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The early national period witnessed an explosion in newspaper journalism in terms of both the quantity of publications produced and their geographic reach. This essay examines these issues through the case of an editor, Joseph Dennie, who worked in New Hampshire in the late 1790s. Dennie is an early (although not an original) example of the dedicated, white-collar editor, and his Weekly Museum and Lay Preacher articles achieved widespread notice. Dennie did not, during his New Hampshire career at least, become a household name, by virtue of publishing exclusively under pseudonyms. The essay looks at the opportunities that this presented and what it allowed him to get away with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States of America, as in other regions of the New World, the colonists imagined that the native peoples were “dying out.” Recent critical studies of this popular and robust narrative neglect to account for its demise. This paper describes the emergence, by the 1870s, of a critique of the “Dying Indian” story that rested on a growing store of population knowledge generated by the United States government. This paper narrates the increasing demographic capacity of colonial authority, starting with Jedediah Morse in the 1820s and noting the use of population data by the Cherokee and by Lewis Cass in the debate about Indian removal in the 1830s. This paper then links the work of Henry Schoolcraft in the 1840s and 1850s to the rise of a reservation system and President Grant's “Peace Policy” in the 1860s, arguing that “statistics” enabled humanitarian policy intellectuals to argue “unsentimentally” for a “civilizing” program. The surveillance capacity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) enabled the critique of the “Dying Indian” thesis made by Francis Walker, Selden Clark, and Garrick Mallery in the 1870s which, in turn, contributed to the political success of Senator Dawes's “allotment” policy in the 1880s. This paper concludes by placing the work of these early critics of the “Dying Indian” story in the context of two histories: of U.S. colonial sovereignty and of the discipline of historical demography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the Mississippi Choctaws engaged state citizenship in the years immediately following removal. I challenge the standard narrative of Choctaws’ relationships with the Mississippi legal system as one in which they were primarily victimized by unscrupulous lawyers and state officials. I argue instead that Choctaws used their new status as citizens to fight back against dispossession. I also examine how ideals of masculinity and class conflicts shaped interpretations of rights and obligations between Indians and whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the death of Joseph Smith, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appropriated elements from their surrounding democratic culture, especially tensions of hierarchy and exclusion, in an attempt to consolidate the fledging Mormon movement through a vibrant patriarchal structure. In doing so, they echoed a powerful strain in antebellum society that feared the cultural changes taking place and worried that unfettered democracy led to societal instability and religious anarchy. This paper examines how early Mormon patriarchy directly engaged several of the central tensions in American antebellum culture: the democratization of religion, the empowerment of common people, the extension of racial rights, and the progression of female power. Combined, these debates emphasize how the notion of the “Kingdom of God” paradoxically dominated the Mormon image in the age of “the voice of the people,” and represent a part of a multivocal conversation about the meaning and extent of American democracy in the postrevolutionary era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examining the controversy surrounding the Union army's 1865 seizure of St James Episcopal Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, this article explores the role of churches as symbols of loyalty during the final days of the American Civil War. The Wilmington episode shows that Union commanders who targeted southern churches exposed themselves to complaints of violating shared principles of church–state separation. Commanders saw expressions of loyalty from the pulpit as essential to establishing Union authority, but the southern clergy vehemently opposed interference in church affairs. Perceiving an opportunity to reaffirm their claims to moral leadership, southern religious leaders tacitly defended the honor of the southern cause by associating it with the cause of religious liberty. In so doing, they laid the experiential and rhetorical groundwork for the discourse of southern “redemption” that played such an important role in the defeat of Reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Histories of visual culture continue to argue that slaveholders envisioned themselves as planter-cavaliers, set apart from modern values and identities. In light of recent scholarship demonstrating the connection between slavery and modern capitalism, this essay seeks to revise this misconception by analysing images of notorious Senator John C. Calhoun. Far from an outmoded "cavalier," Calhoun presented the slaveholding self as part of the modernizing world. He did this by casting aside traditional imagery, embracing the emerging technology of photography, and engaging with the racialized pseudo-science of physiognomy. Through these efforts, Calhoun created a highly visual identity that portrayed the Southern planter (and the slave system they upheld) as culturally, intellectually, and scientifically relevant to the nineteenth century. Moreover, his image gestures towards (and contributed to) the development of the rigid, racialized categories of identity which we