Course blog

Boosting Boundaries of Power:

Revealing Future Los Angeles in a 19^th Century Pueblo Town

Los Angeles is the city of the future. Urban destiny in the making, people, American and Non-American place their fears and dreams into its budding metropolis. Los Angeles plays a central role in defining malleable cultural, geographical barriers. Los Angles, centered as a geographic nucleus, many commuters situate their geospatial location on how far away they sit from Los Angeles’ destination and destiny.  However, commodifying and assigning Los Angeles’ borders commenced before California’s 1850 entry into statehood. City selling itself on the commodity of promise, appealed to both Anglo-Americans and non-Anglo Americans, much like the entire Western region in the nineteenth century. Inherently, the cityscape and its space promote a mythicized culture and consistent class shift resulting in Los Angeles’ geographic reassignment. In the twentieth-century, the term gentrification:

1. A class shift in a given area in which wealthier residents and consumers replace poorer residents and consumers, or in which residents and consumers with more cultural or financial capital replace residents and consumers with less cultural or financial capital.
2. The restoration, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse of existing buildings rather than large-scale slum clearance and redevelopment.

Despite historians’ understandings of who created Los Angeles boundaries and discussions held on the treatment of non-Anglo elites, the two intersections are rarely discussed in conversation with one another. Historians, often focus on broader themes of nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Frameworks like the ‘stockade state,’ heterogeneous political responses, tourism of spatial memory, who qualifies as ‘American,’  transnationalism, booster industrialization and reconstruction in the West are analyzed with mono-lensed mentality of ‘us versus them’ methodology. Methodological approaches in nineteenth-century spatial and cultural assignment contain these frameworks, but seldom speak of how non-Anglo authority and identity is reconstructed with the influencing booster and working class Anglo-Americans. Further, works on Los Angeles infrequently examine how reassignment of cultural and geographic containment affected the established population of non-Anglo communities. These frameworks and methodologies accurately establish occurring pre-gentrification movements in the late-nineteenth century Los Angeles. Also, these systems grossly neglect the perspectives, principles, and cultural relationships in Orange County history. Cultural assignment of geography and stories of navigating built rival geographies rarely find their way out of the Orange County’s agricultural and citrus fields. Applying nineteenth-century frameworks to founding Orange County cities’ history, like Santa Ana, provides an opportunity for significant revisions to the way we understand Anglo American and non-Anglo-American cultures co-existing south of Los Angeles. Moreover, examining these cultural frameworks provides a new diversified perspective in early Orange County History. This essay considers why did Los Angeles Anglo-Americans transform geographic borders and shift cultural boundaries of non-Anglo groups? Also, how did this assignment of cultural boundaries affect non-Anglo groups’ identity and authority within the California? Examining these intersections provides new insights into how racial and economic perspective influences memory of non-Anglo groups?

Los Angeles adapted from a small pueblo city, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, in the late eighteenth-century to a burgeoning metropolis by the early twentieth-century. Scott Zesch describes Los Angeles as “undoubtedly the toughest town of the entire nation during the 1850s and 1860s.”

Contrary to this argument, Scott Truett argues the violence of vigilante groups detract the rich borderland history. “The borderlands remain ensnared in their ‘wild west past’….thus as unstable as they are divided.” These changes of social geography gentrified early Los Angeles.

William Estrada argued, “when history and fantasy converge, both a profound political symbolism  and a clear expression of cultural hegemony emerge, particularly when we consider the dialectic relation between who is doing the “preserveing” and what is being “preserved.” Hise focused on contested space and theoretically illustrated newly constructed geography becomes a place of political struggle. The industrialization of Los Angeles provided booster Anglo-Angelenos opportunity to generate wealth. City boosters, engaged in environmental cognition, created a complex Los Angeles urban environment by assigned social space, creating industry, and romanticizing mythical cultural of non-Anglo Angelenos. Navigating created ‘rival geographies,’ immigrant clusters of communities formed geographic space into place by creating enterprise through tourism, cross-ethnic communities, and established an agency within forced cultural boundaries.

The historiography regarding the political contributions of white women and the African slave population (referred to as people of color in this paper), on the subject of human rights during the Civil War antebellum era, 1781-1860, is now vast, but it was at one time considered to be a less important subject as this group of people’s contributions were rarely if ever included in the official government records of their time, “the gap between national, political history, social history, described by Ellis in terms of subjects of kinds of people, becomes a rigid chronological barrier as well when self-described historians of the founding era define a brief,  Camelot-like early republic, when high politics ruled the day – a last bastion, apparently, of history as the interaction of great men.” Their history would have been forgotten if not for the writings of later historians with more diverse perspectives on what, and who, made up history.  The common thread that connected white women and the African slave population was a strong faith in the religious/moral beliefs that ran through the whole of the antebellum society at that time in history, and they used this common thread to make their voices heard. All had come to the same conclusion, that all humans should be treated equally and that through their words and actions they should be able to achieve this peacefully. While white women had social purpose and a degree of respect in society, their contribution to history was not fully appreciated by earlier historians who did not see them as having important political influence during this antebellum time frame. Earlier historians did not understand the power that white women and people of color had through the shared common thread with most people in the country: religious moral teachings. This general acceptance of white women and people of color (as defined above) as essentially physical and social tools whose writings, speeches and activism was not particularly important to the events leading up to the Civil War was brought into clear focus by the work of later historians whose scope of what elements might be considered history, gives these people greater consideration by encompassing not just the official records of the past, but also the less traditional records such as diaries, letters and the arts to give a better picture of their overall historical contribution.

Primary source analysis:

There were many activists, speaking and writing to affect the fight for human rights during the Civil War antebellum era, but few that made such an impact on the world as Harriet Beecher Stowe with her 1854 fictional book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe was raised in “a prominent religious family” and following the tenets of faith, she felt it was her duty to speak out against slavery, “the heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from long line of Puritan ancestry, and just now it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account.” She wrote to politicians in an attempt to affect change through her words. Stowe’s fictional book is a tale of morality that might not have been considered significant in the events of history by historians interested in the political elites and official records, but in this book, she managed to find the pulse, or steer a direction among those in the grassroots equal rights and abolitionists movements. Her book with regard to white women and people of color had the effect of humanizing people of color and raising the awareness that women had moral power through religious equality with men. In her book, a man of color is the peaceful, thought-provoking and self-sacrificing hero whose faith—the common thread and equalizer of all humankind, and through a white woman with a vision of a better future through her faith, deliver ...

Taylor Dipoto

16 December 2016

American Isolationism and the Monroe Doctrine in the Nineteenth Century

For a great deal of American history, the United States remained—or attempted to remain—independent from the political affairs of other nations. George Washington set this precedent with his Farewell Address, expressing hope that his country “may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected…Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European Ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humour or Caprice?” Although the United States did fight engage European powers in war, this germ of isolationism—a form of nonintervention that prized peace for Americans over any international involvement—presented by Washington, took root.

Despite the early origins of this idea, the bulk of scholarship on American isolationism specifically focuses on the period of the twentieth century that encompasses the World Wars, and often ignores any earlier manifestations of the idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the major questions facing historians who tackle these prior incarnations of isolationism center around its origins. While these historians do not often directly engage in a debate, their ideas nevertheless fall into two different camps: one considers the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 as the official starting point, while the other looks to various earlier moments in American history. Most historians writing on the subject fall into the first category. Carl Becker wrote “The Monroe Doctrine and the War” shortly after the end of the First World War, making him the first historian to notice a connection between the Monroe Doctrine and the broader idea of isolationism, likely because isolationism was more prevalent than ever before in the years directly leading up to American involvement in the war. Several subsequent historians have shared his opinion; Gretchen Murphy (Hemispheric Imagining: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire), Jay Sexton (The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America), and John Kasson (“The Monroe Doctrine in 1881”) make the Monroe Doctrine the focus of their respective works on the American idea of empire in the nineteenth century. More recently however, several historians have come forward to suggest even earlier beginnings to isolationist practices. William Belko’s “The Origins of the Monroe Doctrine Revisited” traces its development to a very specific event: the 1810 West Florida Revolt, which he proposes shaped the eventual “no transfer” policy of the Monroe Doctrine. Reaching even further back, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol looks to the 1790s as a period of early isolationism following George Washington’s suggestion to avoid entanglement in Europe in her article “Early Isolationism Revisited: Neutrality and Beyond in the 1790s.”

While the establishment of a concrete point of origin for isolationism is undoubtedly the most contested point within the historiography, other historians have established an ancillary debate centering around the dichotomy of internationalism and isolationism. Some see these two ideas as completely incompatible, and choose to focus their work on the arguments between “imperialists” and “anti-imperialists” within the American government. David Healy (U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s) and Berkeley Tompkins (Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate 1890-1920) both hold this view in their books dealing with both expansionism and anti-imperialism. On the other side of the debate, Marco Mariano’s “Isolationism, Internationalism and the Monroe Doctrine” and James Sofka’s “American Neutral Rights Reappraised” both point out the similarities between these two ideas, stressing the ways in which they could coexist. Both questions demonstrate the relative lack of consensus among the academic community when it comes to the history of American isolationism, making its study both useful and important in terms reaching new conclusions that may further the field.

Historical works relating to American isolationism vary quite greatly in their specific topics, because scholars do not agree on exactly what “isolationism” comprises in a specifically American sense. Twentieth century historians view it in a narrow sense, defining it as the United States’ reluctance to involve itself in the world wars. These historians rarely acknowledge the existence of isolationism, at least by their definition, before 1914. Understandably, this prevalent idea causes problems when it comes to defining isolationism as it existed in nineteenth century America. This historiography will view isolationism more broadly, as the desire for both distance from and non-intervention in European affairs, Therefore, the major problem in examining works relating to American foreign policy in the nineteenth century—regardless of the emphasis their individual works directly place on it—is discovering exactly how prevalent isolationism was during this period.

Until quite recently, many scholars avoided using the term isolationism at all, even when writing on American foreign policy. However, this does not mean earlier works ignored the possibility of its presence. Instead, a trend carrying from the end of the nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century appears to emphasize imperialism, while failing to acknowledge its connections to isolationist ideas. The implementation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and mass territorial expansion throughout the nineteenth century split both politicians and American citizens into two factions: imperialists and anti-imperialists. Evident by their names, the first group supported territorial expansion outside of the continental United States and the establishment of what essentially amounted to a colonial empire. The second opposed this aim, arguing that imposing American rule upon a foreign group “represented a flagrant violation of the fundamental principles upon which the government of the United States was based.”

Berkeley Tompkins and David Healy both published books on these factions in 1970, emphasizing the ways in which many anti-imperialists viewed colonialism/imperialism as a problem not only for the oppressed, but for the wellbeing of the United States as well. Neither author directly relates anti-imperialism to isolationism, but the two ideas are remarkably similar, as they respectively center on keeping the United States out of foreign territory and foreign affairs. This suggests that in its broad definition, isolation did indeed exist during the nineteenth century. Earlier historians ...

Victoria Perez

Dr. Shrout

Hist 571: Directed Readings Seminar

December 16, 2016

Final Paper

Orange County: Integration in the Early Citrus Industry

Southern California gradually transitioned from a rural region of ranches into a more urban setting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is attributed to the establishment of industrial agriculture and, specifically, the citrus industry. Overall, scholars studied the citrus industry both in broad and specific terms. Regional and state histories allowed them to view citrus as a whole unit that drove the economic development of Southern California and the state in general. Historians also compiled case studies about the specific communities in early cities, such as those in San Juan Capistrano. Starting from a smaller group of people revealed a more personal perspective of the social and cultural changes associated with the citrus industry. This paper utilized the latter method in order to contribute to the small, but growing, selection of Orange County history.

In general, historians approached this industry by examining either the institutions or the people that contributed to urban development. Understanding citrus from a top-down perspective of institutions like the Fruit Exchange or the railroad established the historical background, but it left out many people. Scholars responded to this issue in the historiography by shifting the focus onto the ordinary people experiencing the region’s development. Histories from this second group understood the narrative from the bottom-up. In the last ten years, workers who migrated to California became more visible in the historical narrative. While citrus did in fact promote the region’s growth, it would not have made such an impact without the daily contribution of people

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who picked and packaged the citrus. Those workers consisted of migrants from other states and countries who created new communities in Southern California. During the early twentieth century, immigration and migration influenced the creation of a diverse population and the development of the citrus industry. In general, scholars approached community development within the context of both local and national migration trends in this period of growth. By working from the bottom up, historians eventually established a narrative that attempted to represent more of the Southern California population.

In addition to describing how the state of the field became more inclusive, this paper will also explain that the historiography should now focus on cross-gender and cross-ethnic interactions in the early Orange County communities. Future research would examine how and why the commingling of women and non-Anglos was significant in the make up of the county’s citrus workforce. This paper will build on previous histories by using photographs to explain how interactions among diverse groups of people affected citrus communities. Historians adding to the narrative should not only recognize the diversity within the citrus workforce, but they should also realize that those workers transformed the social and cultural environment of the citrus industry. Studying these aspects more closely will also develop a history seeking to portray a more relatable past for those living and working in a modern and diverse world today.

Since the growth of Southern California’s citrus industry is multi-faceted, historians tried to analyze it in different ways. Theoretical approaches to this subject ranged from economic history to cultural history. Specifically, scholars who wrote social and cultural histories of Southern California established a more complex story. Historians developed a more dynamic perspective when they acknowledged ordinary people’s contributions to growth, instead of describing their

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impact in brief and general terms. This newer approach from the last ten to twenty years highlighted many aspects of Orange County communities, but it also left out other characteristics that have yet to be fully realized. Historians described ethnic groups in distinct and separate worlds, but they still did not entirely explain one aspect of early integration in the work place. The historical debate most related to this discussion deals with this struggle to understand community, whether it is viewed as a significant participant or only a minor contributor to the citrus industry. How much did immigration or migration play a role in developing Orange County’s communities and how should the ordinary person’s story inform its citrus history?

The historical counterargument to this debate approached the question with considerably less focus on people and immigration. It is important to note that these historians published their works before, and sometimes around the same time as, other scholars who argued for the other side of the debate. Although top-down histories mentioned people, they did not always represent every gender or ethnicity that should hold a place in the narrative. Instead, these scholars drew attention to major institutions and their leaders in order to create a broader understanding of significant changes occurring in Southern California.

While histories from above provided a good foundation for the narrative, they minimized the role of the ordinary person in order to identify general trends in the region’s history. William Deverell, in “The Southern Pacific Railroad Survives the Pullman Strike of 1894,” used this top-down approach to explain the power of California’s railroads and its leaders in the midst of labor strikes.1 Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell used an approach similar to Deverell in “The Citrus

1  William Deverell, “The Southern Pacific Railroad Survives the Pullman Strike of 1894.” in Major Problems in California History. ed. Chan Sucheng and Spencer Olin, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 183, 192.

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Industry and the Revolution of Corporate Capitalism in Southern California, 1887-1944.” These three historians did not really consider migration in their analysis of the region’s main factors for growth and success. With an impersonal approach to regional expansion, they argued from the perspectives of company leaders or citrus growers in general terms.2 Unlike histories from below, top-down histories did not emphasize laborers who were unable to make substantial profits from the railroad, real estate, or citrus. However, historians did not try to leave people and immigration out of the story. Instead, they chose to focus on the structures that allowed the region and the citrus industry to flourish. This part of the narrative preceded histories of other people and immigrants because it was important to first understand the environment that drew them to the state. Yet, histories of institutions were still not complete without the laborers who boosted the success of those structures.

Edward Bachus, in “Who Took the Oranges Out of Orange County?: The Southern California Citrus Industry in Transition,” provided another example of how scholars studied community in broad terms, rather than in specific examples of cultural ...

Lynching in the United States is a well-documented topic with countless journal articles and books written on the subject. What struck me was the proliferation of lynching after the high death counts caused by the civil war. The mass mob violence of lynching seems to counter how the nation was exhausted over of the amount of deaths. Half way through the Civil War, almost every household had mourned the death of a loved one. In Drew Faust’s book, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, she examines dying and killing and “explores how those experiences transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering.” The shared suffering transformed how the United States dealt with the memory of death. Memories of shared suffering did not stop the mob violence killing of African Americans in the South. How have scholars argued the rise of lynching after the civil war and how have they been in conversation with each other?  I will argue what has been scholars common thread and how they expanded it in their own arguments. The common thread that has linked scholars is the Southern justification of lynching by labeling African-American’s as the “Black Rapist” and how they used lynching as a spectacle.

Throughout the Civil War Americans, from North and South, have become desensitized to killing. During this period the amount of killings became the norm. To continue killing, after the many years of suffering, a justification was needed in order for it to continue. Crystal N. Feimster’s article What If I am a Women: Black Women’s Campaigns for Sexual Justice and Citizenship provides a justification of how white southerners were depicting African American as the “Black Rapist.” Feimster writes, “In constructing the image of the “Black rapist,” southern white men sought to challenge black men’s and women’s rights to citizens, while expanding their own sexual power over African Americans. The portrayal of black men as beastly and unable to control their sexual desires served to justify lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement.” The disappearance of the North and reclaiming political power of white Democrats by using Jim Crow legislation helped increase the large amounts of lynching and suppressed black women’s rights.

In Amanda K. Frisken’s article “A Song Without Words”: Anti-Lynching Imagery in the African American Press, 1889-1898 she builds on the “Black Rapist” argument, but expands on how imagery justified lynching. Frisken argues, “The stereotype of the black rapist amplified the visual short-hand then developing in the sensational illustrated news…the Police Gazette gradually distilled a version of the southern rape/lynching narrative, namely that African American men had an innate tendency to rape white women, and the lynching was necessary to keep them in check.” Frisken ties her argument with the “Black Rapist” narrator through images of how white Southerners used it to justify lynching. However, she writes how it prompted black newspapers to respond to mob violence and to use images to put pressure on Northern Republican legislatures to provide protection laws for African Americans.

Christine DeLucia’s article Getting the Story Straight: Press Coverage of Italian-American Lynchings from 1856-1910 expands the “Black Rapist” notion by expanding this justification to other ethnic groups. She explains, “In justifying African-Americans lynchings, white southerners drew upon distinct constructions of black men as rapists, while violence against Sicilians was legitimated by construction of them principally as murderers.” Focusing on ...

Introduction  

The U.S.-Mexican War saw the rapid succession of territorial expansion second only to the Louisiana Purchase. The rise of the prominent tacticians and generals who would forge legendary careers with the outbreak of the Civil War, and once President James K. Polk called for war it created a controversy among Congressional members who viewed it as an opportunity to expand slavery westward. The biggest debate surrounding the war is what is left out of the established narrative, which labels it a glorious and justifiable war? For many years, historians such as Dr. Robert W. Johannsen a J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Illinois, believed the decision to go to war with Mexico war was reluctantly taken by President Polk and his cabinet. Once word was received of the ambush of an American unit north of the Rio Grande in which several lives were lost. Gave the United States a reasonable excuse to call for a state of war. As a result whatever doubts remained were now removed when Polk sent his war message to Congress, and two days later both houses approved a war bill by overwhelming majorities.  However, this paper seeks to use new scholarly works to argue that the U.S.-Mexican as an unpopular war, which created controversy among Congressional members and the public alike. In addition, to call for the the advancement of the field to view the war itself as a manufactured war created for the purpose of American imperialism. Resulting in the leaving out of California and Mexican narratives in the newly conquered lands west of Texas. Because it is important to have a complete perspective on the war, which encompasses all narrative, so that scholars and students alike can gain a better understanding as why the war was fought and its effect on the people already living in the lands the U.S. won.

Historiography

On May 11, 1846, President James K. Polk sent a special message to the Congress of the United States for a declaration of war against Mexico. Polk stated that on April 12, Mexican forces at the small border town of Matamoras under the command of General Pedro de Ampudia assumed a belligerent attitude and notified General Zachary Taylor to break up his camp within twenty-four hours and to retire beyond the Nueces River. If Taylor failed to comply with these demands and he would announced that arms, and arms alone, must decide the question. However, April 24 General Mariano Arista, who had succeeded to the command of the Mexican forces engaged with a large body of  Taylors troops, and after a short affair sixteen U.S. troops were killed and wounded while reaming men were surrounded and compelled to surrender. As such, Polk argued for the vindication for the rights and defense of the United States for which Congress must recognize the existence of the war.  As such, he urged Congress to place the disposition of the Executive the means of prosecuting the war with vigor, and thus hastening the restoration of peace. As result of this, message Congress officially declared war on another nation for the second time in the history of the nation. Nevertheless, the actual decision to go to war provoked controversy among the congressional members and the public alike, which seems to have been swept under the rug, do the notion of history books empathizing America’s victory over Mexico and the observation that the majority of American don’t like controversy surrounding military operations like the Iraq War.

Several historians argue that even though the Mexican-American War caused a firestorm of controversy among Congressional party members who called into question was the  war necessary. Historians like Associate Professor Michael A. Morrison from the University of Michigan, argues that the Whig Party was committed to a program of controlled, peaceful expansion.  However, they became disturbed by Polk’s method of acquiring California and the borderlands of the Southwest. Arguing that the fruits of the war-land hunger, greed, and a widely dispersed population-promised to destroy the social and economic conditions necessary to a virtuous. Morrison work is important because he provides the main opposition agonist the war, which is not mentioned in most history books.  As such, resulting enthusiasm of going to war questioned the morality that with victory the possibility of slavery expanded to the west became a reality something that the Whigs feared the most.

While other scholars like Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster Nicholas Lawrence, believes that this enthusiasm for the United States’ military action in Mexico saturated national discourse and political figures. At all levels of government, along with a virtual armada of newspaper writers and literary authors, responded, argue that even popular writers such to the war as a galvanizing moment. However, writers like Henry David Thoreau criticized the war as being “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” What Lawrence ...

During a journey in 1832 to the Dakota region, American painter George Catlin worried that America’s expansion westward would have destructive effects on Native American livelihood, wilderness, and wildlife. He wrote and wished for their preservation, “by some great protecting policy of government . . . in a magnificent park . . . a nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!” His vision, along with other romantic writers and painters helped change the perception of nature from something to overcome to something to admire. This new image would create fifty-eight national parks and 124 national monuments.

In March of 1872, Congress passed the Yellowstone Act, which established Yellowstone as America’s first national park. The government intended these lands to serve “as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

Almost two decades passed between the establishment of Yellowstone and the next national park. The Progressive Era, a period defined by extensive social activism and political change, created the conditions for environmental conservation to occur on an unprecedented scale. The quick expansion of industrialization and the sprawl of urbanization resulted in a burgeoning appreciation for nature and a want for places to escape all the commotion.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act which created the National Park Service (NPS), a new federal bureau belonging to the Department of the Interior. At the time, they were responsible for the protection of the thirty-five established national parks and monuments. “The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations . . . by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life.”

In spite of this effort and government support, the national parks and the conservation movement received some resistance. The inadequacies in policies and the absence of coordination between the government and park administration caused many problems. For almost fifty years the nation’s parks and monuments fell under the supervision of a variety of different departments, including the departments of the Interior, War, and Agriculture. None of the departments coordinated well, which resulted in the mismanagement of the parks and many unforeseen problems.

Historians and other scholars have widely discussed the national parks. In a broad sense, the conservation movement and the creation of the national parks and monuments had good intentions. Yet, these intentions seemed only to benefit a particular group of people: white Americans. The American government used laws and policies in an attempt to preserve nature for “the enjoyment of future generations”, but ended up in the expulsion of native and other occupying groups from park lands and had dramatic effects on the wildlife of the parks. The issues with the creation of and early administration of parks have caused scholars to view these events in a negative way.

In order to fully grasp this negativity, we need to examine the mindset of the people involved in the history of the national parks and conservation. Roderick Nash’s “The Value of Wilderness” does the perfectly. To Nash, the wilderness provided a state of mind for the American people. The United States sprung out of the wilderness. Europeans settled in it, natives that occupied North America for 20,000 were unfortunately considered wild animals. “The American attitude wilderness was highly unfavorable. Wild country was the enemy.”

Until the development of the national parks, the word “park” meant something closer to a garden, where one could bask in the pleasantries of nature. Maintaining a garden meant cutting the grass, clearing undergrowth, trimming hedges, and planting preferred flora and fauna. It was something man could control. The creation of the national parks gave man an area he could control. The man versus nature dichotomy swung dramatically in man’s favor. The understanding of this relationship is crucial to the historiography because it explains why humans take conservation and the environment seriously, and why nature’s role is no longer the enemy.

Yellowstone is, by far, the oldest national park on the planet. After its establishment in the early 1870s, the park had over four decades of government administration before the National Park Service inherited its vast and varying landscape. Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park narratives the long and contentious history of the NPS in Yellowstone. He depicts how the Park Service’s rigorous, petty, and hard-lined policies led to the mismanagement of not only wildlife, but tourists and other NPS personnel. Policies on wildlife management hurt the ecosystem of the parks. First, the NPS wanted to protect big game animals by killing predators. Chase continues to charge the NPS with mishandling of funds and even visitor policy at the cost of maintaining the landscape.

Playing God in Yellowstone is a perfect example of how the historiography of the parks is moving towards a polemic mindset. Chase has nothing positive to say about the National Park Service. His acerbic language attempts to discredit the NPS, but also highlights to delicate mission the parks was tasked with in 1916. They must maintain a difficult balance of preserving nature while maintaining the parks for the public and future visitors. Chase takes this mission into little consideration.

Chase’s book is well-researched. He includes a plethora of sources from newspapers and ...

A Movement for Wholeness in a Fragmented World: Women, Religion and Activism in 19th Century America

While the Second Great Awakening began in the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the movement gained traction within the United States. This Protestant Christian revival movement came from a Postmillennial concept at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the eminent return of Christ meant the general population needed to prepare the world for his return. The Second Great Awakening spawned new and uniquely American protestant denominations. One of the traditions, the reform movement, began to take shape and spread across eastern and Midwestern towns in the United States. The effects of the revival movement on men such as Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone often become the focus of both historical and religious writings while the women of the movement tend to be ignored. The Second Great Awakening also changed the way women viewed their role in society. Changing the social structure of private and public sphere, women found strength in their newfound religious experiences. These women gravitated to the revival movement in the late eighteenth century in large numbers, constituting the majority of Christian converts and dedicated parishioners. Betty DeBerg noted that in 1892 a survey of eight churches resulted in the fact that only twenty-eight percent of a congregation’s membership and thirty-eight percent of the church worshippers were male. This meant that to keep a church going women had to take on roles as leaders in their church, such leadership needs saw women fighting for their right to become ordained as they took over many roles that previously belonged to men. Religious fervor also helped to inspire many women to provide help to the less fortunate and fight for the purity they desired. It led to women stepping out of the home or private sphere to enact social change within their society. But, women who stayed at home worked just as hard behind the scenes. Author Nancy Hardesty contends that one of the largest changes to occur in the nineteenth century happened within the family structure . Where before families were housed together in multi-generational family structures with Women in charge of the home, the nineteenth century saw a number of changes in this structure. Families no longer lived within multi-generational structures and the birthrate declined leaving the mother “in charge but without real authority.” While women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton garnered a majority of historical interest, recently scholars are turning to lesser known women who found their true calling through the religion they held so dear. Even when scholars focus on such prodigious women of the movement, their views on faith and the importance they placed on the faith of the women who followed them is not addressed.
Although historians agree that religion played an important role for women working in public for social reform, they disagree on the extent of religious impact on women who fought for political reform. One major difference in the research is the focal point of the researcher. Looking at a topic such as this one must include not just historical works, but the works of religious historians and authors as well. When including their works as an overall source within the subject matter, one must consider the point of view of the researcher. Looking at the works of religious authors are just as important to the historiography of women, religion and activism as the works of historical researchers. Both fields of study looked at together allows for a more comprehensive discussion to occur. Historical scholars often overlook the impact of religion on women and the activism they took up, religious scholars tend to only focus on the religion, often failing to mention any activism that women took up as a mantle of their faith.
One of the first historians to focus on evangelical women and its relationship to feminism and activism is Nancy Hardesty. Her book Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the 19th Century argues that female activism came about through organized Christian involvement. She claims that, “nineteenth century American feminism was deeply rooted in evangelical revivalism.” As one of the first writers on religious women in the public sphere she delves into a topic that had little in the way of historical background. She views the religious reforms and social work in the name of God as activism, this brings in the idea that not all activism is the same. In contrast, Lori Ginzeberg argues in Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, that it wasn’t until the postwar period that the religious woman stepped out into the public sphere and became active political and social reformers. Catherine Brekus agrees with Ginzeberg. She states in her article, Female Preaching in Early Nineteenth-Century America that women did not begin as early supporters of the women’s rights movement. These evangelical women were less likely to argue against the status quo of social hierarchy. She suggests it wasn’t until later in the nineteenth century that women began to transfer their interests into the various reforms that began to emerge. Female preachers took special precautions to insure that they were not mistaken as feminist leaders, they felt this would belittle their work and question the fact that their “pious” Christian voices deserved to be heard. But it did not stop some ordained women from reaching out and publically activating for causes they held dear. While women found it necessary to fight for leadership roles, they did not always attribute their fight as a form of activism. For these women, they viewed their fight as a step towards living their faith to the fullest.
Betty DeBerg on the other hand looks at the activism incited by religion as a powerful shift in the social structure. In her book, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism, DeBerg argues that the religious revival movement began a push for women ...

“They Ought to Deceive No One”: Lysander Spooner and the Civil War
David A. Beirne
The primary document that best encapsulates my study of the role of economics in the American Civil War is the pamphlet “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,” written by lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist Lysander Spooner and published in 1870, five years after the war. Though Spooner was fervently anti-slavery and hailed from Massachusetts, he brutally criticized the wartime president, the Republican Party for furthering in an unprecedented manner what he considered to be a dangerous consolidation of governmental, military and, apropos this paper, economic power.

Spooner hailed from a family of abolitionists, by 1845 already having written The Unconstitutionality of Slavery that argued that not only was slavery contrary to natural law, but never expressly sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution. Spooner wrote that the founding document “not only does not recognize or sanction slavery, as a legal institution, but that, on the contrary, it presumes all men to be free; that it positively denies the right of property in man; and that it, of itself, makes it impossible for slavery to have a legal existence in any of the United States.” Spooner was even involved in efforts to try and free John Brown. (Barnett 980)

By 1870, he seemed to believe that the slaves had gained their freedom at the expense of the freedom of the American states and, accordingly, the populace at large. “residents, senators, and representatives . . . are really only the agents of a secret band of robbers and murderers, whom they themselves do not know, and have no means of knowing, individually.” (Spooner 52) He continued, “And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals—if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.” (Spooner 53)

Lysander, though fighting his entire life for the abolition of slaves, posited that his government’s rhetoric and selective actions were not aligned with its wider ambitions and abuses. Slavery, in Spooner’s mind, was merely a pretense by which the aims of power were wrought. “All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” of establishing a “government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.” “In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand . . . in return for the money lent for the war.”

