FDR, Disability, and the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Scott Hovey, managing editor of the Journal of the Historical Society, points us to the July 12th issue of Time magazine online. In it doctoral student in history at Boston University Matthew Pressman challenges the idea that a "gentlemen's agreement" existed between

the press and Franklin Roosevelt regarding the president's disability.  Writes Pressman:

The recently discovered film clip of President Franklin D. Roosevelt being pushed in a wheelchair, despite showing neither Roosevelt’s face nor the wheelchair, has become an object of considerable public interest. One reason people find the clip so fascinating is that it seems to represent a radically different era in American political life—one in which the president could rely on the press corps to help him hide from the larger public something so glaringly obvious as the fact that he was a paraplegic from having contracted polio at age 39. 

An NBC Nightly News report on the discovery stated that there was “a gentlemen’s agreement” between FDR and the press corps to hide the extent of his disability, and the Associated Press wrote that it was “virtually a state secret.” That has long been the conventional wisdom, repeated in countless books and articles. But it is inaccurate. In fact, the press sometimes described his condition in great detail. (read more)

Find out more in the September 2013 issue of the Journal of the Historical Society, which will include Pressman's article on the subject. Here is the TOC for that forthcoming issue:

PETER A. COCLANIS, "Editor’s Introduction"

JAMES B. LEWIS, SEONG HO JUN, AND DANIEL SCHWEKENDIEK, "Toward an Anthropometric History of Chosŏn Dynasty Korea, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century"

KAREN M. HAWKINS, "A Moderate Approach: How the War on Poverty Was Kept Alive in Eastern North Carolina, 1963-1968"

MATTHEW PRESSMAN, "Ambivalent Accomplices: How the Press Handled FDR’s Disability and How FDR Handled the Press"

WYATT WELLS, "Research Note: Appointments of Catholics during the New Deal"

Forum on Labor and Civil Liberties in the June 2013 Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The latest issue of the Journal of the Historical Society should be in mailboxes and on the shelves of libraries now.  The June 2013 issue features a forum on Jennifer Luff's 2012 UNC Press book Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars. The introduction to the forum notes that: 
 

Luff finds that during the 1920s and into the '30s, the American Federation of Labor developed a policy position between labor radicalism and state intervention: the AFL's “commonsense anticommunism” promoted voluntarist efforts to curb Communist influence within its unions while also opposing legislation that would outlaw Communist agitation. This position would shift over time, but Luff reveals much about “labor conservatives” that should surprise readers accustomed to the usual popular narrative about the varied strands of the labor movement, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and American anticommunism. After Luff introduces her work to our readers, we present commentary by a number of scholars: Eric Arnesen of The George Washington University; Jennifer Delton of Skidmore College; Harvey Klehr of Emory University; Judy Kutulas of St. Olaf College; Tony Michels of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Steve Rosswurm of Lake Forest College. To conclude the forum, Professor Luff responds to the commentary on her important book.

Running on Empty: Back to the Seventies

Randall Stephens

At least since Bruce Schulman published his The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, and Politics in 2002, historians have been reflecting on that pivotal decade and how it altered the course of recent American history. Maybe it's a sign of the historiographical times that Jefferson R. Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class won the prestigious Parkman Prize in 2011.

Historians like Daniel T. Rodgers (Age of Fracture) and Judith Stein (Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies) also weighed in on the era in 2011. And new explorations of religion and politics in the postwar years are changing what we think about the "recent" rise of the Religious Right (see Dan Williams' God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism).

Is this the scholarly analogue of what The Onion hilariously described back in 1997?: "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'". Unlikely. But, still, the past keeps catching up with us. The seventies--with all it's tragic pathos, decline, hirsute decadence, and acres of polyester--just pulls us in. The decade is certainly a draw for those observes who like to emphasize the heartbreaking, grim side of life. Maybe in these desperate economic times we also see ourselves reflected back in that bleak era.

