Browse

By the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln had transcended the lingering controversies of the Civil War to become a secular saint, honored in North and South alike for his steadfast leadership in crisis. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, he was invoked countless times as a reminder of America's strength and wisdom, a commanding ideal against which weary citizens could see their own hardships in perspective. But as revealed in this book, those years represent the apogee of Lincoln's prestige. The decades following World War II brought radical changes to American culture, changes that led to the diminishing of all heroes. As the author explains, growing sympathy for the plight of racial minorities, disenchantment with the American state, the lessening of patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War, and an intensifying celebration of diversity all contributed to a culture in which neither Lincoln nor any single person could be a heroic symbol for all Americans. Paradoxically, however, the very culture that made Lincoln an object of indifference, questioning, criticism, and even ridicule was a culture of unprecedented beneficence and inclusion, where racial, ethnic, and religious groups treated one another more fairly and justly than ever before. Thus, as the prestige of the Great Emancipator shrank, his legacy of equality continued to flourish. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book documents the decline of Lincoln's public standing, asking throughout whether there is any path back from this post-heroic era. Can a new generation of Americans embrace again their epic past, including great leaders whom they know to be flawed?

After Redlining explains the changed relationship between urbanites and their banks during the last third of the twentieth century, and argues that an urban social movement drove the change. In so doing, it explores how the U.S. financial system shaped and was shaped by the community organizing of ordinary urbanites from 1966 to 1989. The book charts the activism of the urban reinvestment movement whose members blamed anti-urban, bank-friendly policies for the decline of American cities—not riots, white flight, or deindustrialization as current scholarship and popular memory suggested. Drawing on the unprocessed archive of the reinvestment movement’s lead organization, National People’s Action, as well as Congressional hearings and banking trade publications, the book spotlights the impact of this multiracial coalition of low-and moderate-income city residents on urban redevelopment and American politics. The movement’s crowning legislative achievements—the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977—created a unique role for community organizations as grassroots financial regulators who policed urban redlining at the street level. Yet the 1970s economic downturn narrowed the scope of urban reinvestment in practice. Policymakers rejected ambitious urban initiatives out of fear that increased spending would worsen the era’s persistent inflation, making bank-financed reinvestment all the more important. At the same time, financial deregulation—wherein policymakers gave banks untested privileges to lend and manage wealth in new ways—shifted the ground beneath activists’ feet. By decade’s end, “reinvestment” referred largely to something that banks did, and banks had changed dramatically.

Stolen Borders tells the history of the Jewish illegal immigration occasioned by the nation-based, restrictive immigration quotas implemented by federal laws passed in 1921 and 1924. A chaotic underground of illegal immigration emerged in the wake of these quota laws, which barred nearly all immigrants from Asia and most from southern and eastern Europe, people widely considered inferior and “undesirable.” In the years after the quotas, Jewish migrants sailed into New York with fake German passports and came into Florida from Cuba, hidden in the hold of boats loaded with contraband liquor. This book explores the responses that government officials, journalists, Jewish organizations, alien smugglers, and migrants themselves had to this unsanctioned flow of people over U.S. borders. Ultimately, Stolen Borders challenges a central narrative of U.S. historiography—the narrative of the “closing of the gates” to European immigrants in 1924. It demonstrates that the “gates” did not simply close. Rather, the reordering of the nation’s boundaries in the quota era happened unevenly, confusedly, and with much contention. The book also traces the process through which Jews came to be associated with, and then to be uncoupled from, “illegal alienness.” We know in retrospect that Jews, like other European ethnics, ultimately escaped the category of “illegal alienness”—despite their history of illegal entry—in a way that, for example, Mexicans have not. How this happened has been less well understood. Yet, in its twists and turns this story offers compelling insights into the contingent nature of citizenship, belonging, and Americanness.

Afterimages is a study of the role of photography, more particularly photojournalism, in the documentation and communication of wars and conflicts involving the United States since the Vietnam War. The book focuses on photographers who have worked to push the boundaries of photojournalism, adapting it to new conditions of warfare and media production, and whose work illuminates the geopolitics of the American worldview. These are photographers who have produced a meditative form of conflict photography, an “afterimagery” of conflicts and contexts, bound not to spot news reporting but to a more investigative framing of events which reflects on the contexts and scenery of war. The book will examine the ideological and affective conditions of visuality that attend the American worldview, to consider some of the ways in which photojournalism plays a key role in both supporting and challenging it, particularly with regard to the framing of violence carried out by the state. Running throughout Afterimages is an inquiry into the high value (ethical, socio-political, legalistic) that continues to be placed on the power of the still image to bear witness. It presages a number of questions that echo across the chapters. How has the role of the image-maker as witness evolved? What capacities for critique do images maintain? What new visual vocabularies are emerging to represent new forms of war? Afterimages argues and demonstrates through close analysis that photographic images are important means for critical reflection on war, violence and human rights.

