THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW Fall 2011 AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION From Cowboys to Kotex: Exploring America’s Frontiers !! ! ! !! !!! ! !!!!!!!!!!!! THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW An Undergraduate Publication The Yale Historical Review provides undergraduates an opportunity to have their exceptional work highlighted and encourages the diffusion of original historical ideas on campus by providing a forum for outstanding undergraduate history papers covering any historical topic. For information regarding submissions, advertisements, subscriptions, and contributions, please visit our website at www.yalehistoricalreview.org. With further questions or to provide feedback, please contact us at [email protected] or write to us at: The Yale Historical Review, PO Box 200243, New Haven, CT 06520. The Yale Historical Review is published by Yale College students. Yale University is not responsible for its contents. EDITORIAL BOARD ADVISORY BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Caroline Tan, BK ’14 David Blight MANAGING EDITOR Class of 1954 Professor of American History; Katherine Fein, PC ’14 Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for SENIOR ESSAY EDITOR the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Jack Bisceglia, PC ’12 John Gaddis JUNIOR SEMINAR EDITORS Robert A. Lovett Professor of History Elinor Monahan, JE ’13 Beverly Gage Brendan Ross, BK ’13 Associate Professor of History AT LARGE EDITORS Glenda Gilmore Christian Vazquez, BR ’13 Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of Annie Yi, CC ’13 History, African American Studies, and OUTSIDE OF YALE EDITORS American Studies Charles Gyer, SM ’13 Norma Thompson Teo Soares, SM ’13 Director of Undergraduate Studies for DIRECTED STUDIES EDITOR Humanities Andrew Giambrone, PC ’14 Donald Kagan FRESHMAN PAPER EDITORS Sterling Professor of Classics and History Jacob Anbinder, ES ’14 Caitlin Radford, PC ’14 _____________________________________ DESIGN EDITOR Christian Vazquez, BR ’13 Cover Images: COMMUNICATIONS CHAIR Molly Ma, TD ’13 “The Cowboy Life,” Charles Marion Russell, Yale University Library Visual Resources DEVELOPMENT CHAIRS Collection. Layne Johnson, SM ’12 Eric Spies, BK ’13 “Wondersoft Kotex Meets the Comfort Demands Of Modern Women,” Kotex Co., COPY EDITORS 1937, Duke University Libraries Digital Annie Loeb, TD ’12 Collection. Noah Remnick, SY ’15 Spencer Weinreich, PC ’15 4 CONTENTS 7 LETTER Rethinking Yale’s History Major By Steven Pincus 9 JUNIOR SEMINAR When Free Speech Became Treasonous: Alfred Whitney Griswold’s Defense of Academic Freedom in the Early Cold War By Jacob Effron 25 DIRECTED STUDIES The American By Marissa Dearing 29 INTERVIEW Professor Beverly Gage By Brendan Ross 33 AT LARGE Kotex: An Early 20th Century Demonstration of Media Campaigns Addressing Stigma By Jacqueline Sahlberg 44 OUTSIDE OF YALE Bred from Nobler Stock: British Investment in the United States Cattle Industry, 1870-1890 By Mark Goldberg 62 FRESHMAN Monumental Reconciliation’s Failure at Andersonville By Robert Young 71 SENIOR ESSAY Unwavering Patriots: Sacrifice, Coercion, and the Contested Legacy of the FLN Soccer Team Christopher Merriman 5 DONORS Founding Patrons Matthew and Laura Dominski In Memory of David J. Magoon Sareet Majumdar Stauer Derek Wang Yale Club of the Treasure Coast Zixiang Zhao Founding Contributors Peter Dominski J.S. Renkert Joe and Marlene Toot Yale Center for British Art Yale Club of Hartford Contributors Greg Weiss 6 Steven Pincus Letter Rethinking Yale’s History Major Steven Pincus, Bradford Durfee Professor of History, Director of Undergraduate Studies for History, Chair of the European Studies Council We live in exciting times. Events in the past decade have pointed to vast challenges that will face tomorrow’s citizens and leaders. But, none of these developments – issues of climate change, the ‘Arab Spring’, the European Debt Crisis and beyond – are unique or unprecedented developments in human history. They are developments with long trajectories. Only by studying history, by understanding the long-term causes of today’s crises, can we hope to diagnose solutions to the problems of today and tomorrow. The study of history provides its aficionados with the best tools to analyze today’s bewildering world. Yale’s History Department, as documented by the Yale Daily News, has suffered a decline in majors. This, to me, indicates a decline not in the relevance of history but in the fact that Yale’s History Major was designed to cater to the needs of students in the 1980s and 1990s. It is time for a change. But in our view the change need not be cataclysmic. The History Department has been adjusting to new needs under the radar. We offer a much wider range of courses on international history, environmental