Roads to Power

Jo Guldi. Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2012.

Guldi seeks to reclaim the lost role of the State in the history of the British road network prior to the 20th century. This is a history of the development of the “infrastructure state,” something she argues has not been fully recognized or appreciated. The predominant role that private enterprise played in the later nineteenth century has overshadowed an early period; a full century ending in the mid 1830's when the British state, through increasingly centralized means, created a substantial and robust national road network where none had previously existed. In order to convert a scattering of locally-funded turnpikes and a sparse network of military roads built to solidify British control of Scotland into a much more rationalized network serving civilian and economic needs, visionary “centralizers” found the tools—physical, fiscal, and rhetorical—to sway political opinion towards their expansionist, nationalizing ends.

In this light, Guldi finds that the real accomplishment of long-celebrated heroes of civil engineering wasn’t their technical innovations in road- and bridge-building, but their persuasive and managerial talents. Creating a national road network was less a triumph over the physical environment than over parochial interests and deeply-rooted notions of British liberty. The genius of MacAdam, then, wasn’t the technique of road paving named for him (and Guldi notes that he should be regarded as a popularizer, not innovator, of his namesake “macadamized” roads). Rather, MacAdam developed methods of enforcing standardization without reliance on on-site experts, while managing a large, unskilled workforce.

In the end, opponents to the newly created national road network won the political battle within a few short decades of the ‘centralizers’ victory; the localization movement succeeded politically but the cost to British roads and to poorer regions of Great Britain was high. In the early 20th century, the pendulum would swing back towards centralization—in Britain and elsewhere—and then libertarian opposition to the concept of the ‘public good’ would make yet another comeback at the end of the century—an era we are still living through. Lobbying efforts by telecommunications interests to essentially turn the internet into a “toll road” of sorts is part of that same backlash.

White Trash

Nancy Isenberg. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016.

Isenberg holds that Americans have long been in denial about the degree about class--it's role in American history, it's deep roots in early English colonization, and even the very fact of it's existence. This book serves, then, as an implicit critique of American exceptionalism. By the end, she wants the reader to be completely disabused of any lingering doubts that the United States has been, and remains, a society deeply stratified by class, and possessing a sizable white underclass that, to paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth, has always been with us.

She succeeds in that end, but because this is a story of the white underclass, her conceptual relationship with race is problematic. It's not entirely sure what Isenberg thinks of the relationship between race and class in American history. At times, she makes reference to the conventional assertion that appeals to racism have often divided the black and white underclass, but this conventionally leftist appeal to a class-based interpretation doesn't seem to be her primary focus.

Another problem is that African-Americans appear to be the only non-white minority given much attention in this book. We learn little if anything about Hispanic Americans, or the Asian-American experience in the West. Her story begins in the early English colonies, and never really makes it past the Mississippi. And most unfortunately, there are times when her writing seems to suggest an equivalency being made between white poverty and black slavery. Her view is very focused on the rural South and her book might actually be stronger had she made a less sweeping claim to writing "The" story of class in the United States.

Still this is an ambitious book, not afraid to throw a wide net and find connections between colonial land squatters and twenty-first century reality tv stars. It will be interesting to see what Isenberg has to say on race and class in the future.

The Rhetoric of Conservatism

Bruce D. Dickson. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1982.

The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.

That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.

The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.

Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.

Parlor Politics

Catherine Allgor. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson arrived in the still embryonic capital city of the nation he sought to lead away from what he saw as the anti-Republican tendencies of Federalist rule towards a purer, more perfect Republicanism. As the first President to reside in Washington City for his entire term, he also sought to use the social life of the small but growing new city as a means to set the tone of his administration but also to funnel the political life through channels he would mediate, oversee, and control. In the end, though, the growing social life of the city--managed by the elite women married to other political figures--would take on a life of its own. And those women would become an important component of the growing Republican society of Washington, and of the United States' ruling class.

Allgor's study begins with Jefferson and ends with Jackson. Jackson's conflict with the "ladies of Washington" over the Peggy Eaton affair is revealed here as a more substantive and fundamental conflict than many bemused (or amused) historians have allowed over the years. In the end, the ladies of Washington succeeded in banishing Eaton, but at the expense of some of their power, as the role of society in political life would recede in subsequent years and administrations.

