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Articles
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Rethinking the Transition
to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast
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Naomi R. Lamoreaux reopens
the debate over the transition to capitalism in the northeastern
United States. She argues that the kinds of evidence
used by scholars to "prove" that late-eighteenth-century farmers
were not capitalists can, ironically, yield the identical conclusion
for merchants
and manufacturers. To illuminate the transition to capitalism,
she turns to recent advances in economic theory that move beyond
reductive notions
of economic rationality and profit maximization. In the early nineteenth
century, farmers, merchants, and manufacturers all became increasingly
embedded in a market economy. But unlike farmers, merchants and
manufacturers adopted
new economic practices, impelled not simply by a drive for profit
maximization, but by new cultural imperatives.
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The Way of Improvement
Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian's Rural
Enlightenment
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In assessing the influence of the Enlightenment in the British American
colonies, early American historians have tended to focus on urban
elites. John Fea instead explores a parallel rural Enlightenment
through a study
of the short life of Philip Vickers Fithian, a diarist from southern
New Jersey. The complex configuration of Fithian's social world--full
of British
books and nearby friends--demands that we rethink the distinction
between cosmopolitanism and localism on the eve of the American
Revolution and consider
how cosmopolitan aspirations could be reconciled with local attachments
in a rural community.
For suggestions on how to use Fea's article
in the United States history classroom, along with substantial
selections from Fithian's diary and letters, see
our
"Teaching the JAH" Web site
project.
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Red Scare Politics and
the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty
Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling
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Landon R. Y. Storrs argues that anticommunist investigations of
women in government in the 1940s and 1950s curbed both feminism
and the social democratic potential of the New Deal. Using newly
accessible sources,
Storrs reconstructs the loyalty investigation of the government
economist Mary Dublin Keyserling and the Popular Front-era activism
that triggered
it. Keyserling was one of many prominent women in government who
advocated left-feminist social policies until accusations of Communism
truncated their
careers and discredited their causes. The red scare thus not ony
stigmatized dissent but also directly stifled an influential variant
of feminism.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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"Give Earth
a Chance": The Environmental Movement and the Sixties
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As a period, the 1960s has become a cliché--a time of radical protest.
To incorporate the environmental movement into the narrative of
the sixties, Adam Rome argues for a more complex understanding
of the decade. Prior to
Earth Day in 1970, the environmental movement gained momentum as
a result of public advocacy by liberal intellectuals and Democratic
politicians and
of grass-roots activism by middle-class women and antiestablishment
youth. Environmental activism was not simply a form of radical
protest but involved
a variety of social groups and a variety of political methods.
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Special Essay
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What Is the History of the History of Books?
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Joan Shelley Rubin shows how recent studies in the expanding field
of the history of books have surpassed older scholarship by exploring
how social, economic, and cultural factors converge to shape the
creation and
uses of print. Surveying efforts to document the production, dissemination,
and reception of print and to examine the goals those processes
served, her essay traces book historians' contributions to an understanding
of the
place of written communication in the American past. Rubin argues
that the greatest promise of the history of books is to help us
question conceptual
dichotomies--sacred versus secular, public versus private, traditional
versus modern--on which scholars rely too comfortably.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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*** New Section
***
Interchange |
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The Practice
of History
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With this issue, the JAH inaugurates "Interchange,"
an annual section featuring edited conversations among historians.
We invite readers to follow the give-and-take as nine senior historians
consider recent changes in historical practice.
Participants: Drew Faust, Hendrik Hartog, David A. Hollinger, Akira Iriye, Patricia
Nelson Limerick, Nell Irvin Painter, David Roediger, Mary Ryan, Alan
Taylor
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Book Reviews
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A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Web Site Reviews
The full-text of Web site reviews is also available here.
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Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription
Project, by Mary Beth Norton
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Images of Native Americans, by Elizabeth Hutchinson
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Across the Generations: Exploring U.S. History through Family
Papers, by Amy Murrell
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Thomas A. Edison Papers, by David A. Kirsch
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The History of Jim Crow; and Remembering
Jim Crow, by Joseph Crespino
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Philip Morris USA, Inc. Advertising Archive, by Pamela Walker
Laird
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Editor's Annual Report,
2002-2003
Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
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[Top]
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On the cover: Esther Peterson
and Mary Dublin Keyserling at the end of Keyserling's tenure as head
of the U.S. Women's Bureau, January 1969. Both women were accused of
disloyalty during the second red scare but later were able to return
to government service. Courtesy Tom Dublin. See Landon R. Y. Storrs,
"Red Scare Politics
and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation
of Mary Dublin Keyserling," p. 491.
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