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New Books in Women’s History

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Judy Coffin:

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day, (2013).
A history of shame and changing social norms, of privacy and how a “right” to privacy was established, and of changes in what families will and will not confess — to themselves and to others. It’s bold, refreshing, and readable. (In fact it comes with Hilary Mantel’s endorsement.) Published in Great Britain in January, the book due out here at the beginning of April. You can read the introduction on the Amazon website, and pre-order. This is a book that everyone interested in gender, sexuality, and families will want to read.

Linda Greenhouse & Reva Seigel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, (2010).
Here’s another readable and important book. It reconstructs the everyday politics of contraception and abortion before Roe v. Wade, making it clear that the now landmark decision was one case among many, the justices’ reasoning was rather narrowly cast. This is not an all-roads-led-to-Roe story; it is much more interesting, unpredictable, and historical than that. Siegel is a professor at Yale Law School and Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Lizeth Elizondo:

Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, (2009).
Catherine Ramirez illuminates the ways in which Mexican-American women rebelled and chose to express their individuality by joining the popular zoot suit movement of the 1940s. By focusing on the women behind the suit, Ramirez offers a revisionist interpretation of the involvement of women in the infamous Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943.

Alison Frazier:

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2012).
In one volume, Heffernan presents the essential text and tools for readers to begin thinking through the unique and precious “prison diary” of Vibia Perpetua, the visionary young mother who led a mixed-gender group of Christians to martyrdom in early third-century North Africa.

Laurie Green:

Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, (2012).
In contrast to the enormous attention paid to the acclaimed African American singer, actor, radical and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, his extraordinary wife, Eslanda “Essie” Robeson has remained in the historical shadows. For the first time, in Ransby’s biography, we can grasp her amazing lifework, including her intellectual career as an anthropologist and journalist, and her passionate involvement in women’s rights, racial justice and anti-colonialist movements on an international scale.

Janine Jones:

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of a Harem Girlhood, (1995).
Scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi’s captivating memoir of her childhood in a Moroccan harem during the end of the French Protectorate is not to be missed.

Halidé Edib, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New, 2nd ed., (2009).
Turkish journalist, novelist, and early feminist activist Halide Edib’s lyrical memoir of growing to adulthood during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire is filled with stories of tragedy, love, and strength.

Anne Martinez:

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, (2012).
Schaeffer puts desire in the context of the global economy, class, and cultural citizenship in this book about transnational cyber-relationships since the 1990s.

Joan Neuberger:

Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, (2006).
“I started school in 1948. In my class of more than forty children, I was the only one who had a father.” This memoir traces Marina Goldovskaya’s career in Soviet television and her emergence as Russia’s best known documentary film maker. Along the way, we get an inside look at the everyday politics of survival and success in two of late-twentieth-century Russia’s most interesting industries.

Megan Seaholm:

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, (2012).
The significant role that women played in the rise of conservatism from the 1950s through the 1964 presidential campaign. This careful study of conservative women in southern California explains how “populist housewives” became impassioned activists who influenced the conservative agenda for decades.

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, (2011).
Fifty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, often credited with igniting the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Coontz examines this book and the impact it had on readers.

Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, (2010).
Cultural historian Susan Douglas has written a perceptive and often humorous book about the way that icons of popular culture encouraged a generation of women (the “millennials”) to believe that feminism had accomplished its goals.

Ann Twinam and Susan Deans-Smith both recommend:

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, (2006).
The wonderfully readable and compelling book tells the story of Malintzin, the young Nahua woman who became Hernando Cortés’ translator and mistress during the conquest of Mexico. Townsend takes on the difficult task of giving voice to someone who, while typically vilified as a traitor and sexual siren, left no words of her own. The resulting portrait allows us to see Malintzin’s understanding of her situation and the difficult choices she made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

by Hannah Ballard

Flip through the pages of almost any American history textbook. Within the first few sections, you will find paragraphs dedicated to the American Revolution and the ideological groundwork that supported it; the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology that surrounds Abraham Lincoln; the rise of a cotton-based economy in the South and the enslaved manpower that sustained it; the westward expansion of the American population and the lines of communication andtransportation that they created in the wake of their migration. Fast forward to the twentieth century and that same textbook will likely devote space to the Manhattan Project, the Civil Rights Movement, and, perhaps less commonly, the country’s increasing reliance on foreign oil. In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege ambitiously attempts to reconceptualize this well-traversed historical terrain, first and foremost, as “a story of people struggling with the earthy, organic substances that are integral to the human predicament.” In each chapter, Fiege uses his riveting storytelling abilities to show that the nation’s history “in every way imaginable – from mountains to monuments – is the story of a nation and its nature.”

