United States Archives - Page 6 of 7

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen (2008)

To say that the US Civil War (1861-65) was tragic and destabilizing is a glaring understatement. Hundreds of thousands died or were wounded in combat, entire cities were destroyed, and afterwards, the large segment of the nation that had seceded had to be reincorporated into the national body, and a new citizen-subject remained to be embraced by post-bellum societies. Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom analyzes the experiences of recently freed blacks, released from the bonds of slavery and plantation life, who sought to create new lives as freedmen and women. Many headed to cities as part of a “mass exodus from slavery.” The city of Memphis, Tennessee became one such “city of refuge” where freedpersons practiced their freshly conferred citizenship. They established new communities, built churches, opened their own schools, and formed African American benevolence societies that sponsored community events. In short, freedpersons in Reconstruction Memphis, as in many other cities, catalyzed changes in the socio-spatial boundaries of urban spaces that had previously been closed to them.

These changes did not come without tensions, which the continued occupation of southern cities by federal troops exacerbated. White society had also undergone transformations in the wake of the Civil War. In Memphis, working-class white immigrants filled a political vacuum left by the outmigration of the city’s antebellum commercial and political elite. These immigrants lived primarily in South Memphis, a region of the city that also happened to be a major destination for recently arriving freedpeople. Not only did the emerging white elites have to contend with a federal force that undermined their hegemony, they also encountered an expanding entrepreneurial and professional Black elite that they viewed as another threat to their political and economic ascendance. These tensions came to a head on Tuesday, May 1, 1866 in what is known as the Memphis Riot.

On this day, black Union soldiers that had been the primary federal force occupying Memphis turned in their weapons as part of their very public discharge. Because of the public nature of their de-armament, Rosen believes that the city police and white civilians chose this day to act. Over the course of three days, white rioters killed 48 African Americans, wounded 70 to 80, and set fire to 91 homes, four black churches, and 12 black schools. The rioters also raped several freedwomen. What started as a clash between black Union soldiers and Memphis police soon came to affect many more people and to symbolize much more.

Recently, historians have found that the Memphis Riot was not entirely spontaneous, random, or anarchic. It was “well-orchestrated” and the assailants made a “clear political expression.” What historians have missed in previous studies, Rosen argues, is the symbolic weight of the sexual assaults that African American women suffered during the riot. In the wake of the riots, a series of Congressional hearings were convened in Memphis with the aim of clarifying what had happened in Memphis that May. Rosen goes back into the records of the congressional investigating committees that took freedpeople’s testimonies in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, as well as the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to uncover the “coherent symbolic order” demonstrated in the riot. This order was the “nexus of racial and gendered meanings…performed and rearticulated through [rape].”

Why did freed people testify? Rosen’s close analysis of the meanings and discourses embedded in their testimony about the rapes suggests that for freedmen and women, testifying was an act intended to claim the right of all citizens “to live free of violence.” Freedom for formerly enslaved persons meant more than “to be free.” It also meant “to be a citizen,” which presupposed the same rights and protections for all citizens (in law and practice, however, citizen typically signified adult male). Women who described acts of rape had to “find the words to narrate and record” what they had witnessed or experienced. Many of the testimonies of freedwomen who the white rioters raped described the men as having acted very nonchalantly before the sexual assault. Rosen interprets this as stemming from a mentality that saw black women as occupying a position so low on the socio-sexual hierarchy that they simply did not have the choice to refuse a sexual act. Several women recalled having asserted their free status to no avail. Quite convincingly, Rosen contends that by ignoring freedwomen’s freedom claims “the assailants thereby asserted, through their words and gestures, that emancipation was of no significance and that black women continued to be different from white women…who were…protected from sexual exploitation by patriarchal family structures and the rights of citizens.”

