Posts com a Tag ‘The History Teacher (THT)’
Paris and The Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970 – CLARK (THT)
Catherine Clarke. Foto: Comparative Media Studies – MIT /
CLARK, Catherine E.. Paris and The Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 328p. Resenha de: KERLEY, Lela F. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.717-718, ago., 2019.
In this social history of photography, Catherine E. Clark demonstrates that the visual discourses and methodologies used to document the historical and urban landscape of France’s capital were constantly being reconceptualized over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Journalists, curators, city officials, amateur and professional photographers, and societies contributed to a history of Paris that was inextricably linked with a history of photography. Woven into the book’s narrative is an institutional history of the Bibliothèque historique, the Musée Carnavalet, the Fédération nationale d’achats des cadres (FNAC), and the Vidéothèque de Paris vis-à-vis the local/national initiatives and photography contests they sponsored that punctuated, but also commemorated, larger historical shifts such as Haussmannization, the Occupation and Liberation of Paris, Americanization, and “les trente glorieuses.” By examining photographic collections spawned by these events, Clark presents a colorful portrait of how the French, but also foreign tourists, saw the city and interpreted its past, present, and future amid urban transformation.
The book begins with the overarching question: What is the history of preserving, writing, exhibiting, theorizing, and imagining the history of Paris photographically? (p. 1). These concerns are deftly addressed together in each of the five chapters, tracing the way in which understandings of the photographic image—its purpose, function, and the history it purported to communicate— shaped and were shaped by commercial and non-commercial interests. Building on earlier scholarship produced by cultural theorists such as Guy DeBord, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, who view visual spectacle as a metaphor for changing relationships within the city, Clark adds her own original interpretation, arguing that the production, preservation, and use of photographs influenced, informed, and determined how people thought about Paris as a museum city and engaged with it physically (p. 216).
Chapter 1 focuses on Haussmannization, a city works project that precipitated the first major effort to document the destruction of “Vieux Paris.” Through the process of modernization, municipal authorities, archivists, and museum directors slowly shifted their reliance on more traditional forms of visual historical documentation (e.g., maps, paintings, and sketches) to the photograph as they discovered its inherent value as a piece of “objective” historical evidence. A method of scientific visual history, as Chapter 2 illustrates, came to the fore and introduced new “modes of seeing history” by the turn of the century (p. 2). Now considered “an objective eyewitness to history,” the photograph gave rise to photo-histories that were more didactic in their narration of historic events, providing explanations to viewers of how they should interpret the image.
Chapter 3 shows how the Occupation and Liberation of Paris engendered different “mode[s] of reading the photo” (p. 3). Through the practice of repicturing, heavily censored yet seemingly innocent photo-histories of famous Parisian landmarks kept the French revolutionary tradition alive by including a combination of visual forms that would recall acts of resistance embedded in viewers’ historical imagination. Seven years later, the Bimillénaire de Paris of 1951 reduced the photographic image to a visual cliché, and the subjects who figured in those pictures to typologies. Celebrating the last 2,000 years of French history, the Bimillénaire assumed a political bent and “appealed to those who sought to promote Paris as the commercial capital of Europe, backed by centuries of culture and history, not as an intellectual capital of revolutionary political thought” (p. 132). Chapter 4’s discussion of the city’s attempt to promote Paris as modern and futuristic in promotional posters, traveling exhibits, and magazines depended upon older models of seeing history and reading representations that attested to both change and continuity. Chapter 5 examines “C’était Paris en 1970,” a photo contest commissioned by the store FNAC that involved over 15,000 amateur photographers photographing everyday life within Paris (p. 174). Yet the very title of the contest underscored more of what had changed in the last 110 years of photographic documentation and collection rather than what remained the same. Whereas the historical value of a nineteenth-century photograph had taken decades to appreciate, historical value was immediately conferred the moment the photo was taken by the last third of the twentieth century.
This well-researched book will be of interest for those studying urban history, the history of Modern France, visual culture, and archival management. With over eighty illustrations, there is no lack of material with which to engage students. Its slim size and readily accessible prose is appropriate for both upperlevel undergraduates and graduate students, as it complements more in-depth theoretical discussions and debates on the politics of memory and the effects of technology in shaping national and local identities. Its interdisciplinary treatment of photography, publishing, the history of Paris, and the recording, preservation, and promotion of that history makes this an intriguing and indispensable text.
Lela F. Kerley – Ocala, Florida.
[IF]Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands – LIM (THT)
LIM, Julian. Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 320p. Resenha de: BELL-WILSON, Chloe. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.719-720, ago., 2019.
Borderlands history, already a crowded field, has found a new, multiracial, multinational narrative in Julian Lim’s Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. In her introduction, Lim sets out clearly what she intends to do: mitigate the history about erasure and reveal the history of the multiracial past that “has become so hidden, erased from geographical and historical landscape of the borderlands and the nation itself” (p.5). Spanning the 1880s to the 1930s and using rich archival sources from both sides of the Mexican-American border, she shows how the borderlands was never just a space where people of two opposing nationalities vied for dominance. Instead, it was a complicated place that saw the intersection of Native Americans, white (or more white) Mexicans and Americans, black peoples, and Chinese peoples.
Lim looks mainly at the border town of El Paso, Texas, tracing its foundation as a small backwater to its growth into a thriving commercial metropolis, thanks to the arrival of the train. As a border town, El Paso proves an effective window into larger ideations of race, class, and nationalities from both the United States and Mexico. She also examines the sister city of Ciudad Juárez, just on the other side of the border, to illuminate similarities and differences in the two countries.
For a large portion of her work, Lim draws upon legal evidence to substantiate her claims. Some of what she draws upon is well known, like the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Chinese Exclusion Act. But in her assessment, she adds a layer of complexity by showing not only how those in power expected their legislation to function, but also how everyday people circumvented them or, indeed, used them to their own advantage. The Chinese, she explains, were able to flout the Exclusion Act by trickling into El Paso through Mexico. They also used, for a time, racial blending to avoid detection, successfully masquerading as Mexican to cross into the United States. She also makes use of more everyday court cases, like those of miscegenation, workers compensation, and race classification. Though the prohibition of black/white relationships in twentiethcentury America is well known, Lim adds to the interrogation of interracial relations by investigating the way the courts attempted to regulate intermarriage between Chinese, Mexican, and African Americans. In doing so, she shows how socio-cultural norms translated into legal proceedings, and vice versa.
Additionally, Lim’s commitment to showing a well-rounded, inclusive narrative produces an analysis that shows how racial and national identity intersect to create complicated lives. One of her strongest points to this effect is her analysis of how African Americans, after finding themselves rejected by Mexico as either immigrants or tourists, identified even more strongly as proud Americans, even as conditions in the Jim Crow South continued to deteriorate for them. She also carefully traces agency for each group across the entire period she assesses. She opens her work with a detailed assessment of the role Native Americans had in constructing the borderlands, showing that their patterns of commerce, travel, and living in fact set the stage for how the borderlands developed. Rather than abandoning their narrative after both Mexico and the United States forcibly displaced them, however, she then follows their story through the rest of her work.
For example, in 1916, the Apache acted as scouts for the U.S. military during the retaliatory Punitive Expedition in response to the feared invasion of Pancho Villa. Thus, importantly, Lim asserts the continued presence and role of Native Americans at the border.
With clear, well-written prose, Porous Borders provides an illuminating narrative that would be useful for both undergraduate and graduate students looking to understand more about the evolvement of the Mexican-American border into what it is today. For secondary school teachers, Lim’s complex understanding of landmarks in history, like treaties and major immigration legislation, can be used to help students understand the difference between intentions of those in power and the realities of everyday life. Overall, Lim provides a fascinating insight into a period and a narrative that too often faces neglect in borderlands history. Her balance of cultural and legal history in the borderlands provides insight into how large-scale events play out at the local level—a useful conceptualization neatly applied and worth copying.
