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During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, this book mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected—and helped transform—a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility—a heightened moral consciousness of feeling, rooted in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Adam Smith, and including a “moral sense” akin to the physical senses—threads throughout these letters. As the book makes clear, sensibility was the fertile, humanizing ground on which the Adamses not only founded their marriage, but also the “abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity” they and their contemporaries hoped to plant at the heart of the new nation. Bringing together their correspondence with a wealth of fascinating detail about life and thought, courtship and sex, gender and parenting, and class and politics in the revolutionary generation and beyond, the book draws a portrait of a marriage endangered by separation, yet surviving by the same ideas and idealism that drove the revolution itself.

About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically is a long-term history of scientists’ methodological discussions about experimentation in the life sciences. It directs attention to working scientists’ methods discourse, its history and meanings, and its functions in scientific publications. The term “methods discourse” comprises all kinds of methods-related statements in scientific writing, including explicit commitments to experimentalism, descriptions of protocols, and justifications of methodological concepts and strategies. The book examines the complex trajectory of methods discourse from the mid-17th to the early 20th century through the history of snake venom research. Because experiments with poisonous snakes were both challenging and controversial, experimenters produced very detailed descriptions and discussions of their approaches, making venom research uniquely suitable for a long-term history of methodological thought and the various factors impinging on its development. The book offers an analytic framework for the study of methods discourse, its history, and the history of how experimenters organized and presented their thoughts about methods in writings about their experiments.

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?

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences. It shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism. Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, this book is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner—variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book—first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. This history of the daily act of self-reckoning explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples are to those who use them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, the author has penned a biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.

Religious pluralism, the peaceful coexistence of different religious groups, has been such a hallmark of American society that its origins have been taken for granted rather than explained. Examining the earliest phase of English colonization, this book shows that pluralism was not at all the intended or desired outcome of explorers or colonists. On the contrary, it was imagined that the colonies would share the same religion as England. However, the long and contested series of religious and political changes unleashed by the reformation in England, Ireland, and Scotland subverted the creation of religious unity overseas. Tracing the trans-Atlantic relationship between the politics of colonization and the politics of religion, this book shows how religious pluralism emerged out of persistent struggles over the religious life of the English world. Setting the Chesapeake and New England within the context of colonization efforts everywhere from South America to Canada, as well as outposts in India and continental Europe, it shows that the colonies that eventually became part of the United States were not exceptions to the broader pattern of English history but rather part of a spectrum of contested possibilities: and usually on the conservative end of that spectrum. American religious pluralism emerged as the fruit of both royal patronage and an ultimately regicidal revolution that gave Roman Catholics and radical puritans footholds overseas while preventing the establishment of complete religious conformity across the English world. It was an accident, not a national destiny.

A new class of “merchant clerks” appeared on the historical stage in the middle of the nineteenth century, collectively charged with administering the most important production project in America’s emerging capitalist economy, production of the market. In so doing, they manned a labor-intensive regime of writing operations and accounting procedures that transposed a general miscellany of goods into standard sets of commensurable values, re-inventing trade as a far more universal and abstract grid of relations than anything previously known in the marketplaces and seasonal fairs of older systems of exchange. At the same time, these ambitious young men were no less devoted to producing a new version of selfhood as well, one that matched the mobility and mutability so essential to the commodity form. Crossing the thresholds that divided farm and metropolis, homestead and boarding house, and, most significantly, growing things and selling them, they redefined the relationship between “Mammon and Manhood,” and personified that most evocative of modern keywords, human capital.

French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. This book brings these “accidents” to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. The book explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the “inventor” of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, this book focuses on the people, places, and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect. With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, the book maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself.

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Aesthetic Science revises this interpretation, showing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. Seeking to obtain knowledge of the natural world through their senses, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains arising from sensory experience. The book therefore demonstrates that judgments of taste and the pleasures of aesthetic experience had a central role in the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity. It shows that scientists of the later 17th century sought to obtain consensus not only about facts, but also about the pleasures and pains arising from embodied encounters with nature. It thus concludes by calling for a new approach that pays close attention to the role of aesthetic experience in the history of science. Indeed, it argues not only that the sciences of the 17th century had a far more significant role in the emergence of aesthetics and art criticism than has so far been recognized, but also that the conceptual resources of taste and aesthetic judgment can make a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of consensus in scientific communities.