White northerners viewed the Memphis Riot as evidence of the continued need to take a hardline in the reintegration of former Confederate states. One of the most polemical Reconstruction Acts, which set the terms for the reincorporation of the seceded states, was the 14t Amendment. Southern states debated the issue of universal citizenship rights and their extension to former slaves in a series of Constitutional Conventions. Rosen examines one such convention held in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1868 to uncover the meanings ascribed to masculinity and femininity that contributed to the “racist terror” that continued unabated from 1865 to 1876 even though Congress and the northern press publicized the riot and the testimonies of freedpeople.

What is so powerful about Rosen’s study is that it shows the hope that freedpersons had for their future, their trust that government institutions would protect their rights as citizens, and the mentalité that “impinged on their ability to claim their rights as citizens.” The subject matter is not light, but Rosen offers a study of the post-bellum period that helps us interpret the violence against African Americans that was to come and it proposes a way of “reading” rape that has relevance to studies of violence against women used as a political weapon, both past and present.

Photo credits:

Alfred R. Waud, “Scenes in Memphis, Tennessee, during the riot,” 1866.
Harper’s Weekly via The Library of Congress

The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman (2001)

Bruce J. Schulman, in his 2001 work The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, surveys the history of an overlooked decade. Defining the “long 1970s” as the period between Richard Nixon’s entrance in the White House in 1969 and Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984, Schulman counters popular conceptions that the decade was seemingly forgettable and unimportant. Instead, he argues that during the 1970s, the United States experienced a transformation in multiple facets of its character that helped shape our current time.

Schulman’s narrative weaves together politics, economics, social developments, and cultural trends to illustrate the significance of this decade. The author asserts that the 1960s effectively ended with the turbulent events of 1968, and when the “Great American Ride,” or booming postwar economy, finally ran its course. During the 1970s, political power in the United States shifted from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest, the so-called Sunbelt, as Americans, jobs, and federal dollars flocked to these warmer and more business-friendly regions. Politicians such as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan hailed from Sunbelt states, and recognized such political trends. Indeed, the author suggests that the United States encountered no less than a “southernization” of American life in the decade.

"'No Gas" Signs Were a Common Sight in Oregon During the Fall of 1973, Such as at This Station in Lincoln City Along the Coast — An October 1973 photograph by David Falconer: “‘No Gas” Signs Were a Common Sight in Oregon During the Fall of 1973, Such as at This Station in Lincoln City Along the Coast. Many Stations Closed Earlier, Opened Later and Shut Down on the Weekends 10/1973.” Image courtesy of the author via the National Archives.

Americans experienced significant changes in their attitudes during these years. The tragedy of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate created much skepticism toward government. People looked to the private sphere and its potential for solving economic and societal problems, a key theme of the later 1980s. Yet while conservatism toward government grew amongst the populace in the 1970s, social and cultural legacies from the 1960s became more mainstream. Many Americans, even southerners, began to accept the immorality of formal, explicit racial segregation and disfranchisement. Long hair and outrageous clothing became the norm for Americans of all political and social backgrounds, while sexuality outside of traditional marriage became widely practiced and accepted, especially amongst the younger generation. Schulman contends that personal liberation and rebellion against authority became key themes of the 1970s, as Americans sought individualism through new outlooks on religion, popular culture, and sexuality.

"Hitchhiker with His Dog, "Tripper", on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 Crosses The Colorado River At Topock — A May 1972 photograph by Charles O’Rear: “Hitchhiker with His Dog, “Tripper”, on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 Crosses The Colorado River At Topock: 05/1972.” Image courtesy of the author via the National Archives.

Although such tendencies developed, not all Americans welcomed them. The author notes that by the late 1970s, the New Right emerged as a powerful force in politics. Religious conservatives, most notably Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, decried social excesses, while anti-feminists, such as Phyllis Schlafly, organized against the Equal Rights Amendment. Affirmative Action and racial busing divided Americans. Economic conservatives railed against taxes. Cold Warriors disillusioned with détente and the outcome of the Vietnam War theorized a new foreign policy, based on American international power and aggressiveness toward the Soviet Union, known as neoconservatism. Schulman proposes that such groups played a major role in Ronald Reagan’s election and reelection to the presidency through exploiting American anxiety. The author commendably illustrates how the 1970s, rather than being an uneventful and lackluster decade, critically affected the course of United States history. The Seventies will prove insightful reading for anyone wishing to reflect upon this transformative time in our nation’s recent past.