Chloe Bell-Wilson – California State University, Long Beach.
[IF]Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South – MAULDIN (THT)
MAULDIN, Erin Stewart. Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 256p. Resenha de: SCHIEFFLER, G. David. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.720-722, ago., 2019.
Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land is the latest addition to the vast body of literature that explains how the Civil War and emancipation transformed the rural South. Whereas previous scholars have highlighted the war’s physical destruction, economic consequences, and sociocultural effects, Mauldin, an environmental historian, examines the profound ecological transformation of the Old South to the New. Using an interdisciplinary methodological approach, she argues that the Civil War exacerbated southern agriculture’s environmental constraints and forced farmers—“sooner rather than later”—to abandon their generally effective extensive farming practices in favor of intensive cotton monoculture, which devastated the South both economically and ecologically (p. 10).
Mauldin contends that most antebellum southerners practiced an extensive form of agriculture characterized by “shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, slavery, and continuous territorial expansion” (p. 6). Although the South’s soils and climates were not suitable for long-term crop production, most farmers circumvented their environmental disadvantages by adhering to these “four cornerstones” (p. 6). Ironically, however, these very practices made the South especially vulnerable to war. When the Civil War came, Union and Confederate soldiers demolished the fences that protected southern crops, slaughtered and impressed roaming livestock, razed the forests on which shifting cultivation and free-range husbandry hinged, and, most significantly, destroyed the institution of slavery on which southern agriculture was built. Mauldin’s description of the Civil War’s environmental consequences echoes those of Lisa M. Brady’s War Upon the Land (2012) and Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation (2012), but with an important caveat: in Mauldin’s view, the war did not destroy southern agriculture so much as it accelerated and exacerbated the “preexisting vulnerabilities of southern land use” (p. 69).
After the war, southern reformers and northern officials urged southern farmers, white and black, to rebuild the South by adopting the intensive agricultural practices of northerners—namely, livestock fencing, continuous cultivation, and the use of commercial fertilizers as a substitute for crop and field rotation. Most complied, not because they admired “Yankee” agriculture, but because the “environmental consequences of the war—including soldiers’ removal of woodland, farmers’ abandonment of fields because of occupation or labor shortages, and armies’ impressment or foraging of livestock—encouraged intensification” (p. 73). Interestingly, many southerners initially benefited from this change. Mauldin contends that the cotton harvests of 1866-1868 were probably more successful than they should have been, thanks to the Confederacy’s wartime campaign to grow food and to the fact that so much of the South’s farmland had lain fallow during the conflict. In the long run, however, this temporary boon created false hopes, as intensive monoculture “tightened ecological constraints and actively undermined farmers’ chances of economic recovery” (p. 73). Mauldin argues that most of the southern land put into cotton after the war could not sustain continuous cash-crop cultivation without the use of expensive commercial fertilizers, which became a major source of debt for farmers. At the same time, livestock fencing exacerbated the spread of diseases like hog cholera, which killed off animals that debt-ridden farmers could not afford to replace. Finally, basic land maintenance—a pillar of extensive agriculture in the Old South—declined after the war, as former slaves understandably refused to work in gangs to clear landowners’ fields and dig the ditches essential to sustainable farming. Tragically, many of those same freedpeople suffered from planters’ restrictions of common lands for free-range husbandry and from the division of plantations into tenant and sharecropper plots, which made shifting cultivation more difficult. And, as other scholars have shown, many black tenants and sharecroppers got caught up in the crippling cycle of debt that plagued white cotton farmers in the late nineteenth century, too.
Mauldin’s story of the post-war cotton crisis is a familiar one, but unlike previous scholars, she shows that the crisis was about more than market forces, greedy creditors, and racial and class conflict. It was also about the land. Despite diminishing returns, southerners continued to grow cotton in the 1870s, not only because it was the crop that “paid,” but also because ecological constraints, which had been intensified by the war, encouraged it. Instructors interested in teaching students how the natural environment has shaped human history would be wise to consider this argument. They should also consider adding “ecological disruptions” to the long list of problems that afflicted the New South, as Mauldin persuasively argues that the era’s racial conflict, sharecropping arrangements, and capital shortages cannot be understood apart from the environmental challenges that compounded them (p. 9).
In the 2005 Environmental History article, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?”, Linda Nash urged historians to “strive not merely to put nature into history, but to put the human mind back in the world.” With Unredeemed Land, Erin Stewart Mauldin has done just that and, in the process, has offered one way in which history teachers might put the Civil War era back in its natural habitat in their classrooms.
David Schieffler – Crowder College.
[IF]Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 – MURPHY (THT)
MURPHY, Mary-Elizabeth B.. Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 280p. Resenha de: HYATT, Marshall. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.722-723, ago., 2019.
The recent historiography of the Civil Rights Movement has closely examined the extent to which that struggle for equality had its origins in the nineteenth century. Those studies transcended the traditional focus on the active phase years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) by returning to the roots in the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early 1900s. Jim Crow Capital is a welcome addition to that scholarship, providing an in-depth history of the activities of African American women in the nation’s capital in the formative years of what became the twentieth-century civil rights protests. At the same time, the book places important emphasis on the intersectionality of race and gender, delineating that nexus as articulated by critical race theorists.
In doing so, the author brings to light the contributions of women in combating all forms of discrimination and segregation, thus expanding the contours of that history.
Fittingly, the work centers on the nation’s capital, where segregation and racism were rampant both locally and federally. The title of the book itself is a direct reference to the perceptions of African Americans living in Washington, who argued “that the discrimination in their city resembled the worst practices of the U.S. South” (p. 144). There were many manifestations of abuse that supported their contentions. Murphy begins with organized protests in support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which started in the 1920s and culminated during the Depression decade. She underscores the critical importance of the Silent Parade of 1922 and the Rope Protests of 1934, in which “African American women succeeded in generating national attention to the crisis of lynching” (p. 71). Significantly, she argues that women in Washington were ideally suited for these types of protest activities, because “their charged location” allowed them to focus on local and national issues at the same time, and with direct access to the federal government.
Beyond those forays into anti-lynching campaigns, black women also organized protests against police brutality in the city, rioted for economic justice at a time when they were discriminated against in employment, petitioned for voting rights, and engaged in sit-ins and boycotts of department stores that maintained segregationist policies. Surprisingly, in that regard, Murphy only mentions in passing the critical work of women after Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 decision to segregate all offices of government civil service. Early on, she notes that “while activists worked tirelessly with the NAACP to protest segregation, they were unable to integrate the federal government” (p. 6). Yet women, such as Mary Church Terrell, were deeply involved in that effort. Working with Neval H. Thomas, American history teacher at Dunbar High School and NAACP branch president in Washington, D.C., they fought an intensified desegregation campaign in the 1920s and 1930s. The pressure they brought to bear on the federal government achieved some small victories, such as the integration of the Department of the Census and the Bureau of Pensions in the late 1920s. Murphy acknowledges that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes desegregated his bureau in the late 1930s, which created the impetus for the full government civil service desegregation to come, but does not contextualize that achievement within the earlier activism of the Washington branch.
Jim Crow Capital represents an important addition to the “long history of the civil rights movement” revisionism, appropriate for any course on the struggle for black equality. Reaching back into the immediate post-World War I period, when disillusionment among African Americans was fueled by segregation, lynching, and the Red Summer of 1919, it underscores the birth of the “New Negro,” so poignantly described by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke. The black women in Washington, D.C. epitomized his belief that African Americans adopted a “vibrant new psychology” that made civil rights activism a sacred mission. Accordingly, Murphy’s contribution is critical in teaching that African American women were major actors on the stage of civil rights organizing, protesting, and leadership, well before the active phase. They navigated the boundaries of race and gender in their pursuit of racial justice.
Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary Church Terrell, and countless others in the nation’s capital were significant forerunners in the critical crusade for racial justice. It was their inspiration and commitment that passed the torch to Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and others, whose collective activism was a fitting tribute to their legacy.
Jim Crow Capital brings that critical significance to light, while also confirming Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Marschall Hyatt – Geffen Academy at UCLA.
[IF]Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management – ROSENTHAL (THT)
ROSENTHAL, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 312p. Resenha de: MUHAMMAD, Patricia M. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.724-725, ago., 2019.
Scholars have written extensively concerning the Trans-Atlantic slave trade’s intricate financial regime promoted through multi-lateral treaties, slaving licenses, nation states, private companies, and slavers, proprietors, and bankers who financed and insured this barter in human commodities. In Accounting for Slavery, Professor Caitlin Rosenthal outlines municipal slavery business structures primarily in the West Indies; with slaveowners at the highest rank, followed by overseers and attorneys who were property managers. Using the terms “proprietor,” “balance,” “tally,” “middlemen,” and “employees,” Rosenthal transposes this verbiage with “plantation owner,” “bottom line,” “slaves,” “skilled workers,” “overseer,” and “watchmen”—demonstrating the level of accounting practices slaveowners developed.
Interlaced with technical nomenclature, the author includes historical events that affected plantation operations, such as the Maroon Rebellion in Jamaica and more frequent occurrences of sabotage of production output and plots to escape slavery’s brutality. She furthers her analysis by discussing crimes against humanity such as branding and torture as false incentives to increase labor production and compliance. Thus, enslaved people were forced to work against their will and were also chastised for fighting against a system in which human rights violations were systemically committed against them.
The author also discusses how slave codes encouraged plantation owners to maintain accurate records of their slaves’ whereabouts. Local authorities fined slaveowners for failure to abide by these laws, which only complemented their accounting practices. Both municipal and transnational law reflected Europeans’ desire to maintain control of their extended empire through hierarchies that negotiated with established Maroon communities of formerly enslaved people.
Although these communities were not acknowledged as a nation state, they had authority to enter a bi-lateral treaty with England in 1739 to preserve their autonomy with a condition precedent to not accept any additional runaway slaves.
Rosenthal then examines the impact of absentee proprietorship, in which plantation owners returned from the West Indies to England, seeking to maintain accountability of both land and slave. Consequently, these slavers authored plantation manuals (accounting guidelines) to track slaves, harvest, land, and productivity, referred to as “quantification.” Arguably, these standards were the financial antecedent to generally accepted accounting practices used to evaluate professional standards of modern bookkeeping for Western corporations. The slavers also furthered transnational law through lobbying with the British Parliament, securing their interests in sugar markets and a form of anti-dumping preventative measures under international trade law, as well as opposing the nascent trend in public international law to abolish the slave trade. The author argues that their records had a mitigating effect on the regulation of plantation slavery enforced by local officials, requiring slavers to adhere to graduated punishments that they recorded as evidence in their own defense.
Thereafter, Rosenthal dissects the methodology of plantation accounting, including ledgers, balance sheets, sticks used by slaves to account for livestock tallied annually, and eighteenth-century slaveowners’ advent of pre-formatted forms and double bookkeeping. These written records became evidence for British abolitionists to use against West Indian slavers since they not only detailed the loss of productivity, but also the loss of slaves’ lives resulting from the violence and torture they bore at the hands of slave masters.
Rosenthal then assesses rating systems based on historical records that affected the price of slaves as further evidence of their commodification. For instance, she employs the usage of “depreciation” in relation to an enslaved person’s decline due to disobedience, age or health. Value and (human) capital reinforced the disparity of rights between the enslaved and the master, with one person determining the other person’s worth based on what could be extracted by force or used as collateral for purchase of other tangible property.
Lastly, the author discusses the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on both slavers and enslaved. Slavers had the ability to quit the land and negotiate.
However, the agreements enslaved people signed were usually under duress, and former slaveowners had a greater bargaining position due to literacy, land ownership, prior financial gain from their former slaves, and the use of black codes to keep freed peoples subordinate.
The author uses primary sources to illustrate the development of accounting practices, through organization, law, and politics, making the text valuable for historians and graduate students specializing in those matters. With assiduous care, Rosenthal successfully depicts municipal slavery’s evolution from scattered processes to maintain control of slaves and land into a sophisticated, individual business venture that documented crimes against humanity and ironically supported the institution’s inevitable extinction.
Patricia M. Muhammad – Independent Researcher.
[IF]
The Mexican Press and Civil Society 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street – SMITH (THT)
SMITH, Benjamin. The Mexican Press and Civil Society 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 382p. Resenha de: CUDDY, Zachary. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.725-727, ago., 2019.
Benjamin T. Smith’s The Mexican Press and Civil Society examines three and a half decades of journalism in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Smith makes the argument that press readership increased significantly in the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in the 1960s, which saw a more literate Mexico of all classes read the press. In addition, Smith argues that control of the press was often heavy-handed and corrupt. Nevertheless, it varied regionally, and geography played a bigger role than previous historical accounts have posited. The press, Smith argues, was never truly free, but it was not controlled completely by a centralized Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico City either. Rather, numerous individuals and organizations worked within the rigid and corrupt system to reach out to many different types of social classes in civil society. Like most historians, Smith pays homage to past works, but he argues that some literature does not go far enough in truly explaining the nuances of the press. For example, Smith argues that Daniel Cosío Villegas’s idea of Mexican newspapers having unimportant, national news is inaccurate because it ignores tabloids and the decentralized nature of the regional press (p. 6).
Smith’s eight-chapter, 282-page book has three major sections and begins with “Part One: The Reading Public.” The only chapter in this section is an important foundational piece, for it traces political, economic, and social elements of how newspaper readership rose in Mexico from 1940-1976. Smith brings up the role of Mexican presidents, U.S. surveys, censorship, specific national and regional newspapers, and important government bodies like Productora e Importadora de Papel (PIPSA). Smith then pivots to “Part II: The Mexico City Press.” The three chapters in this section detail themes of how to control the press, how and why satire declined in newsprint, and how Mario Menéndez and the radical press functioned in and out of the capital. Smith’s last major section, “Part III: The Regional Press,” encompasses four distinct chapters, the first of which comes back to the theme of controlling the press (badly) from a regional perspective.
The author then explores “gangster journalism” in context with Mexican press baron José García Valseca, and concludes the book with two specific geographic case studies in Oaxaca and Chihuahua.
Smith’s book is highly recommended for upper-division and graduate students of history or journalism. However, it might be too much for 100-level students, for it is quite dense at times due to Smith’s extensive research. For example, in “Chapter 2: How to Control the Press,” Smith has almost eight pages on financial incentives. From a pedagogical perspective, this works, but an inexperienced student might get lost in all of the numbers. Conversely, Smith’s book is most effective when driven by significant and interesting characters, which help attach the reader to a region or time. For example, in “Chapter 6: The Real Artemio Cruz,” Smith breaks down the life of José García Valseca, examining themes of gangster journalism, government killings, shifting ideologies, and extortion. But the chapter also introduces potential historical connections to today’s underworld of journalism and the “deep state” in Mexico, while bringing up unanswered questions such as how involved the Mexican government was in engineering García Valseca’s bankruptcy. Moreover, the relationship “between business and journalism, regional editors and state governors,” is very much alive today as well (p. 189). Therefore, Smith’s book could arguably be more effective when used one chapter at a time, due to the fact that there is so much information to soak up in each chapter. At the very least, the book should be available in the library as a resource reference because of the thorough geographic nature of Smith’s work.
