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Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly?

These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely through language and cultural habit -- and that these same tools can be employed to break through the myth that brutishness is an inherently male trait.

A major re-synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manhood, Brutes in Suits develops ambitious lines of research into the social science of sexual difference and professional history's celebration of rugged individualism; the hunting-and-killing genre of popular men's literature; that master text of hypermasculinity: college football; military culture, war making, and finding pleasure in killing; and patriarchy, sexual jealousy, and the law. This timely assessment of the evolution of masculine culture will be welcomed and debated by social and intellectual historians for years to come.

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Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a master satirist who displayed a fiery wit both as a writer and as an artist. For seven months in 1880, he surprised and amused the readers of New Orleans with his woodblock "cartoons" and accompanying articles, which were variously funny, scathing, surreal, political, whimsical, and moral. This delightful book collects in their entirety, for the first time, all of the extant satirical columns and woodcut illustrations published in the Daily City Item—181 columns in all.Hearn displays immense range, illuminating in words and prints the unique culture of New Orleans, including its Creole history, debauched underworld, corrupt politicians, and voudou practitioners. The columns are expertly annotated by Delia LaBarre, who places them in their unique Crescent City context.

With virtually no training in art of any kind, Hearn began creating his illustrations partly to boost the circulation of a small daily newspaper in a competitive market. He believed in the power of satirical cartoons to communicate big ideas in small spaces—in particular, to reveal the habits, prejudices, and delusions of the current generation. Blind in his left eye (since a boyhood accident) and severely myopic in his right, Hearn nonetheless painstakingly carved out drawings on wood blocks with a penknife to be printed alongside his articles on the newspaper’s letterpress. Hearn developed, from the first of these woodcuts to the last, a unique style that expressed the full range of his wit, from razorsharp condemnation to tender affection.

Hearn had a keen eye for the absurd, along with an extraordinary ability to modulate his criticism and praise in a continuum from cauterizing vitriol to palliative balm, from the heaviest sarcasm to the lightest wit. In the pieces collected here, there can be found a unifying thread: Hearn’s love/hate relationship with the virtues and vices of New Orleans, a city that continually amused and amazed him.

Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Lafcadio Hearn immigrated to the United States as a teenager and became a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he married a black woman, an act that was illegal at the time, the newspaper fired him and Hearn relocated to New Orleans. In the early 1880s his contributions to national publications (like Harper’s Weekly and Scribners Magazine) helped mold the popular image of New Orleans as a colorful place of decadence and hedonism. In 1888, Hearn left New Orleans for Japan, where he took the name Koizumi Yakumo and worked as a teacher, journalist, and writer.

"And it may come to pass that I shall have stranger things to tell you; for this is a land of magical moons and of witches and of warlocks; and were I to tell you all that I have seen and heard in these years in this enchanted City of Dreams you would verily deem me mad rather than morbid." —Lafcadio Hearn, 1880, describing New Orleans in a letter to a friendAUTHOR BIO:Delia LaBarre is Executive Director of the Hearn/Koizumi Center in New Orleans. ... Read more

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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred practically all Chinese from American shores for ten years, was the first federal law that banned a group of immigrants solely on the basis of race or nationality. By changing America's traditional policy of open immigration, this landmark legislation set a precedent for future restrictions against Asian immigrants in the early 1900s and against Europeans in the 1920s.