You may also like:

[The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) project, Documerica, a collection of photographs taken by freelance photographers from 1971-77 that capture moments related to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s.]

Dolph Briscoe IV’s review of Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan: A History.

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.

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson (2006)

by Joseph Parrott

In 1958 Frank Kameny was out of a job. A Harvard trained astronomer and veteran of World War II, he had been working for the Army Map Service. In the wake of the Russian launch of Sputnik in October of 1957, the American government was rushing to catch up, and the young scientist seemed poised to play a role in the new emphasis on space exploration. Yet within just a few months, Kameny’s career was over because he was a homosexual. His story was not unique. He was one of many victims of the Lavender Scare – a manifestation of Cold War paranoia and social bigotry that led to the dismissal of hundreds and possibly thousands of gays and lesbians from government jobs.

Historian David K. Johnson sheds light on this forgotten episode in American history. The Lavender Scare grew from the McCarthy persecutions of the 1950s, but Johnson argues that its policies lasted far longer and became more institutionalized than the anti-communist hysteria. The government dismissed homosexuals on the grounds that emotional weakness and the likelihood of blackmail made them security risks. No evidence supported these accusations and medical experts challenged the idea that homosexuals were in any way different from the majority of employees, but to little avail. Executive departments hurried to dismiss employees suspected of homosexuality, lest ambitious congressmen – already suspicious of the expansion of bureaucratic policymaking – target them for public scrutiny. In the midst of the Cold War, fear, politics, and prejudice combined “to conflate homosexuals and communists.”

The Lavender Scare offers an arresting political narrative, but Johnson also makes sure to present the very human face of this drama. Johnson utilizes extensive interviews to demonstrate the way the purges changed the lives of victims and the social milieu of Washington D.C. itself. The rapid growth of the federal government during the Depression and its relatively egalitarian hiring practices attracted large numbers of young people seeking employment, including many homosexuals hoping to escape the limitations of small town life. By 1945, Washington was, in the words of one resident, “a very gay city,” where vibrant communities thrived and authorities tolerated homosexual activity. In an effortless combination of social and political history, the author shows how the rise of the national security state transformed gay Washington, forcing many to leave and others to endure years of joblessness.

Persecution also inspired a nascent movement in defense of gay lifestyles. Activists like Frank Kameny recast the discrimination against homosexuals as an issue of civil rights. The Mattachine Society of Washington organized picketing and supported challenges to government dismissals, consciously combining “political activism with service to and affirmation of the gay subculture.” Johnson explores how these vocal demands led the government to reevaluate its policies and the connection between the private and public lives of its employees. These early manifestations of homosexual activism not only helped end decades of vocational persecution, but they also informed the networks and tactics that would come to define a movement.

In light of Frank Kameny’s death last October at the age of 86, it is appropriate to look back at the origins of the LGBT activism. The recent repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy demonstrates that cause of homosexual equality has made great strides, specifically in regard to government service. But at the same time, the continuing debate over the necessity of this policy and calls to reinstate it remind the country that Kameny’s ultimate goals have not yet been achieved. David Johnson’s smart, well-written, and truly engaging book clearly lays out the history of anti-gay sentiment in the modern federal government. It also, perhaps, hints at ways activists can continue to challenge discrimination in the future.

Photo credits:

United Press, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, 1954

Library of Commons via Wikimedia Commons

Kay Tobin Lahusen, “Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John Fryer in disguise as “Dr. H. Anonymous,”” 1972

New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division via Wikimedia Commons

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England by Jane Kamensky (1999)

by Zachary Carmichael

Governing the Tongue discusses the importance of verbal communication in seventeenth-century New England society. Kamensky argues that early settlers were uniquely preoccupied with the act of speech and held to specific but unwritten rules about correct speaking. Speech was bound up with Puritan religious beliefs and represented a way of directly interacting with God’s word. Right speech could represent a link with the divine, but incorrect speaking constituted a break with the natural order. Regulating oral communication presented both philosophical and practical difficulties that informed larger issues of social status and order, and Puritans thought uncontrolled speech could corrupt their fragile society.