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud. This book weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted's life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. It explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America's most prominent center for archaeology in the ancient Near East. A portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, the book restores Breasted to the world and puts forward a case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.

Over the past half-century, El Salvador has transformed dramatically. Historically reliant on primary exports such as coffee and cotton, the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 1992 to find much of its national income now coming from a massive emigrant workforce—over a quarter of its population—that earns money in the United States and sends it home. This book examines this new way of life as it extends across two places: Intipucá, a Salvadoran town infamous for its remittance wealth; and the Washington DC, metro area, home to the second-largest population of Salvadorans in the United States. It charts El Salvador's change alongside American deindustrialization, viewing the Salvadoran migrant work abilities used in new low-wage American service jobs as a kind of primary export, and shows how the latest social conditions linking both countries are part of a longer history of disparity across the Americas. Drawing on the work of Charles S. Peirce, the book demonstrates how the defining value forms—migrant work capacity, services, and remittances—act as signs, building a moral world by communicating their exchangeability while hiding the violence and exploitation on which this story rests. It offers insights into practices that are increasingly common throughout the world.

This book examines the influence of U.S.-China relations upon the evolution of conservatism in postwar America. After the Chinese civil war concluded in 1949, the right formulated an “Asia First” approach to the challenge of global communism, one that demanded U.S. foreign policy give the Pacific equal or more consideration than the Atlantic and prioritize the cause of an allied China. It is argued that a combination of anti-communist orientalism and nostalgia for a special U.S.-China relationship allowed conservatives to critique policies of postwar consensus and renovate their ideology for the Cold War in the process. On the diplomatic front, Asia First offered conservatives a geopolitical issue to mark as their own, and their positions on issues like the Korean War and Taiwan Straits Crises laid foundations for a diplomatic ethos that is today so familiar. Hostility toward the United Nations, assertion of American sovereignty in diplomatic affairs, and the promotion of a technological defense state all owe a great deal to Asia First internationalism. At home, conservative politicians used the doctrine to better their fortunes among a changing electorate. They continually invoked the “loss” of China to illuminate what they saw as the corrosion of traditional values, namely strict anti-communism and a commitment to the Open Door. As an issue and as an ideal, China helped to bridge the divide between key GOP elites and pro-Chiang activists at the grassroots level. The result was a long-term working relationship that catalyzed the modern conservative movement.

This book compares the political activism of Chinese Americans in New York City and San Francisco, California, between the Great Depression and the advent of the Asian American movement of the late 1960s. It examines Chinese American participation in the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Kuomintang, the Chinese Third Force, the Communist Party, and other organizations against the backdrop of America’s relationship with the Republic of China on Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The book argues that the US-Taiwan alliance and the dominant anti-communism of American domestic politics in the 1950s and 1960s helped establish the limits of Chinese American political activism. Still, the book concludes that these forces neither eliminated political activism in these communities nor ever really suppressed their diverse array of voices. Instead, the distinctive local political cultures of New York and San Francisco ultimately determined how much the Sino-American relationship affected Chinese American politics in each city. In New York, the Tammany Hall political machine rewarded a handful of loyalists but did little for a population that consisted of large number of unlawful entrants known as “paper sons.” This situation enabled the Kuomintang to remain extremely powerful in New York. In contrast, San Francisco Chinese Americans became quite active in local politics, particularly the city’s emerging multiracial liberal movement, and laid the foundation for long term Chinese American political influence in the Bay Area.

From 1972 to 1991 and beyond, detectives working under the supervision of Chicago police commander Jon Burge tortured or otherwise coerced confessions from over 118 black criminal suspects at Area 2 and Area 3 headquarters on the city’s South and Southwest Sides. As early as 1990, an internal investigator concluded, “The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture.” Seeking to clear cases and punish wrongdoers, Burge and his crew regularly employed deception, threats, discomfort, mental stress, beatings, suffocation, mock execution, and electroshock. Nearly all detectives involved were white, virtually all their victims black. Coerced confessions helped convict scores of defendants. Over a dozen wound up on death row, including several who later won their release. Other actors in the criminal justice system facilitated abuse as well, including patrolmen, police supervisors, prosecutors, judges, and elected officials. The Burge scandal later spawned or united various social movements. For over 30 years, a shifting coalition of torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, community activists, journalists, and academics helped corroborate torture allegations, fire Jon Burge, free the wrongfully convicted, win financial settlements, clear Illinois’s death row, abolish the state’s death penalty, send Burge to prison, and win passage of a municipal reparations package. While the Burge scandal reveals the interplay between personal bigotry and structural racism within the criminal justice system, it also shows how ordinary people held perpetrators accountable despite the intransigence of local officials.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago's public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, this book traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, it chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's (CHA) own transformation from the city's most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects' decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, the book argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. The book is a reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. This book, which considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women's liberation, shows that the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters here examines a distinct moment or setting of the women's movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women's health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women's pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery.