Josh Rothman makes that point in the Boston Globe this Sunday. He also cites out very own Journal of the Historical Society.

When we talk about today's economic crisis, we tend to think about the 1930s and the Great Depression. Increasingly, though, economic historians are focusing on another decade -- the 1970s. It was during the seventies, conventionally dismissed as an aesthetically challenged interegnum between the revolutionary sixties and the Reaganite eighties, that the seeds of our current crisis were planted. The argument was advanced last year, primarily in Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, by Judith Stein, a historian at CUNY. Now it's gaining momentum, with a roundtable of historians and economists responding to the book in this month's issue of The Journal of the Historical Society. As the historian Daniel Rodgers puts it, "In the economic history of the first half of the twentieth century, the crucial decade was the 1930s. For the second half of the twentieth century," there is a "growing consensus" that "the pivotal decade was the 1970s."

I couldn't agree more. In a modern US course several years ago my students and I explored the cultural and political dimensions of the seventies hangover by reading Andreas Killen's captivating, yet underappreciated 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America. (I take special pride in being born in such an awful year.)

John Lennon, not long before his death at the hands of a deranged man, told an interviewer: "Wasn't the 70s a drag, you know? Here we are. Well, let's try and make the 80s good, you know?" Yet the Me Decade would linger on and on. So writes Killen in his intro paragraph:

Will the seventies never end? The question asked recently by a pundit in the New York Times is a valid one. The sevenries are, indeed, the decade that refuses to end--despite the fact that, for a long time, they barely counred as a decade, so completely were they obscured by the long shadows cast by both the sixties and the eighties and by the noisy clamor of their respective partisans. While the former were claimed by the Left and the latter by the Right, the seventies remained the foundling of recent American history, claimed by no one. Despite the current wave of seventies nostalgia and revisionism, these years still need to be liberated from the two decades that bracket them. More than simply the aftermath to the one and the prelude to the other, this decade should be considered on its own terms, as a distinct cultural moment, a moment of rupture and discontinuity in American history but also of tremendous creativity.

Historical Society Membership and Publications

Randall Stephens

If you are not already a member of the Historical Society, you are missing out! Members receive five issues of Historically Speaking and four issues of the Journal of the Historically Society. The latter "supports the Historical Society's mission to revitalize and reorient the study and teaching of history away from fragmentation and over-specialization toward a universally accessible, fully integrated approach. The Journal presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research. By publishing scholarly articles that are readily accessible, the Journal reaches out to a broad audience of specialists and non-specialists, professional historians and history enthusiasts alike."

Each issue of Historically Speaking is packed with lively forums, interviews, essays, and reviews. David Hackett Fischer calls it “The most interesting historical journal that is being published today.” Bruce Kuklick says “I read the whole issue cover to cover, as I do every one of them. In fact, it is the only professional publication I really read at all with any consistency.”

A variety of historians, representing a range of specialties, have appeared in the pages of HS, including: Danielle Allen, Mary Beard, David Cannadine, David Brion Davis, John Demos, Richard Evans, Niall Ferguson, David Hackett Fischer, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Rhys Isaac, Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, John Lukacs, Pauline Maier, William McNeill, Joseph C. Miller, Robert Orsi, Geoffrey Parker, Theodore Rabb, Joyce Seltzer, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Gordon Wood, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

It's easy to subscribe to Historically Speaking by using the Johns Hopkins University Press website. The same is true of becoming a member of the Society. Just sign up here.

Finally, here's a look at what will be in the September 2011 issue of HS. In the coming weeks I'll post excerpts on the blog.

