© 2009 Phi Alpha Theta
BOOK REVIEWS
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Richard Spall
Ohio Wesleyan University
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(Modern Western Europe)
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(United States Since 1865)
Shippensburg University
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(Russia and Eastern Europe)
Wichita State University
Nigel Kennell & Stefanie Kennell
(Ancient World)
Memorial University of Newfoundland
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University of California at Los Angeles
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University of New Haven
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Ohio Wesleyan University
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Zak Gomes
Greg Stull
WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE
Olivia Talbott
Jeffrey O’Bryon
Abraham Gustavson
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AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Martyrdom in Islam. By David Cook. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press,
2007. Pp. xiv, 206. $75.00.)
The role of martyrdom in Islam has taken center stage in recent years due to the
burgeoning terrorist tactic of “self-designated martyrdoms,” often referred to as
“suicide attacks.” Current popular portrayals of martyrdom operations suggest
that martyrdom has always played a pivotal role in Islam and is more pronounced
in Islam than in other religious traditions. David Cook counters this popular
image by demonstrating that martyrdom historically has not played a prominent
role in Islamic thought and practice, outside of the Shii tradition.
Cook ambitiously seeks to provide a broad vision of martyrdom and its
meaning and practice in the Islamic tradition, combining historical analysis,
global coverage ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia, and a thematic approach
to the definition of the martyr in the Sunni, Shia, and Sufi traditions in order to
locate martyrdom both within Islam and in comparison to other religious traditions, notably Judaism and Christianity. Cook’s analysis is based largely on Arabic
language sources and translations of primary materials, permitting inclusion of
short excerpts from various pieces so as to allow the reader direct experience of
the primary sources; this is sure to appeal to historians. The writing is engaging,
and Cook cleverly chooses his excerpted tidbits for their dramatic impact. At the
same time, the analysis is frequently piecemeal, rather than systematic, often
covering major thinkers or sources in a few paragraphs. Examples include discussion of Sayyid Qutb’s understandings of jihad and martyrdom in a mere three
paragraphs, despite Qutb’s status as “the living embodiment of radical Islamic
martyrdom,” and rapid coverage of Quranic references to martyrs and martyrdom in less than three pages (138, 139, 31–33).
The major contributions of this book are many. The author provides a discussion of the classical definition of who qualifies as a martyr according to Islamic
sources, which includes not only those who are killed in religious warfare, but also
extends to women in childbirth, non-Muslims who befriend and protect Muslims,
and those who die from plague. This is followed by discussion of how these
categories were further expanded during the medieval period. There is also an
analysis of the “martyrs of love” from both Islamic literature and the Sufi
tradition. Cook discusses variations in understandings and prevalence of martyrs
regionally, particularly noting the paucity of martyrs in Southeast Asia and
offering possible reasons for this. He also provides analysis of the question of
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intent with respect to martyrdom—when does martyrdom become suicide and is
this ever legally permissible? This last issue, a topic of major historical debate that
is scattered throughout the book, has undergone significant transformation in the
contemporary era. It deserved a chapter of its own.
If there is any fault with the book, it is that it is too short for the scope of its
subject matter. It is best understood as a teaser—an introduction to the topic that
demonstrates the multitude of material ready and waiting for more comprehensive
and systematic analysis. Rather than being the final word, this book suggests
avenues for further inquiry.
Boston College
Natana J. DeLong-Bas
Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide. By M. W. Daly. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xix, 368. $22.99.)
The appearance of the Darfur crisis in news reports around the world has acted
as a catalyst for a number of studies trying to explain the massive human rights
violations that have occurred in what was “one of the least known places in the
world” (1). Few provide the depth of historical analysis presented in this book. M.
W. Daly is an expert on the history of the Sudan and Egypt and so is ideally placed
to put recent events into a proper perspective. His research is a most important
contribution to bettering our understanding of Darfur and it should be read by
anyone attempting to comprehend recent events.
The book is divided into twelve chapters that take the reader from the founding
of the Fur state to the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement. They are structured to reflect
major political changes in the history of Sudan, including the creation of the Fur
Sultanate, the annexation by Egypt, the Mahdiyya, Anglo-Egyptian rule, the
post-Independence era, the “May Regime,” and rule by the National Islamic Front
(NIF). The final chapter offers a penetrating examination of the destruction of
Darfur. The author believes that genocide is the correct term to apply to the mass
murder that has taken place and cannot hide his disappointment at the weak
international responses to the crimes that have taken place there.
When placed in the broader historical context the story of Darfur becomes
one of complexity, fluidity, and change. Daly characterizes this as “chaotic normality” (84). However, several themes do emerge. One is weak governments that
are not interested in the needs of the local population. Throughout the whole
period under study, Darfur has suffered from social and economic underdevelopment, especially in the areas of education, communications, and water supply.
