Keppel, "Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture"

New from Louisiana State University Press: Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation, by Ben Keppel (University of Oklahoma). A description from the Press:

Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial equality to the forefront of the nation’s attention. Beyond its repercussions for the educational system, the decision also heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national identity. “Brown v. Board” and the Transformation of American Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision.

Through the lens of three cultural “first responders,” Ben Keppel tracks the creation of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning studies of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country, helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black. Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle, family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support.

Together, the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal decision. 

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

There's plenty of book reviews this weekend. To start us off, there is a review of Will Haywood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshal and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America (Knopf) in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

"The book doesn’t bring us particularly close to Marshall-the-man, but it includes a larger narrative that satisfies. This is the story of how a nation in the grip of the Vietnam War and explosive questions about race was able to move past widespread racism and accomplish what many Southern senators were absolutely opposed to — appointing a black man as a Supreme Court justice."

Also in the LA Review of Books is a review of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning) by Marion Nestle (Oxford University Press).

Salon interviews David Pilgrim, who has new book, Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice (PM Press).

Dan Jones's Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (Viking) is reviewed in The New York Times. 

"The snag with that uplifting tale is that, historically speaking, almost all of it is either myth or half-truth, as Dan Jones’s lively and excellent “Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty” makes clear. A best-­selling historian with a popular touch — he has written and hosted TV mini-series based on his books — Jones skirts political legend and sticks largely to what is known. He’s frank about unfilled documentary gaps and unsettled disputes of interpretation. Celebrants have made of Magna Carta a modern dawn, while deflationists have shrunk it to a passing incident. Jones avoids both extremes, aware that the story of this document has its own merits."

Jed Rakoff reviews Justice Stephen Breyer's The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (Knopf) for the New York Review of Books.

The New Rambler posts this review of Stephen Hopgood's The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press).

Law and Politics Book Review has posted a review from their May issue of Battleground New Jersey: Vanderbilt, Hague, and their Fight for Justice (Rutgers University Press).

"Seldom does the adoption of a new state constitution emerge from a clash of titans; but that is the story told in Nelson Johnson’s examination of the personal and political forces that cleansed New Jersey’s court system of its ancient rules and “Dickensian absurdity” (p. 5). The titans of New Jersey politics during this period were Arthur Vanderbilt—“The warrior lawyer”-- a Republican WASP from Newark; and Frank Hague, --“Celtic chieftain” – an Irish Catholic Democrat from Jersey City. Their political differences and personal hatred of one another would end with the adoption in 1947 of a new state constitution whose centerpiece, a modernized a judiciary, has been a model for judicial reformers to this day."

From H-Net is a review of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration edited by Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman (Fordham University Press).

Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press) has also been reviewed on H-Net this week.

And a third review from H-Net is of Suk-Young Kim's DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (Columbia University Press).

Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Riverhead) is reviewed in the New York Times. 

"And then we have Vowell, who is an ambling historian. In her latest, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States,” Vowell wanders through the history of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, using Lafayette’s involvement in the war as a map, and bringing us all along in her perambulations — with occasional side trips to such modern phenomena as Colonial Williamsburg, the many protesters who have flocked to Lafayette Square across from the White House and Vowell’s curious fascination with, and fascinated curiosity about, Quaker historians. She encounters one of the breed while visiting the Brandywine Valley, where Lafayette once served with distinction even after having been wounded, and Vowell uses the episode to give a shrewd précis of what she’s about generally."

Eric Rauchway's The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books) is reviewed in the NYT.

More economic history is found in a double review of Chicagonomics: The Evolution of Chicago Free Market Economics by Lanny Ebenstein (St. Martin's Press) and Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik (Norton & Co.).

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890-Present by Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue (Norton & Co) also gets reviewed by David Kennedy in the NYT.

"“These United States” ably documents the scope of those shifts. But disappointingly, for all its freshness of view and impatience with inherited pieties, it fails to explicate the precise causes that have driven the Republic to its current sorry state. But its rich documentation does compel a chilling reconsideration of both the past and the future: “The 20th-century history of the United States,” the authors suggest, “raises the question of whether the American dream of an expanding middle class was a historical accident.” It doesn’t get much more disturbingly revisionist than that."

Jon Meecham's Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House) is reviewed by the New York Times. 

New Books in History interviews Kelly Duke Bryant, who discusses her research in Education as Politics: Colonia Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press).

It's not even December yet and Best Book Lists are already emerging. Here's one from The Washington Post: "Notable Nonfiction of 2015." Making the list are...

