During the Holocene, the present geological epoch, an increasing portion of humans began to manipulate the reproduction of plants and animals in a series of environmental practices known as agriculture. No other ecological relationship sustains as many humans as farming; no other has transformed the landscape to the same extent. The domestication of plants by American Indians followed the end of the last glacial maximum (the Ice Age). About eight thousand years ago, the first domesticated maize and squash arrived from central Mexico, spreading to every region and as far north as the subarctic boreal forest. The incursion of Europeans into North America set off widespread deforestation, soil depletion, and the spread of settlement, followed by the introduction of industrial machines and chemicals. A series of institutions sponsored publically funded research into fertilizers and insecticides. By the late 19th century, writers and activists criticized the technological transformation of farming as destructive to the environment and rural society. During the 20th century, wind erosion contributed to the depopulation of much of the Great Plains. Vast projects in environmental engineering transformed deserts into highly productive regions of intensive fruit and vegetable production. Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, access to land remained limited to whites, with American Indians, African Americans, Latinas/os, Chinese, and peoples of other ethnicities attempting to gain farms or hold on to the land they owned.
Two broad periods describe the history of agriculture and the environment in that portion of North America that became the United States. In the first, the environment dominated, forcing humans to adapt during the end of thousands of years of extreme climate variability. In the second, institutional and technological change became more significant, though the environment remained a constant factor against which American agriculture took shape. A related historical pattern within this shift was the capitalist transformation of the United States. For thousands of years, households sustained themselves and exchanged some of what they produced for money. But during the 19th century among a majority of American farmers, commodities took over the entire purpose of agriculture, transforming environments to reflect commercial opportunity.
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Agriculture and the Environment
Steven Stoll
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American Orientalism
Osamah F. Khalil
Orientalism is an established academic discipline as well as a discourse. In Europe and the United States, Orientalist discourse was reproduced in academic studies, literature, popular culture, and policy circles. American Orientalism shares a number of characteristics with its European progenitors. The persistent representation of the broader East as an inferior, irrational, and emotional “other” reflected and reified disparities in power that then informed the production of knowledge about these vast regions and their inhabitants. American missionaries, social scientists, and counterinsurgency experts used Orientalism to justify their attempts to reshape the broader East in the image of the United States. In his seminal work, Orientalism, Edward Said examined the vast “Orient” as a geographic imaginary of the “Occident.” While he largely focused on Britain and France, Said also discussed American Orientalism and its manifestations in the academy, political discourse, and popular culture. In the decades since Said published Orientalism, scholars have embraced, critiqued, and expanded on its assertions. Yet American Orientalism as a discourse and practice persists and has proven resilient to challenges.
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The American War for Independence as a Revolutionary War
Michael A. McDonnell
The American War for Independence lasted eight years. It was one of the longest and bloodiest wars in America’s history, and yet it was not such a protracted conflict merely because the might of the British armed forces was brought to bear on the hapless colonials. The many divisions among Americans themselves over whether to fight, what to fight for, and who would do the fighting often had tragic and violent consequences. The Revolutionary War was by any measure the first American civil war. Yet national narratives of the Revolution and even much of the scholarship on the era focus more on simple stories of a contest between the Patriots and the British. Loyalists and other opponents of the Patriots are routinely left out of these narratives, or given short shrift. So, too, are the tens of thousands of ordinary colonists—perhaps a majority of the population—who were disaffected or alienated from either side or who tried to tack between the two main antagonists to make the best of a bad situation. Historians now estimate that as many as three-fifths of the colonial population were neither active Loyalists nor Patriots.
