The March issue of the Journal of American History is now available online and in print. Included are articles by 2024 Louis Pelzer Award winner Jordan Villegas-Verrone, Devin Kennedy, 2024 David Thelen Award Winner Alexandre Guilherme da Cruz Alves Junior, and Jessica Adler’s Editor’s Choice article, “Medical Diagnosis and the Contours of the Carceral State: Health, Power, and Protest in a World War II–Era Prison Hospital.” The pieces explore a range of topics, including young women’s labor movements in the American South, the transformation of American finances, the interplay of memory and identity formation for Indigenous Americans in the Civil Rights era, and medical injustice in the mid-century American carceral system. The Textbooks and Teaching section explores the challenges and opportunities that Artificial Intelligence presents to history educators and the utility of data analysis in historical courses taught to undergraduate students. The issue also features reviews of books and digital history.
Previews
Examining the 1938 Lone Star Bag & Bagging Company strike in Houston, Texas, and the subsequent labor activism of its teenaged participants, in the article that won the 2024 Louis Pelzer Award, Jordan Villegas-Verrone considers how young female Mexican American girlhood as a Great Depression–era laboring identity. The girls’ extension of organizing efforts from local picket lines to the Young Woman’s Christian Association’s circuit of industrial girl conferences reveals how these workers sought to construct an interracial, transnational network of girlhood solidarity to aid Mexican American and Black laborers across both Mexico and the U.S. South.
Analyzing the history of incarceration can be challenging because records of closed institutions are often inaccessible or devoid of multiple perspectives. The archival documents featured in the article by Jessica L. Adler offer uniquely frank firsthand accounts from incarcerated people, government officials, staff, and others. These voices show how, between 1930 and the end of World War II, the first federal prison hospital transitioned from being idealized as a beacon of healing to a facility where medical diagnoses could be used to justify various outcomes, including the perpetration of extreme violence. This study illuminates how health-focused rhetoric came to influence experiences and activism of incarcerated people, and to undergird a diversification, expansion, and fortification of the carceral state.
Between 1950 and 1970, millions of Americans became entangled with Wall Street. The cause was the rise of stock investing by institutional investors—organizations responsible for the stewardship of private and public pension funds, insurance company assets, trusts, and the endowments of universities and churches. Devin Kennedy shows that, in drawing together small-scale wealth into vast pools of capital and then deploying it in stock markets, institutional investors transformed American finance and, more profoundly, reoriented the relationship between Americans and markets, as households were enrolled as silent partners to corporations they did not know and ensnared in financial machinations beyond their control.
Studying the Alcatraz Island occupation of 1969–1971 highlights how memories and history were used by the Indians of All Tribes movement to foster new possibilities of futures for Indigenous people in the United States. Alexandre Guilherme da Cruz Alves Junior analyzes the public discourses of the urban Indigenous movement in an attempt to uncover the challenges they faced in creating a national agenda without renouncing their traditional connection with their territories, pasts, and identities.
