US History Archives - Page 24 of 25

David Oshinsky on Capital Punishment

By David Oshinsky

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia struck down state death penalty laws nationwide on grounds they violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.” The 5-4 decision was extremely controversial. Each justice wrote a separate opinion; not one could be persuaded to join with another. The combined verbiage filled 232 pages, making Furman the wordiest decision the Court had ever released. And the implications were stunning. Not only were 587 men and two women immediately removed from death rows across the country and re-sentenced to life in prison, but capital punishment itself now seemed a relic of the past.

The Court’s liberal wing—William Brennan, William O. Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall—portrayed the death penalty as a barbaric punishment, employed almost exclusively against poor and minority defendants, which violated the nation’s evolving standards of decency. The more conservative justices—Nixon appointees Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist—strongly disagreed. Each pursued a different line of argument, noting, for example, that capital punishment had been endorsed by the Founding Fathers, that it enjoyed wide support among the American people, and that it was meant to be decided in the state legislatures, not by nine unelected men in Washington. That left the two centrist justices—Potter Stewart and Byron White—to determine the outcome.

Both men believed the death penalty to be morally and legally defensible, yet both were troubled by its use. The issue wasn’t prejudice or evolving standards or original intent, they argued; it was the arbitrary and capricious method in which the punishment had been applied. The death penalty was cruel and unusual, said Stewart, “in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. . . . The Eighth Amendment cannot tolerate the infliction of a death sentence . . . so wantonly and freakishly imposed.”

Stewart had a point. Every year, more than 20,000 Americans are murdered. Of those arrested for these crimes, about half make a plea bargain or are found guilty at trial. Only a few hundred actually receive the death penalty, many of whom are then spared upon appeal. Such a system—about 100 executions for every 20,000 murders—raises obvious doubts about the effectiveness of deterrence and retribution. More important, it leads one to ask: Who, exactly, is chosen to die? Can we honestly say that the few defendants we execute have committed more horrible crimes than the thousands of defendants who receive prison terms? And if not, is it possible to create the kind of guidelines that will sort out the truly deserving offenders?

Furman had left the door slightly ajar. By deciding that capital punishment as currently practiced was unconstitutional, the justices had implicitly invited the individual states to rewrite their death penalty statutes in a manner that did not violate the Eighth Amendment. But no one on the Court expected this to occur. As Chief Justice Burger remarked privately to friends, “There will never be another execution in this country.” So, what happened?

Quite a lot, it turned out. In Capital Punishment on Trial, I look at the social and political landscape of the 1970s—the rise in urban crime, the cries for “law and order,” popular culture’s embrace of vigilante action, from “Death Wish” to “Dirty Harry.” In short order, the removal of the death penalty by “bleeding-heart judges” became part of the angry debate over why America’s streets had become more unsafe, and what could be done to fix the problem. Politicians promised a tougher stand on crime, leading numerous state legislatures to rewrite their death penalty statutes—the key new provisions being a bifurcated trial with a separate punishment phase in which “aggravating” and mitigating” circumstances could be weighed; and a clearer definition of what constituted a capital crime.

In 1976, the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia upheld the new death penalty statutes in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, ruling that they provided capital juries with sufficient guidance and discretion. Other states quickly followed suit. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court moved cautiously on the death penalty, carefully narrowing its scope while avoiding the issue of abolition—ruling, for example, that those under eighteen and the mentally retarded cannot be executed, nor can those convicted of crimes, such as rape in which a life is not taken. No issue over the years has been more difficult or contentious for the individual justices than this one. And no issue has demanded more of their time.

Today, as in the past, Americans support capital punishment in overwhelming numbers, according to public opinion polls, despite a stream of reports that portray the system as racially biased, weighted against the poor, expensive to maintain, and prone to wrongful convictions. The issue strikes so powerfully because of the combustible elements it contains—elements of morality and justice, on the one hand, punishment and vengeance, on the other. The future of capital punishment is difficult to predict, especially in the post-9/11 world. At the moment, however, one thing is clear. For a majority of Americans, some crimes are simply too heinous to be punished by anything less than death.

Sounds of the Past #2

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Anyone interested in early sound recordings can find a treasure trove at the Library of Congress website.