The Mexican Press and Civil Society is well organized, has clever chapter titles (e.g., “The Taxi Driver”), and has useful acronyms at the beginning of the book for non-Spanish speakers. On the other hand, there were a few instances where Smith could have used more clarity. For example, in “Chapter 4: From Catholic Schoolboy to Guerilla,” Smith begins by saying the Mexican government “probably bombed” the offices of Roger Menéndez (p. 114). The reader is left wondering what evidence there is of this “probable” bombing. However, for the most part, Smith does a fine job interweaving primary and secondary sources with his own insight. Despite the fact that there are no pictures and very few graphs, Smith’s use of songs and humorous quotes add flavor to each chapter.
For example, when delving into the alcoholic male world of journalism, Smith quotes an editor telling a journalist, “You write much better when you’re drunk” (p. 53). Overall, Smith’s book leaves one with a much greater understanding of the struggles and triumphs journalism went through, and gives the reader a desire to begin pouring over the archives of newspapers like Por Qué?
Zachary Cuddy – Southwestern College (California).
[IF]An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic – SMITH (THT)
SMITH, Steven Carl. An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. 264p. Resenha de: ARENDT, Emily J. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.727-728, ago., 2019.
New York City has long been considered the center of the American publishing industry. Although scholars have examined the mid-nineteenth-century figures— titans like George Palmer Putnam and the Harper Brothers—who are often credited with establishing the Big Apple’s preeminence in the book trade, Steven Carl Smith offers a rewarding glimpse into the lesser-known figures who preceded them and laid the crucial groundwork for print culture to flourish in the United States. Tracing the rise of New York’s publishing industry from the 1780s through the 1820s, Smith demonstrates how those involved in the book trade (printers, publishers, and booksellers) built local, regional, and national networks that allowed them to supply domestically manufactured books to a “population that had an insatiable appetite for knowledge” (p. 5).
Smith accomplishes this task through five extraordinarily well-researched case studies, most of which are organized around a key figure in the industry. The first looks at Samuel Loudon, an on-again, off-again state printer, to illustrate how printers helped rebuild political communication networks following the Revolution. Next, Smith uses William Gordon’s history of the American Revolution and its roundabout path to publication in the United States to argue that the domestic publishing industry played a vital role in the project of nation building. His next chapter reveals the power of printers to divide rather than unite Americans by exploring the bookshop politics of John Ward Fenno, a devoted Federalist who challenged Republican competitors and reflected the growing partisan spirit gripping the country by the late 1700s. The next case study focuses on the literary fairs that proved pivotal in crafting the trade into a movement for national self-sufficiency, as printers and publishers convinced booksellers and consumers to buy American-made rather than imported texts. The final chapter surveys the emergence of a national book trade as exemplified in the work of Evert Duyckinck, an enterprising capitalist involved in the sale and distribution of texts—especially cheap schoolbooks—that he solicited based on a keen understanding of what American readers wanted and needed. These examples demonstrate the key role played by early printers, publishers, and merchants in making New York’s publishing trade nationally significant.
Although An Empire of Print primarily offers an in-depth look at some major players in the emergence of a domestic publishing industry, Smith also provides a useful contribution to bigger debates over the rise of the market economy and the creation of a national print culture that connected Americans together through the act of reading. Indeed, he very successfully shows that the distribution networks built by men like Fenno and Duyckinck helped shape a national market for printed works well before 1830. Although it is intuitive that the creation of a national print market would entail the emergence of an “imagined community” of diverse readers, further examination of reception alongside distribution is warranted. In all, however, Smith’s impressive use of newspapers, personal correspondence, estate inventories, account books, and other financial records offers ample evidence to support his contentions.
While this monograph will prove essential reading to scholars interested in the history of the book in early America, it is probably not appropriate reading for most students at the secondary level or in college survey courses. I can imagine, however, that motivated educators would find much of interest and use in preparing lessons on the early republic. In particular, the chapters on print and ideology could be used as background for really excellent lessons incorporating primary sources into the classroom. For instance, Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States, the topic of Chapter 2, is readily available in digitized forms and could be excerpted for students to explore how printers in the late 1700s “helped shape the new nation’s understanding of its history and its possibilities for the future by creating a national reading public attentive to its recent past” (p. 46). The third chapter on Federalist John Ward Fenno could likewise provide inspiration for educators interested in helping students explore the rancorous partisan print culture of the 1790s so readily apparent in periodicals from the time. Well-written and meticulously researched, this volume offers an important look at how New York’s publishing industry helped shape the social, economic, and political life of the early republic.
Emily J. Arendt – Montana State University Billings.
[IF]Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 – STRANG (THT)
STRANG, Cameron B. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 376p. Resenha de: CLUXTON, Hadley Sinclair. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.728-730, ago., 2019.
On the cusp of the nineteenth century, astronomers employed by Spain and the United States set out to survey the boundary between Spanish Florida and the United States as negotiated in the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo. Armed with a variety of scientific apparatus and a bevy of enslaved black men, the two imperial parties—both, ironically, headed by men of British descent—began the arduous task of making the astronomical observations that would establish the new line between nations. Each side boasted of their astronomical prowess, and each side denigrated the other’s supposed failures. However, it was not these imperially funded astronomers who ultimately decided the fate of this expedition. By their own admission, the surveyors never could have hacked their way through the dense foliage or persevered through the Mississippi River’s swamplands without the involuntary assistance of the enslaved black men rented out from nearby plantations. Furthermore, the entire expedition came to a screeching halt in 1800, when the armed resistance of Creek and Seminole peoples forced the empires to abandon their boundary survey. This is but one of many fascinating case studies that historian Cameron B. Strang presents on the production of natural knowledge in the Gulf South in Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850.
Taking cues from one of his mentors, the inimitable historian Jorge Cañizares- Esguerra, Strang joyously exhumed from the archives rich and entangled narratives on the production of natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands and presented these histories in all their glorious complexity. The positive influence of other mentors can also be seen in Strang’s work: Jan Golinski’s constructivism, James Sidbury’s work on race, and Julia Rodriguez’s histories of science in Latin America. In Frontiers of Science, Strang presents a mosaic of case studies highlighting a diversity of Gulf South borderlands places, voices, and branches of natural knowledge. Incorporating a variety of knowledge practices—including astronomy, cartography, conchology, now-debunked phrenology, botany, and ethnography—these case studies defy the myth that only Anglo-Americans in the original thirteen colonies participated in the production of natural knowledge in America, or that scientific knowledge merely diffused outward from metropole to periphery. Rather, Strang argues that “natural knowledge and imperialism evolved together” (p. 21) and that indigenous peoples; free and enslaved blacks; Europeans from France, Spain, and Britain; Anglo-Americans; and creoles all formed part of a rich, polycentric network of intellectual exchange often characterized by loyalties as malleable as political boundaries.
The case studies in Frontiers of Science could make worthwhile readings for undergraduate or graduate classes in the history of science, intellectual history, U.S. history, Latin American history, indigenous history, or black history, just to name a few. Although Strang regularly emphasizes the interconnectedness between imperialism and the production of knowledge, he also builds a strong case demonstrating the importance of free and enslaved blacks in the history of natural knowledge that could (and should) be included in any classroom, given appropriate professorial curating. Until U.S. imperialism ossified the United States’ control over the region, blacks in the Gulf South participated at nearly every level of natural knowledge production. In addition, Anglo-American plantation owners who generously supported the advancement of science did so with wealth created through the labor of enslaved blacks—blacks who were actively oppressed intellectually as well as physically. To this end, Strang presents evidence that white supremacists in the Gulf South wielded science to actively construct the lie of black intellectual “inferiority” in order to justify slavery. As Strang stated, “the routes that supported slavery and science were often one and the same throughout the greater Caribbean” (p. 178). Students at every age deserve to learn about the historical ways in which Anglo-Americans created and perpetuated the structural inequality that persists to this day.
One challenge with incorporating this book into a pre-existing curriculum is the fact that it defies easy categorization. While the book flows well through a variety of case studies, Strang does not oversimplify his narratives. Furthermore, the histories stretch from 1500 to 1850 and include multiple imperial, indigenous, and African or African-descended groups, which poses serious issues of periodization.
