Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches

Reprinted from Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times.

Historians often confront primary sources whose genre conventions mask individual experience. Erik R. Seeman uses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionaries’ accounts of Indians’ deathbed scenes to propose a method for handling such formulaic sources. Model accounts of deaths those that adhere closely to conventional portrayals of the good deathcan give insight into the goals missionaries brought with them to colonial New France and New England. Unorthodox accounts of deaths those that deviate from centuries-old narrative modelscan tell us more about how Indians behaved. By combining the perspectives of social and cultural history, this methodology coaxes insight from seemingly intractable materials and suggests a way to mine other formulaic sources such as wills and conversion narratives. (pp. 17–47) Read online >

A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy

Reprinted from United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric

William Lloyd Garrison energized and radicalized the antislavery crusade, using a rhetoric that dwelt on the sexual exploitation and suffering of slaves. Examining the evolution of Garrison’s antislavery rhetoric, Marc M. Arkin uncovers his deep intellectual debt to Fisher Ames, leader of New England Federalism from the 1790s until 1808. During his early abolitionist years, Garrison regularly quoted Ames and consciously appropriated Ames’s anti-Jeffersonian polemic, including his association of the southern desire for power with sexual license. This relationship shows how social movements may borrow and rework culturally resonant themes and sheds new light on New England sectionalism as a force driving abolitionism. (pp. 75–98) Read online >

The Strike in the Temple of Consumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Reprinted with permission from Nation’s Business.

Taking a well-publicized 1935 strike at Consumers Research as his starting point, Lawrence B. Glickman explores a precursor of today’s international anti-sweatshop campaigns and green consumerism. The strike, which led to the formation of Consumers Union, surprised observers and participants by revealing divisions within what had seemed a unitary consumer movement. In the strike, Glickman argues, “technocratic individualist” consumerism, which used testing methods from the natural sciences to help shoppers pursue their interests, faced a challenge from “social movement” consumerism, which used the social sciences to link the interests of consumers and workers. Glickman shows that politically engaged, social movement consumerism was no evanescent product of the radical thirties, but a recurrent and significant feature of twentieth-century American politics. (pp. 99–128) Read online >

Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography

Jill Lepore contrasts an old genre of historical writing, biography, with a rather new one, microhistory. Unlike biography, which emphasizes the singularity and significance of an individual’s life, microhistory takes an individual’s life as an allegory of broader issues affecting a culture as a whole. Surveying works from many historical fieldsfrom Jonathan Spence’s The Question of Hu to Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s Townto define the contours of microhistory, Lepore meditates on historians’ intimacy with their subjects and its consequences for their writing. (pp. 129–44) Read online >

Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review

Gary J. Kornblith revisits historians’ use of the World Wide Web by assessing The Valley of the Shadow, a long-running site that has received both popular and professional praise. In this appreciative review, Kornblith examines how the Web and other interactive media can enhance access to archival materials, enliven scholarly communication, and transform the relationship between author and audience. Electronic media may revolutionize the reading and writing of history, yet, Kornblith warns, the complexity and multiplicity of online resources can distract historians from basic tasks of distillation and clarification. Kornblith welcomes the democratic potential of new media, but he worries about the loss of coherence and meaning in the quest for multisensory historical simulation. (pp. 144–51) Read online >

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

• “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World,” by Howard P. Segal (pp. 152–54) Read online >
• “Paul Revere: Artisan and Patriot,” by Sarah J. Purcell (pp. 155–56) Read online >
• “Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861,” by Kenneth Myers (pp. 157–61) Read online >
• “North Carolina and the Civil War”; “Duty Called Me Here: The Common Soldier’s Experience in the American Civil War”; and “Turning Point: The American Civil War,” by David A. Zonderman (pp. 162–67) Read online >
• Civil War Visitor Center at Tredegar Iron Works, by Edward L. Ayers (pp. 166–67) Read online >
• “Amish in Illinois,” by Trevor Jones (pp. 168–70) Read online >
• “To Faithfully Preserve: History and Lore from America’s National Parks,” by Randall M. Miller (pp. 171–72) Read online >

Web site reviews are available without a subscription.

• Do History, by Jane Kamensky (p. 317) Read online >
• Africans in America, by Tracey Weis (p. 318) Read online >
• Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America, by David Phillips (p. 319) Read online >
• Mark Twain in His Times, by Carl Smith (p. 320) Read online >
• Panoramic Maps, 1847–1929, by Paula Petrik (p. 321) Read online >
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911, by Ellen Wiley Todd (p. 322) Read online >