White Man's Country Research Articles

“A New West in Mindanao”: Settler Fantasies on the U.S. Imperial Fringe

AbstractThis essay analyzes white settler formations in the Southern Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. Occupied by the United States in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Muslim-majority regions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago became sites of colonial experimentation and reconfiguration. This led to a brief-but-concerted push by Euro-American fortune seekers to settle the “Muslim South.” Supported by U.S. policy makers and colonial officials, white colonists were drawn to Mindanao-Sulu by visions of permanent settlement and limitless economic opportunity. This analysis contends that settler attempts to build a “white man's country” in the Southern Philippines were shaped by vernaculars and modes of conquest developed on the continental frontier. It interrogates the creation of transoceanic frontier spaces in Mindanao-Sulu and the practical attempts to exploit them, which drew inspiration from diverse sources in the American West and across the colonized globe. In its study of settler fortunes and failures, the essay blurs distinctions between national and imperial peripheries, and contributes to a growing scholarly interest in reassessing the importance of U.S. extraterritorial possessions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Contesting White Australia: Black Jazz Musicians in a White Man's Country

In March 1928, a tabloid-fuelled interracial sex scandal led to the deportation of an African American jazz orchestra and the introduction of a decades-long ban on black musicians. The incident raised questions about the place of cosmopolitanism within the White Australia experiment and calls into question the widely held assumption that the policy enjoyed unquestioned popular support in this period. By tracing the links between the individuals who championed the deportation, it is possible to identify divisions over the scope and meaning of the White Australia policy.

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause." (review)

Reviewed by: The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause." Randall M. Miller (bio) The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause." Edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Pp. 424. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $25.00.) James Loewen has been debunking myths about American history for some time, and now he teams up with Edward Sebesta to rattle from their roost all those Confederates still in attics thinking that secession and states' rights were, and are, a noble cause. They do so with a telling array of documents that reveals hard truths about what the Confederacy really fought for and what the "Lost Cause" mythology has concealed about the harshness of slavery, the cause and character of the Civil War, the unfinished promise of Reconstruction, and more. The dominant theme coursing through the book is Americans' persistent, and almost willful, ignorance about basic facts regarding the reasons for secession, the place of blacks in the Civil War, the violent and virulent racism during and after Reconstruction, and the misuse and abuse of history by "neo-Confederates" and others trading in prejudices and hatreds. The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader is Loewen's and Sebesta's mission to set the record straight. It also is their hope to introduce teachers and other readers to the historiographical evolution of the aforementioned concerns. And it is their warning that Americans must know the truth to set themselves free from those who would misuse and abuse the past. In six document-rich chapters the editors combine cogent commentary and critical documents, spanning the time from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to Sonny Perdue's March 2008 "Confederate History Month Proclamation." The editors largely draw on the public record (e.g., speeches, sermons, editorials, public letters, manifestos, political cartoons) to make the case that white southerners unabashedly fought for slavery [End Page 120] and to keep the South a white man's country. The book's emphasis centers on the Civil War era and then on modern appropriation and exploitation of symbols and myths largely forged during and after Reconstruction by white apologists for slavery, secession, the overthrow of Reconstruction governments, and the submission of blacks to white rule. Of special interest is the editors' insistence on the modern distortion, even inversion, of basic truths about the reasons for secession. As the documents from southern legislatures and secession conventions, among others, unequivocably show, white southerners left the Union to protect slavery's interest, which they believed the federal government had failed to respect and which the actions of free state governments had threatened. In sum, states' rights was not the cause of secession because southern slaveholders rejected its legitimacy regarding slavery when northern states refused to return fugitive slaves or otherwise obstructed southern "rights." They wanted more federal power, not less, to save slavery. States' rights became a crutch after the war when white southerners sought to justify their rebellion and failed bid for independence. But, as the editors complain, the postwar fiction has transmuted into accepted "fact" over time so that today those distrusting government invoke the "noble cause" of states' rights for their own purposes and cast the rebels of 1860-61 and after as the precursors of libertarians and any number of advocates for scaling back and opposing the federal government. The editors amply document such "evolution" with documents from the Dixiecrats, White Citizens' Councils, recent "textbooks" written by neo-Confederates, and public statements by white supremacists. Readers will find Loewen and Sebesta at times angry, impatient, and frustrated as they compare the facts with subsequent distortions or subversions of those facts. But theirs is a mission of great urgency, for as they argue in concluding this uncommonly useful and timely anthology, "There is a reciprocal relationship between truth about the past and justice in the present" (393). And what better time than the sesquicentennial of the Civil War to reflect on that great truth? And, one might add, what better time to hope for a reckoning of the obligations regarding that truth? That the University Press of Mississippi...