This (much-needed) presentation of the entangled nature of knowledge production creates problems when trying to squash a round story into a square framework.
If a curricular rewrite is not feasible, one suggestion might be to excerpt case studies where they fit into a pre-existing outline. Another suggestion is to change the frameworks within which we study and teach history.
Strang calls for diversity in places and voices, as well as a more inclusive understanding of what constitutes “science.” Apart from a dearth of female perspectives, this book achieves that goal. Frontiers of Science is an intellectual love song to the Gulf South’s forgotten histories of natural knowledge, a quilt of intriguing case studies that relish in their inability to be readily categorized and constrained within our narrow historiographic frameworks. Strang’s book is a solid contribution to a burgeoning field—the history of natural knowledge in the Atlantic World—a field perhaps not in the process of consolidation, but rather in the process of decolonization.
Hadley Sinclair Cluxton – Odyssey School (Asheville, North Carolina).
[IF]Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry – CHARLES (THT)
CHARLES, Patrick J. Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry. New York: Prometheus Books, 2019. 558p. Resenha de: BABITZKE, Cari S. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.524-526, may., 2019.
Patrick J. Charles opens this new synthesis of the history of firearms rights and advocacy with a warning to scholars: if historians of firearms and gun rights politics in the U.S. adhere to the accepted principles of scholarly inquiry, the contours of the debate and the field must shift. According to Charles, far too much historical work on firearms has been “principled on legal advocacy, political activism,” and “expanding the meaning and the scope of the Second Amendment as broadly as possible” (p. 15). Rather than abandon the field to these alternative histories, Charles draws on his own lengthy career in legal history alongside new research into source materials such as hunting and shooting magazines, newspapers, and manuscript collections to understand the evolution of gun rights politics and rhetoric and the rise of the “Standard Model” interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Charles begins by narrowing the temporal boundaries of the debate over the Second Amendment. After the Civil War, the majority of Americans reached a consensus regarding access to arms—namely, that “state and local governments maintained broad police powers to regulate dangerous weapons in the interest of public safety…so long as they did not utterly destroy the armed citizenry model of the Second Amendment,” without encroaching on the individual’s right to armed self-defense in “extreme cases” (p. 313). This consensus fractured during the second half of the twentieth century, as firearms advocates—notably in organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA)—pushed for a more expansive reading of the Second Amendment. According to Charles, from 1970 to 1980, a substantial amount of this advocacy included the active recruitment of academic scholars to develop and promote a literature reworking the historical meaning of the Second Amendment. This academic push culminated in a new “Standard Model” of the amendment, claiming protection for personal firearms ownership uncoupled from its longstanding connections to militia service and civic republicanism. From 1980 to 1999, Charles argues, studies funded by the NRA and other gun rights organizations effectively revised the field, substituting the Standard Model for the militia-centric understanding of the Second Amendment (p. 280).
At the turn of the twenty-first century, proponents of the Standard Model received a major boost when Attorney General—and NRA member—John Ashcroft modified the Department of Justice’s longstanding position on the Second Amendment.
According to Charles, once the DOJ shifted its position on the Second Amendment, the Standard Model became accepted in federal courts. In United States v. Emerson (2001), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appellate court to adopt the Standard Model. In 2008, the Supreme Court waded into the debate, taking up District of Columbia v. Heller. In its majority opinion, the Court sided with the Standard Model, interpreting the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to own firearms. And finally, in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court applied the Standard Model of the Second Amendment to the states.
Armed in America makes two important contributions to scholarship and teaching on the gun rights debate. In his chapter, “The Birth of the Gun-Rights Golden Age,” Charles examines the late twentieth-century rise in advocacy, offering a concise yet thorough timeline for the interpretive shift in the Second Amendment and important changes in the national legal structure regarding individual firearms ownership. This chapter provides integral information to students interested in the evolution of the legal right to arms in the United States.
But Charles offers a second teaching tool. While presenting this history, he keeps the process of scholarly inquiry front and center. To educators engaged in scholarly training, this book serves as a keen example for budding scholars.
Charles’ research project is front and center—developing a research question; understanding the state of the field and his place therein; locating and using primary sources—and he acknowledges his challenges in working with such a contentious subject and the ever-present reality of today’s gun politics.
Cari S. Babitzke – Boston University. Acessar publicação original
[IF]
In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century – FALLACE (THT)
FALLACE, Thomas D. In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century. New York: Teachers College Press, 2018. 215p. Resenha de: OROMANER, Mark. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.525-526, may., 2019.
In the Shadow of Authoritarianism is a timely contribution to the understanding of how American primary and secondary elite educational thinkers responded to perceived threats from approximately World War I to the 1980s. These perceived internal and external threats (the “Other” against which American educational philosophy evolved) are: Prussianism, propaganda, collectivism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, the space race, mind control, and moral relativity. A chapter is devoted to each of these chronologically ordered episodes. Thomas D. Fallace covers this almost century-long period in a clearly presented and well-documented 149 pages of text. The book is suited as an overview in undergraduate and graduate courses in the History of Twentieth-Century American Educational Philosophy and in other courses in education, sociology, political science, and history that focus on the relationship between politics and education. For students who wish to pursue a particular thinker, time period, school of thought, or social/political movement, Fallace has provided thirty-two pages of Notes and eighteen pages of Bibliography.
During the twentieth century, authoritarianism was used “to depict the outlook… characterized by social hierarchy, ideological homogeneity, and intolerance for dissent” (p. 1). Schools were central for the transmission of authoritarian ideology and values to young people. Under such a system, students were taught to be docile, obedient, intolerant, and compliant. In contrast, under a democratic system (e.g., the United States), students were taught to be open-minded, balanced, and skeptical. These contrasts are, of course, ideal types—however, they are “what most U.S. educators told themselves and one another repeatedly between World War I and the 1980s” (p. 1). Regardless of the changing geopolitical realities, listed above, the reaction of “most leading American educators remained constant” (p.1). That is, to teach students how to think, not what to think. Thus, the avoidance of propaganda and indoctrination in the classroom.
The general agreement that the emphasis in schools should be on the how rather than the what to think left U.S. intellectuals to debate the meaning of this phrase and to adjust to the various challenges the American system faced. Should the curriculum be based on liberal arts, on social issues, on discipline inquiry, on exploration of students’ values and morals? Fallace is well aware that the Constitution of the United States delegates authority over education to the states, and that it is an error to assume that the rhetoric of reform of educational leaders “reflected what was actually going on in the majority of U.S. classrooms at any given time” (p. 3). Throughout most of the twentieth century, the most prominent and influential educational thinker was the Teachers College, Columbia Universitybased philosopher John Dewey. In a 1916 address, Dewey argued that the U.S.
should no longer emulate the German system of education (Prussianism) with its emphasis on bureaucracy, centralization, and regulation. Rather, the American system should emphasize persuasion, expert knowledge, and a student-centered philosophy and pedagogy that stressed how to think. World War I also gave rise to a perceived domestic threat to democratic education; government propaganda to gain support for the war. Given current and recent fears over the contents of textbooks, social media, “fake news” in the traditional media, and the concentration of media channels, Chapter 2, “In the Shadow of Propaganda,” is of particular relevance today.
The reactions of educational leaders to Prussianism and propaganda set the stage for later reactions to fascism, Nazism, and communism, and to post-World War II threats from mind control and technological challenges symbolized by Sputnik. Limitations of space prevent me from describing the nuanced job that Fallace does in presenting the often conflicting views of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers in attempting to ensure that the American educational system is student-oriented and continues to emphasize the how rather than the what to think. In the final chapter (Chapter 8), Fallace argues that the liberal consensus after World War II “collapsed under the weight of domestic turmoil brought on by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War” (p. 136). One influential reaction was the emergence of Lawrence Kohlberg’s developmental framework as a guide to moral growth in a democracy. The pressing question now was: How do we teach values and morality and still say that in a democratic society, education will stress how to think and not what to think? The answer appears to be that the importance of schools as sites building free-thinking citizens has been marginalized by a view of the schools as sites that prepare students for college and careers. I know of no better source to engage students in analyses of where American educational philosophy has been during the past century, and where it may be in the near future than In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century.
