What in contemporary parlance we would call African American feminisms has been a politics and activism communal in its orientation, addressing the rights and material conditions of women, men, and children since the first Dutch slaver brought captive Africans to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Although Black women would not have used the terms “feminist” or “feminism,” which did not enter into use until what is recognized now as the first wave of feminism, scholars have been using those terms for the past two decades to refer to Black women’s activism in the United States stretching at least as far back as the 1830s with the oratory and publications of Maria Stewart and the work of African American women in abolition and church reform. Alongside and in many ways enabled by crucial forms of resistance to slavery, Black women developed forms of feminist activism and a political culture that advanced claims for freedom and rights in a number of arenas. Yet our historical knowledge of 19th-century Black feminist activism has been limited by historiographical tendencies. Histories of American feminism have tended to marginalize Black feminisms by positioning these activists as contributing to a white-dominant narrative, focused on woman’s rights and suffrage. The literature on African American feminism has tended to hail the Black women’s club movement of the late 19th century as the emergence of that politics. Though many people may recognize only a handful of 19th-century African American feminists by name and reputation, early Black feminism was multiply located and extensive in its work. African American women continued the voluntary work that benevolent and mutual aid societies had begun in the late 18th century and established literary societies during the early 19th century; they entered Black nationalist debates over emigration and advocated for the self-sufficiency and education of their communities, including women; and they fought to end slavery and the repressive racialized violence that accompanied it in free states and continued through the nadir. Throughout the century, African American feminists negotiated competing and often conflicting demands within interracial reform movements like abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance, and worked to open the pulpit, platform, press, and politics to Black women’s voices.
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African American Women and Feminism in the 19th Century
Teresa Zackodnik
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Agriculture and the Environment
Steven Stoll
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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Arab American Theater
Hala Baki
Arab American theater broadly includes the dramatic works and performances of self-identified Arab Americans, Americans of Arab heritage, and immigrants to the United States from the Arabic-speaking world. Beginning in the late 19th century with the first wave of modern Arab migration to the United States, the tradition evolved from early intellectual dramas written by Mahjar playwrights to 21st century plays that span the gamut of form and genre. Among the most prominent contemporary playwrights of this tradition are Yussef El Guindi, Betty Shamieh, Heather Raffo, and Mona Mansour. Arab American performance also includes popular entertainment such as stand-up comedy and digital media. Arab American theater has been supported by a collection of amateur and professional companies over the years, as well as festival and digital media producers. Their contributions have culminated in a concerted cultural movement in the 21st century that seeks to disrupt misrepresentations of Arabs in American culture with authentic narratives from within the community. The contemporary Arab American theater and performance canon covers topics ranging from immigrant experiences to cross-cultural conflict, political resistance to identity politics, and popular stereotypes to anti-Arab bias in the government and media. The academic study of this tradition has increased in early 21st century and includes works by scholars in the United States and abroad.
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Argentina-US Relations
Jennifer Hoyt
Relations between the United States and Argentina can be best described as a cautious embrace punctuated by moments of intense frustration. Although never the center of U.S.–Latin American relations, Argentina has attempted to create a position of influence in the region. As a result, the United States has worked with Argentina and other nations of the Southern Cone—the region of South America that comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and southern Brazil—on matters of trade and economic development as well as hemispheric security and leadership. While Argentina has attempted to assert its position as one of Latin America’s most developed nations and therefore a regional leader, the equal partnership sought from the United States never materialized for the Southern Cone nation. Instead, competition for markets and U.S. interventionist and unilateral tendencies kept Argentina from attaining the influence and wealth it so desired. At the same time, the United States saw Argentina as an unreliable ally too sensitive to the pull of its volatile domestic politics. The two nations enjoyed moments of cooperation in World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s, when Argentine leaders could balance this particular external partnership with internal demands. Yet at these times Argentine leaders found themselves walking a fine line as detractors back home saw cooperation with the United States as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty and autonomy. There has always been potential for a productive partnership, but each side’s intransigence and unique concerns limited this relationship’s accomplishments and led to a historical imbalance of power.