White man's country: Kenya Colony and the making of a myth

This article explains the cultural construction of Kenya Colony. It does so by combining two related histories – those of international tourism and of colonial rule – and two key explanatory themes – those of crisis and of commodity. The cultural construction of the colony, the article argues, emerged from two decisive moments: the “Indian crisis” of the early 1920s and the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s. Its content, meanwhile, was determined by its creation as a product, to be constituted, marketed, purchased and consumed. Colonial decline coincided with the emergence of Kenya Colony as global brand. Whilst the political project to maintain white man's country failed, the commercial project – to market white man's country as a commodity – succeeded emphatically. Attending to political crisis and cultural construction together, moreover, illustrates the function of the Kenya myth. The myth of Kenya Colony, the article argues, operated through recursive tropes of the picturesque, the transcendent and the primeval that are manifest not only in the writings of colonials themselves but also in accounts of Kenya produced in the period after independence. By examining the post-colonial period alongside the formative years of colonial rule, the extent to which ideas about Kenya circulating in the world today should be thought of in neo-colonial terms becomes apparent.

From the Frontline 2: It's a White Man's Country Yet: Three Deaths in Custody

From the Frontline 2: It's a White Man's Country Yet: Three Deaths in Custody

Slavery as a Problem in Public History: Or Sally Hemings and the "One Drop Rule" of Public History

Slavery as a Problem in Public History:Or Sally Hemings and the "One Drop Rule" of Public History Barbara Chase-Riboud (bio) This address was originally given at Slavery and Public History: An International Symposium, part of the Eighth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University in November 2006. I have crossed swords with public history as both sculptor and novelist, an accidental historian. As a writer, I backed into issues of slavery and the public by default. I discovered the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings liaison twenty-five years ago and wrote Sally Hemings: A Novel, which, amongst other things, challenged public history and raised the ire of all the Jeffersonians. As a sculptor, this accident led to a whole new literary career of illuminating untold, unknown, invisible subjects left behind by public history. I didn't have the impression when I was writing that I was producing an act of resistance to history. I only said to myself that there were things "scientific history" had overlooked or forgotten, or never written about, or suppressed for political motives, which, for reasons as important as liberation, should be written about. Why is the subject of slavery avoided in the written and oral presentation of the history of the United States? Why is it still taboo, still so painful, still so present? One might even say omnipresent since there was a racial basis for slavery in the Americas, and racism in America remains. Slavery defines American history. It evokes all the contradictions of our national narrative—a national narrative perfectly devoid of any reference to the black presence and what slavery represents. It can be said that there are no errors in history, only consequences. The consequence in this case is the obligatory elimination of any trace of our national secret: the birth of white freedom in the bosom of a slave society with all that that implies—self-delusion, lies, misinformation, guilt, mental acrobatics, and total amnesia—in order to render our American dream, the national image and the idea of a white man's country. Because slavery and the persons who were subjugated to it were necessary to the creation and the survival of a viable United States as a nation and an economic entity—in other words, a raison d'etat—it was held permissible, even defendable, to retain and protect it. In order to do this, a theory of invisibility based upon dehumanization had to be invented. This was done in two ways: by psychological brainwashing and by the invention of racism—the exact opposite of the Patriot's creed of equality, liberty, and independence upon which the national identity was based. A split personality was created to keep the secrets of slavery. To mention slavery at all was to insure discomfort, guilt, and confusion in the minds of both the victims and the perpetuators. The institution was untouchable. [End Page 826] Founding history had to be virgin—without slavery and without the black presence, which in turn, created a rhetoric all its own. A cloak of silence was invented around this untouchable institution, allowing the United States to begin its life an innocent, void of slavery and the ostensibly "contaminating" black presence, which was at the time one-fifth of the colonial population. In other words, this black fifth negated the virginity and the purity of our origins and national myth (the amazing sexual overtones of this are of course present everywhere in racist cant). The myth of a new country born of love and desire for freedom, tolerance, innocence, equality and immigration (Give me your poor, tired, weak etc.) was superimposed on this same new country that still retained chattel slavery, hereditary slavery. Americans have fought three wars over slavery: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights War, each successive war containing the seeds of the preceding one. Of the three wars fought over slavery, the American Revolution or War of Independence is surely the most contradictory and tragic. In 1776, in a country of 10.5 million colonists, one-fifth or two million and a half were black, slave or free, North or South, a fact hardly mentioned in the...