recognize today. This essay suggests that these images need to be deconstructed and contextualized to understand the impact of slavery on the ideology of modernity as it continues to exist today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the interest in the United States for the construction of a trans-oceanic canal in Central America. In 1820, William Davis Robinson published a book, Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution, which contained an appendix discussing the practicability of building a trans-oceanic canal including detailed analysis of the potential routes for its construction. The appendix sparked a lively debate among American political and economic leaders. This debate would not abate until the enormity of the financial and engineering realities of the project coupled with the continuing political instability of Mexico, Greater Colombia, and the Republic of Central America dampened investor enthusiasm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish's 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis's seminal 1971 article, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with "husbands" imposed upon them after emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2016 the Congressional Research Service published its latest version of “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad.” One of the “instances” occurred in 1854, and the entry reads in its entirety: “Naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.”1The following article posits that Greytown was not destroyed to avenge an insult to an American diplomat. Rather, two groups of prominent American businessmen used this and related events and their antecedents as pretexts to enlist the federal government in destroying Greytown. One group, representing a U.S.-owned isthmian steamboat company, sought to seize the port of Greytown as a private fiefdom; the other wanted it as the prospective capital of a new colony based on a huge, dubious land grant they owned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 1829 with the discovery of gold and ending in 1835 with the ratification of the Treaty of New Echota, three political entities waged a struggle for political sovereignty over the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees, of course, had their national self-determination at stake. They referenced treaties with the U.S. government that reaffirmed their status as an independent nation, but also looked to the federal government and its commitments in those same treaties to help the Cherokees uphold their territorial integrity. In this formulation, which the Supreme Court verified, the federal government reigned supreme. The ambiguous nature of American federalism also made it possible for the state of Georgia to claim sovereignty. Beginning in 1830, the state used violence against Cherokees under the guise of bringing social order to a lawless region. The vehicle for creating state authority, the Georgia Guard, used violence as a way of making life untenable for those the state saw as less than desirable. Criminals, especially members of the Pony Club, and Cherokees, were deliberately targeted by the Guard. Federal authorities eventually relented and relied on state figures to help pave the way for the implementation of Removal. By doing so, they effectively ceded political sovereignty to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Choctaw Nation aligned with the Confederacy while remaining a united, autonomous nation during the American Civil War. Rather than being hapless or coerced, Choctaw leaders demonstrated clear comprehension, agency, and pragmatism in their wartime efforts. In particular, Choctaw political leaders like Robert M. Jones reveal the Choctaws’ larger efforts to protect their national sovereignty and defend their homelands. Moreover, the actions of Jones and other Choctaws during the war highlight the critical role that sovereign tribal nations played in the American Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working from previously unknown sources in Danish archives, this article establishes for the first time the important role that the island of St Croix played in the Lincoln administration's considerations on colonizing African Americans abroad. This article argues that U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, commonly viewed as an anti-colonizationist, was at least a mild proponent of colonization in its earliest stages. The article demonstrates further that in the summer of 1862, the St Croix colonization project was an important stepping stone in the Lincoln administration's legal justification for emancipation, and that it was recognized as such by high-ranking Confederates. The negotiations failed for reasons that had little to do with Lincoln or his opinion on the matter. Rather, the plan fell through because the Danes slowly turned against it for economic and political reasons. The substantial conclusion of this article is that, contrary to earlier perceptions in the historiography, African American colonization during the Civil War was not led and directed entirely from Washington. Rather, in this case, the Danish minister proposed a colonization plan and then worked with the U.S. Government to attempt to see it through. