Abstract: Landlord William Scully presents a full picture of the investment and landmanagement activities of one of the most important figures in American agricultural history. An Irishman who first came to the United States in 1850, Scully eventually built up holdings amounting to almost a quarter million acres of the richest prairie and farm lands in Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. The vast land empire, which was worked by some fifteen hundred tenant farmers, earned for Scully the reputation of being America's greatest landlord-this despite the fact that he remained an alien until the last decade of his life

Abstract: From Appomattox to World War I, Blacks continued their quest for a secure position in the American system. The problem was how to be both black and American-how to find acceptance, or even toleration, in a society in which the boundaries of normative behavior, the values, and the very definition of what it meant to be an American were determined and enforced by whites. A few black leaders proposed selfsegregation inside the United States within the protective confines of an allBlack community as one possible solution. The Blacktown idea reached its peak in the fifty years after the Civil War; at least sixty Black communities were settled between 1865 and 1915.Norman L. Crockett has focused on the formation, growth and failure of five such communities. The towns and the date of their settlement are: Nicodemus, Kansas (1879), established at the time of the Black exodus from the South; Mound Bayou, Mississippi (1897), perhaps the most prominent Black town because of its close ties to Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute: Langston, Oklahoma (1891), visualized by one of its promoters as the nucleus for the creation of an allBlack state in the West; and Clearview (1903) and Boley (1904), in Oklahoma, twin communities in the Creek Nation which offer the opportunity observe certain aspects of IndianBlack relations in this area.The role of Blacks in town promotion and settlement has long been a neglected area in western and urban history, Crockett looks at patterns of settlement and leadership, government, politics, economics, and the problems of isolation versus interaction with the white communities. He also describes family life, social life, and class structure within the black towns.Crockett looks closely at the rhetoric and behavior of blacks inside the limits of their own community-isolated from the domination of whites and freed from the daily reinforcement of their subordinate rank in the larger society. He finds that, long before "Black is beautiful" entered the American vernacular, Blacktown residents exhibited a strong sense of race price. The reader observes in microcosm Black attitudes about many aspects of American life as Crockett ties the Blacktown experience to the larger question of race relations at the turn of the century.This volume also explains the failure of the Blacktown dream. Crockett cites discrimination, lack of capital, and the many forces at work in the local, regional, and national economies. He shows how the racial and townbuilding experiment met its demise as the residents of allBlack communities became both economically and psychologically trapped.This study adds valuable new material to the literature on black history, and makes a significant contribution to American social and urban history, community studies, and the regional history of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi

Abstract: The Good Neighbor Policy was tested to the breaking point by ArgentinaU.S. relations during World War II. In part, its durability had depended both upon the willingness of all American republics to join with the United States in resisting attempts by extrahemispheric sources to intervene in New World affairs and upon continuity within the United States foreignpolicy establishment. During World War II, neither prerequisite was satisfied, Argentina chose to pursue a neutralist course, and the Latin American policy of the United States became the subject of a bitter bureaucratic struggle within the Roosevelt administration. Consequently, the principles of nonintervention and noninterference, together with "absolute respect for the sovereignty of all states," ceased to be the guideposts of Washington's hemispheric policy.In this study, Randall Bennett Woods argues persuasively that Washington's response to Argentine neutrality was based more on internal differences-individual rivalries and power struggles between competing bureaucratic empires-than on external issues or economic motives. He explains how bureaucratic infighting within the U.S. government, entirely irrelevant to the issues involved, shaped important national policy toward Argentina.Using agency memoranda, State Department records, notes on conversations and interviews, memoirs, and personal archives of the participants, Woods looks closely at the rivalries that swayed the course of ArgentineAmerican relations. He describes the personal motives and goals of men such as Sumner Welles, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Harry Dexter White, Henry A. Wallace, and Milo Perkins. He delineates various cliques within the State Department, including the contending groups of Welles Latin Americanists and Hull internationalists-and describes the power struggles between the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Board of Economic Welfare, the Caribbean Defense Command, and other agencies. Of special interest to students of contemporary history will be Woods's discussion of the careers and views of Juan Peron and Nelson Rockefeller-for American policy contributed in no small way to Peron's rise, and Rockefeller was the man chiefly responsible for the U.S. rapprochement with Argentina in 1944-45. Woods also gives special attention to the impact of the Wilsonian tradition-especially its contradictions-on policy formation. The last chapter, dealing with Argentina's admission to the U.N., sheds some light on the origins of the Cold War.Wood's investigation of the Argentine problem makes a significant contribution toward the understanding of U.S.Latin American relations in the era of the Good Neighbor Policy, and provides new insights into the evolution of hemispheric policy as a whole during World War II. It reflects the growing emphasis on bureaucratic politics as a principal determinant of U.S. diplomacy

