The March 2020 issue of the Journal of American History includes articles by two Penn PhDs: Emma Teitelman and Adam Goodman. Info on the articles below.
Emma Teitelman is currently a postdoc at Cambridge University (she did her PhD under Prof. Stephanie McCurry’s supervision); this article won the OAH’s Pelzer Award last year for best essay by a graduate student.
Adam Goodman defended his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Michael Katz. Adam is currently Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and History at University of Illinois Chicago.
“The Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and the West after the American Civil War,” by Emma Teitelman
Emma Teitelman examines the politics of property during the Reconstruction era. She argues that the Civil War precipitated a wave of land privatization in the South and the West, which oriented the productive capacities of the lands toward the maximization of profits. Exploring these transformations through one prominent firm, Phelps, Dodge, & Co., she describes the many forms of land dispossession that made possible the industrial extraction of minerals and lumber in the Gilded Age.
“Bananas North, Deportees South: Punishment, Profits, and the Human Costs of the Business of Deportation,” by Adam Goodman
U.S. immigration officials in the mid-1950s deported nearly fifty thousand people across the Gulf of Mexico and deep into the Mexican interior. Scholars know little about the history of these boatlifts and even less about the U.S. government contracting private Mexican companies to carry them out. Examining the physical process of expulsion offers important insights into the lives of migrants and the making of immigration policy. Adam Goodman offers a history of the business of deportation, revealing the bureaucratic, capitalist, and racist motives that propel expulsion.