Jonathan Rees

Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953.

So I have a new book out.  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl.

The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to what the heck “raw water ice” was.  As I no longer live near any of the largest libraries in America, getting time and resources to do this research, let alone understand what I was reading, took an awful lot of time.

The second problem I faced was figuring out how to turn the story of these industries into a coherent narrative.  Biographers have the luxury of beginning at birth and ending with death, or maybe their subject’s legacy.  Describing the history of an entire industry, as well as all of its related industries, proved much tougher.  My solution was to adopt a refrigerating engineering conceit known as a cold chain, which is basically another way of saying that I started at the point of production and ended at the point of consumption.  I didn’t figure that out until 2006.

So what explains the extra seven years?  Part of it was information overload.  Sometime around the time I figured out how to organize everything, Google Books went from being a pet project to a research revolution.  All of a sudden, it was like being back at the University of Wisconsin again.  I could get any obscure tome I wanted faster than it used to take to walk to campus and hit the fourth floor of the Engineering Library for my precious trade journals.  With so much more to see, I felt obliged to read everything I could get my hands on.  I know it sounds like I’m whining, but the final book really is much better because of that effort.

The main reason for that was a choice I made in 2009.  I decided to make the book global in scope.  Yes, it’s called Refrigeration Nation (which is a reference to the United States) but to prove that America has always been refrigeration crazy I had to at least make a pass at what was going on throughout the world, which I did mostly (but not exclusively) through American sources.  That took more time still because even though I had more information at that point than I knew what to do with, I hadn’t been collecting the foreign evidence I needed to adopt this approach until very late in the game.

Research is fun.  That’s why I don’t regret a moment I’ve spent working on this thing.  However, I’m also convinced I’ll never write another book this same way again.  In an age when nearly every published source is both searchable and right
there at your fingertips, there is much less incentive to read everything available because whatever breadth of knowledge you develop will be far less impressive than it once was.  While some people might think this development a sad one, I look forward to reading history books that devote more time to organization, analysis and just plain old good writing.

Whether I just managed to produce such an animal is up to my readers to decide. 

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  Refrigeration Nation:  a History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise is making its way to distributors now.  If you can’t buy one immediately at your local bookseller or favorite online book store, it will be available very, very soon.

Philip White

Well, I’ve done it, and I’m pretty pleased with myself. I finally finished the remaining three chapters of my next book. Well, kinda. In fact, what I really did was send the rest of the first draft to the two generous souls who are reviewing my manuscript.

Now for the fun part. And by fun, I mean death-to-the-ego-and-all-my-hopes-and-dreams. Unfortunately for me, some editors just want to watch the world burn.

You see, soon enough my inbox will light up with e-mails, containing page after page of edit afflicted prose. And with each new comment, redline and question, I will die a little. Or at least my ego will.

In a perfect, pain-free world, writers could just churn out a bunch of words, revise them ourselves and then fling them out to the unsuspecting public. Oh, wait, we can. I keep forgetting about self-publishing.

But alas, those of us who go the traditional route of talking an academic or trade press into publishing our portable monuments to how smart we think we are, are resigned to several months of editorial torture that we willingly brought upon ourselves.

Here are a few tips to get you through the process:

Accept That You’re Too Close

The trouble with you editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing your manuscript is that you’re wed to it. You breathe it. It wakes you up at odd times of the night, then scolds you for forgetting to put your tablet/notepad & pen beside the bed, you clot. No matter how objective you think you’re being, believe me, you’re not. That’s why you asked those poor saps to read it through with a wary eye and a warning finger before you subjected your editor to the horrors of a hundred thousand unbalanced, repeated, bloated words.

Don’t Take It Personally

What an awful subhead. Sorry. But it’s true – when your reviewers, editor and copy editor are poking holes in your work, they’re not doing it because they hate you, because you’re a talentless hack, or because they want you to refrain from ever inflicting so much as another syllable upon the world. Think about it. They’re trying to take your manuscript and HELP you refine it into a great book. Let them do it.

Pick a Hill to Die On (or 2)

At the risk of contradicting and invalidating my previous point, there are a couple of sections in your book that are special. Trouble is, only you know why. Your editor has likely left a line of five question marks with some nice squiggly lines alongside the paragraphs in question, and when you see them, here of all places, you want to take your MacBook and launch it out the window. Then run downstairs and go all Office Space on it, just in case. This will cost you at least a grand for the computer, plus another few hundred for the window, so don’t do that. But do choose a couple of these areas and cling onto them like you’re defending your hilltop castle from a horde of murderous invaders.