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is a great example of the sentimental ballads that became popular in the United States during the 1890s. The classic ballads were maudlin tearjerkers, narrative tales of lost love or dead mothers designed to pull at the heartstrings. They featured snappy melodies that lodged themselves in the heads of anyone within earshot. New York sheet music publishers churned them out by the score, hoping that a few would prove popular with theater audiences and the legions of young women who played the latest hits at the family piano. The assembly-line composition process marked the industrialization of American popular music.

Listen to “In the Baggage Coach Ahead”

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” from 1896 hits all the requisite stops. The song takes place on the sleeping car on a train, where an inconsolable baby cries in its father’s arms. Other passengers demand silence, complaining that they cannot sleep. One woman then suggests that the father take the baby to its mother, a request that set up the song’s kicker. “I wish I could,” the father replies, “but she’s dead in the coach ahead.”

The song was the most popular composition of Gussie L. Davis, a pioneer in breaking down segregation in the music business. He was one of a very few African American songwriters who successfully published sentimental ballads during the decade. Most black writers were either barred from the industry or constrained to writing comic minstrel songs about black inferiority.

The performer, Vernon Dalhart, was a struggling opera singer who moved from Texas to New York around 1911. He eventually became a popular recording artist for the Edison phonograph company, waxing everything from light opera and minstrel songs to popular hits of the day. In 1925, he re-imagined himself as a hillbilly singer and achieved his greatest popularity with “The Prisoner’s Song,” often touted as the first country record to sell a million copies.

Sentimental ballads such as “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” were popular, in part, because they could help Americans grapple with the dramatic social changes they were experiencing. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the expansion of railroad travel, and the availability of thousands of new consumer goods (including phonographs and commercial theater) brought increasing contact with people, products, and ideas from elsewhere. Sentimental ballads helped negotiate the intersection of public and private spheres. Davis’ last verse finds all the mothers and wives on the train helping the lone father sooth his crying child. It concludes, “Every one had a story to tell in their home of the baggage coach ahead.” Mothers saved the day and helped transform a public tragedy into a private morality lesson when witnesses shared the story with their loved ones back home.

Embracing “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” and its kin meant not having to choose between public and private allegiances. Sentimental ballads were commercial leisure that celebrated private domesticity. Listeners could identify with both by singing along with the odes to private virtue echoing from the public stage.

Karl H. Miller’s “Sounds of the Past #1” on Not Even Past

Sheet music cover: Historic American Sheet Music collection, Duke University Libraries Digital Collections
Portraits of Davis and Dalhart via Wikimedia Commons

Black Loyalists and “The Book of Negroes”

by Cassandra Pybus

The Book of Negroes is an extraordinary historical resource, a meticulous list drawn up by the British authorities between May and November 1783, in which they recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated from New York. The great majority of these people were originally enslaved workers who had defected to the British and were now leaving America as free people. The most significant thing about the Book of Negroes is that most people are recorded with surnames that allow them to be tracked through the archives. It is organized by ship with each person given a name, in many cases with a surname, age, brief description, owner’s name, date of absconding, geographic location and, where appropriate, the name of a loyalist sponsor. Even though the surnames of listed individuals are often misheard, the ages are wildly inaccurate and the time of absconding is ambiguous, we simply don’t have demographic data like this about enslaved people in the eighteenth century in any other source.

In addition to the Book of Negroes, a related resource is the muster of black settlers at Birchtown 1783/1784, which was created by the British authorities for the purposes of distributing rations at the biggest black settlement in Nova Scotia. This list provides first names and surnames, ages and sometimes occupations and, crucially, it is organized by households with the names and ages of wives, children and other household members. In addition, the British archives yield other lists of black refugees including Revolutionary musters, land grant schedules in Nova Scotia; Nova Scotia parish records of the settlements of Birchtown, Digby and Annapolis and lists of people migrating to Sierra Leone. These are all partial lists and frustratingly opaque, but they all provide surnames and some demographic information.

In order to interpret the data and unlock the meanings and implications of the vital demographic information contained in the Book of Negroes and other British sources, the data on each person needs to be read against American colonial sources such as lists of tithable slave property, minutes of county Committees of Safety, runaway notices, parish vestry books, wills and probate records, letters and diaries of prominent individuals, petitions to government, shipping records, plantation records, court records, and county militia records. The seemingly impossible task of locating individuals and their kin is made viable for the largest single cohort from the Lower Chesapeake region of Virginia. By a stroke of luck the Norfolk Tithable lists from 1730 to 1780 survive largely intact and these provide a single name for slave property, aged between 16 years and 60 years, belonging to heads of households in Norfolk County.