When we take the war seriously and begin to think about narratives that capture the experience of the many, rather than the few, an illuminating picture emerges. The remarkably wide scope of the activities of the disaffected during the war—ranging from nonpayment of taxes to draft dodging and even to armed resistance to protect their neutrality—has to be integrated with older stories of militant Patriots and timid Loyalists. Only then can we understand the profound consequences of disaffection—particularly in creating divisions within the states, increasing levels of violence, prolonging the war, and changing the nature of the political settlements in each state. Indeed, the very divisions among diverse Americans that made the War for Independence so long, bitter, and bloody also explains much of the Revolutionary energy of the period. Though it is not as seamless as traditional narratives of the Revolution would suggest, a more complicated story also helps better explain the many problems the new states and eventually the new nation would face. In making this argument, we may finally suggest ways we can overcome what John Shy long ago noted as the tendency of scholars to separate the ‘destructive’ War for Independence from the ‘constructive’ political Revolution.
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Banking and Finance from the Revolution to the Civil War
Sharon Ann Murphy
In creating a new nation, the United States also had to create a financial system from scratch. During the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, the country experimented with numerous options. Although the Constitution deliberately banned the issuance of paper money by either Congress or the states, states indirectly reclaimed this power by incorporating state-chartered banks with the ability to print banknotes. These provided Americans with a medium of exchange to facilitate trade and an expansionary money supply to meet the economic needs of a growing nation. The federal government likewise entered into the world of money and finance with the incorporation of the First and Second Banks of the United States. Not only did critics challenge the constitutionality of these banks, but contemporaries likewise debated whether any banking institutions promoted the economic welfare of the nation or if they instead introduced unnecessary instability into the economy. These debates became particularly heated during moments of crisis. Periods of war, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, highlighted the necessity of a robust financial system to support the military effort, while periods of economic panic such as the Panic of 1819, the Panics of 1837 and 1839, and the Panic of 1857 drew attention to the weaknesses inherent in this decentralized, largely unregulated system. Whereas Andrew Jackson succeeded in destroying the Second Bank of the United States during the Bank War, state-chartered commercial banks, savings banks, and investment banks still multiplied rapidly throughout the period. Numerous states introduced regulations intended to control the worst excesses of these banks, but the most comprehensive legislation occurred with the federal government’s Civil War-era Banking Acts, which created the first uniform currency for the nation.
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Caribbean-US Relations
Tyson Reeder
The United States has shared an intricate and turbulent history with Caribbean islands and nations since its inception. In its relations with the Caribbean, the United States has displayed the dueling tendencies of imperialism and anticolonialism that characterized its foreign policy with South America and the rest of the world. For nearly two and a half centuries, the Caribbean has stood at the epicenter of some of the US government’s most controversial and divisive foreign policies. After the American Revolution severed political ties between the United States and the British West Indies, US officials and traders hoped to expand their political and economic influence in the Caribbean. US trade in the Caribbean played an influential role in the events that led to the War of 1812. The Monroe Doctrine provided a blueprint for reconciling imperial ambitions in the Caribbean with anti-imperial sentiment. During the mid-19th century, Americans debated the propriety of annexing Caribbean islands, especially Cuba. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US government took an increasingly imperialist approach to its relations with the Caribbean, acquiring some islands as federal territories and augmenting its political, military, and economic influence in others. Contingents of the US population and government disapproved of such imperialistic measures, and beginning in the 1930s the US government softened, but did not relinquish, its influence in the Caribbean. Between the 1950s and the end of the Cold War, US officials wrestled with how to exert influence in the Caribbean in a postcolonial world. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has intervened in Caribbean domestic politics to enhance democracy, continuing its oscillation between democratic and imperial impulses.