“In short, the North said to the slaveholders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you. (Spooner 54-55) “On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.” (Spooner 55)

Spooner concludes that “The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay “National Debts,” so-called,—that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated plundered, enslaved, and murdered—so long as there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection.” This viewpoint regarding the Civil War is often overlooked, even though Spooner’s case shows that it was not unique and crossed ideological boundaries that made more sense in the mid-nineteenth century than now.

 
Bibliography
Barnett, Randy E. “Was Slavery Unconstitutional Before the Thirteenth Amendment? Lysander Spooner’s Theory of Interpretation.” 28 Pacific L.J. 977-1014 (1997).

Johnson, Reinhard O. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States. Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Spooner, Lysander, “No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority,” in The University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, 1870) 52-53.

Of all the major sources surrounding the controversial decision of the United Sates declaring and waging war on Mexico, the diary of President James K. Polk, tends to be under utilize by scholars when examining the cause of the U.S.-Mexican War.  Written between 1845 and 1849, the diary is essential to find out why Polk pushed for war, which caused a firestorm among congressional members and public alike. More importunity it puts in to play on how the war with Mexico should be remembered as the result of his ambitions of finishing the conquest of the continent, which sought to gain the remaining European holdings in the Pacific Northwest and any disputed land left after the Texas Revolution (1835-1836). Similar to how the  works we read for the class over this semester expanded our notion of not looking a the big events or subjects like the Civil War or slavery as one solid identity, but rather a multilayered network of connections that link people, places, and ideals to each other.

In his earliest dairy entry dated August 26, 1845, Secretary of State James Buchanan suggested to Polk that the United States assert and enforce their authority in the whole Oregon Territory and settle on a comprise between the border of the U.S. and Canada on the 49^th parallel of the north latitude. However, when the British government refused the comprise Polk became infuriated that he was dined access to the Pacific and that rejection to him meant he would no longer give Britain peace. When Buchanan told Polk that if he were to carry out such intentions the U.S. would have war; to which Polk replied, “If we do have war it will not be our fault.”

From his diary, we can see that Polk had established his intentions on the possible acquisition of California seven months before war was officially declared against Mexico. During a cabinet meeting on Friday October 24, 1845, in which they discussed the dispute over the Oregon Territory, Polk recognized that California played a key role in the balance of power in the Pacific and argued that the United would not permit Britain or any other European monarchy to establish any new colony. Since he believed, the Monroe Doctrine gave him the justification to take California and its fine San Francisco Bay in addition to Oregon.

This diary entry alone opens the door on how scholars can see how Polk looked at this situation as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. With the refusal of Mexico to negotiate and the rejection Senator Slidell, Polk wanted war in order to finally claim California for the U.S. and insert American authority firmly on the continent. However, this is where the debate gets murky in regards to Polk’s involvement in the actual start of the war. Did he purposely send troops down to the disputed boarder lands to start the fighting or was it an actual attack by Mexican forces that lead to war? Although Polk never mentions having perpetuated any wrongdoing he does make it perfectly clear that the entire objective in going to war with Mexico was not for conquest however in actuality:

“It was clear that in making peace we would if practicable obtain California and such other  portion of the Mexican territory as would be sufficient to indemnify our claimants on Mexico and defray the expense of the war which that power by her long continued wrongs and injuries had forced us to wage.”

This passage completely changes the perceptive of the war that is either missing in history books or in other scholarly articles how we should remember the war itself. Yes, some do argue it was a means of spreading slavery but this idea was never an issue because the passage of an appropriation bill on August 10, 1846, which prohibited slaveholding in the newly acquired territory and even Polk, recognized that slavery would not work in the new provinces. More importantly, it was not fought for the retribution for the soldiers killed near the border but for the long awaited ability for Polk to claim the land he wanted. The land he felt was rightfully his in the name of American progress ...

Historian Jacob A. C. Remes book Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era examines how citizens and government responded to city disasters in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Salem, Massachusetts. The Halifax fire occurred in 1914 and the Salem fire in 1917. The book focuses on the relationships between victims, first responders, formal organizations, and the state. Remes analyzes each groups perspective on how they responded to the disasters. For example, during the Halifax fire, Remes breaks up the responders in three different groups: the relief workers, relief managers, and survivors. Many of the relief workers left their workplace to volunteer in hospitals due to the overwhelming amount of victims. Relief workers with no formal hospital training were able to organize themselves and adapt quickly to the needs of the hospital. Remes states, “The created order and efficiency without direction…middle-class volunteers who appear to have had little or no connection with those they were helping were not being randomly altruistic. Rather, they were reenacting their own everyday solidarity in extraordinary times.” (p. 29) During the disaster the group that appeared to be disorderly were the relief managers. Relief managers consisted of leaders from businesses, formal organizations, and politicians. The relief managers, due to their lack of knowledge, were not able to responds to the magnitude of the disaster. Due to communication lines being down throughout the city they were unaware of the impact in the city’s North End. In addition, the relief managers did not immediately go to city hall as they tended to their own needs first, securing their homes from the disaster. This was in contrast to the relief workers who also had a lack of knowledge of how to assist in the hospital, but still in their preexisting social order were able to adapt. The lack of knowledge for relief managers prohibited them from adapting quickly. In addition, because of the lack of knowledge they were not able to supply adequate solutions just as yaremenko stated in her post.  The survivors were able to create their own order. Remes writes, “Like relief workers, the built this order on the basis of their preexisting communities, relationships, and networks.” (p. 23) The survivors used the order they built to assist family and close friends.

In Disaster Citizenship, all the actors during and after the disaster had to renegotiate the relationship between each other. After the disasters the state took a more active role to better protect their citizens and improve interaction and formal organization in response to future crisis’s. Remes extensive use of primary sources included the Red Cross, city, military, diaries, personal narratives, church records and newspapers. Remes also provides a well written introduction providing a clear argument and a theme for the book.

Supplementary Reading: Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era

“The Emergence of a National Politics of Disaster, 1865-1900”
By Gareth Davies

In his essay “The Emergence of a National Politics of Disaster, 1865-1900”, author Gareth Davies traces the evolution of a federal policy towards disaster. His argument contends that it wasn’t until the Civil War that the Federal Government became involved on a national level to an extent it had never before considered possible. This occurred through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau came about because the Federal Government needed a clearinghouse to help escaped slave refugees that the “army had no choice but to shelter, clothe and feed.” Falling under the auspices of the War Department, the Freedmen’s Bureau and led by General Oliver Otis Howard. Howard found that his job was antithetical to what the Federal Government had provided to citizens up to that point in history. The Freedmen’s Bureau found itself protecting African Americans from violence, reuniting families and negotiate labor contracts.

The Freedmen’s Bureau became the point of relief distribution when a combination of natural disaster on an epic scale. For the first time a large-scale relief operation occurred when extreme flooding and crop failures swept the South two years in a row. According to Davies, this large-scale disaster had congress providing a budget to Howard which then extended the life of the bureau. The next year more flooding, crop failures and citizen destitution occurred again, but this year an added disaster infected the surviving crops. Caterpillars and cutworms swept through the area. There was an added factor of Yellow Fever epidemic that also devastated the area. Davies contends that the impact was so overwhelming that local governments and private citizens were unable to help. They were also unable or unwilling to “relieve the plight of African Americans.” This put the federal government in a position of having no alternative but to provide relief.
According to Davies, what truly began the relief movement came with the grasshopper plague that occurred in 1874. While the plague was known nationally, the extent of its effects were unknown. It wasn’t until an army major, James Brisbin, traveled through the area to find out if settlers needed more weapons for defense against Indian attacks that the truth of the devastation was revealed. Upon his return, Brisbin insisted that instead of arms, the War Department needed to send people to shoot down buffalo for food to feed the starving citizens. Unfortunately, congress was not in session at the time and it came down to president Grant to authorize the measure without congresses approval, he would seek it when congress returned. Such action freed up the Army to provide resources for those in the Platte area.
Davies also contends that federal relief policies developed from technological advancement. He argues that the development of two specific technological advances truly pressured congress and the federal government to provide relief to more disasters. The first advancement is not new technology. The railroad had been around prior to the Civil War, but it wasn’t until after the war that the railroad had national connections that helped to speed up communications and “change political culture in the more densely steeled areas of the East” The second technological advancement, the extension of the telegraph, sped up communication and allowed for an almost instantaneous reaction. With the telegraph, readers received news of a disaster almost immediately and would be provided updates and given dramatic accounts from various sources. Sometimes newspapers printed hourly updates from disaster areas. This led to the increase of letters in support of relief to congressmen. Davies argues that the simultaneous advancements with both the telegraph and the railroad was more impactful towards the federal government developing a policy of disaster aid than anything else at the time. Davies also shows that not every disaster received federal funding. The more dramatic the public perceived a disaster to be, the more likely it was to receive said funding. One example used by Davies, is the Chicago Fire. On the same day of the Chicago Fire, a more deadly and damaging fire occurred in eastern Wisconsin, killing as many as twenty-five hundred people. Due to the remoteness of the area and lack of dramatic retelling of the event, it never got the attention of the nation and no aid was provided to this area from the Federal Government.
While Davies looks at the development of a policy of Federal Disaster Relief funding compliments the reading for this week. Jacob Remes’ book Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era looks at the local impact of such disasters and how local authorities worked with and against the federal government to provide aid and compete for power structure within a devastated locale. Where Davies article leaves off, Remes’ book begins. Both show how devastating a disaster can be and both look at the political structure surrounding relief aid. While Davies looks federally, Remes looks to the local and private authorities of each city.

Gareth Davies, “The Emergence of a National Politics of Disaster, 1865–1900,” J. Policy Hist. Journal of Policy History 26, no. 03 (2014): 306, doi:10.1017/s0898030614000141.
Davies, 306.
Davies, 307.
Davies, 307.
Davies, 310-311.
Davies, 312.
Davies, 314.
Davies, 317.

Review of Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship

David A. Beirne

The Progressive Era was largely a backlash to the widespread private-public avarice represented in The Gilded Age, as named after Twain’s 1873 book. The economic and cultural realities of the time can be identified in an incident in Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship (2016) that a judge refers to as representing an “an overdose of ‘BUSINESS EFFICIENCY.'” (Remes 109) On the flip-side, progressive reformers have often over-espoused the virtues of the capacity of the state to solve problems. When the state says it wants to help its citizens or others, in particular providing them something for free, it is sometimes hard to see the downside from a purely theoretical sense.

Conservatives, apparently since Edmund Burke, have at least partially agreed with Reagan’s assessment that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Conservative questioning the state’s use of power to give and take resources is often perceived as simply mean-spirited and reactionary. Remes cites anarchist analyst Colin Ward in the book’s conclusion, in which he said that a “society which organizes itself without authority is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state.” (Remes 190) In a paper I wrote for Dr. McLain, Burke was a voice that decried what he understood to be a capricious use of power by the British state in India, in the name of benefit to all largely for this reason: communities have individual histories that can all too easily be overlooked by a distant governmental regime.

Disaster Citizenship reveals the positive good that state aid can have, but also the typically unintended consequences of accumulation of power in a state that does not always recognize what is truly best for local traditions and understandings. The ‘citizenship’ aspect of the title references the changing outlook on just what, exactly the state, armed with public resources, is supposed to do. Knowledge production is created to support this expansion and control, as Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathogens (2006) made evident. Community bonds, “organization without any organization,” and varying definitions of public and private responsibilities permeate different places. (Remes 22) In spite of often unhelpful interference, “everyday forms of solidarity” arose that provided different meanings to citizenship, and reflected in differing responses to disasters that ranged from policies to displays of “identity and empathy.” (Remes 10)

The work uses a transnational perspective comparing the two early twentieth century disasters at 1914 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and 1917 in Salem, Massachusetts, one that is highly reminiscent of the borderland perspective employed by Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Borderlands (2006). I appreciated Ms. yaremenkolena’s reference to Halifax disaster, where “the local order that allowed families to save their possessions was lost, and all that remained was confusion.” (yaremenkolena) Here, it was not so much citizen versus military that was critical to the effectiveness of relief as it was local versus distant, framing the debate over who was to have the civic power to react. Disasters additionally “exposed the economic value of labor that before had gone unremarked,” an argument feminists have long made about traditionally women’s household labor. (Remes 115) Rahm Emanuel had a great line in a 2008 Wall Street Journal conference that, when it comes to the state, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” and Disaster Citizenship shows how crises “do more than take a snapshot of a moment; they alter the direction of historical change.” Thus, these events can transform the way we look at what the state, as ‘the people,’ is supposed to be responsible for, as well as what is left to, well, the people to figure out. (Seib; Remes 5)

Bibliography

Remes, Jacob A. C. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2016.

Seib, Gerald F. “In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama.” November 21, 2008. Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122721278056345271. Accessed November 28, 2016.

In the book, The Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era, historian Jacob A.C. Remes, analyzes social and political structures in regard to responses to devastating fires in the towns of the Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada) in 1914 and Salem (Massachusetts, U.S.) in 1917. It examines those social and political structures that existed prior to the Progressive era. The Progressive government did not understand the concept of communities coming together and helping each other. The author describes how during that era prior social and political structures that had already been in place adversely influenced the events that followed these disasters, as a result. Remes, in his effort to fully understand this situation takes into consideration the writings of political and social scientists on the subject social and political structures at that time. The author shows that in these two disasters, at the social level, people in these communities understood how to react and interact with their neighbors and within their communities, and in fact responded to the disasters more efficiently than government institutions did. For people on the ground, the government was a faceless, soulless entity that the citizens preferred to avoid dealing with, and they didn’t believe that the government could be relied on to help them. The government tried to impose solutions based on an incorrect theories about what the problems were, and this only added to the disconnection between the institution and the citizens in need on the ground.

In Halifax, after the explosion, people initially went to check on their families. Those who had not been injured or who could help “often without direction or even suggestion…went to the devastate areas or to hospitals to help the rescue effort…they created order and efficiency without direction” (p.29). In the Halifax disaster, Remes uses “archives of letters, reports, and, most important, oral history. “This archive is primary in this chapter” (p.27). In the Salem disaster, the author shows how people on the ground were assisting voluntarily, including some military people on site, and were more effective than the military that was sent later by the government and brought only confusion: “the local order that allowed families to save their possessions was lost, and all that remained was confusion” (p.59). The military off duty and not sent by the government were helpful and were coordinating with the people on the ground, responding to their needs as the situation warranted. The minute the government got involved, efficiency disappeared in Salem. Remes expresses that memory fades, and nobody remembers the government, but still remembers their neighbors’ help seven decades later (p.47). The lack of timely aid from relief organizations on the ground drew people and communities together, unifying them in response to the occurring event in a way that the government seemed incapable of doing.

Community support without regard to territorial borders is also seen in the Fugitive Landscape, by Truett, wherein the legal boundaries, government officials, and their involvement were ignored by people on the ground, showing a disconnection between the average person and government officials and organizations. As Robert and higbeejonathan  agreed in regards to Truett’s Fugitive Lanscape  “…most Americans have long forgotten the history of th area or have no interest in it,” but that history traced in Truett’s and Remes’ works shows a clear pattern of the early enterprise among citizens and the disconnect of a distant government. Finally, both authors successfully immerse the reader in the historical events of the past with great details, effectively connecting the past to the present.

On May 11, 1846, President James K. Polk sent a special message to the Congress of the United States for a declaration of war against Mexico. Polk stated that on April 12, Mexican forces at the small border town of Matamoras under the command of General Pedro de Ampudia assumed a belligerent attitude and notified General Zachary Taylor to break up his camp within twenty-four hours and to retire beyond the Nueces River. If Taylor failed to comply with these demands and he would announced that arms, and arms alone, must decide the question. However, April 24 General Mariano Arista, who had succeeded to the command of the Mexican forces engaged with a large body of  Taylors troops, and after a short affair sixteen U.S. troops were killed and wounded while reaming men were surrounded and compelled to surrender. As such, Polk argued for the vindication for the rights and defense of the United States for which Congress must recognize the existence of the war, and to place at the disposition of the Executive the means of prosecuting the war with vigor, and thus hastening the restoration of peace. As result of this, message Congress officially declared war on another nation for the second time in the history of the nation. Nevertheless, the actual decision to go to war provoked controversy among the congressional members and the public alike, which seems to have been swept under the rug, do the notion of history books empathizing America’s victory over Mexico and the observation that the majority of American’s don’t like controversy surrounding military operations like the wars of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

As such scholars today seek, argue that in order to  understand any war that the United States find itself fighting we need to present all aspects of how and why America deicide to take up arms against its supposed enemies, even if certain materials are not in favor of going to war or completely bash it. For example, J. Javier Rodríguez argues that the war against Mexico generated not just the stabilizing narratives of racial or national dichotomies but also intense counter-narratives wherein Mexico and Mexicans were either equivalent Americans defending their republic from invasion, or, in a further extension, and far more disturbing, agents of existential disturbance, standing against the very possibility of meaning itself. As such, he points to one of the clearest examples of this kind of agonistic US–Mexican War literature The Biglow Papers. As such, these papers represent a silent side of the war, which give a deeper understanding on the various thoughts, feelings, and observations people had on the events surrounding the conflict between U.S. and Mexico rather than those who outwardly supported it.

However, one must not only look at the public opinion to see the disagreement of the U.S. picking a fight with Mexico but to look at those who fought on the frontlines. According to Dr. Paul what is missing from the grand narrative of the U.S.-Mexican War is the disenfranchise of the many men who volunteer to fight Polk’s war. He argues that the self-conception of soldiers and the differing standards of discipline marked the two branches (regular enlisted men and volunteer) as distinct. Regular army officers were notoriously quick to resort to the lash against miscreant soldiers. In the volunteer regiments solider as the bulwark of national policy, but the despised regulars were chief instrument of those same politicians on launching and prosecuting the Mexican War.

Armed with these scholarly works with addition to other I seek to track how scholars today argue for the need to present, display, and introduce various sources of discontent towards the U.S. conflict with Mexico in order for the public to gain a better understanding of the war itself. Because understanding why people criticized it can expand our understanding of how we remembered it.

                Brad Lookingbill, ed, American Military History: A Documentary Reader (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 112-13.

                J. Javier Rodríguez, “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s the Bigelow Papers,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 63.3 (2007): 2.

                J. Javier Rodríguez, “The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell’s the Bigelow Papers,”7.

                Paul W. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 13.

                  Paul W. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 17-18.

                  Ibid, ...

            Zaggari in Beyond the Founders, Chapter 3 and 4 discusses women’s expanding social power based on entrepreneurship, but what he does not discuss, which is more evident in Slavery’s Capitalism by Becker and Rockman, is that women of color and white women were essentially used as tools. White women were tools for producing heirs and therefore had greater social importance than women of color, and women of color were used as tools that produced more slaves/workers: cogs for the machinery of the capitalist economy of the antebellum South. Through entrepreneurship, they became part of the labor class. They were creating a space for themselves that equaled no longer simply being tools. While the question of human inequality in the South led to the Civil War, changing the place in society for all slaves, and for men of color this meant political power was possible if not immediately available, it did not change women’s political position in this same world. All women, white and of color, were now socially free, but politically almost powerless except by their own bottom-up revolution through their labor/ entrepreneurial efforts.

            In the World of Civil War Made, Zimmerman discusses the idea of women of color being part of the machinery of capitalism. He cites Marx, using his fairly dispassionate and purely analytical argument with regard the roles of humans in general living under a capitalist system. Marx, despite not writing directly about the Civil War, was known to have written against the practice of slavery and for its abolishment and he saw society in general as beginning at the division of labor of the sexes.

            Zaggari points to the progress made by white women and women of color, wherein they begin to become their own means of production, as Marx predicted, in a bottom-up movement in society. Marx comes closest to recognizing women being used as tools in the division of labor, but that would also apply to men. He doesn’t make a distinction about how white women were used as opposed to how women of color were used. Both were used for the purposes of empirical men. Marx saw women’s place in society as defining it, or as a measurement of the society as a whole. This indicates only that Marx recognized women as tools in a society; however, since his theory tends to see all the people as tools of their society to some extent, it is difficult to tell if Marx was particularly concerned about the place the women held specifically.  He, like the men of his age, lived in an era that may have made it difficult to see that women were treated not merely as tools, but as lesser ones, and tools with virtually no political power, like slaves. As proof of this possibility, he never doubted that slavery was primarily the cause of the Civil War. Therefore, it may be fair to say that he didn’t see women’s roles as tools to serve others as a problem, or as a slave-like condition that needed addressing that arose to the level of justifying war.

            Marx did say, however, “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (p.320). The idea was that the struggle of the wage laborer was part of the fight against slavery, and once again women were not seen as that part of this wage labor movement. Therefore, they were unintentionally invisible in the revolution against unequal power in the world.

            Zaggari and Zimmerman had the benefit of hindsight over Marx. Zaggari, however, despite recognizing that white women and women of color were making themselves part of the labor class, does not address that fact that they were following Marx’s bottom up revolutionary theory. According to Zimmerman, white women were tools that helped society function in the Marxist sense, but with power limited to the social sphere, on par with women of color. What Zaggari and Zimmerman both miss, it that women entrepreneurs were creating a place for themselves in politics, as the labor and social worlds did influence the political world, and this was also true of women of color. Entrepreneurship was doing more to change their world than the fight for equal rights for all people, as white women were still not equal to any men, even after the Civil war, and women of color were freed from slavery but found themselves, like white women, not relevant politically. Entrepreneurship was the key to women being relevant and rising in political power versus remaining tools for other’s uses.

Warwick Anderson’s Colonical Pathologies American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (one of the coolest names ever besides Crockett) utilizes cultural and environmental lenses to examine how medical and racial intersect with imperialism and American boosterism and exceptionalism. Dividing the book into sections examining engagement of American military medicine, how Americans reshaped both public and private spheres, and reviewing case studies that further his stance. Utilizing this new history from the Pan-Pacific side, Anderson asserts that all medicine is colonial in its relation to the body. This ideology evolves over time into racialized epistemologies that change Filipino cultural discourse. ‘Medical Mobilization of civic potential ‘(p.4), combined with the bureaucratic boosters backing, creates this cultural change.

Diana Nguyen stated in her post, “What I found most intriguing was that Anderson never truly defines the concept of “biomedical citizenship” throughout his book but rather instead, her merely infer that compliance with medicalized colonial regimes would be interpreted as evidence for citizenship. “

I completely agree with this as I never actually could locate anything that nailed down what seemed like a key term and a critical point to the argument as Anderson states that the intention of the book is to “chart the colonial development and deferral of what might be called “biomedical citizenship,” (p.3). However, I do see the points that he laid out is defining what biomedical citizenship is within Americanization and its self-exceptionalism to desire to make non-American’s clean and fit for the new globalizing world. Characterizing both Filipino body and culture to show both progress and modernization creates a manufactured sense of place and self within the medical space. What he argues is an experience between both race and empire within the medical field. The result of this faux created citizenship through American medical exceptionalism is biomedical citizenship.

The other readings that came to my mind are Camp and her utilization of racialized agency within cultural boundaries set by Americans. Using the medical field as space, American’s cultural assertion on Filipino culture creates a myth of the culture as something less than American exceptional. The idea of how one’s body can not only be utilized to create mythicized agency and colonial boundaries of non-American cultural is apparent throughout the book. Another theme throughout the reading selections has been issuing authority over people’s body. How does one obtain it, keep and utilize tactical strategies to deploy faux agency? Moreover, with assigning authority, what history is left to be examined against the grain? I find this true with both this book and our covered histories like Commanche Empire, Fugitive Landscapes, A Misplaced Massacre, Chinatown War and Closer to Freedom.  Imperial order always has a cost and is often at the expense of the people who live in created marginalized boundaries (both geographical and cultural). The last chapters of the book were by far my favorite as they examined boosterism group The Rockefeller Foundation and created racialized agency by associating disease with Filipino culture.

Suzanna Melendez

November 11, 2016

4-6 Primary Sources

Fraser, Simon, and W. Kaye Lamb. 1960. Letters and Journals, 1806-1808. Toronto: Macmillian Co. of Canada.

• Emphasized in his biography, explorer Simon Fraser is one of the most neglected explorers in Canada. While Lewis and Clark explored the Louisiana Territory in 1805-6, Simon crossed the Rocky Mountains and built trading posts. During my research, I want to focus on his journey because Frenchmen that utilized his trading posts were Frenchmen married to native women.

MacDonald, Lois Halliday, Francis Eratinger, and Edward Ermatinger. 1980. Fur Trade Letters of Francis Ermatinger; Written to his brother Edward During his Service with the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1818-1853. Glendale, Calif.: A. H. Clark Co.

• The framework of the scholarship highlights the North Americans fur trade and mountain men. It is important to point out that majority of native women married to French men participated in the fur trade. The scholar utilized letters, post journals, fur trade accounts, and official government documents. My intention is not only to focus on the social history of interracial marriages between native women and French men, but also research the political and economic factors.

Morton, Desmond, and Reginald Herbert Roy. 1972. Telegrams of the North-West Campaign, 1885. Toronto: Champlain Society.

• A critical re-examination of European official interactions between the native populations in North America. The vividly details the violent confrontations between two different societies. He utilized diaries, letters telegrams and other government documents. It will be interesting to research the native women’s position, especially, during these violent altercations.

Petitot, Emile Fortune Stanislas Joseph, John S Moir, Paul Laverdure, Jacqueline Moir 2005. Travels Around Great Slave and Great Lakes, 1862-1882. Toronto: Champlain Society.

• Although the story is set in Canada, the primary sources in the book provided by four Frenchmen explorers are critical to my historiography. Letters, diary entries, essays, artifacts, and a compile of dictionaries and grammar of native languages emphasize their presence not just in America but also in Canada. As I organize my essay, I will try and find connections related with native women despite the difference in location.

By tracing the history of the Philippine-American colonialism in the early twentieth century, Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines sought to examine ideas of colonial medicine in the Philippines while also charting the development of “biomedical citizenship” and how the integral body not only played a significant role in the colonial situation between Americans and Filipinos but also in its ability to frame ideas of whiteness and masculinity as well. What I found most intriguing was that Anderson never truly defines the concept of “biomedical citizenship” throughout his book but rather instead, her merely infer that compliance with medicalized colonial regimes would be interpreted as evidence for citizenship. In addition to dealing with the tropical environment, medicine, and race, Anderson also argued that for many Americans, preventing disease had become a process that fundamentally racialized and even disciplined native bodies. As Jonathan stated in his post, the degree in which guaranteeing the health of white people and their whiteness versus the “threatening microbial pathology that lurked within native bodies” became a matter of racial tensions between white Americans and Filipinos. For example, Anderson claimed that “as they investigated, treated, and attempted to discipline allegedly errant Filipinos, America medicos were revealing previously hidden aspects of their own characters and disclosing their fears and anxieties in alien circumstances” (6).

Despite the book’s many strengths from its well-written and comprehensive study on the cultural history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, colonial medicine, as well as ideas on whiteness and masculinity, I found Anderson’s lack of a Filipino voice beyond their roles as doctors, medical personnel, or patients to be a particular weakness. He focused much too entirely on the anxieties and obsessions of his white, male colonialists; not to mention, Anderson’s “protagonists” were all exclusively confined to white, male medical officers. Similar to Jonathan once again, I did see many similarities with Scott Zesch’s The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 as well as Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek for all of their depictions on white American racism, prejudice, and lack of sympathy towards a group of minorities. In an effort to mitigate the fears of a “white degeneration” in the tropics, white Americans decided to civilize the Philippines and its people by training Filipinos in the hygienic disposal of feces while simultaneously labeling them as irresponsible and lacking self-restraint over their bodily fluids and defecation.

As for what I liked most about this book, Anderson’s ability to highlight the complex situation and racialized tensions between white Americans and Filipinos during the U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines in the twentieth century to be a powerful one. Race turned out to be an important factor as ideas of whiteness and masculinity occupied the mindset of many white Americans toward the natives. Using a wide range of sources from medical records, photographs, and personal accounts from white male officers as well as Filipino doctors and medical personnel, Anderson successfully incorporated the many themes of empire building, colonial medicine, race, and gender within his book.

Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies looks at the example of the American colonial experience in the Philippines to highlight the intersection of race and medicine. (Anderson 1) After the U.S. defeated the Spanish in the colony in 1898, the victor instituted policies that continued America’s nineteenth-century liberal reforming national identity. (Ibid) Scientific advancements were understood not only as a means to sanitize the natives, but to provide them with a chance to reach civilized status. The dangers of colonialism were not so much in the geography as in the people, where disease became an element of racialization of Filipinos and disease (Ibid 2) While there was never formal segregation in the Philippines, the viewpoint of Filipinos as part innocent child and dangerously backward permitted demarcation between colonized and colonizer. (Ibid 4, 108) White male bodies could also descend to the level of the native, giving them a personal stake in civilizing process. These experiments in the Philippines provided a microcosm of society at large in which the minds of the West could experiment and take notes. (Ibid 6)

The insights provided by Anderson reminds me of Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop, where the U.S. imperial experience in Latin America gave it the strategies it used for larger-scale warfare in later periods. As Michael Adas of Rutgers University notes in his review, “American interventions in Cuba, Panama, and other Caribbean locals shared the same military genesis, motivations, and modes of organization.” (Adas) Anderson also argues that the “racializing of liberal governmentally” turned the formerly private lives of native people into the collective realms of public discourse, where military personnel became hygiene inspectors as evidenced in the “clean-up weeks.” (Ibid 2-4, 117) I also reminisced about Bernard S. Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, where knowledge was a significant contributor to the Western colonial encounter. I appreciated that Mr. highbeejonathan mentioned the most controversial aspect of Anderson’s book; namely, that many people benefited from this imperialistic excursions as sanitation improvements did, in fact, occur in the Philippines and techniques were developed and brought back to the U.S. (higbeejonathan; Anderson 3-4) A shortcoming in Colonial Pathologies, as noted by Laurence Monnais of the University of Montreal, is that the “the Filipino body makes itself “heard” in Anderson’s volume more than the “voices” of Filipinos. (Monnais) This is due to the dearth of resources maintained by the colonized, themselves, which renders a work focused on the goals and prejudices of colonizers. Still, this is a great lesson in how nineteenth-century imperialistic impulse both formed and was influenced by the science and technology of the emerging twentieth-century.