Multiple social hierarchies governed correct speaking, including class, wealth, age, and gender, Kamensky’s most useful lens of analysis. A married woman, she argues, had to be a “goodwife,” supporting the head of the household, her husband. Women made up the majority of the nonconformist congregations and often held radical beliefs, most famously Anne Hutchinson, banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1638. For Puritan leaders, ungoverned speech equaled the threat of uncontrollable women, exemplary of the social disorder they feared. Women faced some of the harshest penalties for violating speech limitation. Ann Hibbens, for example, was brought to court for complaining too loudly in public about a dispute with male carpenters over the quality of their work, but the trial soon became an evaluation of Hibbens’ continued violation of right speech expectations and her failure to support her meek husband. Excommunicated in 1641, Hibbens was executed for witchcraft fifteen years later because of a “quarrelsome” tongue.

Kamensky also focuses on speech expectations among men, emphasizing the contested verbal domains of fathers and sons. Sons often found it difficult to establish patriarchal order in their own households while remaining verbally respectful to their fathers, exemplified by the case of John Porter, Jr., the only Puritan ever brought to trial for rebelling against his father. John, Jr. insulted and criticized his father repeatedly, failing to live up to high expectations in a society that valued the orderly transmission of status and property from father to son. Although John Porter, Sr. was one of the wealthiest men in Salem, his son died destitute after being taken to court for his disobedience. Kamensky contends that Porter’s parental disrespect echoes a larger struggle in New England during the 1660s, when generational tension between the founders and their children brought the issue of verbal respect to a head.

After illustrating the elaborate rules that governed women’s and men’s tongues, Kamensky convincingly argues for the decline of this system at the end of the seventeenth century. A falling away from original ideals for speech behavior, aided by the increased importance of the written word, paralleled the larger religious and intellectual declension of Puritanism. Discussing the witchcraft trials of the 1690s, Kamensky emphasizes the role of speech in the supposed activity of those practicing witchcraft, including curses and demonic possession, and in the public trials, which depended upon verbal testimony. The emotional and physical trauma of the accusations and executions in towns like Salem helped to debase the “currency of speech” for New Englanders. Numerous apologies from both accusers and judges failed to restore social order, as they once had done.

Kamensky acknowledges the difficulty of hearing Puritan voices in the available evidence. Writing a book about speech, solely using written records is a paradoxical and ultimately unachievable task, but she does an excellent job of finding examples of recorded speech in court records, sermons, and other writings.. Kamensky argues that although it is impossible to get back to the “hearfulness” of New England, the careful recording of court documents, responses to sermons, and quotations in diary entries brings us close to being able to hear the Puritans speak.

Kamensky’s study is a valuable account of the people and ideas responsible for the Puritans’ complicated relationship with the spoken word. She ably identifies the tension between free and governed speech, leaving the reader with the impression that, in Puritan New England, public speech could be both necessary and dangerous.

Photo credits:

George Henry Boughton (artist) and Thomas Gold Appleton (engraver), Puritans Going to Church, 31 March 1885

Library of Congress

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

This film tells the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia slave revolt. For years, historians have grappled with the details of the affair and debated about the ways Nat Turner should be remembered. For some, he was a revolutionary hero; for others, Turner was nothing more than a deranged, blood-hungry killer. After all, it was Turner’s rebellion that sent the South into a frenzy forcing southern legislatures and planters to harden their stances (and laws) on slavery. This PBS movie blends documentary narrative, historical re-enactment, and scholarly reflection to examine the various renditions of the revolt and to uncover the many faces of Nat Turner and slave resistance in general. Directed by Charles Burnett, this is a film worth watching for those interested in slavery, public history, and the history memory. As part of the Independent Lens series, the PBS website provides a wealth of historical material on Nat Turner, slave rebellion, and historical treatments.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

by Kristie Flannery

In his introduction to Confederates in the Attic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz recounts the very strange moment when his weekend sleep-in was rudely interrupted by the loud cracking of gunfire.

