ABSTRACT This essay illustrates how slavery supporters and abolitionists, through their use of the popular press, invoked the recent histories of Central America Texas, and Mexico to justify their views on the United States’ peculiar institution. Slaveholders cast the historical legacy of post-independence Mexico and Central America as the story of floundering countries, comprised of unproductive people

ABSTRACT Much is known about Swedes in America, but little is known about the portrayals of Native Americans in Swedish-American newspapers. Considering their centrality in Swedish American settler communities, this article explores newspaper portrayals as processes of boundary construction. By utilizing the Eliadean concept of cosmisation it is shown how and argued that newspapers served as canvases

ABSTRACT South Carolina’s antebellum upcountry was home to a group of free black farmers who achieved meaningful degrees of economic security and whose lives mirrored those of some of their white neighbours in ways that challenged the boundary between race and class. Though just a segment of rural free people of colour, these farmers more closely resembled non-elite whites than they did the enslaved

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of propaganda to promote enlistment in the Union military during the American Civil War. The concept of propaganda offers historians of the Civil War a useful framework for understanding the means by which power structures and community pressure manifested in Northern recruitment. In addition to arguing for the importance of these power dynamics, this article

ABSTRACT This study goes beyond the debate on anti- and philo-American discourses to focus on the role U.S. cultural diplomacy played in shaping Spanish views on the United States in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from a wide variety of contemporary sources, it argues that the outbreak of the American Civil War led to the active promotion of American democratic ideals in Spain by a host of official

(2020). The Overseers of Early American Slavery: Supervisors, Enslaved Labourers, and the Plantation Enterprise. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 301-302.

(2020). The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 302-304.

(2020). Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 304-306.

(2020). Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 308-309.

(2020). Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 309-311.

(2020). Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 311-312.

(2020). The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 313-314.

(2020). Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 315-316.

(2020). An Environmental History of the Civil War. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 316-318.

(2020). Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 318-320.

(2020). When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 320-321.

(2020). Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 321-323.

(2020). Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 323-325.

(2020). Books Reviewed. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 327-327.

ABSTRACT This article reviews 30 years of synthetic works on Jacksonian America and argues that while most are still political narratives, the elements of a new synthesis are emerging. Recent scholarship suggests three broad areas from which a newer, more relevant synthesis might come: slavery, race, and gender; political culture; and the new history of capitalism. Furthermore, some key building blocks

ABSTRACT Between 1911 and 1914, four major Southern public universities – the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama – conferred honorary degrees upon former students who had abandoned their studies to join the Confederate military. Some 400 Confederate veterans received this tribute a half century after their enlistment, during

ABSTRACT This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish enslavers in Louisiana. The profits extracted from slavery in New Orleans created the possibility for some Irish immigrants to accumulate immense wealth. Irish enslavers were immigrants who took advantage of enslaved people. Indeed, the Irish families examined in this article took to

ABSTRACT Utilizing newspapers and manuscripts to examine the first conventions, this article further challenges the association of Jacksonianism with increasing democratization. The rise of democratization evident through the increased political engagement apparent in the conventions was not purely Jacksonian, instead manifesting itself in anti-Jacksonian political activity. The Anti-Masonic Party

When specialists in comparative urban history think of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, about four things come to mind. First, the City of Brotherly Love began the century as a modest-sized city ma...

In 1845, as Frederick Douglass remembered his time enslaved, he wrote that his “tendency was upward.” Douglass observed that, “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantat...

ABSTRACT A scholarly consensus has emerged in recent years that the Declaration of Independence was the “apple of gold” in Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery political thought and moral grounding. Prior to Congress’s passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, he had mentioned the document only twice, and in his Peoria Address of October 1854, he referred to it as “the white man’s charter of freedom.”

ABSTRACT This article argues that Americans, influenced by British economist David Ricardo, initially blamed banking and the decay of America’s ethic of labor for causing the Panic of 1857. Americans’ stress on the negative influence of banking on labor set the terms for political debate about the Panic. Southern radicals used the Panic to justify slavery and secession. Republicans and other antislavery

ABSTRACT The extent of the multi-ethnic integration of the Seminoles remains a cause of debate in both Florida history and the wider field of Indigenous studies. This article argues against the notion that the Black experience among the Seminoles prior to the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) was homogenous and considers the role of those who experienced the restrictions of enslavement: the Estelusti

geology. Strang highlights the significance of Gulf Coast enslavers and their networks for naturalists in Philadelphia, and by extension, the central role violence – and especially plantation slavery – played in American intellectual life. We see how the collection of geologic specimens relied on the labor of enslaved people, and how theoretical arguments at the vanguard of geology were being used

