of three presidents. But, by 1963, relatively few Americans could recall the shooting of William McKinley and the elaborate protection of the president seemed to rule out another assassination. Fortunately for historians, beginning on the evening of the day he took the presidential oath in Texas, Lyndon recorded nearly all his telephone conversations. It is almost impossible to communicate, in mere words, the degree to which these tapes capture LBJ's persona and leadership skills. Many historians have tried, for example, to describe the legendary Johnson treatment. But, Holland's transcription of these tapes makes it possible to be a virtual ear-witness to that phenomenon. The treatment could include flattery, guile, humor, appeals to self-sacrifice and patriotism, deceit, armtwisting, and intimidation, but ultimately relied on LBJ's instinctive understanding of human nature. recognized that politics was first and foremost a living network of human relationships. He embodied, a former

The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism. Ed. by Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. vi, 338 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-55849-320-4. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-55849-321-2.)

A title alluding to “the triumph of liberalism” leads quickly these days to the conclusion that it deals with either parody or history. In this case it constitutes something of a celebration of the New Deal and its enduring legacy. The thrust is heavily political. The two editors are political scientists, and they alone account for a third of the text; they are joined by five fellow members of their discipline. Two of the four historian contributors provide brief essays. Beyond celebration, the basic theme lies in the political scientists' stress on the New Deal effort to move from partisanship to an “administrative state” (p. 73)—echoing the coeditor Sidney M. Milkis's 1993 book The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal. The celebratory emphasis is most evident in the editors' introduction and in Morton Keller's concluding essay. The New Deal is portrayed by Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur as the “defining moment” (p. 1) in twentieth-century American history with its creation of a “public philosophy” (p. 3) that shaped American life well beyond the era that gave it birth. To Keller “the lengthened shadow of the New Deal” (p. 319) constitutes “the political regime … in which we still live” (p. 320). The New Deal, he contends, can best be understood not as part of a reform continuum (progressivism pales in comparison), but rather as “a defining time, like the Revolution and the establishment” (p. 321) of the American republic. Contrariwise, Nelson Lichtenstein sees himself as among the “pathologists of the New Deal's aging and death” (p. 137). And Donald R. Brand suggests that in the light of developments since the late 1970s the New Dealers in key respects “appeared fundamentally misguided” (p. 189).

Rickover: the struggle for excellence

As the father of the nuclear powered Navy, Adm. Hyman G. Rickover was a pivotal figure in twentieth-century American history. While many books have been written about various aspects of his career, this is the first biography to have access to private papers, family and close friends. It not only deals with the admiral's controversial naval career but with phases of his personal life that made him what he was, including his youth as a Jewish immigrant who embraced America and the opportunities it offered. The author, Francis Duncan, worked with Rickover from 1969, when he was assigned to write a history of the nuclear propulsion program, until the admiral's death in 1986. Shortly before he died, Rickover turned over his files to Duncan, including letters to his first wife that give a vivid picture of the Navy from 1929 to 1945. Rickover's second wife allowed Duncan access to letters covering important events later in his career.The author was also granted interviews with the admiral's son and sister and with individuals from the Naval Reactors, an organization headed by Rickover whose members mostly had refused to talk to other biographers. A witness to the admiral's daily activities and the programs he directed, Duncan also drew on his own considerable knowledge to present a portrait of the man that gives new insights into Rickover's genius and short-comings. The book does not go into technical detail but focuses on the admiral's fights to build and extend the nuclear fleet and the often-difficult relationships that developed in the pursuit of the goal. He shows that Rickover's efforts had a profound effect on the postwar world, that the excellence and responsibility he demanded arequalities that reach beyond the Navy, and that his influence continues to be felt today.