By meticulous cross referencing the information in the Book of Negroes and other British sources I have been able to construct life trajectories, kin relationships, naming patterns and religious affiliations for hundreds of people. These biographies form the first phase of the website Black Loyalist, a repository of historical data about the African American loyalist refugees whose names are recorded in the Book of Negroes

A passport for Cato Ramsay to emigrate to Nova Scotia in 1783. Black refugees behind British lines needed passports to leave the United States. Without this document, they risked a return to their place of origin, which meant a return to enslavement. Source: Nova Scotia Archives

Here is brief sketch of one individual:

James Jackson is said to be fifty years old in the Book of Negroes and described as “Formerly slave to late Robert Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him with Lord Dunmore when he left that country & was employed as a pilot.” In 1775 his owner was the Norfolk merchant and mariner Robert Tucker Jr, and he was inherited from Colonel Robert Tucker, whose extensive estate was mostly sold after his death in 1767. He must have defected to Lord Dunmore sometime between June and November 1775 when Lord Dunmore had taken refuge on a British warship in the James River, just offshore from Norfolk.

Years later the widow to Robert Tucker Jr lodged a claim for property lost to the British at the burning of Norfolk in December 1775 and during the British occupation of the spit of land known as Tucker’s Mill Point in April 1776. The property list includes the names of nine enslaved men, two women and a boy but does not list James, who is appeared in Tucker’s tithables in 1774. This evidence strongly implies that, like several other pilots, James Jackson had defected to Dunmore earlier in the conflict.

During the revolution James Jackson worked as a pilot for the Royal Navy and in 1783 he travelled to Nova Scotia in the company of Captain Henry Mowatt, commander of HMS La Sophia. Travelling with him was another pilot named London Jackson, aged 32, who was apparently his brother and was described as “Formerly slave to William Ballad, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” According to the Norfolk Tithables, London’s owners were Daniel Barraud and his son William, merchants in Norfolk and Hampton, who had close business and kin connections to Robert Tucker. He would have have defected to General Leslie who made a foray into Hampton in 1781. The Jackson brothers did not go to Birchtown but were given a land grant on nearby Nutt Island where they settled with their respective families.

474px-4thEarlOfDunmore — *John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, depicted in 1765 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 offered freedom to American slaves who joined the Loyalist cause.*

Also travelling with London and James Jackson is a woman named Nelly Jackson, aged 33, said to be “Formerly slave to Hampstead Bailie, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” She appears to have run away with London Jackson, but there is no apparent connection between their owners to suggest a kinship connection, and she does not settle at Nutt Island or Birchtown. It is most likely that Nelly was actually the wife of John Jackson who was travelling on the Clinton, which sailed some months later. He was said to be 26 and described as “Formerly the property of Anthony Walk, Princess Ann, Virginia left him 3 years ago.” He must have run to the British forces of General Leslie in late 1780 at the same time as London Jackson; there is a difference in the stated time they ran because of John Jackson’s later departure from New York. He settled at Birchtown where he was said to be 41, with his wife Nancy, aged 32, whom I believe to be the same woman as Nelly Jackson. Johnny can be found in the Tucker Tithables 1765 and in Tucker’s estate in 1768 and listed with Tucker’s widow until 1774. After Mrs Tucker’s death in 1779 he must have been sold to Anthony Walke, who lived in Princess Anne County Norfolk, who also had a mercantile business in Norfolk with connections to Tucker.

The strong circumstantial evidence — close connections between their owners, their shared occupation, the times and places at which they defected—lead me to conclude that these Jackson men are all from one family. There was no reason for me to presume a connection between this family and several other Jacksons from Norfolk who settle at Birchtown. Then I made the chance discovery of a land transfer deed for the Nutt Island grant that states that Jane Thompson was the mother of James Jackson and by extension the mother of London and John.

Jane Thomson was said to be aged 70 and worn out. The Book of Negroes indicates that she was travelling with a five-year-old grandchild and that she “Says she was born free; lived with Col. Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him 6 years ago.” Jane Thompson is one of the oldest members of the cohort of Black Loyalists from Virginia evacuated to Nova Scotia. At Birchtown she is living with Hannah Jackson and two grandchildren, Robert and Peter Jackson. Close examination of the opaque and fragmentary documentary record about Jane Thompson in colonial Virginia reveals an extraordinary narrative of determination and family resilience.

