"A star that gathers lustre from the gloom of night": wives, marriage, and gender in early-nineteenth-century American temperance reform

This article argues that wives occupied a more central place than mothers in the early nineteenth-century American temperance movement, and that temperance literature portrayed them in two ways. First, temperance writers depicted the drunkard's wife as a pitiable example of the dire effects of male drinking on women and families. Second, they cast wives as potent moral influences on their husbands, capable of preventing the sober from faltering and reclaiming the drunkard. These portrayals coexisted with overtly misogynist views of women within the temperance movement that accused women of making men drunkards through perverted influence and blamed drunkard's wives for their own predicament. The temperance movement's depiction of wives' gender both reflected and contributed to the large ambivalence toward women in American society.     

Constituting "The People": National Identity Under William H. Taft and Richard M. Nixon

This project is focused on the long-term constitutive elements of presidential discourse; in other words, how rhetoric helps frame and determine national identity. Seemingly innocuous, and appearing in both ceremonial and policy addresses, presidential language concerning national identity helps shape the context, and thus sets the terms for more substantive, issue-laden debates. While one cannot measure the impact of this type of rhetoric in terms of specific issues and time frames, its influence is apparent in a broader and more diffuse perspective. This research compares the public rhetoric of presidents William H. Taft and Richard M. Nixon specifically in terms of their definitions of national identity. Both Republicans, albeit with very different political contexts and time periods, exhibited marked similarities in their strategies for defining the American polity, particularly with respect to their view of the president as the national representative, the idea that the nation is a unified whole, the belief that the nation follows the greatest good for the greatest number, the belief that each citizen occupies a natural place in the hierarchy of American society, and finally, the conviction that liberty is the most important foundational value of the country. The evidence suggests that rhetorical conceptions of national identity are important over time in the United States. Enjoying a broad audience, the president has the ability to shape national debate according to which groups and issues he includes or excludes from the polity.     

The Human Web: A Bird's-EyeView Of World History by J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill

T he H uman W eb : A B ird 's-E ye V iew O f W orld H istory . By J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill.     

Catholicism, Science, and Modernity: The Case of William Miles Maskell

This is a case study of William Miles Maskell, an eminent entomologist, devout Roman Catholic, and the foremost scientific critic of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Modern Western intellectual history, built on the assumption that secular, scientific modes of thought inexorably swept aside traditional metaphysical and religious ones, has generally written off such persons as ignorant reactionaries battling truth, enlightenment, and progress. But this grand narrative — of scientific light banishing religious darkness — oversimplifies and dis-torts the past. Maskell failed to prevent evolution from becoming paradigmatic in New Zealand biology, to be sure. But it is far from clear that he lost what he regarded as the more important fight — against the scientism and agnosticism he saw as characteristic of modern science. We need to develop a considerably more subtle and nuanced historiography of science-and-religion that gives the religious and philosophical critics of nineteenth century science their due. They battled modernity's scepticism and scientism more successfully than historians have generally acknowledged.     

The Case of William Dick: Ransom County, North Dakota

In May 2009, a decision of the United States Supreme Court with North Dakota roots turned fifty years old. A case unique in the annals of the law, Dick v. New York Life Insurance Company ¹ still fascinates lawyers today. Factually, the case presented a strange question: could an experienced hunter accidentally shoot himself not once, but twice? Some of North Dakota's finest lawyers, including Philip Vogel, Donald Holand, and Norman Tenneson, aimed to get to the bottom of that matter. The judges were equally impressive: Judge Ronald Davies of the federal district court; Judge John Sanborn of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit; and Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Felix Frankfurter. Finally, as a matter of Supreme Court jurisprudence, Dick may have been the last time the High Court granted a petition for certiorari in a case that turned almost exclusively on questions of fact. In honor of its golden anniversary, this article recounts the captivating story of Dick v. New York Life.