December 2008

Volume 95, No. 3

• Articles
• Exhibition Reviews
• Book Reviews
• Movie Reviews
• Web Site Reviews
• Recent Scholarship

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Articles

The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America’s Market Revolution

Courtesy Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division

While the story of antebellum America’s capitalist development has most commonly centered on the urban and industrial transformation of the North, Joshua D. Rothman argues that the booming southwestern cotton economy exposed the anxieties and tensions of the era in their most acute forms. Examining the 1835 hanging of five supposed professional gamblers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Rothman suggests that qualms about the morality of participating in a speculative market economy might have been eased through violence as much as through religious revivals and reform activities. In so doing, he calls for a rethinking of our understandings of regionalism, class development, and the market revolution in pre–Civil War America. (pp. 649–50) Read online > or Test the gate

Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor

Courtesy Barry M. Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe, Arizona

Many historical narratives of the erosion of the New Deal liberal-regulatory order and the rise of the Right focus on post-1964 racial and cultural tensions. In contrast, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer traces Barry Goldwater’s early political career in the 1950s, in Arizona and in the U.S. Senate, to understand how he helped reclaim for American conservatism a language of freedom, individualism, and security that Progressives, New Dealers, and trade unionists had monopolized for almost two generations. He introduced into mainstream politics the idea that many routine, heretofore legal trade union activities were corrupt, dangerous, and un-American. As a result of his prominent role in the 1957–1958 McClellan “Rackets” committee hearings, Goldwater not only won a national following but also helped conservatives establish important footholds in the camp of postwar liberalism. (pp. 678–709) Read online > or Test the gate

“Becoming International Again”: C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–1962

Photo by Lillian Tonnaire Taylor. Courtesy Kate Mills

In recent years historians have expanded their conception of the American New Left well beyond the white student movement and its most prominent organization, Students for a Democratic Society (sds). Daniel Geary makes the case that the American New Left should also be understood in international terms. Geary explores the work of C. Wright Mills, the influential American intellectual who is best known for his influence on sds. By demonstrating that Mills conceived of the New Left in international terms and by exploring his engagements with the British New Left, the international peace movement, and the Cuban Revolution, Geary situates the U.S. New Left within a broad, worldwide movement. (pp. 710–36) Read online > or Test the gate

“Worth a Lot of Negro Votes”: Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign

Photograph by Boston Herald American in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

When John F. Kennedy telephoned Coretta Scott King to express sympathy for her jailed husband, he had little idea that his two-minute call would move to center stage in the 1960 presidential election. That call, James H. Meriwether argues, has obscured Kennedy’s broader efforts to secure the support of black voters while not alienating white voters in the no longer “solid South.” Kennedy drew on the growing transnational relationship black Americans had with an ancestral continent undergoing its own freedom struggles, revealing that he was more interested in Africa than in civil rights. Africa, the newest frontier for Kennedy, became a place where he could show his Cold War credentials, find common ground with black American voters, and strengthen his chances to win the presidency. (pp. 737–63) Read online > or Test the gate

For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see “Teaching the JAH.”

Exhibition Reviews

Photo by Penny Leveritt. Courtesy Historic Deerfield

• Introduction, by Benjamin Filene and Brian Horrigan (pp. 782) Read online >
• “‘Action, and Action Now’: fdr’s First 100 Days,” by Gerald Zahavi (pp. 783–85) Read online >
• The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, by Benjamin Hufbauer (pp. 786–91) Read online >
• The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, by Jeffrey A. Engel (pp. 792–93) Read online >
• The William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, by Michael Pierce (pp. 794–98) Read online >
• “1704 Colonial Encampment Weekend,” by Katherine A. Grandjean (pp. 799–802) Read online >
• “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America,” by Philip Ranlet (pp. 802–3) Read online >
• “Chicago: Crossroads of America,” by Susan Eleanor Hirsch (pp. 804–7) Read online >

Book Reviews

Dec. 2008, Vol. 95 No. 3

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

A

• Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, by Linda J. Lumsden
• Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America, by Cheryl A. Wells
• Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War, by Robert C. Cottrell
• Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?, by David T. Brundage
• Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39, by Craig A. Kaplowitz

B

• Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life, by Nelson Ouellet
• Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska, by Kenneth N. Owens
• Beckert, trans. by Dunlap, Inherited Wealth, by Richard H. Chused
• Bell and Yans, eds., Women on Their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single, by Michael O’Brien
• Benson, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economics in the Interwar United States, by Timothy A. Hacsi
• Berman, Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890–1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies, by Thomas A. Krainz
• Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952, by Jay D. Green
• Blocker, A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930, by Davarian L. Baldwin
• Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West, by Andrew R. L. Cayton
• Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism, by Laura McEnaney
• Breslaw, Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture, by Richard R. Johnson
• Buell and Sigelman, Attack Politics: Negativity in Presidential Campaigns since 1960, by Gil Troy
• Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, by Shawn Francis Peters
• Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals, by Douglas Gomery
• Butters, Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966, by Laura Wittern-Keller