• Melvin Urofsky's Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (Pantheon), 
• Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar Straus Giroux), 
• Will Haywood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Knopf), 
• Linda Horseman's Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (Harper), 
• and Kristen Green's Something Must be Done about Prince Edward County: A Family, a VIrigina Town, and  Civil Rights Battle (Harper).

Readers might also be interested in a review of Kevin Carey's The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (Riverhead Books) in the LA Review of Books, and  a review of John Walton's The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction (University of Chicago Press)in The Washington Independent Review of Books.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week, H-Net posted a review of Chanelle N. Rose's The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968 (Louisiana State University Press).

"Rose has complicated the clichéd racial binary of activists in Miami’s long civil rights movement during the same period, 1896 to 1968. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami is an exceptional history in at least two respects: for bestowing on black activists the full range of political tactics, and for using Miami as a case study to demonstrate how race relations have been both supported and undermined by a tri-ethnic border city dependent upon a tourist economy. On this note, Rose’s chapters on the intersections between the black liberation struggle and the postwar Latinization of Miami will make valuable reading for any graduate seminar."

Also on the subject of civil rights is an H-Net review of Aram Goudsouzian's Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March against Fear (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).

And even more civil rights history is on HNN, with a review of Kristen Green's Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (Harper).

Another review of Will Haygood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Knopf) is publish in the Los Angeles Times.

"Haygood wisely avoids getting mired in legal jargon in a richly textured account that brings to life the political and cultural stakes involved in this confirmation fight. He does so by juxtaposing the drama of the Senate hearings with Marshall's travails as the NAACP's chief counselor. Stories of wrongly accused African Americans whom Marshall freed and civil rights workers whose killers he was unable to bring to justice reveal the elation and despair Marshall endured in serving as his people's go-to lawyer."

New Books in History talks with David Sehat about The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon and Schuster).

They also interview Gregory E. O'Malley about Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (UNC Press).

A Symposium on Mendez v. Westminster

We've noted the publication of Philippa Strum's book on Mendez v. Westminster and an exhibit on the litigation in the federal courthouse in San Diego.  Now the transcript of the introductory secession of a symposium on the case is up on SSRN.  It is Mendez v. Westminster: A Living History, Michigan State Law Review 2014: 401-27, with contributions from Judge Frederick P. Aguirre, Kristi L. Bowman, Gonzalo Mendez, Sylvia Mendez, Sandra Robbie, and Philippa Strum:

School desegregation is not just a "black and white" issue, and in fact it never has been. In 1931, a county court in Lemon Grove, California ordered a school district to stop segregating its white and Latino students. Fifteen years later in 1946, a court reached the same result in Mendez v. Westminster, becoming the first federal court to order the desegregation of schools. In this piece, Gonzalo Mendez and Sylvia Mendez (both now retired) recall their experiences as the children whose parents initiated the groundbreaking Mendez litigation, and the way in which their parents remembered the litigation. Sandra Robbie, who wrote and produced the Emmy-award winning documentary about the case, discusses its historical context. Frederick Aguirre, now a judge, reflects on the legal and personal significance of the decision. Philippa Strum, author of a book about the case, considers the unique challenges and rewards of writing about school desegregation cases. Kristi Bowman facilitates these various reflections and weaves them together.

Graff on Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century

Given that legal history sits at the intersection of two disciplines, we thought the following new release may be of interest: Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), by Harvey J. Graff (Ohio State University). Here's a description from the Press:

Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides.

Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literary studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus.

Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Chronicle of Higher Education "Selected New Books on Higher Education"

Orfield on "Milliken, Meredith, and Metropolitan Segregation"

The UCLA Law Review recently published an article of interest: "Milliken, Meredith, and Metropolitan Segregation," by Myron Orfield (University of Minnesota). Here's the abstract:

Over the last sixty years, the courts, Congress, and the President—but mostly the courts—first increased integration in schools and neighborhoods, and then changed course, allowing schools to resegregate. The impact of these decisions is illustrated by the comparative legal histories of Detroit and Louisville, two cities which demonstrate the many benefits of metropolitan-level cooperation on issues of racial segregation, and the harms that arise in its absence. Detroit, Michigan, and Louisville, Kentucky, both emerged from the riots of the 1960s equally segregated in their schools and neighborhoods with proportionally sized racial ghettoes. In 1974-75, the Supreme Court overturned a proposed metropolitan school integration plan in Detroit, but allowed a metropolitan remedy for Louisville-Jefferson schools to stand. Since that time, Louisville-Jefferson schools and neighborhoods, like all the regions with metropolitan plans, have become among the most integrated in the nation, while Detroit’s schools have remained rigidly segregated and its racial ghetto has dramatically expanded. Detroit’s experience is very common in the highly fragmented metropolitan areas of the midwestern and northeastern United States. Black students in Louisville-Jefferson outperform black students in Detroit by substantial margins on standardized tests. Metropolitan Louisville has also grown healthier economically, while the City of Detroit went bankrupt and both the city and school district were taken over by state authorities. The Article concludes with a call to modernize American local government law by strengthening the legal concepts of metropolitan jurisdictional interdependence and metropolitan citizenship.

