Previews

Over the past thirty years, historians have seen their job prospects shrink and their job security erode. Both the sales of scholarly history books and the number of undergraduate history majors have fallen. But in his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Kenneth T. Jackson sees reasons for hope and spurs to action. He celebrates the unprecedented variety of innovative scholarship and the growing public interest in history. He urges history departments to cut back production of new doctorates and reliance on adjunct instructors. He urges professional groups to work with such natural allies as community college and high school teachers in joint efforts to revitalize teaching and broaden the audience for history.

Paul A. Kramer explores the dialogue between Americans and Britons on the meanings of race, empire, and national exceptionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. At a decisive moment, he argues, American colonialists successfully justified the annexation of the Philippines by an appeal to Anglo-Saxon racial exceptionalism. Reclaiming their ties to the British Empire through blood, culture, and history, American imperialists pronounced the nation both bound and fit to acquire an overseas colonial empire. By 1902, however, the rhetoric of American exceptionalism eclipsed the racial appeal, as Americans trumpeted their alleged republican mission to govern "dependencies" in a selfless spirit and with a promise of eventual self-government.

For suggestions on how to use this article in the United States history survey course, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching>.

As the United States mobilized for World War I, the government looked to voluntary associations to safeguard American communities from foreign invasion and domestic subversion. The officials who urged grass-roots groups to police their neighbors distinguished between "vigilance," endorsed as a democratic duty, and "vigilantism," denounced as mob violence. In the article that won the Louis Pelzer Award for 2001, Christopher Capozzola shows that in practice—in extralegal coercion of workers, women suspected of prostitution, and African Americans—vigilance and vigilantism mingled. His work raises questions about ideals of active citizenship, links between voluntarism and political violence in American history, and contemporary assumptions that voluntary associations contribute positively to civic identity and democratic engagement.

Why did European immigrants decline to study their "native" languages in American public schools during the first half of the twentieth century? The standard historical interpretation stresses the coercive waves of Americanization that dampened linguistic diversity throughout the land. Yet, as Jonathan Zimmerman shows, urban schools continued to offer Polish, Hebrew, Norwegian, and a host of other immigrant tongues. Promoted by ethnic leaders, the courses taught "pure" languages that differed sharply from the regional or mixed dialects that most newcomers actually spoke. By refusing to register their children for classes in their supposedly ancestral tongues, immigrants registered their hostility to uniform ethnic identities. Across a wide range of languages, they expressed their ethnicity—like their Americanism—in their own terms.

Gareth Davies explores the tenacity of the liberal reformist impulse that created the Great Society. Most historians see the mid-1960s as the crest of that impulse, but Davies contends that a second peak occurred within government agencies during Richard M. Nixon's first term. Latinos were among the groups who received increased attention from the federal government during the second phase of the Great Society. Davies uses the rise of the bilingual education program to illustrate how executive concerns, pressure group politics, bureaucratic entrepreneurship, and judicial activism combined to advance the cause of "language minorities" during the Nixon administration.