The Republic of Nature challenges the historiography that relegates environmental history to the margins of key episodes in the nation’s history. By locating “nature” in some of the more familiar narratives of the American past, he forces his reader to ask what role nature plays in history and how the answer to that question shifts our understanding of human actions, interactions, and reactions between groups and with their environment. For instance, Fiege’s argument about the nature of slavery – namely that the driving force behind the institution was the marriage of plants and people – forced this particular reader (who considers herself at least somewhat familiar with American slavery) to rethink my understanding of the peculiar institution. Instead of a capitalist society in which commodification of the enslaved human body constituted the prime motivations of the master, Fiege recasts this familiar story as a power struggle between human (master) and plant (cotton) in which masters often failed to control the plant and thus transferred that loss of power to their slaves by more tightly controlling their lives and the productive abilities of their bodies.

American loggers, 1908 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Cotton farmers in the American south sometime between 1880 and 1897 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Workers at the Central Park Zoo in New York City manicure an elephant, date unknown (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

As title clearly indicates, Fiege’s work is limited to the history of the United States. It is interesting to consider how his work could be expanded beyond national borders to include the transnational perspective that is beginning to permeate the historical discipline. Fiege’s decision to write from a national perspective, however, produced a book that locates “nature” in varied contexts in order to unmake the familiar and remake it with an environmental focus. Occasionally, in the sweeping scope of his scholarship, the notion of “nature” becomes fuzzy as he attempts to thread it through such disparate events over a substantial expanse of time. With those minor criticisms in mind, this reader will still take distinguished environmental historian William Cronon’s word for it: “No book before it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’ No one who cares about American history can ignore what Fiege has to say.”

Honorable Mention of 2013 Essay Contest: Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg by Rod Gragg (2000)

by Adrienne Morea

Harry Burgwyn was twenty-one years old when he led more than eight hundred soldiers of the 26th North Carolina Infantry into battle at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Two and a half days later, after two bloody assaults, fewer than one hundred remained fit for duty. According to some calculations, the 26th North Carolina “incurred the greatest casualties of any regiment at Gettysburg” (Gragg 210). Despite these losses, the 26th rebuilt itself and continued fighting for an additional twenty-one months.

This fascinating regiment is the subject of Rod Gragg’s Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg. As the subtitle indicates, the majority of the book covers the Gettysburg campaign, but it is also an admirable history of the 26th North Carolina and its role in the American Civil War, from the regiment’s establishment in the summer of 1861 to its surrender at Appomattox and the postwar lives of its survivors.

This book is the story of the men and their regiment. By and large, it is not about politics, nor is it an argument about the causes or broad issues of the war. It is a narrative of the experiences of men and boys, in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield. Such a detailed, personal view can enhance anyone’s understanding of the monumental history involved.

Readers make the acquaintance of many Tar Heels, from privates to generals, who fought in or were closely associated with the 26th North Carolina. This regiment was remarkable for the youthfulness of its commanders, several of whom were college students before the war. Colonel Henry King Burgwyn Jr. had graduated from two

institutions of higher education before he was twenty. Major John Thomas Jones, twenty-two, had been a schoolmate of Burgwyn. Lieutenant Colonel John Randolph Lane turned twenty-eight the day after the fighting at Gettysburg ended. At thirty-four, Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew, who commanded the brigade that included the 26th, was already an accomplished scholar in several disciplines. The officers are important and engaging characters, but they are not the entire story. Readers also meet lowlier fellows such as Private Jimmie Moore, a farmer’s son who was fifteen when he enlisted and seventeen when he was wounded at Gettysburg, and Julius Lineback, a slight, observant musician of twenty-eight.

Gragg tells the tale with eloquence, with great affection for the men of the 26th, and with respect for their opponents in blue. Covered with Glory is a work of nonfiction, but it is also a fine piece of storytelling. Sixteen pages of images help to put faces on the people in the text.

We are now in the sesquicentennial year of the Gettysburg campaign. This is a fitting time to study the events and people of the Civil War. As Lane said in a postwar speech, the story of the men of the 26th does not belong only to North Carolina or to the South, but rather it is “the common heritage of the American nation” and represents “the high-water mark of what Americans have done and can do” (Gragg 245). If you are interested in the American Civil War, in nineteenth-century life, or in military history, you should read this book. If you are or ever have been a college student in your twenties, you should read this book.

Photo credits:

Unidentified Union soldier, 1860-1870 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

And be sure to check out Kristopher Yingling’s winning submission to Not Even Past’s Spring Essay Contest.

The Founders and Finance by Thomas K. McGraw (2012)

by Mark Eaker

Thomas McGraw argues that there was something in the background of immigrants to the United States that distinguished them from native born Americans and contributed to their suitability to become Secretaries of the Treasury. Including those born in Africa, less than 8% of the population was not native born and yet four of the first 6 Treasury Secretaries were immigrants. They served in that capacity for 78 percent of the period from 1789 through 1816. McGraw makes his case based almost entirely on the two most important of the Treasury Secretaries, Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin.

