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June 2006
Volume 93, No. 1
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Articles
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The Politics of “More”: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in
Industrial America |
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The growth of large-scale industry and underconsumption caused bitter labor conflicts and economic instability during the Gilded Age. The solution to this dilemma, argued both President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and a new generation of economists eager to shape national response to “the labor question,” lay in granting workers’ demands for “more.” More was, in part, an economic demand for higher wages and shorter hours for workers. More income and leisure time would also, economists and labor spokesmen predicted, help alleviate the problem of underconsumption. Rosanne Currarino shows that Gompers and the economists understood more as an answer to an even broader array of social crises because demands for it were also demands for “all” that was “essential to the exercise and enjoyment of liberty.” (pp. 17–36)
Image courtesy Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection, Duke University.
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Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941 |
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What was the role of law and lawyers in the civil rights movement? Recent work has emphasized a tension between the legal strategies of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) and a commitment to mass movement politics and economic populism. Kenneth W. Mack takes up this question by examining the everyday lives and litigation performances of depression-era black lawyers affiliated with the naacp. Responding to the critics on their left, the lawyers fashioned a new professional identity that melded the naacp’s traditional approaches and concerns with a commitment to mass democratic politics. (pp. 37–62)
Image courtesy University of Pennsylvania Archives.
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Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach Riot |
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Much of the work of racial integration after World War II was done, not by organized activists, but by young African American consumers. That was especially true as black migration and white flight increased spatial segregation in American cities and young African Americans demanded inclusion at sites of commercial recreation. Victoria W. Wolcott argues that teenagers were on the front lines of mid-twentieth-century racial conflict. She uses a 1956 riot in an amusement park near Buffalo, New York, to suggest that controversies over juvenile delinquency masked more profound racial struggles over public space in American cities. (pp. 63–90)
Image courtesy Victoria Wolcott.
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“Lift Up Yr Self!”: Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition |
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Looking beyond the sensational postures and inflammatory rhetoric of the black power movement, historians have begun to analyze it as a political response to the crisis in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s and an intensification of previous African American demands for self-determination and self-defense. In a study of the experiences of the writer and activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Daniel Matlin argues that black power’s masculine ideal was not anarchic and devoid of social responsibility. Instead, Baraka and other black power activists appropriated and embellished the patriarchal masculine ideal of “protecting and providing” that had long characterized the African American “uplift tradition.” (pp. 91–116)
Image courtesy Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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Review Essay
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Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past |
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The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become the largest source of historical writing on the Internet, the most widely read work of digital history, and the most important free historical resource on the Web. Tens of thousands of people—most of them nonprofessionals and all of them volunteers—have written it collaboratively. This makes Wikipedia the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural production. Roy Rosenzweig offers a preliminary assessment of Wikipedia for professional historians, considering the quality of the historical writing; the way its entries are written, rewritten, and debated; and its implications for our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the general public. (pp. 117–146)
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Exhibition Reviews |
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“Clash of Empires: The British, French, & Indian War, 1754–1763,” by Carolyn
Gilman
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“In Service and Beyond: Domestic Work and Life in a Gilded Age Mansion”; and
“From Morning to Night: Domestic Service in the Gilded Age South,” by Catherine
Dean
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“The Way We Worked,” by Adam J. Hodges
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“Resistance or Terrorism? The 1970 Sterling Hall Bombing,” by Timothy C. Glines
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“Big Drum: Taiko in the United States,” by Masumi Izumi
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“Behind the Magic: Fifty Years of Disneyland,” by Kristin Hass
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“The Public Vaults,” by Laura Burd Schiavo
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture; and “A
Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie,” by Mary Beth Corrigan
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
StoryCorps, by Peter Lamothe and Andrew Horowitz
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Michael Olwyler and San Jose Taiko. |
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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 |
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Web site reviews are also available here.
Berkeley Digital Map Collection; Osher Map Library; and Federal Township Plats of Illinois, 1804–1891, by David J. Bodenhamer
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of Congress, by Tom D. Crouch
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: Colonial Times to 1950, by Ann Fabian
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
National Postal Museum, by David Hochfelder
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Jews in America: Our Story, by Daniel Greene
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
"Recent Scholarship" is available online, http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/rs/200606.html |
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On the cover: Samuel Gompers (second from right) was an enthusiastic cyclist. During his trip to
London in 1895, he joined the leader of the 1889 London dock strike, Benjamin Tillett (second from
left), and two others for a ride. Gompers frequently argued that such leisure activities were essential if
workers were to enjoy lives “commensurate with the civilization of our time.” Courtesy George Meany
Memorial Archives. See Rosanne Currarino, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea
of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” p. 17.
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