Casual Friday

This announcement came across our desk recently. You might be interested, or know someone who is.

2013 Webb-Smith Essay Competition

$1000 for the best research essay on: "Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution"

The Department of History at the University of Texas at Arlington in collaboration with the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington announces the 2013 Webb-Smith Essay Competition as part of the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures on March 7, 2013. The topic is “Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution.” We are looking for students and scholars to submit original, unpublished article-length essays (maximum 10,000 words plus endnotes) that explore Texas during the Mexican period, and which examine the origins and long term ramifications of the events that gave birth to the Texas Republic and its subsequent incorporation by the United States. Preference will be given to papers that attempt to integrate the early nineteenth century Texas borderlands into a broad, geopolitical or multicultural interpretive framework, or which seek in other ways to connect the region and its peoples to a wider world.

The winning essay will be published in a forthcoming volume of the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series, published by Texas A&M Press, along with essays by the lecturers, Amy S. Greenberg, Will Fowler, Eric Schlereth, Miguel Enrique Soto Estrada, and Sam W. Haynes.

Deadline for submissions: January 28, 2013

Send submissions either electronically or by mail to:

Jennifer Lawrence
Chair, Webb Lectures Committee
Department of History
UT Arlington, Box 19529
Arlington, TX 76019-0529

For more information about previously published volumes or the upcoming lectures, please write to Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures Committee (see mailing address above) or by email.

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Houston is the West, Right?

The Houston skyline, via Robert Agresta

It depends, of course, on how you define "the West" (an argument I do not intend to rehash here) -- but if you include Houston, then you might be interested in this call for papers that recently arrived:

The History Department and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University request proposals for a conference, "The Past and Present of Race and Place in Houston, Texas" scheduled for February 2013 (pending funding). The conference will bring new work on the history of race in Houston into conversation with current investigations of the city's racial landscape in order to strengthen both areas of scholarship, probe the ways that historical and contemporary scholarship inform one another, and, in places, to highlight how such work offers solutions to current problems rooted in the ways race works, and has worked, in the city.

What is Houston's demographic history, and does that history portend anything for the future? What historical forces channeled particular racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into specific Houston neighborhoods, and what contemporary forces are reinforcing or undoing these former trajectories? What role have racial ideologies played in shaping the political, social, educational, and physical landscapes of the city? How did neighborhood institutions, local communities, and individuals bolster or challenge economic, ethnic, and racial divisions within the city, and what, if any, are the contemporary legacies of such work? Has the city birthed racialized cultural productions in literature, and in the visual and performing arts particular to the city and important beyond it as well? How should what is known about the city at present shape what historians seek to gather about Houston's past? The conference will address these and other key questions.

Please send proposals and a cv to raceinhouston@rice.edu. The deadline for proposals is July 16, 2012. Paper proposals should be no more than 500 words.

OAH 2012 in Milwaukee: lots of labor history, not so much on religion or the West

by Tisa Wenger, April 27, 2012

I don’t always make it to the OAH (Organization of American Historians), but this year I’d been asked to respond to a panel titled “In the Aftermath of Contact with ‘Others’: The Reformulation of Religious and Racial Identity on the Frontier”—with three papers very much of interest to readers of this blog—so I made my way to Milwaukee for the conference last weekend. Actually I headed to Madison first, where I fit in four days of research at the fantastic Wisconsin Historical Society.  (They have impressive holdings that go far beyond Wisconsin history, so check it out if you ever have the chance. I spent most of my time there immersed in the papers of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union, and related collections.)

At the conference I roomed with an old friend, Colleen O’Neill, author of an excellent book on Navajo labor history, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. I bring this up because Colleen also happens to be the associate editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, based at Utah State University, and she mentioned to me that the WHQ is always interested in articles on religion in the American west. So if any of you are working on essays that might fit in that venue, send them her way!

To some extent the OAH program reflected the interests of this year’s president, Alice Kessler-Harris, who is a leading labor historian and gave a very interesting presidential address titled “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief.” So there were a few more sessions than usual related to labor and economic history, important topics to be sure, but not really speaking to my interests. And there were correspondingly few either on the American West or in religious history, let alone the two in combination. I noticed one panel on the Joseph Smith papers, but that happened while I was still in Madison. Another session, “Catholic Lay Women and Mid-Century Public Life,” included 1) Mary Henold on Catholic lay women’s responses to Vatican II, raising important questions about methods and sources for studying the “average” lay women, 2) Karen Johnson on Catholic women and interracial activism in mid-century Chicago, and 3) Tim Lacy on the relationship between political position and conversion to Catholicism in the life of Clare Booth Luce. Great stuff, but unless we place Chicago in the West, not really within the scope of this blog.

These exclusions, of course, reflect something of the blind spots of all these fields: mirroring the traditional lack of attention to class, labor, or the West among historians of American religion, labor historians have only relatively recently started to work on the west, and only a handful have found religious history relevant to their concerns. Exceptions to these lines of division on the program included a roundtable panel on “Religion, Corporate Capitalism, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century,” featuring the star-studded lineup of Kate Bowler, Darren Dochuk, Darren Grem, Kathryn Lofton, and Bethany Moreton, and another roundtable on “Religion, Democracy, and the Working Class in Capitalist America, Gilded Age to the Present.” I couldn’t attend either of these panels—one was on Thursday while I was still in Madison, and the other was on Sunday when I was already on my way back home—but they bode well for the developing conversation between religious history and the histories of class and labor.

