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Presidental Address
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Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform
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In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians,
David Montgomery challenges the overarching narrative that presents United States
history as simply the progressive fulfillment of democratic ideals. Such a view obscures the popular
struggles that have fallen short of their participants' goals and the popular achievements that have
been reversed. Montgomery warns that celebrating past victories of democracy has too often been a way
to undercut attempts to expand human rights. The necessary context of American history is the worldwide
migrations of free and unfree people. Conflicts over the purposes and objectives of government have been
inseparable from the consequent controversies over who is, or can be, an American.
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Articles
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Evolution For John Doe: Pictures, the Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate
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Examining the debates over evolution that culminated in the Scopes trial in 1925, Constance
Areson Clark directs us from the contest of words to the contest of images. Scientists use
images, she argues, not only to communicate among themselves and with the public, but also to shape
their ideas. Such images permeate our culture, but they may not mean the same thing to outsiders as to
scientists. In the essay that won the Louis Pelzer Award for 2000, Clark analyzes visual depictions of
evolutionary ideas in the textbooks, magazines, popular books, and museums of the early twentieth century.
Those images did more than oversimplify scientists' thinking. By presenting evolution as a tidy,
one-directional progress toward humans, they fed racist and eugenicist convictions of the superiority of
some humans to others.
For suggestions on how to use Clark's article in the United States history survey course, see
"Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement.
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The United States and "Psychological Warfare" in Italy, 1948-1955
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Mario Del Pero takes us inside American covert efforts to undermine Italian Communism between
1948 and 1955, the height of the Cold War in Italy. In the essay that won the David Thelen Prize
for 2000, Del Pero shows how the United States shifted its containment strategy from promoting
economic development in the late 1940s to purging Communists from Italian politics and labor after
1953. But American policy was not effective as Italy's leaders sought to contain American pressures.
Such parties as the Christian Democrats battled Communists at the polls but refused to carry out
American strategies if they compromised Italy's constitution. Anticommunism was not enough to
produce an automatic convergence of interests between the Italian and United States governments.
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Round Table: Federal Power and Southern Resistance during World War I
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World War I dramatically increased the presence of the federal government in the lives of
ordinary southerners. In our round table, "Federal Power and Southern Resistance during
World War I," three historians examine how wartime conscription and social insurance
brought federal policy directly into the communities and households of southerners, both
unsettling and reinforcing relationships of class, race, and gender.
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The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917-1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South
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Most histories of World War I have located draft resistance in immigrant and
socialist communities in the Northeast and Midwest. Jeanette Keith argues that the
nation's largest center of draft resistance was the rural South. Rural southern whites
protested conscription through conventional means until shut down by the federal
government's wartime sedition laws. Resistance stiffened as rural whites and blacks
faced draft boards operating under federal rules that penalized the poor. Although
members of both races protested, resistance reflected the racial construction of
southern society, with whites more likely to use violence than blacks. This history
of resistance contradicts long-held assumptions of popular support for the war.
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War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen's Dependents in the South, 1917-1921
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Cash payments for dependents of World War I soldiers, an unprecedented national welfare program,
were intended to reinforce conventional notions of women's work and husbands' power over wives.
Yet, by creating an entitlement and by bringing women into direct contact with the state, the
payments undermined separate gender spheres and male authority, most dramatically in the American
South. The system allowed women to claim half of their husbands' pay--even against their husbands'
will--and demonstrated how the federal government might promote the welfare of families in a region
with few welfare services. More, the payments permitted African American women to escape field labor
and domestic service--perhaps contributing to the later exclusion of agricultural and domestic
laborers from Social Security. K. Walter Hickel's account of the program enriches
our understanding of Progressive reform, the origins of the New Deal, federalism, and women's history.
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Federal Power, Southern Power: A Long View, 1860-1940
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Jacqueline Jones places the southern home front during World War I in the context of the
Civil War and the New Deal. Commenting on the essays by Keith and Hickel, Jones highlights the persistent
efforts of local authorities to circumvent federal authority and the enduring tensions between southerners
along racial and class lines. Throughout these articles can be heard the echoes of a turbulent Confederate
history, even as both foreshadow the social welfare debates of the 1930s.
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Review Essay
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The Liberal Tradition in America: A German View
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Has liberalism defined American political culture? Is American history exceptional? For
three decades historians of the United States have generally said no to both questions.
Klaus J. Hansen respectfully reviews a book by the German scholar Hans
Vorländer that says yes. Hansen agrees that liberalism, though tempered by religion
and republicanism, has dominated American political thinking. To elucidate Vorländer's
contrarian stance, Hansen highlights a juxtaposition implicit in Vorländer's work: the
Sonderweg, the special path taken by Germany as an industrial society that eschewed liberal
democracy, versus the exceptionalism of the United States as an industrial society that
established liberal hegemony. Hansen suggests that Vorländer's study shows the value of an
outsider's perspective.
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Textbooks and Teaching
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Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion
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The syllabi for the United States history survey course developed
by several participants in the Textbooks and Teaching round table
are available at
http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2001/.
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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
Contents of Volume 87
Index of Volume 87
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On the cover: William Jennings Bryan was among the most frequent subjects of 1920s editorial cartoons,
often appearing alongside "cave men" and Neanderthals. The familiar sequence here lends itself to an
implied pun on the idea of the "descent" of humans. When this cartoon originally appeared in 1925,
the four frames were in a line, left to right. Reprinted with permission from the New Yorker,
June 6, 1925. © The New Yorker Collection 1925 Rea Irvin from
cartoonbank.com.
All Rights Reserved. See Constance Areson Clark, "Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public,
and the Scopes Trial Debate."
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