Reconstructing race

Western Historical Quarterly

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 7-26

  West, Elliott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847781643     PISSN: 00433810     EISSN: 19398603     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25047206     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. For two studies of race in America that go beyond consideration of black and white, see Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York, 2002)
2. and Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1979)
3. A recent approach complicates the issue nicely through study of evolving notions of whiteness and what has distinguished it. See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991)
4. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
5. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)
6. and for a survey of the literature, Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History 89 (June 2002): 154-73
7. My admittedly crude generality is based on an estimate of non-Indian languages, plus the relative numbers of Native languages spoken in the United States before and after the annexations of the 1840s, as compiled by Ives Goddard in "Native Languages and Language Families of North America," to accompany Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed., William C. Sturtevant, vol. 17 (Washington, DC, 1996). Area of the United States increased from roughly 1.77 to 3 million square miles
8. Farnham is quoted in "'Scarce More Than Apes': Historical Roots of Anglo-American Stereotypes of Mexicans," in New Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540-1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque, 1979), 302
9. On racial justifications for expansion, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 208-48
10. Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York, 1985), 270-301
11. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 132-72
12. Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American History (Baltimore, 1935), 162-89
13. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 97-129
14. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 158-86
15. Richard L. Wilson, Short Ravelings from a Long Yarn, or Camp March Sketches of the Santa Fe Trail, ed. Benjamin F. Taylor (Santa Ana, CA, 1936), 120
16. Parkman quoted in Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U. S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT, 1982), 85
17. For an excellent analysis of these themes in popular literature set in the West, see Robert Charles Cottrell, "A Study of Western and Southwestern Popular Fiction of the 1835-1860 Period" (master's thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 1977)
18. James P. Shenton, Robert John Walker: A Politician from Jackson to Lincoln (New York, 1961), 38-9
19. J session, Appendix, 5 February (Washington, DC, 1839), 162
20. To Thomas Jefferson Farnham the same "law of Nature" that left the southern mulatto inferior to either of the races that produced him cursed the mingling of white and Indian races in California and Mexico. Weber, "'Scarce More Than Apes,'" 295
21. Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, ed. Robert A. Rees and Alan Sandy (Boston, 1977), 269-70
22. Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, ed. Richard Dilworth Rust (Boston, 1976), 152
23. Robert J. C. Young attributes to Nott the first use of hybrid as applied to humans. See Young's Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995), 6
24. He refers to Nott's "The Mulatto a Hybrid - Probably Extermination of the Two Races if the Whites and Blacks are Allowed to Intermarry," American Journal of the Medical Sciences. 6 (n.s., 1843): 252-6
25. Dippie, The Vanishing American, 12-31
26. Hietala, Manifest Design, 155
27. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 210, 230, 243-4
28. Rodman Wilson Paul, rev. ed. by Elliott West, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (Albuquerque, 2001), 226-52
29. For an excellent work that has gotten too little attention from historians of race during this period, see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, CA, 1994)
30. Almaguer's is by far the best work we have thus far on the impact of California on the shaping of American racial thinking. On ethnic and racial conflict spawned by the gold rush, see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 220-9
31. Paul and West, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 204-6, 228-30, 239-42, 244-7
32. James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman, 1984), 171-201
33. Clifford E. Trafzer and Joel R. Hyer, eds., Exterminate Them! Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and Enslavement of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush, 1848-1868 (East Lansing, MI, 1999)
34. Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians (Lincoln, 1993)
35. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, 1988), 100-92
36. Dale E. Watts, "How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?: Political Killings in Kansas Territory, 1854-1861," Kansas History 18 (Summer 1995): 116-29. Watts tallies fifty-six killed in politically motivated violence in Kansas
37. J Sess., Report 693 (Washington, DC, 1880), 305
38. Quoted in Linda K. Kerber, "The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian," Journal of American History 62 (September 1975): 294
39. Muskogee (Indian Territory) Phoenix, 7 November 1892. My thanks to Gary Zellar for pointing out this artcle
40. Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, 1999)
41. Mark M. Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860 (Austin, 2001)
42. For a recent study, see James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers Along the Rio Grande (College Station, TX, 2002)
43. P. H. Sheridan to General W. T. Sherman, 6 July 1875, Special File of Letters Received, War Department, Military Division of the Missouri, 1866-91, M1495, reel 11 (in author's possession; acquired from the National Archives, Washington, DC). My thanks to my colleague Patrick Williams for pointing out Sheridan's remark
44. For examples of work on racial science, see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago, 1960)
45. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, 1963), 54-83
46. Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman, 1986)
47. David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York, 2000), 36-43
48. Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancients [sic] Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London, 1999), 63-96
49. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001), 86-104
50. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), 30-72
51. For a succinct statement by Nott, see Josiah C. Nott, An Essay on the Natural History of Mankind, Viewed in Connection with Negro Slavery (Mobile, 1851)
52. Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America . . . (Philadelphia, 1839)
53. E. G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley; Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations (New York, 1848)
54. Stanton, Leopard's Spots, 22-44, 82-9
55. William M. Meigs, Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1904), 308-10
56. Newman is quoted in W. H. Hickman, "The Coeducation of Races," in Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question. Reported and Edited by Isabel G. Barrows (1890
57. Arthur B. Stout, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation (San Francisco, 1862), 20-3
58. Diana Ahmad, "Opium Smoking, Anti-Chinese Attitudes, and the American Medical Community, 1850-1890," American Nineteenth Century History 1 (Summer 2000): 57
59. Gerrit L. Lansing, "Chinese Immigration: A Sociological Study," Popular Science Monthly 20 (April 1882): 724-6, 734
60. Stout, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation, 7-10
61. Edward Lurie, "Louis Agassiz and the Races of Man," Isis 45 (September 1954): 227-42
62. Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001), 102
63. Louis Agassiz and Elizabeth Agassiz, A Journey in Brazil (Boston, 1871), 298-9. Agassiz used his observations of the population around Manaos to comment that the "natural result" of interbreeding among races and the further mixing of "half-breeds with one another" was to create "a mongrel crowd as repulsive as the mongrel dogs." With obvious implications for social policy in his adopted home of the United States, he went on to write that "boundaries of species" of all kinds were "precise and unvarying," a truth applying to "the different species of the human family . . . or so-called races," and that the mixing of these species/races would result in irreversible degeneration of the original stock
64. Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), 338
65. Quoted in Robert E. Bieder, A Brief Historical Survey of the Expropriation of American Indian Remains (Boulder, CO, 1990), 30
66. Dippie, Vanishing American, 95-138
67. Gossett, Race, 144-75
68. For an interesting comparative study that places the United States in the context of the modern states' campaigns to absorb indigenous peoples by subduing them, transforming their cultures, and integrating them economically, see John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress (1990
69. reprint, Mountain View, CA, 1999). My thanks to John Mack Faragher for introducing me to this book
70. Quoted in Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (1965
71. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley, 1969), 173
72. John R. Commons et al., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. 9 (Cleveland, 1910), 80-3
73. Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences Series, 24:3 (Urbana, 1939). (This book was reissued in 1973 with a new introduction by Roger Daniels and in 1991 in paperback.)
74. David G. Gutiérrez, "Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West," in A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, (New York, 1996), 68-71
75. George I. Sánchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque, 1967)
76. Abbott quoted in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan, vol. 3 (Urbana, 1974), 70, n.1
77. Standard (Boston), 29 May 1869
78. quoted in Kerber, "Abolitionist Perception of the Indian," 295