ARTICLES

Making Masters Moral: Household Subordinates and Upward Social Discipline in Late Medieval Basel

Philip Grace

Pages 289–314

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab008

This article examines how late medieval non-nuclear household relationships shaped the pursuit of honorable social status. It examines in detail several witness depositions from the Basel municipal court (Schultheissengericht) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have long noted the concern of householders to regulate the morality of their servants and apprentices. However, the study will demonstrate that subordinates could and did defend their own household honor by policing the morality of their masters and other household members, both through verbal shaming and through the distinctive strategic option of refusing to work. The importance of subordinates as arbiters of honorable status was recognized and exploited by individual masters, guilds, and courts; in the region around Basel, it could even be formalized in the written genre of a Schelmbrief (shame-document). Social discipline was not simply a question of householder-masters controlling their subordinates, but also the reverse.

From Impropriety to Betrayal: Policing Non-Marital Sex in the Early Modern Dutch Empire

Sophie Rose and Elisabeth Heijmans

Pages 315–344

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa054

The policing of illicit sex formed a key mode of social control in early modern Europe, where reproduction in legally sanctioned marriage was the primary means through which property and status was passed. When Europeans formed overseas colonial settlements sustained by slave labor and populated by people of a broad variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, this concern with sexually transgressive behavior took on new dimensions. This article takes the case of Dutch trade-company-led colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to examine how colonial visions of social order in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean shaped authorities' responses to different types of non-marital sex. To facilitate comparison, these acts are read through narratives of criminalization, comprised of both conceptualizations of crime and prosecution practices. Through an analysis of legislation issued across the Dutch empire, most notably bylaws, combined with a selection of case studies from the juridical practice, we show that a concern with keeping different ethnic, religious, and status groups separate and maintaining European dominance shaped the policing of sexuality in such a way that the distinction between relatively benign sexual “improprieties” and a more serious criminal narrative of sexual “betrayal” was re-arranged along gendered and racialized lines. Conceptualizations and prosecutions alike show a considerably more stringent treatment of sex between non-Christian or non-white men and women of European status than between European men and enslaved or free local women, even when the latter scenario was coercive or violent.

The Death of Molly Schultz: Race, Magic, and the Law in the Post-slavery Caribbean

Juanita De Barros

Pages 345–373

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab005

This article uses a singular event, the murder trial of a multiracial group of men and women accused of killing a young white girl, to examine the complex interactions between individual experiences and larger social patterns in the twentieth-century British Caribbean. It explores responses to the tragic death of a young child in British Guiana, Molly Schultz, notably its political and legal repercussions, by focusing on the Afro- and Indo-Guianese accused, the colonial prosecutors, and the multiethnic opposition politicians who became involved. Colonial officials took advantage of this death to pass two pieces of legislation. One strengthened the local anti-obeah (magic) law, a change that remained in effect until the late twentieth century. The second was a new law that effectively prevented poor, non-white Guianese from sitting on juries, part of an official attempt to help buttress white political power and a response to the racial fears of a colonial elite. I argue that the quotidian struggles of daily life shaped the lives and the stories of those accused of Molly Schultz's murder. Their experiences helped create the context in which these men and women became involved in the case and informed their explanations of their actions; their accounts in turn influenced the official version of Molly Schultz's death, including the role of obeah. The Indo- and Afro-creole lawyers and politicians who took up the case may not have represented themselves as believing in the magical practices purportedly at the center of these events, but they recognized their political significance. Contemporary racial tensions and political considerations influenced the legal proceedings but the everyday lives of ordinary Guianese helped shaped the outcome and the surrounding debates.