By the end, the rise of Jacksonian democracy had undone earlier Republican qualms regarding personal ambition and the possibly corrupting role of government service on public virtue. The need for wives to serve as political proxies for their ostensibly disinterested husbands through Washington City's social life receded, as did the power those women had once held. As in many other ways, Jacksonian Democracy proved to be extremely riven by gender inequities.

The Shaping of America, Volume 2

D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 2 Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.

Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.

Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.

The Shaping of America; Volume 1

D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 1 Atlantic America, 1492-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

This is the first of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.

Volume 1 covers the Atlantic history era over the course of four parts, the first three of which cover major phases in the development of "Atlantic America" while the shorter fourth summarizes the nature of the new Republic. Each of the three parts are organized in chapters focusing on a single region, theme, or time period. In spite of the sprawling nature of the subject and the structure, the book is fundamentally simple and straightforward. Broader themes develop organically as the narrative moves through time and space. In the end, the United States seems to coalesce from long strands of human and social development played out on stage which is plastic in scale and dynamic in scope.

In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes

David Waldstreicher. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Waldstreicher argues that 'nationalism' is more than a set of ideas, it is also a set of practices. The practice he is concerned with here are public celebrations of events and people during the Revolution and in the early Republic. These public events served to create and validate a sense of nationhood that seemed "discovered" rather than imposed or dictated. Celebrations helped create a collective "recognition" that events and institutions in fact represented what we might now call public opinion.

That is half of the argument; the other is that American nationalism was in many ways a product of print culture--these celebrations, parades, and orations existed in some ways in order to be reported in newspapers around the country. Americans in any one locale were implicitly taking part in in a national conversation.

During the Revolutionary era, Americans had a pre-existing Anglo-American tradition of public demonstrations and ritualized crowd and/or mob activity to draw on. Over the years, this tradition evolved as novel circumstances led to new conceptions of who "the people" were and what their relationship to each other and the newly-created nation would be.

Eventually, these forms of public celebration became a venue for partisan debate over the proper conception of the American nation and its people. This argument that Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans were engaged in deliberate partisan politics through the medium of celebration and print reports of same puts the politics of the early Republic in a different light, particularly for the era just prior to the War of 1812 which traditional historical accounts often portray as being less passionate than the moments just before and after.

In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration would be put to use by partisans of different sections of the country, and in the last chapter of the book by African-Americans seeking to use the language of American nationalism to claim their own place within the nation. In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration has always been contested.

The Grand Idea

Joel Achenbach. The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Achenbach rightly notes that historians have generally paid little attention to the western trip George Washington took in 1784 for the purposes of visiting his own western properties and determining the viability of using the Potomac as the western highway for commerce between the Eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. The result is a very readable account that brings the flesh-and-blood George Washington to life, but largely fails to make the case that this little-remembered trip was as important as Achenbach claims.

He is correct that Washington's concerns regarding communication and commerce with the West were deeply felt and played an important role in events ultimately leading to the Constitutional Convention. For general readers, the connection between concerns about the fragile new nation in the post-Revolutionary age and what were then called internal improvements are surely interesting. And there is real poetry in Achenbach's account of how Washington's "grand idea" would eventually diminish in scale with the Louisiana Purchase and further westward expansion and exploration. Within a few short years after his death, Washington's vision would seem provincial and quaint, even as the Potomac faded from his notion of a 'national' waterway to a mere Eastern seaboard river.

However, there is very little substance underlying these insights; it may be that the reason historians had paid little attention to Washington's westward trip was simply due to the fact that it mattered not very much in the long run. Even his own book suggests that Washington's mind was already made up about the potential the Potomac had as the basis of a trans-Allegheny waterway. In fairness, as a work of popular history--one which does shed a little more light on the character and personality of our first President--this book delivers the goods.

Common Landscape of America

John R. Stilgoe. Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845. New Haven, CT: University of Yale Press, 1982

Stilgoe's work of landscape history is based on the following premise: first, that "landscape" originally referred not to natural scenery in any way nor scenic views in general, but to man-made locales which were neither "natural" nor truly urban; and second, that until the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape in the United States was largely shaped by "common" modes based on Old World beliefs and value systems, modified by colonial and then early national experience.