Bibliography

Adas, Michael. Review of Colonial Pathologies. American Historical Review (Dec. 2007).

Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Monnais, Laurence. Review of Colonial Pathologies. American Ethnologist, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 3059-3062 (2008).

Silvia, Adam M. “Modern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti.” Social history of Medicine 27, no. 2 (March 2014): 260-280.

            In “Modern Mothers for Third World Nations”, Adam Silvia examines American Unitarian Universalist missionaries who were avowed anti-imperialists. They wanted to remove Third World dependency from imperial powers like the United States. However, in these attempts they became cultural imperialists when they “empowered a Haitian physician named Ary Bordes to promote Western medicine and contraception in a peasant community in Haiti in the 1960s.”

For Silvia, a key part in understanding how this cultural imperialism happened lies in neo-Malthusian discourse that “bound nation building to motherhood and a rhetoric of women’s empowerment.” He breaks his article into four parts. First, he examines how American missionaries and Haitian physicians came to think of Western medical culture, especially female contraception. They believed that birth control would unburden an overpopulated nation and free overburdened mothers. Neo-Malthusian thought reveals how women were seen as nation bearers and how their excess reproduction and backwards customs would keep Haiti, and nations like it, in poverty. The Unitarian Universalist missionaries and Bordes wanted to turn peasant Haitian women into “modern” mothers: “a responsible nation bearer”, a mother who will work and use Western medicine to keep her children alive.

In the second part of the article, Silvia analyzes the relationship between Borders, the Unitarian Universalist missionaries, and American contraceptive suppliers – who viewed the missionaries as imperialists. Silvia dives into a long history of how the United States used missionaries as pawns in a war on overpopulation, “a struggle to make sure that overburdened nations would not turn to communism”, like China. Silvia links these two section using an oxymoron, calling the Unitarian Universalists “imperial anti-imperialists.” In the third part, Silvia shows how the missionaries’ doctrine proved anti-imperialists, but the use of medicine belongs into a long history of American Imperialism. The Unitarian Universalists became medical imperialists when they opened clinics with Bordes in Haiti.

The last section shows how a “Western medical empire” tried to modernize the peasant mother. Bordes and the missionaries tried to teach Haitian mothers how to mother. The clinic opened became a chapter in the long history of policies in Latin American that tried to modernize women’s work, as mothers and in the home.

Silvia utilizes many secondary readings and government documents. Given the limited scope of the article, Silvia does an excellent job at highlighting these sources. However, the period he analyzes is the 1960s. Given the he could have used interviews and other personal sources to really drive home his point on how the Unitarian Universalist doctrine and how that fit with them being imperial anti-imperialists. He places this in the context of the Cold War, but issues arise when solely analyzing government documents during this time. The United States government proved extremely anti-communist and that could play into the creation of the sources Silvia utilizes.

Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies discusses similar themes that “Modern Mothers for Third World Nations” does. Both create a sense that medicine became an agent of imperialism, though not deliberately. Anderson describes how imperial officers saw their “new colony as a laboratory of hygiene and modernity, American medical officers were indulging in a form of magical thinking, creating sympathetic associations in the hope of changing the world.” The key words that link the article and the book together are modernity and medicine. How did the Unitarian Universalist missionaries and the American medical officers use medicine in an unintentional attempt to modernize other parts of the word?

Both Silvia and Anderson give off the idea that their subjects – the Unitarian Universalist missionaries and the medical officers respectively – had this burden to modernize Haiti and the Philippines. For Silvia, the idea of the mother in Haiti needed to change in order for the country to thrive and grow. The Haitian mother mentality contributed to the overpopulation of the country. For Anderson, the amount of disease and hygiene issues in the Philippines created a sense that the United States could come in and modernize the nation. Medicine, whether for birth control or hygiene, become the agent for modernization.

Both studies discuss the separation and differentiation of the public and private spheres. In “Modern Mothers”, Silvia highlights how western medicine attempted to create a role for women inside and outside of the home. However, this idea only solidified the idea that women should be in the home. Allowing women to have control over their body and their children firmly placed them in the private sphere and the realm of the home. Colonial Pathologies speaks to how the idea of citizenship became part of who was clean and who was not. Cleanliness became associated with whiteness, and if the native Filipinos could become clean, they could obtain a certain level of citizenship.

One thing lacking from either study is the voice of the “modernized.” Anderson and Silvia include little to no sources on how Filipinos and Haitians felt about the modernizing process. Maybe the authors saw that these voices remained outside the scope of their respective studies. The inclusion of such sources would allow the readers to view the study more holistically.

Adam Silvia, “Modern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti,” Social History in Medicine 27, no. 2 (March 2014): 260.

Silvia, 261.

Silvia, 262.

Silvia, 264.

Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 5.

Anderson, 3.

1. Chávez, Ernesto, ed. The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

I am going to use this handy book for over fifty primary sources related to the war that took place a decade prior to the Civil War to see if there’s any economic or expansionist themes I can use to make my case that the Civil War fits into the general mindset of the times.
2. Finkelman, Paul, ed. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Another book in the great Bedford/St.Martin’s series of collections of commentary and primary resources, this time pertaining to those in the North and South who defended slavery, including for economic reasons.

3. Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1991.

This is a classic work that contains a number of primary sources pertaining to the myriad of causes of the Civil War, including economic ones.

4. Vorenberg, Michael, ed. Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

Primary sources pertaining to one of the defining documents of the Civil War, one that changed the military and moral course of the war. I am going to employ this primary source compilation to understand prevailing sentiments right smack-dab in the middle of the war, picking up on any references to economics and labor system ideology.

The American acquisition of the Philippines is an event in American history that is largely forgotten, overlooked, or briefly mention in textbooks. Fortunately, Dr. Warwick Anderson form the University of Sydney seeks to not only establish why Americans sought take possession of the Philippines but what was the American intention after U.S. troops island hopped across the archipelago in the name of civilizing the Filipinos with the Krag. Armed with photos, personal counts( by physicians and U.S. troopers), and racist  Social Darwinist propaganda, Dr. Anderson seeks to chart the colonial development and deferral of what might be called biomedical citizenship and to suggest continuities between the late colonial civilizing process and international development projects. Which will all Anderson trace the genealogy development back to the medical mobilization of civic potential on the Philippines in the early twentieth century (pgs. 3-4).                                                                                                             

The strongest aspect of Dr. Andersons work is that it pulls no punches when comes to describing the mental attitude the Americans had toward the Filipinos. In practice, the term healthy native referred to a deceptive appearance not to any exemption from disease carriage, which usually implied a qualifier: apparently. As such, physicians did not hesitate to magnify the threatening microbial pathology that lurked within native bodies (pg. 94). Anderson argues that American physicians saw themselves as being doubly representatives for the  body and unlike Filipinos, they produced abstraction, by mouth and by hand, not waste or at least neither dangerous nor visible waste. White Americans talk, report, police, supervise, hunt, fish, and fight: but after reading the medical documents produced in the Philippines in the first decade of the century, one suspects they rarely went to the toilet. Americans bodies became abstracted from the filthy exuberance of the tropics, represented as truly civilized models for Filipinos. However, this American sublime demanded relentless self-discipline and in this sense, the disparagement and civilizing of Filipinos would be a labor of American repression (pg. 111). By including these instances of racial judgment  Dr. Anderson opens allows the reader to understand why many American textbooks shy away from showcasing not only the American acquisition of the Philippians but the brutality and disgusting reality happen during the Philippine War but the insertion of American ideals after the war. I would compare Anderson’s work to what Diana said about Scott Zesch’s The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, in a sense that what the Americans choose to do with the Philippines and its citizens was not out kindness and compassion for improving the public health of the Filipinos. Rather a choice they made because they wanted to make the Philippines into a place that they can call civilized because they felt it needed to be. As a result, the reader is left feeling sympathetic for these individuals who are forced to conform to American standards and the consequences that resonate from them which can be consider good or bad pending which perspective the reader chooses to look at. 

Nevertheless, the most controversial aspect of Dr. Anderson’s work is that he seems to argue that l the racial stereotypes, social Darwinist ideals, and conformity that the Americans placed on the Filipinos regarding their health seemed to advance public health in both the Philippines and the United States. For which he mentioned the influence of the colonial Philippines on the public health in the United States varied considerably. In general, the medical experiences of empire served to amplify pr channel existing features of domestic public health work to reshape or extend structures and policies already on place, rather than introducing wholly new procedures and goals. In particular, colonial experiences tended to focus more attention on the fault lines of race and force recognition of the need to intervene more vigorously to reform the personal and domestic hygiene of those on the margins of society to propel them into civic and medical trajectories (pg. 230). Although what he needs to clarify is that the advancement and improvements on public health on both sides of the Pacific was a gradual process in which was accomplished by improved methods and practices of doctors who gained a better understanding of biology in addition to advances in science. Because the he seems to jump around between different decades a lot, which can through the reader off if he or she is not familiar with the subject material.

In the book by Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, the author, a medical historian, argues that the “colonial laboratories” were not only the way the Filipino population was pushed to assimilating into the imperial lifestyle and its hygiene, by the Anglo-colonialists, but also by medical doctors and bureaucrats who “were itinerants, with the global view of things. . . were prepared to find the modern in the colony, the colonial in the metropole” (p.7). Due to this organic exchange, the author “. . .enables us to recognize that colonial technologies of rule could also be used to develop the ‘nation’ and its various disciplines in both locations” (p.8.). With the military, medical, and hygiene programs that created a new “bureaucratic matrix” came acknowledgment of the importance of bacteriology and parasitology with a shift in these fields to the political and civic recognition. Using sources from the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, political and military studies, the author delivers a very clear understanding of the system, its development in the after-war frame of the colonial time. Tremendous research from social and medical journals, manuscripts, letters, military documents, and official documents were selected by author to confirm her theories on the effects of colonization on the Filipino people.

The analogy for this book is similar to Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, This Republic of Suffering. As sbremer points out, “Faust’s book tackles a seemingly obvious fact – that many people died in a war. However, Faust is able to successfully show that in many ways death in the American Civil War occurred in many unprecedented ways.” As in Anderson’s book, Colonial Pathologies, poor hygiene added drastically to the toll death during the Philippine-American War. And as morganstocks mentioned in her block on The Republic of Suffering, “Faust is able to effectively produce an emotional book while maintaining her objectivity. This Republic of Suffering is a deeply moving work. This much is very clear from just the beginning pages of the book.” That is exactly how the work of Anderson echoes her readers.

I wish the author would write more about why the government and the Rockefeller’s foundation were there in the first place, why they stayed there, and why they were helping with malaria.  I wish that this author had maybe just briefly expressed her thoughts on the history of the Philippines war events.

Bryant, Edward. What I Saw in California. 1848. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Edward Bryant’s book is a detailed look at what an American immigrant to Alta California faced in their primary years in the country. Bryant’s book skyrocketed to fame following the California Gold Rush, and it is invaluable in that it shows the opinions of the westward movement of an ordinary citizens, as well as the motivations of an ordinary Kentucky newspaper man for travelling out west and who ultimately met up with Colonel Frémont and fought under his command.

Duvall, Marius. A Navy Surgeon in California 1846-1847: The Journal of Marius Duvall. Edited by Blackburn Rogers. San Francisco: John Howell, 1957.

Duvall’s daily journal entries that last from April of 1846 to May of 1847 gives us an “outside” American military perspective regarding the Bear Flag Revolt and its major players in that Duvall was stationed on the Portsmouth, a ship off the coast of California when the revolt broke out. Duvall’s account is most likely the earliest account to give adverse criticism to the Bear Flaggers, and it also gives detailed accounts of Frémont and his character as well.

Frémont, John C. The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Vol. 2, The Bear Flag Revolt and the Court-Martial. Edited by Mary Lee Spence and Donald Jackson. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

John C. Frémont is one, if not the the most, important player in the event that was the Bear Flag Revolt. No history of the revolt is possible without discussing Frémont, and by looking at his journals, particularly the ones dealing with the year 1846 since they are many, one can attempt to seek out passages that give a clue as to whether Frémont was acting alone, acting in accordance with government wishes, and to what extent expansionist policies played a role.

Ide, Simeon. A Biographical Sketch of the Life of William B Ide. 1880. Reprint, Glorieta, NM: The Rio Grande Press, 1967.

Although Ide’s work is technically a biography, it is a biography of the first (and only) President of California, the prominent Bear Flagger, and the brother of the author of this volume. Simeon Ide declares that much of the information presented in his work is taken from knowledge he procured from his brother, so in some ways it is the detailing of William B. Ide’s own history of the Bear Flag Revolt, carrying with it no small amount of challenges in using it as a primary source.

Larkin, Thomas Oliver. The Larkin Papers: Personal, Business, and Official Correspondence of Thomas Oliver Larkin, Merchant and United States Consul in California. Vol IV, 1845-1846. Edited by George P. Hammond. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1953.

Thomas O. Larkin served as the only United States Consul to Alta California, and in that position he had constant communication to several high-ranking officials in both the American and Mexican governments. This volume’s preservation of his letters show the increasing alarm that Larking began to feel as he saw an increasing American presence in Alta California, and his correspondence with American officials, especially Secretary of State James Buchanan, reveal the American government’s official response as well as Larkin’s heightened suspicion.

Larkin, Thomas Oliver. The Larkin Papers: Personal, Business, and Official Correspondence of Thomas Oliver Larkin, Merchant and United States Consul in California. Vol. V, 1846. Edited by George P. Hammond. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1955.

This volume of Larkin’s correspondences covers only the year 1846 since there are a considerable amount more of them due largely to the outbreak of the Bear Flag Revolt and soon thereafter open warfare with Mexico. Larkin’s letters of this period illustrate that the revolt was an unexpected event that threw California into chaos, and they also illustrate that the Bear Flaggers and their rebellion clearly upset a plan for peaceful annexation that Larkin was working towards.

Dock, Lavinia L. History of American Red Cross Nursing. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.

Focusing on the section devoted to the period of the First World War and the activities of the American Red Cross throughout the war, Dock’s book includes numerous extracts such as letters and illustrations that not only add a personal touch to the narrative but also value and interest to the book. Dock also includes an appendix, which lists the various organizations conducted by the American Red Cross in the United States as well as other parts of the world.

Hall, Margaret. Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country: The World War I Memoir of Margaret Hall. Edited by Margaret R. Higonnet. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2014.

Hall’s first-person account of her life and experiences in the First World War explores her departure from New York and across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross organization in France. In a series of letters, journals, and photographs, Hall weaves a powerful narrative of the conflict and her own experiences and opinions of the war during her stay in a field hospital near the Western Front. Many of the photographs include movement of troops through town, women working behind front lines, and even what was left of the landscapes after the war.

Millard, Shirley. I Saw Them Die: Diary and Recollections of Shirley Millard. New Orleans: Quid Pro, LLC, 2011.

Millard’s book features a contemporary account of an young American woman who traveled to France in the spring of 1918 as a volunteer nurse to care for the war wounded. As a diary-based book, Millard’s perspective on the horrors of war as well as her fears offer a compelling insight into the lives of women who were constantly under intense pressure during the war, in addition to the bombings nearby. Millard also describes the medical horrors as well the philosophical transformations many of those in her generation shared about the war and life after the conflict.

Wagner, Anges. “My Beloved Poilus.” Accessed November 11, 2015. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24368/24368-h/24368-h.htm

Written by an unknown American women who served and cared for the wounded in France during the First World War, the letters featured in this primary source were not written for publication but instead, for friends and families. These letters offer a brief glimpse of the hardships and distress many American volunteers and nurses often faced in times of war when caring for those who are suffering from the effects of battle. The letters also reveal what some women did in order to bring relief to the war wounded.

Bell, Maj. Horace. Reminiscences of a Ranger; or, Early Times in Southern California. Los Angeles: Yarnell, Caystile, & Mathes, 1881. https://archive.org/stream/reminiscencesofr00bellrich/reminiscencesofr00bellrich_djvu.txt

Bell’s first penned memoir discusses the Los Angeles Rangers establishment and becoming founder of Los Angeles’ earliest paper The Porcupine. Defending the Californios and the Chinese Community, and mentioned in a variety of my secondary and primary sources on eighteenth century life in California, his ‘colorful’ commentary on cultural life in Los Angeles provides a first-hand perspective of cultural conflict and the creation of cultural geographic boundaries. Note: This original item was located at the Huntington Library, however is not accessible without a written request for PhD research.

California. 1850. Reports on cases determined in the Supreme Court of the State of California. San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney.

This primary source document describes the legal case surrounding the damage incurred during the Chinese Massacre of 1871. Chinese merchants collectively sued the Mayor, City Council, and the City of Los Angeles for repair costs of destroyed goods. This primary source, in conjunction with the estimated costs, illustrates bias cultural segregation in the development of nineteenth-century Los Angeles. This is available by public access of the Orange Legal Law Library computers only, but located my remarks online through Google.

David, Leon Thomas. “The Oral History of Leon Thomas David: This History of Los Angeles as Seen from the City Attorney’s Office”. California Legal History, (2011). 277-319.

Judge David recalls his oral history and interactions on his experience and empirical research on Los Angeles in 1950. Becoming a pioneering legal historian, his service in the City Attorney’s office provides a direct perspective and specific aspects on Los Angeles’ changing cityscape. This modern oral history discusses key topics in my research; including the city attorney’s reaction to 1871 Chinese Massacre trails and cultural exclusion changed the Los Angeles cityscape. This was accessed through CSUF’s database.

See, Lisa. On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather, Lisa See examines her heritage from Canton to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Organized, as Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering¸ she utilizes cognitive mapping of Los Angeles, her two-family linage, census records, and oral histories to track their trek to Gold Mountain in California. Using her first hand experiences as a ‘red-haired girl with a Chinese heart’, pointing to her privileged merchant family history, she argues late nineteenth-century non-Anglo Angelenos melted into a blended formation of American-Chinese This book assists discusses first hand-accounts of her grandfather’s prostitute undergarment factory coming under scrutiny for hiring Chinese workers during 1882 Exclusion Act. Also ties to the transnational and cultural authority themes of my topic. This was accessed through CSUF’s database.

Primary Source Annotated Bibliography

Bartlett, W. C. “The Tropical Fruits of California” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Sept 1868): 263-268. Making of America Journal Articles
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.1-01.003/263

This source demonstrates how people viewed the citrus industry as it was developing. It is an early example of a positive reaction to Southern California’s growth that may have enticed people to move to the state.

By-laws of the Yorba Linda Citrus Association, 19 June 1915. Box 1, Folder 7. Local History: Citrus Collection CA4, University Archives and Special Collections. California State University, Fullerton Pollack Library.

This source is an example of the business and cooperative side of the citrus industry. It will help me understand the institution’s perspective in contrast to my other more personal primary sources related to the citrus industry.

Campbell, Ensley J. Community History Project (Orange): Early Orange; and the Citrus Industry. By Milan Pavlovich and Florence Smiley. OH 1507. Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, September 1, 1970.

This source is helpful because the narrator discusses his role in the early development of Orange and in citrus ranching. It also includes commentary about several ethnicities living in the city and different aspects that contributed to the success of citrus.

David Hewes’ Packing House Interior With Workers, ca. 1905. 1905. Orange Public Library Collection, Orange Public Library and History Center, Orange, CA.
http://history.cityoforange.org/awweb/main.jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=16

This is one of several relevant photographs from the Orange Public Library and History Center archive. While this image shows Anglo women citrus workers, other photographs identify men, women, Anglos, and Mexicans working in fields and packing houses. The images demonstrate the types of laborers associated with the citrus industry.

Smiley, Florence. Community History Project (Orange): Reminiscences of Early Childhood. By Milan Pavlovich. OH 478. Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, August 17, 1970.

This is another oral history that provides a personal and detailed view of Southern California life around the turn of the nineteenth century. This source is useful because it explains the growth of the city of Orange from the perspective of a woman who grew up in Southern California and whose family had migrated to the state.

Additional Source:

Bartley, George. Community History Project (Orange): Constable of El Modena. By Milan Pavlovich and Florence Smiley. OH 477. Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, July 2, 1970.

While this source has some information regarding Orange community life, the other two oral histories are more related to my paper. It focuses more on the narrator’s experiences as a constable and a walnut farmer, rather than in citrus.

Grimke, Angelina. Letter XII Human Rights Not Founded on Sex. October 2, 1837, and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, 1838.

Grimke, Sarah Moor. Letter 1: The Original Equality of Woman. July 11,1837.

Sarah Moor Grimke, and her sister, Angelina were Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Activists. Angelina’s Epistle to William Lloyd Garrison was published in The Liberator, and the writings     and speeches of both sisters regarding their personal interpretations of the divine order and how it related to equality for all people. Their writings illustrate the cognitive dissonance that prevailed in that time regarding the moral beliefs expressed by the founders and men of faith at that time, and rights that they claimed the Bible were extended to all human beings. Specifically, Sarah spoke out about how the religious views expressed in the Bible and by those professing to follow its tenants prohibited the enslavement of humans. Regarding the reasons behind white women working toward abolition of slavery, these letters support there was a religious moral authority of that day did not support precluding women or people of color from being treated as equals that motivated these women to act. Their writing supports the claims that white men saw white women and people of color essentially as tools for their won use and not as complete or competent individuals.

Advertisement, Seneca County Courier, July 14, 1848.

Seneca Falls Convention, July 14, 1848.

This is a description of what happened when women delegates from the U.S. to an anti-slavery convention were not allowed to participate. It shows the that these women were considered by the men at that time as basically lesser human beings with ironically no right to speak at a convention about slavery—a condition under which people had no right to speak. It illustrated the cognitive dissonance that prevailed among men of that era in that they were able to both hold a convention dedicated to putting an end to slavery and at the same time refuse to seat women, or to even allow them to speak—a basic right of free people, who had been on the frontline of this movement. It raises the question of women’s motivation to fight for freedom and wither they were interested only in putting a stop to slavery or in equality for themselves as well. It also connects abolition of slavery and the right for women to vote to the fact that initially, some women did have the right to vote in a number of states prior to 1776 and how this may have affect their support of abolition. This supports the idea that initially women were allowed to be more involved in politics, and how upon having this right rescinded, they believed they had a vested interest in reclaiming that right. They began to see the similarities between themselves and people of color. This in turn led to their involvement in gaining or regaining political recognition and power as well as equality. It shows that women, once they discovered that did not have be only placed on earth to serve others, rebelled.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Seneca Falls Convention Speech, July 19,1848.

The writer is a suffragist, women rights activist, and abolitionist. She addressed the inequality of the convention saying, “Man’s intellectual superiority cannot be a question until woman’s has had a fair trial. When we shall have had our freedom to find our own sphere, when we shall have our colleges, our professions, our trades, for a century, a comparison then may be justly instituted” and “In consideration of man’s claim to moral superiority, . . . he is infinitely woman’s inferior in every moral quality, not by nature, but made so by false education . . .” Her speech supports the fact that women understood, clearly, that they, like slaves, were not being treated fairly based on the tenants of the moral authority acquired from their society’s professed faith, but were just being used for the purposes and benefits of others. These women were also pointing out the cognitive dissonance, which once expressed and seen for what it is, becomes hard to undo.    

Frederick Douglass, 1845. Frederick Douglass: A Biography.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. 1845.

Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, and freed slave. He focused on ending slavery and gaining equal rights for African-Americans and also collaborated on women’s suffrage and equal rights for all. His writing supports the fact that white women, like slave, were not being treated as fully human in that their rights to express themselves and to vote, which kept them in a position of powerlessness politically. He shows that white women and people of color were treated as tools of white men, and that they were given very little to no respect beyond those roles.   

Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. ...

James Madison to Thomas Jefferson. 12 March 1815. The James Madison Papers at the Library of Congress. Accessed 10 November 2016. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mjm.17_0202_0204/?sp=3&st=text.

The Library of Congress hold several of Madison’s letters concerning the negotiation of the Treaty of Ghent, and his seeming overarching concern to obtain peace and keep it at all costs. Analysis of these documents, perhaps in tandem with the treaty itself, would make an interesting study of how prevalent isolationist ideas were in terms of ending the War of 1812.

Monroe, James. “Monroe Doctrine; December 2 1823.” The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School. Accessed 10 November 2016. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/monroe.asp.

While the Monroe Doctrine is part of my general research questions, no historian has looked at the doctrine itself to make specific connections to the rise of isolationism. Given as part of President Monroe’s address to Congress, several sentences directly allude to isolationist ideas. Close analysis of the complete text could provide interesting insights into the rise of isolationism.

“Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the causes and extent of the late commotions in Baltimore.”  The Maryland Gazette. 13 August 1812. Accessed 10 November 2016. http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/002200/002206/html/2206sources.html.

Most opposition during the War of 1812 stemmed from Federalists who feared extensive government control. The circumstances of this violent riot in Baltimore connect Federalist concerns to isolationism, by characterizing Democratic-Republicans as too pro-European. Examining the riot in detail could be an interesting way of getting at popular sentiment regarding isolationism.

Washington, George. “Washington’s Farewell Address.” 19 September 1796. George Washington Papers, University of Virginia. Accessed 10 November 2016. http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/washingtons-farewell-address/.

I would argue that George Washington’s Farewell Address as he left office served as the first important advance in the development of American isolationism. Incorporating it into research on the topic as a concrete starting point would make it much easier to reconstruct the trajectory this strain of thought took throughout the nineteenth century.

Conway, Christopher B. and Gustavo Pellon, eds. The U.S.-Mexican War: A Binational Reader. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2010.

Drawing on a rich, interdisciplinary collection of U.S. and Mexican sources, this volume explores the conflict that redrew the boundaries of the North American continent in the 19th century. Among the many period texts included here are letters from U.S. and Mexican soldiers, governmental proclamations, songs, caricatures, poetry, and newspaper articles.

Lookingbill, Brad, ed. American Military History: A Documentary Reader. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

The book presents a series of primary source documents relating to America’s armed forces from colonial period to the present. Of the sources in the book that are vital to the understanding of the U.S. Mexican War like President James K. Polk’s declaration of war and Whig Party disapproval of going to war with Mexico.

Polk, James, and Allan Nevins. Polk; the Diary of a President, 1845-1849: Covering the Mexican War, the Acquisition of Oregon, and the Conquest of California and the Southwest. New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1968.

The diary kept by James K. Polk form 1864 to 1849, which covers such events as the Mexican War, the acquisition of Oregon, and the conquest of California and the Southwestern United Sates. Polk’s diary is very important when discussing why Polk called for war with Mexico and his motives on establishing American dominance across the continent.

Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant,  Volume 1. New York, Charles L. Webster       & Company, 1885.

The personal memoirs of The 18th President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant who served during the U.S.-Mexican War who roused from the rank of Second Lieutenant of the 4th Infantry to First Lieutenant of the 4th Infantry during his deployments while on duty. Although considered one of the greatest American generals of all time he personally dislike the U.S.-Mexican War stated that annexation of Texas could be justified however the manner in which the subsequent was forced upon Mexico cannot. In addition, to mention that the war was a one sided affair that saw a stronger nation crushing a much weaker opponent.

Coffin, George Yost, and Constantino Brumidi. “The Apotheosis of Suffrage.” Digital image. Library of Congress. Accessed November 11, 20106. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016679928/.

 This is a drawing that was published in the Washington Post on January 26, 1896. The importance of this artistic        image is twofold. First, it is a representation of the kinds of publicity the women’s movement worked to promote. The second important aspect is that it has a number of allegories within the picture. While the most obvious allusion occurs within the political realm, there are a number of allegorical references to religion which helps the argument that the women’s movement really came out of a revival and new evangelical belief system in which women emerged as strong voices for their own beliefs.

Willard, Frances E. “Address to Women’s National Council.” Modern History Source Book, 1997. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1891willard.asp.

The address to the Women National Council occurred at its First Triennial Meeting in Washington in 1891. This primary source speaks not only on women’s rights and the fight for suffrage but Frances Willard also takes the time to include the Women Christian Temperance movement and the role religion is playing in her life as an activist.

Unknown Author, “General News Summary.” Readex. Accessed November 09, 2016. http://infoweb.newsbank.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/iw-search/we/HistArchive/?p_product=EANX&p_theme=ahnp&p_nbid=W55H55SJMTQ3ODg4MjgzMC4zMzgyNTY6MToxNToxMzcuMTUxLjE0MS4xMDA&p_action=doc&s_lastnonissuequeryname=3&d_viewref=search&p_queryname=3&p_docnum=19&p_docref=v2:10766901385660E8@EANX-13828AC9F2AFE038@2398106-13827D471CC4BF00@2-138ACC6AE18382B2@General News Summary.

This is a news article from September 1853. In this there is a mention of Antoinette Brown speaking at the World Temperance Meeting. Antoinette Brown is one of the first women ordained to preach. She was ordained at the age of 28 through the United Church of Christ Revival movement.

Unknown Author, “News/Opinion.” Readex. Accessed November 10, 2016. http://infoweb.newsbank.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/iw-search/we/HistArchive/?p_product=EANX&p_theme=ahnp&p_nbid=W55H55SJMTQ3ODg4MjgzMC4zMzgyNTY6MToxNToxMzcuMTUxLjE0MS4xMDA&p_action=doc&s_lastnonissuequeryname=3&d_viewref=search&p_queryname=3&p_docnum=29&p_docref=v2:11343008E4D07040@EANX-1169A494DE04EFC0@2398118-1169A49581FA7C28@3&toc=true.

This page from the Baltimore Sun on Sept 21, 1853 acknowledges that Rev. Antoinette Brown was installed as a pastor of a church in South Butler, New York. This is one of the first women to lead a standing church as their pastor in the United States. She was approximately 28 when she was installed and a vigorous supporter of the Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Temperance movements.

Department of Commerce. Bureau of Public Roads. Phoenix Division Office. Lees Ferry Bridge or Marble Canyon Bridge. Phoenix: National Park Road Project Records, 1949-67.

The making of roads does two things to national parks and visitor experience. First, they alter the landscape. They create divides in the landscape. Second, the creation of roads designate where most of the visitors will go, and therefore view the park.

Gramann, James H. “Trends in Demographics and Information technology Affecting Visitor Center Use: Focus Group Report.” Report to National Park Service Social Science Program, 2003.

