The Journal of American History

Issues

September 1998
Volume 85, No. 2

The Uses of Memory: A Round Table
The Uses of Memory: A Round Table; Introduction by David Paul Nord
For the past decade historians have explored public memory. "The Uses of Memory: A Round Table" suggests new directions. In essays that treat the context, the power, the multiplicity, the malleability, and even the distortions of personal memory as topics for historical study, Robert E. McGlone and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall refocus the study of historical memory on the individual.
Deciphering Memory: John Adams and the Authorship of the Declaration of Independence
What are historians to conclude when truthful witnesses to the past report conflicting memories of shared experiences? What, if anything, can false memories tell us? John Adams and Thomas Jefferson gave contradictory accounts of how Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. Robert E. McGlone argues that experimental psychologists have opened a "code book" for understanding how personal memories such as these are reconstructed in response to changing circumstances. Some memories, he concludes, come to represent not the past itself, but rather presumed truths about life in general or about the rememberers' place in events. Thus in memory's errors may lie coded revelations about the rememberer's sense of self as well as about the contested past.
"You Must Remember This": Autobiography as Social Critique
In a meditation on the life and autobiographical writings of the radical scholar Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall troubles the boundaries between memory and history and illuminates the ways in which historians' memories inform the stories they write. Lumpkin drew on counter memories and on her professional skills to confront and escape the cult of the Lost Cause, the white South's turn-of-the-century effort to secure an understanding of the past that would turn defeat into moral victory and justify disfranchisement and segregation. Using Lumpkin's classic autobiography, The Making of a Southerner (1946), as a point of departure, Hall presents a gender and generational analysis of the Lost Cause and an argument for the use of autobiography as social critique.
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Articles
Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriag in Southern New England, 1760-1880
Daniel R. Mandell shows how the struggle of Indians in southern New England to maintain families and communities was shaped after 1760 by intermarriage with African Americans. Some Indian communities retained the numbers, autonomy, and resources to assimilate the newcomers and their mixed children. Outside such groups, intermarriage combined with migration and regional economic and cultural changes to make dual and shifting ethnic identities and affiliations common. But even the larger tribes were challenged by the strange mixture of romanticism, racism, and civil equality that had developed among whites by the Civil War era. The Indians' story provides an extraordinary view of the social context and effects of intermarriage in America, offering insight into the complexity and shifting nature of race, ethnic identity, and acculturation.
"A Little Beyond": The Problem of Transcendentalist Movement in American History
No homemade intellectual movement in the United States has resonated so widely through so many cultural discourses as Transcendentalism. Yet it has virtually disappeared as a major paradigm in recent historical scholarship. In an essay based on his keynote address for the 1997 Massachusetts Historical Society conference, "Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts," Charles Capper illuminates both sides of that paradox. In a wide-ranging account of interpretations of the movement, he argues that Transcendentalism's intellectual staying power has been nurtured by both its roots in the Tocquevillean trinity of liberal religion, individualist democracy, and national identity and the reconstruction of that trinity by modern ideologies. He shows how postmodern historicist currents, generally thought to have buried liberal intellectual formations, offer unprecedented opportunities for a revival of historical Transcendentalism.
Robert F. Williams, "Black Power," and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle
In 1955 the Eagle Eye: The Woman's Voice, a black newsletter published in Mississippi, warned the "white hoodlums who are now parading around the premises" that the editors were "protected by armed guard." If rarely announced in print, this practice was common among black southerners. In a study of Robert E. Williams, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an advocate of "armed self-reliance" in North Carolina in the 1950s, Timothy B. Tyson argues that armed struggle was as important to the civil rights movement as it was to Black Power. Indeed, most elements that we associate with Black Power were long-standing traditions in the rural and smalltown South where the civil rights movement was born. From Reconstruction on, armed struggle, black pride, and independent black political action operated in tension and tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.
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Review Essay
Taping History
From 1962, when John F. Kennedy installed hidden microphones in the Oval Office, to 1973, when Watergate investigators learned of Richard M. Nixon's secret White House tapes, electronic devices recorded the intimate political and policy conversations of the nation's highest leaders. As transcripts become public, the presidential tapes seem to offer unprecedented evidentiary riches--direct access to the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room that previous historians could only dream about. But how will the newly released presidential tapes shape historical interpretation of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations? How should historians assess this new cache of source material? In a review of books that redact such material, Bruce J. Schulman evaluates the prospects and perils of the presidential tapes.
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Oral History
Introduction, by Michael Gordon and Lu Ann Jones Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History, by Alistair Thomson Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-five Years, by Rick Halpern Interviewing a Close Friend, First Amendment Activist Frank Wilkinson, by Dale E. Treleven
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Editor's Annual Report, 1997-1998 Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: Left to right, Edward S. Williams, Robert F. Williams, John H. Williams (kneeling), and Dr. Albert E. Perry Jr., M.D., at a metting of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1957. What Robert F. Williams called "armed self-reliance" was crucial to the African American freedom struggle and deeply rooted in the culture of the black South. See Timothy B. Tyson, "Robert F. Williams, 'Black Power,' and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle." Photo, John Herman Williams, Courtesy of John Herman Williams.