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Presidental Address
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The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun
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In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians,
William H. Chafe challenges the traditional tendency
to see the age of segregation as one of pure oppression and victimization.
Chafe cites the daily acts of courage, resilience, and community building
through which African Americans sought to maintain the dignity and integrity
of their families, to create a better world for their children, and to find
ways of moving forward--inch by inch--to achieve the chance of freedom. Based
on interviews in ten states, the article suggests the rich texture of African
American community and family life, even in this, "the nadir" of post-Civil
War black experience.
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Articles
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Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst
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The story that the British general Jeffery Amherst attempted to infect Native
Americans with smallpox at Fort Pitt in 1763 has become a commonplace of
American history. But is the story true? And, if the attempt was made, could
it have worked? Was it an isolated incident? Elizabeth A. Fenn,
whose essay won the Louis Pelzer Award for 1999, takes a new look at the evidence
regarding smallpox transmission in eighteenth-century America. She shows that
contemporary military ethics left ample room for acts of biological terror, that
means of spreading smallpox were well known, and that accusations of deliberate
smallpox infection arose frequently. If incidents of willful contagion were not
common, they were probably not so rare as historians previously believed.
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Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling:
The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education
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Current debates about religion in public schools often reflect misconceptions
about the pervasiveness of religion in nineteenth-century schooling.
R. Laurence Moore, drawing on the annual reports of state
public school superintendents, argues that Bible reading and school prayer
were not the practice in most schools. The furor over Bible reading that
alienated many Catholic leaders from public schools obscured the fact that
religion never played more than a marginal role in public school instruction.
Bible reading, where it persisted, was little more than an element of school
discipline. Moore attributes the absence of religious instruction, not to court
decisions, but to the opposition of many religious groups to school lessons that
treated all religious perspectives equally.
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The Changing Experience of Nature:
Historical Encounters with a Northwest River
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Taking seriously the claim that human experience, including experience of
nature, is historical, Linda Nash shows how a series of
surveyors and engineers understood and represented the Skagit River in
western Washington from the 1850s to the 1930s. Not only the interests of
institutions and economic groups but the language and technology people
used shaped experience of the river. Over time, scientific, or objective,
methods of understanding the river were institutionalized, yet individuals--
even engineers--never fully relinquished subjective modes of knowing.
Drawing on literature in the history of science and intellectual history,
Nash writes about the persistent tension between subjective and objective
ways of approaching the natural world.
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On the Borderland of Ethnicity and Race: A Round Table
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On the Borderland of Ethnicity and Race: An Introduction, by David Nord
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Studies of Japanese Americans often focus on their internment
during World War II and thus emphasize the external forces
shaping their history. By examining ethnic organizations in
the prewar decade and the experiences of those who left the
camps during the war, the two articles in our round table,
"On the Borderland of Ethnicity and Race," instead show
Japanese Americans struggling to define themselves.
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The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II
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The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is often seen
as an experiment that engineered an American identity by suppressing
ethnicity. But the group's ethnic identity in the decade before the war,
Lon Kurashige argues, was no less manufactured. Examining
how and why second-generation leaders of the Japanese American community
in Los Angeles created its annual Nisei Week celebration, Kurashige traces
the enactment and enforcement of a biculturalism that opposed external
racial pressures by concealing orchestrations of class, gender, and
cultural authority within Little Tokyo.
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In the Twilight Zone between Black and White:
Japanese American Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942-1945
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By the end of World War II, almost 60,000 Japanese Americans had left
government concentration camps for the Midwest and East.
Charlotte Brooks argues that this large-scale wartime
resettlement both transformed Japanese American life in the United
States and shook up race relations in Chicago. Placing resettlement
in the context of the great wartime migration of African Americans to
the city, Brooks suggests that this larger migration and its ramifications
preoccupied the city's white population. White Chicagoans rarely accepted
Japanese Americans as full equals. But wartime interviews with Japanese
American resettlers reveal that they embraced and defended the
opportunities that black-white tensions created for them, despite the
limits to those opportunities.
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Textbooks and Teaching
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Introduction, by Peter Filene and Peter Wood
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
At Loose Ends: Twentieth-Century Latinos in Current United States History Textbooks,
by Joseph A. Rodríguez and Vicki L. Ruiz
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
A Novel Approach: Using Fiction by African American Women to Teach Black Womens History, by Beverly A. Bunch-Lyons
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
What Happened in the Rainier Grands Lobby? A Question of Sources, by Char Miller
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Teaching Gender History to Secondary School Students, by Kathleen M. Dalton and E. Anthony Rotundo
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
AIDS and American History: Four Perspectives on Experiential Learning, by Douglas Bailey, Gabby DeVinny, Carre Gordon, and Paul John Schadewald
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Book Reviews
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A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
Volume Contents
Volume Index
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On the cover:
Tourists visiting Los Angeles's Little Tokyo in 1941 are treated to a night of adventure and
consumer pleasures, while being assured that Japanese Americans are law-abiding residents
and citizens of the United States. Courtesy Nisei Week Japanese Festival, Inc. See
Lon Kurashige, "The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II."
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