The Journal of American History

Issues

September 2001
Volume 88, No. 2

Round Table: Elections, Conflict, and Democracy
Elections, Conflict, and Democracy: An Introduction, by Joanne Meyerowitz
Responding to the contested presidential election of 2000, the Journal's editors invited historians from different subfields of United States history to participate in our round table, "Elections, Conflict, and Democracy." Their five strikingly different essays suggest some of the ways Americans have defined, pursued, and undermined democracy. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Presidents, Congress, and Courts: Partisan Passions in Motion
Joyce Appleby contrasts the contested elections of 1800 and 2000. Why was the former settled in the House of Representatives and the latter in the Supreme Court? The explanation, she suggests, lies not only in Americans' recent tendency to resolve political issues by litigation but also in the work of those who drafted the Constitution. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Tribulations of an Old Democracy
	Most Europeans associate American life with everything that is new, modern, and forward-looking. On the contrary, the recent electoral crisis exposed a system packed with such "antiquated" political features as low-tech voting methods, powerful party machinery, and the Electoral College. There is nothing ironic about it. The United States, Arnaldo Testi writes, is an old nation and one of the oldest democracies in the world. Testi looks at American political practices as bridges that connect the present with the nation's past, sometimes in uneasy ways. Image Courtesy Vauro for Il Manifesto (Rome), Nov. 10, 2000. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Party Games: The Art of Stealing Elections in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States
	For those disgusted by the 2000 election, there is one consolation: Gilded Age politics could be even worse. Tempering the enthusiasm that historians of political culture have invested in "popular politics" and confirming darker recent portraits of the unmaking of the so-called party period, Mark Wahlgren Summers shows how pervasively the major parties manipulated the voters and the rules to hold onto power--and how useful a sense of being wronged was in inspiring and perpetuating the partisan spirit of late-nineteenth-century America. Image Reprinted from Harper's Weekly, Oct. 18, 1879. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Diluting the Vote: The Irony of Bush v. Gore
Mary Frances Berry puts Bush v. Gore in the context of Supreme Court decisions about race and voting rights. She finds it ironic that justices who had often rejected African American voters' appeals to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment there made sweeping use of arguments for equal protection. By highlighting complications and constraints, the article challenges traditional views of suffrage as becoming ever more inclusive. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Stories, Games, and Deliberative Democracy
Daniel T. Rodgers focuses, not on the 2000 election itself, but on the stories that the partisans immediately began to tell about it. His essay explores the ways in which the Republicans' narrative of the rules of the game trumped the Democrats' narrative of deliberative democracy. And it suggests the implications of this contest over metaphors and stories for the long-term history of American political argument. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Web Supplement For a chronology of the postelection contest for the presidency in 2000, see http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/election2000/.
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Articles
Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party
	Disputes concerning the Civil War era have increasingly focused on the political changes during the 1850s that made war possible. Historians have asked why the Whig party, a mainstay of sectional compromise, disappeared, making political space for a mass antislavery party, the Republicans. One influential answer traces this pivotal development, not to differences over slavery, but to the dramatic growth of antiforeign and anti-Catholic sentiment. Bruce Levine, in contrast, argues that nativism and slavery represented two facets of a single, protracted debate that divided and then destroyed the Whig party--a debate in which matters of class, nationality, race, and gender played complementary roles. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II
To help shore up confidence in the American-Soviet alliance during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to film. In looking closely at Mission to Moscow, a 1943 movie made by Warner Bros. with the Roosevelt administration's blessing, Todd Bennett explores the outcomes of this union of statecraft and popular culture at home and abroad. American audiences generally dismissed the film as unentertaining propaganda, but Joseph Stalin embraced its flattering vision of Soviet history and approved its release. Bennett shows how Stalin's move led to a reintroduction of American films to Soviet audiences, offering them a glimpse of American prosperity and unsettling Soviet authorities at the dawn of the Cold War. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] For suggestions on how to use Bennett's article in the United States history survey course, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement.
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Special Essays
Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900-1940
	The health care crisis of the 1990s forces us to rethink medicine's place in American history. Nancy Tomes reinterprets the early-twentieth-century emergence of modern medicine as a chapter in the history of consumer culture. Examining changing conceptions of doctors as service providers, concerns about medical care's status as a luxury good, the commercialization of self-help products, and the plight of the disenfranchised health care consumer, Tomes shows how patients' choices helped shape a profession even as experts increasingly dominated it. By shifting our attention from professional organizations and policy elites to patients and consumers, Tomes reveals that physicians' rise to professional sovereignty met resistance from many quarters. Image Courtesy Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. Courtesy J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web
In the past five years, the increase in historical resources available on the World Wide Web has outpaced even "Moore's law," which predicts that computing power will double every eighteen months. Roy Rosenzweig asks what this astonishing growth means for American historians. What resources are now online? Who has put them there and who can use them? Although grass-roots volunteers and nonprofit organizations have helped to put historical resources on the Web, private corporations now control some of the most valuable online real estate. Such private control raises questions about the persistence of the Internet as an open, public space. If the road ahead leads to History.com rather than History.edu, what will the future of the past look like? [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Oral History
	Michael Gordon and Lu Ann Jones, "Introduction" [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Burton W. Peretti, "Speaking in the Groove: Oral History and Jazz" [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Mary A. Larson, "Potential, Potential, Potential: The Marriage of Oral History and the World Wide Web" [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Ava F. Kahn, "Oral History and Jewish Life" [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Sandy Polishuk, "Interviewing Radical Elders" [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image Courtesy of the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Web Site Reviews
Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport, by John David Smith [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Oregon Trail, by John Mack Faragher [Full text available at the History Cooperative] AdAccess,* by Kelly Schrum [Full text available at the History Cooperative] American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940, by Thomas Thurston [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Famous Trials, by Jerry Goldman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Oyez Project: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia Database, by Melvin I. Urofsky [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Editor's Annual Report, 2000-2001 Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: This 1848 membership certificate of the Order of United Americans (OUA), a major nativist fraternal organization and antecedent of the Know-Nothing party, designed and lithographed by Charles Parsons, depicts Liberty atop a pedestal and surrounded by men wearing OUA sashes. The clothing beneath the sashes signals the wearers' diverse occupations and social positions, and the image of fellowship thus celebrates the OUA's ideal of pan-class national harmony. Courtesy Library of Congress, #LC-USZ62-090659. See Bruce Levine, "Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party."