Hat tip: Poverty Law

Sunday Book Roundup

Greetings from The Terrace at the University of Wisconsin, Madison--quite possibly the happiest place to finish up a Sunday Book Roundup after a week in the archives!

Up on H-Net is a review of Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction by Jack A. Goldstone (Oxford University Press).

Another review from H-Net is of Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey (University of Georgia Press).

Common-Place has a new special July issue out with four (!) reviews. The first is a review of Thomas P. Slaughter's Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (Hill & Wang).

"Rather than writing an extended brief for Slaughter's contentions, Independence provides a broad and yet selective sweep of the history of the thirteen colonies that became the original United States. The challenge for any author is that there is no best way to cover that much time and space in a straightforward story. Slaughter decides on a more episodic approach, nonetheless managing to weave in a great many incidents and issues that serve as pieces to the puzzle."

Also in the new July issue is a review of Corinne T. Field's The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (UNC Press).

"If you are not currently convinced that age should be a historical category of analysis alongside gender, race, class, and disability, Corinne Field's new book should go a long way toward persuading you. The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America advances the study of citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States by showing how the political significance of maturity and adulthood were at the center of women's and African Americans' efforts to expand democracy to its full meaning and potential."

The third review from Common-Place is a review of Matthew Garrett's Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution (Oxford University Press), which

"explores the complex textures that resulted when the post-constitutional moment's consolidating energies found verbal expression in the fragmentary form of the period's literary production. The book is a "microstructural or subgeneric literary history" (88). It follows the episode—an "integral, but also extractable unit of any narrative" across a range of genres: political essay, memoir, novel, and miscellany (3). As Garrett argues in his lucid introduction, the episode is a dialectical form, "a part that exists as such only in relation to a real or implied whole" (4). This mediating between the one and the many makes the episode an especially rich site for analyzing the politics of form in the early nation."

Lastly, Jenna M. Gibbs's Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850 (Johns Hopkins University Press) is reviewed in Common-Place as well.

"Jenna Gibbs's Performing the Temple of Liberty begins with a fanciful invitation to the reader to accompany her on a "stroll along the Thames River," past the scene of slaves being led to ships that will transport them for sale overseas, towards taverns and coffeehouses where Londoners might have been discussing the Haymarket Theatre's current production of Colman's Inkle and Yarico. She juxtaposes these two images—shackled black bodies en route to the Americas with a play featuring white bodies in blackface debating the moral evils of slavery—to offer a point of entry into her larger subject: a comparative study of performance culture and abolitionism in London and Philadelphia during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century."

As usual, the New Books series has posted several interesting interviews this week, including an interview with Megan Threlkeld about her book, Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Also interviewed is William Elliot III and Melinda Lewis, who discuss their book, The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger).

Kyle Volk, author of Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press) is interviewed, too.

"His book ... provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the tension between majority rule and minority rights and between representative democracy and popular democracy. He focuses on debates in the antebellum northern states where moral reform efforts of Sabbatarians, temperance activist, and racial segregationists circumvented representative government to assert their social vision through direct majority rule."

HNN has posted a review of David Sehat's The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon & Schuster).

And finally, in a piece titled, "How NASA advanced the cause of African Americans during the Civil Rights movement," Richard Paul and Steven Moss's We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program (University of Texas Press) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

Sunday Book Roundup

There's no shortage of book reviews to read this weekend! To start with, The New Rambler reviews Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press).

"Naomi Murakawa, a political scientist and associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton, has written an interesting book that blames both features on American liberals—in particular Harry Truman, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton (and Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden)—and American liberalism. In The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison American, Murakawa takes as her target a conventional wisdom that explains the rise of mass incarceration as a victory of Republican law-and-order over Democratic civil rights. Rather, she argues, starting right in her subtitle, “liberals built prison America.” It was liberals, she claims, who “established a law-and-order mandate: build a better carceral state, one strong enough to control racial violence in the streets and regimented enough to control racial bias in criminal justice administration.” (page 3)"

Michael Signer's Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father (PublicAffairs) is excerpted in The Daily Beast.

