Previews

In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, William H. Chafe challenges the traditional tendency to see the age of segregation as one of pure oppression and victimization. Chafe cites the daily acts of courage, resilience, and community building through which African Americans sought to maintain the dignity and integrity of their families, to create a better world for their children, and to find ways of moving forward—inch by inch—to achieve the chance of freedom. Based on interviews in ten states, the article suggests the rich texture of African American community and family life, even in this, "the nadir" of post-Civil War black experience.

The story that the British general Jeffery Amherst attempted to infect Native Americans with smallpox at Fort Pitt in 1763 has become a commonplace of American history. But is the story true? And, if the attempt was made, could it have worked? Was it an isolated incident? Elizabeth A. Fenn, whose essay won the Louis Pelzer Award for 1999, takes a new look at the evidence regarding smallpox transmission in eighteenth-century America. She shows that contemporary military ethics left ample room for acts of biological terror, that means of spreading smallpox were well known, and that accusations of deliberate smallpox infection arose frequently. If incidents of willful contagion were not common, they were probably not so rare as historians previously believed.

Current debates about religion in public schools often reflect misconceptions about the pervasiveness of religion in nineteenth-century schooling. . . .