Abstract: Historians have largely ignored the western city; although a number of specialized studies have appeared in recent years, this volume is the first to assess the importance of the urban frontier in broad fashion. Lawrence H. Larsen studies the process of urbanization as it occurred in twentyfour major frontier towns. Cities examined are Kansas City, St. Joseph, Lincoln, Omaha, Atchison, Lawrence, Leavenworth, Topeka, Austin, Dallas, Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, Denver, Leadville, Salt Lake city, Virginia City, Portland, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Stockton.Larsen bases his analysis of western cities and their problems on social statistics obtained from the 1880 United States Census. This census is particularly important because it represents the first time that the federal government regarded the United States as an urban nation. The author is the first scholar to do a comprehensive investigation of this important source.This volume gives an accurate portrayal of western urban life. Here are promoters and urban planners crowding as many lots as possible into tracts in the middle of vast, uninhabited valleys. Here are streets clogged with filth because of inadequate sanitation systems; people crowded together in packed quarters with only fledgling police and fire services. Here, too, is the advance of nineteenthcentury technology: gaslights, telephones, interurbans.Most important, this study dispels the misconceptions concerning the process of exploration, settlement, and growth of the urban west. City building in the American West, despite popular mythology, was not a response to geographic or climatic conditions. It was the extension of a process perfected earlier, the promotion and building of sites-no matter how undesirable-into successful localities. Uncontrolled capitalism led to disorderly development that reflected the abilities of individual entrepreneurs rather than most other factors. The result was the establishment of a society that mirrored and made the same mistakes as those made earlier in the rest of the country

Abstract: Word spread across the southern farm country, and into the minds of those who labored over cotton or sugar crops, that the day of reckoning was near at hand, that the Lord had answered black prayers with the offer of deliverance in a western Eden. In this vast state where Brown had caused blood to flow in his righteous wrath, there was said to be land for all, and land especially for poor blacks who for so long had cherished the thought of a tiny patch of America that they could call their own. The soil was said to be free for the taking, and even better, passage to the prairie Canaan was rumored to be available to all. . . . Thus began a pellmell land rush to Kansas, an unreasoned, almost mindless exodus from the South toward some vague ideal, some western paradise, where all cares would vanish.In Search of Canaan tells the story of the Black migration from areas of the South to Kansas and other Midwestern and Western states that occurred soon after the end of Reconstruction. Working almost entirely from primary sources-letters of some of the black migrants, government investigative reports, and black newspapers-Robert G. Athearn describes and explains the "Exoduster" movement and sets it into perspective as a phenomenon in Western history.The book begins with details of Exodusters on the move. Athearn then fills in the background of why they were moving; relates how other people-Black and white, Northern and Southern-felt about the movement; examines political considerations; and finally, evaluates the episode and provides an explanation as to why it failed. According to Athearn, the exodus spoke in a narrower sense of Black emigrants who sought frontier farms, but in the main it told more about a nation whose wounds had been bound but had not yet healed. The Republicans, without any issues of consequence in 1880, gave the flight national importance in the hope that it would gain votes for them and, at the same time, reduce the South's population and hence its representation in Congress. Thousands of Black Americans, many of them former slaves, were deluded by false promises made by individual interests. As the hawkers of glad tidings beckoned to the easily convinced, the word "Kansas" became equated with the word "freedom." Emotional, often biblical, overtones gave the movement millenarian flavor, and Kansas became the unwilling focus of a revitalized national campaign for Black rights.Athearn describes the social, political, economic, and even agricultural difficulties that Exodusters had in adapting to white culture. He evaluates the activities of Black leaders such as Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, northern politicians such as Kansas Governor John P. St. John, and refugee aid organizations such as the Kansas Freedmen's Relief Association. He tells the Exoduster story not just as a southern story-the turmoil in Dixie and flight from the scenes of a struggle-but especially as a western story, a meaningful segment of the history of a frontier state. His remarkably objective, as well as suspenseful, account of this unusual episodes contributes significantly to Kansas history, to western history, and to the history of Black people in America

Abstract: This volume presents the history of the American jet aircraft manufacturing industry from World War II to 1972, documenting the evolution of its technology and covering the intricacies of its management, economics, and relations with the government. A valuable contribution to general aviation history, it also provides a unique opportunity to study the dynamic of a major U.S. industry.Charles D. Bright traces the momentous revolution of the aerospace era from birth to maturity, using as a base the jet aircraft industry. He investigates all significant aspects: the comingofage of aviation during World War II, including global transportation and aerodynamics; the development of jets and missiles from the Truman era to the Vietnam War; the controlling influence of national military strategy; the U.S. Air Force and other government markets; the mechanics of government procurement-bidding, pricing, buying; difficulties in the commercial airliner business; the ordering of technology and the prevailing "design or die" philosophy; and different systems of production through the years.Special attention is given to major problems such as the industry's need for diversification and the skyrocketing costs that threaten to make aerospace products uneconomical. The conventional economic concerns of entry into and exit from the industry are treated in depth. Bright focuses on the overall economic pattern, from the first demand for aerospace machines for military, space, and commercial uses to the failures of recent times as the industry entered recession and peacetime equilibrium. He tells of the desperate competition among giants of the industry, those companies on the frontiers of technology that manufactured fixedwing aircraft of their own design. This is the group that bore the brunt of adaptation to the jet age: Boeing, CurtissWright, Douglas, Fairchild, General Dynamics, Grumman, Lockheed, martin, McDonnell, North American Northrop, and Republic.Central to the story are the reasons for America's leadership in the jet age: enterprising business managers, scientists, and engineers; the pressure of economics; and manifold competition brought on by economics; and manifold competition brought on by the cold war. Bright points to an industry that has responded to incredible demands and that has shown the strength to weather storms.This volume is illustrated with fiftyfive photographs depicting the growth in aircraft technology from 1945 to 1972. As a unique blend of aeronautic, economic, business, and military history, it will fascinate not only those connected with aviation and the aerospace industry, but also those interested in the history of technology, business management, and governmentmilitarybusiness relations.The Jet Makers received Honorable Mention in the 1977 History Manuscript award competition of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Abstract: Lucius Polk Brown was a professional chemist who became a bureaucrat in the field of public health during the Progressive era, when middleclass reformers first attempted to order American society through integrated systems. In his native state of Tennessee, between 1908 and 1915 Brown created a public health enforcement agency, began educating the masses to public health needs, waged flamboyant campaigns against those who violated the laws, and attracted widespread support for pure food and drug control. Moving on to become director of the Bureau of Food and Drugs in the New York City Department of Health in 1915, he continued his battle for public health reform amidst the maze of government agencies and political power struggles surrounding Tammany Hall.In Many respects Brown was typical of Progressive reformers. A middleclass, AngloSaxon Protestant and a professional, he represented a link between the nineteenthcentury agrarian and the twentiethcentury urbanite. More importantly, Brown exemplified a new character on the American scene: a scientist out of the agriculturalexperimentstation mold entering public life, ready to challenge politicians on their own ground.This book contains fresh insights on the history of the public health movement in America, one area of reform that has not received the attention it deserves. Except for incidental references, the major figures of food and drug regulation at the local level have been largely ignored by historians. Lucius Polk Brown's quest for pure food and drugs is representative of what municipal and state officials, as scientific people, encountered when they fought for the passage of new laws, struggled to enforce existing ones, and battled with the politicians, quacks, ignorance that threatened their efforts.Brown's diversified career provides a unique opportunity for studying a scientific reformer caught up in the political turmoil of the Progressive era. His experience in government service spanned twelve years and touched on two dissimilar political systems. In focusing on Brown's struggles, achievements, and failures, Margaret Ripley Wolfe provides a comparative study of state and municipal health administrations, of bureaucratic development in a rural southern state and a northern metropolis. For that reason this book should be of interest to political scientists and public health officials as well as to social historians and students of the Progressive era