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. This book studies the relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for the author's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. The book examines imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This book brings together historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud's legacy in the United States in the century since his visit. There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud's life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud's work had significant intellectual and social impact. The book provides readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans' psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century.

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.

Over the last several decades, paper maps have been gradually displaced by new electronic navigation systems like GPS. For many geographic tasks, the map’s familiar god’s-eye view from nowhere has thus been exchanged for the much more embedded experience of electronic coordinates, with a new focus on geographic points rather than large areas. This book argues that this shift in geographic knowledge should be seen quite broadly as a change in both the macro-politics of territory and the everyday micro-politics of geographic space. It presents the history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century through three of its most important global projects – the International Map of the World, the Universal Transverse Mercator grid, and the Global Positioning System – and traces a widespread retreat from the authority of representational maps in favor of the pragmatism of GPS and its many predecessors. It also questions the usual understanding of globalization as a battle between national territory and global networks. The advent of GPS does not mean that territory is losing its relevance, but rather that there are now new forms of territory – pointillist, non-exclusive, and provisional – that may or may not align with the sovereign space of states. Conceived narrowly, this book is a deep history of GPS and its relationship to earlier forms of mapping. But more expansively, it is also a cultural and political history of geographic space itself.

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.

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe's social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, this book situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, the author shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

What actually took place in the private laboratory of a mid-seventeenth-century alchemist? How did he direct his quest after the secrets of Nature? What instruments and theoretical principles did he employ? Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as “the father of chemistry,” and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, the book reveals the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the book shows how this American “chymist” translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The intriguing “mystic” Joan Baptista Van Helmont—a favorite of Starkey, Boyle, and even of Lavoisier—emerges from this study as a surprisingly central figure in seventeenth-century “chymistry.” A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the book argues, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution.

This transnational history explores how postwar fishing changed from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. Fueled by the new technologies developed during the war and by government subsidies, nations went fishing on an industrial scale. As Cold War policies hardened, fishing became a territorial claim in the oceans, and many nations, including Japan, the Soviets, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and a host of Eastern European states industrialized their fisheries. Governments provided subsidies to modernize moving fishing from salting to freezing and the creation of new fish forms. Post-war trade agreements linked Icelandic cod and Japanese tuna; as imports of both increased, fishermen in New England and Southern California were priced out of their domestic markets. The massive explosion in fishing power created pressure for nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, to regulate foreign fishing in their waters. The expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War stimulated the globalization of fishing and the creation of international fisheries management. While most histories of fishing deal with the primacy of the Atlantic, this book looks at the post-war movement of boats from the Pacific into the Atlantic.

This book will be the first to offer a comprehensive study of American State capitals. Drawing from a historical geography perspective, it gives an insight into the complex processes leading to the selection of state capitals as well as a first assessment of their subsequent evolution and of their integration to the broader processes of territorial and urban building. The book is divided in three sections. The first addresses state capitals as places of memory and studies the urban fabric as well as their symbolic value. The second section studies the capitals’ selection processes. Searching the most suitable location for a capital revealed the way citizens defined democracy (“the people” seldom had to choose directly), territory (through the multifold concept of centrality), and their relationships with the urban world that was beginning to arise and dominate America. The third section tries to explain the developmental delay of most capitals even with the advent of the knowledge economy which should dwell upon their learned workforce and amenities. After the study of the fate of former capitals (for which heritage plays a large part), the book closes by looking at the real extent of changes in state capitals’ place in today’s United States.

This book asks why 20th century American Catholics stopped building churches that looked back to the middles ages, and began building churches that for the present and the future. It argues that belief in an evolutionary universe, a biological paradigm, united Catholic liturgists and modernist architects, enabling the development of a futurist architecture. The book explores the use of architectural models and theologians' and architects' interest in the latest technological developments. It traces the influence of theologians like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, and Harvey Cox on American Catholics' ideas about worship space. Finally, it examines post-Vatican II renovations and experimentation with the location and arrangement of worship space in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Combining social, cultural, intellectual, and architectural history, the book weaves a story about how American Catholics in a dramatically changing world explored the future of their Church through their ideas about the future of the church building.