Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Oldest Post-Truth? The Rise Of Antisemitism In The United States And Beyond, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Antisemitism, the negative stereotyping and hatred of Jews, has overshadowed Western history for 2000 years. In the 20th century, antisemitism led to the Shoah, the systematic state-sponsored murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies. In recent decades, antisemitism diminished significantly in the Western world, and there was hope that this plague would soon be consigned to the past. On the contrary, the past few years have witnessed a drastic increase of antisemitism in Western societies, often paired with far-right activism, racism, and xenophobia. In 2017 in Charlottesville, there were hundreds of marchers giving Nazi salutes, waving …

Introduction To Antisemitism On The Rise: The 1930s And Today, Ari Kohen, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

We live in uncertain and unsettling times. Tragically, today's global culture is rife with violent bigotry, nationalism, and antisemitism. The rhetoric is not new; it is grounded in attitudes and values from the 1930s and the 1940s in Europe and the United States. Antisemitism on the Rise is a collection of essays by some of the world's leading experts, including Joseph Bendersky, Jean Cahan, R. Amy Elman, Leonard Greenspoon, and Jurgen Matthaus, regarding two key moments in antisemitic history: the interwar period and today. Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher have collected important examples on this crucial topic to illustrate …

Into The Void, Or The Musings And Confessions Of A Redheaded Stepchild Lost In Western Legal History And Found In The Legal Borderlands Of The North American West, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

At my first American Society for Legal History conference in 2014, I listened with rapt attention as keynote speaker Patty Limerick asked: "Is western history legal history ?" Limerick answered in the affirmative, citing the many ways in which law had defined the North American West. Those of us who teach Western history courses can count the legal acts Limerick recited on our fingers and toes: the 1784 Land Ordinance, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the 1790 Trade & Intercourse Act, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and every treaty between American Indians and the federal government on one hand; the Missouri Compromises …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Family Histories From The Strait Salish Borderlands, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919. While some of these choices obscured individual family members from historical records, reading their lives in tandem with other family members’ histories reveals remarkable persistence in the midst of dramatic racial and political transformation. Focused primarily on San Juan Island residents, this article suggests that indigenous and interracial family histories of the Pacific Northwest and other borderland regions in …

Review Of Island Queens And Mission Wives: How Gender And Empire Remade Hawai‘I’S Pacific World, By Jennifer Thigpen, Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In Island Queens and Mission Wives, Jennifer Thigpen argues persuasively for the centrality of women and gender to the encounter between missionaries and Native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century. ... Thigpen offers new contributions to scholarship on missionary enterprises and colonialism by offering close readings of on-the-ground relationships between missionary and Hawaiian women. She successfully shows how women’s cross-cultural relationships within intimate settings became significant sites for the building of diplomatic and political alliances. ... Through its engagement with and extension of scholarship on gender and colonial encounters, Thigpen’s manuscript is a solid and engaging piece of historical scholarship.

Review Of A Generation Removed: The Fostering And Adoption Of Indigenous Children In The Postwar World, By Margaret Jacobs, Catherine E. Rymph

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only …

Review Of A Generation Removed: The Fostering And Adoption Of Indigenous Children In The Postwar World. By Margaret D. Jacobs, Catherine E. Rymph

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only …

“A Man With A Wide Horizon": The Postwar Professional Journey Of Ss Officer Karl Nicolussi-Leck, Gerald Steinacher

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In his biography of SS Obergruppenführer Werner Best, the German historian Ulrich Herbert coined the phrase Ausgrenzung in den Wohlstand, or "exclusion into prosperity." According to Herbert, "for those excluded from politics and public service, there remained the liberal professions and business, mostly provided by old contacts, some dating from their student days.”¹ Yet there are few studies on the postwar professional lives of former high-ranking Nazis and SS officers. Among them are Norbert Frei's edited volume Karrieren im Zwielicht (Careers in the twilight) and a dozen or so biographical studies, such as Herbert's work on Best.² Former …

"In Family Way": Guarding Indigenous Women’S Children In Washington Territory, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The cases discussed here represent very few of the guardianship arrangements that characterized intergenerational and interracial households in territorial Washington, yet the patterns they illustrate correspond with other evidence that allows historians to track the distribution of Indian and mixed- race children in the Puget Sound region. Th e 1880 federal census schedules for counties bordering the Puget Sound reveals the informal guardianship of Native women’s children in ninetytwo households. Among these extralegal arrangements were forty- two households headed by white men, some single like Ed Boggess and others married to white women like Phoebe Judson, who classified the indigenous …

