As a companion to our list of books published by non-tenure-track historians in 2019, here is a list of journal articles (and a few essays/book chapters) published by the same sorts of scholars. Most of the authors on this list are contingent academics, though some are working outside of academia altogether. Unlike the book list, however, this is not a list you should use to go purchase access to these articles. In fact, you should know that if you were to click on one of these articles, encounter a charge for access, and pay it, none of that money would go to the author. Scholars are not paid for journal articles, nor do they earn royalties.
While most of the articles on this list are like this—what we call “pay-walled”—a few are “open access,” which you’ll see noted with a bold OA at the end of the entry.1 One way you may be able to get a copy of a pay-walled article is to write directly to the author, who may be permitted to share a pre-proof version with you. Willing to have your Twitter handle included with your entry for such purposes? Think there’s an article we missed? Message Erin Bartram. [Don’t just reply to a tweet.]
Cassius Adair, “Licensing Citizenship: Anti-Blackness, Identification Documents, and Transgender Studies” (American Quarterly)
This essay argues that the use of racial categories on identification documents is a critical piece of transgender history. By tracing the development of driver’s licenses as part of a Progressive Era racial project, this essay contends that the discourse of licenses as measures of fitness and citizenship was constructed partly in response to the supposed recklessness of “Negro” drivers. Thus driver’s licenses as tools to regulate mobility are embedded in anti-Black criminalization projects. In addition, African Americans protested racial designations on driver’s licenses, correctly anticipating that licenses would take on extraordinary status as a racialized identification document. Therefore, when transgender people argue against gender designations on driver’s licenses and other identification papers, they build off work begun by Black activists in the 1930s.
Erin M. Bartram, “American Catholics and ‘The Use and Abuse of Reading,’ 1865–1873” (Religion & American Culture)
In the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” . . . By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson’s arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker’s hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.
Eli Bromberg, “We Need To Talk About Shmuel Charney” (In Geveb) OA
[This article] argues that scholarly and pedagogical discussion of Charney should utilize his family name (Charney) and not an English transliteration of his pen name, regardless of its spelling, given the relationship between the Yiddish pseudonym and the racial slur. The article contends that the two prevalent explanations for Charney’s pen name (that it was merely the Latin translation for black, or that it represented a show of solidarity with African Americans) both serve to obscure the history of “ניגער” as a racial slur reflective of dehumanizing, racist attitudes towards African Americans in largely white Jewish American Yiddish speaking communities.
Stephen T. Casper and Kelly O’Donnell, “The Punch-drunk Boxer and the Battered Wife: Gender and Brain Injury Research” (Social Science & Medicine) OA
This essay uses gender as a category of historical and sociological analysis to situate two populations—boxers and victims of domestic violence—in context and explain the temporal and ontological discrepancies between them as potential brain injury patients. In boxing, the question of brain injury and its sequelae were analyzed from 1928 on, often on profoundly somatic grounds. With domestic violence, in contrast, the question of brain injury and its sequelae appear to have been first examined only after 1990. Symptoms prior to that period were often cast as functional in specific psychiatric and psychological nomenclatures. We examine this chronological and epistemological disconnection between forms of violence that appear otherwise highly similar even if existing in profoundly different spaces.
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, “Interpreting Article II, Section 2: George Washington and the President’s Powers” (Law and History Review)
This article explores Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution and the Acts of Congress . . . to reveal new insights into his constitutional interpretation. Held in a private collection until 2012, this article is the first to examine Washington’s notations in the Acts of Congress for their value as statements about political authority. Washington’s comments in the margins of his volume suggest an evolving view of presidential power and constitutional limitations on the executive branch as early as January 1790. His margin notes on the Acts of Congress served as blueprint for his defense of presidential authority and the expansion of the executive branch in the 1790s. Finally, the annotated Acts of Congress inserts Washington’s ideas about the presidency into the debate surrounding originalism by revealing how his analysis of the language evolved to meet the demands of governing, leading him to reject the delegates’ intent for Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.
Sandra F. Fox, “‘Laboratories of Yiddishkayt’: Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps and the Transformation of Yiddishism” (American Jewish History)
At Camp Hemshekh and Camp Boiberik, post-World War II educators shaped their programs in hopes of ensuring the future of Yiddish after the Holocaust, infusing the language into official camp life even as it ceased to be used for everyday communication between campers. . . .Yiddish summer camp leaders also addressed more general anxieties over the future of American Jewry as they moved from cities to suburbs and became increasingly affluent. Camp attendees . . . came to believe that the infusion of Yiddish into camp life contributed to their personal and collective Jewish authenticity in the face of these changes; Jews who attended Boiberik and Hemshekh emerged not only different, they believed, but better than Jews in the mainstream. Camp leaders thus merged their twin concerns — one regarding the future of Yiddish, and the other regarding the future of American Jewry under new, more comfortable conditions — into an ambitious project for their camps. They reconstituted Yiddishism, a late-nineteenth-century nationalist-linguistic ideology concerned with raising the status of Yiddish, as a tool for transforming American Jewish youth according to their adult visions of real or ideal Jewishness.