H-Net adds a review of The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars by Joshua C. Wilson (Stanford University Press).

"Firstly, he attempts to develop these stories through the lens of "movement-countermovement" analysis whereby he analyzes "how directly competing movements interact with one another—and possibly with a more traditional entity like the state—in a dynamic process where each movement in part creates the conditions within which the other acts" (p. 10). At the same time, he sets out to understand what we can learn about these stories regarding questions raised by traditional "legal consciousness" research, including "determining if and how law mattered for those involved in these disputes; how their stories may or may not reproduce, challenge, or amend legal power and state authority; ... and how their conceptions of law affect the ongoing politics of abortion" (p. 111). Lastly, Wilson includes the perspective of a group of participants in these legal conflicts that is often explicitly excluded in traditional legal consciousness research: state legal insiders or legal "elites," specifically lawyers, legislators, and amicus brief authors. Overall, this book achieves the ambitious goals it sets for itself in that it engages with and furthers two types of socio-legal-historical research: movement-countermovement literature and legal consciousness literature. Nonetheless, certain aspects of the conclusions reached by Wilson raise questions and leave room for further analysis."

More on culture wars and rights can be found in a review of Andrew Hartman's A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press) in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Still yearning for yet more Magna Carta talk? The Los Angeles Review of Books has a multi-book review including Magna Carta and the Rule of Law by Roy Edmund Browned II, Andrea Martinez, Daniel Barstow Magraw (American Bar Association); In the Shadow of the Great Charter: Common Law Constitutionalism and the Magna Carta by Robert M. Pallitto (University Press of Kansas); King John and the Road to Magna Carta by Stephen Church (Basic); and Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 by Nicholas Vincent (Third Millennium).

"The deeper that one goes in studying Magna Carta, beyond the uncritical and largely superficial treatment it receives in high school and popular culture, the more one begins to understand that it is the myth and the reinterpretation of Magna Carta over time that have influenced later generations far more than what actually happened in June 1215."

Also in the LA Review of Books is a review of Steve Inskeep's Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab (Penguin).

History Today reviews Don H. Doyle's The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic).

The New York Review of Books adds a couple of reviews of interest, including one of Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt).

There's also a multi-book review titled, "Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality," that takes up many works, including, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream by Suzanne Mettler (Basic); The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem by Joel Best and Eric Best (University of California Press); Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization by William Zumeta, David W. Breneman, Patrick M. Callan, and Joni E. Finney (Harvard Education Press); Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education by William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin (Princeton University Press); Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton (Harvard University Press); and Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (University of Chicago Press). Here's a bit of the review:

"All in all, despite an emerging recognition that we must change course, the story told in the books under review is a dispiriting one. Mettler attributes the decline of educational opportunity since the 1980s to a failure of “upkeep,” by which she means the failure of government to renew and adapt policies from the past in order to advance their original purposes in the present and future. This strikes me as a generous explanation. The truth may be uglier. Perhaps concern for the poor has shriveled not only among policymakers but in the broader public. Perhaps in our time of focus on the wealthy elite and the shrinking middle class, there is a diminished general will to regard poor Americans as worthy of what are sometimes called “the blessings of American life”—among which the right to education has always been high if not paramount."

In The New York Times, Ryan Gatos's novel, All Involved (Harper Collins), is reviewed.

"Gattis’s premise is provocative: In the six days following the verdict of April 29, 1992, that acquitted three white police officers of using excessive force on Rodney King, the Los Angeles Police Department was so focused on the most violent manifestations of civil unrest that much of the rest of the city went unregulated. “All Involved” consists of 17 different perspectives, a majority of which issue from characters who have all been involved in some manner of illegal activity. As their neighborhood, Lynwood, plunges into general lawlessness because the police are struggling elsewhere, the path becomes clear for these individuals to go extra rogue, settling scores that mostly revolve around revenge and betrayal."

With Politics & Prose Joseph Ellis discusses The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 (Knopf).

Geraldo L. Cadava discusses his Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press) with New Books in American Studies.

The New York Times has curated a list of fiction and nonfiction works for those interested in "Reading About Racial Boundaries."

Forthcoming: Kruse, One Nation Under God

Forthcoming on April 7, 2015, from Basic Books, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse. Here's the Press description: 

We’re often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of “Christian America” is an invention—and a relatively recent one at that.  

As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR’s New Deal. Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of “pagan statism” that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for “freedom under God” culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.  