Another theme is escalating problems with drought, famine, overgrazing, and
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desertification causing migration and clashes over land ownership. The book
also points out the ability of outsiders to conquer but not rule the region. At the
regional level a porous border has led to an intermeshing of conflicts in Darfur
with those in Chad.
These are some of the underlying causes of the first genocide of the twenty-first
century. The more immediate factors, Daly believes, can be found in the nature of
the NIF regime. Their strong Arabist-Islamic ideology led them to support outsiders who were seizing land from local farmers. Because of this, Daly believes
violence in Darfur took on a jihadist character. As the insecurity and resentment
of the varied indigenous peoples increased, it was only a matter of time before
serious violence erupted. The response of the NIF was to allow the janjawid to
implement a policy of ethnic cleansing that by 2006 had left 3.5 million people
in need of assistance (315). Eventually the government did sign the Darfur Peace
Agreement, which is where this book ends. Daly believes that Khartoum never had
any intention of implementing it and notes that the NIF is used to playing the role
of international pariah. Recent developments seem to confirm that this was the
correct interpretation.
University of Ulster
Stephen Ryan
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. By
Michael B. Oren. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007. Pp. xxi, 737.
$29.95.)
Israeli scholar Michael B. Oren has a Ph.D. in history and is a fellow at the Shalem
Institute in Jerusalem, a conservative think tank backed by William Kristol. This
sweeping account of America and the Middle East has all the trappings of
scholarship, including one hundred twenty-seven pages of footnotes and bibliography. But despite the author’s often brilliant prose and occasionally balanced
comments, his ultimate goal is to persuade American readers that support for
Israel should be a paramount concern now and in the future as it was in the past.
The Puritans backed a Jewish return to Zion as did a midnineteenth-century
preacher named George Bush, ancestor of the American presidents. The corollary
of this argument for support of Israel, supported by misrepresentations of sources,
is that Arabs who oppose Zionism only understand force and that military action
was and still is the only way to resolve issues in the Middle East.
Oren uses the Barbary wars of the late eighteenth century, when North African
rulers preyed on shipping of many nations and held captive sailors for ransom,
to establish a recurrent motif of an America threatened by Arabs and Islam.
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Quotations abound, providing American impressions of Arab treachery and the
uselessness of negotiating with the deys of Algiers unless backed by force. The
author provides reality, as opposed to fantasies about harems and desert romance.
The “shrewd and hard-nosed” American negotiator remarked that “Islamism
. . . requires little instruction . . . [and] seems peculiarly adapted to the conceptions of a barbarous people” whose piracy, for Oren, “had threatened America’s
survival” (74–75).
Beliefs to the contrary are the “fantasy” in the title that must be countered by
“power” and Christian “faith.” Oren condemns the Eisenhower administration
for opposing the Israeli-French-British joint attack that sought to depose Egypt’s
Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1956 Suez crisis: “[S]purred by romantic notions of
Middle Eastern nationalisms [fantasy] and an anticolonialist creed, the United
States had banded together with its perennial Soviet enemy against its European
friends and saved an Egyptian dictator whom [Secretary of State John Foster]
Dulles had planned to depose” (516). Oren makes no mention of Israel’s contributions to Egyptian-Israeli tensions, nor does he explain how, in the midst
of nationalist liberation movements against European colonialism, Britain and
France remained “the two powers most capable of safeguarding the Middle East”
(515). His comments suggest sympathy for Western imperialism in the region then
and now.
America’s misguided actions at Suez were encouraged by the Foreign Service
officers interpreting the region who were “Arabists.” For Oren, Arabists are
people who continually questioned Israel’s role as a stabilizing force in the Middle
East; he fails to note that they critically analyzed Arab policies as well. Oren
contrasts these Arabists with the original nineteenth-century American negotiators, many of whom were Jews, and returns to this theme in interpreting contemporary developments in the region.
Ultimately, Oren applies his Barbary pirate metaphor to the al-Qaida attacks
on the United States of 9/11, 2001. At the turn of this century, “the threat of a
major [Islamist] terrorist strike within the United States went largely unnoticed,”
as opposed to “[b]ack in 1789 [when] the fear of attacks by Middle-Eastern
pirates on the new nation’s shores prodded Americans to ratify their Constitution
and unite” (581). Really? This reviewer had no idea that a North-African invasion
of America was imminent in 1788–1789. Oren’s discussion mentions that the only
motive for the colonists uniting was the need to create a navy to protect American
shipping in the Mediterranean (28–30)!