Caroline Grego, “Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893” (Journal of Southern History)
President of the American Red Cross Clara Barton boarded the steamer Catherine to tour the storm-stricken sea islands of South Carolina at 4 a.m. on September 17, 1893. South Carolina’s governor, the infamous white supremacist and demagogue Benjamin R. Tillman, had invited Barton to investigate the situation and determine if her organization could assist the reeling state. Less than a month earlier, on the night of August 27–28, a massive hurricane with 125 mph winds struck the sea islands around Beaufort, taking an immense toll: between 1,500 and 5,000 people died, all but a couple dozen of whom were African American . . . Several historians have . . . explored the hurricane’s impact on rice cultivation and the region’s phosphate industry, and they have interpreted the storm as a flashpoint for memories of Reconstruction and for questions of responsibility in disaster recovery. This article draws on this rich, growing scholarship and focuses on a piece of that story, the hurricane recovery effort under the American Red Cross.
Edward Guimont, “At the Mountains of Mars: Viewing the Red Planet through a Lovecraftian Lens,” in Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3, edited by Dennis P. Quinn (Hippocampus Press)
This article demonstrates that despite the absence of Mars in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, his descriptions of alien life were shaped by contemporary discourse around hypothesized Martian civilizations, and his fiction in turn influenced later authors’ conceptions of life on Mars.
Brett Holman, “The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre: Air Displays and Airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the World Wars” (Contemporary British History)
Aerial theatre, the use of aviation spectacle to project images of future warfare, national power and technological prowess, was a key method for creating an airminded public in the early twentieth century. The most significant and influential form of aerial theatre in interwar Britain was the Royal Air Force Display at Hendon, in which military aircraft put on impressive flying performances before large crowds, including an elaborate set-piece acting out a battle scenario with an imaginary enemy. Hendon was emulated by other air displays in Britain and in Australia, even civilian ones . . . Hendon thus helped to propagate a militarised civilian aerial theatre, and hence airmindedness, in both Britain and Australia.
T. R. C. Hutton, “Sleuthing for Mr. Crow: Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy” (Journal of Southern History)
The lynch mob that formed in Roanoke, Virginia, one day in September 1893 was not the first in the town’s brief history, but it was undeniably the largest. After northern capital and the newly consolidated Norfolk and Western Railroad (N&W) had transformed the village formerly called Big Lick into the fastest-growing city in the South, Roanoke’s racial and political demographics changed dramatically during the 1880s, creating tensions between employers and workers, as well as locals and newcomers, white and black.
Kathryn Julian, “Under the Habit: Resistance of Catholic Sisters against East German State Authority in the 1950s,” in Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements, edited by Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener (Berghahn Books)
[T]he interactions between Catholic orders and secular citizens in East Germany created a tenuous relationship between the GDR regime and the Catholic Church. While religion and state power seemed fundamentally opposed in East Germany, the two were in fact quietly entangled. . . These dynamics were also deeply dependent on contemporary understanding of gender. The following chapter investigates ow women in Catholic orders in East Germany challenged the state from the Soviet occupation in 1945 to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 — a period usually marked by scholars as the height of religious repression.
Mariusz Kałczewiak, “Anticolonial Orientalism: Perets Hirshbeyn’s Indian Travelogue” (In Geveb) OA
This article inscribes Eastern European Jews into the study of (anti)colonialism and Orientalism by analyzing the 1929 India travelogue by Yiddish writer Perets Hirshbeyn. I show how the context of Jewish modernization movements affected the portrayal of “oriental” Asia in Hirshbeyn’s travel writing . . . I suggest that Hirshbeyn, a progressive Eastern European Jew who spent several years in the United States, was an ambivalent actor who transgresses the binary power relations between British colonizers and subordinated native Indians. As a whole, this article deepens our understanding of the relations between colonialism, Orientalism, and Jewishness in Yiddish literary culture.
François Domini Laramée, “Migration and the French Colonial Atlantic as Imagined by the Periodical Press, 1740–61” (Journal of European Periodical Studies) OA
Why did the French show so little enthusiasm for emigration to their early modern colonies, compared to other European peoples? . . . Through a combination of distant reading methods, the article builds a three-layered portrait of the New World as displayed to French readers. The first layer, made up of references to America in theater, games and other cultural artefacts built upon common knowledge, shows an unchanging, alien land filled with riches and glory for the few, mortal threats for the many, and the best, perhaps, set aside for foreigners. A second layer, made up of the periodicals’ coverage of the slow production of knowledge through science and exploration, edulcorates this picture to some extent by showing that the New World is in the process of being domesticated, but that this process is very much still in its infancy. Finally, the top layer, represented by the Gazette’s news coverage, shows a French colonial world that is dominated by Britain, virtually invisible in peacetime, and fraught with chaos at every moment.
