The Graduate History Review

President's Message

2019-10-24T15:51:35-07:00

Chair's Message

2019-10-24T15:51:36-07:00

Editor's Introduction

2019-10-24T15:51:36-07:00

A Discursive Construct of Race in America: The Jim Crow Analogy and the Study of Mass Incarceration

2019-10-24T15:51:36-07:00

A very specific racial discourse defined the Jim Crow era in the United States. Many believed that overturning the laws of segregation and oppression that defined the Jim Crow era through court decisions and legislation would fundamentally change racial discourse in the United States. However, in the 1990s and 2000s, scholarship on the mass incarceration of black American men emerged which invoked the Jim Crow analogy. This scholarship claimed that the racial caste system that had defined the Jim Crow era had simply evolved and was as present as ever. The utilization of the Jim Crow analogy suggests that as a society, the United States has maintained the same racial realities since the turn of the 20^thcentury. Scholars have set up opposing camps in favour of and against the use of the Jim Crow analogy. This paper attempts to explore the divide that has emerged in the study of mass incarceration.

Writing History Among the Tombstones: Notes from Har Hasetim

2019-10-24T15:51:37-07:00

This paper examines the collaborative project to preserve and interpret Har Hasetim, the Gladwyne Jewish Memorial Cemetery. In fall 2015, Villanova University professor Craig Bailey approached the Friends of the Cemetery, an organization affiliated with the local Beth David Reform Congregation, about jointly restoring Har Hasetim. The ensuing project, in which the authors participated as M.A. students, began by expanding the database of known interments in the cemetery, relying on local archives, Philadelphia death records, and census data. This initial work evolved into a range of public history projects such as scout and school lesson plans, informational booklets, academic research papers, and preservation plans. This paper reflects upon the lessons learned from the partnership between our public history class and the Friends. The authors of this paper detail their personal research projects as well as their classmates’ findings about the cemetery, the people buried there, and the neighborhood of Philadelphia— the historic Jewish Quarter—where the deceased once resided. The Har Hasetim project treated history as a civic initiative, helping a community organization to document its history, preserving a physical site, producing materials for site-specific education, and sharing historical discoveries with the public.

"Breeding Ground for Terrorism:" Constitutional Aspects of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1993-8

2019-10-24T15:51:39-07:00

The Northern Ireland peace process is one of the few models for conflict resolution to have produced a demonstrable reduction in paramilitary activity by restructuring society to allow for genuine participation by their political associates. Several scholars have attempted to discern how the developments that occurred during this period convinced loyalist and republican paramilitaries to make previously unimaginable compromises and enter into nonviolent constitutional politics. This article is a departure from previous theories because it focuses on the activities of the Irish and British governments and their acceptance of the fundamental principles of unionist consent and national self-determination. They enshrined these principles into their respective constitutions, demonstrating to Northern Ireland’s warring communities that they had effectively renounced their traditional positions in the conflict and indicated that the constitutional future of Northern Ireland would be determined by its people alone. It examines the interplay between the governments’ activities and the loyalist and republican responses, and finally argues that it was these unique constitutional changes that occurred in the 1990s that enticed the republican and loyalist paramilitaries to end their armed campaigns and to support the political settlement enshrined within the Good Friday Agreement.

To New Zealand for Land: The Timber Industry, Land Law, and Māori Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

2019-10-24T15:51:40-07:00

This paper analyzes the influences of the timber industry on the development of the colony of New Zealand and its land law during the nineteenth century, especially in regard to the dispossession of the indigenous Maori population from the Kauri forests of the North Island. By conducting a case study of Mangakāhia v the New Zealand Timber Company, Ltd. (1882), this paper illustrates the manner by which Maori landowners were increasingly barred from full legal status by the New Zealand courts, and how the economic and political power of the timber industry allowed the Court of Appeals to essentially dismiss Mangakāhia’s case out of hand.

"A Revolution Marches on Two Feet:" The MK’s People’s War in N’wamitwa and Beyond

2019-10-24T15:51:41-07:00

In the waning days of apartheid, an operative of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of South Africa’s most powerful dissident organization the African National Congress, returned to his home community of N’wamitwa after over a decade in exile. His mission was to spark a people’s war, an imported form of revolutionary warfare developed by Mao Zedong and perfected by the North Vietnamese in their revolutionary struggles. The goal of a people’s war is ultimately to involve an entire population in a conflict, eventually crushing a powerful state actor between a mobilized populace and a guerilla army. Through interviews with an insurgent who took part in the uprising in N’wamitwa, this piece seeks to tell the story of the early stages of the people’s war in N’wamitwa and to place the uprising in the context of the ANC’s national revolutionary strategy.

About the Authors

2019-10-24T15:51:41-07:00