Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s

The unsuccessful campaign against the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Mary Hershberger argues, had great significance in the histories of American women and American reform movements. The proposed law generated mass opposition that created new forms of political protest and nearly defeated the bill. Young people flocked to the campaign. Some opponents defied state removal measures and went to prison in protest. To defeat removal, women created their first national petition drive, which drew many otherwise traditional women into public political activity. Though the bill passed and removal proceeded, opponents of removal drew on their experience to change the focus and methods of the antislavery movement: They decisively rejected colonization in favor of immediate abolition, determined to prevent what they perceived as a second unjust removal. (pp. 12–40) Read online >

Immigrants, Labor Markets, and the State, a Comparative Approach: France and the United States, 1880–1930

Catherine Collomp, whose essay won the oah Foreign-Language Article Prize for 1998, compares the role of the state in regulating immigration into France and the United States from 1880 to 1930. The comparative perspective reveals parameters that remain invisible to a single-nation account. Examination of how negotiations between nations organized immigration to France shows how immigrants to the United States were detached from their states of origin and seen solely as individual candidates for American citizenship. Efforts by the French state, employers, and unions to tailor immigration to specific labor shortages prevented the unequal treatment of immigrants common in the United States, even as they impeded the free movement of immigrants within France. Collomp’s analysis uncovers factors that led to the ethnicization of immigrants to the United States and, conversely, the disappearance of ethnicity in the formation of the French working class. (pp. 41–66) Read online >

The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924

Often historians treat the passage of a law as a culmination of public agitation and contest. In a study of the Immigration Act of 1924, which screened immigrants according to their national origins and excluded all Asians, Mae M. Ngai regards its passage as a starting point. Ngai, whose essay won the Louis Pelzer Award for 1998, explores how the law was turned into a practical policy of numerical quotas and racial exclusions. She examines how the lawmakers, judges, and civil servants who fashioned immigration policy drew eclectically on social science and popular assumptions to construct categories of race and nationality that had the force of law. Ngai offers an answer to the question: What are the legal origins of twentieth-century American representations of European immigrants as assimilable, Mexicans as illegal aliens, and Asians as permanently foreign? (pp. 67–92) Read online >

Alternatives to the Party System in the “Party Period,” 1830–1890

From the age of Jackson to the dawn of the Progressive Era, many scholars argue, political culture and behavior were functions of the electorate’s abiding loyalty to the two major parties. Participants in our round table “Alternatives to the Party System in the ‘Party Period,’ 1830–1890,” complicate that argument.

The “Party Period” Revisited

The new mass parties of the 1830s exercised a powerful sway over public ceremonies, electorates, legislatures, and policy. But, Ronald P. Formisano argues, there was simultaneously a lively politics outside parties. Recent scholarship, most notably in women’s and gender history, suggests that the concept of the “party period” needs to be amended to accommodate the great variety of politically charged activities in which men and women engaged-activities sometimes designed to influence parties, but often independent of, or opposed to, them. Formisano applauds the concept of a public sphere for opening up studies of legislative halls, polling places, and caucus rooms to consideration of a wider world of contested policies and values and for shifting historians’ attention to city streets, town squares, churches, school buildings, grange halls, and other spaces and forums. (pp. 93–120) Read online >

The “Third Party Tradition” Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830-1900

Mark Voss-Hubbard asks how third parties fit into an interpretive model that stresses the hold of the major parties. He suggests that nineteenth-century third party movements built upon a nonpartisan tradition to forge alternative, antiparty cultures that condemned partisan politics as corrupting government. Synthesizing the work of political and social historians, Voss-Hubbard restores third parties to a central place in American political history. Because such parties took on issues outside the political realm as defined by the major parties, often issues involving regulation of behavior in the interest of the common good, they raised fundamental questions about the ends of a democratic politics. Voss-Hubbard calls for a reconstruction of nineteenth-century political history that centers on the tension between partisan and nonpartisan frameworks. (pp. 121–50) Read online >

The Primacy of Party Reasserted

Michael F. Holt challenges the attempts by Ronald P. Formisano and Mark Voss-Hubbard to downplay the importance of major political parties in the nineteenth century. The idea of a unique “party period” during the last six decades of the century always rested on an implicit comparison to earlier and later periods when parties had less influence. And neither author, he suggests, pays enough attention to variations across space and time within the party period or to the relationship between partisan conflict over government politics and subsequent voter turnout. That relationship undermines both authors’ contention that voters judged partisan ship an obstacle to effective government. (pp. 151–57) Read online >

The Midlife Crisis of the New Political History

What happens to a field when it has passed through a long period of negative population growth? What happens to its characteristic ways of asking and answering questions? Paula Baker’s response to the essays by Ronald P. Formisano and Mark Voss-Hubbard considers what has happened to political history since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and suggests what is still valuable in its agenda. (pp. 158–66) Read online >

• “1811—Year of Wonders in Mississippi Territory,” by John D. W. Guice (pp. 167–69) Read online >
• “Amistad: A True Story of Freedom,” by Susan D. Pennybacker (pp. 170–72) Read online >
• “Thomas Moran” and “New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes,” by Kenneth Myers (pp. 173–78) Read online >
• “America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War,” by David A. Zonderman (pp. 179–81) Read online >
• Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum, by Curtis Miner (pp. 182–85) Read online >
• “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820-Present,” by Richard Stott (pp. 186–90) Read online >
• “Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn,” by DeAnna Beachley (pp. 191–94) Read online >