Traditionally, settled, agricultural life led people to shape and order their surroundings in ways which facilitated traditional agricultural and supported a way of life which was tradition-bound, static, and fundamentally communal in orientation. These mores reinforced an agrarian mentality which was often suspicious of non-agricultural endeavors--not just trade and urban centers, but also nascent manufacturing and even pre-modern modes of "artifice" such as milling and blacksmithing.

Once Stilgoe establishes this basic worldview and tension between it and the economic, technological, and conceptual challenges that rapid geographic and economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century drove, he then moves to a thematic rather than chronological or regional schema. The book is divided into broad conceptual chapters, divided into sections on specific facets. A chapter on "National Design", for example, includes sections on lighthouses, canals, and the 'grid' with which early national surveyors at first abstractly on paper, and then concretely through land sales, neatly delineated the western expanse of the continent beyond the Appalachians long before the new nation had made much progress peopling or effectively claiming it.

In the end, Stilgoe argues that while subsequent development has largely swept away the broad common landscape of the country, many discrete elements remain--lighthouses, country farms, New England meeting houses, covered bridges, etc.--and they continue to shape American attitudes towards current landscapes and provide an idealized reference point for the collective visualization of the nation. Whether informing the stubborn American insistence on privately owned wooden homes, on manicured lawns, which can be rebuilt, enlarged, and improved easily, or providing the iconography of a pastoral, agrarian past that somehow still defines the core identity of a cosmopolitan, urbanized industrial country to many of its people, the remnants of the common landscape still shape the mental landscape of many Americans.

Liberty's Exiles

Maya Jasanoff. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

The American Revolution was also, in many ways, a civil war. This was likely especially true for the loyalist minority, who experienced the war as a betrayal of their own sense of British identity. Loyalists, Jasanoff shows, were not the conservative reactionaries of contemporary rhetoric or posthumous remembrance. Instead, they often took views on the relationship between provincial subjects and the British government which were remarkably similar to that staked out by the Patriot Whigs. What defined them, ultimately, was loyalty not conservatism.

This study of the roughly 60,000 loyalists--white, free black, and American Indian--who chose to leave the newly independent United States in the wake of the 1783 Treaty traces their exodus around the growing, changing British Empire--what became Canada, the Bahamas, East Florida, Jamaica, Britain itself, Sierra Leone, India--it was a global diaspora, and often involved multiple stops before the exiles (not a few of whom ultimately returned to a United States which by fits and starts became more welcoming to its prodigal subjects-turned-citizens).

By 1815, this process was largely over--the exiles who were still alive were largely dead. During the roughly 30 years of exile, the loyalists had played an outsized role in the creation of a new British Empire, and had also been part of a larger process of constitutional and political development. The British Empire, in contrast to the Republicanism of the United States and France on the one hand, and  the despotism of so many other powers on the other, would be marked by a peculiarly British form of liberal, paternal imperialism.  The loyalist exiles contributed greatly to this development.

By studying the loyalists and following them after most American histories turn away from them, the American Revolution and the development of early American Republican citizenship can be seen in a new light, in contrast to the loyalist exile experience as they struggled to find new homes in the empire they gave up so much in order to remain loyal to.

Caribbean Exchanges

Susan Dwyer Amussen. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Although the bulk of this monograph concerns life in the Caribbean--specifically the English island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica--it is ultimately a work of English history. Amussen studies the ways in which English encounters with Caribbean slavery altered and shaped subsequent legal and cultural conceptions of liberty, race, and gender.

Slavery was not widely practiced in England prior to the colonial era, and so therefore neither English law nor English custom accounted for the institution when English colonists and adventurers in the Caribbean began turning to African slave labor in order to meet labor needs in the new colonies. The institution of plantation slavery had already been developed by other European powers, from whom the English acquired both the template for turning slave labor into wealth through the production of cash crops (sugar, in this case), and often the slaves themselves. Yet at the same time, these colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen, and tried to align both their notions of social hierarchy and English "liberties" with the challenge of managing slave labor and exercising control over the slave population.

It was not an easy, nor an obvious, process. Amussen admits that it is still a mystery as to why the English adopted slave labor; this book outlines the process but cannot answer the mystery as to why it happened. Traditional English forms of labor relations were based on mutual regard and reciprocity; the aggressively profit-oriented form of industrial capitalism which developed in the sugar islands undermined those bonds, even as wealthy planters tried to maintain the paternalist facade.

