The Journal of American History

Issues

June 2001
Volume 88, No. 1

Articles
Reading Indians' Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches
	Historians often confront primary sources whose genre conventions mask individual experience. Erik R. Seeman uses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionaries' accounts of Indians' deathbed scenes to propose a method for handling such formulaic sources. Model accounts of deaths those that adhere closely to conventional portrayals of the good deathcan give insight into the goals missionaries brought with them to colonial New France and New England. Unorthodox accounts of deaths those that deviate from centuries-old narrative modelscan tell us more about how Indians behaved. By combining the perspectives of social and cultural history, this methodology coaxes insight from seemingly intractable materials and suggests a way to mine other formulaic sources such as wills and conversion narratives. Reprinted from Father Joseph François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (1724; Toronto, 1977). [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy
	Today historians often depict Jacksonian Democracy as traditionalist, fundamentally proslavery, and antiblack. Daniel Feller challenges that depiction in his study of Benjamin Tappan, a leading Democrat and elder brother of the Christian abolitionists Lewis and Arthur Tappan. Casting themselves as Enlightenment crusaders against a reactionary Whig aristocracy, Benjamin Tappan and his Democratic fellows pursued a radically egalitarian social vision. Anticlericalism and deep-rooted partisan loyalties prompted those radical Democrats to oppose evangelical abolitionists despite their mutual antipathy to slavery. While pursuing his antislavery goals as a Democrat, Free-Soiler, and Republican, Benjamin Tappan contended with his Christian brothers over whether religion or politics was the true vehicle to human freedom. Reprinted from United States Magazine and Democratic Review, June 1840. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric
William Lloyd Garrison energized and radicalized the antislavery crusade, using a rhetoric that dwelt on the sexual exploitation and suffering of slaves. Examining the evolution of Garrison's antislavery rhetoric, Marc M. Arkin uncovers his deep intellectual debt to Fisher Ames, leader of New England Federalism from the 1790s until 1808. During his early abolitionist years, Garrison regularly quoted Ames and consciously appropriated Ames's anti-Jeffersonian polemic, including his association of the southern desire for power with sexual license. This relationship shows how social movements may borrow and rework culturally resonant themes and sheds new light on New England sectionalism as a force driving abolitionism. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Strike in the Temple of Consumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth-Century American Political Culture
	Taking a well-publicized 1935 strike at Consumers Research as his starting point, Lawrence B. Glickman explores a precursor of today's international anti-sweatshop campaigns and green consumerism. The strike, which led to the formation of Consumers Union, surprised observers and participants by revealing divisions within what had seemed a unitary consumer movement. In the strike, Glickman argues, "technocratic individualist" consumerism, which used testing methods from the natural sciences to help shoppers pursue their interests, faced a challenge from "social movement" consumerism, which used the social sciences to link the interests of consumers and workers. Glickman shows that politically engaged, social movement consumerism was no evanescent product of the radical thirties, but a recurrent and significant feature of twentieth-century American politics. Reprinted with permission from Nation's Business, January 1938 [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Special Essays
Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography
Jill Lepore contrasts an old genre of historical writing, biography, with a rather new one, microhistory. Unlike biography, which emphasizes the singularity and significance of an individual's life, microhistory takes an individual's life as an allegory of broader issues affecting a culture as a whole. Surveying works from many historical fieldsfrom Jonathan Spence's The Question of Hu to Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Townto define the contours of microhistory, Lepore meditates on historians' intimacy with their subjects and its consequences for their writing. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review
Gary J. Kornblith revisits historians' use of the World Wide Web by assessing The Valley of the Shadow, a long-running site that has received both popular and professional praise. In this appreciative review, Kornblith examines how the Web and other interactive media can enhance access to archival materials, enliven scholarly communication, and transform the relationship between author and audience. Electronic media may revolutionize the reading and writing of history, yet, Kornblith warns, the complexity and multiplicity of online resources can distract historians from basic tasks of distillation and clarification. Kornblith welcomes the democratic potential of new media, but he worries about the loss of coherence and meaning in the quest for multisensory historical simulation. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Exhibition Reviews
	"Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," by Howard P. Segal [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Paul Revere: Artisan and Patriot," by Sarah J. Purcell [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861," by Kenneth Myers [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "North Carolina and the Civil War"; "Duty Called Me Here: The Common Soldier's Experience in the American Civil War"; and "Turning Point: The American Civil War," by David A. Zonderman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Civil War Visitor Center at Tredegar Iron Works, by Edward L. Ayers [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Amish in Illinois," by Trevor Jones [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "To Faithfully Preserve: History and Lore from America's National Parks," by Randall M. Miller [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Web site Reviews
Do History, by Jane Kamensky [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Africans in America, by Tracey Weis [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America, by David Phillips [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Mark Twain in His Times, by Carl Smith [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929, by Paula Petrik [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911, by Ellen Wiley Todd [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: Dancing ceremony in New France. The shaman (with turtle rattle) dances with the sick person. This image represents the large number of onlookers who participated in rituals for the sick and dying. It was originally published in Samuel de Champlain, Voyages et descouvertures (Paris, 1620). By permission of the British Library, shelf mark "C.114.a.3." See Erik R. Seeman, "Reading Indians' Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches."