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Previews
History has no monopoly on the past. Like memory, public commemorations, and monuments, history mediates between past and present. But as a mediation, it can achieve only temporary success because the world changes too fast. It outdistances our histories. In his presidential address to the 2007 Organization of American Historians convention, Richard White puts forth a brief history of the mediation of American historians and their attempts to connect their American presents to their American pasts.
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An ongoing debate over the moral and political values of late eighteenth-century America focuses on the meaning and implications of what people of the era called "liberality." Far from being an excuse for interest-driven behavior, J. M. Opal argues, liberality combined Enlightenment and Christian principles of broad-mindedness and tolerance. It evoked the humanitarian dream of "universal benevolence" and authorized early efforts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. During the 1780s, liberal ideas also enabled supporters of the federal Constitution to disdain and deflect Antifederalist claims that the document was "narrow" and "bigoted" by portraying it instead as a blueprint for a more just and humane world. Opal seeks to clarify the complex interplay of religion, politics, and ethics in post-Revolution America and to consider America's liberal tradition in terms that the Founders would have understood.
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The early twentieth century has been called the golden age of public amusements in America, but that golden age was predicated on the exclusion of African Americans from the era's new public leisure spaces. Black entrepreneurs, such as Lewis Jefferson in Washington, D.C., responded to African Americans' demands for their own places of amusement. By the late 1890s, black excursion boats floated alongside segregated steamers on the Potomac River, and black parties flocked to their own riverside resorts. But, as Andrew W. Kahrl shows in the essay that won the 2007 Louis Pelzer Award, the dignity and autonomy guests sought at Jefferson's Notley Hall resort contrasted with frightening new caricatures of African American leisure in mass-culture publications and increasingly sophisticated forms of surveillance and harassment. Kahrl explores the politics of leisure at the dawn of the Jim Crow era and the strategies African Americans employed to circumvent exclusions, combat stereotypes, and capitalize on segregation.
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The phrase "companionate marriage" figures prominently in historians' descriptions of the middle-class marital norms that accompanied the emergence of sexual modernism in the early twentieth-century United States. Rebecca L. Davis shows that rather than characterizing an accepted social ideal, the term "companionate marriage" provoked widespread outrage. By focusing on how the term was popularized and interpreted following the publication of Judge Ben B. Lindsey's book The Companionate Marriage in 1927, Davis shows how the era's anticommunist politics, gender conservatism, and religious tensions constrained companionate marriage's meanings and limited its reformist scope. Debates over what companionate marriage implied contributed to a rhetorical tradition, well-established today, that links marital reform to godless, antidemocratic radicalism.
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| Following World War II, the United States conducted trials intended to bring Axis personnel to justice for violating international law in their treatment of both prisoners of war and civilians. But was the United States willing to hold itself accountable to the same standard that it applied to its recent enemies? Nothing in the wartime record of the United States equaled German genocidal barbarity, but all participants in World War II committed smaller-scale atrocities against enemy troops and civilians. James J. Weingartner explores the reaction of the U.S. Army to two such war crimes, one committed by Germans and one by Americans, and the way those crimes have been processed in the collective memories of the two peoples. |
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