The Journal of American History

Issues

December 2000
Volume 87, No. 3

Articles
What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy
Why did public discussion about sex scandals in American politics thrive in the nineteenth century and fade from view in the first half of the twentieth? John H. Summers argues that the twin influences of evangelical Protestantism and democratic republicanism elevated offenses against prevailing mores to prominence in the nineteenth-century media. Politicians' peccadilloes received little attention in the mainstream press after the 1890s, as the decline of popular politics, the professionalization of American journalism, and the consolidation of a political elite combined to create a political culture of reticence. Summers concludes with reflections on our current preoccupation with the moral character of political leaders and its import for democracy. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania
In the years following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, farmers throughout Pennsylvania obstructed roads with fallen trees, deep ditches, and high fences. Terry Bouton argues that those mysterious road closings were part of an agrarian protest against tax and monetary policies that had led to mass property foreclosure across the countryside. Bouton shows how farmers responded to the crisis by developing networks of resistance that state and national leaders ultimately undermined with new constitutions and laws. Questioning previous interpretations of the "Whiskey Rebellion" of 1794 and "Fries's Rebellion" of 1799, Bouton portrays those uprisings as part of persistent efforts by rural insurgents to halt the erosion of their economic and political independence. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History
"Disability" pervades modern history, according to Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, yet it is usually missing from historical research and teaching. Through a study of the League of the Physically Handicapped, Longmore and Goldberger demonstrate both disabled people's historical agency and disability's historical significance. Fighting job discrimination in New Deal work programs, league members politicized disability by contesting the dominant ideology that framed it as a medicalized social problem. This study of reform, social policy, and cultural values also illuminates the use of disability to mark its opposite, normality, as a means to manage social--and particularly class--relations in modern society. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Cinqué and the Historians: How a Story Takes Hold: A Round Table
Our round table, "Cinqué and the Historians: How a Story Takes Hold," raises perplexing questions about how efforts to address contemporary concerns and create interesting narratives shape the writing of history.
Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth
What do Steven Spielberg, Samuel Eliot Morison, C. Vann Woodward, and Samuel Flagg Bemis have in common? They are all part of a tangled mythology surrounding the claim that Joseph Cinqué, leader of the 1839 revolt on board the slave ship Amistad, returned to Africa and became a slave trader. Using the historian's craft to interrogate the sources that led scholars to question Cinqué's historical image, Howard Jones reveals how an unfounded rumor became a "fact." [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
On Cinqué and the Historians; Mea Culpa; Cinqué, Tall and Strong
Three historians whose work Howard Jones criticizes respond. Paul Finkelman suggests that the evidence on Cinqué's alleged involvement in the slave trade is more complex and ambiguous than Jones believes. Cinqué was important, Finkelman argues, not for what he did after returning to Africa, but for what he did on board the Amistad and in Connecticut. Bertram Wyatt-Brown acknowledges with hindsight that he should have more carefully scrutinized the assertions of Cinqué's biographers. He calls for more research on the African activities of the American Missionary Association (AMA), the organization whose records and institutional memory may have given rise to the rumor linking Cinqué to the slave trade. William S. McFeely reports that Jones has almost convinced him. Linking the fascination with Cinqué's life to historians' debates on race and slavery, he affirms Cinqué's historical importance as the leader of a fight for freedom. Paul Finkelman: [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Bertram Wyatt-Brown: [Full text available at the History Cooperative] William S. McFeely: [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Review Essay
Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review
In our times scholars have pitted memory against history. Those scholars equate history with a study of social structures that overlooks local and subjective experience. They understand memory, in contrast, as a collective construction and representation of the past that yields inspiring and unifying myths. John Bodnar analyzes the recent English-language edition of Pierre Nora's multivolume study of French national memory (first published in French, 1984-1992) and connects it to explorations of the fashioning of memory in various nations, including the United States. National history, Bodnar concludes, has lost its capacity to rationalize the past and contain memory largely because twentieth-century wars disrupted the faith in reason and progress underlying historical constructions of nationhood. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Exhibition Reviews
Introduction by Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice [Full text available at the History Cooperative] From New England to the Great Salt Lake, by Claudia L. Bushman and Richard Lyman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Houdini, by Joshua Ranger [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Sigmund Freud, by Ellen DuBois [Full text available at the History Cooperative] This Land Is Your Land, by David Suisman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Star-Spangled Banner, by Char Miller [Full text available at the History Cooperative] San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, by Thomas S. Bremer [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Kansas in Miniature, by Jay M. Price [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Virtual Wall, by Ed Martini [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Battle Road 2000, by Cathy Stanton [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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Movie Reviews
Reel Report, 1999-2000, by Robert Brent Toplin [Full text available at the History Cooperative] I'll Make Me a World, by Thomas Cripps [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Patriot, by William Ross St. George Jr. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Duel, Suzanne Geissler [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Not for Ourselves Alone and Six Generations of Suffragettes, by Nancy Isenberg [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Sally Hemings, by Catherine Clinton [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Found Voices, by Graham Hodges [Full text available at the History Cooperative] John Brown's Holy War, by Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Who Was Abraham, Lincoln? By Daniel Walker Howe [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Vendetta, by Clive Webb [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Tell about the South, by John C. Inscoe [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Joe Gould's Secret, by Mary Corey [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Hoover Dam, by Virginia Scharff [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio, by Robert F. Murk [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Step by Step, by Kathleen C. Berkeley [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Ordinary Americans, Robert Griffith [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Barry Goldwater, by Jeff Roche [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Watts, Then and Now, by Gerald Horne [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Nixon's China Game, by Sayuri Shimizu [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Hurricane, by Randy Roberts [Full text available at the History Cooperative] 444 Days, by John Dumbrell [Full text available at the History Cooperative] La Ciudad (The City), by Jefferson Cowie [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: This romantic rendering of Joseph Cinqué was painted during the Amistad trial by the New Haven artist Nathaniel Jocelyn. Oil on canvas, c. 1840. Courtesy New Haven Colony Historical Society. See Howard Jones, "Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth."