The Journal of American History

Issues

March 2002
Volume 88, No. 4

Presidential Address
The Power of History: The Weakness of a Profession
Over the past thirty years, historians have seen their job prospects shrink and their job security erode. Both the sales of scholarly history books and the number of undergraduate history majors have fallen. But in his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Kenneth T. Jackson sees reasons for hope and spurs to action. He celebrates the unprecedented variety of innovative scholarship and the growing public interest in history. He urges history departments to cut back production of new doctorates and reliance on adjunct instructors. He urges professional groups to work with such natural allies as community college and high school teachers in joint efforts to revitalize teaching and broaden the audience for history. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Articles
Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910
	Paul A. Kramer explores the dialogue between Americans and Britons on the meanings of race, empire, and national exceptionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. At a decisive moment, he argues, American colonialists successfully justified the annexation of the Philippines by an appeal to Anglo-Saxon racial exceptionalism. Reclaiming their ties to the British Empire through blood, culture, and history, American imperialists pronounced the nation both bound and fit to acquire an overseas colonial empire. By 1902, however, the rhetoric of American exceptionalism eclipsed the racial appeal, as Americans trumpeted their alleged republican mission to govern "dependencies" in a selfless spirit and with a promise of eventual self-government. Special Online Feature: Kramer's article is the featured article for the third installment of "Teaching the JAH" web project. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image reprinted from The Chicago Tribune, Aug. 24, 1898.
The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America
	As the United States mobilized for World War I, the government looked to voluntary associations to safeguard American communities from foreign invasion and domestic subversion. The officials who urged grass-roots groups to police their neighbors distinguished between "vigilance," endorsed as a democratic duty, and "vigilantism," denounced as mob violence. In the article that won the Louis Pelzer Award for 2001, Christopher Capozzola shows that in practice--in extralegal coercion of workers, women suspected of prostitution, and African Americans--vigilance and vigilantism mingled. His work raises questions about ideals of active citizenship, links between voluntarism and political violence in American history, and contemporary assumptions that voluntary associations contribute positively to civic identity and democratic engagement. [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Image courtesty Tulsa Race Riot Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890-1940
Why did European immigrants decline to study their "native" languages in American public schools during the first half of the twentieth century? The standard historical interpretation stresses the coercive waves of Americanization that dampened linguistic diversity throughout the land. Yet, as Jonathan Zimmerman shows, urban schools continued to offer Polish, Hebrew, Norwegian, and a host of other immigrant tongues. Promoted by ethnic leaders, the courses taught "pure" languages that differed sharply from the regional or mixed dialects that most newcomers actually spoke. By refusing to register their children for classes in their supposedly ancestral tongues, immigrants registered their hostility to uniform ethnic identities. Across a wide range of languages, they expressed their ethnicity--like their Americanism--in their own terms. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Great Society after Johnson: The Case of Bilingual Education
Gareth Davies explores the tenacity of the liberal reformist impulse that created the Great Society. Most historians see the mid-1960s as the crest of that impulse, but Davies contends that a second peak occurred within government agencies during Richard M. Nixon's first term. Latinos were among the groups who received increased attention from the federal government during the second phase of the Great Society. Davies uses the rise of the bilingual education program to illustrate how executive concerns, pressure group politics, bureaucratic entrepreneurship, and judicial activism combined to advance the cause of "language minorities" during the Nixon administration. [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Textbooks and Teaching
	"Editors' Introduction: Teaching outside the Box," by Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Special Online Feature: Syllabi and other supplemental material are available at our "Textbooks and Teaching" companion site. "Re-Visioning Women's History through Service Learning," by Catherine Badura [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Exploring the Wide World of Sports: Taking a Class to the (Virtual) Olympics," by Amy Bass [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "'It Was As If We Were Never There': Recovering Detroit's Past for History and Theater," by Charles Bright [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "'Bringing History to Life': Oral History, Community Research, and Multiple Levels of Learning," by A. Glenn Crothers [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Going Public with Introductory American History," by John J. Grabowski [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "La Castaña Project: A History Field Laboratory Experience," by Cecilia Aros Hunter and Leslie Gene Hunter [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "On the Road and out of the Box: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement from a Chrysler Minivan," by Alyssa Picard and Joseph J. Gonzalez [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "'Forgotten Voices and Different Memories': How Students at California State University, Monterey Bay, Became Their Own Historians," by David A. Reichard [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Teaching Students to Become Producers of New Historical Knowledge on the Web," by Kathryn Kish Sklar [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "The Collaborative Research Seminar," by John Wertheimer [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "Using Historical Landscape to Stimulate Historical Imagination: A Memoir of Climbing outside the Box," by James P. Whittenburg [Full text available at the History Cooperative] "A Modest Proposal: Less (Authority) Is More (Learning)," by Michael Zuckerman [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Photograph by James P. Whittenburg.
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here..
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Web Site Reviews
New York Times Daily Lesson Plan and Daily Lesson Plan Archive, by Arnold Pulda [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Documenting the American South, by Crandall Shifflett [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1820-1940, by Allison L. Sneider [Full text available at the History Cooperative] The New Deal Network, by Charles Forcey [Full text available at the History Cooperative] Project WhistleStop: Truman Digital Archive Project, by Patrick D. Reagan [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
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Announcements Recent Scholarship Contents of Volume 88 Index to Volume 88
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On the cover: Selling empire and race patriotism. In this turn-of-the-century tea advertisement, Queen Victoria herself invites President William McKinley to partake in imperial commerce and social relations. Reprinted from Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1897. See Paul A. Kramer, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910," p. 1315