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Asian American Activism
Vivian Truong
Activism is a defining element of Asian American history. Throughout most of their presence in the United States, Asian Americans have engaged in organized resistance even in the face of violent exclusion and repression. These long histories of activism challenge prevailing notions of the political silence of Asian Americans, which have persisted since the rise of the model minority narrative in the mid-20th century. Examining Asian American history through the lens of activism shows how Asian Americans were not simply acted upon, but were agents in forging their own histories. In the century after the first substantial waves of migration in the 1850s, Asian Americans protested labor conditions, fought for full citizenship rights, and led efforts to liberate their homelands from colonial rule. Activism has been a key part of determining who Asian Americans are—indeed, the term “Asian American” itself was coined in the 1960s as a radical political identity in a movement against racism and imperialism. In the decades since the Asian American movement, “Asian America” has become larger and more diverse. Contemporary Asian American activism reflects the expansiveness and heterogeneity of Asian American communities.
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Black Women’s Internationalism from the Age of Revolutions to World War I
Brandon R. Byrd
Black internationalism describes the political culture and intellectual practice forged in response to slavery, colonialism, and white imperialism. It is a historical and ongoing collective struggle against racial oppression rooted in global consciousness. While the expression of black internationalism has certainly changed across time and place, black liberation through collaboration has been and remains its ultimate goal.
Since the emergence of black internationalism as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and during the Age of Revolutions, black women such as the poet Phyllis Wheatley and evangelist Rebecca Protten have been at its forefront. Their writings and activism espoused an Afro-diasporic, global consciousness and promoted the cause of universal emancipation. During the 19th century, black women internationalists included abolitionists, missionaries, and clubwomen. They built on the work of their predecessors while laying the foundations for succeeding black women internationalists in the early 20th century. By World War I, a new generation of black women activists and intellectuals remained crucial parts of the International Council of Women, an organization founded by white suffragists from the United States, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a global organization formally led by Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. But they also formed an independent organization, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR).
Within and outside of the ICWDR, black women from Africa and the African Diaspora faced and challenged discrimination on the basis of their sex and race. Their activism and intellectual work set a powerful precedent for a subsequent wave of black internationalism shaped by self-avowed black feminists.
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Business Social Responsibility
Gavin Benke
“Corporate social responsibility” is a term that first began to circulate widely in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though it may seem to be a straightforward concept, the phrase can imply a range of activities, from minority hiring initiatives and environmentally sound operations, to funding local nonprofits and cultural institutions. The idea appeared to have developed amid increasing demands made of corporations by a number of different groups, such as the consumer movement. However, American business managers engaged in many of these practices well before that phrase was coined. As far back as the early 19th century, merchants and business owners envisioned a larger societal role. However, broader political, social, and economic developments, from the rise of Gilded Age corporations to the onset of the Cold War, significantly influenced understandings of business social responsibility. Likewise, different managers and corporations have had different motives for embracing social responsibility initiatives. Some embraced social responsibility rhetoric as a public relations tool. Others saw the concept as a way to prevent government regulation. Still others undertook social responsibility efforts because they fit well with their own socially progressive ethos. Though the terms and understandings of a business’s social responsibilities have shifted over time, the basic idea has been a perennial feature of commercial life in the United States.
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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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Carlos Montezuma and the Emergence of American Indian Activism
Maurice Crandall
Carlos Montezuma was one of the most influential Indians of his day and a prominent leader among the Red Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born to Yavapai parents in central Arizona, he was kidnapped by O’odham (Pima) raiders at a young age, and sold soon after into the Indian slave trade that for centuries had engulfed the US-Mexico borderlands. Educated primarily at public schools in Illinois, Montezuma eventually went on to be the first Native American graduate of the University of Illinois (1884) and one of the first Native American doctors (Chicago Medical College, 1889). Montezuma was a lifelong friend of Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and he firmly believed in the importance of Indian education. He insisted that educated Indians like himself must serve as examples of what Indians were capable of achieving if given the opportunities. He became deeply involved in the pan-Indian reform movements of the day and was one of the founding members of the Society of American Indians. Montezuma had a rocky relationship with the group, however, because many in the organization found his calls for the immediate abolition of the Indian Bureau and an end to the reservation system difficult to accept. From 1916 to 1922, he published his own journal, Wassaja, in which he relentlessly assailed the Indian Bureau, the reservations, and anyone who stood in the way of Indian “progress.” But Montezuma’s most important work was as an advocate for his own people, the Yavapais of Fort McDowell, Arizona, and other Arizona Indian groups. He spent the final decade of his life working to protect their water, land, and culture, and eventually returned to his Arizona homelands to die, in 1923. Although he was largely forgotten by historians and scholars in the decades after his death, Carlos Montezuma is now correctly remembered as one of the most important figures in Native American history during the Progressive Era.
