ARTICLES

Popolo and Sindacato in the City of Siena: Rethinking Popular Agency in Medieval Italy

María Ángeles Martín Romera

Pages 265–293

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac029

The Italian sindacato was a procedure that from the end of the twelfth century held major officials accountable and exposed them to public control. While the sindacato presented citizens with the opportunity of bringing forward their claims against officials, the evidence of these claims and their outcomes are sketchy. Recent historiography often portrays this procedure as a rhetorical device of civic order and legitimation that only produced real consequences when used as a tool for the political purposes of the elite. The article focuses on Siena, often singled out for the popular character of its governments, as a unique case to test the actual popular participation and oligarchical involvement in sindacati and their significance in relation to the sindacati in other communal cities. First, it analyzes the wide spectrum of participants in the procedure and, in particular, the interests at play for common actors. Second, it explores the direct relationship between sindacati and other institutions and systems of accountability within the city, as well as their interdependent transformations over time. The result is a revision of sindacati that reintegrates the agency and participation of popular actors. The sindacato appears then as neither a zenith of communal democracy nor a crooked tool in the hands of oligarchical interests, but rather as a central act of civic life articulating a wide range of interests among all sorts of citizens, which allowed for its symbolic relevance to perdure until the Renaissance and beyond.

Of Two-Tailed Lizards: Spells, Folk-Knowledge, and Navigating Manila, 1620–1650

David Max Findley

Pages 294–325

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac032

Although seventeenth-century Manila has been anointed the birthplace of global trade and its diversity is well-established, how individuals navigated that milieu is only recently coming to light. To elucidate how various persons experienced Manila, this article assembles and analyzes nearly one hundred denunciations of sorcery (hechicería) made to the Philippine branch of the Inquisition between ca. 1620 and 1650. The hexes and spells sold in this period promised material and physical benefits. Individuals purchased or learned about spells primarily from Indigenous Philippine peoples, but also from Manila’s Moluccan, Indian, and Japanese residents who either imitated Philippine hexes or marketed their own, distinct spells. This exchange took place outside Manila’s city walls, in the sprawling city of Extramuros, where frequent interactions between diverse peoples facilitated exchange and even contributed to the emergence of novel, hybridized hexes mixing Catholic invocations and Philippine rituals. Cumulatively, what these denunciations of a minor crime capture is the everyday interactions between diverse peoples that defined Manila. In the process, they establish how residents experienced and navigated the world’s first global city.

Feeding the Community: London’s Immigrants and Their Food, 1650–1800

Charlie Taverner

Pages 326–351

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac025

Early modern London was a diverse metropolis, but we know little about the social lives of its migrant communities, especially how they fed themselves. Influenced by recent anthropology and sociology of food, migration, and ethnicity, this article examines specific communal food practices of two minority communities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sephardic Jews and French Protestant refugees. Rather than studying how unusual foods marked these migrants as different, it explores how mundane food matters shaped social relations within these communities. The first section analyzes the system of shechita, the ritual slaughter of meat by Jews, by drawing on records of community leadership, account books, and printed texts on the subject. The second section examines two institutions established to feed the Huguenot poor, a soup kitchen in Spitalfields and the hospital known as “La Providence,” both of which left extensive records of administration. Though different, the case studies show how migrant groups, through specific food practices, constructed and experienced community within the capital. The article adds to our knowledge of migrant lives in the city and highlights the richness of institutional records from within these communities. It also suggests how food history can connect minority stories to British history more broadly.

Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis

Patrick Anthony

Pages 352–385

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac057

Some scholars and scientists identify the eighteenth century as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which humans act as a planetary force. This article suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental manipulation, but also by the development of climate politics. Where forests have been the focus of considerable scholarship on eighteenth-century environmental policy, this article turns to hydrology as a theater of material and discursive engagement with the era’s most palpable climatic threat: deluge. Catastrophic floods, like that which followed the eruption of Iceland’s Eldeyjar and Lakagígar volcanos in 1783/84, show how climate took its place in the enlightenment “culture of disaster,” which shifted responsibility from divine to terrestrial authority. Under the rubric of terrestrial enlightenment, I propose a framework for understanding the broad assemblage of artifacts, environments, and imaginaries that constituted late-eighteenth-century climate politics. Encompassing natural resources, infrastructure, and even ruins, terrestrial enlightenment integrates a corresponding range of naturalists, chroniclers, engineers, scholars, artists, and politicians. The naturalist Georg Forster provides an especially rich archive of this time, from his study of Saxon hydraulics in the wake of the flood of 1784 to his death in Paris during the Terror of 1794. On either side of the Rhine, resource management and disaster mitigation materialized political power.

Enforcing Gender at the Polls: Transing Voters and Women’s Suffrage before the American Civil War

Andrew Wender Cohen and Carol Faulkner

Pages 386–410

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac048

Between 1800 and 1860, individuals deemed female by society donned male attire, represented themselves as men, and tried unlawfully to vote, thus challenging the gender binary at the foundation of U.S. democracy. Newspapers regularly featured those who were caught, describing how officials used inspection, violence, and ridicule to deny them the vote and reassert the association between gender and assigned birth sex. Commentators also linked these illicit voters with the organized women’s movement, mocking the possibility of female participation in electoral politics. In response, members of the mainstream women’s movement emphasized their desire to vote as women, reinforcing the gendered assumptions that justified their exclusion. Yet, “transing” voters were more inspired by the raucous partisan politics of the era than such middle-class reformers. The history of their confrontation with an electoral system reserved for men suggests a more porous and inclusive history of gender and citizenship before the Civil War.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Direct Taxation and Negotiated Governance in Colonial Indonesia

Maarten Manse

Pages 411–438

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac050

This article investigates the implementation of direct taxes in colonial Indonesia between roughly 1870 and 1930, to widen our understanding of colonial governance and fiscal state building. It examines the various connotations given to taxation by colonial politicians and statesmen, and elucidates how these were developed and experienced rather differently in practice. Taxes became rooted in local patterns of customary law, indirect rule, and constant negotiation between colonial officials, local indigenous rulers, and subjected taxpayers. This demonstrates that local, colonial institutions did not have the weight and capacity state officials claimed they had, and that in colonial context, bottom-up practices of negotiated governance and consultation, that deliberately ignored the rules of fiscal bureaucracy imposed from above, were pivotal to taxation.

Social Stratification and Career Choice Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe

Orel Beilinson

Pages 439–462

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac042

Central Europe around 1900 was marred with anxiety around the choice of career. This article weaves histories of education, labor, bureaucracy, and the social sciences to show how families reacted to changes in the labor market, including the opening of careers to talent and the mechanization of handicrafts. Parents found themselves unable to guide their children to a safe profession. Whereas previously, career choices were limited, changes in education and the labor market offered adolescents more options. Simultaneously, however, some occupations became endangered and others overcrowded. The erosion of labor stratification gave families the hope of social mobility but also upended their ontological security, as traditional roads to adulthood became impossible to follow. This article uses the discourse on career choice to write a history of this crisis. The discourse was born in early modern Europe to stop parents from forcing their children into a profession against the children’s wishes. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, parents and schools weaponized this discourse against each other to widen or narrow access to advanced education. Social scientists concerned with the industrial labor force joined the conversation by turning career choice into a matter of scientific expertise. Finally, the article shows how voluntary associations pioneered the provision of vocational guidance before state intervention after World War I. Thus, the article traces a significant transformation in the transition to adulthood and offers a prehistory of vocational guidance.

