The Journal of American History

Issues

December 2001
Volume 88, No. 3

Empires and Intimacies: Lessons from (Post) Colonial Studies, A Round Table
Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies
The anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler examines the relevance of postcolonial studies to American history by exploring how matters of the intimate--sex, sentiment, domestic arrangements, and child rearing--figured in the making of racial categories and the management of empires. She identifies convergences in the regulation of the intimate by European colonizers and Americans--at home and abroad--and circuits of shared knowledge that created transnational links among imperial regimes. Treating comparison, not as benign methodology, but as itself a tool of colonial projects, she asks why historians of North America celebrate some comparisons and avoid others. The politics of intimacy, Stoler argues, is a key site for understanding how colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Responses
Five historians--Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Lori D. Ginzberg, Dirk Hoerder, Mary A. Renda, and Robert J. McMahon-- respond to Stoler, welcoming cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives but warning against a temptation to privilege the politics of intimacy, neglect human agency, and ignore subaltern resistance. What's Love Got to Do with It?, by Ramón A. Gutiérrez [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Global Goals, Local Acts: Grass-Roots Activism in Imperial Narratives, by Lori D. Ginzberg [Full text available at the History Cooperative] How the Intimate Lives of Subaltern Men, Women, and Children Confound the Nation's Master Narratives, by Dirk Hoerder [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Sentiments of a Private Nature": A Comment on Ann Laura Stoler's "Tense and Tender Ties," by Mary A. Renda [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Cultures of Empire, by Robert J. McMahon [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response, by Ann Laura Stoler [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Articles
The High Cost of Living in the Progressive Economy
	Government statistics seem worthy if dull indicators of the nation's economic health. Yet when federal bureaucrats first sought to quantify inflation during the Progressive Era, the state's presumption in tracking economic life threatened such a variety of constituencies that the modest effort was soon thwarted. The concept of the high cost of living soon moved from the writings of reformers and experts to the movies and musical comedy. Rather than rationalizing economic thought, Eric Rauchway argues, Progressive efforts to define the national economy had created a popular language without economic substance, licensing clashing interpretations of the true national interest. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
W. E. B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892-1909
	Nineteenth-century German social thought is rarely considered an intellectual basis for challenging racism. For W. E. B. Du Bois, however, the teachings of the German historical school of economics became the vision for a concept of racial emancipation. Axel R. Schäfer maintains that from his German mentors Du Bois gleaned a social ethics that made social interaction and liberal education the basis for the unfolding of the black civilizational gift. He rejected both Booker T. Washington's bootstrap ideology and the liberal civil rights agenda as avenues of racial change. But Du Bois's attempts to use the Progressive model of ethical awakening to create black identity clashed with white Progressives' exclusion of blacks from the civilizational master narrative. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Jews and American Popular Psychology: Reconsidering the Protestant Paradigm of Popular Thought
	Andrew R. Heinze tests the regnant paradigm that Protestantism is the chief source of modern American ideas of human nature and the human condition by analyzing Jewish psychologists' prominent role in popularizing that science in the United States between 1890 and 1940. They marshaled the progressive, functionalist orientation of American psychology to campaign against attitudes that they, as Jews, judged dangerous--especially belief in racial differences in intelligence and a glorification of nonrational aspects of the psyche that, they feared, bred mob violence. Tying together ethnicity and race, popular culture, social science, and the history of ideas, Heinze suggests a new way of viewing the impact of immigrants and ethnic minorities on twentieth-century America. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Finding "the More Satisfactory Type of Jurymen": Class and the Construction of Federal Juries, 1926-1954
	M. Catherine Miller connects the history of law and the history of Americans' perceptions--and denial--of class. Focusing on federal jury selection procedures in Manhattan between 1926 and 1954, Miller examines elite reformers' creation of class-sensitive mechanisms to recruit jurors they considered intelligent and to screen out immigrants, the uneducated, workers, and African Americans. Invoking citizenship, working-class radicals and middle-class women struggled to expand jury service. Women gained a place on the jury, but their inclusion helped mask the role of class. That outcome prompts Miller to question a reliance on ideas of citizenship and constitutionalism to achieve social change. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Exhibition Reviews
