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slaves. In addition to its rich discussions of gender and honor, Forret’s
work takes on the dificult subject of infanticide. He explains that bondwomen murdered their children for complicated motives that included
desires to “govern their own reproductive powers,” and “deny masters
a future generation of enslaved labor” (p. 383). Although Slave Against
Slave uses data from a few areas of the South to offer careful suggestions
about rates of intra-slave violence over time (rising after the American
Revolution and in the pre-Civil War decade), the sample size is much too
small to lend too much weight to those conclusions, and Forret rightly
insists that the numbers are much less important than what the incidents
themselves can tell us about slaves’ conditions and values.
While the book pans across the South, the heart of Forret’s research
lies in data gathered from legal sources from Virginia, the upcountry of
South Carolina, Middle Georgia, and Adams County, Mississippi. Welcome anecdotes relating to people who experienced slavery in Arkansas
surface from time to time, and the book does a good job of showing regional variation in the relevant civil and criminal laws of slavery. For example, Forret notes the similarity in the ways that Arkansas and Missouri
treated intra-slave murders. Slave societies on the margins were more apt
to “tweak the common-law understanding of masters’ liability” (by allowing masters some civil suits in relation to slaves’ murder of slaves) than
were older eastern states or states with higher slave populations (p. 104).
Unfortunately, through no fault of the author and despite Slave Against
Slave’s careful treatment of the topic, some people with particular political agendas may misuse this book to bolster racist claims about black
criminality or a black social life supposedly long broken by slavery. But
Slave Against Slave’s valuable contribution to scholarship far outweighs
this risk, and Forret has written the work in such a way that anyone sincerely in search of history’s truths will ind them within.
kelly houston Jones
austin Peay state university
***
A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II
Arkansas. Edited by Ali Welky. (Little Rock: Butler Center Books,
2015. Pp. 116. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $21.95, paper.)
In recent years, the internment camps for Japanese Americans at
Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas, have attracted new attention. For instance,
BOOK REVIEWS
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the well-known Japanese-American actor George Takei, who was interned
at Rohwer, has helped to raise the proile of the long-overlooked camps.
This renewed interest led to an ongoing digital reconstruction project
called “Rohwer Reconstructed: Making Connections across Time and
Space,” which is supported by the National Park Service and the Center
for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. All of this makes the publication of Ali Welky’s edited collection of
archival materials from both Rohwer and Jerome very timely.
A Captive Audience is meant to be a teaching aid for advanced middle school or high school students, although anyone with an interest in
the camps at Rohwer and Jerome is sure to learn something new about
Japanese internment in Arkansas from Welky’s carefully curated irsthand
accounts. With photos on almost every page and short, easily digestible
quotations drawn from writing done in camp schools by young Japanese
Americans, the book humanizes internment in a way that will help young
readers to develop empathy for historical situations that they might not
otherwise be able to comprehend. The book begins with a series of hypothetical questions to familiarize young readers with the experiences
of Japanese Americans, and each chapter contains a small section called
“Walking in their shoes” that will help teachers to generate classroom
discussion.
Welky’s collection of primary sources was gathered from several
holdings in Little Rock: the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, particularly the Edna Miller Collection, and the University of Arkansas at Little
Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s Life Interrupted collection about the Japanese-American experience in World War II Arkansas.
The book provides the web address for the collections’ inding aids and
explains to readers that all of the archives are open and accessible. For
students living in and around Little Rock, a class trip to these archives
could easily be arranged.
Welky contextualizes the primary sources with an overview of the
internment of Japanese Americans in Arkansas. She begins each chapter
with brief narrative accounts of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, the
subsequent internment order, daily life in the camps, and what people
did after the war ended. The book contains numerous maps, timelines,
and images as well as important terminology that might not be familiar
to readers with no previous knowledge of the history of Japanese migration to North America. She also provides interesting statistics about
the Japanese Americans interned at both camps, such as age and gender
distributions.
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A Captive Audience explores some lesser-known themes surrounding
the experiences of internment in Arkansas. In one chapter, Welky shows
that poor blacks and whites living in the delta sometimes expressed anger and jealousy because the interned Japanese had access to social services, hospitals, and schools and they did not. She devotes a chapter to
friendships and romances that developed over time, noting that there were
more than 250 marriages in the Arkansas camps. She also explains that
most families left Arkansas quickly after the war ended because the state
tried to prevent Japanese Americans from acquiring land. Only one Japanese-American student stayed in the state to attend what is now the University of the Ozarks.
Overall, A Captive Audience is a well-balanced and informative addition to the growing body of literature on the internment of Japanese
Americans during World War II. With the renewed interest in Rohwer and
Jerome, this book will make a welcome addition to classrooms around the
state, helping young Arkansans gain a deeper understanding of wartime
experiences and legacies.
kelly anne haMMonD
university of arkansas, fayetteville
***
Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. By Julie M.
Weise. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. x,
344. Acknowledgments, maps, illustrations, tables, appendix, notes,
bibliography, index. $32.50, paper.)
The anti-immigrant movement that swept the U.S. South starting
around 2004—demands that undocumented students not receive in-state
tuition discounts, local ordinances designed to harass immigrants and
those who give them comfort, and criminalization of undocumented status—serves as the starting point for Julie Weise’s compelling study of
the past one hundred years of Mexican migration to the region. Drawing
on archival sources in both the United States and Mexico and for later
periods on oral histories in both Spanish and English, she rejects the common assumption that southerners’ recent hostility to the mostly Mexican
immigrants was simply a continuation of Dixie’s particularly deep-rooted
commitment to white supremacy. Instead, she maintains that it was the
rise of the modern Sunbelt South and the region’s increasing resemblance
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.