Mark Oromaner – New York City
[IF]The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion – JACKSON (THT)
JACKSON, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. p. Resenha de: IGMEN, Ali. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.527-529, may., 2019.
It is an intimidating if not impossible task to review Peter Jackson’s book, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion. First and foremost, Jackson is one of the founders of the study of the Mongol, and Central Eurasian history in general. The second reason is the encyclopedic breadth of this book, which may be regarded as is an extensive accompaniment to his seminal 2005 book, recently published in second edition, The Mongols and the West. Jackson begins his book by referring to the new corrective scholarship that does not focus solely on the destructive force of the Mongol invasions with a clear statement that he is “concerned equally to avoid minimizing the shock of the Mongol conquest” (p. 6). He also acknowledges the superior siege technology of these “infidel nomads” as opposed to the urbanized societies of Central Eurasia (p. 6). His book tells the story of these infidel masters over the Muslim subjects, mostly from the view of the latter, especially because Jackson examines the role of Muslim allies, or client rulers of the Mongols. One of the main goals of this book is its emphasis on the Mongol territories in Central Asia as opposed to more extensively studied Jochid lands (the Qipchaq khanate or the Golden Horde) and the Ilkhanate. Despite this particular goal, Jackson makes sure we do not forget about Chinggis Khan’s offspring such as Qubilai Khan, who ruled lands as far away as China.
Jackson’s book investigates how the Mongols came to rule such large Islamized territories in such a short time. It also examines the sources, including the wars between Mongol khanates and the extent of destruction of the Mongol conquest, while describing their relationships between the subjugated Muslim rulers and their subjects. The introductory chapter on Jackson’s sources provides detailed information on the writings of mostly medieval Sunni Muslim authors along with two Shī’īs, refreshingly relying on those who mostly wrote in Persian and Arabic, including the newly discovered Akhbār-i mughūlan by Qutb al-Din Shīrāzī (p.145), as opposed to Christian and European travel accounts.
The book is divided into two parts: the first part explores the Mongol conquest to ca. 1260, and the second covers the period of divided successor states with an epilogue that elaborates on the long-term Mongol impact on the Muslim societies of Central Eurasia as late as to the nineteenth century. Although the intricate if occasionally dense first part on the conquest is necessary, educators like myself will find it most useful. It is intriguing to learn about the extent of interconnectedness of the conquered Muslim societies in Eurasia and their Mongol rulers, while understanding the limitations of commercial, artistic, and religious exchanges.
We also learn about the strategic regional Muslim leaders’ relations with the Mongol conquerors. The account of the evolution of the linguistic conversions makes the story even more fascinating. The negotiations between those local rulers who kept their thrones and the Mongol victors tell a more interesting story than the existing accounts of Mongol despotism. The case in point is Jackson’s discussion of the potential of Muslim women in gaining agency under the Mongol rule. Jackson’s analysis of the extent of the repressive laws and taxes provide possible new explanations of the Mongol rule. Furthermore, his analysis of the relationship between the Tājīk bureaucrats and the Mongol military seemed particularly enlightening to me, who is interested in the dynamics of civilian and military interactions. Jackson points out that “the fact that civilian and military affairs were not clearly differentiated added to the instability,” referring to the late thirteenth-century Ilkhanate era (p. 412). The final two chapters complicate the Islamization processes in the Mongol successor states, explaining the lengthy and sporadic nature of conversions.
Without giving away Jackson’s conclusions on Islamization, I can say that he provides a highly nuanced history that challenges any linear and teleological accounts of the Mongol conquest of the Islamic lands. In addition to the breadth and wealth of information, Jackson’s book is generous to the scholars of the Mongols, including younger scholars such as Timothy May. The mostly thematic character of the book results in a shifting chronology, which assumes that the readers possess some previous knowledge of this complex history. Most of the book provides an insight to the intricate history of Mongol politics in conquered lands. The exquisite maps, images, chronologies, and glossary make the book more legible to those readers who may pick it up without prior knowledge of this history. The particular military strategies, coupled with the political intrigue of the Mongols led to a fusion of Muslim, Mongol, and other indigenous cultures, not always destroying what existed before the conquest. Peter Jackson’s book is a worthy reflection of this sophisticated history that is suitable for advanced and graduate students and scholars who possess the basic knowledge of the Mongol conquest and Islamic societies and cultures of the region.
Ali Igmen – California State University, Long Beach.
[IF]
The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire – KELLY (THT)
KELLY, Matthew Kraig. The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. 264p. Resenha de: SCHONK JR., Kenneth. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.529-530, may., 2019.
Matthew Kraig Kelly argues that the long-held conception that Palestinian nationalism is equal to criminality was a conscious construct by British and Zionist (“Zionist” is used here to represent Israeli nationalists) agents to marginalize and negate Arab agency in the Middle East. At its core, The Crime of Nationalism is the story of how ideas, opinions, and biases become discourse. Specifically, Kelly reconstructs the evolution of what he calls the construction of a “crimino-national” narrative of the Great Revolt of 1936 and its immediate and long-term aftermath (p. 2). At the onset of this era, Palestinian insurgency was taken by the British at face-value: a burgeoning nationalist movement seeking political agency in the years after Sykes-Picot, when British interests in southwest Asia were increasingly influenced by Zionist leaders. As tensions flared in 1936, the British began to categorize Palestinian action as criminal and terrorist, thereby associating any and all action by the latter as irrationally violent and dissolute. Within a period of just a few years, Arab transgression—whether it was conducted through political negotiation or in public protest—was defined as violence intent on undermining the ascendant Anglo-Zionist social order.
Kelly queries as to who has the right to use force. Through the use of letters, political missives, and newspaper accounts of all sides involved in this conflict, he convincingly argues that the British came to undermine Palestinian efforts to utilize violent—and peaceful—tactics in their nationalist endeavors. Such efforts yielded myriad results for the British. Primarily was that Arab action in Palestine was saddled with a discourse of violence, thereby negating any nationalist outcome.
Relatedly, such a discourse has had the effect of creating a global consensus that Palestinian nationalism was—and is—tantamount to criminal and terrorist activity.
Moreover, this direct involvement by the British in defining Palestinian action helped to justify any violent actions by the British and Zionists as being done in the name of justice and the maintenance of social order. In sum, these actions enabled the British and Zionists to self-justify their own use of force against Palestinians. This narrative transgresses both the historiography and conventional wisdom of the era that, Kelly argues, has been constructed by the British and has been incorrectly reified in scholarly works on the history of Palestine. As such, Kelly serves to correct this historiography, shedding light on how an ahistorical narrative becomes cemented.
This book has many applications for syllabi in myriad undergraduate and graduate courses on the modern Middle East, as well as those on the British Empire.
Adopters should not be dissuaded by the relatively brief time period covered in The Crime of Nationalism, as the implications of the events in question have relevance up through the present day. Less obvious is the teaching applicability in global history courses on nationalism, crime and criminality, and historical theory. Kelly consistently and effectively demonstrates how events in Palestine were influenced by and had connections to historical events and agents abroad. One such example regards the specter of recent events in Ireland, and how this shaped Britain’s response to the Great Revolt of 1936 and the events that followed in its wake. Thus, the book has a transnational aspect that provides a point of entry—and value—for those who may not be experts in the history of the Middle East. Moreover, Kelly’s arguments regarding the discursive construct of criminality will be of great interest and use for courses on the history of law and order. Additionally, the book has applicability in courses on historiography and historical methods. How Kelly corrects the narrative of the Great Revolt demonstrates the value of an applied empiricism that employs a post-modern analysis of the construction of historical discourse. As noted above, Kelly rightfully intends this as a work that corrects a historiography that has long perpetuated mistruths about the events of 1936. In this regard, The Crime of Nationalism teaches to transgress—that is, how to skillfully and tactfully provide voice to the historically marginalized.