A limited review cannot do justice to the full nature of Oren’s effort to depict
a set of relationships with little resemblance to historical reality. He ultimately
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casts American Middle East specialists as romantics who have fully embraced
Edward Said’s Orientalism [1978], meaning that they “identified . . . wholeheartedly with the Arabs.” This slur, never uttered by Said, cannot be found in
any source Oren provides, but serves as a contrast to the “urbane and elegant”
Bernard Lewis, identified as a British Jew and Princeton scholar who was,
certainly for Said, the epitome of an Orientalist (543). Oren pursues this
dichotomy further, depicting most American Middle East specialists as “reared
on multiculturalism and postcolonial theories,” as opposed to the ubiquitous
Bernard Lewis, who called for close ties with Israel and saw America as the
Middle East’s only hope for “democratic change” (572–3). Oren makes no
mention of Lewis’s role in pushing for an attack on Iraq and his closeness to
neoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, one of whom is Oren’s
own patron, William Kristol.
Examples of true scholarly analysis can be found in this book, including
references to an Israel that disputed sound American advice. But they are rare and
are overwhelmed by Oren’s admittedly brilliant schemata where American power
and Christian faith can and should counter the often pervasive fantasy of a Middle
East whose Muslim inhabitants can be trusted. Oren embodied this message in
March 2007 when he stood at the podium of the AIPAC conference with a
beaming Reverend James Hagee, head of Christians United for Israel, who calls
for fulfillment of the Old Testament by Israel’s retention of the West Bank. As
reported, “Israeli historian Michael Oren set the stage for Hagee’s talk,” declaring
that the roots of American support for Israel dated to the colonial era and
Protestants who embraced the idea of a return to Zion. Photographs of the two
were taken with Oren holding a copy of this book.
Power, Faith, and Fantasy is ultimately a work of propaganda, a model of how
a book’s scholarly apparatus can deceive, serving to promote contemporary
political objectives rather than to illustrate a historical process.
University of Arizona
Charles D. Smith
Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World. By Adam J. Silverstein. (New York,
N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 214. $95.00.)
Who would want to read a book on postal systems in the premodern Islamic
world? Anyone who has heretofore taken postal systems for granted on the
one hand, and everyone interested in the mechanics of state formation and
maintenance on the other would. Adam J. Silverstein argues that postal systems
(barid in Arabic) contributed indispensably to the creation and maintenance of
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345
geographically vast states in the premodern Islamic world. By “premodern,” he
means before the use of modern telecommunications and before privatization.
The term “postal” refers to people and riding mounts being posted at convenient
intervals along a network of land-based routes, serving to transport people,
objects, official decrees, and intelligence reports. With few exceptions, these postal
systems were reserved for the use of ruling authorities. He describes in detail how
the postal systems worked: routes, distances between posts, speed, messengers,
mounts, administration, and associated means of communication like carrier
pigeons and beacons.
Silverstein bases his conclusions on three categories of sources. The first of
these is etymology. He describes the transfer of terminology from one postal
system to another, although “linguisitic continuity can . . . attest to the deliberate
association of one institution with another but not to the existence of identical
institutions” (86). The second is Arabic sources. The author draws from several
well-known medieval Arab writers and from at least one “new source,” the
Siyasat al-Muluk. The third category is secondary sources, which in Silverstein’s
bibliography are vast and very rich. He admits that there are wide gaps in his
information and that he must, in some cases, make long leaps to arrive at certain
conclusions. Nonetheless, the author is aware of the risks and tries to preempt
criticism by saying “some readers will deem my use and analysis of the sources
to be unduly naïve or skeptical, or otherwise misguided. My approach has been to
quote the sources extensively, which should allow readers to make up their own
minds on points of detail” (6).
Most readers will not be so well equipped to make up their own minds and
would do well to trust Silverstein, who has clearly studied a vast quantity and
variety of sources and thus makes those long leaps with confidence. What is not
sufficiently explained is why the barid declined in the late Umayyad period, or
why it was virtually nonexistent under the Seljuks. The latter is especially puzzling
in view of the excellent network of roads and commercial caravanserais that the
Seljuks reputedly maintained.
The style is concise and precise. Each section ends with a series of clearly stated
conclusions. Silverstein regularly says things like “On the whole, the case is
convincing, with three important caveats: first . . . second . . . third” (165).
The greatest value of this work to scholars and students interested in the
premodern Islamic world is that Silverstein places this detailed description of
postal systems into the broader picture of the political traditions of particular
dynasties and rulers, notably the pre-Umayyads, Umayyads, Abbasids, Samanids,
Ghaznavids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Il-Khanids, and Mamluks. He raises the question,
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“What makes Islamic postal systems ‘Islamic’?” and proposes two answers, one
more confidently than the other.
In his conclusion, Silverstein notes that, in stark contrast to the West (Roman
Empire) where nomadic conquerors disrupted the postal system, nomadic conquerors in the Islamic world adopted and adapted preexisting postal systems, and
developed them to unprecedented levels of sophistication, which were far superior
to anything in medieval Europe.
Vanderbilt University
Ronald A. Messier
A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen. By Shelagh Weir.
(Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2007. Pp. xi, xv, 390. $50.00.)
This author’s detailed ethnography describes the political and legal life of the
small tribes of the Rezih region in northwest Yemen over the last four centuries.
