The Journal of American History

Issues

September 2000
Volume 87, No. 2

Articles
Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s
In 1872, when Anthony Comstock provoked the arrest of Victoria Woodhull for sending "obscene" literature through the mails, he exposed the fault lines rumbling beneath the surface of America's sexual culture. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz uses that exposure to reveal, not a polarized debate between old and new, but a complex, fluid conversation about sexual representation. New understandings of the body and of desire raised questions about public discussion of sex: What should the law allow? What should the courts censor? Reinterpreting the law of obscenity, Horowitz relates changes in it to a rising distrust of the commercial urban male culture that sustained racy literature and vice. The clash between Woodhull and Comstock, Horowitz shows, was the last major gasp of a multivoiced nineteenth-century American conversation about sex, before censorship forced it into narrower boundaries. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age
What happened to the national contraceptive trade in the 1870s, when Congress suddenly made it illegal? Andrea Tone teases out an answer from arrest and Post Office Department records, credit reports, patents, love letters, trade catalogs, and trial records. Rejecting characterizations of the era between the criminalization of contraception and Margaret Sanger's movement in the 1910s as birth control's bleakest chapter, she concludes that a lively bootleg birth control trade flourished in the Gilded Age. Tone connects everyday sexual practices to the history of law, business, and reproductive control and shows how legal leniency, entrepreneurial savvy, and widespread consumer support enabled the black market contraceptive industry to thrive. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America
Whom does the welfare state regulate and to what end? Scholars have recently recovered the formative role of gender in the making of modern welfare policy. Gender ideology, they argue, produced structural inequities: Poor mothers received tightly regulated public assistance; workingmen, as breadwinners, received more generous social insurance. Michael Willrich uses local criminal court records to examine another side of the breadwinner norm--the cultural and legal presumption that men must support their wives and children. In the Progressive Era women reformers, charity officials, and male judges created a coercive new system to prevent workingmen from shifting their masculine responsibilities as breadwinners to the public. "Deadbeat Dads" have a history, and our understanding of gender and welfare is incomplete without them. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Talcott Parsons's Shift Away from Economics, 1937-1946
Historians often applaud American thought of the early twentieth century for encouraging intellectual innovation, social reform, and democratic models of community, but in much midcentury social thought they lament a loss of critical perspective and surrender of political will. Howard Brick examines the work of the Harvard University sociologist Talcott Parsons in order to challenge that view. Parsons's inquiries into the nature of modern capitalism reveal the persistence and transformation of reform impulses in social theory. And subtle changes in concepts of economy, society, culture, and personality that Parsons helped shape made possible new kinds of social criticism. The career of the reputedly conservative Parsons thus illuminates surprising continuities in American reformist thought from the Social Gospel to the New Deal and the New Left. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Politics in an Age of Anxiety: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960
K. A. Cuordileone takes familiar Cold War era texts, figures, and events and invites readers to look at anticommunist politics in a new way. Historians have stressed how Cold War political imperatives shaped ideals relating to the family, women, and gender roles; Cuordileone shows that early Cold War political discourse was shaped by concerns about manhood, sexuality, and the male self. Such concerns found their way into partisan politics: In the 1950s a sexually charged political dynamic kept Democrats on the defensive until they succeeded in reinventing themselves as unquestionably hard, intellectually muscular cold warriors. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
No Diplomatic Immunity: African Diplomats, the State Department, and Civil Rights, 1961-1964
In the early 1960s, the State Department became an active, if reluctant, participant in the Kennedy administration's civil rights bureaucracy. Concerned about racial discrimination against African diplomats, State Department officials led campaigns for open housing in Washington, D.C., and a public accommodations bill in Maryland. Those campaigns, Renee Romano argues, not only illuminate the inner workings of the Kennedy administration but also show how the Cold War could foster support for civil rights reforms. While anticommunist crusades hindered progressive politics in the United States, Cold War foreign policy goals encouraged greater activism on civil rights within the government and on occasion led the federal government to take the initiative in making domestic racial reforms. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Oral History
Introduction, by Michael Gordon and Lu Ann Jones [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Talking about War: Reflections on Doing Oral History and Military History, by Edward M. Coffman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Voices from Vietnam: Veterans Oral Histories in the Classroom, by Patrick Hagopian [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Teaching the Past through Oral History, by Pattie Dillon [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Oral History as an Approach to State History, by Kimberly K. Porter [Full text available at the History Cooperative] War, Journalism, and Oral History, by Gary Rice [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Chatham County, Community at the Crossroads: A Southern/African American Oral History Seminar, by Spencie Love [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Editor's Annual Report, 1999-2000 Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: "GET THEE BEHIND ME [MRS.] SATAN." Thomas Nast's 1872 representation of Victoria Woodhull as the devil in female form conveys the moral threat Woodhull posed as seen by upholders of traditional values. Reprinted from Harper's Weekly, February 17, 1872. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, "Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s."