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The image of the “scourged back” remains one of the most visually arresting depictions of slavery. Based on a photograph taken in Baton Rouge in April 1863 and later published inHarper's Weekly, it has become one of the most widely reprinted and recognizable images of American slavery. However, despite the image's ubiquity, we know relatively little about the image and the man featured in it. Most historians who have examined the image accept the narrative in the accompanyingHarper'sarticle as an accurate account of the subject's life and the image's origins. This article argues, however, that there is good evidence to suggest that the accompanying article was largely fabricated and much of what we think we know about “Gordon” may be inaccurate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to analyze how a relatively small Irish-American bourgeoisie legitimated its authority over the broader Irish ethnic community during the antebellum era. As part of the massive wave of immigrants that left Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, the Irish Catholic middle class was saddled with a dually marginal status. On the one hand, its members maintained only tenuous authority over the hundreds of thousands of peasants and laborers that made up the bulk of the Irish-American community. On the other hand, they were deeply distrusted by important elements of native American society that associated them with the supposed superstition, laziness, and violence of their lower-class fellow countrymen. The bourgeoisie responded by using the celebrity status of Irish political exiles to achieve the twin project of simultaneously obscuring intra-ethnic class tensions while proving its suitability for American domestic politics. Famous personalities and the editors who lauded them employed celebrity to consolidate their leadership status in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Norwegian immigrants expressed their sense of belonging during the antebellum period. By focusing on the concept of “belonging” rather than “adjustment,” the article attempts an interpretation sensitive to how antebellum immigrants themselves perceived the process of adaptation to American society. The Civil War is usually referred to as a sort of watershed in Norwegians' adjustment to American society, and consequently scholars have downplayed the extent to which antebellum Norwegian immigrants expressed belonging in the United States prior to the Civil War. Identifying three main categories of expressions of belonging available to antebellum Norwegian immigrants – namely land ownership, place attachment, and settler ideology – the article concludes that even if these immigrants did not readily identify themselves as Americans, they became firmly attached to their new home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the United States county government has remained powerful since before the Revolution, via legal or extralegal arrangements. Even during the nineteenth-century debate over nationalism versus states' rights, they were the governmental power that had the most direct impact on American lives, especially in the South. Challenges to constitutional guarantees of equal protection often come about on the county level. Neoliberal economics and suburbanization have renewed the scope of county government in some places, often in ways that echo the nineteenth century. Although most historians have shown little interest in them, counties could provide them with a framing device for dissecting little-studied sectors of American society and an escape from the problems inherent to American exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1877, Frank Wilson, an African American man, was executed for murdering a white tramp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This article examines the trial, punishment, and press reporting of the case in the evolving context of race and criminal justice in post-Civil War Pennsylvania. It presents three main findings. First, it documents evidence of racial discrimination and wildly disproportionate rates of African American arrest and imprisonment in Harrisburg and surrounding counties comparable to earlier research focused on the largest northern cities. Second, it shows that views on law enforcement were diverse within both white and black communities and shaped by the exigencies of local and national party politics. Third, it makes the case that African American experiences of law enforcement in northern states are better understood as part of a national criminal justice culture than in distinctively regional terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January 1838, Emerson and Lincoln each gave a lecture on the public violence that reached a crisis with the killing of Elijah Lovejoy. For both men, mobbing represented instabilities in the process of democratization that had structural implications for public discourse. In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln argues that if mobbing became conventionalized it could legitimize an extralegal politics of force and coercion. To counterbalance the pressure he saw mobbing place on civil society, Lincoln asserts the importance of developing a culture of reverence for standards of civility in the public sphere. For Emerson, in his lecture “Heroism,” mobbing marked irrational but intentional efforts to suppress dissenting speech and thought. Especially through attacks on political reformers and other individualists, public violence distorted civil discourse and enforced both conformity and silence. For both Lincoln and Emerson, the experience of mob action challenging civil society in the 1830s marked the proximity of civil to uncivil discourse and influenced their responses to proslavery rhetoric in the 1850s. Though they reacted differently, each articulates the risks of allowing the threatened violence of proslavery rhetoric to co-opt the political structure so that civil discourse acted as a façade legitimizing mob rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nineteenth-century abolitionists viewed their transatlantic activism as a simple strategy in which the circulation of facts about slavery in Great Britain could place effective pressure on slaveholders in the United States. But the 1844 case of John L. Brown, a South Carolina man sentenced to death for helping a runaway slave to escape, reveals that transatlantic abolitionist campaigns could still be hampered by lag times in