Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building
The 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh drew from a 1775 negotiation between land speculators and Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) to subjugate Indigenous sovereignty to the powers of Congress. This negotiation is usually framed as a “purchase,” but Joshua A. McGonagle Althoff makes clear that Peeyankihšia people intended to negotiate the right to live within, rather than own, their homelands. Moving away from the idea of a “purchase” reveals how Peeyankihšiaki were preparing for prosperity, not declension.
The “Profane Margins” of the State: Florida Sheriff Walter R. Clark and the Local History of Crime, Policing, and Incarceration
Sheriff Walter R. Clark of Broward County, Florida, used his office to enforce white supremacy, procure labor for local businesses, bolster the illegal gambling industry, and line his own pockets for nearly two decades in the twentieth century. Like other sheriffs, he was also central to the local workings of the state: policing the county, administering the courthouse, and more. Considering Clark in a long historical context from the Jacksonian Era to the present, Cindy Hahamovitch makes the case for the importance of sheriffs and local government in American life.
The Origins of the Student Loan Industry in the United States: Richard Cornuelle, United Student Aid Funds, and the Creation of the Guaranteed Student Loan Program
Britain Hopkins contributes to understandings of the origins of the student loan industry and student loan indebtedness in the United States. The article highlights how private organizations and actors worked with the Johnson and Nixon administrations to establish student loans as a primary means of funding higher education. These private-federal partnerships increasingly sought to commodify student loans on financial markets, thereby tethering access to higher education to previously excluded groups to market incorporation.
Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of U.S. v. Tony Booker (1980)
American antislavery law long denied the problem of sexual assault in slavery. Karin Zipf extends the historiography of American slavery in an analysis of late twentieth-century farm worker slavery cases. Zipf examines the testimonies of male and female farm workers to expose the masculinist narrative in federal antislavery law. Zipf demonstrates the law’s gendered limitations in its masculinist meanings of migrant slavery violence, insensitivity to women’s fieldwork experiences, and subliminal endorsement of racist stereotypes of Black women.
