Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies

The anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler examines the relevance of postcolonial studies to American history by exploring how matters of the intimate—sex, sentiment, domestic arrangements, and child rearing—figured in the making of racial categories and the management of empires. She identifies convergences in the regulation of the intimate by European colonizers and Americans—at home and abroad—and circuits of shared knowledge that created transnational links among imperial regimes. Treating comparison, not as benign methodology, but as itself a tool of colonial projects, she asks why historians of North America celebrate some comparisons and avoid others. The politics of intimacy, Stoler argues, is a key site for understanding how colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out. (pp. 829–65) Read online >

Responses

Five historians—Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Lori D. Ginzberg, Dirk Hoerder, Mary A. Renda, and Robert J. McMahon— respond to Stoler, welcoming cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives but warning against a temptation to privilege the politics of intimacy, neglect human agency, and ignore subaltern resistance.

• “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,”
  by Ramón A. Gutiérrez (pp. 866–69) Read online >
• “Global Goals, Local Acts: Grass-Roots Activism in Imperial Narratives,”
  by Lori D. Ginzberg (pp. 870–73) Read online >
• “How the Intimate Lives of Subaltern Men, Women, and Children Confound the Nation’s Master Narratives,”
  by Dirk Hoerder (pp. 874–81) Read online >
• “Sentiments of a Private Nature”: A Comment on Ann Laura Stoler’s “Tense and Tender Ties,”
  by Mary A. Renda (pp. 882–87) Read online >
• “Cultures of Empire,”
  by Robert J. McMahon (pp. ) Read online >
• “Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response,”
  by Ann Laura Stoler (pp. 888-93) Read online >

The High Cost of Living in the Progressive Economy

Reprinted from Puck, Jan. 26, 1910.

Government statistics seem worthy if dull indicators of the nation’s economic health. Yet when federal bureaucrats first sought to quantify inflation during the Progressive Era, the state’s presumption in tracking economic life threatened such a variety of constituencies that the modest effort was soon thwarted. The concept of the high cost of living soon moved from the writings of reformers and experts to the movies and musical comedy. Rather than rationalizing economic thought, Eric Rauchway argues, Progressive efforts to define the national economy had created a popular language without economic substance, licensing clashing interpretations of the true national interest. (pp. 898–924) Read online >

W. E. B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892–1909

Courtesy Stereoskopischer Bildverleih Kaiser-Panorama-Berlin.

Nineteenth-century German social thought is rarely considered an intellectual basis for challenging racism. For W. E. B. Du Bois, however, the teachings of the German historical school of economics became the vision for a concept of racial emancipation. Axel R. Schäfer maintains that from his German mentors Du Bois gleaned a social ethics that made social interaction and liberal education the basis for the unfolding of the black civilizational gift. He rejected both Booker T. Washington’s bootstrap ideology and the liberal civil rights agenda as avenues of racial change. But Du Bois’s attempts to use the Progressive model of ethical awakening to create black identity clashed with white Progressives’ exclusion of blacks from the civilizational master narrative. (pp. 925–49) Read online >

Jews and American Popular Psychology: Reconsidering the Protestant Paradigm of Popular Thought

Reprinted from W. Béran Wolfe, How to Be Happy Though Human, 1931.

Andrew R. Heinze tests the regnant paradigm that Protestantism is the chief source of modern American ideas of human nature and the human condition by analyzing Jewish psychologists’ prominent role in popularizing that science in the United States between 1890 and 1940. They marshaled the progressive, functionalist orientation of American psychology to campaign against attitudes that they, as Jews, judged dangerous—especially belief in racial differences in intelligence and a glorification of nonrational aspects of the psyche that, they feared, bred mob violence. Tying together ethnicity and race, popular culture, social science, and the history of ideas, Heinze suggests a new way of viewing the impact of immigrants and ethnic minorities on twentieth-century America. (pp. 950–78) Read online >

Finding “the More Satisfactory Type of Jurymen”: Class and the Construction of Federal Juries, 1926–1954

Courtesy The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

M. Catherine Miller connects the history of law and the history of Americans’ perceptions—and denial—of class. Focusing on federal jury selection procedures in Manhattan between 1926 and 1954, Miller examines elite reformers’ creation of class-sensitive mechanisms to recruit jurors they considered intelligent and to screen out immigrants, the uneducated, workers, and African Americans. Invoking citizenship, working-class radicals and middle-class women struggled to expand jury service. Women gained a place on the jury, but their inclusion helped mask the role of class. That outcome prompts Miller to question a reliance on ideas of citizenship and constitutionalism to achieve social change. (pp. 979–1005) Read online >

Courtesy Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives and Library.