A History of Forgetting, and the “Awful Problem” of “Race”: A New Historical Note

Always historicize! --Fredric Jameson On March 15, 1891, a New York Times reporter described, in vivid detail, a killing in New Orleans: The doors were flung open and one of avengers, taking aim, shot him through body. He was killed outright and in order satisfy people on outside who were crazy know what was going on within, he was dragged down stairs and through door way by which crowd had entered. A rope was provided and tied around his neck and people pulled him up crossbars. Not satisfied that he was dead, a score of men took aim and poured a volley of shot into him, and for several hours body was left dangling in air. (Chief Hennessy 1) Knowing as we may think we do history of lynching in South during post Civil War period, we would expect know race of man being killed; we would expect victim be black. Instead victim's name was Pollize, and he was one of eleven Italian citizens summarily executed by what Times headline characterized as AN UPRISING OF INDIGNANT CITIZENS (Chief Hennessy 1). The cause of this outbreak of violence was verdict in a sensational trial. The chief of police of New Orleans had been assassinated on doorstep of his own house, and eleven Italians had been arrested and charged with his murder. They were acquitted in a trial that was rife with charges of jury tampering. When not guilty verdict was handed down, notices were placed in every paper in New Orleans to take steps remedy failure of justice in this case, and a mass meeting was announced (Chief Hennessy 1). The Times claimed that those who responded this call action consisted of the best element of city, and this crowd of extra-legal executioners included a prominent lawyer and a politician whose names were given in report (1). More interesting, though, for my purposes in this essay, are reactions these killings. On day of Italians' murders, Cotton Exchange in New Orleans passed following resolution: Resolved, That, while we deplore at all times resort [sic] violence, we consider actions taken by citizens this morning be proper and justifiable (Chief Hennessy 2). Two days after killing, John P. Richardson, whom Times characterized as owner of biggest dry good house in New Orleans, besides thousands of dollars' worth of other property there, and who is famous as largest cotton planter in world was quoted as saying, 'The lynching in New-Orleans Saturday is just thing that should have occurred. It looks bad on its face those away from there, but people who are acquainted with status of affairs can do nothing but commend action taken. The Italian colony in New-Orleans ... is a menace American citizenship and good government. Why, I had rather have a thousand than one Italian. They are treacherous, revengeful, and seek their revenge in most foul and cowardly manners. They have no regard for truth, and Mafia is all powerful with them. The lynching, as terrible as was, is a blessing for New-Orleans.' (Lynchings Justifiable 1) A New York Times editorial echoed these sentiments: These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians ... who have transplanted this country lawless passions, cutthroat practices, and oathbound societies of their native country, are us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they (qtd in Jacobson 56). Another editorial, while deploring killings, claimed that violence was incited by any prejudice against Italians as such. Nationality had nothing do with it (Editorial 4). Rattlesnakes and Chinamen. The implications of first metaphor are obvious--rattlesnakes are be killed on sight--but implications of term Chinamen (2) is less obvious a hundred years later because we have forgotten complicated history of process in late nineteenth century by which America came be increasingly (ideologically and legally) a white man's country. …

