The Journal of American History

Issues

December 2002
Volume 89, No. 3

Articles
Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815
By early American standards, only women could be raped. Yet print discourse featured the erasure of raped women, focusing instead on men’s protection of women’s virtue and the affront to men when their sisters, daughters, or wives were raped. Rape came under public discussion only as a battle between male combatants. Sharon Block explores how revolutionary-era rhetoric deployed such gendered constructions of rape to depict the British Empire as an attacker and America as a victim. Remaining popular in the early republic, rape narratives represented masculine conflicts over power and mirrored the limits on women’s participation in public life. [Full text at historycooperative.org]
"Public Sentiment Is Everything": The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864
	Menahem Blondheim explores the Lincoln administration’s management of public communications in the Civil War. With the cooperation of the New York Associated Press, the dominant national news wire service, the administration quietly exploited the telegraphic centralization of news collection and dissemination to control the first impression events made on the public mind. Only with the May 1864 bogus proclamation affair, at a critical juncture of the Civil War, did the Lincoln administration move aggressively to restrict press freedom and consolidate control over the North’s telegraphic network and wire services. Blondheim explains why. [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-86709.
"The Art of Killing by Electricity": The Sublime and the Electric Chair
	In the late nineteenth century, many Americans hailed electricity as awe-inspiring and almost supernatural, that is, sublime. The ability to control it betokened both human genius and a superior civilization progressing toward perfection. In the essay that won the David Thelen Prize for 2002, Jürgen Martschukat shows how even executions by electricity inspired pride and awe. The electric chair would turn the barbaric business of hanging into a sublime demonstration of cultural capability. Examining the first electric execution, that of William Kemmler in New York in August 1890, Martschukat explores the way Americans of the era linked technology, progress, the sublime, and the death penalty. [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image reprinted from Harper's Weekly, Feb. 25, 1888.
Delegitimizing Democracy: "Civic Slackers," the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of Politics
	Liette Gidlow reimagines the study of power through an exploration of the 1920s Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) campaigns. Led by businessmen and reforming women, achieved through flashy ad campaigns and sober programs of civic education, GOTV efforts attempted not only to boost voter turnout but also to reestablish civic hierarchies that had been flattened by universal suffrage. Analyzing the campaigns’ work in three ways—as the politics of discourse, the politics of the everyday, and formal politics—Gidlow suggests methods that cultural historians, cultural studies scholars, social historians, and political historians might use to connect their diverse investigations of a shared question: How has power been deployed, resisted, and legitimated? [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image copyright,1924, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission.
Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the "Negro Problem" during World War II
	In the essay that won the Louis Pelzer Award for 2002, Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff examines how the federal government used the black heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis as a cultural icon during World War II. Shunning concrete civil rights measures that might cause political conflict, the state developed cultural programs. Officials hoped publicity about Louis would defuse racial tensions and boost black morale. The War Department and the Office of War Information purposely depoliticized their programs to downplay racial discrimination in the military. Yet in symbolizing black advancement, Louis inspired subtle responses that went beyond the sanitized patriotism white officials had intended. [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image courtesy National Archives, photo no. 44-PA-87.
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Exhibition Reviews
	Introduction, by Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice [Full text at historycooperative.org] "Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans in the Slave South, 1790–1865," by Bruce E. Baker [Full text at historycooperative.org] Battle of Olustee, annual reenactment and downtown festival, by Sean H. McMahon [Full text at historycooperative.org] "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," by Grace Elizabeth Hale [Full text at historycooperative.org] Museum of Mobile, by Clarence L. Mohr [Full text at historycooperative.org] "Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Downtown Baltimore," by Jessica Elfenbein [Full text at historycooperative.org] "Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy," by Stephen E. Kercher [Full text at historycooperative.org] Oklahoma City National Memorial Center Museum, by Carolyn Garrett Pool [Full text at historycooperative.org] "New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers"; "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs"; and "The September 11 Photo Project," by Jeffrey Shandler [Full text at historycooperative.org] Museums and Communities after September 11, by Margo Bloom [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image courtesy The Jewish Museum of Maryland, JMM 1986.52.1.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Movie Reviews
	Reel Report, 2001-2002, by Robert Brent Toplin [Full text at historycooperative.org] War Letters, by Joe P. Dunn [Full text at historycooperative.org] Secrets of the Dead II: Death at Jamestown, by Joan R. Gundersen [Full text at historycooperative.org] Secrets of the Dead II: Witches Curse, by Jane Kamensky [Full text at historycooperative.org] Battle of the Alamo, by Joseph G. Dawson III [Full text at historycooperative.org] Black Indians: An American Story, by Kevin Mulroy [Full text at historycooperative.org] Mark Twain, by Ron Briley [Full text at historycooperative.org] The Jungle, by Mark Pittenger [Full text at historycooperative.org] Woodrow Wilson, by David M. Esposito [Full text at historycooperative.org] Mount Rushmore, by Bill Corbett [Full text at historycooperative.org] Public Enemy #1: The Legendary Outlaw John Dillinger, by David E. Ruth [Full text at historycooperative.org] The Grapes of Wrath, by William H. Mullins [Full text at historycooperative.org] Zoot Suit Riots, by Rodolfo F. Acuña [Full text at historycooperative.org] The Rosenberg File: Case Closed, by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones [Full text at historycooperative.org] Miss America, by M. Alison Kibler [Full text at historycooperative.org] The Majestic, by Paul Buhle [Full text at historycooperative.org] Ghosts of Attica, by Scott Christianson [Full text at historycooperative.org] We Were Soldiers, by Michael Schaller [Full text at historycooperative.org] Investigation of a Flame: A Documentary Portrait of the Catonsville Nine, by Melvin Small [Full text at historycooperative.org] Commander in Chief, by John Dumbrell [Full text at historycooperative.org] Black Hawk Down, by James I. Matray [Full text at historycooperative.org] Electric Money, by Timothy J. Brennan [Full text at historycooperative.org] Image courtesy American Experience/Miss America Organization.
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Web Site Reviews
Introduction, by Roy Rosenzweig [Full text at historycooperative.org] History Wired: A Few of Our Favorite Things, by Ellen K. Rothman [Full text at historycooperative.org] David Rumsey Map Collection, by Joseph S. Wood [Full text at historycooperative.org] The Red Hot Jazz Archive: A History of Jazz before 1930, by Burton W. Peretti [Full text at historycooperative.org] River of Song, by Karl Hagstrom Miller [Full text at historycooperative.org] Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, by Steven F. Lawson [Full text at historycooperative.org] Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley, by Daniel J. Cohen [Full text at historycooperative.org]
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: New Yorkers crowd around a newspaper's bulletin board on Broadway in 1861. War conditions created a demand for ever more and ever faster "hard" news reports. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-112561. See Menahem Blondheim, "'Public Sentiment Is Everything': The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864," p. 869.