Between the lines.

Fireman, Janet

People can read or study the same material or witness the same event but emerge with radically distinct interpretations. Reading between the lines denotes perceiving or detecting an unexpressed meaning. In this issue, Alex Wagner Lough's essay, "Henry George, Frederick Jackson Turner, and the 'Closing of the American Frontier,'" observes that "both George and Turner drew ... from the same historians, economists, and philosophers to tackle the issues before them." Each grappled with the value of land and the future of its ownership, a subject of enormous interest in California and the rest of the nation by the late nineteenth century. "For Turner," Lough notes, "the disappearance of the frontier signaled the end of the era of American Exceptionalism, largely defined by its independence from the class-based agitations facing Europe," while for George, landlordism--the ownership of land--was the basic determinant of a people's and a nation's morality and well-being.

Haunting views of "Manzanar in 1973," photographs made by James S. Brust, depict the derelict and forsaken War Relocation Center in Owens Valley where more than 10,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens had been confined thirty years earlier. Brust had sped past the unmarked and disremembered site many times before a book identifying the place as a "ghost town" triggered his curiosity. His photo essay of the space he encountered--eerie, evocative, and consequential ground--documents the remnants of the abandoned site, a restoration of memory accomplished by a growing number of individuals and organizations in the following years. That lonely, forgotten place now welcomes the public as the Manzanar National Historic Site, and Brust's images now are part of the Manzanar archives.

The title of Albert L. Hurtado's essay, "False Accusations: Herbert Bolton, Jews, and the Loyalty Oath at Berkeley, 1920-1950," conveys expectations of revelations about the longtime chairman of the history department and director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Famous for founding the school of Spanish Borderlands history, publishing prolifically, and training record numbers of graduate students, Bolton is accused of "holding anti-Semitic attitudes and keeping Jews out of" his department. Hurtado expunges this charge through painstaking research and careful analysis over twenty-five years. Inserting his reactions to and ruminations over discoveries among Bolton's profuse papers, and piecing together the clues he found among the professor's multiple correspondents, Hurtado exposes the historian's methodology while constructing a convincing argument to clear Bolton's name once and for all.

Connecting the unexpected, recovering the disremembered, and correcting falsehoods: The essays in this issue display meticulous reading between the lines.