Historically Speaking (September 2011)

An Innocuous Yet Noxious Text: Tacitus’s Germania
Christopher B. Krebs

History over the Water: The King James Bible Turns 400
Derek Wilson

The Bible and the Victorians: An Interview with Timothy Larsen
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence:
A Forum

Ten Years After: Reflections on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence
Peter A. Coclanis

The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe
Jan de Vries

Comment on Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence
Philip T. Hoffman

Economic History in the Decade after The Great Divergence
R. Bin Wong

Ten Years After: Responses and Reconsiderations
Kenneth Pomeranz

The Real Herbert Hoover
Glen Jeansonne

Whose Choir? Which Gospel?
Christopher Shannon

Erik Larson on Historical Non-Fiction and In the Garden of Beasts
Conducted by Philip White

Carthage: A Mediterranean Super-Power
Richard Miles

An Interview with Richard Miles
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Scholarly Journals

Dan Allosso

Along with the rest of the subscribers to H-Net’s mailing list, “C19-Americanists,” I got an appeal today from the editors of Poe Studies and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Washington State University is cutting their funding, and the editors are soliciting support. They admit that the administration’s move “is a fiscal one,” but the editors also suggest there is a bad “climate for higher ed” in Washington, and that administrators lack “awareness about the value of humanities journals,” and by implication, the humanities.

All these claims may be true. And these two journals are probably wonderful, and well worth continuing, even at the expense of cutting other WSU programs—which I assume would be necessary. But in light of the appeal's wide circulation to the mailing list, I think it raises some interesting questions beyond the immediate situation in Washington

Before today, I had never heard of either of these journals. I’ve certainly never held either of them in my hands, or read anything from them. So I’ve got to assume the editors are appealing to people like me in hopes we’ll feel a general sense of solidarity with other Americanists or humanities folks, a sense of antagonism toward clueless administrators, or a fear that our favorite journal may be next in line.

I do subscribe to a few journals (or rather, I get them as a result of membership), but I usually don’t read them in hard copy, even the articles that really grab my attention. Allan Kulikoff’s article in the June Journal of the Historical Society was very interesting (I blogged about it here). I read it online—can’t actually find my hard-copy June issue right now, but it’s still right there if I want to refer to it again.

I’m not suggesting that the Washington journals should be discontinued. Honestly, I think it’s criminally short-sighted how little of 21st century America’s money is invested in education. So yes, the journals should get funding and we should build fewer military drones. But it might also be a good time for those of us who support scholarly communication and refereed exchanges of ideas, to ask ourselves whether the way it’s always been done is the best way to do it now.

Since I don’t think anyone is getting rich writing for or publishing academic journals (correct me if I’m wrong), it doesn’t strike me that there’s an entrenched financial interest resisting change. So the question is, can we find less costly, more effective ways to do the things that journals do for the academy? Many journals are available online as a matter of course, with no increase in cost; so it seems reasonable to assume that online publishing does not add significant expense to the publishing process. I may be wrong, but it seems like a journal’s major expenses would be staff and printing/distribution.

Obviously, you can’t have a refereed journal without referees. But there seem to be important institutional interests supporting this process of validating and professionalizing fields of study. So I suspect there will continue to be ways to get this done—and to get it paid for. The function will be preserved, so it’s the form we’re worrying about.

Is part of the problem a continuing belief in the validation our writing acquires by being printed on paper? Isn’t this belief especially redundant in the case of peer-reviewed journal articles? Would the Washington journals be able to survive in electronic-only form? I don’t know the answer to this (I emailed them the question, and I’ll let you know what they say); nor do I know whether the Washington State administrators would be willing to negotiate, if they were presented with a lower-cost option than the journals’ current budgets. I’m just suggesting that it’s time to think about these issues. As I think the Washington State journal advocates implied in their letter to the list, our favorite journal could be next.