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Contagious Disease and Public Health in the American City
Daniel Wilson
Contagious diseases have long posed a public health challenge for cities, going back to the ancient world. Diseases traveled over trade routes from one city to another. Cities were also crowded and often dirty, ideal conditions for the transmission of infectious disease. The Europeans who settled North America quickly established cities, especially seaports, and contagious diseases soon followed. By the late 17th century, ports like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia experienced occasional epidemics, especially smallpox and yellow fever, usually introduced from incoming ships. Public health officials tried to prevent contagious diseases from entering the ports, most often by establishing a quarantine. These quarantines were occasionally effective, but more often the disease escaped into the cities. By the 18th century, city officials recognized an association between dirty cities and epidemic diseases. The appearance of a contagious disease usually occasioned a concerted effort to clean streets and remove garbage. These efforts by the early 19th century gave rise to sanitary reform to prevent infectious diseases. Sanitary reform went beyond cleaning streets and removing garbage, to ensuring clean water supplies and effective sewage removal. By the end of the century, sanitary reform had done much to clean the cities and reduce the incidence of contagious disease. In the 20th century, public health programs introduced two new tools to public health: vaccination and antibiotics. First used against smallpox, scientists developed vaccinations against numerous other infectious viral diseases and reduced their incidence substantially. Finally, the development of antibiotics against bacterial infections in the mid-20th century enabled physicians to cure infected individuals. Contagious disease remains a problem—witness AIDS—and public health authorities still rely on quarantine, sanitary reform, vaccination, and antibiotics to keep urban populations healthy.
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The Creek Confederacy
Andrew Frank
The Creek Confederacy was a loose coalition of ethnically and linguistically diverse Native American towns that slowly coalesced as a political entity in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Its towns existed in Georgia, Alabama, and northern Florida, and for most of its preremoval history, these towns operated as autonomous entities. Several Creek leaders tried to consolidate power and create a more centralized polity, but these attempts at nation building largely failed. Instead, a fragile and informal confederacy connected the towns together for various cultural rituals as well as for purposes of diplomacy and trade. Disputes over centralization, as well as a host of other connected issues, ultimately led to the Creek War of 1813–1814. In the 1830s, the United States forced most members of the Creek Confederacy to vacate their eastern lands and relocate their nation to Indian Territory. Today, their western descendants are known as the Muskogee (Creek) Nation. Those who remained in the east include members of the federally recognized Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians who live in Alabama.
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Early American Foreign Relations, 1775–1815
Lindsay M. Chervinsky
From 1775 to 1815, empire served as the most pressing foreign relationship problem for the United States. Would the new nation successfully break free from the British Empire? What would an American empire look like? How would it be treated by other empires? And could Americans hold their own against European superpowers? These questions dominated the United States’ first few decades of existence and shaped its interactions with American Indian, Haitian, Spanish, British, and French peoples. The US government—first the Continental Congress, then the Confederation Congress, and finally the federal administration under the new Constitution—grappled with five key issues. First, they sought international recognition of their independence and negotiated trade deals during the Revolutionary War to support the war effort. Second, they obtained access to the Mississippi River and Port of New Orleans from Spain and France to facilitate trade and western settlement. Third, they grappled with ongoing conflict with Indian nations over white settlement on Indian lands and demands from white communities for border security. Fourth, they defined and protected American neutrality, negotiated a trade policy that required European recognition of American independence, and denied recognition to Haiti. Lastly, they fought a quasi-war with France and real war with Great Britain in 1812.
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Economic Thought and Practice in America
Christopher W. Calvo
The conspicuous timing of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and America’s Declaration of Independence, separated by only a few months in 1776, has attracted a great deal of historical attention. America’s revolution was in large part motivated by the desire to break free from British mercantilism and engage the principles, both material and ideological, found in Smith’s work. From 1776 to the present day, the preponderance of capitalism in American economic history and the influence of The Wealth of Nations in American intellectual culture have contributed to the conventional wisdom that America and Smith enjoy a special relationship. After all, no nation has consistently pursued the tenets of Smithian-inspired capitalism, mainly free and competitive markets, a commitment to private property, and the pursuit of self-interests and profits, more than the United States.