Circus Life provides an excellent and relatively unexplored view of the world of the circus in five chapters, each of which explores a different aspect of circus history and culture. Rather than fo...

raged against the kapu: they fired cannons, formed mobs, and lay much of the blame on the recently-arrived missionaries. The Kingdom and the Republic, however, shows how the kapu and its enforcement were less a consequence of missionary leadership – as the sailors erroneously assumed and scholars have subsequently suggested – and instead evidence of indigenous governance and sovereignty in response

ABSTRACT During the era of westward expansion, Americanism became tied to visions of conquering the West with American customs and values. Public schools especially served the interests of promoting nationalism and inducing assimilation. Implicitly Protestant Christian school curricula, however, repelled many Catholics and immigrants from the very institution designed to induce their assimilation.

ABSTRACT From the late nineteenth century up to the end of World War I, approximately half a million people immigrated to the United States from the Greater Syria region of the Ottoman Empire to make money and improve their lives. This article aims to shed light on the history of the Ottoman-Syrian immigration to the United States, particularly focusing on their economic and social integration into

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on slavery has begun to draw attention to the ubiquity of mobility among America’s bound workers. They moved as boatmen, teamsters, lady’s maids, turpentine hands, and fugitives. They moved as commodities in a booming interstate trade. Most of all, they moved as workers. Functioning at one and the same time as the lifeblood, the infrastructure, and the lubricant of American

ABSTRACT This study evaluates the attitudes of slaveholders towards slavery in Maryland’s Tidewater region during the Early Republic, through the examination of their claims for slave property lost in the War of 1812. Of the minority of claimants who created a discourse about their slaves’ escapes, about half refused to believe their slaves wanted to escape, suggesting that the paternalistic ideology

Heerman observes, “virtually no free people in Illinois fought for slavery’s abolition” (p. 59). The author frequently supports these macro-level examinations of slavery and emancipation in Illinois with microhistorical vignettes – plucked from obscure archival sources – that offer humanizing glimpses into the daily lives of so-called “French Negroes” in Illinois. The final three chapters explore the

Matthew Fox-Amato's Exposing Slavery is a compelling and important text. Fox-Amato makes a convincing case for the significant role photography played in shaping and reflecting the ideologies of mu...

world, ranged from outright opposition to evasion and subterfuge, and Damned Nation includes examples of each along with careful considerations of the various dynamics that produced such variety. If there is an aspect of hell in America that seems underdeveloped in these pages – particularly considering the book’s title – it has to do with the collective spiritual status of the nation itself. After

reading of the Revolutionary era. Two counter-examples will suffice. Tidewater Virginia featured the same social structure in the eighteenth century that Nabors lays out for the oligarchy of the 1850s. Yet Virginia was the home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry – in short, the most prominent of the Founders. Why were they less oligarchic than Jefferson Davis and Alexander Hamilton Stephens?

ABSTRACT This article argues against the often-made connection between democratic reform and Union victory in the Civil War. Defining democracy narrowly as an electoral process, the article looks at France, the German states, a selection of Latin American countries, and Great Britain to illustrate that democratic reforms were an ongoing conversation started long before the Civil War. While the Second

ABSTRACT Historians rightly acknowledge the role that white women played in supporting both the Union and Confederacy on the home front and the front lines. Formerly enslaved women and their difficult transition while supporting Unionism remains an important historical issue that scholars examine. This article seeks to add to our understanding of the important wartime mobilization for northern African

ABSTRACT This paper examines the legacy of the Galileo Affair as a weapon used by Protestants against those who, despite the scientific age of the earth, read Genesis literally. Believing science to have a legitimate role in correcting biblical interpretations, nineteenth-century religionists sought to explain the doctrine of creation in accordance with the geological evidence for “Deep Time.” This

ABSTRACT Between 1862 and 1875, most of the teachers in North Carolina’s schools for the freedpeople were black. The vast majority of these teachers were from the South, mostly North Carolina, and many were former slaves. Yet, for over a century, the teachers of the freedpeople had been consistently portrayed as northern white women. Using North Carolina as a case study, this article examines the life

As a social, political, and historical phenomenon – as opposed to a purely theological one – arguing about hell has always been a great American pastime, arising from the intertwining of American e...