For more on the Book of Negroes, the Black Loyalists, and the historical recovery of the lives of African American slaves, see the website Black Loyalist: http://www.blackloyalist.info

And Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Images via Wikimedia Commons.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (2008)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Rick Perlstein traces the antecedents of contemporary American politics to the period 1965-1972, presenting Richard Nixon as a central figure in creating a foundation for today’s bitter partisanship. Perlstein builds his story around the 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972 elections, where Nixon, “the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s,” acted as a critical participant. The author argues that during this time period, Americans intensely divided into two general groups, “each equally convinced of its own righteousness, each equally convinced the other group was defined by its evil.” Richard Nixon exploited the fears and rages of those Americans who resented elites and activists, further tearing apart the United States into warring political factions and establishing what Perlstein terms “Nixonland.” The nation of Nixonland persists today in America’s polarized electorate, which remains incapable of escaping the feuds initiated in the 1960s.

The author contemplates why Americans elected two presidents from different parties in landslides over a matter of eight years (Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Republican Richard Nixon in 1972). He concludes that as Democratic liberalism collapsed under the weight of intense unrest at home and violence in Vietnam during the 1960s, Nixon sought to build a new political coalition among Americans who loathed the chaos permeating their society. Perlstein argues that Nixon particularly courted white southerners and northern working-class ethnics who resented the burgeoning counterculture, antiwar protestors, and Democratic embracement of civil rights. Yet as Nixon demonized his detractors and successfully captured the presidency in 1968, Democratic victories in the 1970 midterm elections and his increasing paranoia led him to conclude that his failure to be re-elected in 1972 would lead to the downfall of the United States, with its governance placed again in the hands of liberals now all the more influenced by civil rights activists, antiwar protestors, and rebellious youth. These obsessions caused him to resort to any means necessary to win a second term, leading to his own ruin in the Watergate scandal.

Nixonland is a magnificent work presenting a detailed political, social, cultural, and economic history of the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perlstein illustrates how the United States of today, especially in its acrimonious politics, owes much of its legacy to this tumultuous era. Perlstein concludes: “Both populations—to speak in ideal types—are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.”

Further reading:

An interview with Rick Perlstein by History News Network.

Great Books on Women in US History

By Megan Seaholm

As one of the students in my U.S. women’s history class put it, “Women are just like men; except that they are different.” For all that men and women have had in common these many millenia, women’s experience has often been different. Women’s History Month gives us the opportunity to talk about two new and one not so new “good reads” on the subject.

The University of Texas Press has just published the latest from the impressive authorial team, Judith McArthur and Harold Smith, faculty at the University of Houston-Victoria. Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth Century Experience (2010) begins with “Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920,” discussing the civic reforms pursued by white and black clubwomen, labor activism, settlement houses and prostitution districts, and the state woman suffrage campaign.

Black and white photograph by Richard Arthur Norton called Suffrage Hikers showing a line of women and men holding protest signs and flags

Texas suffragists were among the few southern suffrage associations to win partial voting rights for women before the federal amendment was passed. These Texas women pulled a “fast one,” and you will want to read about it.

McArthur and Smith continue through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the backlash to same in the last decades of the twentieth century. They make the history they reveal personal with selected documents like “Hallie Crawford Stillwell Gets a Sink and Builds a Bathroom,” “Jessie Daniel Ames Urges Women to Vote against the Ku Klux Klan,” “Army Nurse Lucy Wilson Serves in the Pacific Theater,” “Ceil Cleveland Becomes a Teenage Bride in the Fifties,” and “Ann Richards Moves from Campaign Volunteer to County Commissioner.”

McArthur and Smith are also the coauthors of Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragists’ Life in Politics (2005) which won the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women from the Texas State Historical Association and the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award from the Texas Historical Commission.