	Introduction, by Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity"; "'A Respectable Trade?': Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery"; and "Pero and Pinney Exhibit," by Celeste-Marie Bernier [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden," by Barbara Franco [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Picturing Faith: Religious America in Government Photography, 1935-1943," by Morris L. Davis Jr. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "From Paris to Providence: Fashion, Art, and the Tirocchi Dressmakers' Shop, 1915-1947," by Rainey Tisdale [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Your Place in Time: Twentieth Century America," by Kristin M. Szylvian and Wm. Frank Mitchell [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Filming Maryland," by Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Seeking St. Louis," by Nora Pat Small [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "A State of Health: New Jersey's Medical Heritage," by Janet Golden [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Remembering the Revolution: Twenty-Five Years after the Bicentennial," by Robert M. Dunkerly [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
	Reel Report, 2000-2001, by Robert Brent Toplin [Full text available at the History Cooperative] A Biography of America, by Donald A. Ritchie [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Shaping of America: U.S. History to 1877, by Bruce A. Ragsdale [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided, by Scott A. Sandage [Full text available at the History Cooperative] It Took Brave Men: Deputy U.S. Marshals of Fort Smith, by David La Vere [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Secrets of a Master Builder: The Story of James B. Eads, by Robert A. Taylor [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Lost in the Grand Canyon, by Adam M. Sowards [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Oral History: A Century of Living, by Roger Horowitz [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Wizard of Photography: The Story of George Eastman, by David B. Sicilia [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind, by Beryl Satter [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Streamliners: America's Lost Trains, by William L. Withuhn [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, by Frank Tirro [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Fatal Flood, by Nan Elizabeth Woodruff [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, by Nancy MacLean [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Miss Evers' Boys, by Susan M. Reverby [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Uprising of '34, by Bryant Simon [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Cradle Will Rock, by Ron Briley [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Streetcar Stories, by Cliff Kuhn [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Eleanor Roosevelt, by Allida Black [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Rockefellers, by David B. Sicilia [Full text available at the History Cooperative] U-571; and Pearl Harbor, by Lawrence Suid [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Rabbit in the Moon; and Conscience and the Constitution, by Naoko Shibusawa [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Figures of the Civil Rights Movement: Sit-Ins and the Little Rock Nine, by John Dittmer [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Thirteen Days, by Thomas Doherty [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Nashville: "We Were Warriors," by David Goldfield [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Legacy of Vietnam: Learning the Lessons of War, by Stephen Pelz [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Return with Honor, by Donald J. Mrozek [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Nuclear Dynamite, by Paul Boyer [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Meltdown at Three Mile Island, by Thomas R. Wellock [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Hill vs. Thomas, by Mary L. Dudziak [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Stranger with a Camera, by Robert E. Snyder [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Web Site Reviews
Gold Rush! California's Untold Stories, by David Goodman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multimedia Archive, by Ellen Noonan [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Wet with Blood: The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln's Cloak, by William G. Thomas III [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Dramas of Haymarket, by Martin Blatt [Full text available at the History Cooperative] African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, by Karen Sotiropoulos [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, by Adina Back [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: "Accident or Plot?" Judge John C. Knox's jury selection system is seen through the eyes of its critics in this cartoon: only businessmen served on juries while workers, both black and white, were excluded. From Self Defense Committee of 17 Smith Act Victims, ". . . this, too, is lynch law" (c. 1951). Courtesy Benjamin Davis Papers, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. See M. Catherine Miller, "Finding 'the More Satisfactory Type of Jurymen': Class and the Construction of Federal Juries, 1926-1954," p. 979.