Pace Yourself

Assuming your reviewers and later, your editor, have kindly blessed you with a few weeks to respond to their comments and edits, please take your bloody time. It’s tempting to put in those too-expensive noise cancelling earbuds, down a few double espressos and rattle through the entire manuscript in a red-eyed, heart-hurting weekend. Why do that to yourself? (says the hypocrite who did exactly that with his last book). Last time I checked, the fastest man alive can only go at top speed for 9.58 seconds. Take the time you’ve been given and, if you feel you need it, ask for a couple of extra days. You’ve put in hundreds, nay, thousands of hours into research, writing, oral history interviews, fact-checking and all the rest, so why not close this thing out properly? You’ll regret it later if you rush, right about the time that some miserable reviewer with horns, a goatee and nothing but bitterness in their heart faults you for that silly mistake on page 353.

Good night, and good luck.

The Society of Civil War Historians is soliciting nominations for the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for books published in 2013.

All genres of scholarship on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War are eligible. This includes, but is not exclusive to, monographs, synthetic works presenting original interpretations, and biographies. Works of fiction, poetry, anthologies, and textbooks will not be considered. Jurors will consider nominated works’ scholarly and literary merit as well as the extent to which they make original contributions to our understanding of the period.

Thavolia Glymph, Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, will chair the prize jury. The other members are Alice Fahs, Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Honors Program at the University of California – Irvine, and Kenneth Noe, Alumni Professor and Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc., will serve as a non-voting member of the jury.

Publishers are asked to send nominated books (only those published in 2013 will be considered) directly to the four jurors no later than January 31, 2014. The winner will be announced by August 1, 2014. The award will be presented at the SCWH banquet at the Southern Historical Association meeting, where the winner will deliver a formal address that will be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. 

More information>>>

Conducted by Randall Stephens

W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the

Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S.

Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?

W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents.  People had choices.  Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography.  As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest.  With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence.  The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America.  Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities.  By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment.  Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity.  In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life.  In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone.  But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained.  If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing.  In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery. 

Stephens: What accounts for the close connection between anti-slavery and anti-Catholicism?

Wallace: Economics, immigration, social pressures, and theological disagreements all contributed to the close connection between anti-slavery and anti-Catholicism.  In the nineteenth century the intellectual centers of American evangelicalism were in the large emerging industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.  Here also is where we find strong pockets of Whigs as well as growing numbers of abolitionists and Irish Catholic immigrants.  One could say that the northern cities had all the right conditions for the “perfect religious and political storm” against Catholicism and slavery.

Between 1835 and 1860 the alleged tyrannies of slavery and Catholicism became a unifying idea for

A nativist newspaper from the antebellum period. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

northern Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.   All oppressive hierarchies, religious or secular, were depicted as the enemies of American values.

Stephens: Could you say a little bit about the sources you used in your study?

Wallace: Most of my primary sources were sermons, articles in popular religious periodicals, correspondence, newspapers, and theological essays found in academic journals. Primary Catholic sources were a bit tougher to find than Protestant ones.  There were some letters, but most Catholic sources came from rejoinders against Protestant accusations, Catholic periodicals, theological essays, and polemical pieces defending the compatibility between Catholicism and Americanism.  Without a doubt the journal was the blog of the nineteenth century. 

Stephens: You note that in many ways northern Protestants in the antebellum era were divided over questions about doctrine and politics. How did those divisions shape the struggle leading up to war?

Wallace: I did not find any indication of a monolithic northern evangelical “mind,” but there is evidence that American evangelicals in general, and northern evangelicals in particular, tended to value shared social commitments more than theological precision.  Over the course of the mid-nineteenth century the Protestant theological divisions of the past came to matter less than how Christianity translated into social and political questions.  Evangelicals, however, faced a serious problem when they began to disagree about what constituted legitimate social concerns.  Nowhere was this problem more pronounced than with the slavery question. Where theology could be either ignored or debated without real public consequence, politics could not.  Antebellum politics betrayed the appearance of unity evangelicals so desperately desired.  Both northern and southern evangelicals held fast to the notion that there was in fact a relationship between Protestant Christianity and good government.  This relationship, though never explicitly defined, divided millions of evangelicals when the slavery question could no longer be ignored.  Northern evangelicals believed slavery to be as incompatible with American values as Catholicism, and they launched a semi-coordinated campaign against both Catholics and slaveholders in sermons, speeches, and journal articles.  A consequence of this campaign was that slaveholders, like Catholics, shared the position of the northern evangelical ideological “other”—the outsider who had to be assimilated or reconstructed.  While southern theologians retreated into a myopic defense of the peculiar institution, Northern evangelicals increasingly allowed their understanding of the church to be defined by the American experiment.

Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, May 1851.

Three excellent studies that came out just before or just after my book that further the connections between doctrine and politics (and I wish I had had more time to absorb into my work) are Mark Noll’s, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Harry Stout’s, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and George Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen People.

Stephens: You spend some time writing about how believers engaged the past or constructed a usable past.  Could you tell us a little about how views of the past were politicized?

Wallace: Most people want a useable past regardless of their religious beliefs or where they called home.  Look at the great stories by writers as different in time and place as William Faulkner and Philip Roth.  Both develop fascinating characters whose pasts contribute to self-awareness.  There is something universal in this quest.  In this regard, I don’t think antebellum evangelicals are very different from other people or groups.  What is somewhat unique is the way they used the past and what they emphasized.  Northern evangelical leaders recognized a threat in the articulate and intellectually talented American Catholic hierarchy.  Yet, they also understood the hierarchy had roots in Europe, and they were convinced that Rome was in some way behind all of Europe’s political problems.  Both current events in Europe as well as Europe’s pre-Reformation history loomed large in the northern evangelical imagination.  Specifically, the idea of the Middle Ages as dark, corrupt, and tyrannical provided the perfect foil against which northern evangelicals could articulate their optimism about political liberalism.  They insisted that intellectual and moral slavery were the twin legacies of the Middle Ages, and that under their benevolent Christian influence “mental” slavery must end in Europe as surely as physical slavery would in America.

Stephens: Historians like Charles Irons, Donald Mathews, and Christine Heyrman have studied southern evangelicals’ relationship to slavery in various ways.  Would you say something about how you approached the discussion of southern evangelicalism, slavery, and Catholicism?

Wallace: The scholars you mention are certainly important.  To that list I would add Anne C. Loveland, Mitchell Snay, Eugene Genovese, and Michael O’Brien.  While each subject has been well-covered independent of one another, I found little that treated them together.  Southern evangelicals were conservative in temperament, yet they shared with northern evangelicals the belief that the United States should be identified with Protestant values.  In the main, they overwhelmingly rejected revisions to received Christian doctrine, but they did not entirely reject the idea that

Slave Market, by unknown artist, 1850s-60s.

Protestantism should play an important role in shaping the character of the nation. With the crises of secession and war, southern evangelicals were as resolute as northern evangelicals that their understanding of Christianity provide a moral template for republicanism.  An important point I tried to make in the book is that although southern evangelicals never abandoned the leveling theological principles of Protestantism, they nevertheless distanced themselves from the northern evangelical notion that Protestantism could perfect democracy.   As a result, southern evangelicals found themselves touting hierarchical and elitist political and social arrangements while at the same time they defended the priesthood of the believer, private conscience, and the perspicuity of Scripture.  In short, southern evangelicals worked hard, very hard, to justify a conservative social vision of caste, aristocracy, and natural inequality while at the same time holding on to Protestant religious presuppositions that championed none of these things.  By recasting their political theology in terms that supported slavery, southern evangelicals confirmed what northern evangelicals had been arguing for years—slaveholders were a threat to their nationalist aims precisely because they offered a competing vision of what a Christian republic might look like.  In this sense, southern evangelicals found themselves in a predicament remarkably similar to a group with whom they would otherwise have very little in common, American Catholics. 

Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis Island immigration station. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943. 

Where did these federal restriction laws come from? While episodes of immigration control at the federally run landing stations might sound familiar to people interested in United States history, immigration policy before Ellis Island and Angel Island is not so well known, even to American historians.

Some of the roots of American immigration control can be traced back to earlier immigration laws in seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute passengers and foreign paupers. While New York and Massachusetts were most successful in institutionalizing immigrant exclusion (denial of admission), the Bay State went further by implementing policies for deporting immigrant paupers already in the state. These state policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law that developed from the late 19th century onward.

As important as the succession of law from state to federal levels was how state officials enforced immigration control. In Massachusetts, for example, officials made little distinction between noncitizens and naturalized citizens in deporting Irish immigrant paupers. Immigrants were also deported without necessary court warrants, thus illegally. In criticizing the manner of removal in the state, a Boston newspaper declared in 1855 that humans were being sent from Massachusetts to the other side of the Atlantic with less formality and documentation than “the sending of a tub of butter, or a barrel of apples, from Fitchburg to Boston.”

The deportation of citizens, the coercive treatment of undesirable foreigners, and the inhumanity associated with removal proceedings all characterized the implementation of later federal immigration law, especially when it came to Asians and Mexicans.

Hidetaka Hirota is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99 (March 2013), winner of the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.