The shadow of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations looms large over America. But a closer look at American economic thought and practice demonstrates that Smith’s authority was not as dominant as the popular history assumes. Although most Americans accepted Smith’s work as the foundational text in political economy and extracted from it the cardinal principles of intellectual capitalism, its core values were twisted, turned, and fused together in contorted, sometimes contradictory fashions. American economic thought also reflects the widespread belief that the nation would trace an exceptional course, distinct from the Old World, and therefore necessitating a political economy suited to American traditions and expectations. Hybrid capitalist ideologies, although rooted in Smithian-inspired liberalism, developed within a dynamic domestic discourse that embraced ideological diversity and competing paradigms, exactly the kind expected from a new nation trying to understand its economic past, establish its present, and project its future.
Likewise, American policymakers crafted legislation that brought the national economy both closer to and further from the Smithian ideal. Hybrid intellectual capitalism—a compounded ideological approach that antebellum American economic thinkers deployed to help rationalize the nation’s economic development—imitated the nation’s emergent hybrid material capitalism. Labor, commodity, and capital markets assumed amalgamated forms, combining, for instance, slave and free labor, private and public enterprises, and open and protected markets. Americans constructed different types of capitalism, reflecting a preference for mixtures of practical thought and policy that rarely conformed to strict ideological models. Historians of American economic thought and practice study capitalism as an evolutionary, dynamic institution with manifestations in traditional, expected corners, but historians also find capitalism demonstrated in unorthodox ways and practiced in obscure corners of market society that blended capitalist with non-capitalist experiences. In the 21st century, the benefits of incorporating conventional economic analysis with political, social, and cultural narratives are widely recognized. This has helped broaden scholars’ understanding of what exactly constitutes capitalism. And in doing so, the malleability of American economic thought and practice is put on full display, improving scholars’ appreciation for what remains the most significant material development in world history.
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Elizabeth Seton, American Saint
Catherine O'Donnell
Elizabeth Bayley Seton is the first native-born US citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint. Canonized in 1975, Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first vowed community of Catholic women religious created in the United States. Seton’s sainthood marked the culmination of a role she first served during her life: a respectable, benevolent face for a church whose local leaders were eager to demonstrate its compatibility with American culture. Seton’s founding of the American Sisters of Charity was a more practical achievement and one that shaped the Catholic Church in the United States in tangible ways. Starting in 1809, when Seton began a school and vowed community in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity expanded throughout the United States, eventually running hundreds of schools and orphanages and offering both a spiritual home and a career path for women who chose it. Seton’s life is expressive for what it reveals about her era as well as for her distinctive achievements. Her prominence led to the preservation of decades of correspondence and spiritual writings. Through them it is possible to see with unusual clarity the ways in which the Age of Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon variously disrupted, reinvigorated, and transformed Catholic traditions; to observe the possibilities and constraints Catholicism offered a spiritually ambitious woman; and to witness changes in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Finally, Seton’s rich archive also renders visible one woman’s experience of intellectual inquiry, marriage, widowhood, motherhood, spiritual ambition, and female friendship.
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The Enlightenment and America
John M. Dixon
The Enlightenment, a complex cultural phenomenon that lasted approximately from the late seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century, contained a dynamic mix of contrary beliefs and epistemologies. Its intellectual coherence arguably came from its distinctive historical sensibility, which was rooted in the notion that advances in the natural sciences had gifted humankind with an exceptional opportunity in the eighteenth century for self-improvement and societal progress. That unifying historical outlook was flexible and adaptable. Consequently, many aspects of the Enlightenment were left open to negotiation at local and transnational levels. They were debated by the philosophes who met in Europe’s coffeehouses, salons, and scientific societies. Equally, they were contested outside of Europe through innumerable cross-cultural exchanges as well as via long-distance intellectual interactions.
