ALBERT

Description: This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies.From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century.Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement.Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law.Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenthcentury America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the freethought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for presentday liberation trends.

Description: Stretching from November 1963 to January 1969, the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson was marked both by division and tumult and by significant accomplishments. In this volume, Robert Divine has brought together seven senior scholars who, in new essays, explore aspects of domestic and foreign policy during the Johnson years. This collection is a sequel to Divine’s earlier volume (originally published as Exploring the Johnson Years).The seven essays that compose Volume Two, together with Divine’s incisive and perceptive historiographical overview, offer new insights into Johnson’s complex character and leadership style. The LBJ that emerges from these pages is a very human figure who understands the corrosive, pervasive impact of the Vietnam War on his administration and who struggles to try to preserve the domestic programs he fought so long and hard to achieve.In exploring the antiwar movement, tax and foreign economic policies, environmental and health care questions, and the space program, these essays demonstrate how domestic issues were critically affected by the Vietnam War and provide a fuller understanding of Johnson’s vital but flawed legacy to the nation.

Description: Lucius Polk Brown was a professional chemist who became a bureaucrat in the field of public health during the Progressive era, when middleclass reformers first attempted to order American society through integrated systems. In his native state of Tennessee, between 1908 and 1915 Brown created a public health enforcement agency, began educating the masses to public health needs, waged flamboyant campaigns against those who violated the laws, and attracted widespread support for pure food and drug control. Moving on to become director of the Bureau of Food and Drugs in the New York City Department of Health in 1915, he continued his battle for public health reform amidst the maze of government agencies and political power struggles surrounding Tammany Hall.In Many respects Brown was typical of Progressive reformers. A middleclass, AngloSaxon Protestant and a professional, he represented a link between the nineteenthcentury agrarian and the twentiethcentury urbanite. More importantly, Brown exemplified a new character on the American scene: a scientist out of the agriculturalexperimentstation mold entering public life, ready to challenge politicians on their own ground.This book contains fresh insights on the history of the public health movement in America, one area of reform that has not received the attention it deserves. Except for incidental references, the major figures of food and drug regulation at the local level have been largely ignored by historians. Lucius Polk Brown’s quest for pure food and drugs is representative of what municipal and state officials, as scientific people, encountered when they fought for the passage of new laws, struggled to enforce existing ones, and battled with the politicians, quacks, ignorance that threatened their efforts.Brown’s diversified career provides a unique opportunity for studying a scientific reformer caught up in the political turmoil of the Progressive era. His experience in government service spanned twelve years and touched on two dissimilar political systems. In focusing on Brown’s struggles, achievements, and failures, Margaret Ripley Wolfe provides a comparative study of state and municipal health administrations, of bureaucratic development in a rural southern state and a northern metropolis. For that reason this book should be of interest to political scientists and public health officials as well as to social historians and students of the Progressive era.

Description: Should Frederick Jackson Turner be revered as “the father of western history” or reviled as a misguided advocate of a frontier spirit and rugged individualism that denied cultural diversity and produced widespread environmental destruction? Dividing into campus over the issue, western historians place him everywhere from one end of the spectrum to the other.In this provocative new interpretation of Turner’s life, work, and legacy, Wilbur Jacobs challenges the views of traditionalists and views of traditionalists and revisionists alike. From extensive research in the Turner archives, a nationwide search for additional Turner correspondence, interviews with historians, and a lifetime of collecting Turner anecdotes, Jacobs chronicles Turner’s professional (and sometimes personal) bequest through 100 years of Western historical writing.Jacobs adds his voice to the heated debate by mixing a sophisticated critique of historical writing with stories of professional intrigue—the fights to protect Turner’s legacy, limit access to the Turner archives, and control the Western history Association. He traces the intellectual development of Turner’s frontier theory; explores the intense rivalry between two major Turnerian disciples, Frederick Merk and Ray A. Billington, as they vied for control of Turner’s legacy; and analyzes the efforts of new western historians who seek to erase Turner and Billington from the landscape of what is now called the history of the “West.”Balanced in his assessments, Jacobs treats Turner and his disciples with a sympathetic yet critical eye. He points out Turner’s limitations in dealing with environmental, racialethnic, and urban themes as well as the shortcomings of Merk, Billington, and other Turnerians. At the same time, however, Jacobs illuminates the major contributions of their work.Despite their intense differences, Jacobs argues, all western historians remain inextricably linked by Turner’s legacy.

