The Journal of American History

Issues

June 2002
Volume 89, No. 1

Round Table
Self and Subject
	Do our own pasts and the ways we imagine them shape the histories we write, or are our lives and our constructions of them mostly irrelevant? Is self-revelation a useful way to acknowledge our standpoints, interests, and assumptions or more often a route to self-indulgence? In the round table "Self and Subject," Richard White, Karen Halttunen, Philip J. Deloria, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Demos, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Michael O'Brien explore the interplay of the stories we tell about our own lives and the stories we write about history. "Here Is the Problem: An Introduction," by Richard White [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Self, Subject, and the 'Barefoot Historian,'" by Karen Halttunen [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Thinking about Self in a Family Way," by Philip J. Deloria [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Last Words," by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Using Self, Using History . . ." by John Demos [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "A Pail of Cream," by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Of Cats, Historians, and Gardeners," by Michael O'Brien [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Photograph courtesy Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.
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Articles
Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924
	Erika Lee examines the little-known origins of border enforcement policies along the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders, tracing them to efforts to exclude Chinese migrants. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act sharply restricted Chinese immigration, turning Canada and Mexico into convenient back doors for illegal immigrants. Framing immigration policy and debates over illegal immigration in a transnational context, Lee shows how Chinese exclusion laid the foundations for racialized understandings of illegal immigration and for twentieth-century nation building. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image reprinted from the Buffalo Evening News, Feb. 1, 1904.
How the Working Class Saved Capitalism: The New Labor History and The Devil and Miss Jones
An essay by the late Michael Rogin offers new ways of thinking about both the interaction of consumerism and labor militancy in the 1930s and the relationship of film and history. The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), a screwball comedy about a department store strike, is one of the very few New Deal era movies that directly addresses the period's industrial battles. Rogin finds that the film's intentions, conscious and unconscious, point to the brief historical conjunction of mass popular culture, New Deal consumerism, and labor organizing. Yet even as the film links popular culture with labor's triumph, Rogin argues, it foreshadows the demise of labor's power. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Afterword, by Kathleen Moran [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Is the Supreme Court Sometimes Irrelevant? Race and the Southern Criminal Justice System in the 1940s
	Do judicial decisions produce social change? Drawing on National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) records, Michael J. Klarman concludes that the Supreme Court's first modern criminal-procedure rulings, intended to check the worst abuses of Jim Crow justice, had virtually no impact. Southern blacks continued to be excluded from juries, to be beaten into confessing, and to be incompetently represented. In contrast, the Court's rulings against racially restrictive covenants and all-white election primaries led to visible change. Under certain conditions, then, Court rulings did indeed matter. And the process of litigation itself helped mobilize social protest and promote change. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesy the Ocala Star-Banner.
Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America
A burgeoning scholarship on whiteness is reshaping the study of race in history and related disciplines. Peter Kolchin offers a preliminary evaluation, focusing on the historical literature and paying particular attention to the work of two leading scholars in the field, David R. Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson. Kolchin praises whiteness studies for reinforcing our understanding of race as "constructed" but questions their imprecise definitions of "whiteness," overreliance on whiteness to explain the American past, and parochialism in seeing whiteness as an exclusively American phenomenon. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Exhibition Reviews
	"'1699: When Virginia Was the Wild West!,'" by Kirk Davis Swinehart [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "'Within These Walls . . . ,'" by Brian Horrigan [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site," by Phillip Payne [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "'The Once and Future Web: Worlds Woven by the Telegraph and Internet,'" by Maggie Dennis [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Photo by Harold Dorwin. Courtesy Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here..
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Web Site Reviews
The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, by Philip J. Ethington [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935, by Pennee Bender [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, by Gregory Wilson [Full text available at the History Cooperative] RE: Vietnam—Stories since the War, by Michael Frisch [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Whole Cloth: Discovering Science and Technology through American History, by Nancy Page Fernandez [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: Chinese illegal immigration across the northern and southern borders of the United States was part of a much larger transnational, and interracial, system of illicit trade. This illustration depicts an "American" pilot guiding a Chinese male toward the border. Other common guides were Canadian, American Indian, or Mexican. Reprinted from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March 1891. See Erika Lee, "Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924," p. 54.