|
Issues
List of Issues
Web site Reviews
Subscribe to the JAH
|
 |
December 2005
Volume 92, No. 3
|
<-- Previous Issue | Next Issue -->
|
Presidential Address
|
|
Patriot Acts: Public History in Public Service |
In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, James Oliver Horton
argues that if the promise of America is to be fulfilled, its people must understand its history. A widespread
comprehension of our national history is critical to contemporary conversation about public issues. Horton believes
that professional historians have to play a crucial role in providing context for public debates over politics and
policy. Despite the contentious nature of public history, Horton challenges American historians to deepen public
historical knowledge and to support history education in pre-college classrooms, national parks, museums, and
other sites where many people learn about the history of the United States. (pp. 801–810)
|
|
[Top]
|
|
Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction–Era Ku Klux Klan |
 |
Popular entertainment shaped Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan terror and its meaning for Klansmen,
their victims, and witnesses. Rather than presenting themselves as silent ghostly figures in white robes, many Klansmen
committed atrocities while wearing bizarre costumes such as masquerade disguises, women’s dresses, or squirrel-skin masks.
The nighttime productions of Klansmen sometimes included animal noises, faked foreign accents, and brief dramatic
performances for their victims. Asserting the importance of the Klan’s theatrics, Elaine Frantz Parsons shows that
just as Klansmen used such popular cultural traditions as minstrelsy and the circus to spread their message of white
superiority, so popular cultural venues incorporated the Klan into their acts. (pp. 811–36)
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Tennessee State Museum Collection, Nashville. |
|
“Made by Toile”? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858–1917 |
 |
Close your eyes and imagine Colorado: Is anyone working? Do you see pristine wilderness,
or does your image have room for those who perform the physical labor that maintains a modern society? Those
questions are less innocent than they might appear. As toil in Colorado from the 1870s to the 1910s taught an
old railroader named John Watt, erasing working people from representations of past and place can have real
consequences. Confined to a county poor farm, Watt wrote letters that prompt Thomas G. Andrews to explore the
causes and consequences of how tourists saw—and, from the 1860s on, increasingly failed to see—work and workers
in the Colorado landscape. (pp. 837–63)
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection. |
|
“The Most Wonderful Thing Has Happened to Me in the Army”: Psychology, Citizenship, and American Higher Education in World War II |
 |
Christopher P. Loss examines the way American higher education contributed to nation
building and new conceptions of democratic citizenship during World War II. Arguing that the 1944 G.I.
Bill of Rights was far from novel, Loss explores the army’s soldier education programs before the G.I. Bill.
Those programs satisfied many soldiers’ demands for self-improvement and access to social mobility. They also
reflected officials’ growing faith in the psychological power of education to ensure soldiers’ “adjustment”
to life within and outside the military. Loss concludes that the postwar expansion of higher education linked
citizens’ desire for a better life to the state’s pursuit of political, economic, and emotional stability. (pp. 864–91) [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy War Department, G.I. Roundtable Series: Shall I Go Back To School? (Washington, 1945). |
|
Sound and Fury; or, Much Ado about Nothing? Cochlear Implants in Historical Perspective |
 |
R. A. R. Edwards introduces readers to the uneasy relationship the American Deaf
community has had with assistive technology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The
medical community has viewed the development of devices to relieve deafness—from ear trumpets to hearing
aids to cochlear implants—as a sign of progress, and most hearing people have agreed. Some Deaf people
have viewed the same progression as a thinly veiled assault on Deaf culture, maintaining that deafness
is a cultural condition in need of understanding, not a medical condition in need of alleviation. Edwards
probes this nexus of technology, culture, and disability to shed light on both the history of the Deaf as
a minority group and the future of disability studies. (pp. 892–920) [Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Mike Keefe. |
|
[Top]
|
|
Exhibition Reviews
|
|
“Brooklyn Works: Four Hundred Years of Making a Living in Brooklyn,” by Kathleen Hulser
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Rio Grande: The Storied River,” by Don B. Graham
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Old Montréal in a New Light,” by Ronald Rudin
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] National Hansen’s Disease Museum, by Roy Lechtreck
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Freedom and Unity: One Ideal, Many Stories,” by Mark Case
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] “A. K. A. Houdini,” by John Baumann
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, by John R. Decker
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Mill City Museum, by Andrew Urban
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] “Beyond the Cleavers: Life in the 1950s,” by Steven T. Sheehan
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Jacqueline Calder, Vermont History Center, Barre. |
|
[Top]
|
|
Book Reviews
|
|
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
|
|
[Top]
|
|
Movie Reviews
|
|
"Reel Review 2004–2005, Robert Brent Toplin
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Transforming America: U.S. History since 1877, by Laura Witten-Keller
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, by Douglas R. Egerton
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Young Lincoln: The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1816–1830, by Dan Monroe
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Alamo, by Stanley Corkin
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Great Transatlantic Cable, by David Hochfelder
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Gettysburg: Pickett’s Charge, by Lesley J. Gordon
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Phantom of the Operator (Le fantôm de l’opératrice), by Sharon Hartman Strom
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Emma Goldman, by Judith Smith
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Aviator, by David T. Courtwright
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Massie Affair, by Franklin Ng
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Cinderella Man, by Thomas Doherty
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Fight, by Jack E. Davis
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, by Robert H. Abzug
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Building the Alaska Highway, by William R. Morrison
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Victory in the Pacific, by Hal Friedman
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Great Raid, by Alan R. Millett
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Kinsey (dir. and prod. by Barak Goodman and John Maggio); and Kinsey (dir. by Bill Condon), by Leisa D. Meyer
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Broadway: The American Musical, by David Sanjek
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Tupperware!, by Lynn Y. Weiner
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Fidel Castro, by Thomas M. Leonard
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four, by Robert A. Pratt
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, by Ron Briley
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] RFK, by Gregory Bush
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, by Walter L. Hixson
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, by Benjamin T. Harrison
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America, by D. G. Hart
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Rebecca Cerese/Zoe Cohen. |
|
[Top]
|
|
Web Site Reviews
|
|
Web site reviews are also available here.
Oneida Indian Nation: Culture and History, by Gerald F. Reid
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, 1818–1907, by Randall K. Burkett
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Chinese in California, 1850–1925, by Robert G. Lee
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Picturing Modern America, by John P. Spencer
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Digital Archive, by Allida M. Black
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
HistoryLink.org: The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, by James N. Gregory
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
|
|
[Top]
|
|
Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
|
|
[Top]
|
|
On the cover: Elite tourists such as this well-dressed hunter journeyed to the Colorado mountains for primitive play. As tourists mimicked frontier work, they overlooked their dependence on the labor of the guides and other service workers who blurred into the background. “Hunting Pary,” by Harry Rhoads, c. 1900–1910. Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Rh-5447. See Thomas G. Andrews, “‘Made by Toile’? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Lanscape, 1858–1917,” p. 837.
|
|
