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The contributors to the Forum "What's in a Name?" draw our attention to grammars of power. Words labeling race, ethnicity, gender, and ability assume distinct valences in the guise of pronouns, adjectives, and nouns, plurals and singulars, active and passive constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The words we use matter, yet they undergo constant change in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. There is power in naming, or misnaming, and in who gets to decide. Ideally, this Critical Engagements forum will contribute to our collective, conscious, and rigorous interrogation of the terms we use and why we use them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning after the American Revolution, bourgeouis white northern Americans began to tell Indian origin stories about their mineral springs and spa towns. Appearing in guidebooks, periodicals, fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and scientific discourse, these origin stories had some identifiable roots in Native American practices but were largely an invention of elite white culture. They served as a neat intellectual resolution to some of the central problems of national legitimacy and national identity formation that faced the most privileged Americans. They imagined alternative non-British origin stories for shared Anglo-American cultural practices, which enabled elite white northerners to construct an alternative elite American national identity. They also established the legitimacy of white claims to an American landscape that was still in the process of being expropriated from Indians, and served to explain and deny the continued presence of Indians in white leisure spaces. The cultural script of Indian origins for Anglo-American summer leisure practices at mineral springs resolved a complex and interconnected set of cultural ambivalences through the simple, emblematic figure of an Indian at a spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the American Bible has explored its production, interpretation, rhetorical usage, and authority. Less studied are the images of the illustrated Bibles that proliferated in the early nineteenth century. One of the most innovative and successful of these, Harper & Brothers' artistic and highly ornamented Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible , serves as a locus point for understanding the significance of early nineteenth century Bibles' illustrations. The Illuminated Bible 's emphasis on beauty, mercy, compassion, emotion, and sympathy reflected a shift toward a maternal Protestantism, while the sheer number of images and their embedding within the text serves as commentary on the text itself. This is a gendered commentary, interpreting the Bible through the lens of a feminine sentimental ideal, and serving as the basis of the Illuminated Bible 's reliability, trustworthiness, and authority. Stylistically, the artists of the Illuminated Bible , led by John Gadsby Chapman, employed a mishmash of baroque, neoclassical, rococo, and romantic elements to communicate a refined feminine sentimentality. The Illuminated Bible 's gendered imagery not only marketed the text to women consumers seeking to sacralize their parlors, but also interpreted the text in a sentimentalized fashion, communicating a refined, middle-class theology. Such "Christian refinement" was a juxtaposition of contrasting styles—classical and modern, Christian and pagan—reflecting the contradictory nature of Victorianism itself. The images of the Illuminated Bible enshrined these contradictions. Women were pious, submissive, maternal guardians of a sentimentalized domestic world, but they were also active, public spiritual agents, chosen by their Creator for a starring role in his narrative. The images of Harper's Bible reflect the tensions inherent in America's Protestant communities as women were celebrated for their piety even as they threatened the paternal order by using their religious identities to carve out public roles in biblical education, writing, and leadership of moral-reform associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the antebellum history of the Franco-American Girard family, especially merchant husband Stephen and his wife Mary of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by focusing on family correspondence about the onset of Mary's madness. Topics include Stephen's brother Jean who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, issues of gender, capitalism, and cultural economy in the Atlantic world. Mary was diagnosed as being mad in the 1785 after eight years of marriage and by 1790, Stephen had Mary committed to Pennsylvania Hospital, where she remained until her death in 1815.

The article discusses the impact of feminist scholarship on the practice of U.S. history. Topics include the role of selective memory in preserving heroic or Whig views of history, the roles of master narratives in U.S. historiography, and the relation of race and gender to injustices in U.S. history and at the present time.

The relation of the historiography of U.S. political economy to women's and gender history is discussed. Topics include the role of women in economic history, the relation of women to the history of U.S. capitalism, and the historical use of gender-related language in economic contexts. The importance of women workers in U.S. history is addressed.

The article discusses the relation between feminist history and the historiography of capitalism. Topics include the role of gender in historical analysis, the relation between gender and social class in historiography, and scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism. The relation of sexuality to the history of slavery is noted.

The article discusses the relationship between gender, welfare, and U.S. expansionism on the Florida frontier, focusing on U.S. policies from 1836 to 1842. It examines the U.S. Congress' 1836 resolution to "Aid the Suffering and Indigent Inhabitants of Florida," under which the U.S. Army distributed food to suffering individuals and later to families. The author considers the 1842 U.S. "Armed Occupation Act" in which free public land was given to white heads of households. Female beneficiaries of welfare are considered and the context of the Second Seminole War is addressed.

This essay uses almost three decades of Daniel Parker's private letters as a window into the conceits and personal disclosures of members of the War Department, revealing how gendered reputation, loyalty, and friendship facilitated the Department's evasion of democratic limits to its power and its establishment of bureaucratic autonomy. As chief clerk, adjutant and inspector general, and paymaster general, Parker served as a principal node in the information flows among men of different ranks and political leanings, including generals, army contractors, and secretaries of war, as they collapsed the divisions between macho congeniality and martial duty. Although private letters were ubiquitous in the early republic, most letter writers did not have the power to shape state-sanctioned violence the way War Department officials did. For these men, there was little distinction between masculine entitlement and wartime decisions, and at a time when Americans were learning how to wield political and military power at home and abroad, they relied on confidentially to build relationships, carry out policies, and hide mistakes. The consistency in the use of confidentiality in War Department correspondence, from the War of 1812 until the Mexican–American War, suggests an endurance to the ways in which cruelty and overconfidence pervaded the private and public operations of the War Department, and fueled its determination to shore up the national state's ability to wage war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]