Tracing the origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Andrew Gyory presents a bold new interpretation of American politics during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Rather than directly confront such divisive problems as class conflict, economic depression, and rising unemployment, he contends, politicians sought a safe, nonideological solution to the nation's industrial crisis—and latched onto Chinese exclusion. Ignoring workers' demands for an end simply to imported contract labor, they claimed instead that working people would be better off if there were no Chinese immigrants. By playing the race card, Gyory argues, national politicians—not California, not organized labor, and not a general racist atmosphere—provided the motive force behind the era's most racist legislation. ... Read more

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Blaming the Politicians
In this well researched monograph, Andrew Gyory seeks to answer one question:Why did the United States pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?In the past, historians have clung to two arguments to explain the passage of this act; the California and national-racism theses.The former suggests that workers and politicians in California supplied the driving force behind the Exclusion Act while the latter supports the view that a national xenophobia and prejudice towards the Chinese led to the act's passage.Gyory downplays the role that these two factors had in securing the exclusionist legislation.Instead, he argues that politicians played the race card to improve their political standing in hopes of getting elected to office.Gyory asserts, "The single most important force behind the Chinese Exclusion Act was national politicians of both parties who seized, transformed, and manipulated the issue of Chinese immigration in the quest for votes." Throughout the monograph Gyory seeks to illustrate how politicians took up the issue of Chinese immigration in an attempt to reach their political aspirations.

In order to prove his point, Gyory attempts to disprove the long held thesis that workers nationwide supported Chinese exclusion.He stressed that opposition to Chinese immigration east of the Rockies was largely nonexistent.According to his argument, eastern workers were simply opposed to the Chinese coming to the nation under contract.Hence, white workers had no desire to support immigration legislation based upon race.In fact, Gyory believes, "Most workers evinced little interest in Chinese exclusion." Contrary to prior historiography, he suggests that Chinese exclusion gained acceptance because politicians claimed it would benefit the workingman.Many times throughout his work he blames political maneuvering for securing the act.For example, he claims, "To the very end, politics and political advantage remained the chief motivating force behind every stage of the Chinese Exclusion Act." Although his evidence is convincing, the monograph contains a few shortcomings.

Gyory aptly reveals that eastern workers did not advocate restrictions on free Chinese immigration.However, these workers did not rise up to show their disapproval once the Exclusion Act was passed.Does this silence not suggest that workers possibly supported the act, or were at least indifferent to its passage?Furthermore, the reader will find that the dire situation in California only receives limited attention.Riots and violence were a product of Chinese immigration to the state, but Gyory largely fails, or chooses not to, discuss these events.Moreover, it is difficult to ascertain whether the Chinese Exclusion Act was a product of politicians, or if they were simply responding to public opinion.Despite these problems, the monograph adds greatly to the study of Chinese exclusion.

Gyory's monograph is a great contribution to the historiography of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the reasons it came into existence.By evaluating a wide spectrum of sources - speeches, congressional reports, periodicals, labor journals, and political caricatures - Gyory puts Chinese exclusion in a national context.There is no doubt that his work has caused scholars to reevaluate the old assumptions on what led to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants.However, although he minimizes the impact that white laborers had in securing the legislation, it remains difficult to disprove the long held argument that workers were instrumental to this process.

Well researched look at Chinese exclusion
Andrew Gyory's "Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act" attempts to answer a central question about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically why the United States government passed this bill. According to the author, current historians who have examined the issue fail to offer a comprehensive explanation for this event. Gyory claims that the act did not arise from nationwide racism or at the behest of national labor leaders even though these elements formed an important aspect in its passage. Instead, he offers an alternative thesis: the Chinese Exclusion Act came into existence largely because national politicians sought votes from western states. Moreover, office seekers falsely claimed that anti-Chinese legislation had tacit support from workers across the nation and further argued that the laboring classes would greatly benefit from such a bill. Gyory finds that far from supporting an exclusion of Asian workers, most workingmen east of the Rocky Mountains had few concerns with Chinese immigration.