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Chile-US Relations
Patrick William Kelly
The relationship between Chile and the United States pivoted on the intertwined questions of how much political and economic influence Americans would exert over Chile and the degree to which Chileans could chart their own path. Given Chile’s tradition of constitutional government and relative economic development, it established itself as a regional power player in Latin America. Unencumbered by direct US military interventions that marked the history of the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, Chile was a leader in movements to promote Pan-Americanism, inter-American solidarity, and anti-imperialism. But the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, brought an increase in bilateral tensions. The United States turned Chile into a “model democracy” for the Alliance for Progress, but frustration over its failures to enact meaningful social and economic reform polarized Chilean society, resulting in the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970. The most contentious period in US-Chilean relations was during the Nixon administration when it worked, alongside anti-Allende Chileans, to destabilize Allende’s government, which the Chilean military overthrew on September 11, 1973. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), while anti-Communist, clashed with the United States over Pinochet’s radicalization of the Cold War and the issue of Chilean human rights abuses. The Reagan administration—which came to power on a platform that reversed the Carter administration’s critique of Chile—reversed course and began to support the return of democracy to Chile, which took place in 1990. Since then, Pinochet’s legacy of neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy looms large, overshadowed perhaps only by his unexpected role in fomenting a global culture of human rights that has ended the era of impunity for Latin American dictators.
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Cold War in the American Working Class
Rosemary Feurer
The US working class and the institutional labor movement was shaped by anticommunism. Anticommunism preceded the founding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and this early history affected the later experience. It reinforced conservative positions on union issues even in the period before the Cold War, and forged the alliances that influenced the labor movement’s direction, including the campaign to organize the South, the methods and structures of unions, and US labor’s foreign policy positions. While the Communist Party of the USA (CP) was a hierarchical organization straitjacketed by an allegiance to the Soviet Union, the unions it fostered cultivated radical democratic methods, while anticommunism often justified opposition to militancy and obstructed progressive policies. In the hottest moments of the postwar development of domestic anticommunism, unions and their members were vilified and purged from the labor movement, forced to take loyalty oaths, and fired for their association with the CP. The Cold War in the working class removed critical perspectives on capitalism, reinforced a moderate and conservative labor officialdom, and led to conformity with the state on foreign policy issues.
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Credit Reporting and the History of Commercial Surveillance in America
Josh Lauer
The first credit reporting organizations emerged in the United States during the 19th century to address problems of risk and uncertainty in an expanding market economy. Early credit reporting agencies assisted merchant lenders by collecting and centralizing information about the business activities and reputations of unknown borrowers throughout the country. These agencies quickly evolved into commercial surveillance networks, amassing huge archives of personal information about American citizens and developing credit rating systems to rank them. Shortly after the Civil War, separate credit reporting organizations devoted to monitoring consumers, rather than businesspeople, also began to emerge to assist credit-granting retailers. By the early 20th century, hundreds of local credit bureaus dissected the personal affairs of American consumers, forming the genesis of a national consumer credit surveillance infrastructure.
The history of American credit reporting reveals fundamental links between the development of modern capitalism and contemporary surveillance society. These connections became increasingly apparent during the late 20th century as technological advances in computing and networked communication fueled the growth of new information industries, raising concerns about privacy and discrimination. These connections and concerns, however, are not new. They can be traced to 19th-century credit reporting organizations, which turned personal information into a commodity and converted individual biographies into impersonal financial profiles and risk metrics. As these disembodied identities and metrics became authoritative representations of one’s reputation and worth, they exerted real effects on one’s economic life chances and social legitimacy. While drawing attention to capitalism’s historical twin, surveillance, the history of credit reporting illuminates the origins of surveillance-based business models that became ascendant during the 21st century.
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Dallas
Patricia Evridge Hill
From its origins in the 1840s, Dallas developed quickly into a prosperous market town. After acquiring two railroads in the 1870s, the city became the commercial and financial center of North Central Texas. Early urban development featured competition and cooperation between the city’s business leadership, women’s groups, and coalitions formed by Populists, socialists, and organized labor. Notably, the city’s African Americans were marginalized economically and excluded from civic affairs. By the end of the 1930s, city building became more exclusive even for the white population. A new generation of business leaders threatened by disputes over Progressive Era social reforms and city planning, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and attempts to organize industrial workers used its control of local media, at-large elections, and repression to dominate civic affairs until the 1970s.