Description: Spurred by the Gold Rush of 1859, settlers of diverse backgrounds and nationalities trekked to Colorado and began building towns. Existing accounts of their struggles and those of townbuilders throughout the American West focus on boomorbust economics, rampant boosterism, and bitter social conflicts. This, according to sociologist Richard Hogan, is not the whole story.In Class and Community in Frontier Colorado Hogan offers a fresh perspective on the frontier townbuilding experience. He argues that townbuilding in Colorado was not, as some have suggested, monopolized by local boosters or national business interests. It was, instead, a complex, dynamic process that reflected competition, cooperation, and conflict among various socioeconomic classes, and between local and national business interests as well.Hogan shows how farmers, ranchers, miners, tradesmen, merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, land speculators, and eastern investors all vied for control in six of Colorado’s emerging urban centers: Denver, Central City, Greeley, Golden, Pueblo, and Canon City. Meticulously he traces the conflicts and coalitions that arose in and among these groups.By combining historical sociology with local history, Hogan’s study challenges current thinking about economic development, class structure and conflict, political partisanship, collective action, and social change in the American West.

Description: The Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears” and the forced migration of other Southern tribes during the 1830s and 1840s were the most notorious consequences of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. Less well known is the fact that many tribes of the Old Northwest territory were also forced to surrender their lands and move west of the Mississippi River.By 1850, upwards of 10,000 displaced Indians had been settled “permanently” along the wooded streams and rivers of eastern Kansas. Twenty years later only a few hundred—mostly Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Chippewas, Munsees, Iowas, Foxes, and Sacs—remained.Joseph Herring’s The Enduring Indians of Kansas recounts the struggle of these determined survivors. For them, the “end of Indian Kansas” was unacceptable, and they stayed on the lands that they had been promised were theirs forever.Offering a good counterpoint to Craig Miner’s and William Unrau’s The End of Indian Kansas, Herring shows the reader a shifting set of native perspectives and strategies. He argues that it was by acculturation on their own terms—by walking the fine line between their traditional ways and those of the whites—that these Indians managed to survive, to retain their land, and to resist the hostile intrusions of the white world. The story of their epic struggle to survive will place a new set of names in the pantheon of American Indian heroes.

Description: Word spread across the southern farm country, and into the minds of those who labored over cotton or sugar crops, that the day of reckoning was near at hand, that the Lord had answered black prayers with the offer of deliverance in a western Eden. In this vast state where Brown had caused blood to flow in his righteous wrath, there was said to be land for all, and land especially for poor blacks who for so long had cherished the thought of a tiny patch of America that they could call their own. The soil was said to be free for the taking, and even better, passage to the prairie Canaan was rumored to be available to all. . . . Thus began a pellmell land rush to Kansas, an unreasoned, almost mindless exodus from the South toward some vague ideal, some western paradise, where all cares would vanish.In Search of Canaan tells the story of the Black migration from areas of the South to Kansas and other Midwestern and Western states that occurred soon after the end of Reconstruction. Working almost entirely from primary sources—letters of some of the black migrants, government investigative reports, and black newspapers—Robert G. Athearn describes and explains the “Exoduster” movement and sets it into perspective as a phenomenon in Western history.The book begins with details of Exodusters on the move. Athearn then fills in the background of why they were moving; relates how other people—Black and white, Northern and Southern—felt about the movement; examines political considerations; and finally, evaluates the episode and provides an explanation as to why it failed. According to Athearn, the exodus spoke in a narrower sense of Black emigrants who sought frontier farms, but in the main it told more about a nation whose wounds had been bound but had not yet healed. The Republicans, without any issues of consequence in 1880, gave the flight national importance in the hope that it would gain votes for them and, at the same time, reduce the South’s population and hence its representation in Congress. Thousands of Black Americans, many of them former slaves, were deluded by false promises made by individual interests. As the hawkers of glad tidings beckoned to the easily convinced, the word “Kansas” became equated with the word “freedom.” Emotional, often biblical, overtones gave the movement millenarian flavor, and Kansas became the unwilling focus of a revitalized national campaign for Black rights.Athearn describes the social, political, economic, and even agricultural difficulties that Exodusters had in adapting to white culture. He evaluates the activities of Black leaders such as Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, northern politicians such as Kansas Governor John P. St. John, and refugee aid organizations such as the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association. He tells the Exoduster story not just as a southern story—the turmoil in Dixie and flight from the scenes of a struggle—but especially as a western story, a meaningful segment of the history of a frontier state. His remarkably objective, as well as suspenseful, account of this unusual episodes contributes significantly to Kansas history, to western history, and to the history of Black people in America.