This source shows how the National Parks Service actively looks at the visitor experience. The purpose was to help the NPS plan visitor centers and other related projects. Visitor centers are a key part to visitor experience, most of them enter through these places to gather information about the parks.

Tuler, Seth & Dominic Golding. “A Comprehensive Study of Visitor Safety in the National Park System: Final Report.” Prepared for the National Park Service, 2002.

This report is a systematic analysis of visitor safety. How can the safety of the visitor better contribute to their experience and perception of the parks. How can the parks protect people and create a safer wilderness.

Department of the Interior. National Park Service. Carlsbad Caverns National Park. “Postcard of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.” 1934.

This image is an example of how the national parks portray themselves through photography. The Ansel Adams images do this as well by highlighting the “main attractions” of the park. This in turn alters how the visitor sees the park. By highlighting the positive, they inadvertently cover the negative. They also create monuments which visitors associate an identity of the park.

Suzanna Melendez
11/8/2016
Blog #6

Scott Zesch’s The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 delivers a riveting and well researched moment in American history that is often overlooked. During the 1870s a small-scale turf war began between three Chinese gangs in a small Los Angeles neighborhood. To settle the dispute, a group of Angelenos lynched a group of eighteen Chinese men. Scott Zesch’s research on the Massacre of 1871 offers a compelling account of one of California’s earliest hate crimes. As a historian, his research process was extremely difficult and challenging. During the 1850s and 1880s, the Chinese communities left behind very few written documents. Throughout the book, there are examples of Chinese men writing letters to friends and family back in China. Unfortunately, due to the lack of Chinese sources, Zesch relied heavily on American journalists and Los Angeles County court records. Therefore, as a scholar he emphasized on the historical and political context of the early-Chinese communities in California.

The framework of the book is chronologically organized and provides a thorough background of Los Angeles. In addition, Zesch provided in depth details about the Chinese intention to sail to the U.S., eventually, settling in San Francisco and Los Angeles. As a scholar, he did an exceptional job detailing their traditional roots of family and culture. “Unlike those immigrants from Europe who pulled up stakes and essentially cut their ties with their pasts, the first Chinese who came to America remained closely connected with their kin back home.”(8) Family and culture were important values emphasized in Zesch’s scholarship. In relation to Zesch’s research, Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over Memory of San Creek focused on the Natives attempt to preserve their history and traditional values. aly692 wrote that “They are trying to provide agency to their ancestors and heritage in order to make sure all narratives are being displayed for the Sand Creek Massacre … not the ones the Federal government wants us to hear regarding the ill treatment of Natives.” During the Gold Rush an influx of immigrants traveled to California to earn enough money for their families back in China. Despite the prejudices against the Chinese “new buildings were constantly under construction, and manual laborers were in demand. A local newspaper broadly welcomed immigrants in 1869, proclaiming: Let them come and settle with us; there is room for them and more.” (11) In a paradox, by 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by the U.S Congress and therefore, prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers.

Overall, it was astonishing to read about the hurdles and violence inflicted against the Chinese. As a migrant community, they strived to build businesses and permanently settle in America. Although the author provided a detailed historical background of the Chinese in California, only one chapter is dedicated to the lynching. In spite of the lack of resources, one critique that I would give Zesch is that he could have explored the lynchings more in detail. Moreover, the topic of gender was what intrigued me the most in the book. My classmate sbremer highlighted some interesting points about gender. “For the Chinese women in the sex trade in Los Angeles at this time, I think the argument that they are given no voice or agency a compelling one. There are only a few instances where Chinese women are given a voice and a surprising degree of agency.” Despite the violence and bloodshed inflicted on the Chinese population, Zecsch did a phenomenal job researching a little-known event that would forever stain our history.

•Whitman, Walt. The Sacrificial Years: A Chronicle of Walt Whitman’s Experiences in the Civil War. Edited by John Harmon McElroy. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1999.

Walt Whitman, a northerner living in the south prior and during the early years of the Civil War, traveled north in 1862 to find his wounded brother in Virginia. What he found and saw in Virginia shocked and astonished him; rows of unburied dead, piles of amputated limbs, thousands of wounded men lying on the ground without protection from the elements and hospital staff overworked and undermanned. Due to these sights, Whitman decided to volunteer and soon became a trusted nurse. He tended the sick and wounded, and consoled the dying. At great personal and professional sacrifice, Whitman continued to nurse men in and around Washington, D.C. until the war’s end four years later. Although he never kept a personal diary of his experiences, he wrote hundreds of letters and newspaper articles on his time in the nursing corps.

•Twichell, Joseph. The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story. Edited by Peter Messent and Steve Courtney. University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Books on the Civil War are full of battles, generals and tactics, but not many of them focus on the non-combatants in the armies, the chaplains. Joseph Twichell left his studies to become a Chaplin in New York’s Excelsior Brigade, a Protestant Chaplin in a Brigade made up of mostly poor Irish-American Catholics. Twichell’s letters to his family speaks of life on campaign, in camp, being a Protestant among Catholics, of battle, and of the aftermath of battle. He was involved in seven major battles, from the Wilderness to Fredericksburg to Gettysburg. In addition to writing about “army” life, Twichell writes on politics, slavery, blessing the dead and dying and on the end of the war.

•Eggleston, Larry G. Women in the Civil War: Extraordinary Stories of Soldiers, Spies, Nurses, Doctors, Crusaders, and Others. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2003.

Women in the Civil War looks at women in the Civil War from a unique perspective, not only as non-combatants, but as spies, soldiers, nurses and doctors. While other books portray women only as keepers of the home while the men went to war, Women in the Civil War shows that women North and South saw it as a civic duty to do more. Some went so far as to dress like men and enlist, 400-700 women did this, and 60 or more were killed or wounded during the war. In addition to soldering, women also engaged in spying, nursing, guerrilla raids, and as combat doctors on the frontlines. Women played a larger role in the Civil War than many realized.

•Hancock, Cornelia. Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 1863-1865. Edited by Henrietta Stratton Jaquette. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Often called the “Florence Nightingale of America,” Cornelia Hancock worked tirelessly in field and evacuating hospitals, and on the battlefield. She was a constant companion to those wounded and dying, from Gettysburg to Appomattox. She was one of the great heroines of not only the nursing corps, but of the entire medical field. She wrote to her family of the neglect of wounded soldiers, black refugees and of those in contraband camps.

•McGaugh, Scott. Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013.

Jonathan Letterman was a medical doctor before the Civil War and was stationed in the Western territories including Indian country. Soon after the Civil War started, he was withdrawn to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed Chief Medical Officer of the Union Army. This new position allowed him to reinvent combat medicine by creating the first ambulance corps, and reorganize the field hospital system. In addition, he was instrumental in improving the health, hygiene and dietary standards of the army.

•Hamilton, Leni. Clara Barton. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.

Clara Barton was a remarkable women, she was not only schooled formally but also in the finer details of farm life including horseback riding thanks to her brother. Clara Barton by Leni Hamilton incorporates quotes and passages from her letters and journals. Not only was she well educated, but she also volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War, a passion had since childhood.   Clara is best know for establishing the American Red Cross and her dedication to the Nursing Corps. She nursed hundreds of soldiers and civilians from the battlefields of the American Civil War to battlefields of France and Germany during the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s. Clara Barton was a central figure in the Nursing Corps for the Union Army, and continued to be until her death in 1912.

Scott Zesch’s book tells the largely forgotten history of what occurred in Los Angeles on October 21, 1871 in which eighteen Chinese men were killed by an angry mob comprised of non-Asians. The incident was in retaliation for the shooting of one Robert Thompson by Chinese thugs. Zesch gives a detailed, hour-by-hour breakdown of what occurred that night. Fifteen men were hanged and another three were fatally shot, and mostly all of them were innocent Chinese who were unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Zesch uses the Chinatown Massacre of 1871 as the backdrop for a larger discussion regarding the early history of the Chinese in Southern California. Zesch discusses the first Chinese immigrants to Los Angeles, and how they made their lives and settled into the rough, difficult society of the city. Of certain importance to Zesch’s book is his discussion of the Chinese “tongs” and huiguans, which were groups or organizations of Chinese, some legitimate and legal and some being criminal in nature. Zesch also details the issue of Chinese prostitution and marriage practices, both of which were central to the outbreak of violence.

As beirne points out (in his nicely titled post), Zesch’s book is titled The Chinatown War, because it details a much longer time period than just that fateful night. He breaks his book into two parts, with the first part detailing the establishment of a Chinese population in Los Angeles around 1850 and continues up to the night of the massacre. The second part details the massacre itself and the ramifications that ensued. Zesch argues that the general lawlessness and violence of wild west era Los Angeles that the Chinese moved into shaped and influenced how the Chinese developed and reacted to their new surroundings. Prior to the massacre, in fact, much of the violence presented is between the Chinese themselves. This is not to say that the Chinese were not persecuted and faced racism on a daily basis, they most certainly did. However, the very act that kicked off the events resulting in the massacre was the killing of one Chinese man at the hands of another Chinese man from a rival organization (P. 121).

I found vannoyj’s comments of Zesch’s book quite interesting. As others have noted, Zesch is an independent scholar, and it seems to me that he clearly wrote this book with a general audience in mind. However, I did not find his sentence structure confusing. In fact, I found it quite streamlined and I believe it to be the easiest to read of the books we have covered thus far. However, I found vannoyj’s assessment of Zesch’s discussion of women in his book to ring quite true, for the most part. For the Chinese women in the sex trade in Los Angeles at this time, I think the argument that they are given no voice or agency a compelling one. There are only a few instances where Chinese women are given a voice and a surprising degree of agency. This is mainly realized in Chinese women’s (and Chinese men for that matter) to pursue legal options. This is illustrated in the event in which the widow of one of the men killed in the massacre had the sad distinction of being the first Chinese women to lodge a criminal complaint in Los Angeles in which she accused another Chinese man of inciting a mob resulting in her husband’s death (P. 163).

In his attempt to examine a relatively “unknown” moment and period of time in American history, Scott Zesch’s The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 explored the life and struggles of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles and their subsequent murder by the native citizens who resented them in 1871. Through his detailed descriptions of Chinese life in Los Angeles as well as the events leading up to the massacre, Zesch made a compelling case for himself by providing a valuable window into the lives of Chinese workers and their society in California. By surveying the settlement of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles in the first half of the book, Zesch sets the stage for the gradual build-up of anti-Chinese sentiment and the extreme violence that resulted in the death of eighteen Chinese on October 24, 1871. Although only one chapter dealt exclusively with the mass killing of Chinese immigrants while the rest of the book followed the history of the Chinese who lived in Los Angeles, I thought Zesch did a fantastic job of detailing the conditions in China that ultimately compelled Chinese men to leave their hometown and journey to the United States in order to earn money and return to their country soon after. However, many ended up choosing to stay in California, especially San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even “started their own businesses, washing clothes or peddling vegetables or fish… those with no capital took positions as housekeepers, cooks, waiters, and farmhands” (pg. 6).

Using a range of historical sources from newspaper archives to court records, Zesch also persuasively described how adept the Chinese were at using the American legal system to their advantage. For example, Zesch stated that “the Chinese of Los Angeles learned as early as 1864 that they could use the local courts to resist maltreatment and right the injustices committed against them… the American legal system could be manipulated to thwart one’s enemies and facilitate illicit transactions” (pg. 51). As David B. pointed out in his post, I also thought Zesch did an excellent job of making use of the sources available to him, especially considering the lack of specificity in many of the historical sources and inability of Americans to properly record Chinese names. I would also have to agree with both Elena and David B. again that The Chinatown War certainly brought to mind similarities with Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre for its depiction of violence toward a particular group of people and how innocents were slaughtered indiscriminately due to racism. In addition, both books share a common theme in asking how history has either been created, changed, or remembered differently over time.

As for what I liked most about this book, I thought Zesch did a commendable job highlighting the increasing tensions and anti-Chinese sentiments ultimately resulted in murder throughout the book. By starting the book with the reasons and conditions on why many Chinese men left their villages for America, readers are left feeling sympathetic for these individuals as they struggled to acquire enough money to return to China and live a comfortable life there. Despite Zesch’s unwillingness to fully explore or explain why the native citizens in Los Angeles slaughtered the Chinese-Americans, I thought Zesch’s discussion on the contemporary significance of the massacre in his last four pages to be a powerful one. He leaves readers with the claim that the local inhabitants of Los Angeles “did what they did not because they felt threatened or because their families were out of work but because they wanted to. It seemed fun. They thought they could get away with it because their victims were people who didn’t matter” (pg. 219).

Often ignored in the historical writing of Los Angeles, the Chinese community has a reach history. In his book, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the massacre of 1871, author Scott Zesch attempts to bring the history to life. Going into this book with no background on the Chinese community in Los Angeles, I was anxious. The last time I read a book on a subject I was unfamiliar with, I found myself lost. But Zesch did a great job in providing enough background material that I felt familiar with the history before he jumped into the Massacre event. He writes like a novelist, and from David Bierne’s comments of his history as an historical novelist, it answers the question that I had in that regard.
The book was interesting in that Zesch brought together the overall community within his telling of the story. The interactions of the Chinese community and the inter-racial relations that occurred in Los Angeles at the time were truly unique. Zesch spent much of his time reading between the lines in his quest to find out what occurred during the Massacre in 1871. His use of trial transcripts and newspaper articles helped him in determining what occurred in reality and what was said to occur. I really like how he was able to tell a mostly complete story with the use of these sources, which he notes in the beginning of his book were terribly incomplete.
I did have a couple of issues with the book. His novelistic style did not sit to well with me in the telling of this story. It seemed there was a lot of jumping back and forth in the story telling, he often wrote the phrase “as has been told/described” or “as we will see later/in a later chapter.” This spoke of a knowledge that he might be confusing his reader and makes one wonder why he didn’t feel the need to streamline his writing into a more comprehensible style.
Another issue I found was his portrayal, or lack of portrayal of the women in this Chinese community. In his effort to give them a voice, it seemed that he made them straight pawns with little or no agency within their own lives. One story that stands out is obviously the woman who might have very well began the massacre, Yut Ho. He tells the story of her “kidnapping” her eventual return and subsequent re-kidnapping. He comes to conclusions in the story that I find hard to follow by looking at his sources. He very definitely comes down on one side of the event but never mentions or even questions in his narrative, the feelings of the woman at the center of the controversy. He does this over and over in the telling of stories that involve women, they become a prop for his story telling. While it is understandable that there would be no documentation regarding the women’s feelings, it is odd that he never even questions where Yut Ho would rather spend her life.

On October 24, 1871, after one white life was lost in the crossfire of Chinese gang warfare in Chinatown, Los Angeles, a riot of 500 white Los Angelenos murdered eighteen Chinese, seventeen of whom were entirely innocent. The madness was partly swift angry vengeance, but mostly an act of brutality that, Zesch argues “seemed like fun. They thought they could get away with it because their victims were people who didn’t matter.” (Zesch 219) Decades of pent-up racial resentment against the influx of Chinese immigrants caused such acting out as a celebratory trip to saloons after victims had been hung, mutilated, or shot. Chinese immigrated to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles thoughout the middle of the nineteenth-century, where businesses sprang up and internecine Chinese turf war was common. The massacre, Zesch argues, was inspired by the local Los Angeles press’s longtime stories about the prostitution and violence engaged in by the immigrant community, and seeing a fellow white caught in the crossfire fit well into this narrative. Furthermore, the press highlighted the dangers posed to white male labor with the influx of migrants. Small businesses, a lynchpin in the Chinese immigrant experience, were looted as well as local communities in the outbreak.

Zesch is not a full-time academic, and his background as a historical novelist comes through strongly in The Chinatown War. It is interesting that the book was called The Chinatown War instead of The Chinatown Massacre; this is because Zesch paints the landscape in the decade-plus leading up to the main event as a drawn-out struggle of which October 24 was a boiling point. Nothing happens in a vacuum, but without the full scope of violence and lawlessness that plagued this part of the old American West, Los Angeles, a place not for the weak of heart, the event in question would not be so informative to historians. The general lawlessness of the times is on display, where vigilance committees, sometimes featuring officials themselves, took the place of structured law. Only twenty-five men were indicted, and eight were given short sentences for manslaughter. While this result was obviously not indicative of justice at work, Zesch earlier in the book points out that justice and cosmopolitanism was served more often than we might think in the Los Angels , with many Chinese Americans becoming recognized members of the community and bringing their cases to court, with the exception of testifying against whites.

Although one reviewer from the University of Nevada noted that Zesch’s lack of specialty Asian-American comes into play, the Chinatown War does an excellent job of making use of sources available to us, particular court records from the Huntington Library and newspapers. Another reviewer says that the dearth of sources on early Chinese immigrants was not as bad as Zesch made it out to be. As one of our classmates noted, the book bears a great similarity to A Misplaced Massacre, not only in its depiction of racially-based mob violence but in how it brings its narrative into the present. (yaremenkolena) Both are little known today; marked by plaques but not widely known. Zesch’s work is also reminiscent of Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes in its analysis of how different groups interact within limited space with what was, at best, an emerging system of law and justice. Who remembers remembers events and how reveals much about a nation’s framework for understanding itself. The question is: what IS the meaning of this event? Scott Zesch refers to it as “The Riot That Didn’t Change a Damned Thing.” (Zesch 213) The press and law simply went back to their normalized sensationalist routines. Zesch attempts to connect the event to modern day hate crimes as well. It is also important to remember what happens when mob mentality reigns, particularly when there are complicated histories of entirely different groups attempting to occupy the same space.

Bibliography

Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Supplementary Reading:

La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on the Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903.

By Rachel Grace Shuen

Scott Zesch illuminates the original outbreak of racial violence in Los Angeles in The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 While Los Angeles tried to overcome the stigma of Chinese Massacre trails, both agree that it set racial epistemologies within the Los Angeles’s urban landscape discourse. La Fiesta was an attempt to regain back the city’s national identity as a diverse cultural space while attracting the traveling tourist and their dollars through the expansive development hotel, shopping, and cultural districts.

A strong sense of identity began to rebuild Chinatown in Los Angeles after Black Tuesday.

Looking to tap Los Angeles booming tourist business, the La Fiesta was created with inspiration of the 1893 World’s fair, and Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. The Merchants Association, specifically designed La Fiesta to target the exotic, yet the romantic allure of Los Angeles. An initial investment of $10,000, the parade comprised of concerts, marches, and various activities. The name La Fiesta de Los Angeles (presently named Fiesta Broadway) was the result of a city-sponsored naming contest, evoked thoughts of the city’s Spanish past. Shuen elaborates the city’s desire to have the parade showcase the history of Los Angeles by asking Mexican Americans to ride horses as Spanish conquistadores; Yuma Indians display their float and the Chinese to perform their dragon dance during the parade. Shuen argues that “not only were various cultures commodified for the purpose of economic boosterism, but these groups were expected to enact their own subjugation in this supposed “celebration” of Los Angeles’ historical past.”

Shuen details the float processional, utilizing photographic primary evidence and newspaper articles written about the inaugural event. Describing how the parade progresses through various historical epochs, Shuen pointedly asserts parade organizers were committed to presenting a ‘monolithic ideology’ of Los Angeles’ history. Native American groups played into stereotypes of Native American practices and culture alongside the discovery of California in 1545, the first Anglo immigrants to California, gold mining period, water irrigation and the current prosperity of the last period of Los Angeles’ history.  Spectators admired the elaborate displays that highlighted “typical Spanish life made quite real by the present of genuine senoritas and the company of gallant caballeros on prancing steeds.” As a carnival-sized manifest destiny, the Chinese community still made every effort to gain agency and authority through their Anglo set cultural ...

Scott Zesch, the author of the China Town War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, relies on the records of ancestors of those connected to the massacre and court records to explain the history of the See-Yup dispute that led to the massacre of 1871. Only small number of letters and diaries still exist. They are mostly vanished over time. The author argues that it is a major problem with the research on the subject. And even the sources that still exist might be difficult to find and identify because they probably were written in Chinese. In order to explain the Asian- Anglo situation in Los Angeles, Zesch turns to examples of other cities, such as San Francisco, that had a large Asian population. This book primarily relies on two sources “Los Angeles area court record at the Huntington Library and California newspapers of that time” (p.225). Most of the narratives, comes from the court cases after the massacre. The documents, which were likely to have been translated accounts, could be inaccurate, and self-serving. People frequently relocated and it was very difficult to track them. English transcriptions of names from Chinese could also be changed based on a person transcribing the name that only added to the difficulties of findings.

Zesch’ intent is not to create a perfectly accurate history of the event, but to make readers “” less ignorant” in the words of Him Mark Lai” (p.226). The Author is filling in what life was like using information he finds about Chinese life in San Francisco. Due to the limited resources, this book reads very much like a fascinating historical novel. The author is a historian because of his use of the official and unofficial documents to connect events that took place, but he is also a historiographer because he relies so heavily on the research of Him Mark Lai whom he calls “unofficial dean of Chinese American studies” (p.225).

To give the readers a true sense of life in Los Angeles at that time, the author uses photography, pictures of advertisement, pictures of art, and posts from 1870. What including pictures do – it adds the reality to a historical novel. Picture of a notice of the rewards that sparked massacre is just an amazing evidence, and photograph of massacred bodies of victims also included in the book that create a tone for the massacre of 1871. Fascinating information found among the photograph is about Los Angeles Justice of the Peace, William H. Gray, who the local Chinese thought treated them fairly, and hid some of the potential victims in his caller (between pages 154-155).

The China Town War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, has a great deal of similarity to Ari Kerman’s book, the Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, in collecting historical materials and comparable sources. Both authors have done an incredible work of portraying each event. In Robert Huitrado’s commentary on the Misplaced Massacre, Robert states that the author, Ari Kerman, “focuses on one event and thoroughly investigates it from multiple angles,” that is well expressed about Kerman book and it is precisely how Scott Zesch delivers the history of the event to his readers.

In comparison to the chapter, “The Burnt District: Making Sense of Ruins in the Postwar South” by K. Stephen Prince in Gregory Downs and Kate Masur’s The World the Civil War Made, which examined how northerners have turned to look at ruins and war-torn landscapes in order to make sense of the South after the American Civil War, Thomas J. Brown’s “Monuments and Ruins: Atlanta and Columbia Remember Sherman” specifically looked at the burning of the cities in Atlanta and Columbia and how civic memories of the events eventually took on different shapes after the war. While Prince’s chapter focused on the legacy of the Civil War through the use of images and discussions of ruination in postwar South, Brown’s article discussed the ways in which American memory of the Civil War turned from monuments and ruins to other forms of commemorations instead. Despite their differences, however, by linking national memory of the war to the use of public spaces for mourning in order to commemorate the war dead, both Prince and Brown successfully argued their points while simultaneously showcasing the significance of monuments and ruins in their works.

As depictions of the ruined South became an integral part of northern print and visual culture, “southern ruins

Focusing on the fires that burned Atlanta and Columbia, Thomas J. Brown commendably highlighted the differences and similarities between the two cities during and after the Civil War. Brown stated that while “Atlanta tended to build monuments to its renewal; Columbia preferred to highlight ruins of its lost glory… monuments of Atlanta Illustrated weeklies such as Harper’s Weekly published graphic illustrations of the fire its aftermath while famous photographers from George N. Barnard to Richard Wearn either included powerful pictures of destroyed buildings in books or documented the damage in a series of photographs.

The idea of commemorating the American Civil War through memorials and ruins also played an important role in creating memory of the war in both Atlanta and Columbia. Not only did “commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia illuminate the resolution and persistence of the sectional tensions that exploded in the Civil War” In the end, while memory in Atlanta and Columbia turned from monuments and ruins toward new ways to commemorate the war through battle flags, license plates, and even costumed simulations of the battles fought in the conflict, Brown ends his article by stating that the burning of the two cities ultimately demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities of memory and remembrance in the postwar era.

K. Stephen Prince, “The Burnt District: Making Sense of Ruins in the Postwar South,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 106.

Ibid, 108.

Ibid.

The World the Civil War Made (edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur), is a collection of essays that analyze the “historical distinctiveness” of the postwar period through themes such as “personalized power,” individual rights, and rampant violence (14-15). As higbeejonathan explained, the book’s argument is based on how the Civil War changed the nation (3). The authors examine “new possibilities for imagining government, claims-making, and narrative” (17). These historians were not confined by traditional approaches to slavery or regions; rather, they perspectives of the United States spanned regions, ethnicity, and even territories that had not yet joined the Union. Although the South directly experienced most of the physical destruction and emancipation, the Civil War impacted the west and the north as well as politics at the federal, state, and local levels. The authors demonstrated these developments through the use of monographs, journal articles, treaties, newspapers, photographs, novels, and letters.

The essays in Downs and Masur described several historical events or movements that were considered failures. It reminded me of David Sim’s A Union Forever and the failed attempts of Irish nationhood in the same time period. This method was not simply about labeling failures but also understanding the complexities and consequences of postbellum developments that contributed to those failures. For example, the federal government, or the “Stockade State,” became more powerful during the war but it was not always able to enforce laws and treaties effectively in the Western territories (ch. 2, 3, 7, 9, p. 6, 223). History is not often remembered from the perspective of failure, but historians can consider previously downplayed elements of history with this approach.

This book explained several aspects of the “Reconstruction” era that I had not yet considered. Before reading this, I did not realize that Indian tribes tried to gain citizenship and land based on the Homestead Act. Stephen Kantrowitz’s description of this movement in relation to the postwar period and Western expansion proved that the war affected all parts of the United States, not just the South. Indian relations and other Western developments make much more sense in light of the changes occurring in the rest of the U.S. after the 1860s. This idea of studying regions together instead of separately is visible in Slavery’s Capitalism where historians argue that the North and the South both benefited from slavery. I was also fascinated with the discussion of ruins in chapter four. K. Stephen Prince explained how northerners initially viewed the postbellum South as an idea to be “recreated” (108). He explained that journalists and their readers adopted a mindset of viewing southern destruction as a northern opportunity to renew the south. Postwar Americans had to reconsider the intellectual meaning of destruction and death, which is explained in This Republic of Suffering as Sbremer also pointed out.

Overall, I think this book successfully reimagined the “Reconstruction” period after the Civil War. It was a complicated era that involved continuity and change as Americans tried to reunify their nation going into the twentieth century.

Suzanna Melendez

11/1/2016

Blog Post #5

In Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur riveting collection of essays The World the Civil War Made sheds light to the profound changes the Civil War caused in the East and throughout the Southwest. The impressive cast of scholars wrote on a variety of themes which ranged from race, economics, politics, and religion. Even though the aftermath of the Civil War has been largely written about, Downs and Masur have asked questions and incorporated new innovative methodologies. Although their volume highlights how the field has matured, older works such as    Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution cannot be overlooked. On the contrary, “… historians of the postwar United States almost inevitably draw from Foner’s scholarship, particularly on his ambitious vision of the transformation of Republican ideology and his wide-ranging insights about African American politics.” (6) Ultimately, the existing interpretations about the Civil War have been expanded past the comfortable boundaries of a North-South conflict.

As scholars, they organized the book in a unique manner. “Rather than presuming that Reconstruction is the best framework for understanding the postwar period-and thus envisioning a Reconstruction of the West or the Plains or the world-in this volume we ask whether thinking across regions might in fact might help us understand not just the regions themselves but the entire nation and its place in nineteenth century history.” (2-3) Therefore, the context of the book was not chronologically frame worked. On the contrary, instead of telling new stories, their goal was to frame new questions and modes of analysis. More recent work such as Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of Economic Development have adopted this similar methodology. On their blog post, 20perez16  said “the book as a whole included discussions on the main U.S. regions as well as the international scene.” Historians have brilliantly reimagined the geographic, cultural, political, and ideological landscapes of a world impacted by slavery, war and racism. In both manuscripts the readers are able to see the United States’ dynamic impact upon the world.

In order to write an in-depth analysis of the long-term implications of the Civil War, Downs and Masur abandon the term “reconstruction.” They did a remarkable job explaining that “reconstruction” historically limits the social, political, and legal change to the postbellum South. On the other hand, social changes impacted women, African Americans and Native Americans. In Laura F. Edwards essay Reconstruction and the History of Governance illustrates how grassroots freedom on a local level impacted and shaped the rights claims and legal protections of African Americans. In addition, it was intriguing to read sbremer’s blog post that highlighted that “the government was still in the transitioning phase, and still learning from its experience of tearing itself asunder.” Furthermore, as Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War the nation was still mourning the deaths of thousands of Americans. In order to rebuild the nation, Faust argued that families had to mourn the deaths of their loved ones. In conclusion, the Civil War not only nearly divided the United States but the aftermath had a nationwide effect.

The World the Civil War makes clear that the period broadly understood as Reconstruction was even more complicated than widely recognized. Rather than simply the Republican-led attempt to remake the South, a historical view that is tinted with the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the authors contained herein show that the post-Civil War period can only be really understood by looking at the United States across regions, ethnicities and borders. (Downs 5) It is easy to view Reconstruction through the filter of the behemoth the US became in the twentieth-century, but these essays reveal that US centralized power, for all its growth in support of the war effort, may not live up to its ‘Yankee Leviathan’ reputation. In spite of the intentions of the state to liberalize all within its reach, the West, South, Native Americans and others were not always willing participants. Divergent opinions within Republican party itself, eventually causing Reconstruction efforts to gradually dissipate, was just one example of a force that was fragile to begin with. Yet it was a moment of where great internal improvement measures were realized, heralded evidenced by those like Henry Carey, also featured in Slavery’s Capitalism. Economic solutions would be the best way to solve societal problems, with an American system to create a “harmony of interests” among classes that class-conflict socialism never could (312)

There is even an transnational perspective on the evolution of the American economic system, where “the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem” according to. (304) As I am writing my paper on economics in the Civil War, I was especially grateful for related discussions. While some see economic elites with an expansionist vision getting a stranglehold on national power through the Civil War, Karl Marx saw the Civil War as a revolution in line with his understanding of class overthrow, and his opinions were directly at odds with Carey’s (312). Andrew Zimmerman’s essay states that the Civil War, to many contemporaries proved that revolution could be accomplished through social rather than governmental or economic change. This understanding rendered the South as essentially the bourgeois power on the run. The Civil War was also more of a “redefinition” of American ideals as opposed to a “repetition” of revolution, according to Zimmerman (304).