But ultimately, the slave society which developed began to cleave along lines of race and gender--the latter informing the former as Black men were denied the freedom and self-determination of masculine identity even as Black women were denied the emerging standards of femininity which became to be exclusively identified with White women. The trope of the delicate, upper-class white women who was desired by the dark-skinned 'other' enters into the Anglo world here.

Amussen goes on to argue that this experience with slavery would inform and shape the industrial Britain's attitude towards the growing factory working class. But her story also has much to say about the early Atlantic world, as her Caribbean slave holders are in ongoing communication with the broader Atlantic world as well as the mother country.

Revolutionary Backlash

Rosemarie Zagarri. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Traditional histories of political involvement by women generally begin Antebellum reform movements, culminating in the Seneca Falls convention which has long served as the traditional starting point of formal feminism in American history. Without denying the importance of Seneca Falls or the Antebellum feminist movement in general, Zaggari argues that that particular "feminist moment" is best understood not as the birth of a new level of activism by women, but rather as the culmination of decades of prior political activity by women, and the reaction which ultimately limited it. The Early Republic had been a period in which white women had a much higher degree of public participation in political life than subsequent generations would be accorded. The reasons why that was, and why women lost that freedom of participation, are tied to the role in which race and gender defined full citizenship in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian years.

Women in the early Republic had many concerns about their rights--"rights" much more broadly defained than suffrage. The language of the Revolution was universal in scope, and just as African-Americans used that language to argue for full inclusion in the polity after independence, so did white women argue that civil law, family law, and other social and legal strictures required their consent just as the Revolution itself had laid claim to legitimacy based on the consent of the governed.

For a time, there was room and even encouragement for female participation in the political realm, even if most white men resisted the revolutionary logic of extending freedom and equality to women and African-Americans. Female patriots gave legitimacy to Revolutionary and Whig rhetoric And during the early national period there was initially a generally welcoming attitude towards "female politicians" speaking and writing on behalf of Federalist and Republican positions. However, involving women in partisan politics threatened their gendered role as protectors of social morality and private, domestic harmony. The quest to push women out of politics began.

Within a few decades it succeeded, so much so that by the late 1820's many older women found that they could surprise their daughters and granddaughters by explaining that in their youth women were allowed and sometimes even encouraged to take independent positions on political matters and even enter the public sphere while doing so.

Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America

Nancy Isenberg. Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Isenberg locates the roots of Antebellum feminism in discussions and activism predating the Seneca Falls convention. She also considers the broader goals of antebellum feminists, who saw suffrage as a means to an end rather than a particular goal in its own right. And that end was to achieve "co-equality", a concept which posited that in a republican society women needed to be allowed the ability to speak for themselves and defend their personal sovereignty--including control over their own bodies--while at the same time living in a separate, gendered sphere. Antebellum feminists were engaged in a complex struggle to redefine the role of women both in their private lives and in the public sphere.

This struggle was complicated because feminists understood that the implications of republican thought--particularly in a society which had sanctioned race-based chattel slavery--on those regarded as "dependents" was fraught with challenges. Women had to find ways in which to engage in a public sphere which was gendered as a (white) male theater of action.

The push for "personhood", then, had to contend both with societal norms restricting the legitimacy of feminine engagement with politics, and longstanding legal norms denying women the agency and legal autonomy to speak or act on their behalf. The push for rights--the right to divorce, the right to own property, guardianship of their own children, etc.--was the real goal of antebellum feminism. Suffrage and appeals to abstract notions of citizenship were a means to an end.

Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

This synthetic history of slavery in the United States from the early Virginia colony through the Revolutionary period at the very end of the eighteenth century divides the (future) United States into four main areas for the purposes of slave societies--the North, the Chesapeake/Upper South, the Lowcountry/Lower South, and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Berlin acknowledges that other divisions could have been possible--the Upper South could have been split between Tidewater and Piedmont, for one example--but makes a convincing argument that his categories are both valid and useful. Any further delineation might very well have made the study too complex.

Berlin also makes a distinction between a "society with slaves" versus a "slave society." The latter is completely organized around slave holding both as a central economic activity and an organizing social principle, while the former describes a society in which slave holding is legal and possibly even widely practiced but does not dominate social and economic life.