The first few chapters define an issue that repeatedly appears throughout the book: labor in the West supported Chinese exclusion while workers in the East did not. The distinction between the two camps hinged on the issue of importation versus exclusion. Starting in 1869 and reappearing throughout the 1870s, eastern capitalists threatened to import Chinese to break strikes. The fear that these Asian laborers would work longer hours for a lower wage presented a serious threat to emerging efforts at unionization. Most attempts to bring in Asian workers never materialized, despite the hysteria regarding an 1870 incident in North Adams, Massachusetts where a factory owner did bring in Chinese labor to break a strike. It was the implied threat of such a widespread influx of cheap, non-unionized labor that terrified the average eastern workingman. Gyory argues that even when workers thought such a danger loomed on the horizon, they still did not embrace exclusionary policies. The picture that emerges is instead one of eastern workers welcoming the Chinese with open arms as long as they came to the United States of their own freewill and not under contract with factory owners.

The stance of eastern labor did not find a reciprocal attitude in California and the West Coast. These regions supported a ban on Chinese immigration from the highest echelons of society down to the lowest ranks of the working class. Westerners persistently sought legislation at the federal level to end the Asian influx, with men like Denis Kearney embarking on widely touted tours of the East to promote an exclusionist agenda. These efforts either completely failed or achieved only limited results until the national election of 1880 when presidential hopeful Senator James G. Blaine realized that promoting a ban on Chinese immigration could sweep western votes into the pockets of the Republican Party. Blaine failed to secure the presidential nomination, but both parties soon adopted his race baiting tactics in the hope of winning a presidential election in an era of razor thin vote margins. After several intricate political maneuvers in Congress, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law in 1882. Eastern unions, which had ardently opposed immigration bans for so many years, eventually supported exclusion when it became apparent that this measure was the best labor legislation they would likely get from the federal government.

Gyory's research on this issue is exhaustive. By scouring through mounds of newspapers and related documents, he successfully constructs an argument that eastern unions opposed importation while supporting Chinese immigration. His presentation of the political machinations centering on Chinese exclusion shows the author's mastery at negotiating the immense source material concerning congressional debates and election politics. Moreover, the section of the book outlining Denis Kearney's excursion East illustrates the level of hostility westerners had for Asians while revealing the character of this flamboyant orator. Historians, like the public, enjoy reading about such vibrant individuals.

The author's central premise that eastern workers opposed exclusion runs into a major difficulty when one realizes that the book deals almost exclusively with unions or pro-union laborers. Labor unions during the 1870s never came close to representing a majority of workers nationwide, so drawing an overarching conclusion that "workers" opposed exclusion is arguably still up for debate. Moreover, Gyory often fails to make the critical distinction between organized labor and "workers," and would probably have found firmer ground if he had argued that UNIONS in the East opposed exclusion. Of course union members supported Chinese workers; they could build stronger unions if they could convince Asian laborers to join their ranks. Accomplishing this feat would be more difficult if Chinese laborers could only work through restrictive contracts with capitalist owners.

A further problem with this book lies in the hysterical tones westerners used when referring to Asian immigrants. Why did every level of society in the West reach near consensus about the undesirability of the Chinese? Other than a vague reference to westerners living in an area where the Chinese formed a measurable minority of the population, Gyory never examines the reasons for this overwhelming hatred. Defining the causes of this western repugnance would not necessarily translate into a justification of anti-Asian hatred, but rather would provide an explanation for the unanimous calls for exclusion in this area. Several western figures quoted in the book make vague references to vices and prostitution in their arguments for an immigration ban, so certainly there were specific issues on the West Coast that excited public opinion against the Chinese. What were they and why do they not appear in this book?

bringing the state back in
This is the hot new book on the Chinese Exclusion Act.Dare I spoil the plot?Previous literature on the act falls under (1) the California thesis (proposed first by Coolidge in 1909), and (2) the national racist thesis (which includes famous labor theorists like David Roediger and Gwendolyn Mink).Gyory suggests the California thesis is correct, but it needs to be pitched differently: the Republican party becomes a mere electoral apparatus (after abolitionism) and uses the Chinese question to win over the west, rather than chosing a more controversial issue.The reason why I like this book: This was the heyday of courts and parties--he's right and easy to read.