But this apparent triumph had an ironic twist. In Eisenhower’s hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%. For the first time, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation.  

During this moment, virtually all Americans—across the religious and political spectrum—believed that their country was “one nation under God.” But as Americans moved from broad generalities to the details of issues such as school prayer, cracks began to appear. Religious leaders rejected this “lowest common denomination” public religion, leaving conservative political activists to champion it alone. In Richard Nixon’s hands, a politics that conflated piety and patriotism became sole property of the right. 

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.

Some early blurbs:

“Thorough and thought-¬provoking scholarship…Kruse reveals the marketing machine behind American godliness with authority, insight, and clarity. He illustrates key turning points along the way to provide a cohesive picture of a well-powered movement. He hands us the agenda behind the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘in God we trust,’ and other cornerstones of American patriotism. In short, he exposes the PR man behind the pious curtain.” --Library Journal, starred review 

“In this riveting book, Kevin Kruse combines the history of religion with the history of capitalism to craft an original interpretation about America’s religious identity. Revisionist in the best sense—bold, daring, and intelligent—it will change how we think about the American past.” --Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy 

“In this brilliant and iconoclastic book, Kevin M. Kruse shows how an unholy alliance of greedy businessmen, venal clergy, and conservative politicians exploited American spirituality for partisan gain. Kruse’s research is extraordinary, his prose vivid, his argument profound. One Nation Under God is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture in the United States.”--Ari Kelman, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning A Misplaced Massacre

More information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

Hong Yen Chang (credit)

• The California Supreme Court’s reversal on Monday of its 1890 decision denying Hong Yen Chang’s application to the bar generated several news reports, including one in the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and on NPR.  UC Davis Law's APALSA student group describes the work of  its Hong Yen Chang Project, in advocating for the reversal here. 

• On Monday, April 20, the Lewis & Clark Community College, Godfrey, Illinois, will host a session in the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission’s History on Trial series devoted to the Alton School Cases, “a series of seven circuit court trials and five Illinois Supreme Court appeals from 1897 to 1908, in which Scott Bibb, an African-American father of two school-age children, resisted the newly imposed racial segregation in the Alton school system.” More and hat tip: Riverbender.com

• Over at her Wartime blog, LHB Founder Mary Dudziak reflects on Edward S. Corwin's notion of "totality" in his book on the World War II state, Total War and the Constitution.

• A study of the legal history of Clermont County, Kansas, is underway, according to this report  in the Clermont Sun.

• On May 1, the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society will open its thirteenth (virtual) gallery.  Curated by Teresa Koncick, The Open Door: Roles of Women in Securities Regulation “looks at the roles and progressive participation of women in two key and contemporaneous regulatory agencies–the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA)–from the 1930s to the 2000s.”

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Sunday Book Roundup

H-Net adds a review of Roger Daniels's The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War (University Press of Kansas).

"While his earlier work examines the internment process and events primarily during the Second World War and briefly recalls the redress after the war, Daniels’s most recent work describes in detail Japanese Americans’ legal battles during and after the Second World War and the progression of the Japanese community in American society to the present day."

Also up on H-Net is a review of David La Vere's Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (UNC Press).

Jessica Mathews's "The Road from Westphalia" reviews Henry Kissinger's World Order (Penguin) and Bret Stephens America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Social Disorder (Sentinel) in The New York Review of Books.

The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Henry A. Giroux's Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Haymarket Books).

"HENRY GIROUX correctly sees that universities, at their best, prepare students for a citizen’s role that is informed, critical, and visionary. He views the goal of neoliberalism, by contrast, as cultivating education that prepares the student to be a reflexive supporter of the status quo, take orders uncritically, and accept consumerism as a major desire and goal in public and private life."

There is an excerpt from They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy by Robert Scheer (Nation) in Salon.

Margaret Jacobs discusses her new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Post-War World (University of Nebraska Press), with New Books in American Studies.

The Guardian reviews The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution by Robin Renwick (Biteback).

Seana Shiffrin discusses Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton University Press) with New Books in Law.

Eric Posner reviews Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War by Isabel V. Hull (Cornell University Press) in The New Rambler.

"Hull’s key point is that for all that, governments—or officials within the governments—spent countless hours debating the minutiae of international law. Even the Germans did. Indeed, Hollweg himself acknowledged that Germany had committed an injustice by invading Belgium and announced that Germany would “seek to make [the injustice] good as soon as our military goal is reached.” (p. 44). That these debates frequently occurred in confidential meetings inside governments suggest that officials took the law seriously, and didn’t just trot out arguments to rationalize actions that they had decided on for military reasons."