Jemima Matthews, “Inside Out and Outside In: The River Thames in William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor” (Shakespeare)
This paper offers the first sustained reading of the significance of the Thames for Merry Wives. The geographically informed structure of the paper takes the reader on a journey through the site of Whitehall and the working landscape beyond it. It begins by tracing a “thick description” of the palace architecture before exploring performances, journeys, and labour on the river. It puts the play performance in dialogue with the journeys that brought the actors and audience to Whitehall. The paper argues that the increased liquidity of the Folio is especially attuned to the wider geography of this “event” both “inside” and “outside” the palace in 1604. The paper concludes by turning to the threat Falstaff’s wet permeable body poses to the space of the court. Through an examination of the working world of the river it is possible to see how a threatening potentially subversive Thames intruded upon courtly space in 1604.
Andrew Midkiff, “Thomas Jefferson’s Pen-Maker” (3 parts) and “Yankees Can Do Anything: Josiah Hayden, Early Steel Pen Pioneer” (The Pennant)
The first three articles introduce Peregrine Williamson, a jeweler from Baltimore who began to make steel pens around 1806. In 1808 he sent three examples in his fanciest holders (pen and pencil combination holders) to then-president Thomas Jefferson. The articles cover Jefferson’s correspondence with Williamson. They also cover earlier references to Jefferson’s encounters with steel pens, especially for his experiments with the polygraph, through his correspondence with Charles Wilson Peale. The fourth article introduces a snapshot of the early industrial revolution through a study of Josiah Hayden, an early industrialist in rural western Massachusetts.
Vanessa Mongey, “Going Home: The Back-to-Haiti Movement in the Early Nineteenth Century” (Atlantic Studies)
Kelly O’Donnell, “Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s” (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
This essay examines the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman and her contribution to the circulation of health feminist ideas in the 1970s. Seaman, author of the influential exposé The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill (1969), became a noted critic of women’s health care and of gynecologists in particular. In her next book, Free and Female (1972), and in newspaper articles, interviews, and television appearances, she implored women to “liberate” themselves from their gynecologists and empower themselves in the arena of health care. Seaman’s media engagement contributed to the development of a “popular health feminism” that took the ideas of the women’s health movement public for mainstream audiences to consume and engage with.
Jessica M. Parr, “Plotting Piety: Religious Spaces and the Mapping of George Whitefield’s World” (Wesley and Methodist Studies)
George Whitefield’s career spanned two continents, six full transatlantic voyages, and approximately 18,000 sermons. Although he self-identified as an Anglican clergyman, he frequently ignored denominational lines as counterproductive to his vision of a large, unwalled church community. Responses to Whitefield also varied a great deal both temporally and geographically, depending on the local theo-politics at the time. . . This article proposes ways to analyse the religious spaces Whitefield’s career created. Examining these spatialities can help scholars to better describe the impact of Whitefield’s career.
Eli Rubin, “A Linguistic Bridge Between Alienation and Intimacy: Chabad’s Theorization of Yiddish in Historical and Cultural Perspective” (In Geveb) OA
Yiddish has always been the oracular mainstay of Chabad’s intellectual and spiritual trajectory. Initially it was simply the vernacular of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and its use, even in Hasidic publications, merely reflected its utility as a linguistic medium for the dissemination of Hasidic teachings. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Yiddish became a contested language, an ideological and cultural battleground. . . By the 1920s, processes of urbanization and migration had dramatically changed the linguistic environment in which Chabad sought to perpetuate its teachings, and the use of Yiddish began to be seen as a link to the past, but also as a gateway for the translation of Hasidic teachings into other languages, an initiative in which women played important roles. In this period, Yiddish also began to be framed as a linguistic bridge between alienation and intimacy, reflecting the classical Chabad concern with the sacralization of the self and the world . . .
Jesse Tarbert, “The Quest to Bring ‘Business Efficiency’ to the Federal Executive: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Civil Service Reformers in the Late 1920s” (Journal of Policy History)
This article . . . examin[es] a previously unnoticed reorganization campaign launched in response to Herbert Hoover’s 1925 Chamber of Commerce speech. With Hoover’s encouragement, the National Civil Service Reform League—the nation’s preeminent good-government organization—attempted to build support for a revival of the Harding reorganization plan. . . . While this campaign — much like the Harding reorganization campaign — ultimately failed, this story shows that, during the 1920s, executive-centered reorganization was favored, not only by academic experts, but also by a broad group of elite reformers motivated by what people at the time called “business efficiency.” . . . For observers such as Hoover and Roosevelt, one logical implication of the business-government analogy was to enact executive-centered reorganization to give the president an efficient administrative structure akin to that of a modern corporation. This episode also shows that the Harding reorganization effort was not merely an isolated foreshadowing of later efforts, but part of a continuous effort by administrative reformers that spanned the entire New Era.