The Arrival of History in Constitutional Scholarship

A to by American constitutional scholars has become one of familiar chapters in accounts of legal scholarship at end of twentieth century. But despite a widespread assumption within legal academy that inquiry has become a central, and statured, dimension of contemporary constitutional scholarship, causes of arrival of history in constitutional jurisprudence have not yet been fully explored. This article advances an explanation for turn. Reduced to a nutshell, explanation first posits a connection between three casual elements: a conception of history as a progression of qualitative change over time, in which time is structured in discrete segments (the past, present, and future); confidence, among scholars, about distinctive identity and relative homogeneity of America as a culture with shared ideals and values; and a sharp separation between disciplinary inquiries of historians and legal scholars. In terms of article, a historicist theory of change, a perception of current cultural and stability; and sharply perceived distinctions between and compliment and reinforce one another. In periods of twentieth-century American history when this configuration has occurred, historians have tended to define their scholarly enterprise as structured by canon of objectivity, by which a historically oriented scholar, situated in one time frame, faithfully renders the without injecting concerns or ideological agendas into that inquiry. In those same periods, constitutional scholars in legal academy have defined their scholarly enterprise as primarily ahistorical, focusing on contemporary constitutional issues and setting those issues in analytical and theoretical frameworks borrowed from contemporary social sciences, especially institutional and behavioral theories of political science. Conversely, in periods of twentieth-century American history where alternatives to a historicist theory of change have some prominence, where uncertainty exists among scholars about consensual values that define American present, and where sharp segmentations between past, present, and future time seem less coherent, historians have tended to recoil from strong versions of canon of objectivity, and to emphasize inherent presentism of all inquiry. Legal scholars, in such periods, have exhibited less confidence that field theories drawn from political science can serve as universal frameworks for addressing issues in constitutional law. The result has been a shift from a sharp separation of disciplinary inquiries of historians from those of legally trained constitutional scholars to a comparative integration of inquiries of two groups. Legal scholars have reached out from uncertainty of their present to reconsider past as a source of theoretical explanations for current issues, and historians have abandoned strong versions of canon of objectivity and given fuller attention to presentist dimensions of their exploration of topics. The article seeks to illustrate these general claims by detailed attention to three defining episodes in twentieth century American legal and scholarship. The first episode was emergence of social sciences, including history, as separate disciplines in early twentieth century, and parallel emergence of legal scholarship as inspired by social science theories. The second episode was development in American constitutional jurisprudence, between 1940s and 1970s, of matrix for situating analytical and theoretical inquiries about constitutional issues. The countermajoritarian difficulty matrix was developed and refined in periods of cultural stability, was predicated on a robust historicist theory of change, and was ahistorical in its emphasis. It was also developed and refined in a period in which and strong versions of objectivity canon dominated scholarship of American historians. The third episode was estrangement of several groups of legal scholars (of diverse ideological persuasions) from countermajoritarian difficulty matrix, and parallel estrangement of many historians from consensus history and strong versions of canon of objectivity. That episode began in late 1960s and is still in progress. Its principal contemporary manifestation, in American constitutional jurisprudence, has been surfacing of historically oriented scholarship by a variety of constitutional scholars who are not united in their normative concerns. Thus historical turn in American constitutional scholarship needs to be seen both as an illustration of late twentieth-century cultural ferment and an illustration of quite profound changes in epistemological underpinnings of American higher education as it enters first decade of twentieth century.

Empires on the Pacific: World War II and the Struggle for the Mastery of Asia

Empires on the Pacific smashes the standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific theater, showing America's aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power. Robert Smith Thompson offers a long overdue explanation of what America's war against Japan was really about--in a word: China. The over-reaching British Empire was waning yet unwilling to relinquish its foothold in China, while an increasingly ambitious Japan was determined to dominate the region by conquering China. Enter the young upstart, America. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt and for the United States, the war with Japan had little to do with revenge for Pearl Harbor. Japan would have to be vanquished so that it would never again be an imperial rival.Thompson's recasting of the Asian conflict profoundly alters our understanding of World War II in the Pacific and of what followed in Korea and in Vietnam. Revisionist history at its best, Empires on the Pacific is a far-reaching book that requires us to re-evaluate what we thought we knew about twentieth-century American history and what many still consider our last good war.

