The September issue of the Journal of American History is now available online and in print. Included are articles by Myisha S. Eatmon, Simon Balto, Maggie Elmore, and Michaela Kleber. The pieces cover a range of subjects, including the use of tort law to redress racial violence, immigrant rights in the face of anti-immigrant violence, the construction of the myth of Black criminality, and gender frontiers in the context of colonial contact. The issue also features reviews of books and digital history projects.
Previews
Michaela Kleber explores the proposition that, in their first encounters in the seventeenth century, the Illinois did not perceive missionaries as men, but rather a normative gender in Illinois society that does not fit within binary understandings of gender. Pulling together disparate sources in their original languages, both French and Miami-Illinois, Kleber demonstrates how Two-Spirit people were critical to the Franco-Illinois gender frontier. Beyond reconsidering gender frontiers and rereading colonial contact, normalizing Two Spirits’ historical roles and more carefully calibrating the use of “gender” to local contexts can begin to center Native viewpoints.
In the twenty-first century, numerous families of unarmed Black people have sued cities and police officers for monetary damages for excessive use of force and wrongful death. The need to sue for white-on-Black violence is not a new phenomenon. The roots of this litigation strategy can be traced back to at least the Jim Crow era. Myisha S. Eatmon examines Black Americans’ use of tort law and damage suits to pursue and gain recourse for white-on-Black violence on trains during the early days of Jim Crow. This article argues that a Black legal culture transformed during the post-Reconstruction period thanks to Black plaintiffs’ lawsuits and Black newspapers’ coverage of and commentary on such litigation.
From the 1870s to the 1960s, white criminals in the United States developed a widespread practice of blackening their skin with burnt cork and greasepaint to make themselves appear as Black before committing crimes. Simon Balto explores the acts of blackface criminals and the way they engaged in “racial framing,” with framing having multiple meanings. On the one hand, blackface criminals tried to literally frame Black people for their own criminal actions, endangering Black life and well-being. On the other hand, they were “framing” race itself, interpreting and amplifying white supremacist discourses linking Blackness with criminality that were emerging and consolidating during the Jim Crow era.
Maggie Elmore examines the kidnap and torture of three undocumented immigrants in Arizona and their fight for justice. The case and its impact are largely forgotten today, but in the 1970s the Hanigan case became a rallying point for people fighting for immigrant rights. Simultaneously, anti-immigrant activists latched on to a violent anti-immigrant narrative that remains as virulent today as it was then. An international movement was born that challenged the failures of the U.S. government to protect immigrants’ human rights. The Hanigan case reveals one way that undocumented people and their allies have used the court system to remind the United States of its commitments to protect basic human rights.