Within those spatial and conceptual frames, Berlin summarizes the state and development of slavery in each region, over the course of three different time periods. Part One recounts the "Charter Generations", the experience of the early slaves in North America, who were frequently creoles who were cosmopolitan natives of the Atlantic World. Part Two recounts the "Plantation Generations" who experienced the slow development of indigenous slavery in mainland North America. Part Three recounts the "Revolutionary Generation" who experienced the disruptions of the late-18th century revolutions--revolutions which both offered new avenues for freedom yet paradoxically led to Northern "free"states in which African-American life was increasingly compromised and constricted; and a rapid growth and spread of plantation slavery across the Lower South, a region which would ultimately encompass both the old Lowcountry and the Lower Mississippi.

The book ends at the dawn of the 19th century and the cotton revolution which would exacerbate the spread of slavery and lead the southern United States to ever more aggressively defend the slave society cotton helped create.

From Resistance to Revolution

Pauline Maier. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991, 1972

The process by which once-loyal British subjects in the North American colonies became radicalized and turned against the government of a "mother country" in just a decade is the subject of Maier's now-classic study. By looking at published writings from the era as well as correspondence, she places the rise of the Patriot movement in the larger context of both British imperial history and the legal tradition colonists inherited.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One, "Traditions", recounts the heritage of acceptable resistance and public demonstrations against perceived governmental overreach which British law and custom had long tolerated and even protected. Understanding the forms in which colonial opposition to such British initiatives as the Stamp Act and so forth took is much easier when the reader is aware of this legacy.

Part Two, "Resistance", studies the early years of post-French and Indian War discontent and increasingly organized dissent in the context of British law and colonial conditions. The need to justify resistance in terms of social and cultural norms guided many of the actions taken. The Sons of Liberty and other early Patriots operated within colonial societies still wedded to traditional, corporate forms, so the importance of consensus (or at least the outward appearance of such) and propriety were stressed. "Mobs" were often restrained and even the most rabble-rousing leaders spoke out against the violations of norms.

Part Three, "From Resistance to Revolution", begins by putting the colonial resistance movement as it stood in the late 1760's in a broader context, stressing the connection between the colonists and their perceived allies in Parliament, the City of London, Ireland, and elsewhere. But as "corruption" seemed to clip the wings of most British radicals on the other side of the Atlantic, the colonists came to feel that they were on their own; a realization which fed their increased willingness to consider separation as an option well before the outbreak of actual hostilities in 1775, let alone the summer of 1776.

In the end, Americans embraced republicanism as an alternative to the British constitutional order in which earlier resistance had been based once they concluded that that order had been corrupted beyond hope. They moved towards republicanism in a deliberate move to establish a new ideological basis for continued resistance and then rebellion and revolution.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs

Kathleen M. Brown. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996; published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.

Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.

The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.

The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.

Apostles of Disunion

Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

This brief study of the speeches and letters of several of the over fifty men who served as "Secession Commissioners"--essentially delegates sent as representatives of pro-secessionist state conventions to similar conventions in other states--identifies the language, rhetoric, and arguments of these men as an important indicator of the centrality of pro-slavery sentiment and a commitment to white supremacy to the secession crisis.

Dew's argument is concise and he includes the text of some of the more notable speeches in the Appendix so that the reader can read them in their entirety. Dew, who was raised in the South and was taught from an early age that the "War of Northern Aggression" was fought by his ancestors as a principled defense of Constitutional values and State's Rights--acknowledges that there were other "causes" of the war, including diverging economic systems, and a deeply-rooted (if, I would argue, possibly insecure) culture of honor in the South, but he argues that these documents provide a damning indictment of any effort to deny the degree to which the Confederacy was founded on, and fought for, a defense of slavery and the continued degradation and oppression of Black Americans.

Awash in a Sea of Faith

Jon Butler. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.

The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.

And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.

Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.

All the World's a Fair

Robert W. Rydell. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.

The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".

The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.