 
The Civil War also asked how much government should power versus the states, as well as what did true freedom and equality really mean. I agree with sbremer that K. Stephen’s Prince’s “The Burnt District” was a fantastic chapter for revealing “how the North viewed these ruined cities as their opportunity to rebuild the south in its image.” Furthermore, the collection shows that liberalism in thought or rhetoric does not always equate with reality on the ground. The sense that very different cultures would voluntarily surrender a way of life and be remade was a common mistake in Western expansionist mindset. The talk about liberalism reminded me of Liberalism and Empire by Uday Singh Mehta that I have read for Dr. McLain’s exam, revealing how high-minded notions of bringing civility to those that need is often blinded to its own biases, not to mention violent means by which they can be accomplished. For instance, while blacks were to be incorporated into the free-labor system, they were not necessarily desired in the expansion westward, and Indian Americans received a mixture containment and forced integration policies. We also cannot take rhetoric or even the of law for granted, as Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur note that post-war America was “perhaps a nation ruled by violence interrupted by flashes of rights.” (13) This collection effectively moves us toward a more all-encompassing “Greater Reconstruction,” as Elliott West phrased it. (4)

Bibliography

Downs, Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds. The World the Civil War Made Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2015.

The World the Civil War Made is a collection of essays that seeks to rethink the reconstruction paradigm as a means of best understanding the massive changes that the United States underwent after the Civil War. The essays cover a broad array of different peoples, regions, and ideas that the editors hope will suggest new framing questions and new modes of analysis (P. 2). Of central importance to the new types of thinking this book puts forth is the concept of the United States federal government as being composed of “stockade states.” This refers to the idea that the US government was not a broad, overreaching, powerful “Yankee leviathan,” but rather was a collection of military and civilian outposts that were powerful within narrow geographical boundaries, but were limited in their reach. These outposts were sometimes capable of enforcing their will, were sometimes overpowered, and were almost always beset by competing individuals and power centers who desired to live outside of the reach of authority (P. 6). A prime example of the use of the “stockade state” within the broader context of the book can be found in the third chapter, detailing the trials of the Ho-Chunk Indians of the Great Lakes area. Upon their removal from their homeland, they are forced into boxcars and carted off to Nebraska. Here, from the perspective of the Ho-Chunk, the state takes the form of a boxcar. The boxcar is the symbol of the United States’ federal power, and to the Ho-Chunk who faced the perils of forced migration that federal power was very much real (P. 96).

A further emphasis that this collection of articles puts forth is the idea of the illiberality of post-Civil War America. This is put forth in the essays that detail the championing of debt peonage in New Mexico and Chinese labor in California, the essay detailing the continued persistence of pro-slavery Christianity despite the death of slavery, the essay detailing the horrible practice of night riding, in which African Americans were kidnapped and whipped by roving bands of white men, or in the essay that raises the question of whether emancipation allowed free blacks to attend the theater. The final essay of the book also serves to place post-Civil War America onto the international stage as well. Zimmerman’s essay, as yaremenkolena points out, does this through the lens of Marx’s view towards the Civil War. It also places the American Civil War among the European Revolutions of 1848-1849, the October Revolution of 1917, and even the Popular Front of 1934-1939 (P. 306).

This collection of essays is also all about transformation, and how the United States transformed, both in terms of government and society, as a result of the Civil War. As queenlove35 points out, a central argument to Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is that the United States government had to transform itself in order to deal and cope with the massive loss of life as a result of the Civil War. Downs and Masur’s book also deals with this idea, though in a different fashion. Here, the government is still in the transitioning phase, and still learning from its experience of tearing itself asunder. One chapter in which this is illustrated is in the essay entitled “The Burnt District.” In what I thought to be one of the more powerful essays of the book,  K. Stephen Prince is able to successfully show how Northerners viewed the ruined cities of the south. Prince illustrates how the North viewed these ruined cities as their opportunity to rebuild the south in its image and how northerners made sense of these ruins. The essay also hints towards Faust’s book in that it details something that is dark and slightly depressing, though it is done in a very thoughtful and non-conventional means.  

Elena Yaremenko

I have chosen the peer-reviewed journal article titled “A Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery” written in 2011 by Steve Edwards, a historiographer who reviews the perspectives of a number of historians from 1920 to the 1960s that referenced Marx’s writings on the subject of the Civil War, along with the works of present-day writers from 1980 to the 2011, who in the 1990s appear to have rediscovered the connection between Marx’s theory regarding the evolution of class struggle. Edwards covers the range of these writings as they explore and discuss the connection they have made between the Marxist theory of “bottom up revolution” and which he believes “offer a platform for further debate in particular fields of study to help clarify and define the conceptual armory of historical materialism” (p. 43), in this case, as it relates to the Civil War.

“Marx and Engels did not apply ready-made concepts of revolution to the U.S. Civil War. Rather, the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem, as components of a dynamic transnational set of revolutionary movements.”(p.304) Edwards, in his paper, looks at Marxist historians as they focus their attention “on economic and social transitions or transformations; to think about class agency; and compare modes of production and forms of exploitation” (p.33), which the American Civil War represented. They saw this war as a global referendum on free, as opposed to, unfree labor and its compatibility with capitalism. This in turn led to a worldwide discussion on the subject of personhood and property, an idea that is echoed in the book, The World the Civil War Made, in Ch.12 by Zimmerman, who discusses the Civil War as a redefinition of the revolutionary war.

Edwards revisits the connection of lost Marxist historical scholarship on the subject of the Civil War. He notes that most of the history regarding the causes of the Civil War was predominantly written from the point of view of the elites and empiricists. Edwards personally looks at this new Marxists view of history as a rebellion that favors a change of emphasis from the empiricist view to one of “the class-character of society” (p.34). Thus, he believes that a narrative of the Civil War as a bottom up class struggle, fits well into the of Marxist Theory of causes for revolutions. Edwards notes that in the 1960 that there was “a strong Marxist presence in debates concerned with slavery and the Civil War” (p.33), and he lists a number of authors whose work follows the Marxist tradition of writing about “history from bellow” (p.33). He then compares and contrasts their writings in the Marxist style, to those of the “ethno-religious” and “political elite,” and “born-again empiricists” (p.34).

Comparing the views of Marx, Edwards states, is “no substitutes for historical research, but it is worth turning to his work for some questions, if not answers” (p.39). A fascinating fact that emerges from this article is that Marx wrote is series of commentaries published in the New York Tribune and the Viennese liberal paper Die Presse, on the subject of abolishing slavery (p.39). However, Marx did not study the Civil War or slavery specifically, but he did use the observations about slavery and how it relates to capitalist production in his writings. In Marx’s writings, he discusses slavery in the American South as both “a mode of production corresponding to the slave and a slave or plantation economy. In essence comparing this struggle between the North and South during the Civil War as two social systems that “can no longer peacefully coexist” and which, “can only be ended by the victory of one system over another” (p.40). In his studies of governance structures, economics, and revolutions Marx does not discuss the morality or ethics of slavery directly.

Edwards does not just compare the writings of these authors, but he also argues with them about their views of the Civil War, and about how their theories relate to Marxist theory. Edward’s comparisons examine where these writers’ ideas originated and explains how their perspectives either mesh or do not mesh with Marx’s work. Edwards acknowledges that these historians have done a great deal of research connecting the social class structure to the economy of the capitalist world market and its connection to the North and South pre-war America, but he believes that they attribute thoughts to Marx that Marx never expressed about the Civil War. Probably closest to Marx in this regard was Davidson who explains that “The real blockage on capitalist development was not feudalism or feudal impediments to capital-accumulation, …but slavery” (p.38), as it affected the Southern economy, then the Northern as well, followed by a spread into the British trade: it had a cascade effect. The implosion of the slave-based capitalist system threatened to take down the capitalists economy in the U.S. with global ripples.

The recognition of the connection to Marx’s idea of the underlying that the power of a society came from the “bottom up” can be found in this new wave of writers. These authors generally agree that one of the greatest cause leading to the Civil War was the economics of capitalism and slave labor and that trying to link this to Marx’s theories on social order. They took it a step too far by implying that Marx, in his study of the Civil War and other similar revolutions, advocated that slavery was a negative element. Marx, in his writings on bottom up revolutions merely documented as objectively as it was possible to do, the events that took place with an analysis of why he believed they occurred the way they did. While he did write about the need to abolish slavery, this is not what his theory was about, it was rather based on identifiable facts, not a referendum against slavery. Edwards looks at Marx’s writings and how the elements he writes about can be identified as underlying causes that existed at the core of the Civil War, and that also existed on a global scale in bottom up revolutions as he noted occurred during the French Revolution. These historians under review by Edwards use elements of ...

When we think of the aftermath of the Civil War we tend to remember and fixate on the rebuilding of the South, the institution of Jim Crow, and the U.S. expand westward. However, the world in which the Civil War created is much more complicated and complex then we realize with relatively untold narratives that provide a greater understanding of what happened once the smoke had cleared of the battlefields and the dead mostly accounted for. As such the goal of The World The Civil War Made is to highlight and ask precisely how the the changes that rippled out from the Civil War did and did not echo in people’s lives and communities. They portray a federal government located in outpost, often beset and besieged able to enforce its policies in concentrated areas but hard pressed to extend its sovereignty thought the land. Using court documents, personal testimonies, newspaper articles, maps, and even tribe dissolution forms the authors within the book create the image of a nation defined by shared assumptions about democratic processes and peaceful governance; the essays within the book portray a place convulsed by violence and a government stymied by common people’s stubborn assertions of power and prerogative. In the end they seek to invite us to envision the enduring illiberal and chaotic qualities of life in the postwar U.S. as being imperfect in consolidating liberal nation, but as central to the American experience and as such seek to answer the question how the Civil War change the nation (pg. 3).

The greatest strength of most of the essays in the book which give the reader a better understanding of the world that Civil War are the ones centered around ethnic minorities and how they struggled with ownership of their identity and whether it be their property such as land or their physical body. Similarly to Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire, Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, and Dr. Ari Kelman This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War which give agency to minority groups in their respected books. I also would agree with Mark that the book is more about “local resistance on the ground made it difficult to enforce Reconstruction protections due to the federal governments reach was overstressed” and as such, they took matters into their own hands. In chapter 2, Stacey Smith discussed how merchants and workers protested the unfair wages the received to the Govoner of California and stated that they were not coolies if by that word you mean bound men or slaves (pg. 63). While In chapter 3, Stephen Kantrowitz argued that when the Ho-Chunk Tribe of Wisconsin neither used the words “citizenship” and “civilization” they seem to have attached meanings and hopes to them quite different from those intended by policymakers nor did they seek assimilation into the US nor did they imagine they could fully escape it (pg. 99). In chapter 6, Kidada E. Williams displayed the bravery of African American taking the stand and testifying in courts down south in addition to how emancipation allowed many African Americans to assert new control over their lives through economic means and migration to the Western Territories (pg. 173). Finally, in chapter 10, Crystal N. Feimster traces the black women’s resistance to sexual violence whose crusade for sexual justice took many forms written protest to violent resistance in order to challenge the panoply laws, traditions, and ideas that reinforce white men’s sexual power (pg. 251).

The biggest complement I can give The World The Civil War Made is that it seeks to to tell the unknown stories that are needed to be heard in order for anyone to understand America after the war. For example before this reading, I never heard about Elly S. Parker. I thought C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa did an amazing job bring to life a relatively unknown historical figure to hopefully a wider audience. As such, one can see the significance of Parker’s mission of having the government protect Native tribes form settlers to maintain their tribal sovereignty (pg. 190). While Barbra Krauthamer on the other display that yes, Native American did own slaves which is not really mentioned lot but she takes to one step further by showing how they ended the practice of slavery which I have never personally come cross in any history book. Since she states that black people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations waited longer that most before gaining their freedom and clear picture of their future but they still had plans and ideas about their lives as free people in the nations should look like (pg 232).

The United States federal government expanded its roll during the Reconstruction period. The federal government, led by Republicans helped the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment provided equal protection and citizenship rights for all persons. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination of voting rights by “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Amendments expanded the federal government while enforcing the protections. How was the federal government able to enforce the protections in the south and the far west? What challenges did the federal government face during the Reconstruction period? The World the Civil War Made is a collection of essays that help answer these questions. When historians began to study the aftermath of the Civil War they focused on the “political power and the organization of labor.” (p. 4). Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masure in the introduction state, “Reconstruction refers to the dynamic period of political debate and social upheaval in the South that followed the Civil War.” (p. 4) The essays concentrate on how the federal government had a limited role due to the state local forces. Downs and Masure express this period at the Stockade State, “a collection of outposts—both military and civilian—powerful within narrow geographical boundaries but limited in their reach, sometimes capable of enforcing their will, sometimes overpowered…” (p. 6) I agree with yaremenkolena that “The World the Civil War Made has shifted the focus on the history of the Civil War era from the influence of the federal and state governance to the entitles on the ground…” Local resistance on the ground made it difficult to enforce Reconstruction protections due to the federal governments reach was overstressed. “…federal officials were often frustrated by the army’s incapacity, its limited size, and it dispersal across the vast lands.” (p. 8)

One example of local forces challenging the federal government Reconstruction protections was the physical and psychological terrorization of African Americans from white southern night riders. The terrorization was to stop African Americans newly gained equality. Southern white intimidation imposed fear on African Americans to the point they were afraid to fight. “Oftentimes, the night riders’ mere presence…had the power to reduce, as Herman puts it, “victims’ sense of autonomy” and undermine their willingness and ability to resist.” (p. 163) Even though African American had full and legal protection of the federal government, their lack of reach prohibited protection due to the brutal coercion of the southern night riders. This one example demonstrates how the federal “Stockade State” was undermined by local ground forces in the Reconstruction protections.

The consequences of the Civil War and the abolishment of the slavery spread far beyond of east coast of the United States and actually had an effect on the world globally according to The World the Civil War Made essays. While Americans fought a war for freedom and independence from Great Britain in 1776, it was a war that also expanded aspects of what it meant to be free individuals in general. The Civil War was refining of this concept of freedom on the grander scale. While some of the nation’s founders believed that war of independence should have included all people, slave and free people, they understood that this concept was not held by many of those in the southern states, and they believed that if they tried to force their particular view of freedom, which would include slaves on those in the south they would not have gotten the military support to fight against the British that they desperately needed, leaving the country in a status quo situation which they found unacceptable—better to get some of what they wanted than nothing.

According to Zimmerman, Ch.12, Marx saw the American Civil War as a new type of revolutionary experience that emanated from the workers at the lowest level of political power in an attempt to gain political influence. This view of the more subtle influences on the political spectrum is echoed in Beyond the Founders, which examines the seemingly powerless non-citizens, including white women and people of color, explaining how they did actually did hold a number of keys to change in the political system through entrepreneurial expression and social life. The World the Civil War Made has shifted the focus on the history of the Civil War era from the influence of the federal and state governance to the entities on the ground, and opened up the prospects of a broader sense of understanding of the nation and its formation after the Civil War. The most fascinating approach seems to me that author shown a light into the perspective on the idea that there had previously not been a concept of “rights” for all individuals (p. 28). This was a movement form the ground up that reflected the common thought that if freedom was valuable for some, it should be common for all people—a bottom up concept the Marx elaborated on as an integral part of his doctrine. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were thus influenced by African American, who according to the author, had influence in the “central roles in the major events of the time rather than appearing as inert subjects to whom federal lawmakers gave freedom and rights” (p.27) and that the fact that they were instrumental in procuring their right to be free was not just a construct of the white politicians or white majority at that time.

Economics and the US Civil War

This paper will examine the importance of the national economy, ideologically and practically, in the origins and four years of perpetuation of the US Civil War. The South’s secession over the likely trumped-up threat of Lincoln’s presidency to the instituion of slavery, the lynchpin of the region’s economic system, was simultaneously a political, economic, moral, and Constitutional. I hold, along with Russell McClintock in Lincoln and His Decision for War (2008), that slavery was resolved through military means by choice; one that claimed upward of 600,000 lives. Furthermore, economics played a role in this decision, as decades of interdependence and resultant political compromise between the northern free and southern slave economics gave way to a new reality of lost resources direct competition. While there were sectional differences enough to prompt Southern claims to independence, both Northern Southern understandings of patriotism and common culture developed, with the South understanding the North as an attack on their culture and economic lifeline while Northern emotions were spurred on in opposition to a collective bloc of millions of traitors. Melinda Lawson’s Patriot Fires (2002) discusses the new form of patriotism and Union identity, propelled by the newspaper industry and other business interests, that helped gather momentum for war amidst considerable uncertainty. This appears an update to the fervor of Manifest Destiny on display a decade prior in the US War with Mexico, a controversial military offensive this paper will look at for any similarities who provided supporting arguments and resources to fund the effort. As Richard Franklin Bensel writes in Yankee Leviathan (1990), the business interests that were benefited by the war did not follow through in supporting Reconstruction efforts pushed by Radical Republicans.

 
The South also had a particular vision for a slave-based economic system that reached as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s”empire of liberty.” However, the Old South in the final decades before the Civil War was no longer the small yeoman farmer, but a Cotton Kingdom based large-scale farming with a strict racial hierarchy where it was essentially assumed blacks were enslaved unless proven otherwise. Recent work like Slavery’s Capitalism (2016), edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013) argue for slavery’s centrality to increasing economic behemoth that was the nineteenth century US. These works have shown that the South was no backward place in spite of its now apparent backward practices, but part of an intertwined economy with the North; the absence of which would have been a significant loss to the country. The South, in its high export of cotton, paid a heavy share of taxes from federal tariffs. Gene Kizer, Jr., in Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States (2014), references a post-secession North’s economy was in a tailspin with mass unemployment and popular unrest. Immediately after secession, the high Morrill Tariff made matters worse, according to Kizer, increasing international trade into the South at the expense. There has been great historical debate over slavery’s relation to free trade, with economics Thomas J. DiLorenzo and author of the classic revisionist history The Real Lincoln (2002) viewing the South as constitutive of true free trade while the North pushed high tariffs and attempts deprive state independence everyone from the Founders and Andrew Jackson had recognized. Marc Egnal argues that economic factors, in particular, caused the Civil War, and not the righteousness emancipation or even preserving the union, while James L. Huston looks at slavery with regard to the law of property, and how the institution threatened free labor and dominated much of the Constitutional discussion.

Finally, this paper will examine broader US economic histories like Michael Lind’s Land of Promise (2012) and John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth (2004) to understand how the country’s political economy was transformed by reunion. Lincoln’s centralization of power has been posited as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists’ heir, as Bensel posits. Lincoln’s political career in favor of central banks, tariffs and internal improvement evidenced in Henry Clay’s “American System” gives credence to Lincoln’s understanding of the economic role of government. It is relatively well-known that one of, if not the most, important factors in Lincoln’s decision-making was his pure desire to preserve the Union. The expansion of slavery was something he was against, but Lincoln, from his Inaugural Address to his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, Jr., made it clear that keeping the country together was paramount to everything, even if it meant preserving slavery. Examined herein will be perspectives on Lincoln’s adherence to “American System”-type policies. Both River of Dark Dreams and John Majewski’s Modernizing a Slave Economy (2009) reveal that the Confederacy had a particular vision a state that could compete on a global scale, with Majewski highlighting the CSA dream of an active state in the realm of infrastructure and commerce. Could the Union, with all its population and industry, ever have hoped to become the international economic powerhouse it became without rejoining with the South, albeit without the old slave economy? Bringing together a variety of historiographies surrounding secession, Lincoln, the Civil War and the birthing of modern American capitalism will help bring a unique narrative about the commonly overlooked economic angle of America’s most bloody and personal battle.

Bibliography

Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Roseville: Random House, 2002.

Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

Finkelman, Paul. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

Huston, James ...

 Suzanna Melendez

10/28/16

Polished Paragraph

Prior to the 1970s, American women’s history tended to be neglected furthermore, scholarship focusing on native women was non-existent. Not until the 1980s, did scholars begin to focus on interracial marriages. Throughout my paper, I will focus on French men and Native American women. The reader will differentiate my historiography from other works because my research will mainly focus on Native womens’ experiences and intentions to marry outside their own race. In addition, I will also include a variety of sources focusing on marriages between Indian women and Spanish men in Mexico. It is important to take into consideration the lack of primary sources. During the nineteenth century, majority of women were illiterate and did not record their history. As a result, I had to read around my topic and look at other kinds of interracial marriages in order to put together a robust historiography.

The historical synthesis and methods utilized by scholars are government documents, travel journals, historic maps, and manuscripts. While majority of my sources addressed topics such as gender, economics, politics, and geography the issue of race appeared in every text. In Barbara Fields essay Ideology and Race in American History she addressed how historians have approached race and racism. One of her questions is how the concept of race came to be deeply embedded into our society? The concept of race is a complicated subject matter because an individual’s physical traits did not discourage interracial marriages. In Susan Sleeper- Smith Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes highlights the high number of mixed-blood kinships which unified Indian women and French men. Women not only worked as brokers between two different societies but they helped connect the Great Lakes which expanded the transatlantic economy. By reading Sleeper’s narrative I identified that Indian women’s actions mainly impacted their husband’s interests. Further research by Sylvia Van Kirk in Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur-trade Society, 1670-1870 tried to identify how native women benefited from an interracial marriage. She provided in depth details about family life among the Native Americans. During the early 18^th century, marriages between French men and Native women were encouraged. But there are debates among scholars as to the date and reason interracial marriages were disapproved by French aristocrats. By the 19^th century, physical traits began to be emphasized opposing differences between and discouraging French-Indian relationships. Therefore, are there other components that attributed toward the disproval of mix raced relationships? Although French men wanted political and economic alliances these correspondences began to represent a form of dishonor. Guillaume Aubert’s article The Blood of France: Race and Purity in the French Atlantic World highlights the criticism of interracial relationships. Despite economic and political gains, the social construct a racial hierarchy interfered. Overall, can an emphasis on race reveal an accurate account of native women’s experience in an interracial marriage and the lives of their multiracial children?

The central goal of my historiography is to trace the ways in which slave owners, traders, or governments established capitalistic modes of efficiency in the slave system. The central question should rest on how historians have viewed the claim that the slave system was a backwards, feudalistic structure that kept the plantation system technologically and economically behind the rest of industrialized societies. There are three clear debates between my various sources dealing with how slaves are viewed or used by traders and planters. The first major debate centers around methodical decisions made by those involved in the slave trade. Historians such as Beckert and Rockman, Stephanie Camp, and Rees, Komlos, Long, and Woitek make clear arguments for the intentional ways in which slave plantation owners maximized output of their slave populations through food allotments, quota systems, and detailed record keeping. All of these historians agree that the slave system was not random or feudalistic, but intentionally attempting to maximize efficiency of production and output much like industrial factory. The second major debate follows technological advancements and incentives in order to reach peak production. Walter Johnson, John Majewski, and Chad Morgan all argued that there were very specific advancements in technology or economic structure that pushed slavery forward in its efficient modes of production. These could be as simple as steamboats  to expand southern cotton empires and production capabilities or active pursuit of a southern modernization of factories. Some southern governments even pushed for tax incentives and incorporations in order to modernize the southern structures. The last area of discussion centers around the slave trade and its efficient structures of transport and space usage. Robert Harms, Marcus Rediker, Greg O’Malley, and Stephanie Smallwood all clearly argue that the slave trade created a commodified product of human beings that were treated like other goods for sale (whether on the slave ship itself or in port). The commodification that occurred allows these historians to argue for an intentional capitalistic system that dehumanized the commodity of transport and increased the efficiency of the system.

I will also provide one voice from an early history that challenges the above assertions by various historians. Douglas Egerton’s work was much earlier than the above historians and really might be the voice that they were attempting to silence. His assertions center on the idea that slavery cannot inherently be capitalistic due to its hierarchical society that was established. Edgerton believed that the paternalistic natures of the system and lack of wage for laborers could not create a capitalistic or advancing southern economy.

Following the First World War, the American Red Cross achieved international recognition and fame but also transformed itself into a major national humanitarian organization by the end of the conflict. In addition to its phenomenal growth during the war, the programs it created in order to alleviate the pain and suffering of soldiers, civilians, and foreigners alike would forever cement its place as the nation’s humanitarian relief organization. One of the many debates surrounding the topic of the American Red Cross on gender and war came in the form of its transformation or the “rise and fall” of the organization as it began to adopt an international sensibility and responsibility to help others, especially foreigners, during the war. In Julia F. Irwin’s Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening, she explicitly stated that by implementing languages of obligation as part of their rhetorical strategy during World War I, the American Red Cross helped convinced U.S. citizens that it was of a vital national interest to donate their money and time to not only help foreigners in need but also the war effort. Marian Moser Jones’ The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, on the other hand, also detailed the transformation of the American Red Cross and how the war ultimately transformed the organization into the powerful institution that remains today.

Another debate or theme involving the American Red Cross that the authors in my annotated bibliography all have in common with would be the experiences of women who have made countless of sacrifices for their nation in times of war. From their roles as nurses and volunteers, these women battled sexism and racism, worked long hours and in sufferable conditions, and yet, they still accomplished an extraordinary amount of work through their philanthropic efforts overseas. In addition to exploring the cultural shifts of women’s involvement and the responsibilities of women during wartime, historians have also looked at how ideas of motherhood have come to shape the war effort both at home and abroad. Through the use of American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1918, P.J. Lopez’s “American Red Cross Posters and the Cultural Politics of Motherhood in World War I” looked at how they became a fundamental propaganda tool for communicating notions of femininity and patriotism to American women while also exploring the influences of U.S. involvement in the war as well as the social constructions of white femininity of the time.

The bulk of scholarship on American isolationism specifically focuses on the period of the twentieth century that encompasses the World Wars, and often ignores any earlier manifestations of the idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the major questions facing historians who tackle these earlier incarnations of isolationism center around its origins. While these historians do not often directly engage in a debate, their ideas nevertheless fall into two different camps: one considers the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1832 as the official starting point, while the other looks to various earlier moments in American history.

Most historians writing on the subject fall into the first category. Carl Becker wrote “The Monroe Doctrine and the War” shortly after the end of the First World War, making him the first historian to notice a connection between the Monroe Doctrine and the broader idea of isolationism, likely because isolationism was more prevalent than ever before in the years directly leading up to American involvement in the war. Several subsequent historians have shared his opinion; Gretchen Murphy (Hemispheric Imagining: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire), Jay Sexton (The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America), and John Kasson (“The Monroe Doctrine in 1881”) make the Monroe Doctrine the focus of their respective works on the American idea of empire in the nineteenth century. More recently however, several historians have come forward to suggest even earlier beginnings to isolationist practices. William Belko’s “The Origins of the Monroe Doctrine Revisited” traces its development to a very specific event: the 1810 West Florida Revolt, which he proposes shaped the eventual “no transfer” policy of the Monroe Doctrine. Reaching even further back, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol looks to the 1790s as a period of early isolationism following George Washington’s suggestion to avoid entanglement in Europe in her article “Early Isolationism Revisited: Neutrality and Beyond in the 1790s.”

While the establishment of a concrete point of origin for isolationism is undoubtedly the most contested point within the historiography, other historians have established an ancillary debate centering around the dichotomy of internationalism and isolationism. Some see these two ideas as completely incompatible, and choose to focus their work on the arguments between “imperialists” and “anti-imperialists” within the American government. David Healy (U.S. Expanisionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s) and Beverly Tompkins (Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate 1890-1920) both hold this view in their books dealing with both expansionism and anti-imperialism. On the other side of the debate, Mariano Marco’s “Isolationism, Internationalism and the Monroe Doctrine” and James Sofka’s “American Neutral Rights Reappraised” both point out the similarities between these two ideas, stressing the ways in which they could actually coexist. Both of these questions demonstrate the relative lack of consensus among the academic community when it comes to the history of American isolationism, making its study both useful and important in terms reaching new conclusions that may further the field.

Since Southern California’s early growth is multi-faceted, historians have tried to analyze it in different ways. One of the main historical debates deals with the development related to the citrus industry. What was the most important factor for the region’s expansion and why? How much did immigration play a role in region’s growth? Some scholars, like Edward Bachus, argue for a traditional history of institutions impacting growth, which include irrigation, the railroad, and the Fruit Exchange. Similarly, William Deverell in“The Southern Pacific Railroad Survives the Pullman Strike of 1894” uses a top-down approach to discuss the power of California’s railroads in the midst of labor strikes (Deverell 183, 192). Other scholars argue instead that it was the labor force, such as Mexican immigrants, which drove the citrus industry’s growth. Stacey Smith, in Freedom’s Frontier, offers a broader analysis on the state’s labor and slavery in the 1800s by connecting them to similar national developments. National trends are also explained from the immigrants’ perspective in James R. Barrett’s “Americanization from the Bottom Up.” Douglas Sackman seems to be in the middle of this debate because he emphasizes the citrus corporations’ marketing as a significant growth factor in Orange Empire, but he also recognizes the role of migrant workers. Samuel Truett, in Fugitive Landscapes, can build on Sackman’s work by viewing immigrants and native peoples as key contributing factors in the Southwest borderlands’ development (Truett 129).

Another related historical debate is one that considers the California Dream alongside efforts to establish successful Southern Californian communities. Was this dream attainable for everyone who lived in the state, why or why not? Should historians use cultural and social history, rather than economic history, for instance, to understand how communities developed and grew? Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream discusses “the imaginative aspects of California’s journey to identity” by studying how settlers created and sought after their ideas of the dream (Starr vii). Many people pursued this dream but economic success came mostly to those who had power, money, or land. Starting with this idea of success, historians have studied Southern California’s expansion from the perspective of booming citrus corporations (Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell). Yet, this method marginalizes laborers who were not able to make substantial profit from the railroad, real estate, or citrus (Smith). Some of my sources including Slayton and Estes, Sackman, and Starr refer to key figures, often men, who shaped communities. However, scholars, such as Gilbert Gonzalez, Stephen O’Neil, and Lisbeth Haas, have also identified Mexicans, and women in particular, as important figures in their communities. In my early research, there appears to be a general historiographical turn towards more of a cultural and social history of California’s growth. Rather than viewing the history mainly through major institutions and themes like the railroad or the California Dream, recent scholars have reconstructed the story to shift the focus onto ordinary people and the spaces they inhabited.

The American Civil War was four of the darkest years in American history. Family fought family, brother fought brother, and the American people fought each other over the right to own and sell slaves, an institution established long before the combatants were ever born. Yet, this war would change the way the United States saw itself and how it was seen worldwide. However, this new view would come at the cost of approximately 620,000 to 752,000 men, women and children. That is a staggering number considering the population of the United States in 1860 was 31 million.

