The December issue of the Journal of American History is now available online and in print. Included are articles by Trent MacNamara, Tracey Deutsch, Natasha Zaretsky and Aaron Hall’s Editor’s Choice article, “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South.” The articles cover a range of topics, including imaginings of the heavens in the early United States, Julia Child and the gendered labor of domesticity, the relationship between road infrastructure and policing slavery, and fatigue and working motherhood in the 1980s. The issue also features Anthea Hartig’s 2024 OAH Presidential Address, as well as digital history, book, and movie reviews.
Previews
In her presidential address to the 2024 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Anthea M. Hartig, the Elizabeth MacMillan Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, argues that despite decades of activism and historical research, women’s “lives, accomplishments, bodies, and futures matter less,” leading Hartig to ask, “Where Have All the Women Gone?” Women, in short, are left out. By sharing some of the projects Hartig worked on at the California Historical Society and the National Museum of History, Hartig calls on us to “assum[e]female presence—and go find them.”
In 1800, the skies ruled. For most Americans, great things came from above. Weather originated in the heavens. Fates were written there. Celestial movements foretold earthly events. A watchful, manlike God resided just beyond view. Purity and justice loomed. Everyday life had a fundamental third dimension. Trent MacNamara charts this dimension in an essay on the relationship of universal spaces to universal ideas. He asks: Where do we find transcendence? Who owns the world beyond? How have the heavens shaped life on earth?
Countless earthen common roads lay at the heart of everyday governance and the enforcement of slavery in the plantation South. Through a ground-up history of road administration and policing, Aaron Hall shows how public power both produced and delimited individual planter power to govern enslaved residents. Winding around estates and wilds, bad southern roads organized the landscape into a matrix of private plantation jurisdictions. Their maintenance spurred the most participatory dimension of local government, as myriad local officials took charge of enslaved crews summoned by the state. These roads became a realm of precarious mobility that channeled enslaved users, and they provided the primary infrastructure for popular policing and formal patrolling of plantation space.
While today we might take foodism and gourmet cooking as routine cultural practices, in the mid-twentieth-century United States, this was far from a forgone conclusion. Tracey Deutsch shows how Julia Child reframed laborious, elaborate cooking as a middle- and even upper-class activity. Rather than inward-focused family dinners overseen by thoughtful wives and mothers, these meals were outward facing—ways to welcome other couples, and new ideas, into one’s home. For Child and growing numbers of home chefs, cooking came to be understood as so important that it lay outside women’s realm, and hence outside the realm of work at all.
During the 1980s, the United States transitioned to a dual-earner economy in which most mothers of young children worked for wages outside the home. Faced with the challenge of balancing wage labor and family responsibilities, working mothers were told that they needed to conserve, manage, and invest their physical and psychic energies wisely. Throughout the decade, employers, advertisers, physicians, psychologists, and fitness and diet gurus waged war on women’s fatigue. Natasha Zaretsky examines this campaign and explains how it updated American ideals of self-improvement and repurposed them to portray individual energy management as the solution to the challenges posed by working motherhood in 1980s America.