There are two reviews of Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster): one in The Washington Post here, and a second in The New York Times here.

Chen Guangcheng's memoir, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

The Nation has a multi-book review titled, "The Great Chastening," reviewing Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (Farrar Straus Giroux), John Dunn's Breaking Democracy's Spell (Yale University Press), Dan Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare (Oxford University Press), and Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Belknap).

Thomas's "Founders and the Idea of a National University"

We’ve just noticed the publication last year of The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind, by George Thomas, Department of Government, Claremont McKenna College, with Cambridge University Press:

This book examines the ideas of the founders with regard to establishing a national university and what those ideas say about their understanding of America. It offers the first study on the idea of a national university and how the founders understood it as an important feature in an educational system that would sustain the American experiment in democracy. Their ideas about education suggest that shaping the American mind is essential to the success of the Constitution and that this is something that future generations would need to continue to do.

Introduction
1. The national-university vision and American constitutionalism
2. The national university and constitutional limits
3. The national university and state institutions
4. Constituting the university
5. Education, the national university, and constituting national identity
6. The civic dimensions of American constitutionalism
Conclusion: the Constitution and the American mind.

Professor Thomas's recent post on CUP's blog, "An Education in Politics," is here.
Endorsements after the jump.

New Release: Bowman, ed., "The Pursuit of Racial and Ethnic Equality in American Public Schools"

New from Michigan State University Press: The Pursuit of Racial and Ethnic Equality in American Public Schools: Mendez, Brown, and Beyond (Dec. 2014), edited by Kristi L. Bowman (Michigan State University College of Law). The Press explains:

In 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education; ten years later, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act. These monumental changes in American law dramatically expanded educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minority children across the country. They also changed the experiences of white children, who have learned in increasingly diverse classrooms. The authors of this commemorative volume include leading scholars in law, education, and public policy, as well as important historical figures. Taken together, the chapters trace the narrative arc of school desegregation in the United States, beginning in California in the 1940s, continuing through Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, and three important Supreme Court decisions about school desegregation and voluntary integration in 1974, 1995, and 2007. The authors also assess the status of racial and ethnic equality in education today and consider the viability of future legal and policy reform in pursuit of the goals of Brown. This remarkable collection of voices in conversation with one another lays the groundwork for future discussions about the relationship between law and educational equality, and ultimately for the creation of new public policy. A valuable reference for scholars and students alike, this dynamic text is an important contribution to the literature by an outstanding group of authors.

Shulman on Meyer, Pierce and Parental Rights

Jeffrey Shulman, Georgetown University Law Center, has posted Meyer, Pierce, and the History of the Entire Human Race: Barbarism, Social Progress, and (the Fall and Rise of) Parental Rights.  Here is the abstract:    

Long before the Supreme Court’s seminal parenting cases took a due process Lochnerian turn, American courts had been working to fashion family law doctrine on the premise that parents are only entrusted with custody of the child, and then only as long as they meet their fiduciary duty to take proper care of the child. With its progressive, anti-patriarchal orientation, this jurisprudence was in part a creature of its time, reflecting the evolutionary biases of the emerging fields of sociology, anthropology, and legal ethnohistory. In short, the courts embraced the new, “scientific” view that social “progress” entails the decline and, by some accounts, the demise of parental authority.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of social science disciplines built on a materialistic theory of cultural progress and an evolutionary view of law. One result of these early enthographic efforts was the enormously influential stage-theory of societal development. Simply enough, stage-theory describes how a society moves from a primitive to a civilized state of development, and how it might fail to do so. The theory was congenial to the moral philosophers and social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment; to libertarian-minded contractualists of late-nineteenth-century America; and to the founding fathers of revolutionary socialism. It was a part of the nineteenth century’s great idiom of secular progress and social engineering, part of a story of worldly advancement and human achievement in which the courts had their own role to play.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week The New York Times adds several reviews that might be of interest to readers, including a review of Matt Bai's All The Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (Knopf). For more politics and press, the NY Times also has a review of Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Simon & Schuster) by Harold Holzer. And, if presidential history is your thing, then read this review of Edward J. Larson's The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789 (HarperCollins), also in the NY Times.

H-Net has added new reviews as well. There is a review of The Independence of India and Pakistan: New Approaches and Reflections (Oxford University Press), a volume edited by Ian Talbot.  Also on H-Net is a review of Hilary J. Moss's Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press).

The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents by Robert Nichols (Oxford University Press) is reviewed on H-Net, too.

