Description

Introduction

The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History is pleased to presentits second issue. While we began by only publishing papers written by students at Columbia University, for the current issue the editors solicited nominations from universities and colleges across the United States and Canada. We thank the professors who nominated more than sixty papers from nearly thirty universities and colleges. The editors are excited by the progress in fostering critical intellectual dialogue
and recognizing outstanding undergraduate scholarship in the field of history, a process we hope continues at the upcoming Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Conference. This issue includes five articles reflecting diverse historical interests
and methods that both individually and collectively show the importance of the historical discipline.

Jeffrey Martin of Brown University impressed the editors with his rigorous interpretative framework and careful reading of archival sources. Exploring the key historical topics of power and the process of class formation, Martin uses the temperance movement in Rhode Island to examine class relations and middle class legitimation in the age of the market revolution and an emerging capitalist society.

Written while at Duke University, Barnes Hauptfuhrer’s article likewise reflects a wide and careful reading of published and unpublished primary sources. Exploring the politics of unionism and secession in North Carolina, Hauptfuhrer cautions against historical narratives
that stress the ‘inevitability’ of secession by revealing the complex and contested local politics from the election of Lincoln to the Fort Sumter crisis. Hauptfuhrer effectively uses an intensive local focus to examine larger questions of Civil War politics.


Keisha N. Benjamin of Binghamton University offers an insistent intervention in the historical literature with her attempt to restore the voices of rank and file women to the historiography of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Only the perspectives of elite Garveyite women have been studied, Benjamin contends, and her use of the “Women’s Page” of the Negro World provides an interesting attempt to reconstruct rank and file feminist sentiment.

In addition to publication in the journal, the articles by Jeffrey Martin, Barnes Hauptfuhrer, and Keisha N. Benjamin have been selected for the Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Prize. The combination of extensive archival research with attempts to ask and
address important historical questions in their scholarship reflects the tradition of Herbert Aptheker, a Columbia undergraduate and pioneering historian of slavery whose work challenged generations of
racist historiography. The editors eagerly anticipate the lectures that these scholars will give during the Herbert Aptheker Undergraduate History Conference at Columbia University on February 10, 2009.


This issue of the journal includes two additional articles. Jason Zuckerbrod, of our own Columbia University, contributes an excellent
paper on consensus politics in Britain during the Second World War. Zuckerbrod uses a small but carefully analyzed selection of newspaper
articles in prominent journals to explore how different ideological orientations from the right to the left understood and came to support educational programs for the military. Against interpretations that emphasize the Labour’s post-war ascendancy, Zuckerbrod’s analysis cautions against simplistically equating agreement over particular policies with ideological consensus.

The editors are also eager to include Emma O’Brien’s article, written at the University of Minnesota. Its contemporary focus and use of interviews and other unique sources distinguish O’Brien’s work from the more traditional historical narratives published in this
issue. Her study of the power of place within the hip hop scene in Minneapolis provoked fruitful discussion within the editorial board about t