Without resorting to economic or ecological determinism, she argues that the
fertile and productive mountainous terrain of the Razih region, and its place on an
important trade route, has meant that Razih has been under nominal control by
some form of state entity for centuries; however, these well-armed, geographically
stable tribes were always able to maintain a substantial degree of autonomy.
Drawing on her anthropological field research in the region, as well as historical
and legal documents, Shelagh Weir presents a persuasive account of intratribal
and intertribal relations, as well as relations with the Imamate state, and, after
1962, the Republican state. The historical depth combined with the ethnographic
detail make this book a distinctive and valuable contribution to the literature on
Yemen.
Weir pays close attention to how changes in infrastructure, transportation, and
weaponry have transformed state–tribe relationships, particularly in the Republican period. Equally, she keeps in the forefront the tenacity of tribal customs over
time. Her account notably undermines stereotypes of constantly warring tribes by
giving a thorough account of the “principles, rules, and sanctions” that underpin
tribal governance and dispute resolution. She describes how dispute resolution is
most often about avoiding rather than inciting conflict and about the importance
of persuasive words over brute force. One can see the imprint of Weir’s former
career as a museum curator in her close attention to material objects like male
headgear, daggers, and sacrificial animals. These things are intertwined with
words in the process of dispute resolution: both a verbal admission of guilt and the
slaughter of a beast at the scene of the offense are essential elements of preventing
a conflict from escalating.
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Weir offers a fascinating discussion of hospitality and its role in both maintaining cordial relationships and mediating hostile ones. While acknowledging the
way in which a man’s prestige (or that of his family or tribe) is created through
the generous offering of hospitality, Weir’s analysis includes as well a thorough
consideration of coercive manipulations of the hospitality code. When an individual refuses to pay compensation owed according to the legal obligations of the
tribe, the tribal guarantors of these collective obligations descend on the offender,
who is obliged to offer them expensive hospitality until he pays his dues. A similar
process, called tanfidh, is employed by the state. Armed policemen do not arrest
a miscreant, but rather ensconce themselves at his house, forcing him to feed them
until he finally agrees to comply with the law (188).
This is a beautifully produced book, with some marvelous color plate photos,
capturing Yemen’s captivating landscape, distinctive architecture, and confident
people. It is of considerable relevance to anthropologists interested in theories of
segmentation, tribalism, and legal anthropology. It is a must for all scholars of
Yemen, graduate students and professionals alike, as well as for historians interested in tribal histories in the Middle East.
Trent University
Anne Meneley
THE AMERICAS
The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England. By Emerson
W. Baker. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xiv, 233. $24.95.)
Witchcraft studies often fall prey to two temptations: one is to construct an
overarching theory that will account for the notable outbreaks of witch prosecution between c. 1500 and c. 1800; the other is to look for “rational” explanations
that will chime with prevailing modern sociological and largely nonreligious
theories. Microhistories can perform a very useful function, one among several, in
bringing the reader face to face with the details of people living in the day-by-day,
month-by-month experience of the events being described. Thus, in careful hands,
they can act as a correction and counterbalance to the eagerness to construct
categories, apply formulae, and “explain,” or rather explain away, beliefs, attitudes, and modes of behavior different from ours and regarded as unsophisticated,
somewhat ridiculous, or politically incorrect.
Emerson W. Baker tells a fascinating story of intrigue, neighborly quarrels, land
disputes, local wars, religious abrasiveness between communities, and uneasy
political relations between New England and the governments in London, all
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interesting enough in themselves, but essential to an appreciation and understanding of stone throwing by the Devil throughout the summer of 1682 in Great
Island, New Hampshire. Hundreds of stones were thrown inside and outside a
tavern belonging to George and Alice Walton, yet not one thrower was ever
observed. Other phenomena attended these outbreaks, including the disappearance and reappearance of domestic objects, mysterious destruction of corn and
farm implements, and eerie sounds that seemed to come out of nowhere. The
incident became famous, partly through published accounts by Increase Mather
and an eyewitness, Richard Chamberlain, and partly via extensive networks of
correspondence by whose means news of all kinds traveled remarkably far afield.
Baker successfully shows that there was contact between some of those involved
in or tangential to this 1682 incident and to the more famous witchcraft trials in
Salem in 1692. Salem was not, therefore, an isolated occurrence, however major
in its scope and impact, but had distinct parallels with the earlier episode.
Indeed, Baker is at his best when he is engaged in telling his Great Island
narrative and when he is drawing these comparisons with Salem, and this is where
his impulse to “explain” is legitimately and successfully realized. For the most
part, then, he has given the reader an enthralling microhistory of his chosen
subject. There are occasional weaknesses when he offers redundant and pointless
nudges to his audience—“As twentieth-century observers, we know that witchcraft does not exist”—and when he tries to “rationalize” some of the phenomena
he is describing, such as explaining the behavior of Joseph Ring, who felt he was
under attack by witches, by surmising he may have been suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences in the local wars with the
Wakanabi and the French (98, 194). Baker is also weak in his (relatively few)
observations on witchcraft in Europe, because he relies on generalizing theories
that are both mistaken and well out of date. But these cavils aside, Baker’s
welcome account throws a strong light on an American witchcraft episode that
has not hitherto received the attention it clearly deserves.