Fighting for American Manhood

Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Hoganson's book is "based on the premise that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding culture." (2) Rather than a broad focus on the rather amorphous concept of "culture" at large, she focuses on political culture--specifically "on the gender convictions--meaning the ideas about the appropriate male and female roles--that did so much to define the counters of late-nineteenth-century U.S. political culture." (4)

To be clear, Hoganson is not interested in merely applying a gender-history filter to existing historiography of the war. She instead wants to go back to the sources and start over, making gender the interpretive framework. She does so partly because arguments and debate over gender and masculinity were present throughout American society and cultural institutions at the time; and partly because existing explanations for the outbreak of the war are so unsatisfying. It is not enough to say that yellow journalists were able to exploit the Maine tragedy to drum up jingoistic war fever--we must understand why those journalists wanted to do so, and why that message resonated so much.

Young, white men in the United States of America in the late 1890's knew a few things about their society. It was beginning to offer more professional and vocational opportunities to women, even as it increasingly moved middle-class white men away from physical labor and economic autonomy towards office work in large, impersonal organizations. They also knew that their elders had fought and "proved" themselves in the Civil War, while they were denied the "opportunity" to do likewise. And they were also dimly aware that the United States was becoming more intertwined into a growing global economy and policy makers and business leaders were interested in finding overseas markets, yet there was some sense that the U.S. was not yet regarded as a true peer by the Great Powers of Europe.

Hoganson deftly finds connecting threads of gender anxiety in what many perceived as a crisis of American masculinity running through all these issues, and more. The ways in which McKinley, for example, was somewhat forced into a more belligerent foreign policy at least in part to demonstrate his "manliness" is one of many examples of how gender shaped the terms by which foreign policy decisions were framed and made.

This outburst of hyper-masculinity would not last, however. In the end, qualms about the Philippine insurrection would dampen any enthusiasm for further overtly imperialist adventures, and America's aggressive drive to acquire an overseas empire came to a premature halt. Hoganson's thesis not only helps explain the outbreak of the war against Spain, it also helps explain why in retrospect it would look like an anomaly which historians and students still puzzle over.

Crooked Paths to Allotment

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

This short study focuses on the public careers of two men--Ely Parker, and Thomas Bland--who worked in the late Nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. Parker--an American Indian who had served as Ulysses S Grant's aide in the Civil War--served as the head of the Office of Indian Affairs for a few years following the war. Bland, a white man who also served in the war as a physician, founded the National Indian Defense Association, a private organization that combated the forced assimilationist policies of the Indian Rights Association. The latter group was led by white reformers who believed strongly that the government needed to take a firm, paternalist role in forcing Indians to adopt white American modes of living, including giving up tribal identities and collective land ownership. Leading up to the passage of the Dawes Act and the implementation of the "allotment period", this is a story about two leaders who tried--and largely failed--to stem the tide of Federal Indian policy.

Parker, and then Bland, both pushed back against the growing consensus in post-Civil War America regarding Indians and their fate in the polity. Parker's experience with the Federal government was largely positive--he saw the Army as an efficient and well-run organization, so he was inclined to view the possibilities of harnessing governmental power favorably. He also took the view that a continued reliance on treaties was a mistake--Indian nations had declined in power dramatically, and were continuing to do so; in his view treaty-making was based on the fiction that Indian nations had the power to defend their own sovereign interests, but by the 1870's this was no longer true. For example, Parker sought to have the Office of Indian Affairs transferred back to the War Department from the Interior Department. By ending the reliance on treaties, Parker believed that the government would be compelled to take a more active and constructive role in assisting Indians in meeting their needs so they could enter American society on their own terms.

Parker was pushed out of government service before his reforms could take shape, through political jostling and institutional battles in which his opponents relied on the rhetorical language of "corruption", a charge which Genetin-Pilawa argues was often more useful as a weapon against attempts to wield governmental power on behalf of the disenfranchised than an accurate description of actual corruption as most would define it.

Thomas Bland came to Indian reform by way of his interest in other reform movements; his opposition to concentrated economic power (he seems to have been a Greenback Party member at one point, for example). Once he learned of the government policy of forced assimilation, Bland became an avowed opponent of such measures, and soon was organizing on a national scale against the better-funded and more connected leadership of the competing Indian Rights Organization (the name might be regarded as a cruel joke by many of the recipients of its intended activism).

Bland ultimately failed as did Parker, but both of their careers suggested alternate paths not taken, and therefore illustrate the ways in which the final collapse of Indian sovereignty and resistance in the final decades of the nineteenth century was anything but inevitable or uncontested.