JAH 112:1

 [The June 2025 issue of the Journal of American History is chock full of legal history.  We reprodcue its “In This Issue.”  DRE.]

M. Scott Heerman examines the contours of race, citizenship, and legal personhood abroad during the 1850s. He examines two freedom suits filed by John Lytle and Ben Newton, illegally enslaved African Americans in Cuba, and unpacks State Department policy covering rights to citizenship in those cases and others. His article shows that consular agents on the ground in Havana and high-ranking State Department officials in Washington, D.C., maintained a two-tiered system of protection that distinguished between granting legal protections based on birthright and conferring full rights afforded to citizens.

What is the place of law in the history of anti-immigrant violence in the United States? Seeking an answer, Hardeep Dhillon historicizes several attacks on immigrants from India between 1907 and 1910. She argues that the lack of protection or justice for immigrant communities in the face of mob violence is not a simple history of law gone wrong or even a history of discriminatory law, but a history of anti-immigrant fervor and impunity structured through the law. Her article reveals how laws on the books and laws in practice shaped both the violence immigrants experienced and possible forms of redress.

Despite the wealth of scholarship on mortgage discrimination, comparatively little is known about how redlining affected rental housing. During World War II, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) began underwriting new apartments for defense workers and war veterans. Brent Cebul and Michael R. Glass examine how developers such as Fred Trump and William Levitt abused FHA insurance programs by inflating their costs and reaping excess profits in a tactic known as “mortgaging out.” Drawing upon their original database of FHA-insured apartments, Cebul and Glass illuminate how developers not only deepened racial segregation but also transformed the landscape of rental housing across metropolitan America.

As historians debate the causes of the decline of American democracy—the backlash against civil rights, income inequality, changing media—the Iran-Contra scandal of the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush years, over trading arms with Iran and funding rebels in Central America, never figures in this discussion. Iran-Contra has receded from history, regarded as a minor speed bump in the late Cold War. Reinterpreting the fiasco as an accelerant in the decay of U.S. democracy, Alan McPherson argues that the 1987 televised congressional hearings highlighted several major disparities in how Democrats and Republicans understood norms: Democrats warned of a broad assault on democracy, while Republicans dismissed the disturbing events as mere means to foreign policy ends. Unlike during the Watergate scandal, no one paid a price for Iran-Contra, and the behaviors worsened.

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