Kenneth Schonk Jr. – University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
[IF]The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas – MARTINEZ (THT)
MARTINEZ, Monica Muñoz. The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400p. Resenha de: WEBER, John. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.530-532, may., 2019.
In her remarkable book, The Injustice Never Leaves You, Monica Muñoz Martinez examines the prevalence of anti-Mexican violence in Texas in the early twentieth century, and the importance of the lingering memories and scars created by those campaigns of violence on those who survived. Beyond highlighting episodes of racialized violence in the 1910s and their importance in solidifying a segregated society in the Texas-Mexico border region, this book also focuses on the efforts by those affected by racial violence to understand and record their own version of this history that has long been denied by both officials and academics in Texas.
Martinez has produced an enormously important history of extralegal violence that demands its readers confront past crimes and their continued resonance today.
The book’s first three chapters examine three infamous episodes of anti-Mexican violence and the struggles by survivors to challenge the presumption that wanton killing of Mexicans was justified. The lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in 1910, the murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria by Texas Rangers in 1915, and the killing of fifteen ethnic Mexicans at Porvenir by a separate group of Texas Rangers in 1918 yielded no criminal convictions or punishments. They were all justified by state officials and local law enforcement as appropriate, if brutal, punishment for bandits or people deemed inherently criminal. Beyond these justifications that shielded Texas Rangers or lynch mob members from facing any punishment for their crimes, the families of the murdered and community members in each of these places fought against official versions of the past with a determined effort to maintain and cultivate their own understanding of history based in preserved community memories. In these alternate portrayals of the past that still circulate near the sites of these century-old murders, the Texas Rangers and white vigilantes were the criminals, preying on innocent, law-abiding locals. “Preserving memories,” writes Martinez, “became a strategy of resistance against historical inaccuracies and social amnesias” (p. 126).
Beyond just recounting these moments of violence, in other words, Martinez shows the continued resonance of these extralegal murders and the efforts by those affected to “insist that the state and cultural institutions stop disavowing this history and instead participate in the long process of reckoning” (p. 29).
The book’s next two chapters delve into efforts by the state of Texas and generations of historians to hide the brutal reality of racist violence and the Texas Rangers in the early twentieth century. Martinez shows that in 1919, the Texas government held off two efforts to punish state violence and mob violence. State Representative José Tomas Canales held a much-publicized investigation of the Texas Rangers in an attempt to both record their misdeeds and force their reform.
While the investigation produced thousands of pages of testimony and revealed the racist violence that animated Ranger activities in the border region, the state legislature, the adjutant general’s office, and the governor all resisted efforts to condemn past actions or reform the Rangers. Instead, Ranger activities were justified by Anglo state officials as necessary protections against endemic and inevitable banditry in the border region. As Martinez points out, the governor and the legislature also rejected efforts by civil rights advocates to pass anti-lynching legislation after a particularly brutal and public lynching in Hillsboro in early 1919. These simultaneous failures to confront both state and mob violence were, the author argues, clear proof that these forms of extralegal violence were selfreinforcing and “had a state-building function” (p. 6).
Martinez closes the book with an examination of recent efforts to use public history as a means to tell this more violent and complicated history. The author and other historians of the Texas-Mexico border region have worked to tell the true history of the Texas Rangers and vigilante violence through historical markers and, most ambitiously, through an exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin in 2016 that revealed the history of racial violence that the state had tried to justify and then hide a century earlier.
The Injustice Never Leaves You is an important and timely book that should be read and taught widely. Martinez not only reveals the centrality of racial violence in Texas history, but also makes clear that the events of the past continue to bleed into the present through memory and through the unhealed wounds of contested history.
John Weber – Old Dominion University.
[IF]From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 – PARSONS (THT)
PARSONS, Anne E.. From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 240p. Resenha de: HALL JR., Clarence Jefferson. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.532-533, may., 2019.
In From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, Anne Parsons shows how a renewed commitment to human rights and individual liberty after the horrors of World War II helped spur a movement against the long-term confinement of individuals diagnosed with mental illness. Using the state of Pennsylvania as a case study, Parsons highlights how pressure from mental hospital residents and employees, investigative journalists, civil rights attorneys, and progressive advocacy groups yielded significant improvements in the treatment, care, and living conditions of people with mental illnesses both inside institutions and in new, community-based settings. Inadequate funding and political support for these initiatives, however, quickly imperiled the newly won freedoms of many formerly institutionalized men and women. Sadly, as Parsons demonstrates, the convergence of increasing national crime rates, the violence and uprisings of the Civil Rights Era, and the growing public visibility of individuals diagnosed with mental illness fueled a bipartisan politics of fear. With involuntary hospitalization no longer a readily available option, many men and women exhibiting behaviors associated with mental illness—regardless of diagnosis—often found themselves arrested, jailed, and imprisoned in order to calm the anxieties of white, middleclass voters. In this way, Parsons argues, the post-war deinstitutionalization of mental health care aided in driving the late twentieth-century growth of mass incarceration, both in Pennsylvania and across the United States.
From Asylum to Prison joins a rich and growing literature on the history of the American carceral state. By centering the post-World War II expansion of the U.S. prison system squarely within the history of deinstitutionalization, Parsons reminds readers that mass incarceration, far from being a distinct historical phenomenon, has deep historical roots outside the halls of the criminal legal system. In this case, efforts to improve the care and treatment of those with mental illnesses in non-institutional settings ultimately drove many former patients back into institutional settings (and in some cases, as Parsons shows, into prisons that had once served as mental hospitals). At the same time, however, as Parsons is contending with an ongoing social and political problem in the U.S., From Asylum to Prison demonstrates—if policy makers and elected officials care to pay attention—the potentially life-changing value of historical research for the present and future. As Parsons writes, “History can be a great healer. I write about the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals and the rise of prisons in order to learn from these cycles of confinement and to work to create a more inclusive and equitable society” (p. 19). Accordingly, each chapter is replete with lessons on the countless dangers of viewing involuntary, long-term confinement in institutional settings as a remedy for the nation’s social ills. Thus, Parsons has made an important historiographical contribution that simultaneously serves as a valuable cautionary tale for public officials now and into the future.
The clear, linear narrative of From Asylum to Prison makes it an ideal text for teaching the history of deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration in the seven decades since World War II. Though Parsons focuses her study on communities and institutions across Pennsylvania, she does so without sacrificing the context that is crucial to understanding how the experiences of one state can be representative of the entire nation. Further, Parsons’ research—combining a thorough assemblage of government documents, popular literature and film, academic research studies, journalistic accounts, patient correspondence, and advocacy organizations’ records—reinforces the value of rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship. Finally, Parsons underscores the importance of understanding past choices and developments for making improvements to a criminal legal system that, at least in the case of From Asylum to Prison, remains in bad need of improvement. For these reasons, Parsons’s book would be appropriate for use with students. However, as the book does at times assume some pre-existing knowledge of broad historical context, From Asylum to Prison would best be used in either upper-division undergraduate history courses or in graduate-level seminars. Nevertheless, teachers of undergraduate survey courses in U.S. history, and possibly even Advanced Placement high school history teachers, may find particular portions of the book useful for constructing their own lessons on the tangled politics of mental health care and imprisonment in post-war America.
Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr. – Queensborough Community College / CUNY.