The noise came from an unexpected Civil War re-enactment being filmed outside of his bedroom window. Horwitz had once been a little boy who would spend hours engrossed in an old, enormous book of Civil War sketches, captivated by images of Yankee and Dixie soldiers engaged in battle. But despite spending a number of years working as a war correspondent, it was this surprise encounter with the “men in grey” that prompted Horwitz to turn the critical gaze of the journalist upon his own and his country’s enduring fascination with the bloody conflict that pitted American against American in 1861-1865.

Confederates in the Attic is an informative and entertaining record of the extended road trip that Horwitz made through the Confederate heartland of the United States to investigate how Americans and southerners in particular continue to remember the war, and to make sense of that strange and enduring Confederate pride. Along the way Hortwitz gets to know a number of interesting people. His exchanges with Civil War enthusiasts from all walks of life spur the narrative along. They include the famous Civil War Historian Shelby Foote, female members of the Daughters of the Confederacy who devote considerable effort to finding Dixie soldiers in family trees, and bands of modern day “hardcore” Civil War re-enactors; factory workers who devote much of their free time and money to re-living as authentically as possible the experiences of nineteenth-century Confederate soldiers. For these rough and ready men who are perhaps the most interesting Horwitz introduces us to, this means sewing their own Civil War uniforms, dressing up to march for miles through wild country in ill-fitting boots, and spending nights in open, near-freezing conditions under thin blankets, spooning together for warmth.

Of course race cannot be left out of a book about the Civil War past or present. Horwitz does not meet one Civil War-obsessed African American in his travels. He concludes through his many conversations with white southerners who cherish the memory of the Confederacy that slavery has been conveniently forgotten in popular conceptions of why the South ceded from the Union and went to war against it. Horwitz provides a sobering account of the role the Civil War plays in modern racial violence; how in 1995 the ostentatious display of the confederate flag could lead one young man to kill another young man, and how the Klan is never really far away.

Horwitz demonstrates that the Civil War is very much still alive in the imaginations of Americans and shapes the way in which many perceive themselves and the world they live in. Confederates in the Attic is a must read for anyone studying the US Civil War and modern US history, or history and memory. It is a wonderful resource for teachers who want to get their students excited about this history and its continued influence on the present. It is truly a delight to read and would make a perfect gift for anyone who enjoys history.

You may also enjoy hearing UT professor of History Jacqueline Jones read from her book “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.”

Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York by Samuel Zipp (2010)

by Kyle Shelton

In the 1970s the United Nations complex and the public housing projects of East Harlem projected two disparate images of New York City. If the UN displayed the city’s position as a global capital of culture, politics, and economics, the deteriorating housing projects showed the city’s struggles with overcrowding, high crime rates, and poverty. According to historian Samuel Zipp, the roots of this contradictory double-identity reach back to the rise and fall of the city’s post-World War II urban renewal efforts.

The usual story of urban renewal in America is one of powerful officials, such as New York’s Robert Moses, wielding great power to remake entire cities as they saw fit. Zipp’s Manhattan Projects departs from this narrative by arguing that urban renewal represented a more complicated, contentious process carried out by New Yorkers from all races, classes, and city neighborhoods. For Zipp, renewal politics highlighted questions about what the city should look like, whose interests it should serve, and who would control its remaking. Starting with the celebrated construction of the United Nations complex in 1948 and moving up through the battles over public housing projects in East Harlem in the late 1960s, Manhattan Projects shows how competing visions of renewal and the contests that revolved around its implementation could create symbols of both cultural significance and urban decline.

