December 2024 Acquisitions

Books:
Andy Babiuk, Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four's Instruments from Stage to Studio, 2015.
Brian Michael Bendis, Jinx, 2001.
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2015.
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, 2004.
Tamron Hall with Lish Steiling, A Confident Cook: Recipes for Joyous, No-Pressure Fun in the Kitchen, 2024.
Tini Howard et al, Catwoman Vol. 4: Nine Lives, 2024.
Val McDermid, 1989, 2023.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851, 1981.
Elseworlds: Superman Vol .1, 2018.

Movies:
The Aristocrats, 2005.
The Ipcress File, 1965.

Music:
Archies, The Archies Christmas Album, 2008.
Bad Brains, I Against I, 1986.
BellRays, Meet the BellRays, 2002.
Redd Kross, Red Cross EP, 2020.
Various, Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree, 1997.

"America's First Poster Child"

"In March 1855, young Mary was taken to the offices of the New-York Daily Times, where reporters looked her over and expressed 'astonishment' that this child was 'held a slave.' Today, people are similarly surprised when I show them the daguerreotype of Mary and I point out she was born into slavery. They react the same as people did a century and a half ago, revealing that they still harbor some of the assumptions about race and slavery that Sumner tapped into when he first put Mary onstage."

Jessie Morgan-Owens at Smithsonian tells the story of Mary Mildred Williams.

"To Obey the Law While Respecting Themselves"

"In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America's long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live."

Andrew Delbanco at The Atlantic connects the 1850s to today.

"They Are Footnoted as if They Were Twenty or More Years Younger"

"In disciplinary terms, the secret to these books' success is their position at the hinge of the history profession's adjustment to the new social history. Both Foner and Howe deftly wove together elements of the emerging paradigm with the strongest aspects of the old. More concretely, their books emulated the sweep and liveliness of the mid-century classics of American Studies, with its confidence in the representativeness of 'typical' or 'leading' men—even if neither book sought to circumscribe as large a subject as 'the American Mind,' both books burned with the same ambition to capture the 'Republican Mind' or the 'Whig Mind' in the round: as a political, intellectual, religious, and social phenomenon. This unspecialized or holistic approach was the most valuable legacy that Howe and Foner took from the old paradigm's leading practitioners (Hofstadter, Commager, Welter, et al.), because it set them apart from the more focused monographs of the intellectual historians, political historians, or social historians to come."

Andy Seal at U.S. Intellectual History Blog praises Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War and Daniel Walker Howe's The Political Culture of the American Whigs.

"Protection of Slavery From the Perceived Threat to Its Long-Term Survival Posed by Lincoln’s Election in 1860 Was, in Fact, the Dominant Theme in Secessionist Rhetoric"

"As Gary Gallagher notes in his introduction to The Myth of the Lost Cause, 'White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant.' Some proponents of the Lost Cause remained candid about the racial ideology that sustained the Confederacy. The unrepentant Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote the first history of the Confederacy, with the appropriate title The Lost Cause. The war had ended slavery, Pollard acknowledged, but it 'did not decide negro equality…. This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race.'¹⁷ In a speech to Confederate veterans in 1890, a former captain in the 7th Georgia Volunteer Infantry echoed Pollard: 'We fought for the supremacy of the white race in America.'"

In a 2001 New York Review of Books article, James M. McPherson looks at publications concerning the cause of the Civil War.

"Of No Party or Clique"

"On May 5, 1857, a group of Boston Brahmins gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel and decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns. These men, united in their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names, included such eminences as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. They did not set out to exclude women from the gathering; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served."

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic marks the 160th anniversary of The Atlantic.

"A Thinly Disguised Substitute for Slavery"

"The system worked as follows: Local ranchers and vineyard owners started paying some or all of the wages owed to their Indian laborers in alcohol. The Native Americans then got drunk off the alcohol and American lawmen arrested them for drunkeness. The next morning, after sobering up, the Indians were auctioned off to local ranchers and vineyard owners who would post their bail in exchange for one week of forced servitude. At the end of the week, if the Indians performed their work satisfactorily, one third of the sale price was given to the laborer. Of course, this payment was usually in the form of more alcohol. So the vicious cycle of alcohol-induced arrest and resulting servitude often repeated itself."

Robert Petersen at KCET-TV's "Lost LA" discusses the exploitation of Native Americans in mid-nineteenth century Los Angeles.

"American Slavery Could No Longer Be Hidden From the Rest of the World"

"This was a rhetorical device, however, used to set up the glaring contrast between what the founders did for themselves and the condition of black people at that time. In 1776, he noted, many people viewed George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the others as dangerous subversives and insurgent upstarts despite British tyranny.
"However, with the hindsight of 1852, he said, it was no longer problematic to see 'that America was right, and England wrong.'
"Likewise, Douglass noted, in 1852, abolitionism was considered a dangerous and subversive political proposition. The implication here was that future generations would consider his anti-slavery stance patriotic, just, reasonable—and necessary."

Herbert Dyer, Jr., in Counterpunch discusses Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."

Christopher Wilson in Smithsonian investigates "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the life of Francis Scott Key.