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. If southern identity is changing as much as Larry J. Griffin, Ranae J. Evenson, and Ashley B. Thompson say it is in "Southerners All?", some of us are still determined to find a place where old-style Confederate commemoration enjoys a free rein. In "Playing Rebels," James O. Farmer tells us that those upset by a changing South can find weekend relief by donning the grey and charging into battle against outnumbered and reluctant Yankees. Preparing for battle, courtesy of Ginny Southworth, Aiken Standard. [End Page 1] Who is a southerner? There have been many answers to this question, but until most recently they have all had something in common. Writing in 1928, Georgia-born historian Ulrich B. Phillips famously proclaimed that "a common resolve, indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man's country . . . is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history." About a dozen years later, Carolina journalist W. J. Cash offered his own, decidedly more complex definition of southerners, invoking the enduring power of the frontier interacting with what he took to be the folk traits of Anglo-Celtic ancestry. The result, he declared, was a set of mental characteristics that included individualism, romanticism, and hedonism, and which Cash summed up in his well-known book The Mind of the South. Cash did not limit his list of mental traits to opinions about race relations, but in one key respect, he and Phillips agreed: true southerners had to be white people. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. "Southerners," Shelby Foote memorably declared, "are very strange about that war." Soldier at the reenactment of the Battle of Aiken, courtesy of James O. Farmer. It is not entirely clear when fundamental assumptions about the racial character of southern identity began to waver. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the seminal essays of C. Vann Woodward quietly devastated Phillips's claims for white supremacy as the test of southernness. Enlightening a whole generation, Woodward illuminated a path for southern identity that could outlast Jim Crow, but even for him "southern" history and destiny were largely the province of white people. Perhaps it was Martin Luther King who began to integrate southern [End Page 2] identity with his stirring hope "that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slaveholders will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Certainly it was not until the triumph of the Civil Rights movement that the phrase "black and white southerners" began to come naturally to popular writers. Today it is still commonplace to see the word "southerner" used as if it only applied to whites, but when forced to think about it, most southern whites will also agree that nonwhite southerners have an equal claim on the regional label. The most conspicuous exceptions I can think of are the members of the neo-secessionist League of the South, who declare on their website that "the League seeks to protect the historic Anglo-Celtic core culture of the South because the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English have given Dixie its unique institutions and civilisation [sic]." Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. "Rebels in the Wake of 9-11," a photo essay by Katy Vinroot O'Brien, depicts a homecoming celebration at the University of Mississippi in October 2001, just a few short weeks after the infamous attacks. Photograph courtesy of Katy Vinroot O'Brien. After all the historians who have casually written black southerners out of the South's regional identity, a team of sociologists has finally come along to set the record straight. Larry J. Griffin, Ranae J. Evenson, and Ashley B. Thompson have studied the results of the Southern Focus Poll, a decade-long survey of southern and nonsouthern opinion, to find out what southerners of all races and ethnicities have to say about the matter. Contrary to all the historical pundits, they find [End Page 3] that blacks in the South are more likely than whites to call themselves "southerners...

The Unpublished Diaries of Charles Kikuchi: “Black and Yellow” through the Eyes of a ProgressiveNiseiIntellectual

In the winter of 1942, only a year removed from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and nearly seven months into his internment at the Gila River Relocation Project in Arizona, a young Japanese American named Charles Kikuchi recounts an afternoon's passing conversation in his diary. “I was walking over by the Butte this afternoon and I stopped to talk about the camp with a Negro workman who was digging postholes for the fence which is going around the place,” writes Kikuchi. The young African American asks the youngNisei(that is, second-generation Japanese American) about the loyalty of other Japanese Americans and is disappointed to discoverNiseiallegiance to the United States. The workman responds, “Boy, you are making a mistake. Why should you be loyal to a country that don't want you? … This is a white man's country and all the colored peoples of this world has got to change this so that I can get a good job just like a white man and I don't have to dig post holes to lock you Japanese up who are born in California. You help this country out and they will turn around and give you a kick in the pants afterwards.”