Who caused the Chinese Exclusion Act?
America had become the typical chosen destination of immigrants for its image of a land of plenty, a non-stratified society, and its democracy.This ideal of allowing immigrants to take advantage of these opportunities regardless of their ethnicity ended with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.The rationalization for this law was first hypothesized by Mary Coolidge on the basis of California racist atmosphere and political pull in Washington.Later it was suggested by Stuart Miller that it was workers that encouraged Chinese exclusion.Gyory suggests neither one of these theses are correct, but the catalyst for the prohibition of Chinese immigration was national politicians who seized and manipulated the issue in an effort to gain votes, while arguing that workers had long demanded Chinese exclusion and would benefit from it. Gyory's main intention was to exonerate the workingman as being the contingency that caused the Chinese exclusion.This is stated by including union newspapers and labor proceedings stating their opposition to imported contract labor, but not exclusion.The emergence of a nation-wide railroad strike bared the clear social divisions of the Gilded Age. Demanding `bread or blood,' railroad workers instigated speculation of a possible social revolution and the first red scare of a communist putsch.Upon the perceived anti-Chinese rhetoric and Dennis Kearney's urging Chinese exclusion, politicians were prompted to pick a non-ideological issue to appease these workers' demands.This study does demonstrate a new perspective on the instruments that enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, but fails to give evidence why the masses accepted the politician's racist platforms.

Great history on the Chinese Exclusion Act!
I throughly enjoyed this well written book. Mr. Gyory documents the relatively unknown treatment of Chinese workers atempting to enter the United States. He illustrates the profound impact which this movement hadon US immigration. Highly recomended. ... Read more

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Drawn from research in the manuscript records of the federal judiciary and the court reports of the Florida Supreme Court, this book examines how state and federal judges responded to the enforcement of local, state, and national prohibition in Florida. Upholding these measures often resulted in governmental encroachment on civil liberties; consequently, judges found themselves positioned to determine the scope of the liquor laws. As they balanced the rights of individuals with the power of the state, Florida judges acted independently of public opinion and based their rulings on precedent and citation of authority. To present the fullest picture possible, this text, while focusing on the efforts of the judges to uphold the spirit and the letter of the various liquor laws, it also considers the views of individuals who violated prohibition. ... Read more

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a pleasantly inebriating reading experience
unlike the dry accounts one often reads of our sometimes sobering historical past, dr. guthrie has rendered the material in an informative and entertaining manner.his choice selection of anecdotes engages the reader in a topic that, in the hands of a lesser scholar, might be considered an account of arcane litigations.to be sure, dr. guthrie's book was a pleasantly inebriating reading experience, and one which i can highly recommend to anyone interested in this period of american history. ... Read more

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Long before lucrative tribal casinos sparked controversy, Native Americans amassed other wealth that provoked intense debate about the desirability, morality, and compatibility of Indian and non-Indian economic practices. Blending social, cultural, and economic history, Alexandra Harmon examines seven such instances of Indian affluence and the dilemmas they presented both for Native Americans and for Euro-Americans--dilemmas rooted in the colonial origins of the modern American economy.Harmon's study not only compels us to look beyond stereotypes of greedy whites and poor Indians, but also convincingly demonstrates that Indians deserve a prominent place in American economic history and in the history of American ideas through the twentieth century. ... Read more

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As questions of citizenship generate new debates for this generation of Americans, Thomas argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. He considers 4 case studies in which individuals are presented in literature as "the good citizen," "the patriotic citizen," "the independent citizen," and "the immigrant citizen." He also provides analysis of the civic mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln and the case of Ex parte Milligan. Engaging current debates about civil society, civil liberties, civil rights, and immigration, Thomas draws on the complexities of law and literature to probe the complexities of U.S. citizenship. ... Read more

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Mapping the relationship between racial formation and sexual classification in the United States
"Slumming" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction.Professor Heap's book interview is running as cover feature here today, August 5, 2009. ... Read more