Description: Challenging carvedinstone tenets of Christianity, deism began sprouting in colonial America in the early eighteenth century, was flourishing nicely by the American Revolution, and for all intents and purposes was dead by 1811. Despite its hasty demise, deism left a theological legacy. Christian sensibility would never be quite the same.Bringing together the works of six major American deists—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, Elihu Palmer, and Philip Frenau—an dthe Frechman Comte de Volney, whose writings greatly influenced the American deists, Kerry Walters has created the fullest analysis yet of deism and rational religion in colonial and early America. In addition to presenting a chronological collection of several works by each author, he provides a description of deism’s historical roots, its major themes, its social and political implications, and the reasons for its eventual demise as a movement.Essential readings from the three major deistic periodicals of the period—Temple of Reason, Prospect, and the Theophilanthropist—also are included in the volume. This is the first time they have been reprinted since their original publication.American deism is more than merely an antiquated philosophical position possessing only historical interest, Walters contends. Its search for a religion based upon the ideals of reason, nature, and humanitarianism, rather than the blind faith, scriptural inerrancy, and miracles preached by Christian churches at the time, continues to offer insight of real significance.

Description: Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a panorama on a continental canvas: the Great Plains of North America, stretching from Texas to Alberta. Onto this surface the author lays the large features of regional practice in the harvesting and threshing of wheat during the days before the combined harvester—harvesting with binder and header, threshing with bull thresher and steam engine. Into the picture he places the key figures who accomplished the task of gathering the grain—the farm men and women, the custom threshermen, and the bindlestiffs, or itinerant laborers. Affectionately he sketches the small details of folklife that comprised the everyday work and culture of the wheat belt—building shocks, loading racks, constructing stacks, pitching bundles into the separator, hauling water to the engine, drinking deep from the crockery water jug.Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a profusely illustrated study of a complex, vigorous regional culture concerned with the production of wheat—a culture that centered around the annual harvest and declined with the advent of the combine. This is an examination of the interaction of culture, environment, and technology with import for the fields of agricultural history and regional history. More than that, with its grassroots research, its descriptions of tools and customs, and its lavish illustrations, it is a recreation of a proud phase of regional life previously captured only in yellowed albumen photographs.

Description: The story of the westward expansion of this country does not stop with the hardships encountered by travelers on the Mormon Trail, the discomforts endured by early settlers in sod houses, the bravery of the Pony Express riders, the romantic solitude of the cowboys, or the sufferings of the Indians forced to abandon their homes bleak and alien country. Much has been written about these colorful episodes and, through the courtesy of Hollywood and TV, has been brought into millions of homes in living color. But what happened to the people, including the Indians, who survived the great raid on Fort X, the bitter winters and scorching summers spent in primitive housing, the terrible loneliness and lack of communication with eastern kin? What did migrants do when they reached the end of the Mormon Trail? And did the Cherokees’ Trail of tears become a neverending journey from one “relocation” to another? How did people develop and accommodate themselves to an environment which was itself constantly altered by an everchanging society?In these essays we find that tragedy and joy, victory and defeat, human fulfillment and human degradation are visible in roughly equal proportions in the story of the Americanization of the West: that the goals, both realistic and unrealistic, of one group, society, or culture are frequently pursued only at the expense of other groups; and that the skeletons in the closet of American history abound to a greater extent than a nation convinced of its own virtue is willing to admit. Racism has plagued the nation since its inception, and exploitation of one group by another was sadly a part of the Western frontier. However, there was a freshness and vigor in the history of the West. Young railroads continued to grow, linking productive farms with brawling cities. New businesses and new political parties emerged, all contributing to the growth of the region that Stephen A. Douglas called the “adhesive of the Union.”This is a fascinating collection that serves to illuminate both the tragedies and accomplishments of the westward movement.