University of St. Andrews
P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830. By Martha
Tomhave Blauvelt. (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. 275.
$39.50.)
If diarists are chroniclers of history, then The Work of the Heart is an invaluable
study of what the author classifies as “emotion history” (2).
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Focusing on several diaries, the author presents a compelling sample of
white, Protestant young women of means and the challenging “emotion work”
contained in their diaries. The result of that “work,” as Martha Tomhave
Blauvelt notes, is the evolving task of maturing and adapting to society’s
standards.
Those private, often secret, and even “therapeutic” diaries are artifacts from
which a social and cultural period emerges. They are a genre, often adding
footnotes to history and providing, as the author implies, a foundation for
significant historical study of young women’s emotional evolution from their
teenage years to adulthood and marriage. Blauvelt provides insights into the
diarists’ private reflections and their contrasting public voices that conformed to
social expectations (190).
Within this historical and cultural landscape, Blauvelt’s diarists were challenged to conform to the ways in which “society shapes people’s feelings” (3). As
a result, the “work” recorded in these diaries reveals a complex, often conflicting
struggle in which these women shape and reshape their feelings to accommodate
themselves to assigned roles.
Respected historical and social research is prominent in this book, and Blauvelt
quotes from it liberally, weaving it through the emotional struggles that the diaries
illuminate. Although she does not attempt to generalize her study to all women of
the period, the author does note that the social standards of the era affected most
women—to a greater and lesser degree—regardless of social, ethnic, or economic
status.
Most of the young women in this sample boarded in private homes and
attended the prestigious Litchfield Women’s Academy in Connecticut. Their
diaries reveal the complexities involved as they worked to fulfill rigorous academic
requirements, define their religious lives, and maintain courtesy and sympathy
in their relationships. The sentiments in their diary entries display their efforts
to conform to the standards prescribed to women, which the author notes were
frequently at odds with their feelings and aspirations.
Following a comprehensive introduction, the author divides her work into five
chapters: “The Work of the Heart,” “Schooling the Heart,” “Discerning the
Heart,” “Losing It,” and “Reconstructing the Heart.” Each of these chapters
defines changes in experience and emotion as these young women matured—from
their reflections on popular fiction; to their admiration for, and grievances with,
friends and teachers; and ultimately to the challenges of courtship and marriage.
The author insightfully places these changes within their historical and social
contexts.
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Blauvelt provides a window into the past through the often vexing “work” of
expressing feelings and meeting society’s expectations. Her extensive notes, bibliography, and index are invaluable for researchers as well as courses in women’s
studies and the history of this era. The general reader with interest in this subject
may also find the book engaging. Of significance is a vivid record of these young
women through their diaries within the context of the times in which they lived.
The Work of the Heart is a vehicle from which the reader can travel from these
early American women’s diaries to the sentiments, expectations, and roles of
American women today.
California Lutheran University
Marsha C. Markman
Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. By Susan K. Cahn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 375. $29.95.)
In this study, the author traces the history of Southern adolescent girls’ sexuality
from the 1920s through the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement,
exploring ideas about—and, where possible, the lived experiences of—flappers,
delinquents, the feebleminded, pick-up girls, and teenagers. Throughout the study,
Susan K. Cahn argues that concerns about what young girls, both black and
white, were doing with their bodies mattered, as these both reflected larger
concerns about social change and, more importantly, represented fissures in the
edifice of white supremacy supported in large part by ideas about virtuous white
women. When young white girls seemed no longer interested in being virtuous,
this called into question all forms of white privilege largely based on the sexual
politics of race. Cahn simultaneously examines corresponding changes among
African American girls, showing their ambivalent interactions with dominant
attitudes and behaviors.
By showing how the seemingly irrelevant antics of youth threatened the
social order, Cahn makes scrutable why something as innocuous as integrating
high schools could throw Southern whites into a violent panic. High school
experience in the 1950s, she argues, revolved around heterosexual romance.
Teens met their mates in high school. It is no wonder that the presence of
African Americans in classrooms suffused with teen romance would raise fears
of racial amalgamation.
Cahn in many ways brings together several decades of research on changing
ideas of sexual expression in the twentieth-century South. And some of her
arguments are familiar. Historians know about working-class heterosocial
culture, and exploring gender and compulsory sterilization is fairly well-trod
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ground. But Cahn uses these aspects of sexual history to make a larger point about
the role that teenage sexuality and experimentation played in scientific, political,
and economic debates in the South. She is able to bring to life the lived experience
of girls in the past. Her chapter on the African American girls’ sexuality in the
1930s is fresh and fascinating, using a set of interviews about sexual behavior that
expose the calculations black girls made with their sexuality. Respectability did
not necessarily buy security as it was supposed to for white girls and African
Americans adjusted their standards accordingly.
