Project MUSE®: Reviews in American History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Reviews in American History.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 23 (1995) through current issueLatest Articles: Reviews in American HistoryTWOProject MUSE®Reviews in American History1080-66280048-7511Latest articles in Reviews in American History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The New Origins Debate: Looking Back at 1619 in 2019–2021, and Beyond
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985624
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No one expected the blowup over slavery, history, and American origins in 2019, much less for it to take the strange shape it did. Even professional specialists in early American history expressed shock—and sometimes dismay. After all, The 1619 Project made an exposé out of a chestnut that early Americanists had picked over for half a century.Historians long debated when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, whether or not they were enslaved for life, and—most controversially—whether anti-Black racism preceded and caused slavery’s rise or could be better characterized as its result. This earlier iteration of the “Origins Debate” had fallen out of style by the early 2010s, if not sooner. The 1619 Project
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallThe New Origins Debate: Looking Back at 1619 in 2019–2021, and Beyond2026-03-16text/htmlen-USThe New Origins Debate: Looking Back at 1619 in 2019–2021, and Beyond2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®948842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Bewilderment and Darkness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985625
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There’s a story about a man who took a boat into a region beset with horrific violence. People were killing each other everywhere. The area was awash with blood. No one was safe because everyone had lost their way, and the horror and chaos were impossible to ignore. But the man on the boat brought with him a message of Peace, Power, and the Good Mind. He cleansed thoughts, recruited followers, and taught ceremonies of condoling, transforming, alliance building, and governing. In the end, thanks to his teachings, even the most violent people were remade, and “places of great danger” became “a single place of peace and safety.” What the man left behind functions as “the road map showing how both the leaders and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallBewilderment and Darkness2026-03-16text/htmlen-USBewilderment and Darkness2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®291532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16A Diabolical Country
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985626
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In April 1781, Charles O’Hara, second in command of British troops in the southern colonies under Lord Cornwallis, wrote to the Duke of Grafton updating him on the progress of the war. The previous few months had proved frustrating to British forces operating in the Carolinas. O’Hara detailed a number of challenges, but chief among them was the region’s physical environment. The terrain in North Carolina, “a very mountainous Country, almost a continued thick Forrest, cut with numberless Broad, Deep, and rapid Waters,” in particular ensured that the “movements of the Army would be attended with many difficulties.” Lord Cornwallis determined to make the army more mobile and led by example. “Burning all of his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallA Diabolical Country2026-03-16text/htmlen-USA Diabolical Country2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®268562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Beyond Consent: Sexual Violence, Slavery, and the Law in Antebellum New Orleans
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985627
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In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Saidiya Hartman shows how the sexual violence of chattel slavery confounded the legal definitions and moral dimensions of consent. In some cases, an assailant forcibly violated the enslaved person, as when Celia’s new owner violated her just after her purchase. Routine horrors like that one reinforced the contemporary gendered racial hierarchy as well as subsequent ideas about how sexual violation under slavery worked. However, not all sex across status under slavery took this form, even for Celia. What of its alternate—though no less exploitative—aspects? As Hartman asks, “Can [the enslaved woman] use or wield sexuality
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallBeyond Consent: Sexual Violence, Slavery, and the Law in Antebellum New Orleans2026-03-16text/htmlen-USBeyond Consent: Sexual Violence, Slavery, and the Law in Antebellum New Orleans2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®322742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16The End?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985628
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Historians of Reconstruction have traditionally devoted much attention to defining the period’s chronological boundaries. The dual processes of re-integrating the rebellious states into the Union and addressing the consequences of emancipation began well before the end of hostilities, whenever that was, and the conventional end date of 1877 has long been questioned. Historians of the Civil War have obsessed less over this matter. The start of the conflict seems straightforward enough (though some would take issue with the firing on Fort Sumter as the beginning), whereas the term “Appomattox” barely requires elaboration. Historians have been fully cognizant of what Grant and Lee did, and didn’t do, in Wilmer and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallThe End?2026-03-16text/htmlen-USThe End?2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®310992026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Nature, Nature Everywhere
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985629
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The “idea of nature,” wrote the Welsh literary critic Raymond Williams more than four decades ago, “contains an extraordinary amount of human history.” Williams traced the shifting meanings and uses of the word “nature” from western antiquity through early modern England, the industrial revolution, and the environmentalism of the late twentieth century in order to make legible the power relations simultaneously imbedded in the word and obscured by it. He was particularly attentive to the ways in which England’s agrarian and industrial elites used ideas of nature to make their own rule appear inevitable and uncontested. An uncritical use of the term “nature,” he demonstrated, left it[v]ery difficult to recognize all
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallNature, Nature Everywhere2026-03-16text/htmlen-USNature, Nature Everywhere2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®255362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Educational History and the Long El Movimiento
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985630
