The Death of Frank Wilson: Race,Crime, and Punishment in Post-Civil War Pennsylvania

In 1877, Frank Wilson, an African American man, was executed for murdering a white tramp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This article examines the trial, punishment, and press reporting of the case in the evolving context of race and criminal justice in post-Civil War Pennsylvania. It presents three main findings. First, it documents evidence of racial discrimination and wildly disproportionate rates of African American arrest and imprisonment in Harrisburg and surrounding counties comparable to earlier research focused on the largest northern cities. Second, it shows that views on law enforcement were diverse within both white and black communities and shaped by the exigencies of local and national party politics. Third, it makes the case that African American experiences of law enforcement in northern states are better understood as part of a national criminal justice culture than in distinctively regional terms.     

Soldiers under the Skin: Diversity of Race,Ethnicity, and Class in the Illinois National Guard, 1870–1916

A close examination of the Illinois National Guard (ING) between 1870 and 1916 demonstrates that contrary to the commonplace assumption of a homogeneous, white, middle class, native‐born membership, the ING had a very heterogeneous membership, drawing in rural and urban men, and men from an array of ethnicities, races and economic circumstances. Information on 2245 members drawn from enlistment data and the federal census, combined with evidence drawn from a wide variety of textual sources firmly establishes that this organization attracted men from a broad range of backgrounds. The ING stands out against other male‐only organizations of its time as an organization whose membership was consistently drawn from a broad cross‐section of the American population. The Illinois National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered an organization that could unite many American men across cultural and social boundaries at a time when there was much to divide them.     

George Washington carver slept here: Racial identity and laboratory practice at Iowa state college

Racialist social agendas have helped determine who will and will not be admitted to the engineering programs of American universities, and bench‐level activities within university laboratories have both followed from, and encouraged these structures of occupational opportunity. The engineering division of Iowa State College between 1900 and 1960 was one site of such exclusionary activity. African‐American students were under‐represented in its programs throughout this period, even as other areas of the university diversified and as women gradually increased their presence in the engineering division. This paper proposes a study of ISC's engineering curricula, instruments, and facilities as a means of identifying and understanding this inequity.     

Crusading in Africa: Religion,Race, and Post-9/11 Intervention in Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun (2003)

Abstract

African American director Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, a 2003 war ?lm made with US Navy cooperation, imagines the intervention of Navy SEALs in an ethnic cleansing being conducted against Christians by Nigerian Muslims. It is at once an exercise in black diasporic consciousness and an expression of American exceptionalism. The director aimed to raise awareness of contemporary African crises, but the picture is also the closest Hollywood combat cinema came in the immediate post-9/11 years to addressing and endorsing the polarizing discourse and militarism of the Bush administration. The ?lm’s use of reductive religious imagery, its weak box of?ce return, and its generally hostile reception overseas expose its failure as a tool of diplomacy and reveal the waning ability of triumphalist Hollywood cinema to de?ne or explain the ‘War on Terror’.     

Forging a nation: the Ethiopian millennium celebration and the multiethnic state

Due to a different calendric system, Ethiopia celebrated the turn of the millennium in September 2007. This paper investigates how Ethiopia's coalition government, associated by many Ethiopians with minority rule, set up and mobilised a year‐long millennium project to propose new idioms of nationhood redefining Ethiopia's identity to deal with the challenges of ethnic federalism and to accommodate its multiethnic society. I argue that the millennium celebration sought to find a solution to the divisive effects of the politics of ‘difference’ derived from a policy of ethnic federalism, and to the existing outdated metaphors of nationhood rooted in Semitic culture and Orthodox Christianity. It proposed more suitable idioms of common identity based on the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. This paper contributes to our better understanding of the role of symbolism, commemorative events and appropriation of the ‘sites of memory’ in the complex process of the transition of multiethnic societies into nation states.     

Snapshots: Images of Men in the United States Colored Troops

Abstract

This article considers the intertwined impact of two very different developments that emerged during the era of the American Civil War. The first concerned the invention and dissemination of new photographic technology that made it possible for ordinary citizens to sit for portraits and come away with multiple copies of new cartes de visite. The second concerned the revolutionary decision by the federal government to recruit African American men into the Union Army. As a result, in the final two years of the war uniformed African American men were having their portraits taken, and those small images began circulating among friends and family members. This speculative essay considers how these small cultural artifacts might have reflected and shaped a world in transition.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

The Politics of Policy Circulation: Unpacking the Relationship Between South African and South American Cities in the Adoption of Bus Rapid Transit

This paper utilizes the introduction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in South Africa to unravel the role of South–South connections in local policymaking. While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after Bogotá's Transmilenio, whose accomplishments have been touted as the low‐cost, high‐quality transport solution, the process through which other Southern cities influenced the circulation of BRT remains underexplored. In so doing, this paper asks how and why certain cities are brought into conversation with one another and what happens as a result? This analysis suggests that policy circulation is never a rational survey of best practices but a political process through which policymakers select their sites of learning in accordance with wider aspirations, ideologies and positioning. Illustrating the way in which policymakers deploy different meanings of the global South and their position within this construct to justify local policy decisions adds a critical dimension to understandings of policy mobilities.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

Dental Health of Free Blacks in New York State during the Mid‐19th Century

The current research will examine the frequency of carious teeth, periapical abscesses and ante‐mortem tooth loss in the Newburgh Colored Burial Ground (1830–1870), a free black cemetery in Newburgh, New York. The Newburgh material is compared with skeletal samples from the New York African Burial Ground, New York State almshouses, a free black cemetery from Philadelphia and middle‐class/upper‐class European cemeteries. Although previous research suggests that dental health became worse throughout the 19th century, there is no consistent pattern between the 17th‐century and 18th‐century skeletal sample of enslaved blacks from New York City and 19th‐century free blacks from Newburgh and Philadelphia. The frequency of dental caries does increase through time but the other indicators change little (equal or fewer ante‐mortem tooth loss) or suggest an improvement in dental health (fewer periapical abscesses) through time. Relative to contemporaneous populations, the individuals from Newburgh appear much more similar in terms of dental health to upper‐class and middle‐class European groups than to the other marginalised groups considered in this research. The impact of the economic, political and social changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and their potential impact on dental health are considered. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.