White man's country: The trans‐national history of a national project

Understandings and explanations of historical processes have been constrained and distorted by nationalist frameworks of analysis. In this article I suggest that the founding idea of Australia as a ‘white man's country’ can only be fully understood in the context of the trans‐national circulation of knowledge in the late nineteenth century, especially historical knowledge. The chief authors of the White Australia project—Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins and Edmund Barton—drew explicitly on American history lessons, most notably concerning the ‘failure’ of the multi‐racial experiment of Radical Reconstruction. And they drew especially on the writings of historians James Bryce, Charles Pearson, John W. Burgess and William Dunning. The idea of the ‘white man's country’ was a defensive trans‐national response to new global dynamics—in Africa, North and South America and Asia.

How fair is fair?

How fair is fair?

Surveying the South: A Conversation with John Shelton Reed

A Conversation with John Shelton Reed Editor's note: On a Saturday afternoon in August 2000, John Reed sat down for a conversation with Betsey and Gene Genovese, noted historians of the South, at their home in Atlanta. The tape recorder was turned on-- JOHN SHELTON REED: Aren't you supposed to read me my rights? ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE: I'd like to start with what you mean by the South. You've written a lot about the South. You do all this mesmerizing stuff with how many more people eat Moon Pies down here than in other parts of the country, or go to church, or what have you. But what's beyond that, beyond what those numbers add up to? JSR: As I've often said, I'm less interested in the South than I am in southerners. I'm less interested in the region than I am in the group. And social psychologist that I am, I see the group as defined by identification with it. Basically, the question arises: Who are these people who describe themselves as southerners? And what does that mean? How has it changed? How is it changing? I don't see southern identification as some sort of Platonic ideal to which people are in some sort of approximation. I see it as defined on the ground by the folks who choose to affiliate. And this means that the group is open to attrition and infiltration. It doesn't mean the boundary doesn't exist, it just means people cross it. What that boundary contains can change and has changed. What it contains is an empirical question. EFG: Then why do you think, as I do myself, that history seems to be so important to people's sense of what it means to be a southerner? History, place, confinuity in place, family, all of those things. JSR: I agree with you that history has been and still is important, and that one way many groups define themselves is by a shared history transmitted through ancestry. It's not the only way groups define themselves. Social classes are defined by what they have in common in the present, although they have histories, too. But it's a shared predicament in the present that gives rise to class consciousness. EUGENE D. GENOVESE: Let me press a bit further on the question of identification as southerners. That identification surely has an objective basis historically. You suggest it has been a changing basis, but then it seems to me necessary to trace the main lines of that basis. What over time has made the South a distinct region, understanding that it has not been static? It seems to me implicit in your work that there is something that could legitimately be called a tradition, which again would distinguish the South and southerners from other Americans. JSR: Well, the South emerged, historians tell me, as a self-conscious region in the sectional conflicts of the early nineteenth century. These were over slavery. And I don't have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery. It certainly wouldn't have happened without it. It's true most white southerners weren't slaveholders, but a good many of them would have liked to be. Folks up where I come from used to sing, All I want in this creation's a pretty little girl and a big plantation. Just as plainly, southern identification is not about slavery any more. For a long time it was about Jim Crow. That's what Ulrich Phillips said in the 1920s: The cardinal test of a southerner was the commitment that the South be and remain a white man's country. That was a glaring and obvious distinction. The minute you crossed into the South you were under a different system of laws. Ninety-eight percent of white southerners in 1942 thought black and white children should go to separate schools. But that's not what the South's about any more. These days southern identification is not so much a matter of shared history as a shared cultural style--some cultural conservatism, religiosity, manners, speech, humor, music, that sort of thing. I don't think many southern blacks at the turn of the century referred to themselves as southerners; Booker T. …

Making the 'White Man's Country' White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South

Making the 'White Man's Country' White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South

Crossing Borders: Sharon Pollock's Revisitation of Canadian Frontiers

Sharon Pollock's "history plays" are essentially iconoclastic, deconstructing comfo rtable assumptions about the growth of the Canadian nation and the peaceful integration of "others" from across the borders. In two of her early plays — Walsh, which premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973, and The Komagala Maru Incident, which was first produced at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1976 — she demonstrated how the politics of exclusion determined the characteristics of a "white man's country." In Fair Liberty's Call, which opened at the Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ontario in July, 1993, she deconstructs the "Loyalist myth" which assumes that Canada's democratic freedoms owe a great deal to the courageous, independent exiles from America, who crossed the border to begin a more egalitarian society. The title of Pollock's play is shown, in fact, to be ironic: there is little difference between the policy or actions of rebel and loyalist, Patriot and Tory. The contentious issues which fuelled the War of Independence...