history, economic history and the history of gender and sexuality than we ever have before. We have also increased our geographical range, as we recently hired a historian of southern Africa as well as a historian of the Middle East; in addition, we are currently searching for two historians of South Asia and a historian of the contemporary Middle East. The problem, then, is to ensure that these new resources are available to undergraduates in a systematic, coherent and easily legible way. In November, the History Department discussed and approved a variety of changes to the major. Most significantly, we decided to re-organize the major in terms of thematic pathways. At present, students are told that they have to take 12 history courses, a certain number of which have to fulfill various distribution requirements. Instead, we will offer a menu of thematic pathways to help students select courses that best represent their interests. We envisage pathways 7 LETTER in environmental history, intellectual history, international history, the history of capitalism, the history of gender and sexuality, the history of religion, the history of empires, the history of revolutions and social movements, the history of war and violence and many others. Each of these pathways will have its own webpage that will list relevant courses, faculty members with similar interests as well as various events on campus relevant to that pathway. We hope that this new structure will allow students to select distributional courses that best match their interests, give them a better sense of potential senior essay advisers and, during their sophomore and junior years, match those in the major with a history adviser who can help them select courses that most closely meet their intellectual goals. In sum, we hope to provide a more fulfilling and coherent academic experience within the history major. Yale’s History Department remains one of the jewels of Yale College and is arguably the best history department in North America. There are many good reasons for undergraduates to major in a department with such a long tradition of teaching excellence. Additionally, we feel that the history major is an ideal place to prepare Yale students to lead the world in facing the challenges of the new century. The study of history has changed significantly in the past two decades. Whereas historians in the third quarter of the twentieth century focused on local studies and national developments, historians have since widened their gaze to emphasize global and comparative trends. This change is a reaction to the problems of the twenty-first century, which after all are global, not local, in scale. Concerns about environmental degradation, terrorist attacks, the crisis of capitalism, rapidly developing social and political revolutions, and health pandemics all demand a broad global and historical perspective. Yale’s History Department not only reflects this new direction in academic thinking, but also sits on the cutting edge of these developments. As a result, students who are interested in explaining the origins of the European debt crisis can do no better than examine the rise of government borrowing in the context of state formation and revolutionary change. Students who wish to grapple with the grave environmental problems that face today’s leaders would be well-served by studying the development of the range of human relations with the natural world through our strong offerings in environmental history. Students concerned about the causes and consequences of the Arab Spring can explore their context through our wide variety of classes on revolutions and social movements, our proliferating range of courses on the Middle East and perhaps even through our strengths in the history of religion. On top of this, we hope students will pursue coursework in many of these fields, as a broad education in history equips our students with the tools to address not only the past and the present, but also the future. Being a History major at Yale offers the best of all possible worlds. Yale’s History department trains students to think and write through a series of challenging courses taught by excellent and dedicated teachers. History trains Yale students to use the past to think creatively about the future. 8 Jacob Effron Junior Seminar When Free Speech Became Treasonous: Alfred Whitney Griswold’s Defense of Academic Freedom in the Early Cold War Jacob Effron, SM ’13 Written for Yale and America, Professor Jay Gitlin, Spring 2011 Faculty Advisor: Professor Beverly Gage Edited by Elinor Monahan and Brendan Ross During their junior year, history majors complete at least two seminars covering history from two different geographical regions. In this paper, junior Economics major Jacob Effron takes us back to Yale in the early 1950s, when anti-communism