Most of the Founders, like Washington, Jefferson and Madison under whom Hamilton and Gallatin served, were raised as wealthy members of the planter class. Their experiences and lifestyles revolved around agriculture and large landholdings. In contrast Hamilton and Gallatin both had early exposure to merchant activities in which they developed knowledge of markets and finance. Hamilton had little interest in land and agriculture and although Gallatin had a romantic notion of land and the West, he was not successful as a landowner.

Although plausible, the argument is not very convincing. First, McGraw provides no evidence to connect immigrants in general with a merchant background. He does not even make that connection with the two other Treasury Secretaries who were immigrants. Second, Gallatin shared the Republican view that land and agriculture were of paramount importance to the future of the country even though he came from an urban background.

A daguerreotype of Albert Gallatin, taken sometime between 1844 and 1860 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Fortunately, the linkage between Hamilton and Gallatin’s service to the country and their immigration status is not very important in assessing the contributions that the two men made. McGraw makes the case that they were the most dominant cabinet members in the administration in which they served. The two of them along with another immigrant, Robert Morris, who served as Superintendent of Finance under the Articles of Confederation were largely responsible for establishing the foundation of the country’s economic policy. They made the new nation credit worthy by implementing a national tax system that reduced the revolutionary war debt of the states and by establishing the Bank of the United States that provided a stable supply of currency.

A 1791 draft of Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures,” a treatise on American manufacturing (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Historians often emphasize the policy differences between Hamilton and Gallatin, but the similarities are much more important. Both men understood markets and the importance of national credit worthiness. Hamilton was instrumental in the first battle to establish the Bank of the United States and Gallatin convinced Jefferson of the need to renew the charter. The policies that each supported were less a function of their views than the views of the principals for whom they worked. Washington was a committed nationalist who believed that the Federal government should take the lead in fiscal matters. Jefferson and Madison believed in a minimal role for the Federal government and more authority for the states. Hamilton and Gallatin provided policy recommendations consistent with the beliefs of their Presidents and the functioning of the market. Both men were pragmatists who placed an emphasis on what would work rather than on ideology.

Statue of Alexander Hamilton in front of the United States Treasury Building, Washington, DC. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It is one of the great ironies of the era that had Jefferson and Madison prevented the establishment of the Bank of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase would likely not have been possible and the United States would have had difficulty fighting the War of 1812.

The Founders and Finance provides a valuable historical perspective on our current fiscal problems. The nation has confronted from its earliest days questions about our fiscal policies and the potential answers to them. McGraw died within three weeks of the publication of the book but not before he wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal. In that essay he applied the lessons of his book to our current fiscal crisis. McGraw did not offer a specific plan, but he argued the need for the type of leadership that Hamilton and Gallatin provided the nation in its first three decades.

You may also like:

Mark Eaker’s review of Lords of Finance, a history of the most influential central bankers of the 1920s

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003)

by Cameron McCoy

For African Americans in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a dream destination; black migrants were drawn to it (much as they were drawn to Chicago and Detroit) in search of freedom from the Jim Crow South. However, Los Angeles African Americans quickly confronted their limitations as a minority group. Jobs, housing, education, and political representation spearheaded blacks’ struggles for greater equality in Los Angeles. In L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present, Josh Sides argues that the migratory experience of blacks in Los Angeles was more representative of the history of urban America than that of northeastern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

Sides begins L.A. City Limits by introducing the Great Migration from the early 1900s through the 1930s, as African Americans migrated from Louisiana and Texas. He explores the growth, development, and sustainment of the Los Angeles African American community as compared to the nation as a whole, both in the north and the south. Sides highlights the roles of Leon Washington and Loren Miller as members of the black press, and the significance of the color line in the labor industry as it applied to blacks and Mexican Americans. He discusses the complex nature of racial equality and organized labor among blacks and Mexican Americans. He also uses several examples that emphasize the separation of the races; not along ethnic lines, but rather to the extent of “white” and “non-white.” As Sides notes, “Multicultural neighborhoods brought blacks and other groups into contact with one another not just as neighbors but also, at times, as fellow parishioners, club members, consumers, friends, and even spouses.” Although Los Angeles African Americans did not live in all-black neighborhoods like in Chicago and Detroit, they still struggled to define their status and “were justifiably ambivalent about their progress” prior to World War II.

