The Journal of American History

Issues

March 1998
Volume 84, No. 4

Articles
"The Extention of His Majesties Dominions": The Virginia Backcountry and the Reconfiguration of Imperial Frontiers
The eighteenth-century American frontier has long been regarded as both the creation of those who settled it and the matrix of a distinctive American society. Warren R. Hofstra puts the frontier in a broader, transnational context, turning the spotlight on international struggles and people who shaped the frontier from afar. The eighteenth-century Virginia backcountry was an arena for the contest between England and France, Protestantism and Catholicism. The backcountry's ethnic, religious, and economic diversity was, Hofstra argues, the purposeful creation of British imperial officials who offered land to settlers and speculators -- the protagonists in much frontier historiography- to fulfill imperial strategies. To thwart European enemies, to stabilize regions unsettled by conflicts involving Native Americans, and to secure land from runaway slaves, imperial officials promoted the settlements of white, Protestant, yeoman farm families that defined this frontier.
Huguenot Traditions in the Mountains of Kentucky: Daniel Trabue's Memories
An intimate, local perspective on eighteenth-century American frontiers and the white, Protestant yeomen who peopled them emerges from Marco Sioli's essay, which won the OAH Foreign-Language Article Prize for 1996. Sioli sensitively reads the early-nineteenth-century memoir of Daniel Trabue, a Virginia-born Kentuckian of French Huguenot descent. Sioli explores how Huguenots remade memories and traditions of their ancestors' flight from persecution and their establishment in a new land. Such memories, he suggests, were blended into their interpretations of the major eighteenth they participated -including religious awakenings, the American Revolution, and the settlement of the trans-Appalachian frontier. The article illuminates the construction of memory and the way non-English settlers helped form the United States as a nation and a culture.
Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845
François Weil, whose essay won the OAH Foreign-Language Article Prize for 1997, uses methods reminiscent of the Annales tradition in French historiography to revisit a classic topic in American economic history. Weil challenges the view that industrialization began in the United States when a group of rich and powerful men, the Boston Associates, responded to opportunities opened up by technical changes in the British textile industry. Weil first deconstructs how the concept of "Boston Associates" entered historiography. Then, in a study of the local entrepreneurs who developed industries around Springfield, Massachusetts, he proposes an alternative explanation for economic transformation. To understand the origins of American industrialization, Weil suggests, historians should explore the local dynamism of early-nineteenth-century New England.
Accidental Ethnography in an Antebellum Southern Newspaper: Snell's Homecoming Festival
What do the tall tales of antebellum southern humor and the rigidities of southern honor have to do with each other? Exploring that question, Edward E. Baptist or dealing with the persistent problem of the suggests a strategy for dealing with the lack of sources from the lower levels of pre-twentieth-century society. Baptist mixes a close reading of an elite source, a Jocular news paper account of a bizarre court case in Florida in the 1840s, with a deep investigation of the many contexts that shaped this document. In the antebellum South, the essay argues, conflicting definitions of honor and masculinity shaped encounters between planters and poorer whites. Recovery of the subtleties of lower-class hite male humor-even from elite sources that caricature it-may challenge assumptions about planter hegemony.
The Politics of Cafe Society
Are cultural gestures--entertainment, art, music--a meaningful form of political action? Rejecting work in American cultural history that erases distinctions between culture and politics, David W. Stowe answers: Not unless participants recognize them as politics. His suggestive study of the Greenwich Village nightclub Café Society shows orthodox and cultural politics interacting, Founded and patronized by the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s, Café Society challenged racial barriers among audiences and performers, lampooned fascism, and sassed Manhattan's social elite. It also had links to the Communist party's drive for social acceptance and political power. Those links led J. Edgar Hoover to collect a file on its proprietor, Barney Josephson. As this information was leaked to journalists, Josephson and his club became casualties of the red scare. Yet Café Society, rooted in orthodox prewar politics, was also an emblem of the cultural politics that remade postwar United States society.
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Textbooks and Teaching
Textbooks and Teaching: A Reintroduction, by Peter Filene and Peter Wood "Pictures Have Now Become a Necessity": The Use of Images in American History Textbooks, by Louis P. Masur Slavery in United States Survey Textbooks, by Peter Kolchin Explorations in Teaching Inspiration: A Seminar for Students Beginning Dissertations, by Martha Hodes "Dynamic Syllabi for Dummies": Posting Class Assignments on the World Wide Web, by Gary J. Kornblith Mr. Yamamoto and Japanese Americans in New Jersey during World War II, by Robert Shaffer Material Object as Document: A "Hair-Curling" Classroom Exercise, by James S. Terry
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship Scholarship in Law Reviews, Michal R. Belknap Volume Contents Volume Index
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On the cover: The Stork Club served as a New York headquarters for Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, shown with associate Clyde Tolson at a New Year's Eve party, 1935. With its whites-only policy, overpriced food and drink, and emphasis on chances to gawk at celebrities rather than on entertainment, "the Stork" was the polar opposite of Café Society. Reprinted from Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. See "The Politics of Caré Society" by David W. Stowe.