The June issue of the Journal of American History is now available online and in print. Included are articles by Jessica Choppin Roney, Jennifer Thomson, Calvin Cheung-Miaw, and Benjamin Madley’s Editor’s Choice article, “‘Aloha with tears’: Native Hawaiians in the California Gold Rush, 1848–1860.” The pieces cover a wide variety of topics, including the imperial dimensions of expanding republican government after the American Revolution, the experiences of Native Hawaiian miners in nineteenth century California, the ways the EPA contributed to residential racial segregation, and the role of anti-Asian discrimination in the case for affirmative action. The issue also features reviews of movies, books, and digital and public history projects.
Previews
Jessica Choppin Roney asks: In the era after the American Revolution, what work did extending republican government to western states do on behalf of the U.S. Empire? The Constitution vested sovereignty in “the people,” but the Northwest Ordinance simultaneously insisted that new political communities must align with Anglo-American norms, constraining self-determination and institutional forms based in local history, custom, and choice. Republican government gave powerful tools to citizens and made possible a geographically vast political community, but it did so at the cost of foreclosing a diverse array of local preferences and arrangements. The Northwest Ordinance ensured that the sovereignty vested in the people would not jeopardize unity.
Perhaps 1,000 or more Native Hawaiians mined California gold between 1848 and 1860, transforming Hawai‘i, and the Hawaiian diaspora. Largely forgotten today, they were part of a world shaping event that flooded global markets with gold. They hailed from across the archipelago, struck gold repeatedly, innovated uniquely Kanaka (native Hawaiian) mining methods, prospected in every major California gold-mining region, and left enduring legacies in both California and the kingdom. Epidemics had already decimated the Hawaiian population. New gold-rush-era diseases and migration brought additional population losses, further altering the historical trajectory of Hawai‘i. Kanaka gold seekers also firmly established what is now the world’s largest diasporic Hawaiian population. Drawing on sources from Hawai‘i, California, and beyond, Benjamin Madley offers the first in-depth history of their remarkable story.
From 1972–1986, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted billions of dollars to states for the design and construction of sewage treatment facilities. Jennifer Thomson demonstrates how the EPA, in the administration of its Municipal Wastewater Treatment Works Construction Grants Program, routinely granted projects to jurisdictions practicing exclusionary zoning. In so doing, the EPA furthered racial residential segregation and ignored its federal civil rights and fair housing obligations. By financing healthy infrastructures for white suburban neighborhoods while requiring many Black-majority cities to incur significant debt to meet EPA-mandated infrastructure improvements, the EPA actively reproduced environmental health as a privilege of race. The agency’s choices directly contributed to the crumbling sanitary infrastructure across the nation today.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of clashes over educational access thrust Asian Americans into the center of debates about the viability of multiracial coalitions. Asian American studies scholars played an important role in shaping those debates. Those scholars hoped that drawing attention to anti-Asian discrimination would strengthen, not weaken, the case for affirmative action. Calvin Cheung-Miaw analyzes two key moments of controversy, at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the San Francisco Unified School District, to explore why those hopes ultimately receded. He finds that Asian American studies scholars’ belief that different kinds of disadvantage could be subsumed within an anti-Asian racism affecting all Asian Americans limited their ability to identify new grounds for multiracial solidarity.