Despite the violence and brutality of the battles during the Civil War, the darkest specter of the soldiers and civilians on either side was unseen, that of disease. Dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid fever and pneumonia were constant companions and killers in cities, towns and military camps. My annotated sources discuss three questions/debates frequently: 1) Which disease killed the most people, soldiers and civilians, during the Civil War? 2) How did hospital sanitation and care contribute to Civil War deaths? and 3) Why did the care of Black soldiers and Black civilians differ from the care given to the White population?

Question number one is unique because every source has its own opinion on which disease was the deadliest. Andrew Bell, author of Mosquito Soldiers, chose Malaria and Yellow Fever. Dr. Drew Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, discussed Typhoid Fever and Scarlet Fever primarily, but she also mentioned outbreaks of Smallpox, Malaria and Yellow Fever. Dr. Margaret Humphreys, author of Intensely Human, mentions Malaria and Pneumonia as primary killers; yet, she says Yellow Fever was not a primary agent of death. Robert Reilly MD in his article Medical and surgical care, mentions Dysentery, Malaria, Yellow Fever, and Typhoid Fever as the top killers, with Measles and Smallpox as secondary. Dr. Jim Downs author of article The Art of Medicine, says Dysentery, Typhus, and Pneumonia were the top killers, with Yellow Fever, Typhoid Fever and Smallpox coming in right behind. Dr. Helle Mathiasen author of the article Bugs and Battles, focuses his short article on Malaria and Yellow Fever and how they were spread by mosquitos in the South.

For question #2, Dr. Drew Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, also covers hospital sanitation and care, and that doctors and nurses frequently contracted illnesses from the patients they were treating which included: Typhus, Typhoid Fever and Smallpox. Dr. Megan Nelson, author of Ruin Nation, wrote on death, hospitals and hospital care. She documented how easy it was kill, how there were so many ways to do it during the war, and how hospital staff, especially after large engagements, were overwhelmed by the wounds they saw and how to care for so many. Robert Reilly MD, in his article Medical and surgical care, spoke not only of the diseases that ravaged the armies, but on the medical advancements the war helped to create. He wrote extensively on the advancements in both the medical and surgical fields.

To answer question #3, Susan Grant, author of The War for a Nation, focused her book on the African-American plight in contraband camps, military hospitals, and the treatment of Black POWs. Dr. Margaret Humphreys, author of Intensely Human, focused her book on African-American care in hospitals which were separate from White facilities, Black doctors/surgeons, and the regions in the South where Black troops were known to become ill more frequently. Dr. Jim Downs, author of the article The Art of Medicine, wrote on how emancipated slaves and runaways in contraband camps became sick due to the proximity of these camps to Union army camps and the lack of food and clean water available to them.

Reilly, Robert F, MD. “Medical and surgical care during the American Civil War, 1860-1865.” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 29, no. 2 (2016): 138.

Los Angeles adapted from a small pueblo city, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula, in the late 18^th century to a burgeoning metropolis by the early 1900s. Immigrant clusters of communities formed geographic space into place, within the social boundaries Anglo-Americans, created. My historiography focuses on how transnationalism and globalization shaped and confined urban culture geographies in the 19th century, Los Angeles. Thematically, my sources share arguments that border-making processes have defined 19th century Los Angeles social geography.

Utilizing the legal history perspective of The History of Los Angeles: As Seen from the City Attorney’s Office provides consistent issues that concern all of my sources: housing, land, water, transportation, immigration, and integration of the newcomer. Erika Lee’s book At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Action 1882-1943, asserts that the United States ceased being a nation of welcoming immigration and integration without restrictive borders. Its policy of becoming a ‘gate-keeping’ nation with an active federal control set the standards of race and class. This new policy shift affected immigrant patterns, communities, and racial identities and led to America’s exclusionary culture. Los Angeles culture becomes affected by 18th-century European colonization ideologies and its 19th-century expansion and area migration of immigrants. The culture mixture and clashes of perceived identity and community are formed by American’s industrialization and desire for globalizing dominance.

In Williams Estrada’s article Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Spaces and Phoebe S. Kropp’s book California Vieja reconcile Los Angeles’s cultural Spanish past through investment of cultural memory through the creation of built environment. In an ambitious attempt to create Southern California a geographical space of work, live and play, and desire to honor local history, they focus on the romanticized memory of Olvera Street. Anglos’ primary vision to desire yet disdain non-Anglo culture is a consistent strategy found in the 19th century and 20th century. The incorporation of constructed places becomes a place of political struggle and reconciliation. Historical areas like China City, now Chinatown, and Senoratown, now Olvera Street are created out of space for Anglo-American’s consumption of traditional culture. On the other side, it forces the excluded to create personal ecologies within these jarred landscapes in Los Angeles. Forming ethnic enclaves into the physical landscape is a theme throughout all of the works when building the industry in the Los Angeles area. The public practices of social distinction are organizing culture through Anglo-American cultures and traditions a reader can gain a sense of how Los Angeles creates these boundaries.

The purpose of my historiography paper is to examine after the Civil War what were the contributing factors of the proliferation of lynching in the south. Specially, the factor I plan to focus on is the historiography of the rise of the lynching as a spectacle. During my initial research there has been a lot of examining of the socioeconomics of lynching in the south. However, there has been a recent turn to the complex culture effects that produced white mob violence.

The latest turn in scholarship highlights how lynching formed a culture of violence. In Michael Pfeifer’s 2004 Rough Justice: Lynching in American Society, 1874-1947 that “rough justice” a culture complex authorized harsh, demeaning, and communal punishment. William Carrigan’s 2006 The Making of Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 proposes how historical memory of harsh punishment in the antebellum period affirms mob violence and the historical tradition of a culture of violence. Jacqueline Goldsby’s 2006 A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature builds off Pfeifer and Carrigan’s use of traditional historical methods. Goldsby employs a poststructuralist approach to her analysis. Karlos K. Hill of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigns book review states, “…she argues that discursive representations of lynching such as poems, novels, plays, and short stores are important historical sources because they capture culture processes that tend to be muted or omitted from traditional lynching sources…” Amy Louise Wood’s 2009 Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America 1890-1940 expands from Goldsby’s research and studies technology of this period and how white southerners used it to strengthen white supremacy with the use of photography. Bringing another perspective of the use of photography is Amanda K. Frisken article, “A Song without Words”: Anti-Lynching Imagery in the African American Press, 1889-1898. Frisken’s perspective counters how the lynching imagery helped fuel the anti-lynching movement. Frisken writes, “Recent scholarship shows that in the early 1900s, the black press published lynching photographs and postcards, redeploying the propaganda of the lynch mob to prove that lynching occurred, and gradually to present a visual critique of lynching.” One gap, through my initial research, is how women and children responded of the use if imagery. There is very little or not any scholarship on how women and children responded to the mob violence and its imagery. This may be my argument for the future direction of my topic that could be expanded.

While the Second Great Awakening began in the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the movement gained traction in the US as a whole. This Protestant Christian movement came from a Postmillennial concept at the beginning of the 19th century that the eminent return of Christ meant there was a need to prepare the world for his return. The momentum of the Second Great Awakening. Through the Second Great Awakening came new religious movements. This stemmed especially out of the Reformed tradition that began to take shape. Revival Preachers such as Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell independently created a reformed movement that merged together in the 1830’s. Through the popularity of the Second Great Awakening, social changes within the midst of the private and religious lives of women change. While many historians and religious scholars write on the men of the movement, Stone and Alexander just to name a few, women are often removed from the conversation. The role women played in the development of the Reform Tradition and other social movements changed. Women took roles as leaders and, in some instances, Preacher. The creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance movement stems from these overarching social and religious changes. The conversation involves scholars from multiple areas. Through this historiography the conversation will encompass scholars from both the historical and religious fields.
One discussion noted between the various authors is the changing scope of the Private and Public Sphere. With the large number of revivals and reinvigoration of evangelism within the social structure of society, the public role of women changed. For scholars, the largest debate stems from this changing societal structure. As religion became a cornerstone in the lives of these women, some scholars see the transition of leadership roles in bible reading and prayer in the home helping women emerge as leaders in the religious public sphere. Women helped to lead the creation of denominations. According to Loretta Young, the wife of Alexander Campbell, Selina, was the backbone of the Christian Church reform movement. Other scholars find that the revival and reform movement led to a strengthening of the separation between private and public spheres. Some scholars, such as David Harrell, attribute this parting to Selina Campbell as well.
The Authors’ debates are developing through careful research. The role of the Second Great Awakening and emerging female roles on the creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance movement, the role that women preachers played on society are threads that emerge as I continue to read and negotiate my way through the texts.

The history surrounding the National Parks is more complex and disturbing that what we think. In the Progressive Ere, America became increasingly urbanized. This caused much of the government to enact policies that restricted urbanization and environmental impact. Out of this wave of policies came the National Parks System (NPS). The NPS was tasked with lofty and righteous goals of protecting nature from the sprawl of man and save the delicate ecosystems the government identified as important. These newly established parks also encouraged the American public to “got back to nature,” and escape the slums and pollution caused by urbanization. However, the consequences of this system, as some historians and scholars argue, proved more harmful than good.

General themes come from the context of the National Parks System. The most obvious one is conservation and man’s place in nature. In Playing God In Yellowstone, Alston Chase argues that the mission to protect Yellowstone has actually hurt the park. With the creation of the park, the ecosystem suffered consequences that started when park rangers began hunting the predators in the park. Wolves and mountain lions were targeted because they were seen as “threats” to the ecosystem and man. In turn, this caused the elk and bison population to increase, which then caused a loss in vegetation which other animals fed off of. Also, the park became government property which evicted indians, who hunted the bison and elk, from the park. Similarly, Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature argues that the development of the NPS imposed a a view of nature upon the land. Park rangers and managers created “nature as it ought to be.” Basically, they designed the parks so people could visit them. Jacoby goes into more depth about the people who lived and survived off park lands. Rugged individuals were now seen as squatters, and indians, who hunted in the park, were now poachers. Jacoby creates this rugged dualism of the park system and the people involved in its creation.

Another theme coming from the National Parks is that of a social space. Jacoby speaks about how park managers created a space that was in nature, but not natural. Lynn Ross-Bryant’s Pilgrimage to the National Parks talks about how the visitors of the parks created meanings of the parks and how these meanings have shifted over time. She views the parks as a symbolic function that generated ideas about nature and nation. The parks also became sacred spaces for the individuals that visited them. They could forge their own experiences or reenact the visits told by an older generation.

Elena Yaremenko HIST571Fall2016

One of the primary questions/debates by numerous authors in Beyond the Founders and in Slavery’s Cpitalism, is the consequences of the choices of material selected and rejected by past empiricist historians and how this gives an incomplete picture of the time early pre-civil war era. Empiricist historians did not include in their histories, according to these authors, how people of color and women (the non-voting population), influenced politics. Thus, they missed the opportunity to examine all aspects of the interconnectedness that economic development and social order had on politics in this era. In the Beyond the Founders series of essays, historiographers/historians explain how these empiricist historians appear to have simply ignored the power and influence of these historically underrepresented groups, and thus, important facets in the sphere of political influence they had.

In Beyond the Founders, Chapter 4: “Women and Party Conflict in the Early Republic,” author Zaggari explains that past historians saw the non-voting groups of Americans as powerless and without influence in the affairs of politics and government. They appeared to see politics as the purview of the white men. However, Zaggari notes that over time, with the inclusions of, and understanding about, the social order of that society, women and those engaged in entrepreneurship had more political influence than was previously thought: “through a variety of informal notes, processes, and symbolic actions can be considered genuinely ‘political’ in the sense that they influenced the structure of political power or the dynamic of political action” (p.108).

In Beyond the Founders, Chapter 3: “Why Thomas Jefferson and African American Wore Their Politics on their Sleeves,” author David Waldstreicher’s first words are expressed in the form of a question: “Why bother re-dressing political history?” In his writings, he looks at political “language” found even in the clothing made and worn by various groups and notes that is was ignored by historians. The author expresses the lack of past attention paid to the relationship of “clothing and politics” (p.80) in an era of boycotts and tariffs. He further explains how some groups, through economic actions, “particularly African Americans, Native Americans, and women,” were considered by past historians to have been “marginal figures” and thus unimportant in their contribution to politics (pp.80-81). Waldstreicher’s research demonstrates the unseen, but not discussed power of these groups in the political arena.

The authors of the collection of essays in Beyond the Founders, and the book, Slavery’s Capitalism, follow the progress of white women and people of color, who though disenfranchised politically, did have political influence through economical and social means. The authors argue that they had an important place in early American politics, and that their roles, which were rarely, if ever, included in prior histories on the pre-Civil War era, should have been included in order to have a truer picture of early political workings in this era. c

In my paper, “She Works Hard(er) for the Money: Investigating Historical Intersectionality within the 19th Century Female American Workforce,” I will analyze multiple historical perspectives revealing the ways in which wage-earning women, of various backgrounds, were discussed, theorized and analyzed. I will also interpret how the scholarship evolved, contextualizing industrial work in new methodologies and structures to reveal more about marginalized working women. Spanning from the 1970’s to the later 2000’s, historians have employed some cohesive presentations of female factory and mill workers from the early to mid nineteenth century. Most employ a combination of economic perspective with a social framework, balancing the need for both factors. Some, such as, Julie A. Matthaei in An Economic History of Women in America favored the commercial aspect, while others such as Alice Kessler-Harris in Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States leaned towards a social orientation. Yet, all historians and scholars conferred in this paper show both elements to be integral to the study of women’s labor. Most historians also addressed the social construction of gender and how the industrial revolution, in the United States, but also around the world, shaped and shifted gendered notions of women’s and men’s work.

Moreover, historians and scholars examined in this historiography also maintained some consistency in the essential questions leading their work. These authors are concerned with questions such as: Which women worked? Why kind of work did they do? Why was the female labor force predominantly young and single? If they were married, what was the impact on family life? How did gender impact the Industrial Revolution in the shift from private to public sphere? What were the limitations of the independence of women gained from wage work? As these questions demonstrate, there is an apparent familial thread throughout all analysis of women’s work which ties into the shift from the home to the factory, private to public. As the historical analysis developed, historians began to add additional layers to the questioning, such as researching the ways in which women protested or accepted their position, and in which ways their independence was a promising or threatening.

Despite some evidence of a clear and consistent analysis of female wage-work, there also emerged a trajectory in which this analysis was developed and built upon. Starting with Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, with their foundational text based on European workers, and Thomas Dublin’s multiple texts concerning New England textile mills, other scholars developed deeper and more diverse analysis. In my research, up until the late 1990’s, a heavy Marxist perspective was used by historians to interpret the class and gender conflict coming out of factory work. This made for a very broad and vast interpretation of workers, often seeing them as a unit. Every text cited at least one of Dublin, Scott, or Tilly’s work, showing these texts to be the beginning and therefore it would seem necessary to provide much of the theoretical framework for others to build upon. However, they are not the end. Preceding historians and scholars used these texts to open the door to new interpretations, some using Foucault or a feminist perspective in which to launch their own analysis.

In addition to the various approaches historians or scholars employed, they also used the same sources but for different ends. Many authors used the same body of work, again creating cohesion in the material. Many utilize diaries, letters, and more specifically, The Lowell Offering, a newspaper written by female textile workers. They also rely on more impersonal sources such as census, tax lists and city directories. While their sourcing might be similar, the methodologies used by the author transformed the source for their intended purpose. Julie Husband used the newspaper to show the connection in discourse concerning the treatment of factory workers in comparison and to slaves. Yet, Dublin used this source to provide a more intimate narrative of the mill workers. Finally, some also weight the types of evidence differently. Especially early historians, some leaned towards a more quantitative driven interpretation while others show a more emotional and qualitative position. Based on the interpretation of the existing body of scholarship, there are arising questions this paper hopes to elucidate. How can we use these questions concerning economic and social history to discuss the working world in which women, beyond single white middle class wage workers, operated in? What space do historians give the even further marginalized or how does a particular work open up a dialogue for such a discussion to occur?  Despite the massive amount of literature on the subject, even the historians in the texts agree, there is still much more work to be done.

When it comes to presenting the Mexican-American War the biggest debate surrounding the war is what is left out of the established narrative, which labels it a glorious and justifiable war? For many years, historians such as Robert W. Johannsen, believed the decision to go to war with Mexico war was reluctantly taken by President Polk and his cabinet. Once word was received of the ambush of an American unit north of the Rio Grande in which several lives were lost a gave them a reasonable excuses enough to call for a state of war. As a result whatever doubts remained were now removed when Polk sent his war message to Congress, and two days later both houses approved a war bill by overwhelming majorities . However, that is not what histories of today see the war.

Today several histories seek to argue that even though that the Mexican-American War was the second war Congress ever declared it caused a firestorm of controversy among Congressional party members who called into question was the the war really necessary. Historians like Michael A. Morrison argue that committed to a program of controlled, peaceful expansion, Whigs were especially disturbed by Polk’s method of acquiring California and the borderlands of the Southwest and the fruits of the war- land hunger, greed, and a widely dispersed population-promised to destroy the social and economic conditions necessary to a virtuous .”

What is also missing in the grand narrative of the Mexican-American War is the lack of sources form the Mexican side of the conflict. Which sites up another debate as to if we are going to discuss or write about the Mexican-American should we include Mexican sources and narratives. To which one should argue that yes, they are needed to tell the complete story of the war and break with older traditional narratives. Fortunately, historians like Lisbeth Haas, who seeks to uncover the unexplored accounts of the Californios who have been largely forgotten form the war’s narrative. As such, she argues Californios had a long fought to create and protect their political autonomy in territorial affairs and would not allow either Mexico or the United States to erode their sovereignty without significant resistance. Even those who sympathized with the United States’ republican system and democratic ideals would express a strong sense of having been deceived by Americans whose race ideas were pervasively expressed against them during the war and occupation . By combing all these new narratives with their sources can we gain an understanding as how we must accurately understand the Mexican-American War.

Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8.
Michael A. Morrison, “New Territory versus No Territory: The Whig Party and the Politics of Western Expansion, 1846-1848,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 1992): 28.
Nicholas Lawrence, ““This boa-constrictor appetite of swallowing states and provinces:” Anti-Imperialist Opposition to the U.S./Mexican War,” South Central Review 30, no. 1 (2013): 55-56.
Lisbeth Haas, “War in California, 1846-1848,” California History 76, no. 2/3 (1997): 336-337.

The Bear Flag Revolt occurred on June 14, 1846 when a small band of Americans in Sonoma, California raised a rudimentary flag marked by a lone bear above the Mexican stockade there. This ushered in the brief existence of the Bear Flag Republic, the independent California that ceased to exist less than a month later when on July 9, 1846 the United States military raised the American flag over northern California. The Bear Flag Revolt has resulted in numerous controversies, many of which have naturally been picked up by scholars. One such controversy that has proven central in many scholarly works is the role that United States expansionism played in the outbreak of the rebellion. The question of whether the Americans who declared their independence from Mexico and the Californios were directly motivated by American expansion comes to the forefront. An extension of this question is that of whether the United States government had an active role in promulgating the rebellion. Scholars of this notion point to the clear fact that President James K. Polk was an avid expansionist, who partially gained office by stating that he would bring California into the Union. This argument is furthered by the mysterious journey of one Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, who was known to have met with Polk, and then traveled to California where he met with the United States consul in Alta California, Thomas O. Larkin, and the commander of the Pacific Fleet John D. Slope. Upon delivering his messages he went north and met Colonel John C. Frémont, who turned south, rode into California, and then the Bear Flag Revolt conveniently took place. Many scholars point to this rather suspicious series of events as proof that President Polk sent secret orders to Larkin, Slope, and Frémont to take California by dubious means, thereby adding a crown jewel of American expansion to the empire. However, as one may imagine, this is not the only viewpoint shared by scholars.

Other scholars point to the fact that the content of Gillespie’s letters was never recorded. Gillespie most likely memorized the letters and then destroyed them to avoid an intelligence leak. The point is made that if the actual content of the letters was, and never can be known, a true declaration of Federal involvement cannot be made. Others argue that within Alta California, as Mexican California was then known, there was a growing degree of dissent by the Americans who had settled within it.  To some, the Bear Flag Revolt was an event that American settlers turned to the American Revolution as inspiration for. They were an isolated band of Americans, who no longer wished to be under the thumb of Mexican rule. This viewpoint is bolstered by other bands of Americans throughout Alta California who called for looking to Texas as an inspiration to resist Mexican rule over their lives. Other bands suggested looking overseas, to Britain or France, for support against Mexico. Scholars of this view argue that Frémont and his men only joined the Bear Flaggers later, when they had already made their claim for independence without any word or aid from the United States.

Of certain importance in answering this question of the role of American expansionism on the Bear Flag Revolt is understanding the “leader” of it, Colonel John C. Frémont. His aims, goals, and actions in California have also resulted in much scholarly debate, with some praising him and others condemning him. Regardless, he stands as an important figure in this quagmire, and must feature in any discussion regarding the Bear Flag Revolt. Frémont’s actual role in the revolt has been much debated, as has his legitimacy of reentering California after he and his small cadre of men had left to Oregon. For many years Frémont has been prominently featured in this expansionist question, with both sides using him to further their arguments. He is very much an enigma within the riddle that is the Bear Flag Revolt.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on historiographical synthesis, the methods uses, theories engaged, and theoretical interventions proposed by the sources used throughout the paper.          After reviewing the different sources that will be used for The Relationship of Legal Rule and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century historiographical paper there was about two to three debate or questions the sources share.   The majority of the topics that are represented within the works are: race, gender, social order, politics, space, power, economics and identity within the antebellum south. One of the questions that came up is how does a patriarchal society work within legal institutions when there is a “double character” associated with slaves? “Double Character” is describes how slaves were seen as both person and property. This is looked at in Double Character, written by Ariela J. Gross, by issuing the paradoxes of slaves as person and property within the south. Her book is written within the context of social history, similar to the other sources, in order to show the interlinking of law and society through close statistical analysis of trial. On the other side of the coin, Walter Johnson’s book Soul by Soul looks at everyday dealings of traders, buyers, and slaves within the social networking of the slave market. Johnson focuses on the patriarchal society and the roles that slave-owners and traders wanted to present outward. By taking these two concepts together provided by Gross and Johnson, I initially thought how does this change when gender is looked at separate from race? What does it mean for class and honor as well, especially within a social society that is ruled by the identity you presented in the public sphere. The other question or debate that occurred in my initial overview of the sources is looking at Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman text as well as the article by Matthew Axtell “Toward a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor”. Axtell argues focuses on the new history of capitalism by arguing how slavery was an essential component of economic expansion. Beckert and Rockman demonstrate how slavery played a vital role in the expansion of the market place in American History. By combining both of these topics together, which are similar in nature, how can we use the methods of social history to better understand the relationship of slavery and legal rule? Each of the sources shows the history of how the topics of slavery and legal rule have been altered, changed, and developed by different historians.

Ari Kelman’s book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, approaches the subject of the events that transpired in the southeast corner of the Colorado in 1864 that at the time were seen as a victory for the Union army and as an unnecessary massacre by the Native Americans. The author attempts to trace this bifurcated history through written documents of that day, and through the oral and spoken testimony of people recalling their own ancestors’ past recollections. He then focuses on analyzing the information gathered, rather than doing away with these narratives which may, or may not, contain false or elaborated memories, which he acknowledges can happen with time, and which he demonstrates using Chivington’s (the U.S. Colonel at Sand Creek) own recollections and reinterpretations of the event throughout his own life.

Kelman decides not to speak for these sources, opting instead to attempt a reconstructive mode that does away with the narrative elements and uses an interpretive mode that encourages and interprets the narratives.  He tries to remain neutral and in the background; however, in collecting all these materials, written and oral, by necessity, he is involving himself in the process and in the interpretation of the history of this place.  He talks about the tribal traditionalists and their concern that the history of Sand Creek would be written by individuals representing the white federal government and consequently, that it would not be their history. So, while there were some activists within the tribal community who determined to not let the U.S. Government to write the history of this place after declaring it a National Park, the author believes that the practicality of economics of the region also played into to the narratives of other Native American representatives who spoke at the opening ceremony. The author interpreted their speeches as being more “politically correct” than accurate, as they understood the park would draw tourists and much needed income to the area. The author believed that there was a real fear that Federal Government rhetoric would dilute the truth of the actual history of, and the tragedy of the massacre, here.

The author uses as his basis for gaining a perspective on all involved in this history, three well-documented accounts of the Sand Creek events, beginning with Colonel Chivington, who writes to his superiors about his victory over the hostile natives, to Silas Soule, who calls the battle a massacre, and from George Bent who seems to be uncomfortable about it and describes it as an unfounded attack (p. 8). Within these three documents, the interpretation of the event range from its having been a glorious battle to its having been a hideous massacre. Additionally, there is almost complete disagreement about the cause, the political reason for it, and who should be accountable for what happened (p. 8). Part of the problem, which the author writes about, is that people on the both sides of the narrative are defensive and/or uncomfortable. The ancestors of the white settlers of the area don’t want to be portrayed as “bad guys” (p.7) and the present day Native Americans don’t want to create anger over a past event that could hurt their community economically.

Every interview, the author finds, has a component about it that is motivated by political, cultural, and/or social persuasions that revolve around the portrayal and analysis of the events of the Sand Creek. The interviews are awash in ideologies and ideas, movements, government agencies and dealings, political parties and voters, political leaders and cabinet members, with analyses of social, economic, and cultural institutions, and the norms of a people that portray the disconnect with the average common folk of the past and present that could be seen in the “Fugitive Landscape,” where people on the ground are disconnected from the politics, policies of their governments, and the elites going it on their own without people’s consent.

Comparing the study of peoples’ culture of the past and present, focusing on the struggle over understandings and perspectives, and how this struggle affects their view of historical events and memories, confirms the importance of cultural and social history movements. This is well expressed by peer, Robert, with regard to his own view imposing itself into his interpretation of Colonel Chivington’s behavior with respect to this event, “ had to stop and remember the state of affairs of the Union at the time, what his background was, what he thought and believed in, and what his focus was.” Though, it is definitely left for the reader and future generations to decide how or whether Kelman’s information should be validated.

The book ends with an acknowledgement that there is a real, if terrible and unintended irony, that at the same time the U.S. Government was fighting to free slaves in the South, it was also pushing to expand into Native American territory. It was killing one group of people while fighting a war to save another group (p.278-279). It is difficult to understand how objective observers could hold such vastly differing views of these events, but as Robert pointed out, it may only seem obvious by today’s standards and our more modern perspective from a century and a half later.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington’s volunteer regiments attacked a Native American encampment where their violence became unchecked in doing so slaughtering women, children and elderly. In A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over Memory of San Creek Ari Kelman is a detailed study of Sand Creek by exploring the different memories of the event, determining the event as massacre or battle, and by offering the narration through place. The problem is determined by when the events actually happen and where it occurred. Kelman is able to be as detailed as possible by using the Cheyenne and Arapaho oral traditions, archaeology, and cartography.

A Misplaced massacre seeks to challenge the popular rhetoric that “memorialization has palliative qualities” (pg. 4) and that erecting monuments in remembrance has a way of providing closure for the past. This is not case. Rather, Kelman portrays how individuals and communities can denounce the integration of a nationalistic memory and rather chose the anti-colonial resistance portrayal of what occurred at Sand Creek. Kelman states “the Native people who helped to create Sand Creek historic site rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of painless healing and quick reconciliation at the opening ceremony” (pg. 5). The Cheyenne and Arapaho voices argued that the site also needed to tell the story about the massacre from the Native perspective and to acknowledge their heritage.

Similar points that VANNOYJ had mentioned in their earlier post, the crux of the book really focuses on the difference between memorialization and historical records. I felt that Kelman is able to provide agency, a topic discussed often in this class, to a topic that for the most part would get its typical American federal history mark and move on. But rather what makes his book so fascinating is the struggle the Cheyenne and Arapaho have in making sure that does not happen. They are trying to provide agency to their ancestors and heritage in order to make sure all narratives are being displayed for the Sand Creek Massacre … not the ones the Federal government wants us to hear regarding the ill treatment of Natives. Kelman states, “the memorial would help them preserve their cultural practices, securing their future by venerating the past. For these activists, the site would serve tribal rather than federal interests” (pg. 6).

Unlike the Comanche Empire, the Native voices within this book can defiantly be heard. One of the things I enjoyed the most about this book was the oral history component Kelman is able to use. He was able to use a lot of primary sources, direct quotes from tribal leaders & the National Forest, political interviews, and historical interviews to give an excellent portrayal of how Cheyenne and Arapaho push their agency through the sand Creek site.

The other aspect I wanted to acknowledge was by HIGBEEJONATHAN when he discusses the positive attributes of the work. I defiantly agree that one of the compelling attributes is when Kelman acknowledges that historians need to seek out other methods or theoretical inventions that may not lie in just history. To artfully portray a full big picture understanding of Sand Creek you had to do it the way Kelman did. You needed to see out history, humanities, social sciences, archeology and social history to paint the picture of the federal and Native memory of Sand Creek.

A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman tells the history of the Massacre that occurred at Sand Creek and the eventual and controversial declaration and installation of a memorial site that honors the Sand Creek Massacre. The central issue in the book, the difference between memorialization and historical records really intrigued me. Having studied Public History during my graduate tenure, I found this book absolutely fascinating. The use of primary sources included various oral histories and interviews the author conducted himself really brought the conflicting beliefs to light. The book, for me also served a dual purpose. While telling the history of the installation and conflict involved with instituting the Sand Creek Massacre Memorial Site, the book also provides an in depth historiography of works that have previously been written regarding the Sand Creek Massacre and the various arguments and changes that have occurred in historical authorship through the years.
Intriguing was the look at whether the site was to use the word “Massacre” or “Battle.” The historical development and cultural changes that occurred to allow the government itself to recognize that the site was one of a massacre and not a battle showed how such minute words can change the impact a historical site can engender on, not just visitors, but the surrounding community as well. I found Jonathan Higbee’s argument that ethno history and the importance of using multiple sources to be insightful.
The books detail regarding the conflict between two very different historical cultures was insightful. All semester we have looked at agency and how minorities can be given agency in a historical work. This book does something completely different. Kelman writes of how the Cheyenne and Arapaho worked both within and around the political system in order to force their will on the project. In essence, the book details how the Native American’s involved in the Sand Creek Massacre site literally created a way to push their agency forward.
The creation of a community memory was a great argument in the book. The fact that history had always been told with the Sand Creek Massacre in one area, only to be discovered (maybe) that the site is located miles away and the resulting conflict due to a cultural remembrance shows how public historians have to always take absolute care when working with a varied community such as the one in Colorado. With a goal to work as a Public Historian, the book acted as a warning for me. While Public Historians need to tell an accurate history, they have to make sure that the community that will be most impacted is heard and their stories told. The distrust the government provoked by not being completely open with the Native American Communities shows how a small mistake can derail an entire project.
In the end, the project is able to move forward, not because of the historical work, and not because of the power of the Native American community to ensure their community memory stays intact. They are able to come together because an outside source was able to tell both sides that they were right. It is sad that the government was not able to create a better relationship with the Native American communities and that the communities continued to distrust the government. If they could have worked together and allowed trust to build, maybe the Native American perspective could be told in more Federal Historic Sites.