March 2011 Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been arriving in mailboxes this past week. Articles from it can be downloaded at the Wiley Online Library. The March 2011 issue features:

"Blind Men of Industan"
F. S. Naiden

"Three Weeks in Mississippi: James Meredith, Aubrey Norvell, and the Politics of Bird Shot"
Aram Goudsouzian

"Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875"
Thomas Albert Howard

"Tar and Feathers"
Barry Levy

"The Age of Reagan? Three Questions for Future Research"
John Ehrman

Here is a little from Howard's "Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875":

Europe's "revolutionary century," the nineteenth, has experienced its own historiographical revolution in recent decades. Not too long ago its direction reflected the academy's penchant to think in terms of "secularization"; the title of Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975) might serve as an illustration of an earlier status quo. Encouraged by the advent of the so-called "new cultural history" in the 1990s and building momentum ever since, religious topics have emerged as a significant focus of scholarship. One German scholar, Olaf Blaschke, has influentially proposed that, far from a "secular age," we might do better to think of the nineteenth century as a "second confessional era," in light of the persistence of Catholic and Protestant "milieus" throughout Western Europe and lingering confessional animosities and prejudices. Blaschke's words have received much deserved attention. read more >>>

Become a Member or Contribute to the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Our Boston NPR stations are in the middle of pledge-drive mania. I like to make the occasional contribution to them and to PBS for the great work they do. (Or maybe just to make the pledge drive stop). Here at the Historical Society we also have to pass the hat, so to speak, now and then, and ask members and non-members for renewed support. I paste here part of current society president Mark Smith's recent email on the subject.

"The Historical Society continues to do good work as it enters its second decade. It is the institutional embodiment of history understood as a civilizing enterprise, focusing the talents of the academy outward to general readers, teachers, and the society at large. Our partnership with the National Council for History Education (NCHE), for instance, puts every issue of Historically Speaking into the hands of thousands of K-12 history teachers. The Society fosters venues for genuinely open conversations among historians and makes those conversations available to the larger public. . . . [Consider signing up and you will receive both Historically Speaking and the Journal of the Historical Society.]

But the Society faces considerable challenges, particularly in the current economic environment. Although we function on a bare-bones budget, we depend upon the generous contributions of friends and members who share our vision. To end the year in the black, we need to raise an additional $25,000. . . . our goal is reachable.

Please consider making a tax-deductible gift to the Historical Society. You can do so quickly and securely at www.bu.edu/historic/donate. If you decide to donate $50 or more, we will send you two volumes of your choosing from the University of South Carolina’s excellent Historians in Conversation book series, edited by Historically Speaking senior editor Don Yerxa and Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens."

Interview with George Huppert, Editor of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Earlier in the month I spoke to George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) about editing the Journal of the Historical Society. Huppert and associate

editor Scott Hovey aim to reach specialists and nonspecialists alike. The journal "presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research."

In the video embedded here I ask Huppert about the kinds of articles he seeks out and the models he looks to for the journal. He describes the ways in which the historian Lucien Febvre has informed his work and he notes the influence of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.

Huppert is a social historian of early modern Europe. He has written extensively on the Renaissance, humanism, the history of philosophy, and the annales school. He is the author of a variety of articles and books, including The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Season's Readings: Give the Gift of Historical Society Membership and Two Books for Only $50

With the holiday season here, consider giving a friend, colleague, student, or loved one the gift of membership in the Historical Society.

For just $50 you can sign up a friend to receive one-year subscriptions to both the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking. Your gift is tax deductible. The Historical Society is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization.

We want to make this offer even more attractive by adding two volumes from an exciting new series of books edited by Historically Speaking editors Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens. Historians in Conversation, published by the University of South Carolina Press, brings together interviews, essays, and forums from Historically Speaking that speak to a common theme (military history, historiography, early America, Africa and the Atlantic World, and more). These books are terrific teaching tools. Eight volumes have been published thus far, and we will send a choice of two to the recipient of your gift subscription.

Order by using this secure web form: www.bu.edu/historic/gift

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

The September issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has hit the streets/shelves. Copies are available from Wiley. Subscribe to THS and receive four issues/year plus five issues of Historically Speaking. This new issue of the journal includes a forum on Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln, along with essays on abolitionism, Christian missions, and the history of medicine.