Christine Stansell, a well-regarded historian at the University of Chicago, provides a national perspective in her latest publication,The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (2010). Don’t be daunted by the title. This is not a polemic, nor is it a weighty treatise on social theory. Rather, it is an exceptionally readable narrative of the efforts of American women to improve their social, political and legal situation. Stansell notes the efforts of women of color and of working class women alongside the more well-known white middle-class activists. She provides the general reader, as well as the scholar new to women’s history, with a splendid survey of women’s rights activism beginning with the days of the early republic. Her discussion of the woman suffrage movement is particularly strong because she explains the divisions in the movement and its culminating diversity, which led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. From the racism of the movement’s “southern strategy” to the dramatic protests of the National Woman’s Party in front of the White House even during World War I, Stansell’s unflinching history is good reading. Stansell barely pauses once women have won the vote. Her story continues through the interwar years to the “second wave” of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Black and white photograph by Evert F. Baumgardner from 1958 entitled by Family Watching Television

Again, she explains that the “movement” was far from monolithic in goals or tactics, but she acknowledges the accomplishments as well as the internal politics.Stansell’s subject is organized women’s activism, which like activism of all sorts, was viewed with suspicion in the early years of the Cold War, aka “the McCarthy Era.” Fortunately, Elaine Tyler May moved into the breach with Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988). Who knew that Cold War foreign policy and its home front counterpart had such important implications for family life? May’s first chapter “Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth,” shows the ways that the Cold War foreign policy of “containing Communism” was reflected in family life.

The Fifties have been canonized as the nostalgia decade of domestic tranquility before the tumultuous Sixties. Professor May confounds, or, at least complicates, this happy myth. The frenzied public celebration of family life introduced new stresses into families and to couples, as social norms regarding dating, birth control, marital sexuality, consumerism, and divorce were in flux. A history of family life, a history of women’s experience, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound is a young classic.

Photo credits

Suffrage Hikers, By Richard Arthur Norton, via Wikimedia Commons
Bessie Colman, First African-American Pilot, National Air and Space Museum, via Wikimedia Commons
Family Watching Television, 1958, by Evert F. Baumgardner, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Great Books on The Rise of American Capitalism

by H. W. Brands

Ron Chernow. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. The best combination of narrative and analysis on the banking house that made J. P. Morgan the towering financial figure of his time.

Matthew Josephson. The Robber Barons:The Great American Capitalists. The classic muckraking account of the generation of industrialists and financiers who built modern American capitalism. More than any other book, this one is responsible for the shadow the captains of industry still labor under in history.

Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives. Danish-immigrant-turned-investigative-journalist prowls the Lower East Side with notepad and camera in hand, recording and depicting the lives of the desperately poor.

Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery: An Autobriography. The best-titled memoir in American history and one of the best overall. Recounts the life of the great African American leader, who rose from bondage to international fame by dint of intelligence, shrewdness and sheer hard work.

William Riordon. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. A delightful primer on big-city machine politics, by a prominent politico. The machines have largely vanished, but Plunkitt’s philosophy still goes far to explain American politics.

Willa Cather. My Antonia. A beautifully crafted evocation of life on the Plains frontier, which was disappearing even as Cather wrote.

Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. The last days of the free Sioux, as told by one of their medicine men.

H. W. Brands on the Rise of American Capitalism

By H. W. Brands

During the quarter millennium since American independence, two institutions and sets of values have come to characterize American society: democracy and capitalism. Each had roots in the eighteenth century, but each blossomed only in the nineteenth century. Democracy emerged first, during age of Jackson, as ordinary people began exercising political power and electing candidates who seemed much like themselves. By 1850, while the practice of democracy left much to be desired (neither women nor African Americans could vote), the principle had become unassailable in American politics.

Capitalism emerged later, during what Mark Twain derisively called the Gilded Age. But it burst forth with an energy and thoroughness that made the final third of the nineteenth century the era of America’s capitalist revolution. The revolution transformed American finance, turning Wall Street into the hub of investment and speculation and New York the budding capital of world finance. The capitalist revolution reshaped the larger economy, converting America from a nation of farmers into a country of urban workers, managers and professionals. It recast American geography, pulling the recently feudal South into the web of capitalist commerce and exploiting the natural resources of the West. It altered American politics, injecting money into elections as never before and making the nurturing of American business the principal agenda of the dominant Republican party.

The capitalist revolution spun off personal fortunes for John D. Rockefeller, the titan of oil; Andrew Carnegie, the sultan of steel; J. P. Morgan, the master of money; and a hundred lesser winners in the capitalist struggle for profit and dominance. It drew millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, men and women who dreamed of achieving not the enormous wealth of Rockefeller and Carnegie but merely a modest piece of America’s prosperity for themselves and their children. It built cities of brick and steel and concrete, of skyscrapers and mansions and tenements and slums. It lifted the average American to a standard of living never attained anywhere else in previous history, even as it intensified inequalities between the rich and the poor.