Cahn later explores the experience of white teenagers in the romantic culture
of high schools after World War II. This reviewer would like to have seen her flesh
out her arguments with a larger source base, moving the focus beyond one high
school and one set of yearbooks. Nevertheless, she largely confirms what most
historians have suspected about teen culture at midcentury. Ultimately, her analysis of experience does indeed show how Southern girls “navigat[ed] between hard
reality and imagined possibility” (307). Although the reviewer still wonders if it
is possible to write a book about gender in the 1950s South and avoid having it
devolve to a narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, Cahn shows that it is
impossible to avoid race (and class) when discussing gender. On the whole, this is
a compelling book.
University of Alabama
Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Vol. 1. The Public Years. By Charles
Capper. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xxi, 649. $40.00.)
Although Margaret Fuller’s life was very short, it overflowed with learning,
thinking, writing, teaching, travel, and social and political engagement. As a
young child, Fuller studied classical languages and literature. She taught herself
French and German in order to read the latest European literature and philosophy. In her twenties, she edited the New England transcendentalists’ journal,
taught in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and at a girls’ academy, and led
Conversations for the elite women of Boston and Cambridge. A vacation led to
her first book, Summer on the Lakes in 1843. Her second book, Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, developed an androgynous vision of freedom for women
and men. As an editor on the New York Tribune, she dared readers to engage
with Romantic literature on its own terms and to address the social injustices in
their burgeoning city. She became America’s first foreign correspondent, covering the Roman revolution with ever-growing passionate engagement. She gave
birth to a son in 1848 and witnessed the siege and bombardment of the Roman
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republic in 1849. Then, while returning to America in 1850, Fuller and her
family drowned in a violent storm. Her brief forty years were indeed full.
To write a biography of such a rich life requires capacious knowledge
rivaling Fuller’s own. Charles Capper meets this monumental challenge. This
second of two volumes explores Fuller’s “public years,” from her editorship of
the Transcendentalists’ journal through New York to Europe. Capper places
Fuller’s life and work in their historical, philosophical, and literary contexts,
and judges them within those contexts. He treats Fuller’s personal struggles in
a balanced manner, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, and especially
psychoanalysis, without allowing them to overwhelm his nineteenth-century
sources.
In examining Fuller’s close, intense, and often vexed relationship with Ralph
Waldo Emerson, for example, Capper concludes that what Fuller “seems to
have wanted (to translate her Romantic idiom into a psychoanalytic one) was
to transfer her blocked childhood need for loving acceptance onto him, ‘as a
father,’ so that she might cease mourning for it” (29). This created an insuperable problem for them: “Emerson’s marriage, their monogamous beliefs, Emerson’s discomfort with bodies, both his and others’, obviously precluded the
physical. In any case, in their letters they said nothing more about it. To twentyfirst-century observers, that move might seem a gross evasion of the clear erotic
issue between them. However, it evidently did not seem so to them” (28). Negotiating between nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses, Capper manages
to illuminate both.
As the biography’s subtitle, “An American Romantic Life,” suggests, the focus
is clearly on Fuller’s Romanticism. Yet it does not privilege her early Transcendentalist days; more than three hundred pages trace her activist years in New York
and Europe. Fuller’s expansive feminist vision is an important theme in this
volume, although not quite as central as in other recent biographies of Fuller. For
Capper, Fuller’s “two primary intellectual constructs of formalist-organicist criticism and rights-minded androgyny” both supported her fundamental Romantic
“cosmopolitan literary patriotism” (520). In this portrait, Margaret Fuller is first
and foremost an intellectual, firmly rooted in Romantic literature and philosophy.
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life gives readers a coherent, judicious,
richly contextualized interpretation of a fascinating American Romantic intellectual devoted, above all else, to the life of the mind.
San Diego State University
Eve Kornfeld
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Voices from an American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans
Ursulines, 1727–1760. Edited by Emily Clark. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 138. $25.00.)
The editor of this book is one among only a handful of recent historians committed to the study of colonial Louisiana. Standing on the exceptional shoulders
of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Daniel Usner, Emily Clark proves that the study of
French and Spanish Louisiana can be as innovative and brilliant as the voluminous canon of works related to British North America and the Southwestern
Borderlands. Her acclaimed previous work stands as a guide for all those who
wish to comprehend the cultural complexity of a place at the geographic nexus of
French, Spanish, British, and American colonialism. This book is a smaller part of
the editor’s larger interest in understanding the intersection of religion, race, and
gender in the lives of Ursuline nuns in colonial New Orleans. As a collection of
three sets of primary sources, Clark’s short but insightful book is a useful introduction to the history of French Louisiana and the women who contributed to its
foundation.
