History Commons^™

Revising The Past, Complicating The Future: The Yushukan War Museum In Modern Japanese History, Takashi Yoshida

History Faculty Publications

In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM’s activities and the 2000 Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, the former associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace and reconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.

The Disneyfication Of New Orleans: The French Quarter As Facade In A Divided City, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

The article discusses the development of New Orleans, Louisiana as a tourist attraction. The author suggests that Hurricane Katrina allowed the public to perceive racial and economic divisions in New Orleans. He suggests the French Quarter of New Orleans was developed for tourism due to its historic architecture. An attempt to attract military bases to the region during World War II failed due to the labor market and competition, leading to a focus on tourism. The author compares the city's appearance to that of Disneyland and suggests urban renewal relocated African Americans to ensure the development of the French Quarter.

Building And Rebuilding New Orleans: Nature, Artifice, And Transformation, J. Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Corridos In Migrant Memory, Jose A. P. Alaniz

History Faculty Publications

As a Mexican American academic, I found that this study hits home. Professor Chew Sanchez's book deals with the power and influence that traditional Mexican ballads known as corridos have on Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and specifically, Mexican immigrants in the United States. The aim of the author is to examine the role of corridos in shaping the cultural memories and identities of transnational Mexican groups, focusing on transnational communities from northern Chihuahua dirough northern Texas and New Mexico.

We Are Not Tijuana: The Valley Protests Washington's Crackdown On Gambling, Robin Robinson

History Faculty Publications

During Prohibition, the US Treasury Department limited the number of hours that international bridges spanning the Rio Grande River were open in an attempt to control such illegal activities as gambling. Brownsville, Texas, typically received an exemption for the bridge between Brownsville and Matamoros, Mexico, by arguing that Matamoros lacked the vice problems that had prompted the border restrictions elsewhere. The article discusses actions taken when, in August 1931, Brownsville was not exempted.

The United States Military Occupation Of Matamoros, Mexico, 1846 - 1848, James Mills

History Faculty Publications

US troops occupied the Mexican border town of Matamoros from 1846 to 1848 during the Mexican-American War. The troops were not welcome, but no serious confrontations occurred. American merchants established stores, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in the town. After the occupation, the army moved to the north side of the Rio Grande and founded a new community called Brownsville. The occupation helped develop the social and commercial relationship between Matamoros and the Texas town of Brownsville.

"This Is Not Dixie:" The Imagined South, The Kansas Free State Narrative, And The Rhetoric Of Racist Violence, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications

This essay explores how white Kansans employed images of the "South" and its association with racist violence in constituting the identity of Kansas as the "Free State" from 1865 until 1914. It argues that prevailing assumptions about the South offered a sectional imaginary through which white Kansans interpreted the racist violence in their own midst. On the one hand, the South, and the violence that occurred there, provided a means to obscure, dismiss, and justify incidents in Kansas, allowing commentators to cultivate a sort of historical amnesia, to deem each subsequent episode an anomaly, the exception that proved the rule …

Danger On The Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism And American Print Culture In The Progressive Era (Book Review), R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Nordstrom, Justin. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. ISBN 9780268036058

Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, And Baptists In Texas (Book Review), R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Barton, Paul. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. ISBN 029271291X1

A Border Community's Unfulfilled Appeals: The Rise And Fall Of The 1840'S Anti-Abolitionist Movement In Cincinnati, Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

This essay explores the nature of the anti-abolition sentiment in Cincinnati, Ohio, through an analysis of a short lived anti-abolition organization and newspaper. The two institutions developed in response to the race riot of 1841 and attempted to address the social and economic concerns of certain Cincinnati citizens.

Review Ofunderwriting: The Poetics Of Insurance In America, 1722-1872, By E. Wertheimer, Mark T. Tebeau

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

(Review) Struggle For Empire: Kingship And Conflict Under Louis The German, 817-76, Frederick S. Paxton

History Faculty Publications

Reviews Eric J. Goldberg's, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–876. (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past.) Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiii, 385; black-and-white figures, genealogical tables, and maps. $47.50.

Review Of Manifest Manhood And The Antebellum American Empire, Gerhard Grytz

History Faculty Publications

Amy Greenberg’s study Manifest Manhood provides an intriguing new interpretation of the meaning of Manifest Destiny and the discourse of American expansionism during the middle part of the nineteenth century. Reversing commonly held historical interpretations, Greenberg convincingly shows that Manifest Destiny continued to hold its appeal to Americans after the Mexican-American War. Proponents of aggressive expansionism viewed the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Central America as the “new frontiers” in need of conquering. Between the conclusion of the Mexican- American War and the outbreak of the Civil War, the practice of filibustering, the invasion of foreign territory by private American mercenaries …