John_D._Rockefeller_1885 — John D. Rockefeller

The capitalist revolution, like all revolutions, swept along the willing and unwilling alike. The winners outnumbered the losers, but they didn’t always outshout them. Farmers burdened with deflation-aggravated debt attempted to rein in the big capitalists. They created the Populist party and promoted candidates who promised to restore the traditional values on which the country had been built. Railroad workers, steel workers and other industrial laborers organized unions that waged strikes against their employers—and, in effect, against the government, when state and federal officials sided with the employers. Intellectuals challenged the ethos of capitalism, contending that the clamor for profit coarsened society and commodified life.

The capitalist revolution surged beyond American shores during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A withering depression caused merchants and manufacturers to seek markets abroad. A modern navy constructed in capitalist shipyards provided the means to extend American power to the far corners of the earth. The self-confidence the country’s bumptious growth had fostered encouraged Americans to emulate the imperial powers of Europe and Asia. In the 1890s the United States defeated Spain in battle, annexed islands and archipelagoes in the Caribbean and Pacific, and announced its entrance onto the stage of global power.

The capitalist revolution was the big story of era, but it was a big story composed of many small stories. Jay Gould was a young financier who grew a bushy beard to make him look older, and who remained calm during the tensest moments of difficult speculations, except for the telltale habit of tearing pieces of paper into tiny bits. Gould and his partner Jim Fisk, the P. T. Barnum of Wall Street, tried to corner the gold market in 1869 and nearly succeeded. They were foiled only at the last moment, when the federal government intervened. The ensuing turmoil wracked the financial world, jolted the broader economy, added “Black Friday” to America’s calendar of infamy, and nearly saw Gould and Fisk hanged from lampposts in lower Manhattan. James McParlan was a Pinkerton spy who infiltrated the “Molly Maguires,” the murderously radical wing of the coal miners of Pennsylvania. McParlan assumed a false identity, romanced the sister-in-law of one of the Mollies, and provided evidence that led to the execution of several of the radicals, some of whom quite likely were innocent of the crimes for which they were hanged.

Sleeping_homeless_children_-_Jacob_Riis — Jacob Riis, Sleeping Homeless Children

Jourdon Anderson was a former slave from Tennessee. He emigrated to Ohio after the war, only to receive a letter from his former master inviting him to come back. Anderson declined the invitation, saying he preferred his life in the North. He asked his master to convey his regards to his old friends on the plantation. “Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.” Gertrude Thomas was the wife of a Georgia planter ruined by the Civil War; she tried to make the transition from the prewar slave economy to the postwar capitalist economy, and from the former culture of deference to the new one characterized—for a time, at least—by egalitarianism. But the old habits and thought patterns died hard in her, and her life gradually disintegrated.

Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux who, as teenager, fought in the battle of the Little Bighorn and scalped a federal cavalryman while he was still alive. He was an adult when the federal army had its revenge at Wounded Knee, in the slaughter of women and children on a frozen hillside in Dakota. Charles Goodnight was a ranch man who blazed one of the long trails from Texas to Kansas by which cattle drovers put beef on Northern plates and Texas on the map of the national economy. Howard Ruede was a Pennsylvania boy who went west to claim a homestead in Kansas. He built a dugout home from the virgin sod, but knew he’d never win a wife until he moved upscale to a proper frame house with windows, door and a roof that didn’t leak mud every time it rained.

Mary Fales was a Chicagoan who lost her home and the belongings she couldn’t carry when the Chicago fire of 1871 roared through the city and destroyed her neighborhood. She nearly lost her life but managed to reach the shore of Lake Michigan, where refugees from the flames waded into the water to avoid being roasted on the beach. Jacob Riis was a young Dane who fled his homeland for America when the woman he loved married another man. After several rough years he found his calling as an investigative journalist and photographer; his exposé How the Other Half Lives alerted the country to the poverty that existed within a stone’s throw of the great wealth of New York City. Chun Ho was a Chinese girl who was lured to California on the promise of economic opportunity on the “Gold Mountain,” as America was called in China, but who was forced into prostitution. As an illegal immigrant she feared going to the police, who anyway were in cahoots with the woman who pimped her out. Eventually she made her escape, but knew other girls who were murdered in the attempt.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans had concluded that the capitalist revolution, for all the material benefits it conferred, had tipped the balance too far away from democracy. The complaints accumulated to the point where an unforeseen event, the assassination of William McKinley, pushed the pendulum back in the opposite direction. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor, led a democratic counterrevolution that during the first half of the twentieth century reclaimed for democracy the ground that had been lost to capitalism, and more—preparing the way for another reversal, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which capitalism was again unleashed, and which culminated in a bust that provoked new demands to rein in the capitalists.