Finally, back to the session that took me to the conference in the first place, which proved a fruitful exploration of the construction of racial and religious identities within various sites of encounter in the American west. Kristine Gunnell’s paper, “The Daughters of Charity as Cultural Intermediaries,” examined the motivations and racial dynamics of the work of this Catholic order in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, a time of extensive Mexican immigration into Southern California. In “Texas Jews and other Others: Race, Masculinity, and American Identity,” Sarah Imhoff interrogated the interest among some Jews in early twentieth-century Texas in claiming kinship to Native Americans, or somewhat later in “playing Mexican,” as ways of asserting both whiteness and masculinity. For Imhoff these practices reflected an impulse distinct from but parallel to the contemporaneous Zionist movement—one that similarly sought to assert Jewish identity and masculinity, but in this case placing themselves at home in the American West. And finally, in “William McCrary’s Racial Ventriloquism during the Mormon Exodus, 1846-1847,” Max Mueller mined the few available sources in an effort to recover the perspective of McCrary, a racially ambiguous “Negro-Indian” Mormon convert who left the Saints after Mormon leaders refused to accept his claims to prophetic authority. I am looking forward to seeing all three of these pieces in publication.

So that was my experience of the OAH this year. The take-home for me, as it has been so many times before, was—why so little in our field on the program? And one answer to that question is that if we want to see sessions on religion in the American west, then we need to propose them. Kudos to Kristine, Sarah, and Max for doing just that at this year’s conference, and I’d encourage all of you to do the same in future years!

Book of the Month:

Bryan Stone, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas 

Review by Sarah Imhoff

In The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), Bryan Edward Stone uses the idea of the frontier to conceptualize his history of Texas Jews. Perhaps this should come as no surprise as the tale of a place where the sixteenth century saw Spanish-heritage Crypto-Jews, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented fighting between white settlers (some of whom were Jewish) and Native Americans, and the subsequent racial landscape claimed Anglos, Blacks, and Mexicans. For some of us, however, thinking about the American West in terms of “frontier” conjures specters of the problematic interpretations of Frederick Jackson Turner: white men courageously conquering the land and its residents, civilization defeating barbarism.

But Stone reimagines the idea of the frontier to be a place of cultural coexistence, interaction, and negotiation. In this way, he writes, “American Jews are, and always have been, frontierspeople” (15). In justifying his choice of central motif, Stone relies on the recent work of Sander Gilman, who has proposed the idea of the frontier as a better image for understanding contemporary Jewish identity (specifically post-1948). Rather than clinging to traditional ideas like Diaspora or exile, using frontier metaphors allows us to imagine Jewish identity in more complex ways than one that identifies Israel as the center and the Diaspora as the periphery. Gilman writes: “Let us imagine a new Jewish history written as the history of Jews at the frontier, a history with no center, a history marked by dynamics of change, confrontation, and accommodation, a history that focuses on the present and in which all participants are given voice. The frontier is not the periphery… it is the conceptual and physical space where groups in motion meet, confront, alter, destroy, and build.” (Gilman, Jewish Frontiers, 15). The idea of the frontier leaves behind the center-periphery in respect to Israel and the Diaspora, but in the American context, it also unseats versions of American Jewish history in which New York serves as the paradigmatic locale of the Jewish experience.

Stone, therefore, sees this model of the frontier as a fruitful one for understanding the experiences and identities of Texas Jews throughout their history. By building on this conceptual framework, Stone’s work aligns with the methodological commitments of what we often call “borderlands” histories. (Although he never explains his preference for “frontier” over “borderlands,” it is clear that for Stone the two share much of their substance and method.) The Chosen Folks traces how the space of conceptual divide, contact, and difference played “a pivotal role in shaping Jewish identity and self-definition in Texas” (2).

At the outset, Stone claims that as frontierspeople, these Jewish Texans made poor Jews, and as Jews, they made poor frontierspeople. Stone shows that strictly observant traditional Jews—what he means here by “good Jews”—never constituted a large portion of Jewish Texans. Without large Jewish communities, religious observance like keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath could be quite difficult. Nevertheless, Stone’s research suggests, the Jews who did make their homes in Texas became different kinds of “good Jews”: Jews who negotiated to adapt and defend Jewish identity and what they saw as Jewish values. His chronologically organized history stretches from the Crypto-Jews and their descendants in the sixteenth century to present. Along the way, Stone provides insightful interpretations of major historical issues as well as the minutia of everyday life. He analyzes the early nineteenth century and its settler-“Indian” encounters in the “wild” region, interfaith friendships, reactions to early Zionism, responses to the Ku Klux Klan, Jewish participation in Texas politics, disagreements about religious practice within the Beth Israel synagogue, reactions to World War II and the Holocaust, and interaction with the Civil Rights movement.

While a single work could never cover all the details of Jewish Texas history, Stone’s wide-ranging attention to “frontiers” in the metaphorical sense allows him to present compelling accounts of both important episodes and larger social trends for Jewish Texans. For instance, his careful attention to the dynamics of the racial and religious components of Jewish identity demonstrates how Jews (as not Black, not Mexican, and not Indian) found themselves firmly in the category of Anglo, and yet nevertheless would experience the acrid rhetoric of the Klan. In this sense, The Chosen Folks sets itself apart from most other histories such as Hollace Ava Weiner’s Lone Stars of David and Jewish Stars in Texas that concentrate on telling the tales of individual personalities and communities.

If we take seriously the idea of the frontier as a metaphor for all Jewish identity—as Stone suggests—then The Chosen Folks may serve as a model for helping us to rethink the metaphorical topography of American Jewish history in two ways. It can help decenter an often New York-centric story, and it can offer a narrative based on borders and encounters rather than center and periphery.

Editor’s note: Have you read this book?  What do you think about it?  Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments!  If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, James Bennett reviews Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).