In the early years of the Cold War, many New Yorkers viewed urban renewal as a “benevolent intervention” that would turn run-down and crowded streets into modern showcases for American democracy and strength. Early renewal efforts stemmed from an “ethic of city rebuilding” that focused on creating an ordered and open city. Zipp argues that the United Nations represented America’s attempts to help remake the world through internationalism and remake the city through modern architecture and superblock construction. In both cases, the goal was to order chaos, whether it was caused by war or overcrowding. Few complained about the UN’s destruction of an old meatpacking district. Instead, the city celebrated renewal’s ability to bring a site of international significance to life from a collection of abandoned abattoirs.

Celebration of redevelopment ebbed, however, when renewal officials sited several projects in the heart of old residential neighborhoods. Rather than accepting the destruction of their homes and communities, many New Yorkers pushed back against renewal. Zipp argues that the rise of resident activism had a contradictory impact on the shape of the city. On the one hand, activism helped preserve historic neighborhoods and prevented displacement of many New Yorkers. On the other, these protests led to the decline of urban renewal as a viable public project. That decline led to the deterioration of public housing and, when combined with segregation that limited the occupational and residential opportunities of many people of color, helped precipitate the urban crises of 1960s and 1970s. Using the building of Lincoln Center and the development of public housing projects throughout the city as examples, Zipp demonstrates the irony of this anti-renewal activism. It protected the close-knit, older neighborhoods of the activists, even as it pushed officials to abandon the residents of public housing projects to a fate of faltering services and non-existent civic support.

By delving deeply into the local politics surrounding the construction of several of New York City’s most iconic landmarks, Manhattan Projects demonstrates that urban renewal’s legacy stretched well beyond the concrete foundations of its projects and the large personalities of its leaders. Renewal fostered competing imaginings of the city’s future, jumpstarted important debates over the meanings and pursuit of progress, and resulted in the formation social issues that continue to shape the city—and its growth—to this day.

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward L. Larson (2006)

by Brian McNeil

Like most teenagers growing up in Alabama during the late nineties, my first encounter with the 1925 John Scopes Trial came on the first day of my ninth grade biology class. Inside the front cover of the textbook a message from the Alabama State Board of Education stated: “This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals, and humans.” Passed by the Board of Education in 1995, the supplement went on to say, “No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”

The disclaimer in Alabama biology textbooks was the product of a decades-long debate in the United States over science and religion in the classroom. In Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson examines this oft-contentious dispute from Darwin to Darrow to Dayton—host of the Scopes Trial and present home of Bryan College, one of the leading institutes of creationist biology. He demonstrates how contemporary thought influenced the debates surrounding the Scopes Trial and, in the last section of the book, how dramatic portrayals such as Inherit the Wind shape our own thinking on evolution today. Yet, as Larson skillfully notes, the “Trial of the Century” stays with us not because of the scientific questions it raised but because the Scopes Trial embodied “the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy.” The Scopes Trial, in other words, asked who would control curriculum in classrooms? Would it be the local many that clung fast to their bibles and looked up to the heavens for the answer to the origin of man? Or, would it be the distant few who studied science and looked down into the earth at the fossil record for the answer to the origins of species?

These are the questions that drew the major antagonists to the Scopes Trial: William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan—known as the Great Commoner for his support of the Populist Party in the 1890s—was a reformer who steadfastly held to religion and popular politics. Darrow, the most prominent lawyer in early twentieth-century America, used his sharp legal mind to challenge popular notions of morality and religion. The most memorable aspect of the trial was the back and forth between these two American giants on the lawn outside the courthouse (the trial had to be moved outside to accommodate the interested public). Darrow asked questions that had nothing at all to do with human evolution and everything to do with casting doubt over Evangelical Christianity in general and Bryan’s faith in particular. “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” Darrow asked at one point during Bryan’s testimony. “No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her,” the Commoner acidly replied.

The great strength of Summer for the Gods is Larson’s ability to demonstrate how the debate over science and religion has changed over the decades. As unbelievable as it may sound today when the battle lines are so firmly demarcated and the trenches are so deeply dug, there was a time when fundamentalist Christians attempted to accept evolutionary biology on its own terms. The first section of the book details how this era of good feelings changed following the end of the First World War. Believing that modernism, natural selection, and eugenics caused both the Great War and the social unrest that followed it, fundamentalist Christians fought back against evolutionary biology. Because of this rising tide of conservatism, many states in the early 1920s passed laws that restricted teaching Darwinism in the classroom and ultimately led to the Scopes Trial.