Abstract: This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women's chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies.From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women's rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman's publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century.Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women's movement.Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock's powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock's personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals' significance in the emergence of obscenity law.Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenthcentury America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the freethought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for presentday liberation trends

Abstract: The names of most of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet members are well known. Anyone familiar with FDR's administration will remember Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and James Farley. One member of that circle, however, has remained a virtual unknown: Harry H. Woodring, the recalcitrant Secretary of War who was forced by Roosevelt to resign from the cabinet.It is doubtful that the story of any of Roosevelt's cabinet members is more interesting than that of Woodring. With the breakdown of world peace in the 1930s, the matter of national defense became a major concern, and the United States military establishment became increasingly important. Woodring's role in Washington during this time was a critical one; his dealings with Roosevelt were extensive, and on many key issues his influence was considerable. Why, then, his lack of notoriety?The simple fact is that until now almost nothing has been written of Woodring's service as Secretary of War. He was one of the few individuals closely associated with Roosevelt who did not write an autobiography, memoirs, or some other personal account of what took place during those years. Keith D. McFarland is the first scholar to have had access to Woodring's personal papers. Drawing from this new material, as well as from Woodring's official correspondence and from personal interviews with the members of Woodring's immediate family and dozens of Woodring's associates, he provides in this volume the careful study that has long been needed.McFarland first traces Woodring's early political career in Kansas. As a Democratic Governor from 1931 to 1933, Woodring worked successfully with the Republicandominated legislature to alleviate many of the physical and economic hardships facing residents of the state during the Depression, Nevertheless, he lost his bid for reelection to Alf M. Landon. When Roosevelt won the presidency that same year, he appointed Woodring as Assistant Secretary of War.Woodring served the country well on the national level. He was influential to expanding the Army Air Corps and in making practical the Army's industrial and military mobilization plans. After the death of George Dern in 1936, Roosevelt demonstrated his confidence in Woodring by appointing him Secretary of War.The conflict between Woodring and the President arose over the sending of American military supplies and equipment to foreign nations. It was Woodring's job as secretary of War to see that the War Department adhered to the neutrality legislation of the 1930s. Roosevelt believed that the United States should aid the enemies of Hitler, even if such action did not adhere to the spirit of the neutrality legislation. Upon the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, FDR did everything he could to supply Britain and France with American arms and munitions. Woodring was caught between is loyalty and devotion to the President and his sincere belief that the chief executive's program would endanger the nation's security. Maintaining that it was tactically unsound to give away supplies at a time when the U.S. Army was in desperate need of such items, Woodring made concerted efforts to prevent the implementation of FDR's program. The President was forced to ask him to resign.Few American Presidents have been more respected and admired than Franklin D. Roosevelt. There has been a tendency to disregard, ignore, or ridicule those administrative officials who disagreed with his actions and objectives. In relating the viewpoint of a distinguished, patriotic American who strongly opposed FDR's policies and tried to change them, this book provides a clearer understanding of politics and government in preWorld War II America

Abstract: This study traces the evolution of political status in Puerto Rico from 1936 to 1968, with special emphasis on the events that led to the creation of the Commonwealth in 1952. No other work published in English has dealt with the Puerto Rican status question in such detail.The central problem in the status debate has been: how to strike a happy balance between Puerto Rico's economic needs, which could be filled through uninterrupted association with the United States, and the cultural divergence between the mainland and the island. Bringing together new and significant information drawn from government records and personal papers of U.S. officials, this book will be of interest to all serious students of Puerto Rican affairs, as well as to U.S. and Puerto Rican government and political leaders