communication, by the difficulty of confirming reports from the South, and, most of all, by damaging rumors about interracial sex spread by anti-abolitionist opponents. This article uses the Brown case, which prompted important changes in the strategies of proslavery southerners, to suggest the importance of studying not only those transatlantic abolitionist campaigns that succeeded but also those that produced outcomes other than those intended by abolitionists themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable recent scholarship has focused on the activism of the early American state, undermining the old idea that it was “a midget institution in a giant land” (Murrin). This essay uses the case of disaster relief to evaluate this new literature, and suggests that scholars may now be in danger of over-compensating for the undoubted limitations of the old scholarship. While the federal government did on occasion provide relief to victims of catastrophe before the Civil War, much more commonly it did nothing. This reflected its fundamental lack of capacity in an age of limited bureaucracy, short congressional sessions, and slow communications. It also owed much to the fatalism with which Americans commonly viewed disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theodore Roosevelt's trust policy has been viewed as “progressive” by his contemporaries, dictated by big business by the New Left, and as a precursor to autonomous institutional development most recently. This thesis will instead analyze Roosevelt's actions through a pragmatic lens. Roosevelt's first legislative action in relation to the trusts was to create the Bureau of Corporations. Whilst seemingly ushering in transparency in business affairs through its reporting function, Roosevelt secured executive jurisdiction over publicly circulating its findings, paving the way for private, state-corporate cooperation. Obtaining sensitive information through the promise of discretion, Roosevelt held an implicit leverage over companies, allowing him to threaten to publicize illegalities if they refused to abandon them. The Bureau became a forum for closed-door agreements which achieved tangible amelioration of practice, whilst minimizing the damage entailed by a public airing of corporate America's dirty laundry. I will analyze several Bureau investigations and illustrate the learning curve by which Roosevelt and big business came to an agreement over the parameters of cooperation. Mired by mixed signals from both sides during its early investigations, the emergence of dialectical negotiations over corporate practice and the extent of government-induced public scrutiny came to embody a fledgling cooperative process. These investigations illustrate the pragmatic means by which Roosevelt pursued a conservative, yet effective, reigning in of big business power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article represents an exploration of class identity among southerners during the decade preceding the Civil War. Myriad works on class identity in the antebellum era are extant, but few have used sources by Americans living abroad. William Stiles's History of Austria shows consistent amount of sympathy for European nobles and aristocrats during the 1848 Revolution in the Austrian Empire. The book, centered on a historical event that stemmed from class inequality and nationalist thought, provides an interesting lens to address the issue of class culture and identity in the United States. Using Stiles's work, newspapers, and appropriate primary and secondary monographs, the article argues that aristocratic identity in the South remained more influential than recent historians allowed well into the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the late 1840s there was a concerted effort by a group of editors and opinion-formers to encourage the development of a more respectable and “moral” theater. The American Dramatic Fund Association, based in New York City but consciously part of a transatlantic movement, was founded in 1848 as the organizational embodiment of this cause and the Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows was one of its foremost spokesmen. This article explores why theater reform was seen as important, who supported it, and who opposed it. It suggests that we should understand theatrical reform, in the form it took in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as a quintessential example of a transatlantic liberal reform aimed at combating the destabilizing and morally degenerate consequences of urbanization and industrialization. The article also locates theatrical reform within antebellum party formations, arguing that it exposed a basic fracture within the Whig-Republican coalition between evangelical reformers and cosmopolitan liberal reformers over the nature of cultural authority in an urbanizing, fragmented society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Travel lectures were a popular part of the American self-culture movement of the mid-nineteenth. Audiences enjoyed travel lectures because they possessed analogical potential rooted in narratives of self-discipline and mastery to aid in the adaption to the socio-economic changes of the market and consumer society. Audiences viewed the lecturer Bayard Taylor as a model of liberal/republican masculinity. His career also reveals the role that metaphors of mobility served in the transformation from the ethos of character to the later outer-directed, “personality” driven, pursuit of personal self-realization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article positions emergent interest in the southern mountains at the end of the nineteenth century within the broader context of U.S. imperialism and immigration. In these years, observers proclaimed that the Appalachian South was a reserve of “pure American stock.” Accordingly, Appalachian people were said