C

• Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922, by Jeanne D. Petit
• Casper, Groves, Nissenbaum, and Winship, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, by Oz Frankel
• Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine, by Rex Ellis
• Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico, by David J. Snyder
• Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry, by Pamela Walker Laird
• Charters, A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz, by Charles Hersch
• Chernus, Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity, by Anna K. Nelson
• Cobb and Fowler, eds., Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900, by Brian C. Hosmer
• Conser and Payne, eds., Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture, by Steven P. Miller
• Cool, Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande, by Andrew R. Graybill
• Cooling, Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam, by Christian B. Keller
• Corke, U.S. Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare, and the cia, 1945–53, by Douglas Little
• Cumbler, From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century, by Dean Grodzins

D

• Daum, trans. by Geyer, Kennedy in Berlin, by Ronald J. Granieri
• Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Marian Beth Mollin
• DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, by Dominick Cavallo
• Denkler, Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage: Exploring Issues of Public History, Tourism, and Race in a Southern Town, by J. Todd Moye
• Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940, by Roxann Wheeler
• Duffin, Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse, by William D. Rowley

E

• Einolf, George Thomas: Virginian for the Union, by John David Smith
• Elliott, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer, by Paul Andrew Hutton
• Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris (1795–1856): Nature, Science, and Society in the Life of an American Naturalist, by Mark V. Barrow Jr.
• Engel, ed., Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, by David S. Foglesong
• Ensalaco, Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11, by Nur Bilge Criss
• Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Ganada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, by Scott W. See
• Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space, by Sarah Schrank

F

• Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by George C. Rable
• Fenby, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill Won One War and Began Another, by Manfred Jonas
• Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s, by Mark Voss-Hubbard
• Fraser, Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina, by Sharon Block
• Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War, by Terry Bouton
• Fuller-Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing, by Richard Maltby

G

• Garry, An Entrenched Legacy: How the New Deal Constitutional Revolution Continues to Shape the Role of the Supreme Court, by David Stebenne
• Giggie, After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915, by Douglas Carl Abrams
• Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, by Hanes Walton Jr.
• Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, by Stephanie Cole
• Gustafson, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974, by Jeffrey F. Taffet

H

• Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States, by Robert C. Bannister
• Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, by Ronald Lora
• Haskell, Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star, by Robert Miraldi
• Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History, by David Bergman
• Hills, Telecommunications and Empire, by Christopher Simpson
• Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Jerald A. Combs
• Hoffer, Hoffer, and Hull, The Supreme Court: An Essential History, by Gordon Morris Bakken
• Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America, by Edwin Gaustad
• Holt, Mamie Doud Eisenhower: The General’s First Lady, by Raffaella Baritono
• Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, by Rita Roberts

I

• Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, by Suzanne Geissler

J

• Jack, The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters, by Lawrence O. Christensen
• Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America, by William L. Joyce
• Jakle and Sculle, Motoring: The Highway Experience in America, by Mark S. Foster
• Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause, by Micki McElya
• Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation, by Hans L. Trefousse
• Jeffries, ed., Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party, by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
• Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg, by M. J. Heale
• Johnson, Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition, by Larry J. Zimmerman

K

• Kaiser, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, by David R. Wrone
• Kamoie, Irons in the Fire: The Business History of the Tayloe Family and Virginia’s Gentry, 1700–1860, by John E. Stealey III
• Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship, by Angela G. Ray
• Kaufman, Rosalynn Carter: Equal Partner in the White House, by Betty Boyd Caroli
• Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South, by Robert Olwell
• Kendrick and Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by Sean Patrick Adams
• Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840, by A. Kristen Foster
• Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, by Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod

L

• Lacey, From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications, by Gretchen Townsend Buggeln
• Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History, by Robert H. Craig
• Laver, Citizens More than Soldiers: The Kentucky Militia and Society in the Early Republic, by James M. Prichard
• Lehman and Nolt, Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War, by Thomas F. Curran
• Li, U.S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950, by Kelly Ann Long
• Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, by Matthew J. Streb
• Lockley, Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South, by Christopher M. Duncan
• Logevall and Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977, by Melvin Small

M

• Mahaffey, Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation, by Bruce C. Daniels
• Major and Major, A Huguenot on the Hackensack: David Demarest and His Legacy, by Bertrand Van Ruymbeke
• McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877, by Stephen E. Maizlish
• McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810, by Robert A. Taylor
• Mickulas, Britton’s Botanical Empire: The New York Botanical Garden and American Botany, 1888–1929, by Richard A. Overfield
• Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, by Frederick J. Blue
• Miller, Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneering Anthropologist, by Curtis M. Hinsley Jr.
• Miller, Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City, by E. Wayne Carp
• Moran, Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States, by Robert Eric Barde
• Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the cia, by David R. Wrone
• Moyer, Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Frontier, by Daniel P. Barr
• Myers, Senator Henry Wilson and the Civil War, by Allan G. Bogue