[IF]
Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego – PATIÑO (THT)
PATIÑO, Jimmy. Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 356p. Resenha de: RODRÍGUEZ, Elvia. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.533-535, may., 2019.
In his book, Jimmy Patiño analyzes how the United States’ immigration policies became a focal point for Chicano Movement activists, particularly in San Diego.
San Diego, being a borderland region, emerges as a site of unity between Chicanos and Mexican nationals, as both groups were often victims of brutality from Border Patrol agents and/or experienced the negative effects of immigration laws (family separations, wage suppression, etc.). This unity is a “raza sí, migra no” stance that propels social and political action.
Part I of the book addresses activism around immigration through the 1930s-1950s with groups like El Congreso del Pueblo que Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-Speaking People) and Hermandad Mexicana (Mexican Brotherhood). Chicanos’ activism in the 1960s and 1970s is the focus of Part II.
Here, readers learn about the efforts of organizations such as CASA Justicia and La Raza Unida Party to resist what Patiño calls the “deportation regime” and how individuals in these organizations bring about a shift in the Chicano Movement’s agenda, not only by taking on the issue of immigration, but in so doing, adopting a transnational identity that unites Chicanos and Mexicans. “Raza sí, migra no” activists then focused on appealing to both the United States and Mexico to address the root causes of illegal immigration. The final chapter in Part II momentarily moves away from immigration to look at another form of persecution that people of color encountered—police brutality. Part III deals with San Diego organizations, especially the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), protesting the Carter and Reagan administrations’ oppressive immigration procedures. Patiño uses Herman Baca, who headed many of those efforts, as a connecting thread throughout the narrative. For decades, Baca and his print shop served as the center of resistance against the deportation regime.
Raza Sí, Migra No is a book that could be assigned in an upper-division course dealing with American, immigration, or Chicano history. A discussion on labor history would also benefit from the information presented by Patiño. Chapter 2, one of the strongest sections of the book, would be a valuable addition to any women’s history class. Here, Patiño discusses how white Border Patrol agents asserted their dominance over the Mexican/Chicano community by sexually harassing and/or assaulting women of Mexican ancestry. Patiño also demonstrates the patriarchal norms of Mexican culture as women were usually seen only as wives and mothers. Due to its very specific scope, the best place for this book, however, may be in a graduate seminar. Students would certainly receive greater insights into the debates and aims of the Chicano Movement, such as organizations’ diverging stance on support for amnesty or who is a member of la raza and who is not (many Chicano individuals excluded Mexicans from this community). Raza Sí, Migra No could also be used in a seminar on social movements, as Patiño does a masterful job at tracing the evolution and sometimes collapse of organizations seeking rights for minorities. Aside from students, educators may also find the book useful, especially when discussing the Carter administration as well as immigration policies of the late twentieth century.
Patiño’s critical look at Chicano activism makes his book a fine addition to the field. He does not shy away from presenting fractures and even failures within the Chicano movement. Moreover, Patiño’s examination of the coalition between Chicanos and African Americans (against police brutality in San Diego) is not typically found in this scholarship, but is a welcome contribution. While Raza Sí, Migra No presents fascinating issues, in some instances, the reader is left wanting more. For example, in Chapter 7, Patiño brings up the Ku Klux Klan’s plan to start a patrolling program on the U.S.-Mexico border, and he goes on to discuss the press coverage the Klan received over their plan, but then readers do not get more information on this very intriguing matter. Similarly, Patiño raises the idea that “the amnesty provisions of [the Reagan administration’s] IRCA co-opted social movement forces that could have focused on uprooting the deportation regime” (p. 265), but does so in the conclusion and devotes only a few sentences to this assertion. These exceptions aside, Raza Sí, Migra No absolutely furthers the scholarship of Chicano activism, but in addressing immigration policies, this book also sheds light on a matter that is at the forefront of today’s political climate.
Elvia Rodríguez – California State University, Fresno.
[IF]
Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World – CARTER (THT)
CARTER, Sarah Anne. Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 216p. Resenha de: BICKFORD III, John. The History Teacher, v.52, n.3, p.523-524, may., 2019.
Imagine a class exploring and classifying objects like archivists in a museum. Students’ thinking shifts from observation to inference as items are considered and reconsidered; the teacher guides attention towards concealed, unnoticed, or misunderstood aspects. Sarah Anne Carter’s Object Lessons details how nineteenthcentury American teachers used common items as catalysts for learning.
Object lessons, in their simplest form, appear as the teacher positions students to analyze and organize. Heuristics were taught and scaffolded, with the intent to teach how to think, not what to remember. Students scrutinized the minutiae for meaning and systematized their findings: natural or assembled, animal or plant, organic or inorganic, to list a few. Learners’ abstract thinking generated multifaceted understandings about the origins and avenues of familiar, overlooked objects (Chapters 1 and 2). The history and iterations of this interdisciplinary, inquirybased pedagogy are traced from Old World Europe to antebellum New York and the postbellum South; the reader follows the evolution of object lessons from classrooms into fictional stories and the trade cards, magazine advertisements, and street posters of political campaigns and business adverts (Chapter 3). Carter’s book is accessible, evocative, and engaging, much like the objects that form the book’s footing.
Object Lessons has import for scholars and teachers of distinct disciplines. Carter’s work contributes to the fields of American Studies, American history, and the history and foundations of American education. Education foundations researchers will recognize the ingenuity of having students interrogate windows, ladders, chairs, granite, tin, and other everyday objects for interconnections and manifest labor in their construction and relocation. Educational philosophy scholars will appreciate the epistemological and ontological assumptions in an ancestor of cognitive constructivism and sociocultural theory—prior knowledge impacts interpretations of new information; understandings are contextually contingent and emergent; evocative catalysts coupled with age-appropriate scaffolding sparks criticality; and through observation and reflection, teachers can better understand how students construct, organize, and articulate understandings. English teachers will identify a myriad of critical thinking and literacy opportunities, like close readings, text-based writing, and intertextual connections between diverse sources. Early childhood experts will spot the elicitation of curiosity in the hands-on, minds-on inquiry of a forebear of the Reggio Emilia approach and Montessori education. Educational psychologists will identify the cognitive tasks—analysis, synthesis, and evaluation— as students’ schema is refined with new experiences and understandings. Teachers will be reminded of education’s cyclical nature: inquiry, criticality, disciplinary literacy, interdisciplinary themes, and a relevant curricula that refine students’ prior knowledge all appeared within nineteenth-century object lessons and in twentyfirst- century educational initiatives. History teachers, especially, will likely find a treasury of new ideas. History students can engage in object lessons to experience the novelty, to recognize the austerity of nineteenth-century American schooling, and to illumine nineteenth-century America’s racial and social hierarchy (Chapter 4).
To highlight one example, the book features a detail-laden photograph of a white teacher leading a class of African American students examining a Native American. Carter unpacks this living object lesson to consider the accompanying ethical considerations along with a myriad of misrepresentations and anachronisms (pp. 113-114). Modeling how teachers were to guide scrutiny through interjection of obscure yet important details at opportune times, Carter points out how the school name of Hampton Institute, located in the photograph’s title, would mean little to students. The Hampton Institute was founded to train newly freed African Americans for service for which its most famous alumnus, Booker T.
Washington, would later be synonymous. Not grounded in literacy, object lessons complemented Hampton students’ training in gardening, farming, washing, and ironing. Photographs of Hampton’s newly freed African Americans learning to labor can offer an aperture through which twenty-first-century inhabitants can view America’s nineteenth-century past.
Object lessons ebbed, as Carter details, towards the nineteenth century’s end as new trends with differing emphases emerged. Traces of object lessons have remained or have reemerged at times. As Carter argues, “That some nineteenthcentury Americans learned and believed that things and pictures could stabilize or even crystallize ideas, however simple, should be part of the history of ideas in the United States” (p. 137).
John H. Bickford III – Eastern Illinois University
[IF]