"And our Mother from in Heaven": Death and Love in a Mexican Courtship Diary, Guadalajara, 1864–69

William E French

Pages 374–399

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa062

Doña Carlota Yñiguez de Gil's death and her resurrection in textual form in the courtship diary of Luciano Gallardo and Carlota Gil, a twelve-volume tome written in and around Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, between 1864 and 1869, offer a unique perspective on broad questions taken up in the literature on death and deathways in Mexico and elsewhere. Doña Yñiguez de Gil has much to say about ideologies of rule and understandings of piety at a point in time when, in Mexico, both death and marriage were shifting from ecclesiastical to civil control. Yet, her role as an active agent in history extends far beyond that of exemplary case in these paradigmatic shifts in politics and piety. A community of memory, one comprised of family, friends, neighbors, and others, grew up around her; through their ongoing relationship with her corpse, a social being, they found a powerful means to help them constitute identities of gender, family, class, community, and citizenship. Along with her grave and some of her possessions, she became a site of affect around whom a web of narratives, ideas, and values formed. Feelings accumulated around her as did a cluster of promises, including those of happiness, legitimacy, and acceptable family formation. The omnipresence of the deceased Doña Yñiguez de Gil in the diary, and her perceived role of intervening on the couple's behalf from on high, was also central to structuring remembrance, commemoration, a particular sense of time, and even the values and meanings of romantic love.

Yawn: Boredom and Powerlessness in the Late Ottoman Empire

Avner Wishnitzer

Pages 400–425

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab013

Over the last decade or so, boredom has attracted tremendous media and scholarly attention. Historians, however, remained largely uninterested, which is all the more surprising considering the wide consensus among scholars about the historicity of modern boredom, and its distinctiveness from earlier forms of tedium. This article joins a handful of works that discussed boredom in concrete historical contexts, focusing on the late Ottoman Empire. The article places boredom in two different discourses, developed by different generations of writers. The first was promoted by the Hamidian regime (1876–1908) and some of the most prominent writers of the time. In this discourse, the boredom of subalterns, including soldiers, women, and youngsters was considered a social problem. Hegemonic writers blamed boredom on the bored, warned that it could breed “harmful” ideas and behaviors, and spurred their addressees to become productive subjects promoting their own personal, and imperial, progress. But for young and educated urbanites, probably the foremost target group of this discourse, the motivational talk was itself dull. Pinned down by their elders, by their social superiors, by an oppressive political system that offered little true prospect of “advancement,” all these youngsters could do was to disengage and wait. Their own discourse therefore associated boredom not with indolence but with estrangement, melancholy, and frustration. So while hegemonic writers interpreted these emotions in terms of lethargy and decadence, they in fact held potential political energy, which later fed the uprising against the Hamidian order in the summer 1908.

The Imperial Makings of Medical Work: Peter Johnstone Freyer and the Practice of Genitourinary Medicine in Britain and the Raj, c. 1875–1921

Kieran Fitzpatrick

Pages 426–452

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa056

This article establishes the social history that connected British imperialism, the medical profession, and the meaning of its work through the career of a prominent Irish surgeon, Peter Johnstone Freyer, between 1875 and 1921. Although the social history of professions has been of frequent interest among contributors to this journal, their readings have maintained particularly “structural” accounts of what provides professions with their power and authority. From this perspective, professions are made and maintained by formal education, the strength of the associations between their members, and how they practice their knowledge. In recent years, however, such accounts have been called into question by scholars who seek to emphasize the “imaginative” qualities of professions, that is, the active processes by which they situate their ethics, values, and institutions in relation to particular cultures external to the formal structures of the profession itself. This is the premise from which I work in order to demonstrate the ways in which the social and cultural contexts provided by British imperialism shaped the meaning of Freyer's practice in genitourinary medicine, both in India and metropolitan London. As a result, I augment pre-existing accounts of this medical specialty, which have been written in line with structural accounts of the social history of professions.

Searching for Vance Lowry: "Banjo King" and "A Kind of Parisian Figure"

Deirdre M O'Connell

Pages 453–483

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab042

The life stories of traveling people reveal hidden historiographical connections and serve as allegories for broader cultural patterns. This biographical portrait of African American banjo player Vance Lowry tracks a path from the Appalachian Mountains to the avant-garde salons of 1920s Paris. As a figure on the vanguard of cultural change, Lowry's knowledge was absorbed by like-minded white people on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet he has been remembered only as a person who influenced the vanguard—if he has been remembered at all. If histories of the white avant-garde have emphasized the ruptures of modernism, this account of Vance Lowry's life, family, and career point to its continuities. Namely, that Black materials fashioned American culture and the culture of the modern world. In tracing this tradition, the article chronicles the shifting place of the banjo in the modern imagination, while disassembling systems of white patronage that sustained Vance Lowry's performing life but relegated him to a footnote in annals of modernism.