Fugitive Theory: Political Theory, the Southern Agrarians, and America

The group known as the Southern Agrarians came out of Vanderbilt University in the wake of the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In response to attacks on the South and Southern culture, these scholars and poets-including Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, and others-turned their attention to the defense of the South and its political tradition in numerous essays and books. Christopher Duncan's Fugitive Theory situates the Agrarians' political thought within the larger context of the Western political tradition in general and in the context of American political thought in particular. Duncan argues that the political theory of the Southern Agrarians is best understood in terms of a civic republicanism that has its roots in the thought of theorists such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, James Harrington, and Thomas Jefferson. In exploring this fascinating chapter of twentieth-century American history Duncan recovers a vision that included a commitment to private property in land, autonomy, and decentralized power-a vision that pitted itself against the call for centralization and materialism implicit in the ascendant industrial order.

The Arrival of History in Constitutional Scholarship

A to by American constitutional scholars has become one of familiar chapters in accounts of legal scholarship at end of twentieth century. But despite a widespread assumption within legal academy that inquiry has become a central, and statured, dimension of contemporary constitutional scholarship, causes of arrival of history in constitutional jurisprudence have not yet been fully explored. This article advances an explanation for turn. Reduced to a nutshell, explanation first posits a connection between three casual elements: a conception of history as a progression of qualitative change over time, in which time is structured in discrete segments (the past, present, and future); confidence, among scholars, about distinctive identity and relative homogeneity of America as a culture with shared ideals and values; and a sharp separation between disciplinary inquiries of historians and legal scholars. In terms of article, a historicist theory of change, a perception of current cultural and stability; and sharply perceived distinctions between and compliment and reinforce one another. In periods of twentieth-century American history when this configuration has occurred, historians have tended to define their scholarly enterprise as structured by canon of objectivity, by which a historically oriented scholar, situated in one time frame, faithfully renders the without injecting concerns or ideological agendas into that inquiry. In those same periods, constitutional scholars in legal academy have defined their scholarly enterprise as primarily ahistorical, focusing on contemporary constitutional issues and setting those issues in analytical and theoretical frameworks borrowed from contemporary social sciences, especially institutional and behavioral theories of political science. Conversely, in periods of twentieth-century American history where alternatives to a historicist theory of change have some prominence, where uncertainty exists among scholars about consensual values that define American present, and where sharp segmentations between past, present, and future time seem less coherent, historians have tended to recoil from strong versions of canon of objectivity, and to emphasize inherent presentism of all inquiry. Legal scholars, in such periods, have exhibited less confidence that field theories drawn from political science can serve as universal frameworks for addressing issues in constitutional law. The result has been a shift from a sharp separation of disciplinary inquiries of historians from those of legally trained constitutional scholars to a comparative integration of inquiries of two groups. Legal scholars have reached out from uncertainty of their present to reconsider past as a source of theoretical explanations for current issues, and historians have abandoned strong versions of canon of objectivity and given fuller attention to presentist dimensions of their exploration of topics. The article seeks to illustrate these general claims by detailed attention to three defining episodes in twentieth century American legal and scholarship. The first episode was emergence of social sciences, including history, as separate disciplines in early twentieth century, and parallel emergence of legal scholarship as inspired by social science theories. The second episode was development in American constitutional jurisprudence, between 1940s and 1970s, of matrix for situating analytical and theoretical inquiries about constitutional issues. The countermajoritarian difficulty matrix was developed and refined in periods of cultural stability, was predicated on a robust historicist theory of change, and was ahistorical in its emphasis. It was also developed and refined in a period in which and strong versions of objectivity canon dominated scholarship of American historians. The third episode was estrangement of several groups of legal scholars (of diverse ideological persuasions) from countermajoritarian difficulty matrix, and parallel estrangement of many historians from consensus history and strong versions of canon of objectivity. That episode began in late 1960s and is still in progress. Its principal contemporary manifestation, in American constitutional jurisprudence, has been surfacing of historically oriented scholarship by a variety of constitutional scholars who are not united in their normative concerns. Thus historical turn in American constitutional scholarship needs to be seen both as an illustration of late twentieth-century cultural ferment and an illustration of quite profound changes in epistemological underpinnings of American higher education as it enters first decade of twentieth century.