World War II was a landmark event for African Americans. Between 1940 and 1970, the black population of Los Angles swelled from 63,744 to nearly 763,000. Sides labels this period as the “Second Great Migration,” and provides case studies of the African American experience from three southern cities: Houston, New Orleans, and Shreveport. He then examines how Los Angeles adjusted to this large influx of black southern migrants, revealing the adverse effects of racial segregation, by highlighting major World War II industry opportunities, the “Negro problem,” and the challenges migrants faced as they settled in South Central Los Angeles.

During the postwar era Los Angeles African Americans experienced a negative restructuring of the postwar economy, as economic parity with whites remained outside their grasp. However, there were advances in employment in major industries such as automobile, rubber, and steel manufacturing. Nevertheless, Sides emphasizes that the aerospace industry, which produced significant suburban residential growth, held to racist hiring practices. Despite these economic and employment limitations, Sides concludes that after World War II, life for black men and women in Los Angeles vastly improved. Housing discrimination during the urban crisis in the postwar era, however, together with “ghetto flight” and the emergence of a black middle class widened the gap among blacks, both financially and geographically. In addition, Mexican Americans, who at times adopted a “white or near white” identity, occupied an area within the racial hierarchy where they were viewed with far more tolerance and acceptance than blacks, according to Sides. This increased Mexican integration into white society was largely a reflection of white attitudes toward blacks and Mexicans.

Sides’s treatment of black political activism illustrates the steps Los Angeles African Americans took in responding to workplace discrimination and police brutality. In his treatment of black activism, Sides examines the signature event of the 1965-Watts Riot and the ideological differences between prominent black organizations, arguing that during the 1940s and 1950s the Communist Party was “the most outspoken and militant advocate for black equality in postwar Los Angeles.”

L.A. City Limits is an important work for students and historians of the American West, race relations, and urban studies. Sides takes a defensive position in his study of the city of Los Angeles in comparison to Chicago and Detroit. He argues that scholarly studies overemphasize the Great Migration to northern cities and a study of Los Angeles provides a more comprehensive view of the overall experience. Sides convincingly constructs the racial hierarchy among minorities, providing an element of Latin American studies that is largely absent from most Great Migration studies. Nevertheless, L.A. City Limits does not completely live up to its title. Sides’s work centers on the years 1945–1964, as opposed to the Great Depression to the present. Despite this limitation, Sides’s examination is a suitable companion to works such as Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and James R. Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989).

Photo Credits:

An employee of the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, CA, circa 1940s (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Los Angeles, circa 1950 (Image courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration)

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson (1973)

“How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Forty years on, that question still haunts the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 like the ghost of Boss Tweed. First appearing as a series of articles in Rolling Stone Magazine, Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 presidential election shines light on the darker side of the democratic process. Thompson, author of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has the right kind of eyes to see the corruption, the lunacy, and the sheer depravity of choosing a chief executive in modern America. In his landmark work of Gonzo journalism, Thompson chronicles the Democratic Party’s struggle to mount a viable challenge to Richard Nixon as the Vietnam War raged on with no end in sight.

book cover for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Thompson powerfully sets the stage for the 1972 Democratic primary contest – a party divided, old coalitions fragmenting, and the chaos of the 1968 election looming over the process. For the first time, the Democrats would choose their nominee exclusively through state primaries rather than a combination of elections and back-room deals. The list of candidates – including Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, and Gov. George Wallace of Alabama – proved familiar but uninspiring. In the midst of this drab battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, Thompson spots an honest man in a pack of party hacks: Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

McGovern, who died last weekend at the age of 90, emerged in 1972 as the Democratic Party’s unlikely presidential nominee. As a rare liberal spokesman from a conservative state, McGovern championed the anti-war movement in the U.S.

Senate. McGovern, a former history professor and decorated World War II bomber pilot, passionately protested the Vietnam War on the Senate floor, lamenting: “I am sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” McGovern’s fledgling campaign picked up steam through the primaries of 1972, and Hunter S. Thompson went along for the ride.

Hunter S. Thompson (left) and Sen. George McGovern on the campaign trail, 1972. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As a sort of embedded journalist with the McGovern campaign, Thompson shunned the idea of impartial reporting. Objective journalism, he argued, is a “pompous contradiction in terms.” After all, selecting sources and choosing verbs are subjective activities. Besides, Thompson reasoned, artificial objectivity blinded most journalists to the dishonesty of politicians like Richard Nixon, his main antagonist. By this reasoning, Thompson publicly declared his support for McGovern early in the primaries.

At times, Thompson’s irreverent style (which he termed “Gonzo journalism”) also blurs the line between fiction and reality. On the campaign trail, he reported that a rumor was circulating that frontrunner Ed Muskie had been treated with a powerful psychoactive drug called Ibogaine. His report was true. There was indeed a rumor, but Thompson had started it himself. Similarly, Thompson sets his sights on derailing Hubert Humphrey’s nomination bid. Over the course of a brutal series of primary battles between Humphrey and McGovern, Thompson tells of suspected election fraud and attempts to circumvent the newly-instated primary system by the “old ward heeler” from Minnesota.

