“The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun”

In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, William H. Chafe challenges the traditional tendency to see the age of segregation as one of pure oppression and victimization. Chafe cites the daily acts of courage, resilience, and community building through which African Americans sought to maintain the dignity and integrity of their families, to create a better world for their children, and to find ways of moving forward—inch by inch—to achieve the chance of freedom. Based on interviews in ten states, the article suggests the rich texture of African American community and family life, even in this, “the nadir” of post-Civil War black experience. (pp. 1531–51) Read online >

Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst

The story that the British general Jeffery Amherst attempted to infect Native Americans with smallpox at Fort Pitt in 1763 has become a commonplace of American history. But is the story true? And, if the attempt was made, could it have worked? Was it an isolated incident? Elizabeth A. Fenn, whose essay won the Louis Pelzer Award for 1999, takes a new look at the evidence regarding smallpox transmission in eighteenth-century America. She shows that contemporary military ethics left ample room for acts of biological terror, that means of spreading smallpox were well known, and that accusations of deliberate smallpox infection arose frequently. If incidents of willful contagion were not common, they were probably not so rare as historians previously believed. (pp. 1552–80) Read online >

Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education

Current debates about religion in public schools often reflect misconceptions about the pervasiveness of religion in nineteenth-century schooling. R. Laurence Moore, drawing on the annual reports of state public school superintendents, argues that Bible reading and school prayer were not the practice in most schools. The furor over Bible reading that alienated many Catholic leaders from public schools obscured the fact that religion never played more than a marginal role in public school instruction. Bible reading, where it persisted, was little more than an element of school discipline. Moore attributes the absence of religious instruction, not to court decisions, but to the opposition of many religious groups to school lessons that treated all religious perspectives equally. (pp. 1581–99) Read online >

The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River

Taking seriously the claim that human experience, including experience of nature, is historical, Linda Nash shows how a series of surveyors and engineers understood and represented the Skagit River in western Washington from the 1850s to the 1930s. Not only the interests of institutions and economic groups but the language and technology people used shaped experience of the river. Over time, scientific, or objective, methods of understanding the river were institutionalized, yet individuals—even engineers—never fully relinquished subjective modes of knowing. Drawing on literature in the history of science and intellectual history, Nash writes about the persistent tension between subjective and objective ways of approaching the natural world. (pp. 1600–1629) Read online >

On the Borderland of Ethnicity and Race: An Introduction, by David Nord

Studies of Japanese Americans often focus on their internment during World War II and thus emphasize the external forces shaping their history. By examining ethnic organizations in the prewar decade and the experiences of those who left the camps during the war, the two articles in our round table, “On the Borderland of Ethnicity and Race,” instead show Japanese Americans struggling to define themselves. (pp. 1630–31) Read online >

The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is often seen as an experiment that engineered an American identity by suppressing ethnicity. But the group’s ethnic identity in the decade before the war, Lon Kurashige argues, was no less manufactured. Examining how and why second-generation leaders of the Japanese American community in Los Angeles created its annual Nisei Week celebration, Kurashige traces the enactment and enforcement of a biculturalism that opposed external racial pressures by concealing orchestrations of class, gender, and cultural authority within Little Tokyo. (pp. 1632–64) Read online >

In the Twilight Zone between Black and White: Japanese American Resettlement and Community in Chicago, 1942–1945

By the end of World War II, almost 60,000 Japanese Americans had left government concentration camps for the Midwest and East. Charlotte Brooks argues that this large-scale wartime resettlement both transformed Japanese American life in the United States and shook up race relations in Chicago. Placing resettlement in the context of the great wartime migration of African Americans to the city, Brooks suggests that this larger migration and its ramifications preoccupied the city’s white population. White Chicagoans rarely accepted Japanese Americans as full equals. But wartime interviews with Japanese American resettlers reveal that they embraced and defended the opportunities that black-white tensions created for them, despite the limits to those opportunities. (pp. 1655–87) Read online >

• Introduction, by Peter Filene and Peter Wood (p. 1688) Read online >
• “At Loose Ends: Twentieth-Century Latinos in Current United States History Textbooks,” by Joseph A. Rodríguez and Vicki L. Ruiz (pp. 1689–99) Read online >
• “A Novel Approach: Using Fiction by African American Women to Teach Black Womens History,” by Beverly A. Bunch-Lyons (pp. 1700–1708) Read online >
• “What Happened in the Rainier Grands Lobby? A Question of Sources,” by Char Miller (pp. 1709–14) Read online >
• “Teaching Gender History to Secondary School Students,” by Kathleen M. Dalton and E. Anthony Rotundo (pp. 1715–20) Read online >
• “aids and American History: Four Perspectives on Experiential Learning,” by Douglas Bailey, Gabby DeVinny, Carre Gordon, and Paul John Schadewald (pp. 1721–33) Read online >