to have provided a bulwark to the effects of immigration within the nation, but equally as crucial, the region was protected from the supposedly dangerous racial contamination that occurred from exposure to, and contact with, colonized peoples abroad. However, other observers recorded dangerous levels of moral and behavioral decline in the mountain South. This article exposes the tension of an allegedly superior population that is perceived to have declined into abject poverty and moral depravity. Doing so provides insight as to why Appalachia looms as a contradictory place of much fascination in the U.S. cultural imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Race is routinely defined as “socially constructed,” from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay synthesizes conclusions about the agency of enslaved people drawn from three books by William Dusinberre: Them Dark Days; Slavemaster President; and Strategies for Survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the long-neglected early period (1790-1906) of American naturalization. The article maintains that lax naturalization procedures dominated this period because of a conscious social effort to facilitate territorial expansion and because an unconscious schema of automatic naturalization of rural immigrants guaranteed that newcomers would invariably become loyal and productive citizens. This naturalization regime was questioned in the mid-nineteenth century and ultimately abandoned in the early twentieth century amidst the closing of the American frontier and a massive influx of labor migrants who were not only urban and industrial, but also showed more interest in work than in citizenship. As a result, the naturalization process became centralized and the federal government adopted a new naturalization schema that emphasized civic education and an expectation that 'enlightened' immigrants would assimilate into American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the construction of the Northern Rockies as a hunter's paradise in the latter years of the nineteenth century. It explores the crafting of the region as a game utopia by a cadre of hunter-tourists, whose writings of what I term “fictionalized reality” celebrated the Rockies as an American Serengeti for sports and a realm of pioneer exoticism. Significantly, it argues that hunting became far more than an exercise in imperial tourism, instead representing a regenerative mechanism through which the sportsman emerged from the game trail, firstly as an exemplar of American masculinity, and secondly, as a fully-fledged westerner. Stories of nature red in tooth and the “hunter-hero” thus effectively obscured the political and economic realities of frontier assimilation to present the West as one vast playground for entertainment, adventuring and honorable violence. The article discusses the engagement between hunter and hunted, taking in themes of western tourism, codes of manhood, nature appreciation, gun-play, and the gaze, before concluding with an analysis of how the “storied past” of hunting literature, photography, and taxidermy broadcast a strident identity for the Northern Rockies that persists to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the emergence of antebellum American abolitionism tends to trace this movement's intellectual genealogy to one predominant ancestor. But close analysis of the impact of New England's Federalists on its abolitionists highlights the complexities that too often elude this scholarship. The evidence for this influence is more often suggestive than conclusive. New England Federalists' style and many of their concerns echoed in abolitionism. But this conclusion requires a much shorter inferential leap than to declare that Federalism made abolitionism. This article serves as a case study not only of the complex roots of abolitionism, but also of the many obstacles scholars typically face when attempting to solve the problem of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the impact of slavery on the lives of the formerly enslaved and their descendants in the black communities of the upper Midwest and explores contested memories of slavery and emancipation in three sites of cultural production: Emancipation Day celebrations, obituaries, and postbellum slave narratives. The essay finds that the formerly-enslaved and their descendants grappled with a national legacy of slavery in memory and commemoration, in public memorials to private suffering, and by recalling, revisiting, and inscribed on community remembrance and national history the traumas of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proslavery propagandists developed a standard line on the domestic slave trade: the trade was of only marginal importance to the system of slavery, and the trader was an outcast. In recent decades, historians have recognised a strong propaganda element in this position but - even in recent specialist studies of the trade - the assumption has been that notions of paternalism must have caused owners to feel a measure of unease in dealing with the trader. The present study brings new evidence to dispute this assumption and suggests that traders found no difficulty in being accepted as respected citizens of the Old South. The essay points to two key elements in the proslavery position on the trade - first, the notion of the trader as outcast, and second the concept that black people were not capable of deep and lasting emotional suffering. The 'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda and was not really believed: the concept of superficial black emotions operated at a deeper level and was internalised by owners. Notions about shallow black emotions allowed slaveholders to break up families and to deal comfortably with the trader while still maintaining a self-image as benevolent paternalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]