Making Desegregation Work: Citizen Participation and Bureaucratic Resistance in the Boston Public Schools, 1974–85

Greta de Jong

Pages 463–489

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac028

Court-ordered desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in the 1970s has often been cast as an example of federal overreach that inflicted a disruptive “forced busing” plan on the city, generating only racial conflict and trauma while failing to ensure educational equality. Yet by encouraging citizen participation in developing and implementing plans for eliminating racism from the school system, the court order opened space for parents and community members to get involved in the public schools on an unprecedented scale. While some white Bostonians responded to desegregation with racist violence, others took advantage of the opportunities provided by the court order to press their vision for a more inclusive school system that would prepare children to live in an interracial democracy. Their efforts came up against an entrenched, self-interested bureaucracy that had no interest in sharing power or significantly reallocating educational resources. The struggles over education reform that played out in the offices of school administrators reveal the diverse interests and motivations that undermined school desegregation in Boston and allowed inequities to persist.

REVIEWS

The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America. By Philippa Koch

Janet Moore Lindman

Pages 490–492

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab068

Completed as the COVID-19 pandemic raged throughout the globe, Philippa Koch’s book, The Course of God’s Providence, confirms the need to contextualize the meanings of human suffering—whether in the past or the present. This intellectual history adds to our understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship between religion and medicine during the eighteenth century. The growing impact of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment occurred alongside the tenacious salience of providentialism in discussions of sickness and health. The author challenges the common refrain that secularization, with its emphasis on “disenchantment” and “rationalization,” emerged seamlessly to displace religious doctrine and belief, which both conveniently faded away. There was “no immediate wholesale paradigm shift from religious to secular, from God’s providence to human activity, science, and progress” (11). A strong narrative focus is sustained throughout the monograph about the presence of providential thinking in a variety of sources (pastoral manuals, unpublished diaries, death accounts, and midwifery treatises), and topics (medical care, epidemic disease, breastfeeding and childbirth). Primarily interested in the “foundational narrative and theological practices” (17) evident in these sources, Koch traces providentialism as a powerful component in the experience and narration of disease, disorder, and death. The eighteenth century was not a period of spiritual declension but one “of persisting and transforming religious belief and practice” as early Americans displayed “new optimism about human reason, science and benevolence with long standing Christian commitments to repentance, faith and salvation” (12-13).

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. By Jessica Marie Johnson

Lorelle Semley

Pages 493–495

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab071

It gave me pause to read and think about intimacy in all of its beauty, horror, and possibilities in the heat of the COVID-19 epidemic. As we bemoaned the loss of causal touches and friendly embraces, we recognized the new weight of shared space at home and in peering eyes on our screens. In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, Jessica Marie Johnson demonstrates artfully that intimacy could have different, far-reaching repercussions. She argues that intimacy along with kinship were central to the ways Black women practiced freedom in a slice of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world that included Senegambia in West Africa; Haiti and Cuba in the Caribbean; and the Gulf Coast in North America. Deploying intimate and kin relationships as her main tools of analysis, she reveals the daily lives of women and their families and how their lives intersected with enslavers and colonial officials. At the same time, Johnson issues broader challenges to the practice of history, the reading of archives, and the conceptualization of freedom as a counterpoint to slavery. Beyond examining intimacy as “corporeal, carnal, quotidian encounters of flesh and fluid,” she tells a timely and complex story of Black women “making freedom free” for other Black women (4).

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson

Jonathan Hall

Pages 496–498

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab076

Until very recently, Black nineteenth century activism remained largely in the shadows, eclipsed by the formidable figures cut by a William Lloyd Garrison or John Brown. When scholars did acknowledge the significant work of people of color, they turned their attention to a handful of figures, mostly male, who raged against slavery from public venues such as churches or abolitionist meetings. The Colored Conventions Movement and its companion website The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) offer an array of essays, exhibits, and digital resources that challenge us to think deeply about the silences in the historical record and rethink what we know about Black activism across the nineteenth century.

Beginning as a response to mob violence in Cincinnati in 1830, Colored Conventions spanned the nineteenth century and convened in every region of United States to provide a space for men and women of color to press their case for equal rights as citizens and human beings. Predating the antebellum abolition movement by several years, and the formation of the NAACP by eight decades, Colored Conventions and their thousands of dedicated delegates and attendees confronted a wide range of issues beyond the extinction of slavery including lobbying for educational opportunities, voting rights, land ownership, and the fruits of full citizenship. According to P. Gabrielle Foreman, one of the book’s editors, these conventions served as an outlet for “a parallel politics, actualized in the face of official exclusion, derision, and violence” that worked independently from and sometimes ahead of whites (29).

Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915. By Jack Daniel Webb

Johnhenry Gonzalez

Pages 499–501

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab074

Jack Daniel Webb’s Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915 is an exploration of the diplomatic relations between the two countries, Haiti’s depictions and ideological uses in the British press and among Britain’s Victorian intellectual and political elite, as well Haitians’ responses to the racism of the Victorian era. At the center of the book both structurally and interpretively is the author’s analysis of the Morant Bay War and the cotemporaneous HMS Bulldog Affair between Britain and the Haitian forces of Sylvain Salnave. Building on work by Matthew Smith, Mimi Sheller and others, Webb explores the ways in which Haiti played its own role in the expansion of British ideas around racial and civilizational world policing in the era of Caribbean gunboat diplomacy. Webb has passion for the sources, and he has uncovered many intriguing dimensions of Haiti’s historical entanglements with Britain.

Webb has made quite a choice with regard to periodization. Here we see another author pushing the turn towards Haiti’s nineteenth century by stepping entirely past the era of the Haitian Revolution. This is quite striking given the importance of Britain’s major involvement in the Haitian Revolution. But the author lays out the ways in which Haitian studies has a great deal to offer to the relatively robust arena of Victorian British political and intellectual history. Discussions of James Anthony Froude, Spenser St. John, and Carlyle are all likely of interest for scholars of race and the Victorian era. The vignette of Froude snooping around the Haitian marketplace searching for any evidence of human flesh for sale is remarkable.

Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. By Vincent DiGirolamo

Philip M Glende

Pages 502–503

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab073

Vincent DiGirolamo has written a richly detailed account of the American newsboy that is filled with anecdotes bringing to life the boys, men, and sometimes girls and women, who were responsible for distributing the nation’s thriving urban press from 1830 to 1940. Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys is based on memoirs, contemporary accounts in the newspaper and trade press of the day, and government documents. DiGirolamo demonstrates the importance of this labor force in the commercial success of the newspaper industry and in the delivery of news to America’s growing reading public. He also situates the newsboys’ work in the struggle of workers to be represented by unions, and in the evolution of social thought about child labor and juvenile well-being, though “newsboy” is a catch-all term that refers to adults and children. Some were wandering street hawkers, some had permanent newsstand locations on street corners and in rail stations, others sold papers on trains with regular routes, and still others operated fixed delivery routes.

Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy. By George Sánchez

A K Sandoval-Strausz

Pages 504–506

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab077

From George J. Sánchez, one of the most prominent scholars in the field of Latino history, comes Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy. The book is both a labor of love and a well-chosen community study: the former because Boyle Heights is the neighborhood where the author’s parents settled upon arriving from Mexico in the late 1950s; the latter because this section of Los Angeles presents an early example of the kinds of demographic changes that have transformed many neighborhoods in American cities both big and small. Sánchez focuses on “how this community came to be a thriving multiracial neighborhood, what challenges it faced in maintaining a sense of community over time, and how the legacy of this progressive multiracialism continued to exert a powerful influence over residents when the neighborhood became overwhelmingly Latino in the last third of the twentieth century” (4). He identifies Boyle Heights as “a flourishing interracial community in the midst of a government committed to racial separation and white supremacy,” which made it “deeply threatening” to Los Angeles’ municipal leaders (10). Nonetheless, Sánchez explains, its history “tells an important story about a neighborhood that was strong because of its diversity, and about the absorption of a constant stream of newcomers into the life of the city” (13).