Challenging Custodialism: Families and Eugenic Institutionalization at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn

Chelsea D Chamberlain

Pages 484–509

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab009

Historians have described how powerful eugenic ideologies fueled the rapid expansion of custodial institutionalization of the so-called feebleminded in the early twentieth century. Using new sources from the recently opened archive of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn, this article argues that in practice, this transition to custodialism was difficult, uneven, and subject to constant compromise. Institutional residents and their families contested expert prognoses and disciplinary methods and maintained relationships across institutional boundaries. Their vernacular ideas about mental impairment, curability, and the purpose of institutional segregation produced a gap between eugenic discourse and institutional life. The challenges that residents and their families levied were neither absolute nor consistent: their force and success depended on their class status, community contexts, and most significantly, the perceived severity of a resident's impairment. Residents with greater care needs were frequently relegated to the background, not only in psycho-medical professionals' treatises and administration but in the expectations that families brought to bear on the institution. Decades before institutionalized people and their families formed political advocacy groups that struggled for deinstitutionalization and civil rights, they fought individual battles that pitted their intimate knowledge against expertise. Although their victories were small and statistically rare, they tested the bounds of psycho-medical authority and established the ideological and practical limits of eugenic mass institutionalization.

The Kimbalitos: The Plan Kimball, Cold War, and Medicine in Paraguay, 1956–64

Bridget María Chesterton

Pages 510–532

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa053

This article studies a faculty exchange from the medical school at the University of Buffalo (later the State University of New York, University at Buffalo) to the medical school in Asunción, Paraguay in the 1950s and 1960s. The arrival of U.S.-trained medical professionals spurred a new pedagogical program designed to improve medical education by reducing the number of students enrolled, making the curriculum more scientifically oriented, and demanding the professionalization of its future doctors. Moreover, the program was strategically designed to depoliticize the medical school in Asunción at the height of the Cold War. Using oral interviews of Paraguayans who participated in the reforms, government records, and documents produced by U.S. medical professionals, the article tracks how the program was started and under what conditions it operated, and concludes that both the United States and Paraguayan medical professionals considered the program a success—it improved the quality of Paraguayan medical professionals and, at least temporarily, neutralized the political leanings of the medical school.

REVIEWS

Beyond Babel. Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. By Larissa Brewer-García

Karen B Graubart

Pages 533–535

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa066

What might a black theology have looked like in the Spanish colonial world? There is now abundant scholarship on black Christian practices in colonial Latin America, including studies of black saints, confraternities, healing practices, and social networks. But the archives offer little in the way of insight into a specifically black theology. By illuminating the work of black men and women who acted as intermediaries in the seventeenth century Andes, Larissa Brewer-García offers access to the process of slave conversion and insight into black Christian intellectual life.

Beyond Babel begins with a sketch of Spanish humanist thought about the relationship between color, intellectual capacity, language, and spiritual virtue. Legal codes and popular literature associated blackness with rudeness, danger, and incompetence, but evangelization treatises presented a conflict: how might the Catholic church recognize enslaved and indigenous subjects as autonomous decision-makers in the face of conversion while treating their bodies and minds as (temporarily) incapable of that consent? The conundrum sets Brewer-García up to analyze language as a medium for conversion. While missionaries placed indigenous and black subjects on the same continuum as all humanity, their baptisms could only be valid with linguistic intercession.

Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory. By Alison Games

Jared Ross Hardesty

Pages 536–538

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa050

In early 1623, Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials on the island of Ambon in modern Indonesia arrested, tortured, and executed 10 English East India Company (EIC) employees, nine Japanese mercenaries who worked for the VOC, and the VOC's slave overseer. The “conspiracy,” according to the VOC, involved the EIC employees scheming with the mercenaries and Ambon's enslaved population to evict the Dutch from Ambon and monopolize the island's lucrative clove trade. VOC officials extracted evidence and confessions using torture. While historians continue to debate what exactly happened on Ambon, the story of the “massacre” shaped Anglo-Dutch relations and the British Empire for over three centuries.