While Eric Lott’s important book Love and Theft (1995) was central to the discussion, I was surprised that Dale Cockrell’s book on minstrelsy, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (1997), went unmentioned. This was indicative of a deeper lack of engagement with musicological scholarship on minstrelsy from the past few decades. Discussion of the music of ragtime and songs such

forefront of the author’s analysis, which strives to simultaneously attest to both the independent “power of art” and to the fact that “Maryland, My Maryland” happened to be “the right piece, in the right place, at the right time” (p. 302). Readers resistant to the idea that a song’s appeal can exist separately from its context, if even in part, might question whether the allure of this famous song

be insensible to the wrongs and sufferings of any part of the great family of man” (p. 103). It was not for nothing, Chaffin demonstrates, that Douglass claimed “to have undergone a transformation” on this tour (p. 3). Yet for all these strengths, weaknesses of organization and argument undermine the overall effectiveness of this book. Chaffin or some editor at the press would have done well to exercise

law, on the one hand, and on the other, as a tool by which those settlers can co-opt those virtues and eliminate the Natives themselves. In this case, Richards sees the rhetoric of white purity, including Natty Bumppo’s, undermined by repeated suggestions of questionable ancestry and possible miscegenation. A similar kind of reversal takes place in the reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Richards sees

largesse of the Rochester Ladies’ Antislavery Society collection at the Clements Library but also Julia Wilbur’s papers at Haverford College. The latter contains two series of diaries that Wilbur kept in tandem, one a series of pocket diaries and the other a longer and more extensive set of personal reflections. With the assistance of the Friends of Alexandria Archaeology, Whitacre turned the latter

The appearance of Hawai’i’s history within the pages of a journal devoted to nineteenthcentury US history may strike some readers as problematic. Throughout most of that century, Hawai’i was a sovereign, independent kingdom. Moreover, although US imperialism grew to dominate much of the economic, political, and social life of this kingdom throughout the nineteenth century, Hawai’i’s future was not

ABSTRACT This article traces how Anglo-Americans invoked climatic and racial ties between Hawai‘i and Southern California in the late nineteenth century to forecast an American settler colonial future for the islands and obviate Native Hawaiian efforts to restore native sovereignty, after white elites overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and sought annexation to the United States. This climatic binding between

comes had personal and not societal benefits during the first half of the twentieth century. Since litigants had to show “weakness and inferiority,” they inadvertently reinforced the Lost Cause and white supremacist racial attitudes (p. 123). Despite this shift, the courts gave them an avenue in fraud and personal injury suits. Since fraud had clear ways to either prove or dismiss, these cases required

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, a rich historiography on nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi has argued that too often the islands have been understood as marginal, and their people as passive in the face of American colonialism. This literature recovers the voices of the colonized, stressing the crucial ways in which Hawaiian history is not American history, but rather that of an independent people whose

ABSTRACT This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which

Aaron Hall shows even more clearly the entanglement of state and market development within the American South. Quintana’s book stands out here not only for being one of the first to focus on the category of the state in relation to slavery, but for demonstrating convincingly that slave mobility provoked, in reaction, the construction of a territoriality ordered by racial enforcement. Quintana’s conception

ABSTRACT The Hawaiian Islands possessed a consistent legal system between 1847 and the early 1900s while going through several political transitions. The continuity of law through three distinct political regimes presents a puzzle. This paper uses three cases studies and a quantitative analysis of published judicial decisions between 1847 and 1902 to investigate change and consistency in the vocabulary

ABSTRACT Scholars know Hawai‘i’s “minister of everything” as an upstart who rose to prominence by defending Hawaiian sovereignty. Few have noticed that Walter Murray Gibson’s influence stemmed from a paternalistic campaign to improve Islander health and expand the labor force for an emerging plantation complex. Improbably, public health presented Gibson, an excommunicated Mormon missionary, with a

systematic in its approach. An unfortunate byproduct of this ambition, however, is a tendency to ignore the visceral impact that yellow fever had upon those who were exposed to it. Archival analysis of more personal accounts, which are largely absent here, may have helped to illuminate the contemporary preoccupation with health and disease and personified its victims. Likewise, race is addressed within

question. Chapter Four, “Gender Transgressions in the Age of U.S. Empire,” adds another crucial dimension to Skidmore’s study of trans men: citizenship. As the United States expanded into the Caribbean and Pacific during the late nineteenth century, Americanness became conflated with whiteness and masculinity. While white trans men deployed the tropes of empire and imperialism to reinforce their claims

“unusual height seemed to save his image from some of the usually negative attributes of caricature” (p. 129). Because Lincoln had throughout his political career consistently mocked himself, his reputation did not lose any prestige when caricatured; in fact, Thompson insightfully demonstrates, Lincoln benefited politically when made fun of in visual media, for caricatures ironically only strengthened