*Hunter S. Thompson, 1971. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

From the primaries to the convention, Thompson’s colorful prose proves both gripping and darkly humorous. The unprecedented access he gained to McGovern campaign staffers and Democratic Party chiefs enabled him to document every day of the historic contest in graphic detail. Thompson does not simply regurgitate press releases and the transcripts of pool interviews. He vividly relates the feel of life on the campaign trail – the blind euphoria, the hopeless despair, the money, the loneliness, the alcohol, and all. Thompson’s clarity and wit have firmly established Fear and Loathing as a celebrated work of political journalism and its author as an icon of American literature.

But what of the hero? What of George McGovern?

McGovern lost every state in the Union, save for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Nixon’s landslide victory represented the first time a Republican carried every Southern state and delivered the incumbent a then-record 520 electoral votes. Thompson rattles with contempt in his reflections on the Nixon landslide but maintains enough composure to analyze the reasons for McGovern’s devastating loss. First, the ugly primary fights with Humphrey left the liberal McGovern labeled as the candidate of “Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion.” Second, the fractured Democratic establishment never fully united behind its nominee.

*Senator McGovern, 1972. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Perhaps most significantly, McGovern’s running mate, Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri, was revealed to have undergone electroconvulsive therapy for depression. After waffling for days, McGovern asked Eagleton to step down to be replaced by former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. Through these debacles, Thompson portrays McGovern as an honest man making foolish mistakes. These political errors undermined public confidence in McGovern’s judgment and reinforced his image as “too liberal” for the country.

While the American public rejected McGovern in 1972, Thompson viewed him as the last best hope for America. As he writes: “The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes […] is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been.”

*Nixon at a campaign event. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

In light of the social upheaval of the 1960s and the persistent trauma of war in Vietnam, McGovern’s grassroots campaign provided a powerful contrast to the heavy-handed and often secretive Nixon Administration. Indeed, as Thompson tracked McGovern’s campaign for Rolling Stone, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein diligently investigated the June 17, 1972, Watergate burglary in the pages of the Washington Post. To avoid a probable impeachment, Nixon resigned the presidency just over two years later. As Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 brilliantly reveals, George McGovern inspired many with a vision of an honest and humane government intent on building peace at home and abroad. It is a vision that has been eroding ever since.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman (2007)

by Rachel Ozanne

In the past ten years, Americans have shown a sustained interest in cultural depictions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or the Mormon Church. South Park’s 2003 episode “All about Mormons” and the 2011 musical The Book of Mormon satirized the founding of the LDS church. Other television shows, however, like HBO’s Big Love and TLC’s Sister Wives have tried to portray other non-LDS strands of Mormonism in a more complex way by exploring modern day polygamy. Now with Mitt Romney’s nomination for the Republican Party candidate for President, the Mormon faith once again finds itself in the spotlight.

With all the drama of television, or quite frankly a presidential campaign, the historical origins of Mormonism can get lost in the shuffle. Despite all the media coverage, a religion that some scholars have deemed the quintessential American religion remains largely misunderstood by the American public. For those interested in learning more, however, about many of the fundamental doctrines and the beginnings of the Mormon (and particularly LDS) Church, I recommend Richard L. Bushman’s recent biography of Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, Jr., Rough Stone Rolling.

In Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman brings his extensive knowledge of early Mormon history to expand upon his first book about the life of Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, by tracing the entirety of Smith’s life from the cradle to the grave with a special emphasis on the cultural context out of which he came. Bushman himself is a member of the LDS Church, but his pro-Mormon bias does not prevent him from presenting Smith as a flawed human being, noting that Smith never set himself up as a perfect moral exemplar, but rather a “rough stone rolling”—one that would be smoothed over in time.

“The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith jun.” 1886 print (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Bushman’s approach to writing a biography of Joseph Smith almost necessarily focuses heavily on Smith’s spiritual development and how it went hand in hand with the development of Mormonism. Thus, the narrative of the book is punctuated by major events of Smith’s spiritual life, well known to followers of Joseph Smith: his first contact with the Angel Moroni; his discovery of the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written; the transcription of those plates into an English text; the restoration of the Aaronic priesthood and the priesthood of Melchizedek in 1829; the founding of the church in 1830; and various revelations that instituted new doctrine or prompted the growing Mormon church to move from New York to Ohio and eventually to Illinois, where Smith was killed.

However, Bushman also spends much time providing the cultural and political context of Smith’s life. In so doing, he implicitly engages with a number of debates about Mormon history. For instance, did Joseph Smith invent the Book of Mormon or was he truly divinely inspired? Was he a power hungry man who had “convenient” revelations resting the sole power of revelation for the LDS church in him or did he really hear commands from God?

