American Public Life and the Historical Imagination

by Gamber, Wendy; Grossberg, Michael; Hartog, Hendrik

• ISBN13: 9780268020170
• ISBN10: 0268020175
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr

Summary

OVER THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, a number of historians, preeminently Morton Keller of Brandeis University, have created a new field of historical study that reinvigorates political history by incorporating the study of legal, economic, religious, and cultural institutions into a broadly conceptualized history of American public life. The essays in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, all written by former students of Keller, illuminate this new field while also offering a rich appreciation of the complex and diverse American experience. By applying a variety of critical historical strategies and methodologies to the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American public life, contributors to this volume unearth fascinating chronicles in American history. The alliance of the Anti-Saloon League and the Klu Klux Klan in the early twentieth century, hurricane control as a paradigm of twentieth-century institutional life, Native Americans as historians of the United States, and the difficulties that a legal theorist of the 1930s found in describing t

Author Biography

Hendrik Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Introduction Particulars and Perspectives: Rethinking the History of American Public Life	1	(6)
Wendy Gamber
Michael Grossberg
Hendrik Hartog
PART ONE Pluralist Methods and Contexts
``Thinking Like an Indian'': Exploring American Indian Views of American History	7	(20)
Frederick E. Hoxie
The Pluralist State: The Convergence of Public and Private Power in America	27	(22)
William J. Novak
Progressivism and Pluralism	49	(19)
James J. Connolly
Llewellyn, Divorce, and Description	68	(23)
Hendrik Hartog
PART TWO Identities
Anna Dickinson, America's Joan of Arc: Public Discourse and Gendered Rhetoric during the Civil War	91	(22)
J. Matthew Gallman
The Cold Spring Tragedy: Murder, Money, and Women's Business in the Gilded Age	113	(26)
Wendy Gamber
The Enigma of Louis Brandeis's ``Zionization'': His First Public Jewish Address	139	(24)
Allon Gal
``We Can Play Baseball on the Other Side'': The Limits of Nationalist History on a U.S.-Canada Borderland	163	(20)
Beth LaDow
A Successful Defense of Yesterday: Hoyt Moore and the Administration of the Steel Code under the National Industrial Recovery Act	183	(30)
Charles W. Cheape
PART THREE Institutional Experiences
``A Protected Childhood'': The Emergence of Child Protection in America	213	(27)
Michael Grossberg
Kluxing the Eighteenth Amendment: The Anti-Saloon League, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Fate of Prohibition in the 1920s	240	(22)
Thomas R. Pegram
The Public Storm: Hurricanes and the State in Twentieth-Century America	262	(31)
Raymond Arsenault
Afterword The Multiplicity of American Public Life	293	(6)
Ellen Fitzpatrick
Index	299