Alison Games's intriguing Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory examines the “Amboyna Massacre” and its aftermath. Games is a scholar of the rise of the English and, later, British Empire. As she has shown in her The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660, there was significant overlap between England's imperial endeavors in the Americas and Asia and it has been modern historians, not contemporaries, that draw a distinction between the two hemispheres. This work expands on that theme, examining the Amboyna incident's historical context, what the judicial murder of 10 Englishmen on Amboyna meant, how that meaning changed over time, and how discourse around Amboyna influenced Britain's rise as a global power.

Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. By Guy Beiner

Joan Redmond

Pages 539–541

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa052

Guy Beiner's book is a highly impressive, indeed encyclopaedic, work of historical scholarship. At over 700 pages and with many chapters over 100 pages each, it is a dense read that may be off-putting to more casual readers; the relative lack of introductory context is also problematic for non-specialists. Its close structure prevents any real dipping in and out of different sections, and it demands a high level of commitment of its readers. This commitment is rewarded however by a substantial achievement of detailed and careful research, combined with intensive engagement with a wide range of scholarly literatures—a true “big book” demanding time, effort and reflection often not readily available in current Anglo-American academic climates of Research Excellence Frameworks and other pressures. This will surely see it stand as a vital contribution to scholarships of social memory, social history, source criticism and Irish history, to name just a few, for many years to come.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds. By Rossen Djagalov

Steven S Lee

Pages 542–544

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa051

While much recent scholarship has focused on transnational movements and activism, Rossen Djagalov turns our attention to the international—specifically the leftist, state-driven networks connecting the Soviet Union to Asia, Africa, and, later, Latin America. Throughout the twentieth century, we learn, the Soviet state actively supported anti-colonial struggles across what, during the Cold War, became known as the non-aligned “Third World.” Thus, what we find here is the convergence of Second and Third Worlds, resulting in an estranged view of each: anti-colonialism in a Soviet key, the Soviet Union (in particular its Central Asian republics) as a hub of Afro-Asian politics and culture. While the Soviet Union's allure for anti-colonial and anti-racist activists during the interwar years has been established by scholars from multiple fields, Djagalov carries this forward to the postwar years, through the Soviet collapse, and into a post-socialist present in which the genealogy that he reconstructs has been willfully forgotten.

Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice. By Quito J. Swan

Robbie Shilliam

Pages 545–547

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa048

Quito Swan's new book follows the Bermudan Black Power activist Pauulu Kamarakafego (1932-2007) in his journeys across the Caribbean, North America, Africa and Oceania. While presenting a life full of movement and eclecticism, Swan is especially concerned to underscore Kamarakafego's technical contributions to global environmental justice. Pauulu's Diaspora makes crucial contributions to a set of inter-connecting literatures that probe the breadth and depth of black internationalism. In this panoply of scholarship, black women's activism, non-anglosphere locations, and the “black pacific” are direct points of engagement. Above all, though, Swan's intervention challenges the U.S.-centric nature of black power narratives.

Towards this end, Swan begins by setting out a multi-dimensional framework for tracking and analyzing social movement history. Thinking with the notion of “radical black diaspora” allows Swan to glean a specific kind of politics from the archives. And the concept of “trans-Africanism” allows him to connect these Pan-African politics through a constellation of global black spaces. Kamarakafego's diaspora, as Swan tracks it, is an incredibly diverse yet interconnected twentieth century world that has not one but multiple centers, all of which constantly shift in constellations of struggle and creativity.

Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century. By James P. Woodard

Molly C Ball

Pages 548–550

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa059

James Woodard's monograph opens with Brazil's class C on the verge of its consumer arrival. The designation, which by the early twenty-first century referred to Brazil's working poor, had evolved from a classification scheme of potential consumers that J. Walter Thompson (JWT) advertising executives brought to the country in 1929. Brazil's Revolution in Commerce shows the pervasive reach, nuance, and ability to impact national cultural practices that Brazil's advertising and commercial sector had between 1920 and 1980. The study highlights how firms, individuals, and consumers cultivated, created, and reflected Brazilian consumer capitalism, and the critique and self-reflection they offered as their ideas, practices, and class distinctions expanded beyond advertising.