"By 1886, where Robert Nichols begins this book, a clear consensus had emerged within the colonial administration in Peshawar about the need to create a separate administration and set of laws to deal with what they called frontier crimes. These included retaliatory murders that were a product of the blood feuds endemic to the region, violence stemming from perceived slights on a group's honor (mostly focusing on issues relating to women's behavior), and looting raids made against villages in British administered territory by tribes beyond their direct control. What made frontier crimes different from ordinary crimes was that the perpetrators were acting in accord with their own cultural values and that their actions had the tacit acceptance of the local population—sometimes even its overt approval."

The New Books series has a couple of interesting interviews this week as well. Terry Golway talks about his book, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright), with New Books in History. Kirk Randazzo talks with New Books in Law about his co-written book (with Richard Waterman) Checking the Courts: Law, Ideology, and Contingent Discretion (SUNY Press).

The latest issue of the Law and Politics Books Review is out with a review of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (Cambridge University Press) by Ajay K. Mehrotra, as well as a double book review of both Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity by Joseph Fishkin (Oxford University Press) and Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State by Megan Ming Francis (Cambridge University Press).

"Both Megan Ming Francis’ CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE and Joseph R. Fishkin’s BOTTLENECKS: A NEW THEORY OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY take up the question of social equality in novel and important ways. Francis’ historically-based investigation of the early role that the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) played in developing twentieth century civil rights litigation tactics invites us to reconsider the framework scholars use to think about the civil rights movement. In a different mode of questioning, Fishkin’s analysis of some extant theories of equal opportunity leads him to develop his own theory with an eye to its legal and policy implications. While these books are very different from one another, each one of them presents a persuasive contribution to the literatures in which they are engaged. "

HNN reviews Mark M. Smith's The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (Oxford University Press). There's also a review of Stanley Aronowitz's The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement (Verso)

Malcolm Gaskill's Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (Basic) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books. There's also a review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism (Basic).

In The Oxonian Review, Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press) is reviewed.

"History, according to Jo Guldi and David Armitage, needs a confidence boost. It needs to be bolder, more assured, more engaged—and most of all, it needs to be bigger.
If history today is in trouble, they argue, the roots of the problem lie in the 1970s, when historians began to focus their attention more closely than ever before on the obscure stories of the ordinary, the marginalised, and the oppressed. This kind of history, what the authors call the Short Past, “reflected a call of conscience, a determination to make the institutions of history align with a more critical politics.” But that sense of purpose has gone astray. Its call has been drowned out by the demands of the historical career itself, by a cacophony of articles and monographs speaking to smaller and smaller audiences of anxious, precarious professionals. The History Manifesto is an intervention not just in the scholarly sense—it’s also the kind you organise for an addict."

Katha Pollitt discusses her new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador), at Politics & Prose via Slate.

Sixty Years After Bolling v. Sharpe: Public Education and the D.C. Federal Courts

[We have the following announcement from the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.]

The special relationship between the Courts of the D.C. Circuit and the D.C. public schools was the subject of the Society's most recent program, "Sixty Years After Bolling v. Sharpe." The program can be viewed in its entirety on the Society's website. Listen as James Forman of Yale Law School moderates a discussion among Judge David S. Tatel; Kaya Henderson, Chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools; Rod Boggs, Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs; and Brian W. Jones, General Counsel of Strayer University on the significance of Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education as well as key public education issues and challenges presented by the twin goals of achieving integration and improving education in public schools. Listen also to Eloise Pasachoff of Georgetown University Law Center as she highlights the history of the Courts' engagement with the D.C. schools, and read the full text of her remarks. The program can be viewed here.

New Release: Williams, Jr., on "Prudence Crandall's Legacy"

New from Wesleyan University Press: Prudence Crandall’s Legacy: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education (June 2014), by Donald E. Williams, Jr. (president pro tempore of the Connecticut State Senate). The publisher explains:

Image Credit: Connecticuthistory.org

Prudence Crandall was a schoolteacher who fought to integrate her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, and educate black women in the early nineteenth century. When Crandall accepted a black woman as a student, she unleashed a storm of controversy that catapulted her to national notoriety, and drew the attention of the most significant pro- and anti-slavery activists of the day. The Connecticut state legislature passed its infamous Black Law in an attempt to close down her school. Arrested and jailed, Crandall’s legal legacy had a lasting impact—Crandall v. State was the first full-throated civil rights case in U.S. history. The arguments by attorneys in Crandall played a role in two of the most fateful Supreme Court decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. In Prudence Crandall’s Legacy, author and lawyer Donald E. Williams Jr. marshals a wealth of detail concerning the life and work of Prudence Crandall, her unique role in the fight for civil rights, and her influence on legal arguments for equality in America.