N

• Nagy, Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution, by John Resch

O

• Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians, by John T. Juricek

P

• Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962, by Jason Colby
• Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television, by Ronald Garay
• Paskoff, Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 1821–1860, by John K. Brown
• Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, by Amanda Irene Seligman
• Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800, by Henry L. Feingold
• Peters, When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law, by Lynne Curry
• Putman, Class and Gender Politics in Progressive-Era Seattle, by Sarah Deutsch

R

• Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America, by Edwin J. Perkins
• Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861, by Anthony Quiroz
• Reid, Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era, by Donald R. Shaffer
• Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, by Steven Volk
• Rennella, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters, by William W. Stowe
• Ritchie, Electing fdr: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, by Richard T. Ortquist
• Robertson, “In the Habit of Acting Together”: The Emergence of the Whig Party in Louisiana, 1828–1840, by Thomas E. Jeffrey
• Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II, by Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
• Rondón, trans. by Aparicio and White, The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City, by Karl Hagstrom Miller
• Ruiz and Chávez, eds., Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories, by Mark Reisler

S

• Schneller, Blue and Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy, by Jo Ann O. Robinson
• Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, by Jonathan Soffer
• Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture, by Ulf Jonas Bjork
• Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, by David Culbert
• Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, by K. A. Cuordileone
• Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen: Die Gerichtsreportage in Berlin, Paris, und Chicago, 1919–1933 (The city and crime: Courtroom reporting in Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, 1919–1933), by Brigitte L. Nacos
• Smallwood, The Feud That Wasn’t: The Taylor Ring, Bill Sutton, John Wesley Hardin, and Violence in Texas, by Paul D. Casdorph
• Smelser and Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture, by Gerd Horten
• Sneh, The Future Almost Arrived: How Jimmy Carter Failed to Change U.S. Foreign Policy, by David F. Schmitz
• Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929, by Tracey Jean Boisseau
• Spinks, Law on the Last Frontier: Texas Ranger Arthur Hill, by William D. Carrigan
• Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills, by Thomas Chambers

T

• Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the wpa; When fdr Put the Nation to Work, by James A. Burran
• Torrey and Miller, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, by Patricia D’Antonio
• Trotti, The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South, by Terri L. Snyder
• Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia, by Amos J. Beyan

W

• Wesson, Households and Hegemony: Early Creek Prestige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Social Power, by Julie Anne Sweet
• Wiest, Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the arvn, by Dale Andradé
• Wilhelm, Deutsche Juden in Amerika: Bürgerliches Selbstbewusstsein und jüdische Identität in den Orden B’nai B’rith und Treue Schwestern, 1843–1914 (German Jews in America: Middle-class self-assurance and Jewish identity in the B’nai B’rith Order and True Sisters, 1843–1914), by Stanley Nadel
• Wittern-Keller, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981, by George Potamianos
• Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love, by David M. P. Freund
• Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
• Wright, usa: Modern Architectures in History, by Miles David Samson
• Wright, One Nation under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe, by Richard H. K. Vietor

Y

• Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, by Andrew Denson
• Yarbrough, Harry A. Blackmun: The Outsider Justice, by Roger L. Goldman
• Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York, by Thomas Dublin

Z

• Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, by Brian Kelly

Movie Reviews

Photo by Lloyd Francis Jr. Courtesy Room 11 Productions

• John Adams, by James T. Kloppenberg (pp. 937–39) Read online >
• Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934, by Charles J. Maland (pp. 940–1) Read online >
• Buffalo Bill, by Joy S. Kasson (pp. 942–3) Read online >
• Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the fsa/owi Photographers, by John Raeburn (pp. 944–5) Read online >
• Sputnik Mania, by Lary L. May (pp. 946) Read online >
• Chicago 10, by Walter L. Hixson (pp. 947–8) Read online >
• Lioness, by Eve Allegra Raimon (pp. 949–50) Read online >

Web site Reviews

Web site reviews are available without a subscription.

Editor’s Annual Report, 2007–2008

Letters to the Editor

Announcements

Recent Scholarship

View “Recent Scholarship” listing online >

Recent Scholarship is available as a searchable database, Recent Scholarship Online >

On the cover:

While visiting Africa in March 1957, Vice President Richard M. Nixon is made an honorary paramount chieftain of all Liberia. The traditional cap and “country cloth” robe presented to Nixon by the paramount chieftain are symbols of that important office. Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 306-RNT-64-A-232-60-18235. See James H. Meriwether “‘Worth a Lot of Negro Votes’: Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign,” p. 737

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