And Robert G. Parkinson in The New York Times looks at slavery, Native Americans, and the Declaration of Independence.

James Livingston reponds to Parkinson at Politics and Letters.

"Has There Ever Been Another Independence Day Speech to Match It?"

"In the end, the promise of the Declaration could not be delivered without force of arms. The contradictions between freedom and slavery were etched so deeply into the nation that no orator's tongue could resolve them. Still, Douglass called down the storm, whirlwind, and earthquake in the attempt, and his oration deserves a place of honor in the American canon. It would please the wrathful prince to receive the recognition that is his due; though he would surely be careful to accept it only through faintly pursed lips. And then, with that tight smile, he might wonder if we too would be rash enough to ask him to speak on our Fourth."


James West Davidson in Slate analyzes Frederick Douglass's speech from July 5, 1852.

"History Can Be as Stirring as the Most Gripping Fiction"

"This was the period when the term underground railroad came into widespread use, and if infuriated Southerners tended to overestimate the scope and power of ad hoc arrangements that helped perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 runaway slaves during that decade (a pitiful percentage of the 4 million enslaved), they accurately perceived that legal maneuvers and covert action combined to undermine what they saw as their sacred property rights."


Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

"What’ll Become of Me?"

"What became of this girl, Northup’s close acquaintance and one of the major figures in his book, who was terrorized by her master and mistress? Did she succumb to one of the bouts of disease that swept the Louisiana-bayou slave communities? Did Epps’s severe beatings or his wife’s unhinged jealousy take their toll, or did he perhaps sell her some time after 1853? Was she secreted away by members of the Underground Railroad? Did she survive until emancipation rolled through the area via the Red River Campaign in 1864, then travel elsewhere? Or did she remain in Louisiana?"


Katie Calautti at Vanity Fair tries to find out what happened to Patsey from Solomon Northrup's memoir, Twelve Years a Slave.

"I Would Exterminate"

"Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri 'hyper-violent,' making it a 'uniquely different wartime experience' from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, 'bushwhackers,' carried connotations of a different kind of fighting—attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer 'concocted' the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part 'to legitimize the brutality' of the Missouri guerrillas."

Nicole Etcheson in The New York Times discusses Confederate William Clarke Quantrill.

"Both Stowe and Tom Deserve Our Reconsideration"

"But this view is egregiously inaccurate: the original Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an 'Uncle Tom.'"

David S. Reynolds in The New York Times revisits Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"

A-Mouldering in the Grave

"After decades of mistrust and recrimination over the conflict between slavery and free labor, many in the North and South now found themselves even more fundamentally at odds. As Northerners increasingly hailed Brown as a hero, panicky Southerners execrated him as the devil himself."

Steven Lubet in Salon marks the sesquicentennial of John Brown's Raid.

Boxed Out

"And even the casual fan won't notice that he's speaking a kind of code when he says, Jeff Francoeur went four-for-four. For this we owe at least a tip of the cap to an Englishman eager to champion his new homeland's answer to cricket as printed a 150 years ago this summer."

Mike Pesca of NPR's Morning Edition reports on the sesquicentennial of the baseball box score and its innovator, Henry Chadwick.

Lincoln Logged

In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 and The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Ronald C. White, Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone's Lincoln on Race & Slavery, and John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And Kaplan, Gates, and Stauffer (along with Michael Kazin) respond.

Honestly

"In the wake of the 2008 election and on the eve of an inaugural address with 'a new birth of freedom,' a phrase borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, as its theme, the Lincoln we should remember is the politician whose greatness lay in his capacity for growth. Much of that growth stemmed from his complex relationship with the radicals of his day, black and white abolitionists who fought against overwhelming odds to bring the moral issue of slavery to the forefront of national life."

In The Nation, Eric Foner ponders Abraham Lincoln during the bicentennial of the former president's birth.

And on his PBS show in February, Bill Moyers interviews Foner.

Debating Society

"As an exemplar of the gauzy distortions of hindsight, Guelzo cites late media scholar Neil Postman's pronouncement that where Lincoln-Douglas embodied a literary oratory and belonged to 'the Age of Exposition,' Nixon-Kennedy and subsequent made-for-TV clashes were nothing but creatures of 'the Age of Show Business.'
"Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should know better than to traffic in such nostalgia; the Lincoln-Douglas contest, after all, provided plenty of entertainment, too. Guelzo's feat is that he does more than just resist the romanticized view of the event. He takes on with equal relish the counterclaim, widely accepted by academics, that the Lincoln-Douglas encounters were simply the trashy 'political theater' of a pre-wired era. While some historians have argued that the turnout at debates like these reflected simply the robust energies of the party machines, which hustled out crowds and plied them with food and drink, Guelzo gives the debates their popular due.
"He does so by locating them within the context of the 1858 senatorial campaign, enfolding them in a seamless, if sometimes heavy-going, narrative. He also grounds them in confident analyses of the period's political culture: the state of the parties, the prevalent style of campaigning and public speaking, and the issues that voters worried about—above all, the debate over slavery's expansion into the American West."

David Greenberg reviews Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America in Slate.