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Death and Dying in the Working Class
Michael K. Rosenow
In the broader field of thanatology, scholars investigate rituals of dying, attitudes toward death, evolving trajectories of life expectancy, and more. Applying a lens of social class means studying similar themes but focusing on the men, women, and children who worked for wages in the United States. Working people were more likely to die from workplace accidents, occupational diseases, or episodes of work-related violence. In most periods of American history, it was more dangerous to be a wage worker than it was to be a soldier. Battlegrounds were not just the shop floor but also the terrain of labor relations. American labor history has been filled with violent encounters between workers asserting their views of economic justice and employers defending their private property rights. These clashes frequently turned deadly. Labor unions and working-class communities extended an ethos of mutualism and solidarity from the union halls and picket lines to memorial services and gravesites. They lauded martyrs to movements for human dignity and erected monuments to honor the fallen. Aspects of ethnicity, race, and gender added layers of meaning that intersected with and refracted through individuals’ economic positions. Workers’ encounters with death and the way they made sense of loss and sacrifice in some ways overlapped with Americans from other social classes in terms of religious custom, ritual practice, and material consumption. Their experiences were not entirely unique but diverged in significant ways.
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Ellis Island Immigration Station
Vincent J. Cannato
The Ellis Island Immigration Station, located in New York Harbor, opened in 1892 and closed in 1954. During peak years from the 1890s until the 1920s, the station processed an estimated twelve million immigrants. Roughly 75 percent of all immigrants arriving in America during this period passed through Ellis Island. The station was run by the federal Immigration Service and represented a new era of federal control over immigration. Officials at Ellis Island were tasked with regulating the flow of immigration by enforcing a growing body of federal laws that barred various categories of “undesirable” immigrants. As the number of immigrants coming to America increased, so did the size of the inspection facility. In 1907, Ellis Island processed more than one million immigrants. The quota laws of the 1920s slowed immigration considerably and the rise of the visa system meant that Ellis Island no longer served as the primary immigrant inspection facility. For the next three decades, Ellis Island mostly served as a detention center for those ordered deported from the country.
After Ellis Island closed in 1954, the facility fell into disrepair. During a period of low immigration and a national emphasis on assimilation, the immigrant inspection station was forgotten by most Americans. With a revival of interest in ethnicity in the 1970s, Ellis Island attracted more attention, especially from the descendants of immigrants who entered the country through its doors. In the 1980s, large-scale fundraising for the restoration of the neighboring Statue of Liberty led to a similar effort to restore part of Ellis Island. In 1990, the Main Building was reopened to the public as an immigration museum under the National Park Service. Ellis Island has evolved into an iconic national monument with deep meaning for the descendants of the immigrants who arrived there, as well as a contested symbol to other Americans grappling with the realities of contemporary immigration.
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Financial Crises in American History
Christoph Nitschke and Mark Rose
U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.
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Food in 19th-Century American Cities
Cindy R. Lobel
Over the course of the 19th century, American cities developed from small seaports and trading posts to large metropolises. Not surprisingly, foodways and other areas of daily life changed accordingly. In 1800, the dietary habits of urban Americans were similar to those of the colonial period. Food provisioning was very local. Farmers, hunters, fishermen, and dairymen from a few miles away brought food by rowboats and ferryboats and by horse carts to centralized public markets within established cities. Dietary options were seasonal as well as regional. Few public dining options existed outside of taverns, which offered lodging as well as food. Most Americans, even in urban areas, ate their meals at home, which in many cases were attached to their workshops, countinghouses, and offices.
These patterns changed significantly over the course of the19th century, thanks largely to demographic changes and technological developments. By the turn of the 20th century, urban Americans relied on a food-supply system that was highly centralized and in the throes of industrialization. Cities developed complex restaurant sectors, and majority immigrant populations dramatically shaped and reshaped cosmopolitan food cultures. Furthermore, with growing populations, lax regulation, and corrupt political practices in many cities, issues arose periodically concerning the safety of the food supply. In sum, the roots of today’s urban food systems were laid down over the course of the 19th century.