1830 copy of The Book of Mormon (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Bushman’s treatment of polygamy is particularly engaging, given that mainstream Mormonism (the LDS Church) officially gave up polygamy in 1890. Even though Bushman doesn’t support polygamy himself, he tries to explain why “plural marriage” (the Mormon term for polygamy) made sense in the context of Joseph Smith’s theology. In particular, Bushman claims that Smith emphasized the importance of family, so he created, or was inspired to create, rituals to ensure that marriage and family lasted for eternity—marriage sealing and baptism for the dead, for instance. In this light, taking on multiple wives was considered another way to extend the family and preserve as many people together in the afterlife as possible.

1853 Harpers Magazine engraving of Smith being tarred and feathered (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Perhaps it is unsurprising that he takes a sympathetic view of polygamy, because he views Smith sympathetically throughout the book. Skeptics may find his matter-of-fact dealings with angels and revelations a bit hard to swallow, and strong opponents of polygamy will not likely be satisfied with Bushman’s assessment that plural marriage was mostly a loving institution at its beginning. It is important to remember, however, that Smith was not the only antebellum American experimenting with different kinds of marriage or claiming to receive messages directly from God. He was in good company with the Oneida Community, Ellen G. White and the Seventh-day Adventists, and many other 19^th-century religious groups.

The Book of Mormon Broadway musical, New York City, 2011 (Image courtesy of Brechtbug/Flickr Creative Commons)

As a biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling only tracks the development of the Church of Latter-day Saints up to Smith’s death in 1844 at the hands of some angry Illinois citizens. Readers interested in the rest of the story will have to pick up other books to learn about schisms in the early church; the trek westward of the followers of Brigham Young; the contest between Mormons and the U.S. government over the legality of polygamy; and the history of race and Mormonism. Nevertheless, Bushman’s history provides great insight for a reader trying to understand the appeal of Joseph Smith and the Mormon faith from the outside.

Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed (2009)

by Mark Eaker

For those watching the financial markets, events in Europe are front and center. Market participants await announcements by government leaders, finance ministers, central bankers, and economists with anticipation. Depending upon the degree of optimism or pessimism generated by a given announcement, the market reaction leads to hundreds of billions of dollars lost or gained on equities, currencies, bonds and commodities from Frankfurt and London to New York and Tokyo. One might assume that the enormous worldwide impact that events in Europe are having is a function of globalization, new forms of financial engineering, and the speed of information transfer brought about by the Internet. Without doubt each of those has had an impact, but as the Liaquat Ahamed’s superb history of the events leading up to the Great Depression reminds us, it has all happened before.

Lords of Finance is a multiple biography of the four most prominent central bankers of the 1920s: Mantagu Norman of the Bank of England; Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank ; Emile Moreau of the Banque de France and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank. There is a colorful supporting cast including the economist John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill as Chancellor of Exchequer and Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co. However, the focus is on the actions and inactions of the four bankers.

Ahamed did not write the book in anticipation of our reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. He does not draw direct comparisons of the events of the 1920s to those of today. His narrative is an artful description of the roles each of the men played with rich and meaningful insights about their individual characters, their relationships with one another, their ambitions, and their personal struggles. Those insights are not just bits of historical gossip but they are at the heart his explanation of the failure of the United States and Europe to confront the problems that ultimately brought about the Depression and set the stage for the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The historical and biographical details are engrossing. In addition, Ahamed’s economic and investment background allows him to deliver an excellent primer on currency, the gold standard, and international banking.

Although Ahamed does not relate the events or lessons to today’s problems, it is hard for a reader to refrain from doing so. At the root of Europe’s problem was the debt burden imposed on Germany in the form of reparations after World War I and the decisions made to return to the gold standard at pre-war rates of exchange. Today’s problems are also related to excessive external sovereign debts and a Euro currency mechanism, which, like the gold standard, eliminates devaluation as an instrument of economic policy. In the 1920s, the economic prescription was austerity and it is the same medicine being prescribed today.

Let’s hope for a better outcome and that someday another author will describe the events of our era as well as Ahamed does the 1920s.

Photo Credits:

John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White at the 1946 Bretton Woods Conference (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1936 (Photo Courtesy of The New York Public Library. Photography Collection: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs)

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (2012)

by Jacqueline Jones

On the surface, Train Dreams appears to be an historical novel; most of the story takes place during the first third of the twentieth century, and it includes real people and places. Yet as a narrative, the novel—or rather, novella (consisting of 116 short pages)—is fundamentally ahistorical. The protagonist Robert Grainier lives for 80 years, but he remains outside the mainstream of American life; when he dies, he has never used a telephone. He has no heirs, and he has no personal history before the time he can remember as a boy. He never learns anything about his parents or the place of his birth, and in fact he “soon misplaced this earliest part of his life entirely.” Thus he lacks a sense of his own beginnings.