Organized into six lengthy chapters, Brazil's Revolution in Commerce explores how United States' individualism and advertising practices impacted Brazilian society. The first five chapters proceed chronologically, showcasing Woodard's encyclopedic knowledge of the processes, major actors and agencies, and novelties accompanying commercial expansion. Companies and advertisers often deliberately adopted United States' strategies, but they also consciously adapted to Brazilian preferences, and realities. The final chapter delves into the criticism that politicians, artists, playwrights, journalists, and even advertising men expressed throughout the period under analysis. Woodard's close readings of plays, novels, memoirs, artwork, and speeches attest to the psychological, economic, and social complexity wrought by Americanization and consumerism's catch-22 of dissatisfaction and dependence.

Korean Skilled Workers. By Hyung-A Kim

Peter Banseok Kwon

Pages 551–553

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa060

Hyung-A Kim's Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy tells the story of South Korea's first generation of skilled industrial workers and their socio-political transformation over four decades. Kim explains how these “industrial warriors” were originally recruited through an authoritarian system for state-imposed skills training, through technical high schools and vocational training programs, and then served as the bulwark of state-led heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI). They were employed by the most prominent Korean, family-owned conglomerates called chaebŏl in the 1970s and thereafter. These industrial warriors, however, evolved into self-proclaimed “goliath warriors” and led the democratic labor union movement in a working class struggle against the state and chaebŏl from 1987 to the early-1990s. By the early 2000s, they emerged as the “labor aristocracy,” distinguishing themselves from other lower-tier workers of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and contingent nonregular workers, and enjoying privileges that included superior wages and guaranteed job security.

The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. By David Paul Kuhn

David Austin Walsh

Pages 554–556

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa065

The hard hat riot—where a group of construction workers in Manhattan viciously attacked an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on May 8, 1970—has long been of interest to scholars of the 1960s and 1970s as a striking example of Richard Nixon's “Silent Majority” coming violently to life. David Paul Kuhn's The Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution is the first full-length book treatment of the riot. It's an engaging, well-written, but frustratingly uneven account of the riot, its origins, and its aftermath.

The book is organized into three broad sections. The first section, dealing with the backdrop of the riot, is the most problematic, as Kuhn seems more interested in validating the grievances of working-class whites against New Left radicals and their liberal political allies than in analysis. (In his endnotes, Kuhn writes that he uses “New Left more expansively than is traditional” to include “newish liberalism” like that of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.”) An entire chapter is dedicated to the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968; while Kuhn points out quite rightly that most Americans sided with the police over the protestors, he also implies that the police violence in Chicago was—if not exactly justified—brought on by the radical demonstrators themselves.

Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State since the 1970s. Edited by Jonathan Bell

Paul M Renfro

Pages 557–558

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa055

In her 2018 historiographical essay “The Power of Queer History,” published in the American Historical Review, Regina Kunzel observed that scholarly efforts “to locate LGBT/queer history in the larger context of power, politics, and the state are more evident than ever.”

Beyond the Politics of the Closet reflects and reinforces such efforts. It boasts an impressive list of contributors that includes some of the foremost scholars working on LGBTQ+ history in the United States. Their essays showcase important original research interrogating the “complex interactions” between sexual dissidents and the state since the 1970s (9). Indeed, the volume ultimately encourages scholars to challenge conceptions of a uniformly repressive “straight state,” particularly when considering the politics of sexuality since the convulsions of the sixties and seventies. As Jonathan Bell trenchantly notes in his introduction to the collection, “we can no longer talk about either the state or private capitalism as exclusively ‘straight' in the way we perhaps could before the 1980s” (4).