America—whether it is understood expansively as the two full continents and neighboring islands within the Western Hemisphere or, in a more limited way, as the territory that now constitutes the United States—played an especially prominent role in the Enlightenment. The New World’s abundance of plants, animals, and indigenous peoples fascinated early modern natural historians and social theorists, stimulated scientific activity, and challenged traditional beliefs. By the eighteenth century, the Western Hemisphere was an important site for empirical science and also for the intersection of different cultures of knowledge. At the same time, European conceptions of the New World as an undeveloped region inhabited by primitive savages problematized Enlightenment theories of universal progress. Comparisons of Native Americans to Africans, Asians, and Europeans led to speculation about the existence of separate human species or races. Similarly, the prevalence and profitability of American slavery fueled new and increasingly scientific conceptions of race. Eighteenth-century analyses of human differences complicated contemporary assertions that all men possessed basic natural rights. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the American Revolution focused international attention on man’s innate entitlement to life, liberty, and happiness. Yet, in a manner that typified the contradictions and paradoxes of the Enlightenment, the founders of the United States opted to preserve slavery and social inequality after winning political freedom from Britain.
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Federalism
Alison L. LaCroix
Federalism refers to the constitutional and political structure of the United States of America, according to which political power is divided among multiple levels of government: the national level of government (also referred to as the “federal” or “general” government) and that of the states. It is a multilayered system of government that reserves some powers to component entities while also establishing an overarching level of government with a specified domain of authority. The structures of federalism are set forth in the Constitution of the United States, although some related ideas and practices predated the founding period and others have developed since. The balance between federal and state power has shifted throughout U.S. history, with assertions of broad national power meeting challenges from supporters of states’ rights and state sovereignty. Federalism is a fundamental value of the American political system, and it has been a controversial political and legal question since the founding period.
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The Federalist Era and US Foreign Relations
Timothy C. Hemmis
The Federalist Era (1788–1800) witnessed the birth of the new American Constitution and ushered in a period of a strong Federal government headed by a president and a bicameral Congress. The new American government sought to protect American interests in a turbulent time. From threats from Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean Sea to the turmoil in Revolutionary France and to the slave revolt in Haiti, the young republic had to navigate difficult political waters in order to protect itself. Furthermore, it also had to deal with the British and Spanish, who remained in American territory, without starting another war. Additionally, the United States had to engage with various Native American tribes in the interior of the continent to end the threat of war on the American frontier. Later in the time period, tensions between the United States and the new French Republic became strained, which led to the diplomatic embarrassment of the XYZ Affair and an undeclared naval war between the United States and France. American foreign policy during the Federalist Era was a matter of trial and error because there had been no standard protocol for dealing with international incidents under the old government.
George Washington, the first president under the new Constitution, shouldered the burden of creating the new American foreign policy. Washington, along with cabinet members such as Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, helped shape US foreign policy in the Federalist Era. Washington was succeeded by his vice president, John Adams, who guided America through tense times, which included conflict with France. With the creation of the American Constitution, Washington and other Federalist leaders had the difficult task of creating a new nation, which included forging a foreign policy. The goal of the fledgling American republic’s foreign policy was to protect American sovereignty in an era of perpetual threats.
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Fur Trades
Carolyn Podruchny and Stacy Nation-Knapper
From the 15th century to the present, the trade in animal fur has been an economic venture with far-reaching consequences for both North Americans and Europeans (in which North Americans of European descent are included). One of the earliest forms of exchange between Europeans and North Americans, the trade in fur was about the garment business, global and local politics, social and cultural interaction, hunting, ecology, colonialism, gendered labor, kinship networks, and religion. European fashion, specifically the desire for hats that marked male status, was a primary driver for the global fur-trade economy until the late 19th century, while European desires for marten, fox, and other luxury furs to make and trim clothing comprised a secondary part of the trade. Other animal hides including deer and bison provided sturdy leather from which belts for the machines of the early Industrial Era were cut. European cloth, especially cotton and wool, became central to the trade for Indigenous peoples who sought materials that were lighter and dried faster than skin clothing. The multiple perspectives on the fur trade included the European men and indigenous men and women actually conducting the trade; the indigenous male and female trappers; European trappers; the European men and women producing trade goods; indigenous “middlemen” (men and women) who were conducting their own fur trade to benefit from European trade companies; laborers hauling the furs and trade goods; all those who built, managed, and sustained trading posts located along waterways and trails across North America; and those Europeans who manufactured and purchased the products made of fur and the trade goods desired by Indigenous peoples. As early as the 17th century, European empires used fur-trade monopolies to establish colonies in North America and later fur trading companies brought imperial trading systems inland, while Indigenous peoples drew Europeans into their own patterns of trade and power. By the 19th century, the fur trade had covered most of the continent and the networks of business, alliances, and families, and the founding of new communities led to new peoples, including the Métis, who were descended from the mixing of European and Indigenous peoples. Trading territories, monopolies, and alliances with Indigenous peoples shaped how European concepts of statehood played out in the making of European-descended nation-states, and the development of treaties with Indigenous peoples. The fur trade flourished in northern climes until well into the 20th century, after which time economic development, resource exploitation, changes in fashion, and politics in North America and Europe limited its scope and scale. Many Indigenous people continue today to hunt and trap animals and have fought in courts for Indigenous rights to resources, land, and sovereignty.