Review Of The Southern Journey Of A Civil War Marine: The Illustrated Note-Book Of Henry O. Gusley, Charles V. Waite

History Faculty Publications

Henry O. Gusley was a Union enlisted man who kept a diary of his experiences as part of the Marine contingent on board the steamships USS Westfield and USS Clifton from May 1862 through September 1863. His notebook fell into Confederate hands when Gusley and hundreds of others surrendered after the humiliating Federal defeat at Sabine Pass. The Galveston Tri-Weekly News began printing passages from Gusley’s diary in serial form, and these entries became popular reading among Confederate Texans. Ironically, Gusley himself wrote to the paper from Camp Groce, the Confederate prison camp near Hempstead, to request copies of his …

The Power Of Position: Bejing University, Intellectuals, And Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Weston, Timothy B. The Power of Position: Bejing University, Intellectuals, And Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

ISBN 9780520237674

Clerical Marriage And Territorial Reformation In Ernestine Saxony And The Diocese Of Merseburg In 1522-1524., Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Imagining Serengeti: A History Of Landscape Memory In Tanzania From Theearliest Times To The Present, Christopher A. Conte, Jan Bender Shetler

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History, Christopher A. Conte, Gregory Maddox

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'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.

Black And On The Border, Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas Iii, Anne Sarah Rubin

History Faculty Publications

In an attempt to bring together aspects of the war that are often kept separate, this essay focuses on the region of the United States that is often ignored when explaining the onset of the Civil War: the border where the upper South met the lower North. This area--a third of the nation--went into the war with uncertainty but then gave itself over to the conflict, playing a crucial role start to finish as battlefield and supplier of soldiers, materiel, and leaders. Specifically, this essay looks at the border between Virginia and Pennsylvania, a region almost arbitrarily divided by the …

In The Shadow Of The Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Henriot, Christian and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds. In the Shadow of the Rising Sim: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Policing Chinese Politics: A History, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Dutton, Michael. Policing Chinese Politics: A History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

ISBN 9780822334774

Review Of Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, And American Environmentalism, By S. Schrepfer, Mark T. Tebeau

History Faculty Publications

Review of Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism, by S. Schrepfer

The Business Of War: Military Mobilization And The State, 1861-1865, Harold S. Wilson

History Faculty Publications

This is essentially an institutional study of the Union Quartermaster Department in the American Civil War, and its central thesis is that “modern American business and government were shaped directly and indirectly by a military model of administration that had been on display in 1861–1865” (p. 4).

Fascism's European Empire: Italian Occupation During The Second World War, Maura E. Hametz

History Faculty Publications

Davide Rodogno offers an illuminating appraisal of Fascist Italy’s ambitions, achievements, and failures in the occupation of Mediterranean Europe from 1940 to 1943.

In War And Famine: Missionaries In China's Honan Province In The 1940s, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Christensen, Erleen J. In War and Famine: Missionaries in Chinas Honan Province in the 1940s. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-07735-28523-9.

Book Review: Empire Of Ashes, Jeanne Reames

History Faculty Publications

Three historical novels about Alexander the Great were published in 2004 to coincide with the November release of Oliver Stone’s epic film on the conqueror: The Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield, who is best known for Gates of Fire (1998) about the Battle of Thermopylae; Queen of the Amazons by Judith Tarr, who wrote about Alexander once before in Lord of the Two Lands (1993); and Empire of Ashes by relative newcomer Nicholas Nicastro.

The European And The American University, Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Invited lecture at the University of the Balearic Isles, Spain, 7 February 2007, exploring positive and negative features of the contemporary American higher education scene to be weighed by European reformers.

Review Of Seldom Heard: Ranchers, Ranchos And Rumors Of The South Texas Brush Country, Thomas A. Britten

History Faculty Publications

Nationally recognized jewelry designer, photographer, and Hebbronville native Dian L. Malouf provides a second installment of her ongoing romance with the ranchers of the Texas brush country in Seldom Heard. Reminiscent of her first tome, Cattle Kings of Texas (Beyond Words Publishing, 1991), Seldom Heard is a “coffee table book” that provides what might be called a “romantic eulogy” to the industrious, entrepreneurial, and at times, eccentric behavior of twenty-five ranching families living in the rough mesquite and cactus riddled country south of San Antonio. Malouf views these ranchers in much the same way as late-nineteenth-century photographers perceived Native Americans--as …

The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours Of History And Memory In Japan, China, And The U.S., Takashi Yoshida

History Faculty Publications

In Japan, China, the United States and beyond, arguably no Japanese wartime atrocity against China is more widely known than the Nanjing Massacre. [1] Whatever the significance of mere name recognition, however, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre are profoundly complex. Indeed, even the phrase “Nanjing Massacre” (hereafter NM) remains contested, and to this day there are circles within which the words cannot be spoken without stirring deep feeling and disagreement.