To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS. By Dan Royles

Katie Batza

Pages 559–560

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa064

To Make the Wounded Whole is an exciting, worthwhile, and accessible addition to the quickly growing field of HIV/AIDS history because it shines a significant spotlight on its often-overlooked intersection with Black communities and history. Focusing on the framing, negotiation, and (re)definitions of Black politics spurred on by the epidemic, Royles explores a wide array of organizations attempting to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The book consists of seven chapters along with an introduction and conclusion. Royles dedicates each chapter to the in-depth study of a different response to AIDS in the African-American community. This approach invites a symphony of characters in the history of African American AIDS struggle, ranging from religious leaders to recovering drug users and from medical professionals to gay and feminist Black intellectuals. With the herculean tasks of juggling so many perspectives and drawing meaningful conclusions to weave them all together coherently, Royles uses the introduction well to provide the clear structure that organizes his analysis and drives the argument of the book: “in bringing sustained focus to grassroots responses to the epidemic, I show that AIDS occasioned not only the breakdown of Black politics but their reimagining as well” (9). The subsequent chapters unfurl a complex and diverse quilt of organizations that provided a patchwork of services, strategies, programs, and understandings of how best to respond to the AIDS crisis and its disproportionate impact on Black communities. By centering the ways that all of these varied organizations reimagined Black politics in the face of AIDS and compounded by neoliberalism, structural racism, and the failures of respectability politics, Royles is able to illuminate the centrality of three major themes: identity politics, religion and respectability, and the imagined and real relationship to Black internationalism that played out across all of the organizations he charts. He is careful to showcase that each of these organization came to a different imagining of Black politics that were at various times overlapping, outright opposing, coordinated, and fleeting. In doing so he highlights the true breadth and dynamism of cultural debates within African American communities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century that historians too often, if at all, depict as flat and two dimensional within the context of the disease. This framing is brilliant in that it allows Royles to examine an otherwise bizarre constellation of organizations that spanned the United States, the political spectrum, and various global partnerships. How else would we see the National of Islam alongside ACT UP Philadelphia and the Black Feminist organization Sisterlove, along with several other, equally diverse organizations? He does so with great agility by depicting each as stakeholders in the African American response to the AIDS epidemic and engaged in a reimagining of Black politics under the strain of the new disease.

They Didn't See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties. By Lisa Levenstein

Katherine Turk

Pages 561–562

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa058

Lisa Levenstein's framing question is clear and important: what happened to feminism after the 1970s? Few would deny that the following decade was rough for social justice efforts. But Levenstein's terrific book reveals that feminism reemerged in unexpected and often unseen ways. It was “an unsung movement,” she writes, “one that had faded from the headlines but never ceased to organize and to evolve” (2).

Feminism at century's end was forged by its new conditions. Emerging technologies facilitated novel forms of communication and organizing strategies, and some feminists could express their commitments through their jobs. But an increasingly neoliberal economy deepened social inequalities, and, perhaps most problematic, many Americans believed that organized feminism had already done its work. In this climate, feminism put down deep roots in different movements and institutions and grew branches that wrapped the globe. This varied approach made the movement harder to see, but also provided its power.

Trans America: A Counter-History. By Barry Reay

Rachel Hope Cleves

Pages 563–564

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa063

Twenty-five years after the emergence of trans studies as a field, broad synthetic approaches to trans history remain few in number. Barry Reay's Trans America: A Counter-History makes a worthwhile addition to this small field, joining earlier volumes like Susan Stryker's Transgender History (2008) and Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed (2004), which Reay calls the “best history of transsexuality” (231 fn8). Reay's work blends episodes that will be familiar to readers of those earlier titles with new material, especially in chapter 4, that fulfills the subtitle's promise to offer a “counter-history.”

Written in engaging prose, Trans America is structured into five chronological chapters that narrate the emergence and development of transgender in the United States. The first chapter, “Before Trans,” tackles the history of sexual and gender diversity prior to the 1950s. Reay argues that historians should “resist transgender as a master category” (10) in the past. Rather than offer a substitute, Reay raises questions and points to the instability of historic gender and sexual variance. He professes a preference for Clare Sears' “trans-ing” methodology over the work of scholars like Jay Prosser, who “claim transsexual subjectivities” (16) prior to the emergence of the modern category. Reay sidesteps entirely the history of Indigenous two-spirit people in early America, proclaiming the topic too difficult (18). Instead, his text fast-forwards quickly to the late nineteenth century and the rise of sexology. Here, Reay again rejects the “transsexual essentialism” (21) of scholars who argue that Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, and Ellis were really talking about transsexuality rather than homosexuality. Nonetheless, Reay casts a wide net in his history of “transgender before transgender,” hauling in the fairy and the bulldagger along with familiar subjects like Lili Elbe.