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Genocide and American Indian History
Jeffrey Ostler
The issue of genocide and American Indian history has been contentious. Many writers see the massive depopulation of the indigenous population of the Americas after 1492 as a clear-cut case of the genocide. Other writers, however, contend that European and U.S. actions toward Indians were deplorable but were rarely if ever genocidal. To a significant extent, disagreements about the pervasiveness of genocide in the history of the post-Columbian Western Hemisphere, in general, and U.S. history, in particular, pivot on definitions of genocide. Conservative definitions emphasize intentional actions and policies of governments that result in very large population losses, usually from direct killing. More liberal definitions call for less stringent criteria for intent, focusing more on outcomes. They do not necessarily require direct sanction by state authorities; rather, they identify societal forces and actors. They also allow for several intersecting forces of destruction, including dispossession and disease. Because debates about genocide easily devolve into quarrels about definitions, an open-ended approach to the question of genocide that explores several phases and events provides the possibility of moving beyond the present stalemate. However one resolves the question of genocide in American Indian history, it is important to recognize that European and U.S. settler colonial projects unleashed massively destructive forces on Native peoples and communities. These include violence resulting directly from settler expansion, intertribal violence (frequently aggravated by colonial intrusions), enslavement, disease, alcohol, loss of land and resources, forced removals, and assaults on tribal religion, culture, and language. The configuration and impact of these forces varied considerably in different times and places according to the goals of particular colonial projects and the capacities of colonial societies and institutions to pursue them. The capacity of Native people and communities to directly resist, blunt, or evade colonial invasions proved equally important.
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Haiti and the Early United States
Philippe R. Girard
Haiti (known as Saint-Domingue until it gained its independence from France in 1804) had a noted economic and political impact on the United States during the era of the American Revolution, when it forced U.S. statesmen to confront issues they had generally avoided, most prominently racism and slavery. But the impact of the Haitian Revolution was most tangible in areas like commerce, territorial expansion, and diplomacy. Saint-Domingue served as a staging ground for the French military and navy during the American Revolution and provided troops to the siege of Savannah in 1779. It became the United States’ second-largest commercial partner during the 1780s and 1790s. After Saint-Domingue’s slaves revolted in 1791, many of its inhabitants found refuge in the United States, most notably in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans. Fears (or hopes) that the slave revolt would spread to the United States were prevalent in public opinion. As Saint-Domingue achieved quasi-autonomous status under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, it occupied a central place in the diplomacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Louisiana Purchase was made possible in part by the failure of a French expedition to Saint-Domingue in 1802–1803. Bilateral trade declined after Saint-Domingue acquired its independence from France in 1804 (after which Saint-Domingue became known as Haiti), but Haiti continued to loom large in the African-American imagination, and there were several attempts to use Haiti as a haven for U.S. freedmen. The U.S. diplomatic recognition of Haiti also served as a reference point for antebellum debates on slavery, the slave trade, and the status of free people of color in the United States.
