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Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most Americans acted as though they lived in a Christian nation. Most Americans knew little about the religions of the world except that there were Jews, Muslims, “heathens” (such as Native Americans, Buddhists, and Hindus), and a handful of freethinkers who embraced no religion. Even the notion of a Judeo-Christian culture did not win widespread acceptance until after World War II. The religious landscape of the United States changed dramatically in the wake of federal legislation in 1965 that abolished the restrictive (and Euro-centric) quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924. Under the new law millions of immigrants from all regions of the world, not just Europe, began flooding the country. The bulk of the immigrants who entered between 1966 and 2000 were family members of recent immigrants, with 85 percent of them coming from the so-called Third World. Naturally, these new immigrants brought their religions—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many, many more—with them. By the new millennium scholars were suggesting that the phrase “Judeo-Christian” be discarded in favor of the “Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition” or, more simply, the “Abrahamic faiths.” One observer mockingly predicted that Americans seeking religious inclusivity would soon be referring to the “Judeo-Christian-Buddhist-Hindu-Islamic-Agnostic-Atheist society.” This book brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.

The Nature of the Future examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. The book shows that these improvers saw profit and agricultural development not only as a goal but also as the underlying purpose of the natural world. However, their sense of the natural future was not unified—improvement began as a developmental tool for large landholders but its meanings split and fragmented as wealthy urbanites, middling farmers, and agrarian radical tenants took hold of improving institutions. This disparate group was bound together by a commercial network of warehouses, nurseries, printers, and manufacturers who acted as experts and focused improving attention more and more upon saleable goods. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, improvers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession, where theories of value were contested. Improving networks laid the groundwork both for later industrial agriculture and organic “alternative” agriculture.

How did southern white ministers who believed that racial segregation was against God’s teachings attempt to convince people in their churches and their communities to abandon fears of integration and overcome prejudices? This book is about important episodes in United States history, southern history, church history, and the power of faith. Southern white ministers who aligned with the Civil Rights Movement experienced harassment, vilification, jailing, beating, and psychological pain. Their sermons, efforts, and sacrifices on behalf of school integration and the Civil Rights Movement are chronicled in this book. Did their efforts help change southern society? Scholars differ in opinions. Most argue that black leaders and organizations brought an end to segregation, Others contend that the federal government speeded the process, but this book shows that southern white ministers were also influential, sometimes only locally, sometimes only personally, but counted together their actions become significant. Clinton High in Tennessee and Central High in Little Rock where ministers accompanied African American students amid angry and jeering mobs, today, are good functioning schools with interracial student bodies. The University of Mississippi, where an Episcopal vicar was knocked off a pedestal while trying to quell a bloody riot, has made great strides towards racial reconciliation. These ministers welcomed black people into their churches in spite of closed-door policies. A Baptist minister established an interracial farm that has endured for seventy-six years, a farm that birthed Habitat for Humanity. The sacrifices of these ministers showed African Americans that not all white people were enemies.

This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the American past through the lens of race and sexuality studies. Chapters range from the prerevolutionary era to today to grapple with an array of captivating issues: how descriptions of bodies shaped colonial Americans' understandings of race and sex; same-sex sexual desire and violence within slavery; whiteness in gay and lesbian history; college women's agitation against heterosexual norms in the 1940s and 1950s; the ways society used sexualized bodies to sculpt ideas of race and racial beauty; how Mexican silent film icon Ramon Navarro masked his homosexuality with his racial identity; and sexual representation in mid-twentieth-century black print pop culture. The result is both an enlightening foray into ignored areas and an elucidation of new perspectives that challenge us to reevaluate what we “know” of our own history. The book looks at how racial subjugation feeds sexual normativity as well as how sexual and racial subjects enact liberating claims that can fall short of liberation even as they bring into being imaginative ideas about social, political, and cultural change.

The last days of fighting in the Civil War's eastern theater have been wrapped in mythology since the moment of Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House. War veterans and generations of historians alike have focused on the seemingly inevitable defeat of the Confederacy after Lee's flight from Petersburg and recalled the generous surrender terms set forth by Grant, thought to facilitate peace and to establish the groundwork for sectional reconciliation. But this volume of essays by leading scholars of the Civil War era offers a fresh and nuanced view of the eastern war's closing chapter. Assessing events from the siege of Petersburg to the immediate aftermath of Lee’s surrender, Petersburg to Appomattox blends military, social, cultural, and political history to reassess the ways in which the war ended and examines anew the meanings attached to one of the Civil War's most significant sites, Appomattox. Contributors are Peter S. Carmichael, William W. Bergen, Susannah J. Ural, Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, William C. Davis, Keith Bohannon, Caroline E. Janney, Stephen Cushman, and Elizabeth R. Varon.

As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an urbanized, industrial giant between the War of 1812 and the early twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the question of what it meant to be American. Blackface Nation argues that this struggle is especially evident in popular culture and the interplay between two specific strains of music: the songs of middle-class reform and blackface minstrelsy. The songs of middle-class reformers, such as the popular Hutchinson Family Singers, expressed an American identity rooted in communal values, with lyrics focusing on abolition, women’s rights, and socialism. Blackface minstrelsy, which emerged out of an audience-based coalition of Northern business elites, Southern slaveholders, and young, white, working-class men, expressed an identity rooted in authentic masculinity, anti-intellectualism, and white superiority. Blackface performers embodied a form of “love crime” racism, in which vast swaths of the white public adored African Americans who fit blackface stereotypes even as they used those stereotypes to rationalize white supremacy. By the early twentieth century, blackface reigned supreme in American popular culture. The Hutchinsons became increasingly seen as old-fashioned, their songs forgotten. This book elucidates a central irony in American history: much of the music interpreted as black, authentic, and expressive was invented, performed, and enjoyed by people who believed in white superiority. At the same time, music often depicted as white, repressed, and boringly bourgeois was often socially and racially inclusive, committed to reform, and devoted to challenging the immoralities at the heart of America’s capitalist order.

Picturing Political Power analyzes images of political power from the nation’s founding through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Building on scholarship that focuses on antislavery and civil rights imagery, the book demonstrates the centrality of visual politics—the strategic use of images to promote a cause or candidate—to women’s rights campaigns over the long nineteenth century. Powerful opponents of women’s rights printed popular satirical pictures to reinforce dominant gender norms and women’s relationships with the state. In response, reformers distributed portraits and propaganda to contest them. Suffragists found that they needed to engage in this visual conversation to change widespread perceptions of political women and win support. Unlike their lectures and pamphlets that reached select audiences, Americans encountered these pictures everywhere. Illustrated newspapers, decorative parlor prints, and photographic portraits prompted the rise of visual culture, which facilitated shared understandings of the nation. Popular pictures constructed dominant ideas about race and gender. Individual leaders initially incorporated visual strategies from other movements and, ultimately, professionals coordinated innovative national campaigns that laid the foundations for modern ones. While many suffrage histories analyze the movement’s internal politics, this book situates reformers within the context of public political conversations. Anti-suffragists dominated, even without a national organization, during the nineteenth century. Therefore, they prove central to this broader visual debate about gender and politics. This wide lens captures a broader range of women’s activism, organizations, and important leaders. Black women—including Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Church Terrell—stand out as public image innovators.

Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world's least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today's most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. This book explores this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today. The chapters address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. The chapters show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business.