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Prisoner of War

Offshore prisons. Extraordinary rendition. Warrantless wiretaps. Torture. By pushing questions of civil liberties and human rights to the forefront of political consciousness, the war on terror has provided some new subjects of inquiry for American historians, while putting some old concerns in a new light. Established accounts of the nation's past have rather quickly become inadequate. When alleged U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions dominated the news a few years ago, Linda Kerber, president of the American Historical Association at the time, expressed her "embarrassment" that she had never discussed the conventions in her classes.1 Surely many scholars were blushing, or should have been, along with Kerber. Contemporary events have, not for the first time, outrun attempts to place the present in historical context. Fortunately, some recent scholarship has demonstrated how embarrassment might lead to opportunity. This work has not only explored human rights, broadly defined, but has also tried to incorporate human rights concerns into more general narratives of American, and world, history. Notable efforts include Lynn Hunt's long view of the campaign against torture, Elizabeth Borgwardt's illuminating exploration of World War II-era multilateralism, and Mae Ngai's incisive study of illegal aliens, along with a pair of pathbreaking essays by the late Kenneth Cmiel.2 To this pioneering work we can now add Ernest Freeberg' s Democracy's Prisoner. In his riveting account of the incarceration of Eugene V. Debs and the amnesty movement that set him free, Freeberg has subtly reimagined the post-World War I Red Scare for a post-September 11 world. Freeberg's previous book, The Education of Laura Bridgman (2001), breathed new life into the hoary topic of antebellum reform by recounting the deeply moving story of Samuel Gridley Howe and Bridgman, his deaf and blind protege. Keeping this troubled and ultimately tragic relationship at the center of his narrative, Freeberg weighed in on longstanding scholarly debates over nineteenth-century science, religion, and social control, while making a novel