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The History of Jewish Women in the United States
Joyce Antler
The story of Jewish women in the United States is one of impressive achievement. Despite their numerically small representation in the American population, they made major contributions to politics and culture, and their organizations were among the nation’s most influential women’s groups. Yet both as women and as Jews, they often confronted troubling inequities in religious and secular life and struggled to balance their multiple identities.
Jewish women played vital roles in colonial and revolutionary America, managing their household economies and family life. Highly literate and with extensive social networks, they often engaged in commerce in the interconnected Atlantic world. Jewish women were the mainstays of religious observance, promoting religious worship and the construction of synagogues and schools. Intermarriage was infrequent, with Jewish men marrying out more frequently than women.
In the early 19th century, some Jewish women attended the new female academies, becoming teachers, social reformers, and writers. They also founded and managed educational and philanthropic institutions, including the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the coeducational Hebrew Sunday School, orphan associations, and mutual aid groups, including the Independent Order of True Sisters, the first national Jewish women’s organization.
Jewish women constituted roughly half of the Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from German-speaking European nations in the first half of the 19th century. They also constituted about half of the two and a half million Eastern European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920. Upper- and middle-class Jewish women established sisterhoods, settlement houses, clubs, and schools to aid the new arrivals, inaugurating the first Jewish women’s movement. In 1909, laboring under exploitative conditions, Jewish women garment workers launched an eleven-week strike that transformed the labor movement. Highly represented in movements like socialism, anarchism, and communism, Jewish women also participated in campaigns for birth control and international peace.
By the mid-20th century, a new generation assumed leadership at the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah, and other Jewish women’s groups. Involved in campaigns against immigration restriction, rescuing refugees from Nazism, and efforts to create a Jewish national homeland, they strengthened Jewish communities throughout the world.
In the postwar decades, Jews migrated in significant numbers to the suburbs, where they were the mainstay of synagogue life and helped popularize new rituals like the bat mitzvah. Major leaders in the campaigns for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and peace, in the 1960s and 1970s they helped launch second-wave feminism. Jewish women were prominent in both liberal and radical branches of the women’s liberation movement. As Jewish feminists, they challenged sexism within Jewish religious and community life and pressed for more egalitarian practices across the denominations. By the early 1970s, Jewish women began to serve as rabbis in the Reform and Reconstruction movements; the first Conservative woman rabbi was ordained in 1985.
In the 21st century, Jewish women reflect a more culturally, religiously, and racially diverse population than before. Jewish women and men are increasingly likely to marry or partner with non-Jews, but to raise their children Jewishly. They are more than twice as likely as prior generations to identify with a race or ethnicity other than white. Asian American, Syrian American, and African American women rabbis have been among the most influential voices in their communities. The gay and lesbian synagogue movement, which began in the early 1970s, provided a locus for lesbians to explore their own religious identities. Jewish Women of Color, an expanding group, places itself at the intersection of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism as it pursues an intersectional vision of social justice.
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Housing Policy Across the United States
Kristin M. Szylvian
Federal housing policy has been primarily devoted to maintaining the economic stability and profitability of the private sector real estate, household finance, and home-building and supply industries since the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945). Until the 1970s, federal policy encouraged speculative residential development in suburban areas and extended segregation by race and class. The National Association of Home Builders, the National Association of Realtors, and other allied organizations strenuously opposed federal programs seeking to assist low- and middle-income households and the homeless by forcing recalcitrant suburbs to permit the construction of open-access, affordable dwellings and encouraging the rehabilitation of urban housing. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican from California, argued it was the government, not the private sector, that was responsible for the gross inequities in social and economic indicators between residents of city, inner ring, and outlying suburban communities. The civic, religious, consumer, labor, and other community-based organizations that tried to mitigate the adverse effects of the “Reagan Revolution” on the affordable housing market lacked a single coherent view or voice. Since that time, housing has become increasingly unaffordable in many metropolitan areas, and segregation by race, income, and ethnicity is on the rise once again. If the home mortgage crisis that began in 2007 is any indication, housing will continue to be a divisive political, economic, and social issue in the foreseeable future.