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. By David Hugill

Sasha Maria Suarez

Pages 507–509

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab082

The murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) in May of 2020 catapulted Minneapolis into the national spotlight. The city quickly became a site of examination regarding structural racism and inequity prevalent in Midwestern cities that have frequently touted themselves as progressive and liberal bastions. The days and months following Floyd’s violent murder led to numerous discussions about how cities like Minneapolis are rife with violence for people of color, specifically Black and Indigenous Midwesterners. In Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis, geographer David Hugill articulates an urgent need to reevaluate how, like other American cities, Minneapolis is perceived as exceptional when its foundations are built upon a continual rearticulation of settler colonialism and racial disparity.

Though Hugill points to contemporary contestations, he seeks to take up a longer historical thread that begins in the years following World War II. This book is best considered as two halves that provide interlocking analyses and arguments. The first half is an examination of transformative post-war public policies, which Hugill says “produc[ed] discrete zones of privilege and deprivation” in Minneapolis (34). He argues that the Indigenous community concentrated in Phillips neighborhood (separated to the south of downtown by an interstate) is, in part, a result of the reproduction of settler colonial oppression. Through “urban strategies,” which included state-subsidized suburbanization, the building of interstates, the destruction of “Skid Row,” absentee landlords, and a notable lack of capital to support a densely populated “inner city,” Hugill demonstrates that the city’s rapidly growing Indigenous community was “inseparable from a particular political economy of exclusion”(51). Importantly, he also argues that white liberal antiracist advocacy, represented through organizations such as the League of Women Voters, relied (as it arguably still does) on a notion of individual success over a truly radical assessment of structural inequity. Such ideologically-driven advocacy ignored assumptions regarding the incompatibility of Indigenous cultures and urban spaces while maintaining racist portrayals of Indigenous uncleanliness, alcoholism, and incarceration.

Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s. By Kathryn Schumaker

Zebulon V Miletsky

Pages 510–511

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac003

Harkening back to an era in which students were often labeled and disciplined as “troublemakers,” Kathryn Schumaker describes in eloquent terms the stakes involved in being a student activist at a time when to question authority was to play with one’s reputation, and as such, one’s own future. The label “troublemaker,” once applied, was not easily removed. Demonstrating the gradual ways in which popular notions of student activism began to change—allowing for the student activist to emerge as hero, changemaker and leader of a vanguard movement in several U.S. cities—Schumaker convincingly shows how student activism changed the face of American education and upended the notion of the compliant and passive American student. What also emerges in this fascinating study is one facet of American exceptionalism—the somewhat anomalous experience of a suppressed student movement in the 1960s. Student activism had been an important element in Europe, and in the global south—particularly Latin America—and yet the student voice in the United States, as Schumaker explains, was not considered a constitutionally protected form of expression prior to 1969. Slowly, in the 1960s, campus protests by students began to capture the public’s attention, if not always their support. In earlier studies of the new left, this has often been attributed to a “generation gap” between the post-war “baby-boom” generation and their parents. Indeed, the decade in which many of Schumaker’s subjects grew up, the 1950s, was the reign of the teenager with Rock and Roll (and its attendant rebelliousness) as well as growing buying power in the economy by the American teenager. In actuating a student body politic, and organizing on America’s campuses, Schumaker’s subjects—those pioneering “troublemakers”—tapped into the power of this worldwide phenomenon of student activism that was not only a great changemaker, but long recognized as a necessary element in worldwide social movements and politics. Indeed, the most recognizable student movement of the 1960s was hatched in one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning, U. C. Berkeley, which would come to be known as the “free speech movement.” Many of those student leaders would later become aides-de-camp in the fight for Civil Rights in the Southern (and Northern) states—with some joining “Freedom Summer,” teaching in freedom schools, and marching on Washington—using their own privilege to create a moral crisis for their parents’ generation. As the war in Vietnam escalated, and issues became more urgent, they soon eclipsed Civil Rights, and that same student movement would go on to call into moral question an entire war. But did students have the right to free speech? As Schumaker points out, it was not until 1969 that the Supreme Court would recognize the First Amendment rights of students to express dissent at school in Tinker vs. Des Moines. So, to be a student activist before 1969 was to be labeled a “subversive” and to have one’s own life threatened all because they wanted to have a better education.

Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women's Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era. By Suzanne Kahn

Kristin Celello

Pages 512–513

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab080

In this tightly argued, deeply researched work, Suzanne Kahn explores how and why the experience of divorce in the late 1960s and 1970s birthed a generation of feminist divorce reformers who fought, with varying degrees of success, for legislation that would protect women from the economic hardships that frequently accompanied the end of their marriages. Kahn argues that while these reformers wanted to push the state to recognize marriage as an economic partnership between the spouses—even if wives’ labor within the home was unpaid—reformers frequently accepted compromise legislation that reinforced marriage as a special status from which many benefits flowed, especially to those with the economic privilege to access them.

Kahn divides her work into three sections. In the first, she details how and why the no-fault divorce “revolution” shifted the marital playing field for so many American women, who married under one set of expectations but divorced under a completely different regime. As divorcing women discovered that the vestiges of coverture were alive and well in American law, they turned to the burgeoning feminist movement, and especially the National Organization for Women, for aid. Kahn looks specifically at three influential reformers—Betty Blaisdell Berry, Elizabeth Coxe Spalding, and Tish Sommers—each of whom drew on their varying personal experiences of divorce to frame their approaches to activism. Sommers, for instance, had gone through a second divorce in her late 50 s. Acutely aware of the hardships facing older women who had spent decades out of the workforce, she organized around the need to support educational and job training programs for the women she labeled “displaced homemakers.”

No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality. By Paul Adler

Quinn Slobodian

Pages 514–516

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab079

When Donald Trump was elected to the office of president in 2016 on an economically populist platform condemning multilateral trade deals, the offshoring of American jobs, and unfair overseas competition, many saw this as an unpleasant but long-overdue reckoning with the consequences of globalization on the lives of ordinary U.S. citizens. Many others heard echoes of previous opponents of globalization, including Patrick Buchanan and Ross Perot in the 1990s before the passage of NAFTA, the WTO, or the boom in Chinese manufacturing. One often heard the narrative that there were only two options: a cosmopolitan free trade attitude or a reactionary protectionist xenophobia.

Paul Adler’s essential new book tells the story of a group who rejected this false binary. His protagonists had long been predicting a shift in public sentiment toward globalization and had campaigned, organized, and strategized for a non-xenophobic, socially just, and internationalist alternative since the 1970s. While the subtitle suggests the focus is on “U.S. activists,” a better moniker is one he introduces himself: “the people’s experts” (12). Working in the spirit of what he calls the “public interest progressivism” pioneered by Ralph Nader and his 1965 pathbreaking book Unsafe at Any Speed, Adler tracks an alphabet soup of organizations, advocacy groups and non-profits, many of which were founded by Nader himself, which used “lobbying, lawsuits, and other ‘insider’ tactics to bring about social change” (2).

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. By Francesca Morgan

Cassandra Good

Pages 517–519

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac004

In the first two pages of her book A Nation of Descendants, Francesca Morgan makes a key point that opens new possibilities for her exploration of genealogy: politics is about far more than government institutions. At times, Morgan argues, genealogy was tied to government institutions and policies, but most often its political import was as a tool of power for reifying social hierarchies and solidifying white Protestant supremacy in America. In order to prove this argument, Morgan looks beyond the typical subjects of histories of genealogy—white New England Protestants—to examine how marginalized groups both shaped and were shaped by the quest for family histories. This story of genealogy is usefully clarifying about Americans’ long-running obsession with their family roots.

The first of the book’s two parts covers what Morgan calls “arguments about exclusion” in the period before 1960. Chapter one, the only chapter primarily focused on the nineteenth century, demonstrates how “narrowing definitions of American belonging, along the lines of inheritance, documentation, and whiteness,” elevated the importance of genealogy (20). Tracing family histories became a way of drawing boundaries between racial groups, and Morgan argues that this grew in importance for native-born white Protestants facing ethnically diverse newcomers in the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, through the 1887 Dawes Act and grandfather clauses in southern state voting laws, the government used patrilineal family descent to restrict and oppress Native and African Americans, respectively.