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region's chief cash crop: tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, this book demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. The author asks how the myth of the boll weevil's lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. The book brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives.

Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependency on municipal debt, and how the terms of municipal finance structures racial privileges, entrenches spatial neglect, elides democratic input, and distributes wealth and power. In this deeply researched book, we see in vivid detail how beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath its quotidian infrastructure lurked a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, Destin Jenkins offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation arose not only within local politics, but also in banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to these financial arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city. By honing in on financing and its imperatives, Jenkins boldly rewrites the history of modern American cities, revealing the hidden strings that bind debt and power, race and inequity, democracy and capitalism.

Like other industrial cities in the postwar period, Chicago underwent the dramatic population shifts that radically changed the complexion of the urban north. As African American populations grew and white communities declined throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to the city, adding a complex layer to local racial dynamics. This book examines the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era. It reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in the midst of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Over the course of these three decades, through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods, the book demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving their dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores. This book charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, it shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of do-it-yourself. The book provides the history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.

Bulls Markets offers a revised business history of the Chicago Bulls NBA franchise since the late 1970s, with a focus on the team's transition to a new arena, the United Center, in 1994. Journalists and academics praised Bulls executives for using private funds for the construction of the United Center, and for establishing a philanthropic partnership with the surrounding neighborhood. The mainstream story of the Bulls and the United Center thus portrayed franchise owner Jerry Reinsdorf as a paragon of corporate responsibility in an industry typically known for manipulating municipal politicians and fleecing local taxpayers. Available evidence, however, points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the team's business practices contributed mightily to the intensification of economic inequality in Chicago in recent decades. While the Bulls fronted the cash for the United Center's construction, they made most of it back through tax breaks. Instead of taking meaningful steps to promote ancillary economic development around the arena, the Bulls made every possible effort to monopolize local retail activity, up to and including waging a ruthless campaign to put local sidewalk vendors out of business. In the process, they raised prices for tickets and concessions so high that few ordinary Chicagoans could see the team live on anything resembling a regular basis. The book also contends that, by focusing their analyses of the sports business almost exclusively on the industry's relatively unique monopoly structure, economists have missed how larger economic shifts allowed teams like the Bulls to exploit and exacerbate urban inequality.

From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago's character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago's story as a reflection of America's industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, this book explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories, but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape. It documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city's outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, the book demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, this book establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America.

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's “wageworkers' frontier” and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as “hobohemia.” Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. This book tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a new interpretation of the “American century” in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, it breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but also shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. The author shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. This retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over “home” charts the change from “homelessness” to “houselessness.”

Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, this book is an eye-opening account of the inmates' experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria. While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, the book's extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. It highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, the book also exposes the government's aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves. The re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. This book rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.

This book expands and complicates the history of race relations in northern cities by analyzing the little-known and largely forgotten story of Catholic interracialism prior to the modern civil rights movement. Bishop Bernard Sheil created the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) in 1930 as a Catholic version of muscular Christianity, using the glamour of sports to attract thousands of boys and girls from neighborhoods throughout Chicago. A nationally-known figure by the mid-1930s, the cosmopolitan Sheil was the antithesis of Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s anti-Semitic radio priest. Catholic social teaching and New Deal urban pluralism provided the ideological rationale for the CYO, which from its inception welcomed African Americans. Paradoxically, the CYO was organized around the parish—often a bulwark of ethnic identity in the urban North. Roman Catholic tradition regarded each parish as an equal part of one citywide community. CYO participants from Chicago’s Bronzeville, therefore, competed as equals with young people from white ethnic parishes. Interviews with African Americans who took part in the CYO reveal that their participation often resulted in interracial experiences that created opportunities for greater involvement in Chicago’s business community and civic culture heavily influenced by Irish Catholics in the mid-twentieth century. John McGreevy and other scholars of urban history have focused on conflicts between white Catholics and African Americans over neighborhood turf, particularly in the postwar period. Crossing Parish Boundaries, however, reveals a countervailing tradition of Catholic interracial cooperation during the Great Depression and World War II, while arguing it is a model worth reexamining.