America’s Diversity in Comparative Perspective

In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, George M. Fredrickson looks at a set of issues at the forefront of public concern in the United States today—those associated with multiculturalism—and does so from a deep historical and broad international perspective. The address compares the debates on multiculturalism in the United States with those occurring in several other modern industrial nations and points to the unique features of American pluralism. The author argues that Americans do not have as much trouble as citizens of some other nations with cultural diversity but have a harder time with “race.” Why race matters more, and culture less, in the United States than elsewhere is explicable by the peculiarity of the African American experience within a nation of immigrants. (pp. 859–75)

“Why Should You Be So Furious?”: The Violence of the Pequot War

Why was warfare between Indians and English colonists so violent? In a new look at the brief but bloody Pequot War of 1637, which foreshadowed the pattern of later settler-Indian conflicts, Ronald Dale Karr argues that the ethos of early frontier warfare was imported from Europe, where intense warfare was waged subject to varying degrees of restraint. Violence could be limited only if enemies, recognizing each others’ legitimacy, agreed to honor a common code of conduct. That recognition, in turn, rested on a balance of military power. Despite cultural differences, English settlers at first recognized the Pequots’ legitimacy. But as the tribe weakened, the imbalance of power removed the incentive to agree on rules for war and thus heightened violence. (pp. 876–909)

Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region

In the era of the American Revolution, Susan E. Klepp finds a radical American revolution carried out by women, a change in their approach to pregnancy, childbearing, and family life. American women discarded their earlier images of themselves as fecund physical creatures and began to construct a more rational and numeric relationship to reproduction in which they planned the number of children they would bear. Childbearing became a life stage rather than a calling. In what demographers call the “fertility transition,” fertility rates began to decline, Painstakingly looking at women’s own statements about pregnancy and childbearing, Klepp challenges common explanations of the fertility transition by placing women’s decisions, rather than men’s economic activities, at the center of change. (pp. 910–45)

Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below

Joining the discussion of just how revolutionary the American Revolution was, Michael A. McDonnell takes a look, from the bottom up, at Virginia, the largest and most important British mainland colony. He shows that Carl Becker’s 1909 formula—the Revolution was a struggle not just over home rule but over who would rule at home—applies even there, in the seemingly most unified colony. To understand the world view of ordinary white farmers, who left few written records of their own, he examines their day-to-day conflicts with the gentry over military mobilization. The article uncovers a popular political culture that challenged gentry hegemony and thereby made the war for independence a revolutionary war. (pp. 946–81)

The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered

Historians of slavery in the antebellum United States have emphasized how the competing interests of masters and slaves created conflict. But now threatening could such conflict be if it was rooted in a shared stake in crucial aspects of slave life, for example, the family? Building on recent scholarship on the slave family, economy, and community, and on the work of economic anthropologists, Christopher Morris speculates about how the master-slave relationship evolved to incorporate the opposing interests of masters and slaves. The evolution of the structures of slavery may have had a paradoxical result—It made for real conflict between individual masters and slaves, Perhaps more important, however, it strengthened slavery as a system. (pp. 982–1007)

• “American Treasures of the Library of Congress,” by Carol B. Stapp (pp. 1008–16)
• “In the Presence of the Past: The Miami Indians of Indiana,” by Gregory Evans Dowd (pp. 1017–19)
• “Paradise Found and Lost: Migration in the Ohio Valley,” by Barbara V. Howe (pp. 1020–24)
• “Science in the Pleasure Ground,” by Jeffrey Sanders (pp. 1025–28)
• “Ansel Adams, a Legacy: Masterworks from the Friends of Photography Collection,” by David P. Peeler (pp. 1029–32)
• “Teenage New Jersey, 1941–1975,” by John E. O’Connor (pp. 1033–34)

• A Third Choice, by Robert J. Spitzer (p. 1173)
• Amistad, by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (pp. 1174–75)
• The Richest Man in the World, by Mansel Blackford (p. 1176)
• From a Different Shore, by Roger Daniels (p. 1176)
• Titanic, by Steven Biel (pp. 1177–78)
• Influenza 1918, by Richard Melzer (pp. 1179–80)
• Mr. Miami Beach, by Edward F. Haas (p. 1181)
• Riding the Rails, by Todd DePastino (p. 1181)
• Taken for a Ride, by Jon C. Teaford (pp. 1182–83)
• Cadillac Desert, by David Igler (p. 1184)
• Saving Private Ryan, by Lawrence H. Suid (p. 1185)
• America in the Forties, by Marilynn S. Johnson (p. 1186)
• The Black Press, by Phillip McGuire (pp. 1187–88)
• Truman, by William E. Pemberton (p. 1189)
• Big Jim Folsom, by Edward F. Haas (p. 1190)
• First Person Singular, by Robert L. Harris Jr. (p. 1191)
• City Dump, by Daniel A. Nathan (p. 1192)
• Arthur Miller and “The Crucible,” by Jerold Simmons (p. 1193)
• The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, by John H. Haley (p. 1194)
• Four Little Girls, by Jack E. Davis (pp. 1194–95)
• Divided Highways, by Clay McShane (p. 1196)
• Their Own Vietnam, by Leisa D. Meyer (p. 1197)
• From the Earth to the Moon, by Tom D. Crouch (p. 1197)
• Reagan, by Chester Pach (p. 1199)
• Unraveling the Stories, by Nancy Page Fernandez (p. 1200)