More information is available here.

Public Education and the D.C. Federal Courts Since Bolling

[We're moving this up, as the  program will be held later this week.]

[On Thursday, June 19, 2014, from 4:30-6:00, the Historical Society for the District of Columbia Circuit will host the program“Sixty Years after Bolling v. Sharpe: Public Education and the D.C. Federal Courts,” in the ceremonial courtroom in the Prettyman US Courthouse.  From the Society’s announcement:]

For over 100 years, the Courts of the D.C. Circuit have had a special engagement with the D.C. public schools. Until 1968, the District Court appointed the members of the D.C. Board of Education. Major cases such as Carr v. Corning in 1950, which endorsed “separate but equal” schools; Bolling v. Sharpe; Hobson v. Hansen in 1968, where Judge Skelly Wright enjoined “tracking” of students, ordered cross-town transfers, and required faculty integration; and Mills v. Board of Education in 1972, where the District Court held children in D.C. entitled to a free public education regardless of disabilities, have played a critical role in shaping public education in the District of Columbia. Associate Professor Eloise Pasachoff of the Georgetown University Law Center will open the program with stage-setting remarks highlighting the relevant history. This will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Clinical Professor James Forman, Jr. of the Yale Law School, a former Public Defender in D.C., and co-founder in 1997 of the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. 

Participants in the panel will be:

Roderic V.O. Boggs, Executive Director, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and founder of Parents United for D.C. Public Education in 1980

Kaya Henderson, Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools

Brian W. Jones, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Strayer University; formerly Chair, D.C. Public Charter School Board, 2007-13, and General Counsel, U.S. Department of Education, 2001- 05

Judge David S. Tatel, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit

Admission is free. A reception will follow the program. Reservations are not required.

AJLH 54:1

Volume 54, Issue 1 (January 2014), of the American Journal of Legal History is now in the mail.  Here are its contents:

Laura Cahillane, “An Insight Into the Irish Free State Constitution”

Scott Gelber, “Child Support Litigation and the ‘Necessity’ of American Higher Education, 1920-70"

Andrew Norris, “A Maelstrom of International Law and Intrigue:  The Remarkable Voyage of the S.S. City of Flint”

Sunday Book Roundup

This week the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Thomas Healy's The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (Metropolitan).

"In March 1919, the most illustrious figure in American law, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., speaking for a unanimous court, upheld the Espionage Act convictions of Eugene Debs and several other socialists, who opposed the United States going to war. But by November 1919, barely eight months later, Holmes had changed his mind. The majority of the Court affirmed the convictions of a group of Jewish anarchists under the Sedition Act by simply relying on Holmes’s earlier opinion. But Holmes instead wrote a powerful dissent, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, upholding First Amendment protection for antiwar speech. 

In The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America, Thomas Healy uses this fascinating transformation in Holmes’s thinking about the First Amendment to explore the very invention of free speech in the Supreme Court."

H-Net adds several interesting new reviews, including two in women's history: a review of Lewis L. Gould's Edith Kermit Roosevelt:Creating the Modern First Lady (University Press of Kansas) (here), and another of Lucia McMahon's Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press) (here).

Other new reviews on H-Net are of Nico Slate's Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (Routledge) (here), and of John Virtue's The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four U.S. Army Regiments in the North, 1942-1943 (McFarland) (here). Of the latter book, the reviewer writes,

"The most interesting parts of the book are the ones when Virtue looks at the effects of discrimination and segregation, interracial contacts between black soldiers and Canadian and Alaskan locals, and stories of protest and revolt. The most promising in this respect are chapters 13 through 16. However, Virtue, unfortunately, often only scratches the surface and does not delve deeper into the analysis of the important stories that he tells."

The Guardian has a review of two books--How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters (Head of Zeus) by Daniel Hannan and Acts of Union and Disunion (Profile Books) by Linda Colley.

"Linda Colley is such a good writer I'd buy her shopping lists if anyone published them. Her essays on the myths of Britishness contain a warning against Hannan's double standards. "The cult of superior British liberty," she says, "has often been deployed to uphold and maintain the political status quo." The best you can say is that liberty moves fitfully in Britain, she continues. After the 1832 Reform Act, a higher proportion of the male population was enfranchised in Britain than in almost any other European country. By 1900, the franchise was one of the narrowest in Europe. The soldiers we will commemorate in 2014 marched to the Somme to defend democratic rights many of them did not enjoy."