Grainier suffers a great tragedy in mid-life, and that tragedy shapes his subsequent being in the world, but he does not seem to change much as a person; throughout the book he remains a skinny and steady hard worker, and though we feel for him in his loneliness, we do not learn much about him as a person. The book is not organized chronologically, and from start to finish certain constants endure—Grainier’s encounters with the menacing magnificence of nature in northern Idaho, and with the “the hard people of the northwestern mountains”—his people—who live there. Johnson highlights the railroad as a metaphor and as a source of employment for Johnson, but it is not a machine that takes us from one place to another; rather, its whistle blends with the howl of the coyote, and as it passes through the valley where Grainier lives, it enters his dreams.

From a historian’s perspective, the greatest virtue of Train Dreams is its evocation of the rough life followed by railroad construction workers and lumbermen in the Pacific Northwest. As a young man Grainier spends time as what he calls a “layabout,” but what we today would call a casual worker. He helps to blast tunnels, bridge canyons, cut trees, and roll logs. He embraces outdoor engineering feats as intrinsically heroic, hailing the spanning of a 60-foot deep, 112-foot wide gorge akin to building the pyramids. He and his co-workers “fought the forest from sunrise until suppertime,” and then collapse, exhausted, into their bunks.

An 1869 sketch depicts men Working on the last mile of the Pacific Railroad. European and Asian laborers mingle together. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Railroad workers for the Southern Pacific Company in San Francisco. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

By the time he is in his late 30s Grainier is making and saving money to care for his wife Gladys and their daughter Kate, whom he regularly leaves in their valley cabin for months at a time while he seeks work wherever he can find it. Returning from a railroad job in the fall of 1920, he sees that a fire has consumed the valley and that Gladys and Kate have vanished: “Soon he was passing through a forest of charred, gigantic spears that only a few days past had been evergreens. The world was gray, white, black, and acrid, without a single live animal or plant, no longer burning yet full of the warmth and life of the fire.” Devastated by the loss of his family, Grainier slowly rebuilds a cabin on the site of the old one, and lives isolated from the rest of the world, as long as his savings sustain him.

Juxtaposed to the tenderness Grainier feels for his family is the deep and persistent violence that Johnson presents as a fundamental fact of rural western life. The author punctuates his story by accounts of horrific deaths—a lumber worker killed by a falling tree branch; a 12-year old girl murdered by her father when he discovers she is pregnant (unbeknownst to him, raped by her uncle); an Indian run over by a train, his remains scattered in tiny pieces along the track; a teen done in by a weak heart while lifting a sack of cornmeal; a prospector blown to bits while trying to thaw out a stick of dynamite on his wood stove.

Southern Pacific Company railroad yards in San Francisco. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Women railroad workers take over the cars and maintenance of freight and passenger trains in the Southern Pacific Company yards at San Francisco. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Gladys appears as a ghost to tell her widowed husband the circumstances of her own painful demise; in fleeing the fire with Kate she fell onto rocks in a river, breaking her back. The rushing waters bore her away. Train Dreams contains other elements of magical surrealism—think Toni Morrison flirting with Paul Bunyan–mainly as a means of melding humans and animals into a single life-force that animates the mountains and valleys. After years of living alone, Grainier hears terrifying stories of a “wolf-girl,” half person and half beast, who roams the land with no other apparent purpose than to strike fear into hearts of grown men: She was “a creature God didn’t create. She was made out of wolves and a man of unnatural desires.” Predictably, this wolf-girl turns out to be Grainier’s long-lost daughter Kate, though the first and only time they confront each other, she shows no recognition of her father, and quickly disappears forever into the forest. To mourn, Grainier howls with the wolves, his lament echoing off the mountainsides.

One of the great pleasures of Train Dreams is the evocative language Johnson uses to describe the brutality of entwined natural and human forces. A group of white men grab and try to lynch a Chinese railroad worker accused of stealing, but the attackers are at least momentarily thwarted when their victim “shipped and twisted like a weasel in a sack, lashing backward with his one free fist at the man lugging him by the neck.” Grainier finds that his snug home with Gladys and Kate has been reduced to “cinders, burned so completely that its ashes had mixed in with a common layer all about and then had been tamped down by the snows and washed and dissolved by the thaw.” Yet there is beauty too: Before too long, as Grainier drives through the valley in a wagon “behind a wide, slow, sand-colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees.” At night Grainier contemplates his own solitude as he “watched the sky. The night was cloudless and the moon was white and burning, erasing the stars and making gray silhouettes of the mountains.”