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In 2010, the Arizona legislature passed a bill that restricted teaching Ethnic Studies in general and effectively ended the La Raza/Mexican American Studes program in the Tucson School District in particular. House Bill (HB) 2281 ended an educational program that was tied to a key civil rights demand from the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement—El Movimiento—in Arizona in the 1960s. The Ethnic Studies ban in Arizona prompted a debate about ethnic studies across the nation. After HB 2281 was deemed illegal in 2017, ethnic studies mandates, graduation requirements, and curriculum expansions were underway in states such as California, Texas, and Minnesota. Popularized by the widely used 2011 documentary Precious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallEducational History and the Long El Movimiento2026-03-16text/htmlen-USEducational History and the Long El Movimiento2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®162092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Last Bite at the Big Apple
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985631
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The first two volumes of this Oxford University Press series established Mike Wallace as the foremost historian of New York City. The first, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998), which earned a Pulitzer Prize in History for Wallace and his co-author, the late Edward G. Burrows, covers the period from the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624 to the consolidation of Manhattan and four “outer boroughs” into the New York City we know today. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this monumental volume of nearly 1,400 pages easily surpasses all prior attempts to capture the multi-faceted and complex history of America’s largest city. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallLast Bite at the Big Apple2026-03-16text/htmlen-USLast Bite at the Big Apple2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®218412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16The Ambiguities of National Security
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985632
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“National security” is a phrase so often invoked in American public rhetoric that it is easy to assume we all know what it denotes. Yet the moment one attempts to define it, its meaning becomes elusive. Does it signify the country’s safety from territorial invasion? Is that the ultimate reason for the far-flung network of American alliances and military deployments, hegemonic relationships, and involvement in overseas conflicts over the course of the late 19th to early 21st centuries? Or does national security encompass the defense beyond this country’s borders of the political values that are supposed to lie at the foundation of American national identity? And what of domestic threats to the well-being and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallThe Ambiguities of National Security2026-03-16text/htmlen-USThe Ambiguities of National Security2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®390522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16The Rebranding of Hubert Humphrey
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985633
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It is no secret that liberals mythologize their own. JFK, FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt. But Hubert Humphrey? Lyndon Johnson’s lapdog? The also-ran who believed compromise was a virtue? Who cozied up to segregationist Lester Maddox? By the time he was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Humphrey seemed like a Cold War sop, a moderate hack in a time of radical change. Whatever happened to Hubert? asked baby-boomers in mock tones.Today, however, it is Hubert’s decency that stands out. Whatever his flaws, Hubert Humphrey played fair. His earnestness, once so square, is refreshing in a sea of cynics and bullies. His across-the-aisle bargaining, once a sign of selling out, now appears as political
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallThe Rebranding of Hubert Humphrey2026-03-16text/htmlen-USThe Rebranding of Hubert Humphrey2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®330742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16Up in the Air: Hijacking in History and Memory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985634
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Aviation has been in the air of late. In January 2025, a commercial plane and a helicopter collided and crashed into the Potomac River, killing sixty-seven people; this was the deadliest air disaster in the United States in over two decades. Five months later, an Air India flight crashed into a building shortly after take-off. During the same period, air traffic control outages at Newark Airport raised public fears about whether it was safe to fly in and out of that hub, among the busiest in the nation. And in the second season of HBO’s docu-comedy The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder ventured into the terrifying world of fatal plane crashes, hypothesizing that failed communication between pilots and co-pilots (especially
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallUp in the Air: Hijacking in History and Memory2026-03-16text/htmlen-USUp in the Air: Hijacking in History and Memory2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®274542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16“Loving More”: Polyamory and the Contradictions of American Sexual Norms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985635
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What exactly is polyamory, and where did it originate? What does its fluctuating popularity explain about the histories of American sexual conventions or marriage? These and other questions drive Christopher M. Gleason’s new book, American Poly. He argues for the surprisingly conservative origins of “polyfidelity” and other alternatives to monogamy since the mid-twentieth century among libertarians, Neo-Pagans, and others. Gleason’s attention to religion and politics enriches his study substantially. Equally significant is his documentation of how popular media, especially daytime talk shows and internet sites, simultaneously amplified and distorted the carefully constructed non-monogamous principles of polyamory’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmall“Loving More”: Polyamory and the Contradictions of American Sexual Norms2026-03-16text/htmlen-US“Loving More”: Polyamory and the Contradictions of American Sexual Norms2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®112832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16The Organizational Synthesis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985636
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In the 1960s and 1970s, historians declared large-scale organizations the defining feature of modern America. With postwar institutions at their zenith—and “organization men” prominent in the American cultural imagination—adherents to what Louis Galambos called the “organizational synthesis” declared the twentieth century United States “the most highly organized nation in history.”1 In a 1970 essay outlining the emerging paradigm, Galambos observed that studies across business, political, and labor history had coalesced around a central premise: that “some of the most (if not the single most) important changes which have taken place in modern America have centered about a shift from small-scale, informal, locally
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/168/image/coversmallThe Organizational Synthesis2026-03-16text/htmlen-USThe Organizational Synthesis2026-03-162026TWOProject MUSE®1310222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-16