The national housing goal of a “decent home in a suitable living environment for every American family” not only has yet to be realized, but many law makers now favor eliminating or further restricting federal commitment to its realization.
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Ideas of Race in Early America
Sean P. Harvey
“Race,” as a concept denoting a fundamental division of humanity and usually encompassing cultural as well as physical traits, was crucial in early America. It provided the foundation for the colonization of Native land, the enslavement of American Indians and Africans, and a common identity among socially unequal and ethnically diverse Europeans. Longstanding ideas and prejudices merged with aims to control land and labor, a dynamic reinforced by ongoing observation and theorization of non-European peoples. Although before colonization, neither American Indians, nor Africans, nor Europeans considered themselves unified “races,” Europeans endowed racial distinctions with legal force and philosophical and scientific legitimacy, while Natives appropriated categories of “red” and “Indian,” and slaves and freed people embraced those of “African” and “colored,” to imagine more expansive identities and mobilize more successful resistance to Euro-American societies. The origin, scope, and significance of “racial” difference were questions of considerable transatlantic debate in the age of Enlightenment and they acquired particular political importance in the newly independent United States.
Since the beginning of European exploration in the 15th century, voyagers called attention to the peoples they encountered, but European, American Indian, and African “races” did not exist before colonization of the so-called New World. Categories of “Christian” and “heathen” were initially most prominent, though observations also encompassed appearance, gender roles, strength, material culture, subsistence, and language. As economic interests deepened and colonies grew more powerful, classifications distinguished Europeans from “Negroes” or “Indians,” but at no point in the history of early America was there a consensus that “race” denoted bodily traits only. Rather, it was a heterogeneous compound of physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics passed on from one generation to another. While Europeans assigned blackness and African descent priority in codifying slavery, skin color was secondary to broad dismissals of the value of “savage” societies, beliefs, and behaviors in providing a legal foundation for dispossession.
“Race” originally denoted a lineage, such as a noble family or a domesticated breed, and concerns over purity of blood persisted as 18th-century Europeans applied the term—which dodged the controversial issue of whether different human groups constituted “varieties” or “species”—to describe a roughly continental distribution of peoples. Drawing upon the frameworks of scripture, natural and moral philosophy, and natural history, scholars endlessly debated whether different races shared a common ancestry, whether traits were fixed or susceptible to environmentally produced change, and whether languages or the body provided the best means to trace descent. Racial theorization boomed in the U.S. early republic, as some citizens found dispossession and slavery incompatible with natural-rights ideals, while others reconciled any potential contradictions through assurances that “race” was rooted in nature.
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Immigration to American Cities, 1800–1924
Hidetaka Hirota
Between 1820 and 1924, nearly thirty-six million immigrants entered the United States. Prior to the Civil War, the vast majority of immigrants were northern and western Europeans, though the West Coast received Chinese immigration from the late 1840s onward. In mid-century, the United States received an unprecedented influx of Irish and German immigrants, who included a large number of Catholics and the poor. At the turn of the 20th century, the major senders of immigrants shifted to southern and eastern Europe, and Asians and Mexicans made up a growing portion of newcomers. Throughout the long 19th century, urban settlement remained a popular option for immigrants, and they contributed to the social, cultural, political, economic, and physical growth of the cities they resided in. Foreign-born workers also provided much-needed labor for America’s industrial development. At the same time, intense nativism emerged in cities in opposition to the presence of foreigners, who appeared to be unfit for American society, threats to Americans’ jobs, or sources of urban problems such as poverty. Anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the introduction of state and federal laws for preventing the immigration of undesirable foreigners, such as the poor, southern and eastern Europeans, and Asians. Cities constituted an integral part of the 19th-century American immigration experience.
