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Dec. 2004 JAH Cover

Dec. 2004
Volume 91, No. 3

Articles
Exhibition Reviews
Book Reviews
Movie Reviews
Web Site Reviews

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Articles
"Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity": New Evidence on the Internal Migration of Americans, 1850-2000
Since Frederick Jackson Turner published his famous essay on the significance of the frontier, internal migration has been a contentious issue for American historians. Patricia Kelly Hall and Steven Ruggles use evidence from the census, made accessible by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (ipums), to reevaluate the history of American migration. On several key empirical points, Turner got it right. The highest mobility occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century; the high levels of nineteenth-century migration resulted from long-distance westward migration to farms; and the closing of the frontier precipitated a decline in westward migration. Assessing the social implications of migration in U.S. history, Hall and Ruggles trace the differences between black and white migration patterns and explore evidence that suggests that migration may have improved economic opportunity. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service, and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918–1935
	Shedding light on the intersections of militarism, race, and citizenship in the interwar period, Lucy E. Salyer tells the story of Asian men who fought in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. Like African American soldiers, the Asians used their patriotic service to assert their right to membership in the American polity in a period when loyalty vied with race as the quintessential criterion for inclusion. To become naturalized citizens on the basis of military service, they had to overcome racial bars written into naturalization laws. Asian veterans secured legislation allowing their naturalization in 1935--but only after forging an alliance with the American Legion, a champion of both martial patriotism and nativism [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-7562.
Insecure Equality: Louis Marshall, Henry Ford, and the Problem of Defamatory Antisemitism, 1920-1929
	Victoria Saker Woeste examines a familiar episode in the life of Henry Ford--the 1927 libel suit against him and his antisemitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent--as a formative event in the history of hate speech. Uncovering the roles played by lawyers and activists seeking to control the outcome of the litigation, she relates the case to the politics of antisemitism after World War I. Ford's manipulation of the legal process and conflicts among Jewish activists over strategy produced an out-of-court resolution of the case. But newly discovered correspondence and long-overlooked materials from the Ford collections reveal that the case might have led to more--to a conclusive determination of the validity of group rights. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesy Collections of the Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, negative number 90.1.1740.13.
"It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped": Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle
In the essay that won the 2004 Louis Pelzer Award, Danielle L. McGuire provides a haunting account of the brutal rape of an African American college student by four white men in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1959. McGuire revises the history of twentieth-century racial violence by arguing that the rape of black women, like the lynching of black men, served as a tool of white supremacy. McGuire argues that black women counterbalanced a "culture of dissemblance," in which they refrained from commenting on sexual matters, with a "tradition of testimony," in which they spoke out publicly against sexual violence. The Tallahassee case and others throughout the South demonstrate how protests against the rape of black women helped galvanize the civil rights movement. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
"Do Whites Have Rights?": White Detroit Policemen and "Reverse Discrimination" Protests in the 1970s
	Protests by working-class white men in the 1970s, Dennis A. Deslippe argues, shaped and limited affirmative action. He describes white Detroit policemen's fierce, sometimes violent, opposition to the city's affirmative action plan and its effect on the law, politics, and the workplace. Harnessing "rights talk" to their own ends, white policemen in the post-civil rights era made far-reaching claims about equality, justice, and citizenship. In Detroit, such opponents of affirmative action formed cross-racial and cross-gender alliances with liberal unionists sympathetic to some aspects of affirmative action. When affirmative action plans moved beyond hiring and promotion to threaten seniority systems that protected longtime public employees from firing, courts across the country ruled in favor of the opponents. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesy Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University..
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Exhibition Reviews
	"One Nation under God: The Church, the State, and the Louisiana Purchase," by Gaines M. Foster [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Liberty Bell Center, by Allen F. Davis [Full text available at the History Cooperative] National Constitution Center, by Michael Zuckerman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Looking for Liberty: An Overview of Maryland History," by Paul A. Shackel [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America," by Briann G. Greenfield [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Will We Ever Forget: Baseball in Philadelphia, 1876-2004," by Bruce Kuklick [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Women in Sports: Breaking Barriers," by Linda J. Borish [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Movie Reviews
Race--The Power of an Illusion, by Christoper Phelps [Full text available at the History Cooperative] History of King Philip's War, by Daniel P. Barr [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Slave Island: New York's Hidden History, by Jessica Kross [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Brave Man, by James Kirby Martin [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Patriots Day, by Bruce A. Ragsdale [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Murder at Harvard, by Joel Best [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Cold Mountain, by John C. Inscoe [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, by Tilden G. Edelstein [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Iron Jawed Angels, by Carla Bittel [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Golden Gate Bridge, by Sarah Schrank [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Bataan Rescue, by Peter S. Kindsvatter [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Partners of the Heart, by Susan L. Smith [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Mona Lisa Smile, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Hoxie: The First Stand, by Gerald Horne [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Citizen King, by Steven F. Lawson [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Intolerable Burden, by Raymond Wolters [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders, by John Hinshaw [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, by Thomas Cripps [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Weather Underground, by Ron Briley [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, by Xiaojian Zhao [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Miracle, by John Soares [Full text available at the History Cooperative] World of Ideas: Howard Zinn, by Paul Lyons [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Fahrenheit 9/11, by Robert Brent Toplin [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Web Site Reviews
Web site reviews are also available here without a subscription . Thomas Jefferson Papers; and Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive, by Robert M. S. McDonald [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Freedom Bound: The Underground Railroad in Lycoming County, PA, by Lois E. Horton [Full text available at the History Cooperative] American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920, by Robert W. Snyder [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The World War I Document Archive; and First World War.Com: The War to End All Wars, by Christopher Capozzola [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Letters to the Editor [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Announcements [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: Though overlooked in most histories of World War I, Asians and Asian Americans served in the U.S. armed forces, often seeing military service as a path to citizenship and greater social acceptance. Here, five Japanese American doughboys from Honalo, Kona, Hawai'i, pose in their uniforms, c. 1917. Only two have been identified: Tsuneichi Fujii (right, back row) and Shigeichi Harada (center, back row). Gift of Ruth Nishida. Courtesy Reverend Shugen Komagata, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. See Lucy E. Salyer, "Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service, and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918–1935," p. 847.