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March 2007
Volume 93, No. 4

Articles
Military History Round Table
Textbooks & Teaching
Book Reviews
Web Site Reviews

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Articles
“The Cause of Her Grief”: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England
In the essay that won the 2006 Louis Pelzer Award, Wendy Anne Warren tells the story of a rape—the rape of an enslaved African woman on an island in Boston Harbor in 1638. That assault, the outcome of an early attempt at breeding slaves in seventeenth-century Boston, calls our attention to the importance of African slavery and transatlantic connections to colonial New England. The fragmentary nature of the evidence raises larger questions concerning the nature of history itself. In seeking to re-create the life of an individual woman based on this singular incident, the author challenges the difference between fact and fiction, asking when speculation crosses the boundaries of scholarly history. (pp. 1031–49) [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
“A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation”: The Word “Contraband” and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States
	Many students of history are familiar with the story of how, at the beginning of the Civil War, Gen. Benjamin Butler of the Union army designated escaping slaves as “contraband of war.” But historians have not previously considered how and why the term “contraband” leapt instantly into popular culture and became a crucial part of Americans’ vocabulary of race and servitude during the war. Examining representations of contrabands in journalism, music, art, fiction, and other cultural forms, Kate Masur argues that northerners, black and white, used the term as a medium in which to express their views on the prospect of slave emancipation and on the character, needs, and desires of the nascent freedpeople. (pp. 1050–84) Image excerpted from The Old Contraband. Song and Chorus, words by John L. Zieber, music by Rudolph Wittig (Philadelphia, 1865). Courtesy Brown University, John Hay Library, Sheet Music Collection. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History
	Between 1921 and 1927, the U.S. trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a cause célèbre among international radicals, labor movement activists, and intellectuals as well as the popular masses. Lisa McGirr explores the dynamics of the worker-led and worldwide protests, both at the time of the trial and during the subsequent memorialization of the two Italian anarchists, to capture a unique moment of transnational solidarity. These social movements—prominent in the case yet often ignored in the scholarship—hold the potential to situate the United States globally. As this fresh perspective demonstrates, the case underscores the nation’s global connections as well as heightened international fears over the emerging power of the United States. (pp. 1085–1115) Image courtesy Boston Public Library. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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American Military History: A Roundtable
Wayne E. Lee challenges historians to follow recent trends in military scholarship that bring a humanistic perspective to the study of war, viewing military institutions and behavior through a cultural lens. Spanning U.S. history from the colonial era to the present, this article synthesizes conventional wisdom in military scholarship, while highlighting arenas of ongoing debate. Military historians could profit from applying cultural analysis to traditional operational studies, historians in other fields from recognizing war as a topic ripe for cultural study. Both ventures demand that scholars look more closely at the interactions between institutional culture and society and how this interplay molded individual actions on the battlefield. Following Lee’s article, an international group of historians, Tami Davis Biddle, Brian P. Farrell, Marc Milner, Brian Holden Reid, and Ronald H. Spector, offers perspectives on the state of the field of military history. “Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field” Wayne E. Lee (pp. 1116–42) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Military History, Democracy, and the Role of the Academy” Tami Davis Biddle (pp. 1143–45) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Mind and Matter: The Practice of Military History with Reference to Britain and Southeast Asia” Brian P. Farrell (pp. 1146–50) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “In Search of the American Way of War: The Need for a Wider National and International Context” Marc Milner (pp. 1151–53) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “American Military History: The Need for Comparative Analysis” Brian Holden Reid (pp. 1154–57) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Teetering on the Brink of Respectability” Ronald H. Spector (pp. 1158–60) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “A Final Word” Wayne E. Lee (pp. 1161–62) [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Textbooks & Teaching
“Pivoting the Center”: Diverse Surveys of American History
	To consult syllabi for courses described in this “Textbooks and Teaching” section, along with other supplementary material and the full text of the article, visit http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2007/. “‘Pivoting the Center’: Diverse Surveys of American History” Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser (pp. 1163–64) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Recasting the Narrative of America: The Rewards and Challenges of Teaching American Indian History” Ned Blackhawk (pp. 1165–70) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Black History Is American History: Teaching African American History in the Twenty-first Century” Allison Dorsey (pp. 1171–77) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Exposing the Price of Ignorance: Teaching Asian American History in Michigan” Scott Kurashige (pp. 1178–85) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Playing the Pivot: Teaching Latina/o History in Good Times and Bad” Pablo Mitchell (pp. 1186–91) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Teaching ‘Straight’ Gay and Lesbian History” Nancy C. Unger (pp. 1192–99) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image from Nancy C. Unger's article. Courtesy William Lipsky.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Web Site Reviews
Web site reviews are also available here.
Women Working, 1800–1930, by Janice L. Reiff (pp. 1334–35) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Crisis of the Union: An Electronic Archive about the Causes, Conduct, and Consequences of the US Civil War, by Aaron Sheehan-Dean (pp. 1335–36) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Illinois during the Gilded Age, by Richard S. Schneirov (pp. 1336–37) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Unified Vision: The Architecture and Design of the Prairie School, by John F. Quinan (p. 1337) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Poetic Waves: Angel Island, by Erika Lee (p. 1338) [Full text available at the History Cooperative] CongressLink, by Raymond W. Smock (pp. 1338–39) [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship “Recent Scholarship” is available online at http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/rs/200703.html.
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On the cover: In the series of three paintings that begins with this image, Thomas Waterman Wood represented an escaping slave’s transformation from “contraband” into soldier and veteran. Thomas Waterman Wood, The Contraband. Oil on canvas, 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Charles Stewart Smith, 1884 (84.12a). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Kate Masur, “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” p. 1050.