H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor (2010)

by James Jenkins

The War of 1812 was not a war between two nations, but rather a civil war, in which “brother fought brother in a borderland of mixed peoples.” Alan Taylor focuses on the U.S.-Canada borderland, which stretched from Detroit to Montreal. Before the war, the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens in the region remained uncertain. The British asserted that their empire’s subjects remained subjects for life, precisely when a stream of Irish people were migrating to the United States. Moreover, immigrants from the United States made up the majority of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Although the War of 1812 resulted in a stalemate from a diplomatic or military perspective, it gave closure to the contested border and resulted in the emergence of the United States and Canada as modern nation-states.

Taylor identifies four components that made the War of 1812 a civil war. First, The Republican-led American government vied with Britain over who would control Upper Canada. Yet, the U.S.’s poorly trained military struggled to occupy even a sliver of Canadian territory. Taylor describes how supply lines, propaganda, and prisons all played pivotal roles in the war’s outcome. Second, American Federalists sympathized with Britain. Most Federalists opposed the war and some even contributed to Britain’s war effort by smuggling, spying and threatening secession. Moreover, the United States never waged a significant campaign on the upper St. Lawrence River because Federalists in Ogdensburg, NY used their political influence to block such a strategy. Possessing the St. Lawrence River would have weakened all of Upper Canada, which relied on the seaway for supplies. But Republican politicians from western New York and Kentucky successfully lobbied to make the Detroit and Niagara Rivers the primary American fronts. Third, Irish republicans who had immigrated to the United States renewed a failed rebellion in Ireland by enlisting in American forces. But, they also faced Irish soldiers who had joined the royal army, pitting Irishman against Irishman.

Taylor describes a fourth aspect to the civil war: the involvement of Native peoples. Many Indians joined British forces in the hopes of stopping further U.S. settlement in the Ohio Valley. However, Native peoples are curiously peripheral to Taylor’s narrative, and he instead highlights their ability to terrify untrained American soldiers and provide fodder for anti-British propaganda. Taylor’s emphasis on imagined Indians leaves some paradoxical questions unanswered. For instance, he argues that American General William Henry Harrison’s troops considered arming Indians to be racial treason. Yet Taylor has little to say about the two hundred some Native people who joined Harrison’s forces. In addition, Taylor offers almost no biographical details on Native individuals. Those wishing for the next chapter of Taylor’s The Divided Ground (2006), which places the Haudenosaunee at the center of the American Revolution, will be disappointed.

Despite this shortcoming, Taylor’s borderland approach and assiduous research make for a welcome revision to an often overlooked war. The Civil War of 1812 should appeal to a large audience thanks to Taylor’s engaging narratives and elegant writing style.

History Underfoot

by Erika M. Bsumek

History can sometimes surround us – sometimes it’s even underfoot. This rug, from the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, represents the kind of textiles that were made by skilled Navajo weavers and sold on the Navajo reservation from the late 19th into the early 20th century.

The attractive geometric designs of such creations corresponded with other fashion forward styles of the era and they became popular additions to dens and “Indian corners” across the U.S. Navajo rugs have had a lasting influence on interior design ever since. Consumers currently spend millions of dollars every year for antique rugs and blankets, newer rugs still being created by Navajo weavers, or even the less expensive “American Indian style” rugs made in Mexico or India.

So, what’s the history of a rug like this one and why should we care about it? One view is that after the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of sheep in North America, weaving became central to the development of trade goods throughout the Southwest. Thus, Navajo textiles reflect Spanish influence and cultural exchange. When Anglos began settling in the region, they developed a taste for woven goods and further altered the trade. Traders encouraged weavers to include borders, like the Greek key style design found in this rug, similar to those found on Persian rugs.