Clark wants nothing more than to “offer rare female perspectives on early
American life” and to show women crossing “the boundary between the Old
World and the new” during the early modern period (4, 5). She achieves these
goals by editing the letters of Marie Madeleine Hachard, the youngest of the
first twelve Ursulines to arrive at New Orleans in 1727, as well as the obituaries
of six founding sisters and an account of the first public Eucharistic procession
through the streets of the Crescent City. After providing a nice summary of the
political, economic, and ecclesiastical history of the Lower Mississippi River
Valley, Clark allows the words of the Ursulines to “reveal that the well-known
Puritan women of New England had equally pious Catholic counterparts in
Louisiana” (19).
It is obvious in the “Introduction” that Clark has lived with her subjects for
quite some time and has developed a tempered level of admiration for the
French women religious of New Orleans. Clark’s selection of primary sources
exhibits the idea that “such women represented a paradox” because of their
aversion to “the roles of wife and mother that essentially defined their gender
and eluded the male authority to which those roles were subject,” that in turn
created an “alternative femininity” with roots in the monastic tradition of
seventeenth-century France (5). The primary sources also provide great insight
into the racial complexities of Louisiana and the resultant complicity of
European Catholic men and women in the enslavement of Africans and the
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dispossession of Native Americans. Voices from an Early American Convent
will leave most readers wanting to know more about the religious, racial, and
gendered dimensions of life in colonial Louisiana. By “flesh[ing] out and complicat[ing] our portrait of early America,” Clark has done a great service to the
future study of women in the Atlantic world (19).
Florida State University
Michael Pasquier
Family Life in 20th-Century America. By Marilyn Coleman, Lawrence H. Ganong,
and Kelly Warznik. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 326.
$65.00.)
This study uses a topical approach to cover the most salient of the broad
changes affecting family life in twentieth-century America. There are chapters
on “family transitions” (courtship, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and bereavement), family life, work, rituals, mothers and motherhood, men in families,
children and adolescents, abuse and neglect, and alternative family forms. Each
of the chapters is a broad general summary of a fairly limited selection of recent
secondary literature on family life and history. Consequently, this volume serves
more as a desk reference than a major contribution to the history of American
families. As the authors are all specialists in human development, the focus of
the work is primarily on the study of families by social scientists. Critics of
“family experts,” such as Christopher Lasch and this reviewer, do not even
appear in the bibliography.
Historians who are substantially ignorant of the history of families in the
United States in the twentieth century might find this slim volume a useful
introduction to the field, or at least to the thinking of specialists in human
development. They might be better advised, however, to consult Steven Mintz and
Susan Kellogg’s Domestic Revolutions [1988] or Mintz’s Huck’s Raft [2004].
Missing from this volume are the stories of family life that are found in countless
memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies. As this material is “anecdotal” rather
than reliable, it finds little place in this volume. But this omission is unfortunate
because this volume presents the dry facts about families with little sense of how
families actually operated.
Family Life in 20th-Century America is a convenient summary of the study of
families through survey research and other instrumentalities of social science
research and as such is invaluable for those readers who need a quick survey of
this field. The volume is a part of the “Family Life through History” series
published by Greenwood, but it owes more to the social science side of historical
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study than to the humanistic side. To be fair, finding out what the internal
dynamics of families both past and present were like is extraordinarily difficult
if not impossible. Scholars who seek to learn about such matters would do well to
ground themselves thoroughly in the anecdotal literature as well as in the material
culture of family life (and their limitations), and then recognize that painstaking
use of these materials can yield important insights about how families lived and
family dynamics. The work of historian John Demos in A Little Commonwealth
[1970] and in Past, Present, and Personal [1988] illustrates what might be done
using such sources. A useful reference or textbook, this book does not fully live up
to the scope of its title.
University of Memphis
Joseph M. Hawes
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. By Robert Dallek. (New York, N.Y.:
HarperCollins, 2007. Pp. xii, 740. $32.50.)
The author of this book, a renowned biographer of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
B. Johnson, has turned his attention to the next president, Richard M. Nixon.
Robert Dallek’s latest book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, differs
somewhat from his earlier presidential biographies. He presents a study of the
president’s foreign policy rather than a full-blown biography, and he has elected
to include Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s principal foreign policy lieutenant,
as a coprotagonist. Both are good choices. Most of the interest in Nixon is in his
conduct of foreign affairs and Watergate. It is impossible to write about Nixon
and foreign affairs without putting the Nixon-Kissinger relationship front and
center. The result is a superior book, which is substantial and detailed but not
overwhelming.
Dallek writes with his customary grace and maintains control over what is
probably the richest lode of documentary material of any presidency. There are
the White House tapes, Kissinger’s transcripts of his telephone conversations, the
extensive notes that Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman took on every meeting he attended with the president, and millions of pages of the administration’s
official memoranda.