• Introduction, by Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice (p. 1006) Read online >
• “Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity” “‘A Respectable Trade?’: Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery”; and “Pero and Pinney Exhibit,” by Celeste-Marie Bernier (pp. 1006–11) Read online >
• “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” by Barbara Franco (pp. 1012–15) Read online >
• “Picturing Faith: Religious America in Government Photography, 1935–1943,” by Morris L. Davis Jr. (pp. 1016–19) Read online >
• “From Paris to Providence: Fashion, Art, and the Tirocchi Dressmakers’ Shop, 1915–1947,” by Rainey Tisdale (pp. 1020–23) Read online >
• “Your Place in Time: Twentieth Century America,” by Kristin M. Szylvian and Wm. Frank Mitchell (pp. 1024–30) Read online >
• “Filming Maryland,” by Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. (pp. 1031–32) Read online >
• “Seeking St. Louis,” by Nora Pat Small (pp. 1033–35) Read online >
• “A State of Health: New Jersey’s Medical Heritage,” by Janet Golden (pp. 1036–37) Read online >
• “Remembering the Revolution: Twenty-Five Years after the Bicentennial,” by Robert M. Dunkerly (pp. 1038–40) Read online >

• Reel Report, 2000–2001, by Robert Brent Toplin (pp. 1178–80) Read online >
• A Biography of America, by Donald A. Ritchie (p. 1181) Read online >
• The Shaping of America: U.S. History to 1877, by Bruce A. Ragsdale (pp. 1182–83) Read online >
• Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided, by Scott A. Sandage (pp. 1184–85) Read online >
• It Took Brave Men: Deputy U.S. Marshals of Fort Smith, by David La Vere (p. 1186) Read online >
• Secrets of a Master Builder: The Story of James B. Eads, by Robert A. Taylor (p. 1187) Read online >
• Lost in the Grand Canyon, by Adam M. Sowards (p. 1188) Read online >
• Oral History: A Century of Living, by Roger Horowitz (p. 1189) Read online >
• The Wizard of Photography: The Story of George Eastman, by David B. Sicilia (pp. 1190–91) Read online >
• Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind, by Beryl Satter (pp. 1192–93) Read online >
• Streamliners: America’s Lost Trains, by William L. Withuhn (p. 1194) Read online >
• Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, by Frank Tirro (pp. 1195–97) Read online >
• Fatal Flood, by Nan Elizabeth Woodruff (p. 1198) Read online >
• Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, by Nancy MacLean (p. 1199) Read online >
• Miss Evers’ Boys, by Susan M. Reverby (p. 1200) Read online >
• The Uprising of ‘34, by Bryant Simon (p. 1201) Read online >
• Cradle Will Rock, by Ron Briley (p. 1202) Read online >
• Streetcar Stories, by Cliff Kuhn (p. 1203) Read online >
• Eleanor Roosevelt, by Allida Black (p. 1204–1206) Read online >
• The Rockefellers, by David B. Sicilia (p. 1207) Read online >
• U-571; and Pearl Harbor, by Lawrence Suid (p. 1208) Read online >
• Rabbit in the Moon; and Conscience and the Constitution, by Naoko Shibusawa (pp. 1209–10) Read online >
• Figures of the Civil Rights Movement: Sit-Ins and the Little Rock Nine, by John Dittmer (p. 1211) Read online >
• Thirteen Days, by Thomas Doherty (pp. 1211–12) Read online >
• Nashville: “We Were Warriors,” by David Goldfield (pp. 1213–14) Read online >
• The Legacy of Vietnam: Learning the Lessons of War, by Stephen Pelz (p. 1215) Read online >
• Return with Honor, by Donald J. Mrozek (p. 1216) Read online >
• Nuclear Dynamite, by Paul Boyer (p. 1216) Read online >
• Meltdown at Three Mile Island, by Thomas R. Wellock (p. 1217) Read online >
• Hill vs. Thomas, by Mary L. Dudziak (p. 1218) Read online >
• Stranger with a Camera, by Robert E. Snyder (p. 1219) Read online >

Web site reviews are available without a subscription.

• Gold Rush! California’s Untold Stories, by David Goodman (pp. 1221–22) Read online >
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multimedia Archive, by Ellen Noonan (pp. 1222–23) Read online >
• Wet with Blood: The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Cloak, by William G. Thomas III (pp. 1223–24) Read online >
• The Dramas of Haymarket, by Martin Blatt (p. 1224) Read online >
• African-American Sheet Music, 1850–1920, by Karen Sotiropoulos (p. 1225) Read online >
• Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, by Adina Back (pp. 1225–26) Read online >