Railroad worker housing along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks in Sacramento County, CA. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

A tool shed along the Idaho Northern Railroad in Gem County, ID. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

This spring the Pulitzer Prize board rejected all three nominees put forth by the fiction jurors—David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (a behemoth at fifty chapters and 500 pages), Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and Johnson’s Train Dreams. If the Pulitzer intends to reward “the great American novel” or even “a great American novel,” then it is not difficult to discern the rationale behind the board’s decision to bypass Train Dreams at least. Johnson has written a novella that is more literary than historical (and his novel, Tree of Smoke, did win the National Book Award). Even had he intended to reveal the fraught enterprise of modern “progress”—the human price it exacts, and the natural barriers to it—then Train Dreams is only a qualified success, for it lacks the substance of a larger early twentieth-century story. Missing here is any meaningful intertwining of technology, capitalism, community, and the exploitation of labor and the organized resistance of laborers to that exploitation. The evocations of Train Dreams are not exclusively American; we can imagine, and document, similar themes in the history of Canada or Australia, for example—the prejudice and anger of various ethnic groups toward each other; the hard living of single men toiling in the forests and on the railroads; the unforgiving nature of the seasons; and the predatory wiles of beasts which are, perhaps, not so different from humans after all. Still, the story is a great pleasure to read.

Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel (1997)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Historian Jules Tygiel presents not only an account of Jackie Robinson’s heroic struggle to integrate Major League Baseball, but a larger history of links between African American history, baseball, and the modern civil rights movement. Baseball’s Great Experiment further raises questions about race and sports in our current day.

The integration of baseball in the immediate post-World War II years profoundly impacted American racial attitudes and culture. Baseball, the national pastime and most popular sport at the time, had remained segregated even as football and basketball had begun integrating. Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey became convinced that the integration of African Americans into Major League Baseball would serve as both a moral cause and an untapped resource of talented players that could strengthen his team. Rickey recruited Jackie Robinson, a former army lieutenant and exceptional athlete who had played numerous sports at UCLA, to initiate his great experiment. Robinson suffered threats, taunts, and abuse while breaking baseball’s color line in 1947, but performed remarkably on the field, carrying himself with a righteous dignity that amazed Americans. Tygiel contends that Robinson’s quest raised awareness among white Americans ignorant to the scourge of racism in their midst. Additionally, the integration of baseball influenced future civil rights initiatives by providing an example of brave nonviolent protest in the face of brutal opposition, and also through illustrating how economic factors could undermine segregation.

Tygiel emphasizes the importance of Rickey and Robinson’s endeavor in the struggle for black equality. Robinson played the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals before joining the Dodgers the next year, thereby also challenging Jim Crow in the minor leagues. Integration in the minors became as critical as in the majors, since farm clubs provided opportunities for blacks to develop their baseball skills. The author notes that black ball players in the minors often continued to face vicious racism, even after Robinson broke down the color barrier in the majors. Robinson’s success with the Dodgers eventually caused other ball clubs to recruit athletes from the Negro leagues, continuing baseball’s integration. Soon African American athletes like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Satchel Paige starred in Major League Baseball. These ball players became heroes to the larger black community and caused whites to reexamine their racial attitudes. Black major and minor leaguers often challenged southern segregationist mores while in spring training by attempting to integrate hotels, restaurants, and other public venues, setting the stage for later civil rights battles. Tygiel argues that the successful coalition of black protestors (like Robinson), white liberals (such as Rickey), and sympathetic members of the press (both white and black) created a precedent for the modern civil rights movement.

The economics of baseball in small town life also played a role in integrating baseball. Major and minor league spring training provided valuable income for hosting locales, most of which were in the South. After some initial resistance, southern boosters largely abandoned their protests against integrated teams for fear of losing their lucrative deals with baseball clubs. Economics outweighed social customs for most business people seeking to build a prosperous South.

Yet while Robinson and Rickey’s great experiment achieved success, the author reminds us that inequality persists in baseball, and indeed, other sports. In the years following his retirement from baseball, Robinson became disillusioned with the pace of racial integration in baseball, and in society itself. The lack of African Americans in manager and front office positions in Major League ball clubs particularly disturbed him. Although the number of minority coaches has increased since 1983 when this book was published, we continue to see a disproportionately low number of minorities in coaching and organizational positions not only in baseball, but also in football, basketball, and in other sports, at both the college and professional levels of play. Baseball’s Great Experiment illustrates the fascinating story of the struggle to integrate baseball while encouraging us to contemplate the continued presence of racism in sports. Today, with sports occupying such a prominent place in American life, readers will benefit from studying this interesting and moving book about race and athletics.

Photo Credits:

(Image courtesy of ozfan22/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of Black History Album/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of stechico/Flickr Creative Commons)

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