The Journal of the Historical Society, September 2009
Contents

"Introduction to the Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Eric Arnesen

"Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln: A New Approach to Religion, Reform, and Abolitionism"
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

"'I Always Thought 'Dixie' One of the Best Tunes I Ever Heard': Lincoln's Claims on the South and the South's Claims on Lincoln"
Stephen Berry

"The Southern Abraham?"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Author's Response to the Southern Intellectual History Circle Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Orville Vernon Burton

"Confronting Abolitionism: Bishop John England, American Catholicism, and Slavery"
Adam L. Tate

"They Twain Shall be One Flesh: The Courtship and Marriage of Thomas Hudson and Mary Aulick, Baptist Missionaries to China in the 1890s"
Keith Harper

"Reticence in Action: The Antisepsis Controversy"
Stewart Justman

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been out for a couple weeks. Editor George Huppert and managing editor Scott Hovey continue to publish high quality, accessible essays with distinctly international/transnational themes. Full versions of the essays can be read at the Wiley site. If you can't access material at Wiley, download some featured essays here.

The Journal of the Historical Society, Volume 9 Issue 2 (June 2009)

"On Primo Levi, Richard Serra, and the Concept of History"
Johan Åhr

"Modernization, Socialism, and Higher Education in Mexico: The Instituto para Hijos de Trabajadores"
Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi

"A Modern Monarch: Dom Pedro II's Visit to the United States in 1876"
Teresa Cribelli

"Havana During the Nineteenth Century: A Perspective from Its Spanish Immigrants"
Translated by Franklin W. Knight
Rosario Márquez Macías

"'French' Immigrants in Naples, 1806–1860"
Marco Rovinello

The September issue of the journal will include essays by Keith Harper on Baptist missionaries in love; Stewart Justman on antisepsis and Victorian reticence; Adam L. Tate on Bishop John England, abolitionism, and Catholicism in the American South; and a forum on The Age of Lincoln, by Orville Vernon Burton with Eric Arnesen, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Stephen Berry, David Moltke-Hansen.

Free Articles from the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The Wiley-Blackwell website has offered five articles from The Journal of the Historical Society free of charge. Under the able direction of George Huppert (editor) and Scott Hovey (managing editor), the journal ranges broadly over time and thematic focus. The JHS is one of the only publications that is accessible to the non-specialist educated reader who is interested in "worldwide trends in historical research." For this reason the TLS wrote that the journal published "essays that represent history as it should be." It also praised the JHS for paying "serious attention to . . . serious subjects." Take, for instance, Herman Ooms’ 2005 essay, "Early Modern Japanese Intellectual History: USA, France, and Germany." Like a number of other articles in the JHS, it is a readable, fascinating account of a field that few non-specialists know anything about:

The field of intellectual history of Japan’s Early Modern or Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as practiced in the United States has a unique characteristic. It has produced what one could call, with only a slight exaggeration, an actual subfield of state-of-the-art reflective writing. An unusual number of scholars are keeping themselves busy, at one point or another, surveying the field or, putting it less technically, sizing up their colleagues. An outsider might wonder whether there are actually not more reflecting scholars than practicing historians. And indeed, one could conclude that the United States is running out of scholars that are available for this peculiar subfield because the last one to engage in it (in 2002), James McMullen, is British. Between 1996 and 2002 over half a dozen publications, averaging one a year, addressed in one form or another the “state of the field.” >>> read the complete article here

See this Wiley-Blackwell page for other free articles.

The Journal of the Historical Society
Table of contents, March 2009

"Was Hitler a Riddle?"
Abraham Ascher

"Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906–19171"
Jonathan W. Daly

"Santa Anna Never Had an iPhone: Some Thoughts on the Price of Peace and the Financial Misfortunes of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848"
Richard J. Salvucci

"The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination"
Steven A. Reich

"Antebellum South Carolina Reconsidered: The Libertarian World of Robert J. Turnbull"
Raymond James Krohn