A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman describes the Sand Creek massacre from the aftermath of the massacre to the creation of the Sand Creak Massacre National Historical Site. Kelman uses traditional methods using archival records, like newspapers and letters to name a few, but his main methodology is the use of oral histories. He writes, “As I began doing this research for this book, I realized that I would have to move beyond archival records and consult oral histories as well. As a result, I conducted well over a hundred interviews that eventually produced in excess of 3,500 pages of transcribed text.” (p. x) One of the main goals of the book is to recount the massacre through memory, “You hold in your hands the result of my efforts: a sturdy of the collision of history and memory, of past and present, at Sand Creek.” (p. x) I would like to build off Robert Huitrado insight,  “I found Professor Kelman’s use of multiple angles out of the ordinary.”, due to Kelman’s approach of understanding this approach through memory. The reason the massacre is hotly contested is through the different ways participants remember this event. Memory was central to Native Americans, more importantly than written accounts. Kelman writes, “…the descendants viewed oral histories as crucial to their cultural sovereignty. For Larid Cometsevah, oral histories were the best way to transmit Cheyenne history.” (p. 111)

Chapter Two I found very interesting from a public history perspective with the creation of monuments. Kelman discusses how memory also has an impact on how monuments are created. He states, “The upsurge in memorialization was akin to what students of collective memory call ‘the invention of tradition,’ the way that societies create historical narratives or rituals to suit contemporary political or cultural conditions, Invented traditions are often crafted to maintain power relations and uphold the status quo.” (p. 73) During the beginning of the twentieth century when many Civil War monuments were created, the Americans viewed the war through nostalgia remembering the brave sacrifices of the military. The monuments captured this view and as Kelman states, “…inspired onlookers to venerate a shared iteration…” (p. 73) The collective memory of the early twentieth century helped dictate how the Civil War monuments would be depicted. As we know through time, views change often with more information of an event and also the cultural politics of the current day. This reminds me of how cultural politics were used in previous articles in Beyond the Founders. During the mid-twentieth century the Native Americans voices permeated Sand Creak as a massacre versus a battle. A reaction to the Native American voice was a creation of a second monument providing how the memory of the event can be viewed as a battle or massacre. “Bearing a bronze plaque headed by the mixed message “Sand Creak: ‘Battle’ or ‘Massacre,’ the state column suggested that by 1950, cultural politics had already begun complicating efforts to memorialize the violence.” A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek seeks to discover the memory and how it can impact and change the view of history.

There are certain events in history that blur the lines of how we remember and represent them. Sometimes we remember them for being cornerstones and foundations of our national character and identity and as such, we think of them as pivotal movements in which we either came together as a nation to fight a common enemy like the attack on Pearl Harbor. While others, are seen as mistakes that shake our concepts of politics and government like the war in Vietnam. However, as we continue to move forward some events are forgotten and their significance is lessen to the point they lose their meaning or they are missed represented. Fortunately, Dr. Ari Kelman a McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University seeks to uncover one of those forgotten events of American history the Sand Creek Massacre.    

Armed with personal accounts, maps, courtroom testimonies, newspaper articles, and federal laws Kelman recounts the events surrounding the Sand Creek Mass  acre by using a central narrative of the historic site’s creation as the book’s spine and flesh out that tale with flashbacks to the era of the massacre and various moments when people struggled over Sand Creek’s memory (pg. x-xi). As a result, Kelman describes how discrepancies in historical record can be ascribed to the so-called fog of war. Scenes of violence, especially mass violence are notorious for breeding unreliable and often irreconcilable testimony. The stories of Sand Creek with all their disagreements stem not only the havoc they experienced but also from the politics of memory surrounding the points, they dispute. In regards to what caused the bloodshed? Could it have been avoided? Who should be held accountable for what happened?, and was it a glorious victory or a horrendous massacre? Such questions still raised issues of racial identity and gender ideologies that structured an emerging multicultural society in the American West, their interplay of politics and violence on the American borderlands, and about the righteousness of the continental expansion and the bloody conflicts of both the Civil War and the Indian Wars that accorded by that process (pg. 8).                                                                                                                   

One he greatest strengths of Kelman work is that he acknowledges that historians need to drift comfortably between the humanities, the social sciences, and anthropologist who typically identify with the latter category, archeologist are social scientists who flirt with harder sciences. In addition, for a young subdiscipline like battlefield archeology, questions of scholarly taxonomy or methodological orientations became all more important. Meaning that to real uncover the meaning and truth of an event one wears many hats to better gain information to challenge and rewrite the established narrative of an event like the Sand Creek massacre. As such, historians become detectives who go into the archives to interview witnesses and possible suspects. Form those materials; they get the story down on paper. However, historians are often left conflicting stories and as such that when the anthropologist steps in to get the hard evidence. Only by combining the two disciplines is it possible to complete a more actuate picture of the past. Much like how archeologist  Doug Scott hoped that his data would be unimpeachable answering without any doubt at all the questions of where the massacre happened and perhaps hinting at how blood was shed (pg. 125).                                                                                                          

Another strength of Kelman’s work is much similar to the work of both Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire and Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp’s  book Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South which give agency to minority groups. To which I will agree with Robert when he stated, “it was interesting that no matter who was involved in the research and search for the official site of the massacre, political, tribal, and cultural tensions still played an integral part in the creation of The Sand Creek Massacre National Park, and continue to this day in some way, shape or form.” Since it is Kelman’s main objective to showcase how the native tribes of the Cheyenne and Arapaho who rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of painless healing and quick reconciliation at the opening ceremony. Concerned that the memorial might be stalking horse for an older assimilationist project these skeptics instead portrayed the site as an emblem of self-determination. They understood that controlling the interpretative apparatus at a national public space offered them an opportunity to define insiders and outsiders. As such, they fought for years to steer the commemorative process to call the site the Sand Creek Massacre National Site. In doing so they believed that the memorial would help them preserve their cultural practices and securing their future through venerating the past (pgs. 5-6).   

Correspondingly, the story of memorializing Sand Creek suggests that history and memory are malleable, that even the land can change and that citizens of the United States are so various that they should not be expected to share a single tale of a common past. Sometimes their stories complement one another and sometimes they clash. Sometimes they intersect and other times they diverged. Depending on who tells it the story of Sand Creek for instance suggest that the Civil War midwifed in President Lincoln’s words, “a new birth of freedom,” but also that it delivered the Indian Wars; that it was a moment of national redemption for some Americans, but of dispossession and subjugation for others. While the National Park Service officials and the descendants will never concur on every element of Sand Creek’s interpretation, but they might agree that the historic site should challenge visitors to grapple with competing narratives ...

Ari Kelman’s book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek re-told the “massacre” of Sand Creek from three different points of view: 1) From Colonel John Chivington, 2) Captain Silas Soule, and 3) George Bent. Each man experienced or saw the events of Sand Creek differently. Colonel Chivington viewed his involvement as a glorious victory over hostile native tribes; Captain Soule considered Sand Creek for what it was… a “massacre of peaceful Indians” (12), and Mr. Bent, who was living in the native village when Chivington attacked, saw the attack as a unlawful assault on peaceful natives who were unjustly targeted and who endured untold atrocities by Chivington’s troops and Colorado Militia volunteers. In addition to these view points and discussions surrounding the “truth” of what happened at Sand Creek,  A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek also covers two other topics, those of establishing Sand Creek as a National Park, and of returning the bodies of Native Americans to the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations for proper burial. I found each chapter intriguing and captivating.  I had always assumed that the Sand Creek Massacre/battlefield location was known, until a massive NPS (National Park Service) investigation took place which included NPS representatives, Congressional researchers, and Native American representatives from the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to find the official site.  From an historical perspective, I enjoyed Chapter Three the most because it went hand-and-hand with historic research techniques. We as historians follow many of the same procedures mentioned in the text, especially focusing on primary sources like participant testimony, and secondary sources, while placing “hearsay” and such works at the bottom of the totem pole unless they can be authenticated. Despite our modern fast-paced lifestyle, “That the descendants , which they buried following strict tribal protocols, spoke volumes about the persistence of the Cheyennes and Arapahos as well as their ongoing respect for a traditional way of life.” (267) It was interesting that no matter who was involved in the research and search for the official site of the massacre, political, tribal, and cultural tensions still played an integral part in the creation of The Sand Creek Massacre National Park, and continue to this day in some way, shape or form. Interpretations may differ as to the purpose and meaning of the National Park, but hopefully someday, “the massacre will no longer be misplaced in the landscape of national memory.” (279)

Like mark_t_garcia, I found the discussion surrounding the terms “Massacre” and “Battle” interesting. It was fascinating to read and understand the federal government’s argument of why Sand Creek should be called a “Battle” and not a “Massacre.” I can understand, especially at that time, why “Battle” would be preferred. The very minute the Native Americans fought back and defended themselves against the cavalry and militia, it became a “Battle” and not a “Massacre”. However, the federal government of the 21st century should have known better than to press the “Battle” issue considering Captain Soule’s known disapproval of Colonel Chivington’s recounting of the “battle”. Captain Soule disproved of any attack on the Native Americans at Sand Creek, and he spoke publicly on the topic pre-and post-battle, and in his letters to his mother, sister, and former commander, Edward Wynkoop.  In addition, there were Mr. Bent’s Frontier articles and letters written to historian, George E. Hyde,  which spoke of the “battle” from the Native perspective in which he saw it not as a “Battle” but a “Massacre.” Although labelled as a Confederate, which he was, and thus forced to live with his mother’s people the Cheyenne for protection, his words were no less  true, especially when added to the oral histories collected by Ari Kelman and other transcribers. To read the interactions between the federal government, anthropologists, archaeologists, researchers/investigators, and  Native Americans was intriguing. I can see why the NPS and the federal government wanted to protect themselves from the blemish of Sand Creek, but reading Chivington’s multiple-altered accounts should have told them something; i.e. his accounts could not be trusted and should not be seen as factual. Despite what some might say, the Civil War did play a part in Sand Creek, but only in that many of the cavalry officers involved in Sand Creek and George Bent himself fought in that War. To go beyond that connection is to stretch the truth and history.

I have read a lot on Native Americans, especially in my Anthropology classes, but even then, this book is unique, for it focuses on one event and thoroughly investigates it from multiple angles. I found Professor Kelman’s use of multiple angles out of the ordinary. Normally, historic books focus on an event, and information surrounding that “event” is straight forward. Sand Creek however, from the start was never going to be straight forward, just based on the history of the massacre. A Misplaced Massacre covers five narratives, three from Colonel Chivington, and the last two from Captain Soule and Mr. Bent; in addition, the topics of establishing Sand Creek as a National Park, and returning Native remains to their rightful nations is also discussed. What makes this narrative even more unique is Chapter Three, which discusses how the real site of Sand Creek was found. As I was reading Chapter One: A Perfect Mob, I kept shaking my head in disgust and in anger because the reasons Colonel Chivington gives for attacking a peaceful Indian camp are insane and off the wall. However, as a reader and an historian, I had to stop and remember the state of affairs of the Union at the time, what his background was, what he thought and believed in, and what his focus was. If all of these aspects of his personality and life were taken into account, a reader could “somewhat” understand why he did what he did.  That does not mean that what he did was right or necessary. Then to have Chivington change his story three times throughout the years and embellish it more and more with every telling should have sent up red-flags, especially to modern historians and researchers. His narratives and claims should be questioned and their legitimacy investigated. Stepping away ...

In her attempt to examine the history of a mostly ignored aspect of the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War takes a look at the history of death, dying, and suffering on a massive scale and how American society in both the North and South dealt with such a loss. Although my knowledge of the American Civil War tends to be limited to what has been often told in popular American history, I did find Faust’s attempt at bringing a new perspective to previous Civil War scholarship through the idea of “empathy” refreshing. Early on in the book, Faust noted that a majority of the deaths and fatalities were either caused by combat but “disease proved a far more deadly killer than combat… twice as many soldiers died of disease as from battle wounds” (p. 48). Throughout the book, Faust’s main argument revolved around the idea that the war produced untold suffering yet it also helped transform American society, culture, politics and its institutions in the nineteenth century. Not only did the war dramatically alter the way Americans previously thought about death but it also changed their perceptions on the subject matter of religious faith during wartime.

By exploring the topic of religion and war and its significance on the soldiers who willingly risked their lives just so that they could die in God’s good grace, Faust claimed that the war undeniably challenged the foundations of American faith and religious devotion. Drawing on a huge range of primary sources from Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., to Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville, Faust made great use of the documents, letters, and diaries scattered throughout her book while relying heavily on the writings of others as well. Like sbremer and Taylor, I was also reminded of Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning as well as Susan R. Grayzel’s Women’s Identities at War when Faust focused on the topic of mourning and how women essentially coped with the deaths of their loved ones after the war. While Winter’s and Grayzel’s books both took place during the First World War, they similarly addressed the strict regulations of mourning dresses for women and how society ultimately dealt with mass death through the use of public spaces and war memorials.

As for what I liked most about this book, I found that although nothing Faust talked about in her book was particularly new, innovative, or insightful—especially when it came to the killing of others on a national scale and the consequences of it in the aftermath of the war, she did an incredible job detailing the struggles of Americans as they reacted to the systemized slaughtering of others while maintaining a strict and long-cherished belief in their faith. Her use of letters, poems, photographs, and memories of soldiers and their families made for a heartfelt read. Despite its repetitiveness, This Republic of Suffering should still be considered a powerful, well-researched, and well-written book that covers much more than just the Civil War but on the true meaning of war and human life.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is not only an examination of how death occurred during the Civil War. More broadly (and importantly), it is a fascinating look at the ways in which the Civil War fundamentally changed Americans’ relationship to death and its meaning. Faust structures her book in such a way that her major argument, which she states most succinctly as the fact that “death created the modern American union – not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments,” (6) is clearly proven in each chapter. Rather than moving chronologically or jumping between case studies, she focuses each chapter on a specific aspect of death. This allows her to demonstrate the ways in which each of those specific aspects transformed the nation.

Each of these chapters is quite strong, but the most impressive and unique spin on the traditional Civil War narrative is chapter 6: “Believing and Doubting.” The majority of the chapter focuses on the ways in which the carnage of the war inspired both renewed religious faith and questions regarding its validity. While interesting, this is not particularly revolutionary, as Faust notes that “religion remained the most readily available explanatory resource, even as it was challenged by rapid cultural and intellectual change.” (174)  So although the traditions of religion came into question, Fust seems to conclude little really changed in this regard. What is far more interesting, and what I believe to be the most innovative part of the book, is the end of the chapter’s focus on irony as a response to the war, and the more wide-reaching implication of doubt not only in regards to religion, but “a more profound doubt about human ability to know and to understand.” (210)

I see this discussion as important because in studying the Great War, it is so often pointed to by European historians as the first “modern” war, the first war to blur the lines between home front and front lines, the first war to cause mass disillusion. Faust does not overtly challenge these ideas as the bulk of the book progresses, but here in chapter 6 she draws a distinct parallel between the study of the Civil War and the World Wars, specifically quoting Paul Fussell’s work on the First World War (194), she seems to make the suggestion that the Civil War also encountered these “new” developments over fifty years prior. Perhaps due to this interest, I was excited to see that sbremer also took note of the WWI connections, looking at Faust’s methodological similarities to Jay Winter’s. I completely agree with sbremer’s assertion that Winter’s work on mourning and memorials as forms of memory work as a sort of continuation of Faust’s work. I see this (especially given her specific reference to Winter) as perhaps subtle acknowledgement of the importance of the American Civil War in terms of world history. It is interesting to see the similarities between disillusionment and reactions to death in Civil War and Great War scholarship.

Suzanna Melendez

Blog #4

10/17/2016

           This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is a powerful academic scholarship which focuses on nineteenth century American’s attitude toward death, grief and mourning. Drew Gilpin Faust examines and provides readers with extraordinary statistics that prove that the Civil War was as one of the bloodiest wars in American history. The theoretical framework of the book not only provides a voice for the thousands of men who perished during the war, but Faust skillfully incorporated mothers, wives, and sisters personal experiences on how they mourned their loved ones death.

Faust thesis suggested that the high number of casualties incorporated with a violent death transformed Americans understanding of death. As dshanebeck emphasized in his blog entry for Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreichers’ Beyond the Founders “…editors of this massive collection of essays attempted to weave an argument that expounds the ideas of American political history beyond that of powerful white men who shaped the early institutions of American political structures and theory.” As a result, Faust’s study highlights the bloodshed and sacrifices Americans endured in order to preserve those political ideologies. This bottom-up history highlights the deaths of union and confederate soldiers. Her work suggested that family members wanted to mourn the corpse of a soldier. On the contrary, Americans faced the physical dilemma of rotting corpses on the battlefield and pieces of bodies as a result of explosive weaponry of the industrial era. The Civil War changed the circumstances of a soldier’s death and proper Christian burial. America in the nineteenth century was a nation of strict religious beliefs and assumed that a person’s death was a certain indication about one’s afterlife. In order to be eternally saved “… family members needed to witness a death in order to assess the state of the dying person’s soul, for these critical last moments of life would epitomize his or hers spiritual condition.” (10). Faust did a remarkable job of explaining the importance of the “good death,” and its dramatic change during the Civil War. The four year war transformed America’s Christians notions of the proper way to die. A dying man was no longer surrounded by his family who they hoped to reunite in heaven. On the battlefield, majority of men died alone, anonymous, and without comfort, their families unaware of their fate.

Faust does an exceptional job describing a families’ effort to recover a body from the battle field. The family fallen soldiers went to the battle field to recover the bodies and escorted them home. On the contrary, “in northern cities entrepreneurs also established themselves as agents who would seek missing soldiers for a fee.” (117) If there was no physical body or letters to inform a comrade’s whereabouts, spiritualism was a means to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Toward the end of her book, Faust highlights the importance of fashion during the stage of mourning in both the North and South. Different colored garnets displayed a stage of mourning, while showing respect to a loved one’s memory. Economics and a woman’s location also played an important role in the way they mourned. Women in the South endured shortages of clothing and money compared to women in the North. Mourning was not a private matter but was displayed in the fashion worn by women.

The Civil War nearly divided the United States, but its aftermath traumatized every citizen. Women along with men mourned the sheer numbers of deaths during the conflict. Faust’s accounts claim that in order to rebuild and move forward as a nation, Americans had to grieve the deaths of their fathers, uncles, brothers, sons and friends. Over several decades, mourning developed into different traditions and rituals, which helped family members cope with the death of a loved one. One suggestion given to Faust would be to include African Americans in her scholarship. Thousands of black soldiers joined the war effort and died in combat. It would be interesting to see how African American families mourned the death of their fathers, sons, or relatives.

In Drew Faust’s book, she assigns authority to all aspects of death during and after the Civil War. She points out that war about union, citizenship, freedom and human dignity required a transformation of the federal government.  Arguing that it takes equally as much ‘work,’ effort and impact, to deal with death as it does to create and fighting wars. She continues to illustrate that Americans had to redefine their roles in self-identity because of the massive number of deaths caused by their own hands. It is interesting to point, all of the books read this thus far, talk about American’s fighting other cultures and the boundaries but never speak really about the aftermath of fighting and the reconcilation of death.

Agreeing aly692 that Faust redefines the American Civil War with this study of death. It is less focused on the actual military history of it and paints the faces and lives that were involved through the Civil War. The soldiers and supports become more than just a part of the battle. They are given a humanity normally not covered in Civil War books and poor sappy movies, that don’t quite get the picture (I think one of the modern movies getting assigning authority is Glory, and I cannot get through that movie without bawling my eyes out).

The least talked about chapter so far in the postings is chapter 6 Believing and Doubting. Faust takes her argument and reconciling. Death required meaning, and to cope with new identities. Before I proceed, these new ‘widow’ identities given to wives, children and the childless, locating ways to cope with their new term ‘widow’ strongly reminded me of Stephanie Camp’s assigned identities to bondswomen and bondsmen. She describes in her book that they actively sought out ways to not only resist, but would abscond with dresses, materials and sometimes, themselves, to cope with their identify as a slave. Secretly crafting and making food for late-night bondspeople parties, were equivalent to widow’s identifying with spiritualism. Chapter 6 discusses the sudden rise again in spiritualism after the Civil War. After the first wave of spiritualism, it was its ideologies that were directly connected to dealing with their new identity. Traditional religious arguments did not allow people to reconcile the loss of their loved one. The idea that rejecting something a popular like Christianity, and embracing spiritualism are very powerful. People believing in heaven, even more, coming from a place of a reunion was a change in American’s assignment to death. Living just beyond the veil, allowed widows to believe that this plight and assignment is life, was only a temporary way of being. Spiritualism and the idea of consoling a widow by telling them that their loved one died on the principles of ars moriendi, the good death, provided ways for people to reconcile post-Civil War death. Faust also connects the North and South, like Beckert/Rockman, by comparing death to industrialization. “northerners and southern lie mingled together, “fame or country least their care.”” (page 202). Both the idea of industrialization/to raw cotton to death/to speechlessness undoubtedly tied the states together.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s brilliant book This Republic of Suffering details how the massive death toll of the Civil War changed American society. Faust’s book tackles a seemingly obvious fact – that many people died in a war. However, Faust is able to successfully show that in many ways death in the American Civil War occurred in many unprecedented ways. First was the massive scale of loss, with 600,000 soldiers being killed, or equivalent to six million of today’s population (P. xi). Second was the rapidness, unpredictability, and efficiency that soldiers killed.  Faust illustrates how new technological advances, such as rifled barrels and greater artillery, led to greatly increased ranges and effectiveness for killing (P. 39). Faust also illustrates how it was not just soldiers who lost their lives, but also an estimated 50,000 civilians were killed between 1861 and 1865. As a result of such a massive loss of life, society had to come up with new means of coping with death, and soldiers doing the fighting had to develop means to come to terms with the carnage occurring all around them.

As morganstocks points out, Faust is able to effectively produce an emotional book while maintaining her objectivity. This Republic of Suffering is a deeply moving work. This much is very clear from just the beginning pages of the book. However, as Morgan points out, she also looks to factual number data from the government as a means of study as well. Faust also portrays the effects death had on people from nearly every angle. Understandably her focus is on the troops involved, but she gives the Union and the Confederacy an equal treatment. She also includes an (albeit brief) discussion regarding African-American soldiers and how they coped with dying and killing and how they were in some ways uniquely affected by death. However, an interesting thought was raised by Robert, in that the focus is much heavier on the eastern campaigns than the western ones.

As many have already pointed out, Faust’s sources are fantastic. Her book is heavily primary-source based, and she uses them brilliantly. Her selection of soldiers’ letters perfectly describe the horrors of war, and are positively heart wrenching at times. I was also impressed with Faust’s selections for her chapter titles. They are simple, one-word titles but they perfectly encapsulate the theme of her chapter. I found this to be particularly true in the “Naming” and “Realizing” chapters. Faust is able to show how the deaths of the Civil War were instrumental in bringing out modernity as well. Whether it be in the creation of dedicated cemeteries for fallen soldiers such as that at Gettysburg, in improved bureaucracies for documenting fallen soldiers, or in refrigerated coffins or embalming methods this argument is repeatedly proven to be true.

In reading Faust’s book I cannot help but think of Jay Winter’s book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, which details the massive deaths of World War I and how those of the cultures involved dealt with it. Winter argues that society turned to preexisting, more traditional methods of coping, many of which can be found in This Republic of Suffering. Faust also mentions Winter, but only in passing (P. 30). Winter’s book, though published first, can be read as something of a continuation of Faust’s book. In sum, Faust’s book is a profound, deeply moving, very well researched, and thought-provoking work.  I cannot speak more highly of Republic, and I think one would be hard pressed to find someone who did not feel the same. 

Disease and Death go hand and hand, and the American Civil War was a breeding ground for both of these vectors. Death was the primary focus in Dr. Faust’s book The Republic of Suffering, and as such, she goes into great detail on how Death effected the American psyche, civilian, soldier and family alike. Death from battle wounds was high, not because of lack of medical knowledge, but because of Disease caused by a wide variety of factors. These factors included: “ignorance, climate, poor sanitation, lack of medicine, bad nutrition, movement of soldiers from north to south, density of warm bodies, and decisions made by military commanders…” especially when it came to free Black persons and runaway slaves. The Diseases that ravaged the American countryside, military camps, hospitals, and cities during the Civil War included: malaria, yellow fever, plague, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, dysentery, and pneumonia, all of which had devastating effects on the human populations of the north and south.

Despite the widespread outbreaks of Disease during the Civil War, Republic of Suffering only sporadically covers these outbreaks and their consequences. However, Dr.’s Mathiasen and Downs in their respected articles, Bugs and Battles during the American Civil War and Emancipation, sickness, and death in the American Civil War, concentrate their focus on Disease, its causes and its results. Dr.’s Mathiasen and Downs see Disease as the primary cause of Death in the Civil War, not battle. Dr. Mathiasen eloquently sums up Disease’s place in history by quoting Hans Zinsser, MD., in his 1935 book, Rats, Lice, and History, “soldiers have rarely won wars … typhus, with its brothers and sisters – plague, cholera, typhoid, dysentery – has decided more campaigns than Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, and all the inspector generals in history.” Disease is only the unified name for agents or non-human vectors of Death.

We have all heard of these agents: malaria, yellow fever, plague, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, dysentery, and pneumonia. Each one caused countless deaths during the Civil War, and in some cases continue to do so. Dr. Mathiasen cites from Andrew McIlwaine Bell’s book, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the course of The American Civil War, that “disease, not war produced the majority of deaths.” Hospitals too were highly susceptible to Diseases.

Hospitals, no matter if at the front or in a city were prime environments for the spread of disease. “nurses, matrons, and other medical workers often contracted illnesses from the patients they attended or from the polluted water supply they all shared.” Unfortunately, many of these Diseases were spread by unseen agents, namely ticks, fleas and mosquitoes. Lice also played a role but, they were more of a pest and annoyance that an agent of Disease.

Ticks were a common occurrence of troops marching North and South, especially through long or tall weeds, grass and shrubs. Fleas, like their tick cousins, were also a normal occurrence; yet, as we know from the Black Death or plague, they could be the undoing of an entire army if proper hygiene was not properly maintained and controlled. One area where fleas were agents of Death was in the military prisons established during the war, most notably, Andersonville and Libby Prisons. Andersonville was one of the worst Confederate prisons. It held 45,000 Union prisoners with nearly 13,000 dying of scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. Libby Prison, a Confederate prison for Union officers was quickly overcrowded, with many of the prisoners dying of malnutrition and disease. The prison was supposed to hold 300 prisoners in three rooms, but by 1863 that number increase exponentially to over 2,000. Deaths due to ticks and fleas, however, were merely a drop in the bucket compared to the Deaths caused by the favorite spreader of Disease, the mosquito. Dr. Mathiasen wrote, “the Civil War was an environmental catastrophe causing immeasurable suffering for soldiers and civilians.” In her article, she focused on two Diseases, malaria and yellow fever, both spread by mosquitos, and both of ...

Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War artfully gives a new portrayal of the American Civil War. Faust’s covers the most obvious fact of the war in that it produced the highest fatalities ever to be seen in American History. What makes Faust’s book different than any other Civil War book out is his focus on how Americans and their institutions confronted the idea of death, a good death, and how death during the war propelled a new transformation in beliefs, cultural practices, and political structures in America. He states in the beginning, “the presence and fear of death touched Civil War Americans’ most fundamental sense of who they were, for in its threat of termination and transformation, death inevitably inspired self-scrutiny and self-definition” (page xv).

Faust sections her book in away to show the components of death: “dying”, “Killing”, “Burying”, and “Accounting” in hopes of showing how Americans faced cultural transformations with death during the Civil War. The Civil War gives a window into understanding how wartime began to alter, how the romanticism of war death became gruesome, and how to deal with the decay seem a dehumanizing task. She explains further, “In the Civil War death the distinction between men and animals threatened to disappear, just as it was simultaneously eroding in the doctrines of nineteenth-century science” (page vxii).

In agreement with Robert’s post, I agree that Faust found a particular niche that gives new excitement within looking at the Civil War without looking at the military battles. She is able to pull emotion throughout her entire book by using the components of death to further exemplify her focus in showing how death became transformed in the nineteenth century.

I also agreed with 20perez16 in how Faust’s book had similarities with Stephanie Camp’s book in the assessment how groups handled difficult events. Both authors take popular history topics and are able to derive new findings within the field. This also ties in with the objective of our final to understand what the current field is with a particular topic, where it can go, and what sources could assist in pushing it forward.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

I was surprisingly captivated by this somber book about death and loss during the Civil War. Faust brilliantly captured death as a multidimensional construct during the later part of the nineteenth century, prevalent across the country, as literally everyone mourned or was affected by death in some way, shape or form. In the preface, she stated that “death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared for the war’s experiences” (xiii). As 20perez16 mentions, one needs to understand the “shared suffering” just as much as the individual suffering that was going on. Despite the regional and racial differences driving the conflict, death was common ground in which the North and South could reunite at the conclusion of the war (xiii). Throughout the book, Faust utilized many sources, most coming from the words of the soldiers experiencing death directly or the loved ones who were challenged with coping and grieving, often without the closure a body would bring. As Robert and 20perez16 pointed out, she integrated her evidence and narrative seamlessly, using newspapers, letters, photographs, and poetry to show the pervasive nature of death throughout all parts of society.