Crossing Borders: Sharon Pollock's Revisitation of Canadian Frontiers

Sharon Pollock's "history plays" are essentially iconoclastic, deconstructing comfo rtable assumptions about the growth of the Canadian nation and the peaceful integration of "others" from across the borders. In two of her early plays — Walsh, which premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973, and The Komagala Maru Incident, which was first produced at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1976 — she demonstrated how the politics of exclusion determined the characteristics of a "white man's country." In Fair Liberty's Call, which opened at the Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ontario in July, 1993, she deconstructs the "Loyalist myth" which assumes that Canada's democratic freedoms owe a great deal to the courageous, independent exiles from America, who crossed the border to begin a more egalitarian society. The title of Pollock's play is shown, in fact, to be ironic: there is little difference between the policy or actions of rebel and loyalist, Patriot and Tory. The contentious issues which fuelled the War of Independence are replicated in Canada. In all three plays, borders are imposed — between countries, between individuals — in the interests of securing or protecting property. Political or ethical principles are modified to serve basically acquisitive impulses, and government policy expresses the entrenched bigotry and greed of an established population, all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

A Woman's Place in 'a White Man's Country'. Rights, Duties and Citizenship for the 'New' South Africa, c. 1902

A Woman's Place in 'a White Man's Country'. Rights, Duties and Citizenship for the 'New' South Africa, c. 1902

White man's country: an aspect of mid-twentieth-century Australia

White man's country: an aspect of mid-twentieth-century Australia

Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (review)

284CIVIL WAR HISTORY American nationalism expanded in the 1890s in response to major changes in society, he does not say so directly, leaving the reader not fully convinced. For all that, this challenging work offers new insight to the lasting consequences of the Civil War and the nature of Gilded Age society. Jerry Cooper University of Missouri-St. Louis Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio. By Robert D. Sawrey. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Pp. 194. $30.00.) Dubious Victory examines the effect of public opinion on the political process —and vice versa—in one important Northern state, Ohio. Sawrey asks the key question: What was it that Northerners wanted in the way of Reconstruction ? His answers demonstrate that historians who lament the failure of Reconstruction to secure substantive constitutional rights, or to provide economic security in the form of land, are guilty of imposing their own values on an era where they simply do not fit. What the voters of Ohio wanted, Sawrey finds, in an analysis that closely follows the path established by C. Vann Woodward in "Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy," was a secure peace. Ohioans never intended to disturb white supremacy in the South. When Southern intransigence impelled the national Congress toward establishing political rights for the freedmen in the South, Ohio voters refused to countenance such a revolution at home. Hoping to bring a quick finish to Reconstruction, Ohioans endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, which "almost exactly mirrored their Reconstruction demands" (61). This "moderate compromise measure" granted citizenship to blacks, provided for their basic civil rights, and guaranteed equal protection ofthe laws, all without granting them the franchise "northerners would not tolerate," especially at home. Sawrey's analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment is curiously silent on the historical debate surrounding the intent of the framers. He seems not to have pondered exactly which rights inhered in national citizenship or what changes, if any, the amendment was intended to effect in federal-state relations . His uncritical assertion that "radical Republican congressmen had failed to force their ideas into the amendment" (65) leaves the reader to wonder if he is aware that other historians have discerned a potential constitutional revolution in the amendment. And if Ohio voters perceived the Fourteenth Amendment to be as benign as Sawrey suggests, it seems strange indeed that Ohio was one of three Northern states that attempted to rescind their initial ratification of the amendment. When the South's refusal to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment moved the national Congress to impose black suffrage in the Southern states, Ohio Republicans —recognizing the hypocrisy involved in a policy for the South that they did not recognize at home—attempted to enfranchise the state's small book reviews 285 black population. Voters quickly registered their determination to keep Ohio a white man's country. They defeated the amendment soundly in 1867 and elected a Democratic majority to both houses of the state legislature. Licking their wounds, Republicans reconsidered their priorities in light of their constituents ' desires. Thus they carefully avoided the question of black suffrage in the state platform of 1868 and endorsed a national platform that endorsed black suffrage in the South whUe leaving the issue in the loyal states to be decided at home. Continuing his account through the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment , Sawrey provides tremendous insight into the limitations Northern voters forced on Reconstruction policy. Newspaper accounts and private papers of politically active Ohioans demonstrate unequivocally that Ohioans were totally uninterested in fostering genuine social or political revolution in the South. With the Fifteenth Amendment in place to enable the freedmen to work out their own political salvation, Ohio voters retreated from Reconstruction long before the national Congress made it a rout. One wishes, nevertheless, that Sawrey's brief account did not end so abruptly in 1869. Reconstruction was not over simply because Ohioans desired it so. The escalation of violence following the election of 1868 introduced the problem of how to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments— not to mention the question of what those provisions actually meant. Some analysis of public opinion regarding federal enforcement procedures in the South would make the book...