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Free Civil Legal Assistance in the United States, 1863–1980
Felice Batlan
Legal aid organizations were first created by a variety of private groups during the Civil War to provide legal advice in civil cases to the poor. The growing need for legal aid was deeply connected to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. A variety of groups created legal aid organizations in response to labor unrest, the increasing number of women in the workforce, the founding of women’s clubs, and the slow and incomplete professionalization of the legal bar. In fact, before women could practice law, or were accepted into the legal profession, a variety of middle-class women’s groups using lay lawyers provided legal aid to poor women. Yet, this rich story of women’s work was later suppressed by leaders of the bar attempting to claim credit for legal aid, assert a monopoly over the practice of law, and professionalize legal assistance. Across time, the largest number of claims brought to legal aid providers involved workers trying to collect wages, domestic relations cases, and landlord tenant issues.
Until the 1960s, legal aid organizations were largely financed through private donations and philanthropic organizations. After the 1960s, the federal government provided funding to support legal aid, creating significant controversy among lawyers, legal aid providers, and activists as to what types of cases legal aid organizations could take, what services could be provided, and who was eligible. Unlike in many other countries or in criminal cases, in the United States there is no constitutional right to have free counsel in civil cases. This leaves many poor and working-class people without legal advice or access to justice.
Organizations providing free civil legal services to the poor are ubiquitous across the United States. They are so much part of the modern legal landscape that it is surprising that little historical scholarship exists on such organizations. Yet the history of organized legal aid, which began during the Civil War, is a rich story that brings into view a unique range of historical actors including women’s organizations, lawyers, social workers, community organizations, the state and federal government, and the millions of poor clients who over the last century and a half have sought legal assistance. This history of the development of legal aid is also very much a story about gender, race, professionalization, the development of the welfare state, and ultimately its slow dismantlement. In other words, the history of legal aid provides a window into the larger history of the United States while producing its own series of historical tensions, ironies, and contradictions.
Although this narrative demonstrates change over time and various ruptures with the past, there are also important continuities in the history of free legal aid. Deceptively simple questions have plagued legal aid for almost a century and have also driven much of the historical scholarship on legal aid. These include: who should provide legal aid services, who should receive free legal aid, what types of cases should legal aid organizations handle, who should fund legal aid, and who benefits from legal aid.
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Gambling in the Northern City: 1800 to 2000
Matthew Vaz
While American gambling has a historical association with the lawlessness of the frontier and with the wasteful leisure practices of Southern planters, it was in large cities where American gambling first flourished as a form of mass leisure, and as a commercial enterprise of significant scale. In the urban areas of the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, and the upper Mid-West, for the better part of two centuries the gambling economy was deeply intertwined with municipal politics and governance, the practices of betting were a prominent feature of social life, and controversies over the presence of gambling both legal and illegal, were at the center of public debate. In New York and Chicago in particular, but also in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, gambling channeled money to municipal police forces and sustained machine politics. In the eyes of reformers, gambling corrupted governance and corroded social and economic interactions. Big city gambling has changed over time, often in a manner reflecting important historical processes and transformations in economics, politics, and demographics. Yet irrespective of such change, from the onset of Northern urbanization during the 19th century, through much of the 20th century, gambling held steady as a central feature of city life and politics. From the poolrooms where recently arrived Irish New Yorkers bet on horseracing after the Civil War, to the corner stores where black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers bet on the numbers game in the 1960s, the gambling activity that covered the urban landscape produced argument and controversy, particularly with respect to drawing the line between crime and leisure, and over the question of where and to what ends the money of the gambling public should be directed.
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Gender in US Foreign Relations
Heather Stur
Throughout US history, Americans have used ideas about gender to understand power, international relations, military behavior, and the conduct of war. Since Joan Wallach Scott called on scholars in 1986 to consider gender a “useful category of analysis,” historians have looked beyond traditional diplomatic and military sources and approaches to examine cultural sources, the media, and other evidence to try to understand the ideas that Americans have relied on to make sense of US involvement in the world. From casting weak nations as female to assuming that all soldiers are heterosexual males, Americans have deployed mainstream assumptions about men’s and women’s proper behavior to justify US diplomatic and military interventions in the world. State Department pamphlets describing newly independent countries in the 1950s and 1960s featured gendered imagery like the picture of a young Vietnamese woman on a bicycle that was meant to symbolize South Vietnam, a young nation in need of American guidance. Language in news reports and government cables, as well as film representations of international affairs and war, expressed gendered dichotomies such as protector and protected, home front and battlefront, strong and weak leadership, and stable and rogue states. These and other episodes illustrate how thoroughly gender shaped important dimensions about the character and the making of US foreign policy and historians’ examinations of diplomatic and military history.