The first aspect to the book that I found very compelling was the balance of the emotional angle and presenting an objective reflection of the data, both from a present analysis but also from the time. Especially in the first three chapters, Faust created an emotional and heartbreaking picture of the battlefields and at home. In the first chapter, “Dying,” she discusses how soldiers and those writing home desired to portray their death as morally “good” versus as “bad” death that could result from being executed for desertion (7, 18). The motivations for war became complicated, as vengeance entered into play and soldiers were compelled to fight against those who killed their brothers in arms (35). The emotional side of war contrasts with a removed analysis on the actual data concerning the numbers of casualties. In “Accounting” and “Numbering,” Faust looked at the actions by the government to account for the dead in a systematic and organized way. The cause for counting actually shifted after the war ended, as it tried to bring closure to families instead of account for remaining resources (252). While the numbers can not be fully devoid of the human element, Faust effectively shows the varying ways in which to understand death.

In addition, I appreciated Faust’s attention to those who worked to identify the soldiers. Often times, these were women, such as Clara Barton, who resolved to notify as many families as possible. It was these people who attempted to heal a very broken nation. Even more so, I thought the discussion on the “female responsibility for mourning” was particularly interesting (242). In this section, Faust showed how women took this informal and traditional role and turned it into “motivation for women’s leadership of the souther reburial effort” (242). Through these efforts, women who tried to honor the Confederate soldiers who had fallen, in addition to Union fighters, were displaying a personal and private act gone “unavoidably public and political” (242). To me, this connected to last week’s text, Beyond the Founders. Women were able to gain political agency after the war through public mourning of those the country deemed not worthy of grieving for. Just as in Beyond the Founders, women, like Clara Barton, were able to establish some political culture as a result.

Finally, Faust delves into ideas and thoughts about memory, as the soldiers and their families desired to create closure. Soldiers did this through their actions of wanting to be identified, such as keeping artifacts on them that could help them be named if found dead on the battlefield (28). The entirety of chapter 3, “Burial” showed the lengths at which the military tried to give combatants proper burials. However, it was the families of those who had died who suffered the most in terms of memory, as some drove to great lengths in order to preserve the memory of their loved one loss. J. M. Taylor, who lost his son, spent many years after the war still looking for specific details on how his son died (134). In sum, this text was incredibly put together, with an effective structure and use of evidence, woven to create a heartbreaking but irresistible story of Civil War death.

The dead, the dying and the living are all represented in Dr. Dew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which covers how the Civil War changed the American perspective on just how devastating a war can be. From the killing of soldiers on the battlefields to the mass graves where they were buried, the Civil War took its toll on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line and left a nation sacred. From the book, one does get a sense of just how one goes out and counts the unprecedented number of bodies lying in the fields and streets. However, even with such a grim subject and successfully telling it in a sufficient manner, the book is not without its faults and does lack some strength to it.

The book is about the work of death during the American Civil War and how between 1861 and 1865 and into the decades that followed Americans undertook a kind of work that history has not adequately understood or recognized (pg. XIV). In the end Faust seeks to describe how Americans both during and after the war came to understand the costs of war through measuring the causalities that come from it. By Using personal accounts, photos, illustrations, and governmental documentation Faust tries to paint a picture on the effects of losing so many husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons in the most horrific ways that Americans have ever witness at the time. More importantly, she establishes the notion of killing was not simply justified but also required, even when such action demanded suspension of fundamental rules of war and humanity (pg. 47). Besides providing the methods to as to which both the Union and the Confederacy used in order to obtain victory and to ensure men would be killing, Faust focuses on the effects of the mass killing had on the home front both sides of the war. For example, upon hearing of the casualties of a battle, many families went to the battlefields in the hopes that they could find the remains of their family member so they could bring him/them back home (pg. 85). Faust describes just how death became fixated with everyday life. Some examples include families and soldiers alike, frantically waiting for reports from the battlefields in the hope of learning the fate of a family member or friend and attempting to cope upon learning the news and fate of a person some one cared for. While railroad companies made money hand over fist, by providing and offering transpiration for grieving families to have the remains of their lost loved ones shipped back home to be buried (pg. 91-2). Not only did the Civil War tore apart families it was also successful in creating religious doubt, leaving many questioning why would any god allow the war to happen? As a result, many Americans began to redefine their faiths in all loving and responsive deity, while some went as far as to rejecting their old beliefs (pg. 210). Faust’s main ejective is that she wants the reader to know that even with the Civil War being over and those who fell in the line of duty are now buried, there is still the need to continue remembering the dead for their sacrifices. In addition, she calls for the preservation of our humanity to the point where we do not come face to face with the same type of death and destruction brought about by the Civil War (pg. 371).

Her greatest strength is the use of documentation and a variety of primary sources that help the reader come to an understanding on just how grim and horrific the Civil War was. Faust does her best to bring the war into focus on just how much effect it had on both sides of the conflict. From Confederate soldiers on the battlefield, who showed no remorse or mercy in killing black Union Troopers too President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which explained the justification of the wars carnage (pg. 189). By presenting sources that are from the different social and racial classes of the period enables the reader to get a broader perspective on just, what the war meant and represented to them. To the newly freed slaves, it was a chance to fight for their humanity and for the further abolishment slavery (pg. 47-8). While other non-black soldiers on both sides saw the war, as a military adventure that called for heroism and glory for which they would be whiling to die for, however the war turned into a living hell that lasted for four years. Although her book is compelling, in the sense that she sheds light on just what affect death had on the American people both in the north and in the south during and after the war, she does tend to fall flat. I completely agree with Robert Huitrado when he mentioned how “Dr. Faust’s book, Republic of Suffering, is almost a perfect book. I mean, it won the Bancroft prize and was a Pulitzer finalist; not many writers can say that. If anything, I would say Republic is only lacking in a few areas: 1) the medical field, and 2) the Western theater of war. Let me take #2 first, Dr. Faust does mention the Western theater but only in passing.” Because she only seems to be focusing on the well-known battles that accrued on the Eastern-Theater of the war. Yes, she does mention William Tecumseh Sherman’s march but, it is only limited to his interactions with southern civilians. But the best way to get the complete bloody picture that the Civil War painted is to display and the many lives that were lost and disrupted is to inform the reader about the Western-Theater as well. She does however ...

Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering demonstrated that “death created the modern American union— not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments” (xiv). The survivors’ mourning became a “shared suffering” in order to understand the meaning behind all the death caused by the Civil War (xv-xviii). While Faust addressed the numbers of civilians and soldiers killed, her book shifted the focus onto personal experiences related to death. She grappled with the aftermath of death, rather than simply stating that many battles and death had occurred. America had not really experienced anything like this until the 1860s. Faust examined the response of American society and culture to these new developments of total war.

A soldier’s death was necessarily an isolated and impersonal event. Instead, Faust argued that the Civil War should be understood through the idea of the “work of death” (xiv-xviii, 54). She connected this idea to the social and cultural transformations as a reaction to mass death. Each section highlighted an aspect of the work of death. Soldiers had to prepare themselves for certain death as well as the issue of killing another human being. Their lives were already brutal enough, but they also involved the laborious practices of burying their fallen comrades. The book also explained how the works of mourning and naming caused northerners, southerners, and the government to rethink their beliefs regarding their great loss and bereavement.

Faust’s argument for the work of death was especially exemplified through her use of letters, dissertations, diaries, newspapers, photographs and other sources. Like Robert, I also noticed Faust’s extensive use of sources. Although her interpretation was interwoven throughout, she also let the voices in the primary texts speak for themselves. This approach allowed me to perceive the personal and emotional struggles of the historical characters in their own words. It was also helpful to see contrasting examples, like with the information gathering methods of the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission (110-112).

This Republic of Suffering was similar to Stephanie Camp’s book in that both examined how people groups dealt with harsh circumstances. In Camp, enslaved people responded to their bondage through acts of truancy and defiance, such as stealing or going to parties. Civil war Americans had to create ways to cope with death and its consequences. Civilians and family members sought to retrieve and memorialize their fallen soldiers. They adapted their traditions, such as the “Good Death,” and developed a system to help them mourn those buried far away. Camp and Faust started with the popular historical topics of slavery and the Civil War but added another dimension to them by adding agency and human emotion to their histories.

Overall I thought the book was a fascinating read. Having studied the Civil War before, I appreciated this new take regarding death’s impact on the country’s values and practices. Faust wrestled with the dehumanizing consequences of death, yet still provided her readers with a personal humanized understanding of the suffering. This book gave me an opportunity to recognize the historical significance of death. Perhaps it is also meant to demonstrate to modern readers that death, in general, cannot be downplayed or ignored (176-177).

The American Civil War has been covered by historians across the board, from military historians, to economic and political analysts, to fiction and non-fiction writers and many others. However, Dr. Faust found a niche that not many persons nor historians have focused on, that of Death, and how Death during the Civil War fundamentally changed the United States, North and South. Republic of Suffering is a superb example of how to write an historical narrative and not follow the same-o bland narrative of “this battle or that battle” or “this general did this and this general did that.” Instead, Republic stands as an island of uniqueness in a sea of normality. Dr. Faust organized her book into chapters that drew on a person’s sense of understanding, compassion and sadness, with such chapter titles as Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Accounting and Numbering, all of which seemed to flow in good sequential order. Dr. Faust pulls on emotions as she begins to unfold her story and Death becomes the primary factor in the lives of soldiers, civilians and families. Although Republic is an outstanding literary work, it is missing information on the medical field, i.e., doctors, nursing, hospitals, medical knowledge and medical advances. Dr. Faust only briefly mentions these topics in her work, but in my opinion they go hand-and-hand with Death.

Dr. Faust’s book, Republic of Suffering, is almost a perfect book. I mean, it won the Bancroft prize and was a Pulitzer finalist; not many writers can say that. If anything, I would say Republic is only lacking in a few areas: 1) the medical field, and 2) the Western theater of war. Let me take #2 first, Dr. Faust does mention the Western theater but only in passing. She cites soldiers under Grant and other generals who fought in the West, and Death statistics from those campaigns, but those statistics are most of the time combined with the Eastern theater to give a complete picture. There is nothing wrong with combining statistics, but a chapter or a few paragraphs about Death in the West would have been appreciated. As for #1, there is an unofficial thought or perception among undergrads and those who are not history majors, I was one of these before I began my higher learning, that the medical knowledge of the era was antiquated, outdated, unsophisticated, and backwards. In one sense it was for modern germ theory had not yet been discovered; it was “officially” discovered and accepted in the 1890s. Yet, doctors at the time were treating the wounded and dying with the best medical knowledge available, be it under inhospitable conditions and without the proper supplies or help most of the time. Republic, despite its two faults, is a must buy for Civil War and/or military historians. Dr. Faust wrote such a fantastic book that any study on Death pertaining to the Civil War should cite her book. As I was reading Republic, I could not but be amazed at the number of sources, citations and quotes Dr. Faust incorporated into her book; every paragraph contained at least ten or more examples of these primary sources. She interwove these “sources” perfectly into her narrative. Her chapter notes in the back of the book contained page after page of prime examples to further her thesis and connect a twenty-first century reader to the lives of those who witnessed the carnage and Death of the American Civil War first hand. Dr. Faust did not waste her sources and use them as filler for a lackluster book; instead, she handpicked every source to further the chapter arch and paragraphs under discussion.

Suzanna Melendez

10/16/2016

Annotated Bibliography

1995. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspective of Native American Women. New York: Routledge. (Book)

* Negotiators of Change is a collection of essays that incorporates ten tribal groups including the   Cherokee, Iroquois and Navajo. In addition, this scholarship includes well less known tribes such as the Yakima, Ute, and Pima-Maricopa. This book will be a unique source because it argues that Native American women lost their power as European colonization expanded. Lastly, the social construction of women’s roles transforms motherhood and gender ideologies within the context.

1999. “Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.” New York: New York University Press. (Book)

* The book Sex, Love, Race will provide me with a historical foundation about interracial marriages and multiracial children. The collection of essays are from younger and well-known scholars. These researchers seek to probe why and how the specter of sex and race crossed the boundaries and felt threatening towards Americans. The essays centered on Indians, Europeans and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists’ fascination with multiracial relationships. Other themes such regions, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations are incorporated in the essays. Overall, there is an overlap between racial, ethnic, and sexual identities in America.

Aubert, Guillaume. 2004. “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series 61.3: 439-78. (Article)

*By the end of the 18^th century, French aristocrats began to disapprove of French-Indian and French-African relationships. These correspondences represented a form of dishonor which threatened the pure blood of the French noble colonial population. Furthermore, the article goes into details about political and economic alliances between Frenchmen and Native tribes.

Barbara Fields. 1990. “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. Ed. Morgan J. Koussar and James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 143-177); “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181. 95-118. (Essay)

* In Barbara Fields’ essay “Ideology and Race in American History” she pinpoints how historians have approached race and racism. This work analyzes how race is not a physical trait but a social construct opposing differences. It is important to include this in my historiography because French-Indian relationships were acceptable during the 1600s. Throughout the essay, Fields highlighted the example of race not developing when Europeans first encountered Africa. It was over time, that questions were raised about the morality of Africans being sold as chattel during the industrial Revolution.  In conclusion, I want to include Fields ideology about how race was socially constructed differently across space and time.

Barr, Juliana. 2007. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Boarderlands. Chapel Hill: Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, by the University of North Carolina Press. (Book)

* Compared to Negotiators of Change, Julian Barr’s Peace came in the Form of a Woman writes about how Indians were in a position of power whole Europeans were forced to accommodate. Between the years of 1690s and 1780s, Indian tribes such as the Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas. In my paper, I want to include Barr’s argument about Indians retaining control over their territories while controlling the Spaniards. Instead of focusing on race, Barr focuses on settlement and intermarriage, mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity.

Devens, Carol. 1992. “Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1990.” Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. (Book)

* Carol Devens’ well documented Countering Colonization provides a revisionary history of Native American women. There is an emphasis in the book that Indian women were vital to their communities and shaped the encounter between Native American and white civilians. The book will provide my paper with a perspective of Indian women preserving their culture. Therefore, Devens acknowledge these women as historical significant actors. Although women’s voices have been silent their actions have been preserved in missionary letters and reports. While some Indian men accepted religious teachings, many women felt that their lives and beliefs were threatened. Overall, the book highlights the gender conflicts in Native American communities.

Marshall, C. E. 1939. “The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review (Duke University Press); Vol. 19, No.2, 161-184. (Article)

* The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain details the origins of the interracial marriages between Indians and Spaniards. This article will be useful because in my historiography, I will include the interracial marriages between Spaniards and Indian women. The Spanish empire was unique because it was inhabited by race of many colors. Overall, the three centuries of Spanish rule had a population of over three million mix blood individuals as an outcome of mixed racial marriages.

Nash, Gary B. 1995. “The Hidden History of Mestizo America.” The Journal of American History 82 (3): 941-964. (Article)

* Gary Nash’s article The Hidden History of Mestizo America centers on the history of interracial marriage in the United States. One example provided by Nash was the marriage between John Role and Pocahontas who was the daughter of King Powhatan. The themes of mixed-race identity, progeny classifications, and prohibitions of  racial intermarriage are addressed in the article.

Sleeper-Smith, Susan. 2001. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. (Book)

* The book is centered in the region of the Great Lakes during the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period. I will be able to draw from the cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. This is an important and well-researched study because it focuses on Indian women who married French men. These is an overlooked topic which mainly focuses on the men’s perspective. But in Sleeper’s book the role played by Indian women were highlighted especially, since the mixed-blood kinship unified Indian and French societies. More importantly, Indian women served as brokers between the two worlds. Indian women and French men who married helped connect the Great Lakes which ...

The Economic Causes of the Civil War
David A. Beirne

1. Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

*Featuring some of the most up-to-date interpretations of slavery’s importance to the economics of North and South, I look to employ the variety of research to see if the North’s interest in the slavery economy at the time of secession had anything to do with the war.

2. Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

*This work analyzes the divergent developments of the relationships between the state and economies that existed in the North and South.

3. Chavez, Ernesto. The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

*I am going to use this handy book for over fifty primary sources related to the war that took place a decade prior to the Civil War to see if there’s any economic or expansionist themes I can use to make my case that the Civil War fits into the general mindset of the times.

4. Collier, Paul. “On Economic Causes and Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers 50 (1998), 563-573.

*This is a paper about civil wars and their economic factors, generally, so I will see if any frameworks work for understanding the the U.S. Civil War, where one side thought they were leaving the Union and the other side thought they were rebelling.

5. Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Causes of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

*This book makes the case that economics caused the Civil War. While studies address how the North and South grew apart in the decades leading up to war, Egnal’s study examines how decades of economic connections between the North and South began to disintegrate, with the result being secession.

6. Finkelman, Paul. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

*Another book in the great Bedford/St.Martin’s series of collections of commentary and primary resources, this time pertaining to those in the North and South who defended slavery, including for economic reasons.

7. Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

*Another foundational book for my study, this book looks at the economic origins of the civil war from the perspective of the law and financial implications of the institution of slavery.

8. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013.

*This book really paints a vibrant picture of the economic powerhouse that was the Old South, in addition to the interconnectedness with Northern interests.

9. Lawson, Melinda. Patriot Fires: Forgin a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North.

*Nationalism and economic expansionism sometimes gave a mutual dependency, so Lawson’s book may indicate how the interests of the federal government business communities contributed to redefining American identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.

10. Majewski, John. Modernizing a Slaver Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

*Majewski is an author I found in Slavery’s Capitalism, and like that edited book and Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, I will use it to paint a picture of what the South’s ideal vision of its economic future looked like to understand why secession made sense.

11. Montgomery, David. Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

*I am using this book to understand the vision that the Republican Party and labor organizations had prior to the Civil War, and how the war and its aftermath may have been supported and shaped with some of these goals in mind.

12. Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1991.

*This is a classic work that contains a number of primary sources pertaining to the myriad of causes of the Civil War, including economic ones.

13. Thornton, Mark and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2004.

*Thornton and Ekelund Jr.’s work discusses how Northern government and industry united to fight the Civil War, research I will examine to see what interests were at play during the war that may have also contributed to its lead-up.

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic presents a collection of cultural essays. The goal of each piece recognizes the shifting differences from old political history, from the top down, towards new social history, from the bottom up. While this was sorely attempted by Sim in A Union Forever, this collection provides the background context of its founding settings to explore foundation nation ideals through the cultural history historical lens. While not a main point in the introduction to the collection, reading them, I located a common theme throughout some of the ideas: Grassroot ideologies. While I would consider this a modern term in explaining how the marginalized communities to grant authority, and contributed to the community narrative. Beyond take this authority to illustrate how the community ‘outsiders’ were main players America’s framework, creating the first party system (chapter 4 with women strategically building male political alliances), and then a bifurcated party system (chapter 13 and the anti-renters providing the ideologies of the Republican platform). Walsticher, Newman, Pasely and Huston all point to some grassroots movement shaping the cultural identity if America’s framework. Throughout the collection of essays, I am often reminded of Camp’s work (notably in the Dress and Mobilization, Women in Party Conflict chapters) BeckertRockman’s book (Dress and Mobilization), Gould’s law of nations (Dress and Mobilization, Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere ‘tactic consent’ chapters) in this collection of essays. While Gould focuses on law and how this formed our transatlantic foreign relations, I could not help but connect his argument in a ‘cultural’ sense when reading how our new American dress shaped how foreign countries viewed us as a new nation.

Beyond classifys the cultural essays into the following sections:

• Section I Democracy and Other Practices; Examines cultural politics/studies to understand how politics how partisan strategies shape founding American politics (Page 10).
• Section II Gender, Race, and other Identities; Studying the politics of identity is a legacy of the early republic (page 13).
• Section III Norms and Forms; Rethinking how political language within the Revolutionary era, constitution/law formations are important in shaping the nation (page 15).
• Section IV Interests, Spaces, and Other Structures; Viewing the cultural-historical ‘other’ and how these groups contribute to events, institutions, thus shaping the nation’s identity (page 16). The writers agree the other groups are the less successful than other working frame workers.

Drawing on the same ideas of David S. and andrewjarralkelly, I agree that the reader needs to understand what the essay author is trying to challenge. This makes some of the essay’s great, but not very assertive on what top-down perspective problem it is trying persuade the reader to rethink. The introduction of the book makes it very clear that these essays will challenge traditional ‘founding’ epistemologies (Pg 18). However, while all of the essays do not come out and argue what area they are challenging, I often found myself spending longer times in the footnotes of the articles, trying to grasp an understanding of why the essay was written. The variety of sources utilized in each essay provided a starting point and new key terms to source search for my annotated bibliography.

Beyond the Founders provides a collection of essays that introduces a new way of looking at political history in the early American Republic. The essays reinvigorate political by injecting it with ideas of race, gender, space, region, nationality, and class, not just views of the political elite. These new political historians are not just interested in the elite leaders of the nation, they want to show how various groups used the political culture and ideology to show their aspirations. The little guy plays an important role in shaping early American politics. The book is divided into four sections. The first is devoted to popular politics nurturing nationalism and democratization in the United States. The second section, the authors suggest that the “politics of identity is as much a legacy of the early republic as it is a late twentieth-century phenomenon” (13). In the third, the authors speak about how the language of political debate turned into law. In the final section, the authors try to write a “more holistic sort of political history” (17). This new political history does not reject the founders as a subject, but it does insist that neither the invention of American politics nor the significance of the Early Republic can be grasped solely, or even mainly, from the top down or from the bottom up.

I really enjoyed the dialogue that the introduction establishes between political history and the dominance of cultural and social histories. While most of the topics broadly taken up in this book are often the subjects of cultural and social history, the editors do not criticize the approaches cultural and social histories. Instead, they embrace the strengths of these histories and intertwine it with political history.

It seems like I agree with David S. all the time but he brings up valid points before I get a chance to write my blog post. He had an issue with some of the essays lacking context to the ideas they challenge, his example was Saul Cornell’s “Beyond the Myth of Consensus” article. I hate it when historians, or anyone for that matter, does not establish what scholarship they challenge, especially when they claim to be doing so. This is not nitpicking as David says, it is necessary to include the previous scholarship in order for the reader to fully grasp the author’s argument. I mean that one of the most important things about academics, we have to create a dialogue with each other in order to further knowledge.

In the edited book, Beyond the Founders, the contributing essayists work towards a new idea of bridging the gap between political and social history. The introduction provides a solid background for the past and current discussion within the field of political history. The book is brilliantly laid out in themes with the essays within each theme conversing with each other. The individual essays unique and thought provoking and I didn’t find any essay to be detracting from the book at all. I can honestly say that this is quite possibly my favorite reading of the class so far. The authors of the essays took a subject that has had extensive study and brought new insights into the subjects by adding in the social history aspect. This was particularly true of the first themed section. The essays in this theme used the oddity of a political event to bring into discussion how the populace, even those without a vote, were able to make their voices heard and their opinions count in the political discourse of the day. They looked at the community rituals around the election process and how the voice of the marginalized could sometimes make an impact on the race. The essays also looked at the different ways women and people of color could make their opinions count and known in the political sphere.
Interestingly, throughout the book the gendered language that politicians and newspaper editors used to either glorify or denigrate a candidate or political party. This is especially true on the essay that I found most interesting, the Essay on Aaron Burr. I found that his essay provided some interesting insight into the gendered language used to fight against Burr’s popularity. This unrelenting attack of gender/sexuality bias helped to bring Burr down in the political world.
I found the book intriguing in how it brought to mind Slavery’s Capitalism. With Slavery’s Capitalism, the essays took a subject not many historians would enjoy and made interesting and unique arguments that were sustained with excellent writing. As Victoria wrote in her post on Slavery’s Capitalism this book also forces the class as readers to “rethink.” Not just slavery, but the political party process and development as a whole. Beyond the Founders, does the exact same thing. Only instead of taking a subject many historians struggle with, the editors and authors took a subject that many historians know has been well researched, especially from the top down and began the process of providing new and interesting arguments within their essays. It also brought back interesting concepts from Closer to Freedom in how the discussion of clothing could bring a sense of status.
I was surprised that I found Chapter 8 extremely interesting. Like the author, John L. Brooke states in his opening paragraph, I like many historians often shy away from theory. This essay really had me interested and I felt that the look into theories driven around the public sphere interesting and challenging. It was one of the essays that I wanted to finish before taking a break during my reading process. The discussion on persuasion and its varied meaning was fascinating.

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic is a collection of essays examining the early American republic synthesizing a new political history methodology of understanding of the early republic. One aspect of the new political history is bringing culture and the influence it has on politics to the reader. The introduction describes a popular culture and cultural politics approach, “Cultural politics has the virtue of seeing the political aspects of other social phenomena, of seeing conflict as well as consensus in them, and most of all, of bringing other actors into the political field.”

Fast forward to the twenty-first century; I would like to examine cultural politics and how cultural participation can influence a community into activism. In Daniel McClure’s 2012 article Brokering Culture: Elma Lewis, Cultural Politics, and Community Building in Postwar Boston, he investigates the impact of Elma Lewis who forms a “cultural base” upon which boosted calls for “community control” and activism. McClure argues, “Unlike black freedom work that emphasized agitation for jobs, equitable education, and political representations, Lewis focused on ‘cultural politics’. She created black cultural institutions that helped define and frame the significance of black cultural communities both within and beyond Boston.” Lewis’s goal was to use education and culture as a tool for African-American empowerment which McClure calls “community cultural development”. Community cultural development provides a space for cultural politics while building identity and a common collective between individuals. This participatory engagement is similar to the “deferential participant” in Andrew W. Robertson’s article Voting Rites and Voting Acts. Lewis’s community cultural development provides political engagement and influence just like the marginalized individuals who were able to use deferential politics. McClure’s article also focuses on Lewis’ later worker in the creation of the Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park. It was built on the same premise of her previous work. She combined education and cultural tools, but the playhouse was not limited to the African-American community. The park chosen for her playhouse was in Franklin Park in the heart of Boston’s African-American community. Franklin Park’s location was known for prostitution and drug activity.  Lewis wanted to bring the local and outside communities together for quality cultural programs which she was able to successfully do. Plus, bringing attention to city government through her cultural politics she helped foster empowerment and reclaim community institutions. Lewis wrote an open letter in the Boston Globe newspaper about schools she established through community support, not city support, helped remove moral blight and bring outside communities to share in culture. Bringing communities together helped continue the success of the playhouse and Lewis was able to establish an all community volunteer Franklin Park coalition which raised money for the upkeep of the park. Lewis focus on culture politics helped redefine a community that empowered local and non-local individuals to revitalize and take ownership through community control.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 9.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 41.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 58.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 75.

Daniel McClure, “Brokering Culture: Elma Lewis, Cultural Politics, and Community Building in Postwar Boston,” Black Women, Gender and Families 6, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 55.

Daniel McClure, “Brokering Culture: Elma Lewis, Cultural Politics, and Community Building in Postwar Boston,” Black Women, Gender and Families 6, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 58.

Wood, Kirsten E. “Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic. American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (October 2014): 1083-1116.

            “Join with Heart and Soul and Voice” analyzes how the discourse of music, particularly as it appeared in political festivities, created what author Kirsten Wood terms a “harmonious republic” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She emphasizes the idea of harmony in terms of music as “a system in which internal variety meant delightful contrast,” which she then conflates with the idea of harmony as an essential component of the relatively new American Republic. Rather than examining the ways in which the idea of harmony theoretically influenced politics, she argues that music itself provided a unifying way for Americans to express political ideas, celebrate their victories, and impart the burgeoning seeds of American virtues.

Wood claims that music’s unique ability to do such far-reaching work stemmed from two countering reasons. In one way, it reached the illiterate, by providing an easy and memorable way to internalize and emotionally connect to political ideas. She notes that the most popular and lasting songs “came easily to the tongue and voice and…summoned up the feelings many Americans believed important to their national union.”

This argument is well supported throughout the article, and draws from an interesting combination of primary sources. Wood mainly examines newspaper prints of songs, as they directly relate to one of the main premises she works to prove. Several prints are reproduced on full pages within the article, both making for an interesting visual, and giving the reader the rare opportunity to directly engage with the same primary source as the author. However, she also looks at letters from luminaries of the era, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams, as well as tracts or speeches relating to music. Wood uses these sources in two interesting ways that bolster her argument.

First, these letters and speeches give her article context, displaying the strong presence of music in daily life in the Early American Republic. This essentially proves the legitimacy of using music as a source, which is still relatively revolutionary in terms of academic history. Second, the letters in particular show an interesting aspect of music’s function. An interesting example is John Adams’ son-in-law William Smith, who claims the new American government could very well utilize music as a means of “captivating the mob.”

Several of the articles in Beyond the Founders similarly address the idea of mass political involvement through political festivities and ordinary means. Jeffrey Pasley’s “The Cheese and the Words” and Andrew Robertson’s “Voting Rights and Voting Acts” are the most overt examples of this parallel. Pasley argues that the strength of popular political culture during the same period discussed by Wood stemmed from the fact that arose from daily life, meaning that Americans participated in politics by “devising their own mean of building support…with their own local resources.” He uses the humorous example of a group of Massachusetts women who sent President Jefferson a “mammoth” wheel of cheese to express their support as an example. This idea of ordinary actions as representations of political involvement is present in Wood’s word too, although she never explicitly states it as such. Her emphasis on music as popular and quite ordinary implies that those who engaged in music as a form of political activity, were doing exactly the same thing as Pasley’s cheesemakers: they focused their preexisting abilities or passions on political expression.

Robertson also examines the political involvement of ordinary Americans, although in a much different way. His article in Beyond the Founders makes the ultimate argument that deferential political rituals served the purpose of establishing an identity and providing citizens with an image of “egalitarian inclusiveness.” This too, connects to Wood’s work on music in the Early American Republic. While Wood’s work focuses on political celebrations and festivals, rather than the more formal electioneering rituals detailed by Robertson, both authors seem to be making the broad point that ritual was quite important to mass involvement in politics (even if, as Robertson acknowledges, that involvement is largely imagined).

Beyond the Founders as a whole focuses on portraying the Early American Republic in a different way from the norm, whether “from the top down, from the bottom up, and perhaps especially from the middle out in every direction.” The articles within the book demonstrate the ways in which public involvement, rather than the actions of a few important men, effected American government and history. Wood’s excellent and thought provoking article could quite easily fit into this volume just as well as the articles the editors originally chose.

Kirsten E. Wood, “Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic, American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (October 2014): 1087.

Wood, 1107.

Wood, 1102.

Wood, 1098.

Wood, 11111-1113.

Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 49.

Andrew W. Robertson, “Voting Rights and Voting Acts” in Beyond the Founders, 75.

Beyond the ...