Defending Constitutional Rights

Perceptive writings and opinions of a powerful figure in twentieth-century civil rights legislation Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson of Alabama decided many of the most important civil rights and liberties cases in twentieth-century American history. During the 1950s and sixties, his decisions supported Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights fighters in their struggles for justice and equality. Johnson extended the Constitutional defense of individual rights for women, students, prisoners, mental health patients, poor criminal defendants, and voters during his active judicial career, which lasted until 1991. This collection assembles some of Johnson's most thought-provoking and insightful essays, many published as journal articles that explain and defend a number of his decisions. Also included in this volume is the first published transcript of a 1980 public television interview with Bill Moyers, in which Johnson personally explains his historic decisions. Meticulously detailed and documented, yet accessible to a wide range of readers, this book explores the constitutional ideals that Johnson forged and defended as he persistently overcame public officials' resistance to constitutional rights and social change.

Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996

Far from merely paying respect to a man proclaimed as one of the key figures of twentieth-century American literary and cultural history, this volume provocatively recreates the impassioned voice of Ginsberg as man, poet, revolutionary and political activist. Always witty and engaging, this collection of interviews from throughout Ginsberg's career reveals his attitudes towards poetry and drugs, his literary influences and personal relationships.

Talking It Over

It's back. The revival of pragmatic social theory in the academy, a phenomenon beginning at least a decade ago, is now in full swing. For Richard Rorty and Jiurgen Habermas, Cornel West and Drucilla Cornell, pragmatists have returned as important ballast for intellectual argument. In the past few years no less than three sympathetic intellectual biographies of John Dewey have been published, the best of them by Robert Westbrook, a co-editor of In Face of the Facts. The new interest in pragmatic social theory is fueling new interest within the academic disciplines. Barbara Maria Stafford in art history, Hillary Putnam in philosophy, James Kloppenberg, Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacobs, and Lynn Hunt in history-all are among those suggesting that pragmatism is a useful guide for contemporary scholarship. No doubt Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead are looking on from the beyond and yelping a' la George Castanza: We're back in the game, baby!! Back in the game? The of pragmatism? Was it ever really away? Pragmatism saturates so much twentieth-century American intellectual history that speaking of its return can appear odd. Yet, it is appropriate. Pragmatism has never been without its critics and certainly by the 1970s it had fallen out of favor in many disciplines. The neo-Kantian philosophy of John Rawls and the cultural relativism of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz were just two ways that academics distanced themselves from pragmatism. Early feminist scholarship and the neo-Marxism of the seventies were also often either indifferent or hostile to pragmatic theory. The two fine books under review here, both broadly part of the pragmatic revival, are indicators of how much has changed since then. Objectivity is not Neutrality collects a number of essays Thomas Haskell has written since the late seventies. Such collections are often disappointments,

A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War

World War II was a turning point in twentieth-century American history, and its effects on American society have been studied from virtually every conceivable historical angle. Until now, though, the role of religion--an important aspect of life on the home front--has essentially been overlooked. In A Cautious Patriotism, Gerald Sittser addresses this omission. He examines the issues raised by World War II in light of the reactions they provoked among Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Unitarians, and members of other Christian denominations. In the process, he enriches our understanding of the relationships between church and society, religion and democracy. In deliberate contrast to the zealous, even jingoistic support they displayed during World War I, American churches met the events of the Second World War with ambivalence. Though devoted to the nation, Sittser argues, they were cautious in their patriotic commitments and careful to maintain loyalty to ideals of peace, justice, and humanitarianism. Religious concerns played a role in the debate over American entry into the war and continued to resurface over issues of mobilization, military chaplaincy, civil rights, the internment of Japanese Americans, Jewish suffering, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and postwar planning. Originally published in 1997. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. |Explores the cultural aspirations of Nazi leaders by examining both their formulation of a national aesthetic policy and the content of their private collections.

MEMORY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM. ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN WORLD WAR I

World War I is the pivot of twentieth century American history because it transformed the United States from a regional into a global power. As the fiftieth anniversary of World War II winds down, we remind ourselves of the first “Great War” and its continuing importance to American self‐conception and memory.