In the 1880s, the white traders who encouraged these changes knew that the beautiful Navajo textiles could be sold to white consumers – if marketed correctly. Another view, the Navajo view, is that Spiderwoman (a key spiritual figure in Navajo cosmology) gave Navajo women the skill they needed to fashion cotton and wool into beautiful creations to trade and feed their families.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell, who ran the Ganado Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona, turned their attention to selling Navajo rugs as a way to generate income for the post. Hubbell’s first step was to convince famed hotelier Fred Harvey to stock his hotel gift shops with Navajo blankets and rugs. Harvey also used Navajo rugs as decorative accessories throughout his hotel. This meant that railway tourists to the Southwest could simply stroll into the hotel’s lobby, see the beautiful the rugs used throughout the hotel, enter the store, and purchase a rug to take home. Beyond Harvey’s gift shop sales, traders like Hubbell also published catalogues that they shipped to potential customers or curio stores throughout the United States. The text and advertisements that appeared in trader catalogues promoted the traders as much as, if not more so, than the weavers.

This kind of marketing made Navajo textiles part of an emerging fascination with “primitive’ peoples. By the early 1900s, Americans across the United States were collecting goods from Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest. Just as painters like Picasso began to include elements of indigenous art in modernist art forms, consumers could buy goods that reflected similar design elements: geometrical, bold, abstract.

As consumer fascination with Navajo rugs took hold in the marketplace, rugs grew in value. But, where were the weavers who made the products? How were they treated? Ironically, although Navajo textiles took on social value, Indians were being de-valued in society. Government efforts to assimilate Indians remained strong well into the twentieth century. In response, Navajo weavers, in particular, have worked to preserve their culture through their weavings. So, the next time you see a Navajo rug, you might want to consider its history – and more importantly, the history of the people who made it.

Read more about the marketing of Navajo crafts:

Erika Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940

The Age of Reagan: A History, by Sean Wilentz (2008)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Historians often define political periods in the United States according to the dominant president of the era. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., most famously wrote of an Age of Jackson, and other scholars have proposed Ages of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sean Wilentz adds another chapter to this genre, labeling the last quarter of the twentieth century after Ronald Reagan, with his book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. From the 1974 Watergate scandal until 2008 when Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, the U.S. witnessed the triumph of political conservatism. Ronald Reagan harnessed conservative angst to win the White House, pursued conservative polices as president both domestically and internationally, and left a legacy his conservative political successors attempted to continue, with mixed results.

The Age of Reagan provides a valuable overview of recent U.S. political history. During the 1970s both major political parties experienced internal divisions. Conservative Republicans criticized Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Henry Kissinger’s pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union as dangerously weak foreign policy. Liberal Democrats railed against Jimmy Carter’s ineffective leadership in solving the nation’s economic and social problems. Americans turned away from moderates in both parties and looked to conservatism when they elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan succeeded in entrenching conservatism within the federal government, particularly with his judicial appointees and expansion of presidential power.

Yet the author correctly debunks much of the mythology surrounding Reagan, noting that his administration often pursued pragmatic policies, unable or unwilling to roll back much of the liberal reform of past years, and also encountered many setbacks, most notably with the Iran-Contra scandal.

The Age of Reagan goes on to describe the triumphs and travails of Reagan’s presidential successors. George H. W. Bush, less conservative than his predecessor, encountered difficulties in appealing to both the moderate and right-wing factions of his party. Bill Clinton, a self-described New Democrat, governed as a centrist following Republican capture of Congress in the 1994 elections, recognizing this as a requirement in a conservative age. Wilentz concludes with a brief overview of George W. Bush’s tumultuous presidency. During these years conservatism may already have been running on borrowed time, butevents of the Bush years, such as the controversial election of 2000, the disastrous Iraq War, the miserable response to Hurricane Katrina, and the dramatic collapse of the economy ultimately sounded the death knell for the Age of Reagan, as Americans rejected conservatism in favor of Barack Obama’s call for political change. Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan is a fascinating narrative of recent U.S. history, and will prove engaging reading, especially in the aftermath of the 2010 elections.

Time will tell if the Age of Reagan truly is over. The emergence of right-wing groups such as the Tea Party and the continued popularity of demagogic figures like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck suggest that the conservative movement will not exit quietly into the night. The current president and his supporters would have to convince Americans of the superiority of their policies, no small task. Their success or failure will determine whether the United States has entered a new period, perhaps an Age of Obama, or returns to the Age of Reagan.

« Previous Page

Recent Posts