A Testament To Power: Mary Woolsey And Dolores Rodriguez As Trial Witnesses In Arizona's Early Statehood, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In 1913, two women made history when they testified before the all-white, all-male jury of the Superior Court of Yavapai County in the State of Arizona v. Juan Fernandez murder trial. Mary Woolsey, an elderly Yavapai widow, and Dolores Rodriguez, a Mexican single mother of three, established the legal precedent for allowing non-English-speaking, non-citizen women to testify in state courts in Arizona when many other western states still did not grant such privileges to indigenous residents. Woolsey and Rodriguez showed that Arizona's indigenous population were competent, if somewhat problematic, members of Arizona's body politic, and their historic involvement in the …

Teaching Digital History Through The University Archives: The Case Of Nebraska U: A Collaborative History, Peterson Brink, Mary Ellen Ducey, Andrew Jewell, Douglas Seefeldt

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Nebraska U: A Collaborative History (http://unlhistory.unl.edu) is a collaboration between faculty and staff in Archives and Special Collections (Brink, Ducey, and Jewell) and the department of History (Seefeldt). This project engages undergraduates in archival research, historical synthesis, and digital project creation.

Nebraska U uses digital technology to provide a research framework for students exploring the way the study of history is transformed using new media publication forms. Specifically, students in Dr. Seefeldt's "Digital History" course selected a topic from the history of the University; worked with Archives staff to locate materials and thoroughly research that topic; selected items …

"Introduction" To European Immigrants In The American West: Community Histories, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

European immigrants are the forgotten people of the American West. Their stories are not told in the many books, paintings, and movies that have created the mythic West. Immigrants did not easily fit the image of the West as the bastion of unfettered individualism and self-reliance-a region peopled by the free, brave, and pure-battling against the urbanized, industrialized, a,nd economically dominant East. Nor do European immigrants populate the pages of frontier history. Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner opened the field a hundred years ago, general histories of the American frontier have tended to ignore them. Grounded on the Turnerian notion …

The Capitals And Capitols Of Nebraska, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

When Europeans visit the Great Plains region of the United States, they are impressed by the newness of the place. Coming from communities that often are filled with physical evidence of great age, they are reminded that here virtually none of the visible marks of Euroamerican culture are more than a mere century old. Before 1854, the year in which Nebraska was legislated into existence, permanent residence in this place was technically illegal. Except for the never-numerous Indians, a few fur trappers and traders, and some soldiers and their camp followers clustered around Fort Kearny, Nebraska had no population. It …

Ethnicity On The Great Plains: Preface & Introduction, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Immigrants from Europe formed a major element in the population that settled the Great Plains in the nineteenth century; their descendants constitute the majority of persons in many parts of the region today. A century ago, as the agricultural frontier moved across central Nebraska onto what is considered the Great Plains, foreignborn persons consistently formed a much larger proportion of the inhabitants on the western edge of settlement than they did in the state as a whole. Some years later the census of 1890 revealed that in North Dakota, for example, 42.7 percent of the population of that newly admitted …

Legal Restrictions On Foreign Languages In The Great Plains States, 1917-1923, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

A major effect of World War I on American social history was that it focused attention on the nation's apparent difficulty in assimilating the millions of immigrants and their children who had streamed to the United States during the preceding two decades. The national mood, darkened by fears and resentments of long standing and deepened by systematic wartime propaganda, favored the adoption of stringent laws limiting the use of foreign languages, especially in the schools. During the war itself, restrictions were usually extralegal and often the consequences of intense social pressure recklessly applied. After the war, however, many state legislatures …

"Introduction" To The Great Plains: Environment And Culture, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In the pages that follow I have summarized the views of certain selected scholars whose emphases seem to illustrate changing and contrasting interpretations of the interaction of environment and culture on the Great Plains. I have grouped their writings into two inclusive categories. First come those whose conceptual schemes suggest the primacy of environmental variables. I refer to these scholars, perhaps simplistically, as environmentalists, even though this term has acquired a different meaning in recent years. In the second group are several scholars, selected more arbitrarily than the first, whose writings seem to accord more importance to cultural factors. For …

Introduction To Ethnic Voters And The Election Of Lincoln, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

A twofold purpose informs this anthology of essays on ethnic voters in the presidential election of 1860. First, it gathers together a great quantity of factual information about immigrants and politics on the eve of the Civil War. Naturally, the Germans receive the greatest amount of attention. Not only did they rival the Irish in numbers in 1860. but they were also the most diverse ethnic group in America. The essays of this volume also offer much data about politicians and their perceptions of the democratic process, about political parties and the social bases of their support, and about political …

The Origins Of Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Clericalism, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Cannibals - mountebanks - charlatans - pious and whining hypocrites - necromancers - pseudo-Christians - mystery mongers. These are among the epithets which Thomas Jefferson applied to the clergy of the Protestant denominations and of the Roman Catholic Church as well. It was they who "perverted" the principles of Jesus "into an engine for enslaving mankind"; it was the Christian "priesthood" who had turned organized religion into a "mere contrivance to filch wealth and power" for themselves; they were the ones who throughout history had persecuted rational men for refusing to swallow "their impious heresies." This attitude of Jefferson, with …