Children Are Hiding in Plain Sight in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Rouleau

All kinds of peoples, previously marginalized in favor of the actions and thoughts of elite policy makers, now fill foreign relations histories. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, workers, and many others have been shown to be indispensable—if informal—diplomatic assets. And yet, diverse as this cast of characters has become, notice one thing they share in common: their adulthood. It is as if human experience with foreign affairs only begins with the age of majority. What might be gained once we appreciate the influence of young people, as both audience and agent, in the long history of America's entanglement with the wider world?

Author(s):  
James David Nichols

Scholars have long suggested that nineteenth-century runaway slaves turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a line of freedom. However, as this chapter argues, such an interpretation of the border is somewhat problematic. A closer examination of the history of northern Tamaulipas explains why. From 1820 onward, African Americans began to arrive to that region in search of freedom and a changed racial milieu, but this process was deeply fraught. U.S. American jurisprudence could continue to affect Mexican space formally and informally from the outside, greatly troubling Mexican sovereignty and its foreign relations in the process. Hence, the freedom found by African Americans in Mexico—guaranteed by Mexican law—was never particularly secure in practice. This chapter builds upon the previous chapter and provides an in-depth analysis of a specific case study of fugitive slaves’ struggles for freedom in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.


Author(s):  
Charles W. Eagles

Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state’s past. In 1974, when Random House’s Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit (Loewen v. Turnipseed) challenging the book ban.


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