Journal of American History

December 2000

Cover image

Volume 87, No. 3

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Articles

What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy

Why did public discussion about sex scandals in American politics thrive in the nineteenth century and fade from view in the first half of the twentieth? John H. Summers argues that the twin influences of evangelical Protestantism and democratic republicanism elevated offenses against prevailing mores to prominence in the nineteenth-century media. Politicians’ peccadilloes received little attention in the mainstream press after the 1890s, as the decline of popular politics, the professionalization of American journalism, and the consolidation of a political elite combined to create a political culture of reticence. Summers concludes with reflections on our current preoccupation with the moral character of political leaders and its import for democracy. (pp. 825–54) Read online >

A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania

In the years following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, farmers throughout Pennsylvania obstructed roads with fallen trees, deep ditches, and high fences. Terry Bouton argues that those mysterious road closings were part of an agrarian protest against tax and monetary policies that had led to mass property foreclosure across the countryside. Bouton shows how farmers responded to the crisis by developing networks of resistance that state and national leaders ultimately undermined with new constitutions and laws. Questioning previous interpretations of the “Whiskey Rebellion” of 1794 and “Fries’s Rebellion” of 1799, Bouton portrays those uprisings as part of persistent efforts by rural insurgents to halt the erosion of their economic and political independence. (pp. 855–87) Read online >

The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History

“Disability” pervades modern history, according to Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, yet it is usually missing from historical research and teaching. Through a study of the League of the Physically Handicapped, Longmore and Goldberger demonstrate both disabled people’s historical agency and disability’s historical significance. Fighting job discrimination in New Deal work programs, league members politicized disability by contesting the dominant ideology that framed it as a medicalized social problem. This study of reform, social policy, and cultural values also illuminates the use of disability to mark its opposite, normality, as a means to manage social—and particularly class—relations in modern society. (pp. 888–922) Read online >

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Round Table

Cinqué and the Historians: How a Story Takes Hold

Our round table, “Cinqué and the Historians: How a Story Takes Hold,” raises perplexing questions about how efforts to address contemporary concerns and create interesting narratives shape the writing of history.

Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth

What do Steven Spielberg, Samuel Eliot Morison, C. Vann Woodward, and Samuel Flagg Bemis have in common? They are all part of a tangled mythology surrounding the claim that Joseph Cinqué, leader of the 1839 revolt on board the slave ship Amistad, returned to Africa and became a slave trader. Using the historian’s craft to interrogate the sources that led scholars to question Cinqué’s historical image, Howard Jones reveals how an unfounded rumor became a “fact.” (pp. 923–39) Read online >

On Cinqué and the Historians; Mea Culpa; Cinqué, Tall and Strong

Three historians whose work Howard Jones criticizes respond. Paul Finkelman suggests that the evidence on Cinqué’s alleged involvement in the slave trade is more complex and ambiguous than Jones believes. Cinqué was important, Finkelman argues, not for what he did after returning to Africa, but for what he did on board the Amistad and in Connecticut. Bertram Wyatt-Brown acknowledges with hindsight that he should have more carefully scrutinized the assertions of Cinqué’s biographers. He calls for more research on the African activities of the American Missionary Association (ama), the organization whose records and institutional memory may have given rise to the rumor linking Cinqué to the slave trade. William S. McFeely reports that Jones has almost convinced him. Linking the fascination with Cinqué’s life to historians’ debates on race and slavery, he affirms Cinqué’s historical importance as the leader of a fight for freedom. (pp. 940–50) Read online >

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Review Essay

Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review

In our times scholars have pitted memory against history. Those scholars equate history with a study of social structures that overlooks local and subjective experience. They understand memory, in contrast, as a collective construction and representation of the past that yields inspiring and unifying myths. John Bodnar analyzes the recent English-language edition of Pierre Nora’s multivolume study of French national memory (first published in French, 1984–1992) and connects it to explorations of the fashioning of memory in various nations, including the United States. National history, Bodnar concludes, has lost its capacity to rationalize the past and contain memory largely because twentieth-century wars disrupted the faith in reason and progress underlying historical constructions of nationhood. (pp. 951–63) Read online >

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Exhibition Reviews

  • Introduction by Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice (p. 964) Read online >
  • “From New England to the Great Salt Lake,” by Claudia L. Bushman and Richard Lyman (pp. 965–66) Read online >
  • “Houdini,” by Joshua Ranger (pp. 967–68) Read online >
  • “Sigmund Freud,” by Ellen DuBois (pp. 969–72) Read online >
  • “This Land Is Your Land,” by David Suisman (pp. 973–76) Read online >
  • “The Star-Spangled Banner,” by Char Miller (pp. 977–80) Read online >
  • “San Antonio Missions National Historical Park,” by Thomas S. Bremer (pp. 981–83) Read online >
  • “Kansas in Miniature,” by Jay M. Price (pp. 984–86) Read online >
  • “The Virtual Wall,” by Ed Martini (pp. 987–91) Read online >
  • “Battle Road 2000,” by Cathy Stanton (pp. 992–95) Read online >
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Book Reviews

Dec. 2000, Vol. 87 No. 3

Alphabetical by the last name of the book's first author or editor.

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
Y
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Movie Reviews

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Letters to the Editor

Announcements

Recent Scholarship

“Recent Scholarship” is available online, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.3/

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thumbnail of cover

On the cover:

This romantic rendering of Joseph Cinqué was painted during the Amistad trial by the New Haven artist Nathaniel Jocelyn. Oil on canvas, c. 1840. Courtesy New Haven Colony Historical Society. See Howard Jones, “Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth.”

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Full Text

The full text of current issues (1999–present) of the Journal of American History is available to subscribers electronically at the History Cooperative. Back issues are available at JSTOR.