I currently live in Texas, and the great debate in the Lone Star State over curriculum in the classroom has in many ways shifted away from science toward social studies and history. Conservatives and Progressives are now debating the origin and character of the United States, not the origin of human beings. But if Larson were to comment on this dispute over history textbooks, he would surely argue that the debate is not new at all. Instead, he would insist that the same struggle between majoritarian democracy and individual liberty that guided the Scopes Trial frames the present debate over history textbooks in Texas. Larson’s lucid writing, command of detail, and ability to connect the Scopes Trial to longstanding debates in American history make Summer for the Gods a great read.

Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes by Lisa L. Moore (2011)

by Mary Katherine Matalon

The 1792 poem “Verses to Abigail Smith,” was preserved by Abigail’s brother, Elihu Hubbard Smith, who transcribed the poem into his diary and chronicled the strong friendship that existed between Sarah Pierce, the author and future founder of the Litchfield Female Academy, and his sisters Abigail and Mary. Like Smith, Lisa Moore is interested in recording and preserving the rich world of female friendship and same sex desire that she has discovered in a variety of creative media in the late eighteenth century. While diverse in form, these “sister arts,” including garden design, paper collage, collecting, and poetry, were united by the ways that their practitioners all used the landscape and the natural world both literally and metaphorically to create artworks that forged and memorialized the bonds among women.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Moore analyzes the lives and works of eighteenth-century women who practiced the sister arts: the artist Mary Delaney, the natural philosopher and collector Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, poet Anna Seward, and the aforementioned Sarah Pierce. Moore is a skilled and vivid storyteller and her compelling prose enables the reader to inhabit the affective and intellectual landscapes these women traversed. For instance, the Duchess of Portland emerges as an insatiable collector and connoisseur of both female friendships and objects of natural history. In fact, Moore argues, the two practices—the forging of deep and sustained female friendships and the collecting of natural history specimens—were inextricably intertwined for the Duchess, who served as key link among a network of female friends who shared her passion for the natural world. For the Duchess, as for the other women Moore studies, flowers, shells, and other aspects of the natural world become a kind of language through which women can express their love and desire for one another.

Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes is simultaneously concise and evocative. Moore’s analysis not only suggests fresh, new ways of thinking about the history of sexuality and the history of material culture but also suggests ways in which these two, typically separate, fields might overlap. Moore’s stated goal is not to recuperate a straightforward lesbian identity for her subjects, but to establish the ways in which their creative practices can be read as lesbian, “because of their resonance with central features of lesbian history and culture that are still meaningful.”

Mary Delaney‘s botanical illustrations of flowers were considered to be “libertine” by some eighteenth-century critics.

In so doing, she demonstrates how we might map a history of sexuality onto the history of material culture—that is, she shows us how we might begin to read objects, rather than people, as lesbian or queer. For instance, Moore reads the shell grotto created by Mary Delaney and The Duchess of Portland as an important contribution to the lesbian sister arts tradition. Accordingly, Moore emphasizes the aspects of the grotto that accord with this tradition; she excavates the associations between the shells and female sexuality and she explains the way in which the creation of the grotto would have contributed to the two friends’ intimacy. Ultimately, Moore contends that the grotto serves as a monument to the two women’s passionate friendship. While we will never know the exact nature of that friendship, Moore demonstrates that inscribing its tangible manifestation—the shell grotto—into the lesbian sister arts tradition allows us to see the ways in which sexuality and intimacy were embedded both within the grotto and the women’s enduring relationship in ways that can be classified as lesbian or queer. Overall, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes is a deeply rewarding book for it both complicates and enriches our view of these women (some of whom have been vastly understudied) and their creative legacies.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Abridged Edition by Raymond Arsenault (2011)

