The Journal of American History

Issues

September 1997
Volume 84, No. 2

Articles
Slavery, Freedom, and Social Claims to Property among African Americans in Liberty County, Georgia, 1850-1880
How could slaves, without rights and themselves legally property, own property? Dylan Penningroth's account of mid-nineteenth-century African American society on the Georgia coast explores slaves' ability to maintain stable claims of ownership. Slaves' access to resources grew out of a network of social relationships, interests, and informal understandings. They cooperated with neighbors and kin, traded, and left property to heirs. Public display of property in yards and before the black and white inhabitants gathered for church services fixed title. Penningroth teases out the story from claims for compensation made by ex-slaves whose livestock and movable goods had been seized by Union soldiers--claims that often convinced northern officials that slaves had not merely "possessed" property but "owned" it.
"Good Cooks and Washers": Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourban County, Kentucky
In a study of slave hiring in antebellum Bourbon County, in northern Kentucky, Keith C. Barton shows how slavery was used to fulfill domestic ideals usually associated with the northern middle class. Bourbon Countians, including many who owned no slaves, often hired slaves to do household labor. White wives and mothers could then devote themselves to managing household consumption. Disturbing questions lurk here--about the symbiosis of domestic ideals and exploitation and the adaptability of slavery amid social change.
Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois described the voice narrating his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folks, as African. Richard Cullen Rath unpacks that description. Like other turn-of-the-century thinkers, Du Bois saw history as made by striving, purposeful energies. But he balked at identifying such energies only with individuals. His embrace of a West African idea of purposeful transpersonal souls enabled Du Bois to reject individualism without denying human agency. The coherence of Du Bois's work is lost, Rath argues, if it is placed solely within traditions derived from Europe. But Du Bois never relinquished his European and American training, especially in William James's pragmatism. In showing how Du Bois constructed his thought from a double ground that was both African and American, Rath helps us comprehend what is African in American identity.
The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory
Kevin Boyle explores the shifting social world of 1950s industrial workers as it was revealed in an explosive incident--a "Merry Christmas" kiss placed on the cheek of a white woman by a black man. The article traces the cultural constructs that divided automobile factories, pitting workers against employers, whites against blacks, men against women. It shows how such human impulses as playfulness, friendship, and desire led two workers to cross cultural boundaries. The article itself blurs the boundaries of social history, which privileges large-scale forces over the intimacies of everyday life. To understand the racial and gender conflicts that cut through workers' worlds, Boyle suggests, historians need to see the delicate and dangerous ways in which personal acts and cultural strictures coincided and conflicted.
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People in Motion, Nation in Question: The Case of Twentieth-Century America: A Round Table
What does it mean to become American? Is the American nation that immigrants joined and shaped best understood as a way station in many diasporas, a potential bearer of humane values, or a focus for coercive impulses? The contributors to our round table "People in Motion, Nation in Question" address these questions.
Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans
Old myths die hard. Here Gary Gerstle examines the persistence among historians of one of our nation's oldest myths, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's eighteenth-century celebration of "America" as emancipating immigrants from Old World constraints. From the 1920s to the 1970s, scholars excised Crèvecoeurian motifs from historical accounts of immigration and acculturation. But since then some have depicted the United States as offering individuals extraordinary freedom to determine their own identities. These neo-Crèvecoeurians are opposed by scholars who emphasize how class, gender, race, and nation eviscerate or constrain the real emancipatory potential of "Americanism."
National Solidarity at the End of the Twentieth Century: Reflections on the United States and Liberal Nationalism
In a concluding critique of David A. Hollinger's Postethnic America, Gerstle connects historiography with current debates about immigration, multiculturalism, and the future of the American nation. David A. Hollinger offers a qualified defense of a liberal nationalism that appeals to a sense of shared nationality to justify state action in behalf of citizens' welfare, liberty, and equality. The defense is grounded, not in a confidence that liberal nationalism will inevitably succeed in diminishing racism and socioeconomic inequality, but in a belief that it is a more promising instrument of these ends than alternative kinds of identity and solidarity available to the United States. Hollinger insists that choices about committing energies to one solidarity or another be formulated in a global context and take account of the dynamics of world capitalism and of ethnoreligious particularism. He finds obvious many of the points about American history and generic nationalism emphasized by Gary Gerstle, and he takes sharp issue with Gerstle's characterization of his recent book, Postethnic America.
Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Immigration Historians
Donna R. Gabaccia agrees that nativism, immigration restriction, and red scares help explain the Americanization of immigrants who stayed. But she calls for an interpretation that acknowledges the majority of migrants to the United States who returned home or migrated elsewhere. All sending and receiving countries seek to create loyal citizens out of transient workers; the making of Americans and American debates about national unity and cultural pluralism express a global, twentieth-century transformation in the relationship of states and citizens. Her essay opens the possibility of freeing the study of immigration from national histories and embedding it in a transnational history.
The Power of Nations
by Gary Gerstle
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Oral History
Introduction, by Lu Ann Jones and Michael Gordon "There's a Footnote to History!": Memory and the History of Martin Luther King's October 1960 Arrest and Its Aftermath, by Clifford M. Kuhn The Oral History Collections of the Presidential Libraries, by Regina Greenwell
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Editor's Annual Report, 1996-1997 What We See and Can't See in the Past: Responses Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: W. E. B. Du Bois as a young man, late 1880s. Courtesy Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor Lenox and Tilden Foundations. See "Echo and Narcissums: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois," by Richard Cullen Rath.