| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, . | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Linda Gordon. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 416. $29.95.

In this fascinating examination of an incident in child welfare history, Linda Gordon brings together the fruits of decades of social history research and the contemporary interest in cultural analysis. She does so with flair through the shrewd use of a narrative structure that allows her to explore a multitude of analytic issues in detail while focusing on the particular individuals and arresting historical moments through which the events unfolded. Gordon demonstrates the continuing vitality of the issues social historians have brought to the table—class, race, gender, family—in the context of a new commitment to a synthesizing narrative. She also shows how the very best and most innovative history can be made engaging for the general reader. 1

The incident that Gordon has chosen to bring to life in this way took place in Arizona in 1904, when a trainload of Catholic orphans, destined for the homes of Mexican mineworkers' families in the towns of Clifton and Morenci, were forcibly removed from these homes by white vigilantes and town officials. The most attractive of the "white" (largely Irish) children were kept by the mostly non-Catholic families who had abducted them. Others were returned to the New York foundling home from which they had come. Gordon has recreated these events, well known in Arizona but only slightly familiar elsewhere (as a result of the Supreme Court case to which it led), in their full historical context. She has endowed them with both contemporary social meaning and with long-term historical resonance. . . .

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