by Matt Tribbe

Fifty years ago, in the spring and summer of 1961, a brave group of activists dared to commit one of the most dangerous acts imaginable at the time: they blatantly obeyed the laws of the United States. Knowing full well that a majority of white Southerners did not accept federal desegregation orders, and that the Kennedy administration was reluctant to enforce them, hundreds of civil rights activists nonetheless embarked on Southern-bound buses in order to test a recent Supreme Court decision forbidding segregation at interstate bus terminals. This was not necessarily civil disobedience, disobeying unjust laws for moral and political ends. Rather, as Raymond Arsenault notes of these “Freedom Rides,” it was a “disarmingly simple act.” The Freedom Riders would just behave as if Supreme Court rulings were, in fact, the law of the land, and then respond nonviolently to the inevitable bloodied heads, broken bones, firebombings, and intimidating prison stints that greeted their attempts to sit in interracial pairs on buses and integrate restaurants, waiting rooms, and even shoe-shine stands at terminals in the Southern states. Though few anticipated the full ferocity of the organized white resistance in the Deep South, the Riders hoped that such disturbing scenes of brutality against nonviolent activists who were simply expressing their constitutional rights would shock the nation out of its complacency on Southern segregation.

Arsenault offers an engaging chronicle of the Freedom Rides in this new, abridged edition of his definitive 2006 account. He places the Freedom Rides in their larger historical trajectory, revealing their antecedent in an earlier attempt to desegregate interstate buses in 1947 and examining various civil rights strategies and initiatives over the 1950s that contributed to the decision to launch the campaign. But this book is about a specific moment in time—the summer of 1961—and Arsenault uses his gripping narrative to explore many broader issues confronting the civil rights movement and the nation as a whole in that particular year. We see in all their complexity, for example, the often-strained relationships and clashes over strategy between various civil rights organizations. Most established groups like the NAACP were critical of these provocative actions, yet it was that organization’s unenforced court victories that made the Freedom Rides both possible and necessary. Another major theme that Arsenault follows over the year is the Kennedy Administration’s consternation at the Rides. Wary of the embarrassment they might cause the United States at this pivotal moment in the Cold War, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and shortly before Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Attorney General Robert Kennedy constantly urged the Riders to accept a “cooling-off period” so that the administration could deal with Southern segregation in a more deliberate manner. But as the Riders well knew, “cooling off” meant returning to the unacceptable status quo. Indeed, to the Kennedys’ great chagrin, they were perfectly willing to cause a national crisis in order to force the administration to finally take meaningful action against segregation.

As the emphasis in the book’s title suggests, however, what comes across most vividly in Freedom Riders is the dogged determination of the four-hundred-plus activists who volunteered to continue the Rides over the summer, even after it was clear that violence and incarceration in Southern jails were unavoidable. Arsenault ably recreates all of the savage beatings and unenviable dilemmas faced by these men and women who risked their well-being, their freedom, and even their lives in order to force America to live up to its principles.

Readers wishing to learn more about this often-overlooked campaign of the civil rights movement and the very diverse group of people who pulled it off; about the movement’s decisive shift toward the strategy of non-violent direct action; about the massive headaches this endeavor caused the Kennedy Administration; about the horrors that faced anyone who challenged Deep South racial mores in the early 1960s; and, perhaps most important, want this story told with both nuance and flair, will enjoy Freedom Riders.

The fiftieth anniversary of the freedom rides this year has brought out a number of moving books, films, and other website materials:

PBS “American Experience,” film, Freedom Riders

The website for the PBS “American Experience” film, Freedom Riders, includes historical material, maps, biographies, teaching guides, and more.

James Farmer, one of the organizers of the Freedom Rides, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Raymond Arsenault interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air”

Group photograph: Freedom Riders at the home of Dr. Richard Harris after the church siege in Birmingham, AL. Included are Lucretia Collins (center), James Farmer (far right) and John Lewis (ground, right).
Credit: Johnson Publishing Company
From American Experience, Freedom Riders (fair use)

Photograph of James Peck seated on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Alabama following attack on a Freedom riders bus. By Joseph M. Chapman Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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