A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914.

Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments 1. The Colonial Sojourners, 1858-1871 2. A World of Their Own: Morality, Law, and Public Health, 1871-1914 3. Confederation, the Chinese, and the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1871-1885 4. Checking Chinese and Japanese Competition, 1886-1896 5. The Politics of Restricting Immigration, 1896-1902 6. Checking Competition within British Columbia, 1896-1902 7. The Lull before the Storm, 1903-1907 8. The Vancouver Riot and Its Consequences, 1907-1908 9. Making a White Man's Country, 1908-1914 Epilogue Appendix Notes Manuscript Sources Index

Historical patchwork: A reply to John Young's ‘race and sex in Fiji re‐visited’

stated in his 1968 doctoral thesis, and its slightly qualified published version of 1984.2 In both he claims (and the following words are from the published version) that: 'It was not then the attitude of the male settlers, despite their covert racism, nor that of the Fijian authorities, which led to the development of racial antagonism between the two peoples. It was the arrival in Fiji of European women in numbers sufficient to revive eroded cultural identity.' Furthermore, 'the number of women was large enough to lead men to believe that Fiji would become the future home of a race of rampant Anglo-Saxons .. .'8 In his latest paper the argument has been re-stated in a more roundabout way. Young claims that the 'crucial role of white women' in the creation of the fantasy that a new 'white man's country' was possible in Fiji was two-fold. It was crucial, firstly, for biological reasons ? 'for without them there could be no future white society' ? and, secondly, because their presence encouraged 'expectations' which made them partners 'in the revival of the cultural identity of the settler community'. In other words, because women had babies, and because they were there, they were both active participants in history and (equally?) responsible with men for deteriorating race relations.4 We do not believe that accountability for deteriorating race relations can be assigned to white women merely because they were white women, had recently arrived in Fiji, or were expected by men to think and behave in particular Stereotypie ways. Nor does this establish their active participation in history. It allows for prescriptions, expectations and roles being held responsible for historical outcomes, rather than real people. Young's explanation is based on the ill-argued assumption that prior to the arrival of white women relations between white men and Fijians were harmonious, and fails to take into account the more basic factors responsible for racial tension. As Claudia Knapman pointed out in her critique of this position, Young himself suggested more fundamental social, political and economic reasons for conflict. These centred on the white settlers' primary concern for land, labour and security. Since Young has presented no new data nor new insights, which might advance our understanding, it should not be necessary to elaborate on the causes for tension nor the detailed objections to his argument here. They are discussed in detail in Knapman's White Women in Fiji.5 In Young's recent paper there is considerable misrepresentation of our views (frequently by implication), much of the discussion is not integrated with the argument and its relevance is unclear, and the elaborated re-statement of his earlier position fails to address the theoretical and methodological insights of feminist history. These three concerns will be addressed in turn. In terms of misrepresenting our views, the article seems to be based on the totally