History Commons^™

Remembering Appomattox, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Appomattox became ever more elevated in our national imagination not because it resolved what would follow but because everyone could see in it what they wanted. The white South envisioned nothing like the Reconstruction that would follow and thought that their quiet and peaceful surrender here meant that nothing more would happen. They saw Appomattox as the end, as resolution, not as the beginning of a more profound revolution in American life, a revolution in which formerly enslaved men would vote as well as fight, a revolution in which the North would call the shots in American politics and public …

The United States On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The four-year war that eventually descended on the nation seemed impossible only months before it began. Powerful conflicts pulled the United States apart in the decades before 1860, but shared interests, cultures, and identities tied the country together, sometimes in new ways. So confident were they in the future that Americans expected that the forces of cohesion would triumph over the forces of division.

The Village As Cold War Site: Experts, Development, And The History Of Rural Reconstruction, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

This article examines ‘the village’ as a category of development knowledge used by policymakers and experts to remake the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War. The idea of the village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-led social reform, structured efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people from Asia to Latin America and Africa. Rooted in a transnational interwar movement for rural reconstruction, village projects were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by a scientization of development that narrowed the range of experts in the field and by Cold War politics that increasingly …

Narratives Of Development: Models, Spectacles, And Calculability In Nick Cullather's The Hungry World, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

To describe The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia as a history of the green revolution does not begin to convey the ambition and rewards of Nick Cullather's new book. In less than three hundred pages, Hungry World offers a detailed diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history that spans more than a century and three continents. Cullather deepens and revises our understanding of the "green revolution" as a history of the Rockefeller Foundation and its "transfer" of agricultural technology from Mexico to Asia, in part by showing how the green revolution's intellectual and political construction involved a …

‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise And Fall Of The National Afro-American Council,’ By Benjamin R. Justesen, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

The dominance of Booker T. Washington and the loyalty of most African Americans to the Republican Party are often mistaken as markers of black political unanimity at the turn of the twentieth century. Even worse, they are assumed to stand for the whole of African American political life. Benjamin R. Justesen’s story of the struggles to establish and sustain the National Afro-American Council should serve as an important reminder of the tensions, diversity, and energy within black politics in this period. The reminder is so important, and so potential productive, that one wishes that Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall …

The Tide Is Setting Strongly Against Us, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Lincoln's bid for reelection in 1864 faced serious challenges from a popular opponent and a nation weary of war. For a good part of 1864 -- the year he faced reelection -- Abraham Lincoln had little faith that he would win or even be renominated.

"It Was Still No South To Us": African American Civil Servants At The Fin De Siècle, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

If Washingtonians know anything about black civil servants of the early twentieth century, it is that they faced discrimination under President Woodrow Wilson. Beginning in 1913, Wilson’s Democratic administration dismantled a biracial, Republican-led coalition that had struggled since Reconstruction to make government offices places of racial egalitarianism. During Wilson's presidency, federal officials imposed "segregation" (actually exclusion), rearranged the political patronage system, and undercut black ambition. The Wilson administration's policies were a disaster for black civil servants, who responded with one of the first national civil rights campaigns in U.S. history. But to fully grapple with the meaning of federal segregation, …

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

The American Civil War, Emancipation, And Reconstruction On The World Stage, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Americans demanded the world's attention during their Civil War and Reconstruction. Newspapers around the globe reported the latest news from the United States as one vast battle followed another, as the largest system of slavery in the world crashed into pieces, as American democracy expanded to include people who had been enslaved only a few years before.

'Subterranean Evil' And 'Tumultuous Riot' In Buganda: Authority And Alienation At King's College, Budo, 1942, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Staff petitions, sexual and disciplinary scandal and open riot pushed Buganda's leaders to close Budo College on the eve of Kabaka (King) Muteesa II's coronation. The upheaval at the school included a teachers' council that pro-claimed ownership of the school, student leaders who manipulated the headmaster through scandal and school clubs and associations that celebrated affiliation over discipline. Instead of enacting and celebrating imperial partnership and order in complex, well-choreographed coronation rituals, the school's disruption delineated the fractures and struggles over rightful authority, order and patronage within colonial Buganda, marking out a future of tumultuous political transition.

Grandfathers, Grandsons, Morality, And Radical Politics In Late Colonial Buganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Late in 1948, one of the radical Luganda newspapers in Buganda printed Dionizio Sifirwakange's rhetorical and distinctly aggrieved questions: "Has it become a crime for schoolchildren to evince patriotic sentiments? Why does the Government prohibit the assembly of the Bataka at the houses of their 'grandfathers'?"¹

Sifirwakange was complaining about the repressive response of the Kingdom of Buganda and its ally, the Protectorate of Uganda, to a political and social movement whose most visible adherents were the patriotic schoolchildren, along with other youth and men of all ages, who assembled by the thousands at the homes of their grandfathers …

Delaney Amendment, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

In 1958, U.S. Representative James Delaney of New York added a proviso to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act declaring that the Food and Drug Administration cannot approve any food additive found to induce cancer in a person or animal.

Teapot Dome Oil Scandal, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

In October 1929, Albert B. Fall, the former Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, was convicted of accepting bribes in the leasing of U.S. Naval Oil Reserves in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

Worrying About The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

There is no animosity in any of these historical or practical interpretations of the Civil War. It is clear that the North fought for purposes entirely good--for Union and the end of slavery--but Confederate soldiers also win respect for their bravery, their devotion, and their struggle against long odds. They seem to have been playing historical roles for which they are not to blame. The reenactors, the books in stores, and the battlefield tours generally avoid talking about the cause of the war, focusing instead on the common bravery and hardships of soldiers North and South.