The picture that emerges, more clearly than in the many previous biographies
and memoirs, is an administration in constant turmoil, often teetering into chaos.
Nixon felt threatened by a variety of enemies: real and imagined, Democrats,
Congress, the bureaucracy, the press, and what he constantly belittled as “the
elites” or “the establishment.” Kissinger was his own bundle of insecurities; as a
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German-Jewish refugee, unsure of his place in U.S. society, he swallowed Nixon’s
incessant anti-Semitic remarks. He told his staff and favored journalists that he
worked in a madhouse.
Dallek is at his best when writing about Nixon’s severely suspicious personality. He tried to obtain Nixon’s medical records as he had done in the case of his
Kennedy biography. The son of Nixon’s doctor was not as forthcoming as
Kennedy’s physicians, but Dallek received enough information to describe
Nixon’s deteriorating state of mind as the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973
and 1974.
Dallek’s assessment of Nixon’s success and failure in foreign policy is in the
mainstream. The opening to China is Nixon’s enduring achievement. Détente with
the Soviet Union diminished the dangers of nuclear war. But détente could have
been more successful had Nixon and Kissinger made use of expert advice rather
than continuously denigrating it. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy after the 1973
Yom Kippur War set in motion the long, tortuous peace process between Israel
and its neighbors. Although shuttle diplomacy was a personal triumph for Kissinger, it came after years of neglect in the early days of the administration. During
the Yom Kippur War itself, the U.S. government did not function at all. Nixon,
who became disoriented by Watergate, and often inebriated, left decisions to
Kissinger. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s conduct of the Vietnam War, was, as Dallek
writes, an almost complete failure.
Nixon and Kissinger were talented, knowledgeable, and experienced men.
They were also suspicious, demanded total control, and worked in secret. Dallek
appropriately calls their collaboration “a cautionary tale,” which “suggests that
no one has a monopoly on wisdom” (623).
University of Colorado, Boulder
Robert D. Schulzinger
Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives. By Stanley L. Engerman. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 114.
$25.00.)
Historians, especially those trained in the 1970s, identify Stanley L. Engerman
as the coauthor with Robert W. Fogel of the controversial “econometric” twovolume Time on the Cross [1974]. Specialists on the history of slavery, however,
know Engerman as the prolific author of numerous pathbreaking and authoritative books and articles on slave demography and fertility, economic adjustments
and change, and comparative slavery and emancipation. In 2005, Engerman
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delivered the distinguished Walter L. Fleming Lectures in Southern History at
Louisiana State University. These revised lectures provide the basis for Engerman’s
cogent Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives.
In “Slavery in World Perspective,” Engerman argues that, all rhetoric aside,
African-American slavery never was a “peculiar institution.” Rather, “[s]lavery
was obviously not unique to the American South, but it was clearly among the
most ubiquitous and long-standing of all human institutions influencing population and labor supply” (12). Having said this, however, Engerman notes that,
unlike other slave societies, the antebellum South was exceptional because
of its extraordinarily high rate of slave fertility, a condition that obviated the
importation of African slaves. “The high share of those native-born in the slave
population in the United States relative to elsewhere in the Americas,” Engerman explains, “is important for analyzing differences in slave culture, the nature
of slave revolts and resistance, and the question of African survivals” (34).
For example, the high ratio of creole slaves in North America led to relatively
stable slave family structures. According to Engerman, “some combination of
better nutrition, lesser work demands, and a more favorable disease environment . . . influenced the demographic differences between U.S. and Caribbean
slaves” (35).
In “Emancipation in World Perspective,” Engerman maintains that North
American emancipation differed from most cases worldwide because it was immediate, because manumission resulted from military action, and because Southern
slaveholders never received compensation. U.S. emancipation was unique, Engerman continues, “in the greater rights given ex-slaves upon their liberation, in its
higher subsequent levels of income and more rapid rates of income growth, and
in the marked political changes in the initial decades after emancipation” (59).
Engerman notes that despite the significant gains of the freed people and their
descendants, seemingly unanswerable moral, political, and practical questions
have blocked the payment of reparations to the relatives of America’s former
slaves. “While the claim for reparations serves as an important rhetorical device
in arguing for redistributive policies, difficulties of implementation have probably
made it uncertain as a specific policy measure today,” he writes (71).
Engerman concludes his book with a postscript on “Slavery and Its Continuities in the Modern World.” Noting modern language that utilizes slavery as an
analogy for all manner of evil, he observes “that the use of slavery as a metaphor
may sometimes have unexpected effects for understanding the historical and
contemporary record, even while it is clearly crucial for seeking current-day
reforms” (92).
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Students of slavery and emancipation will find Engerman’s concise book a
timely, original, and lucid work of informed synthesis, penetrating insight, and
incisive analysis.
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
John David Smith
Havana: Autobiography of a City. By Alfredo José Estrada. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007. Pp. x, 277. $24.95.)
This author joins hundreds of travelers who over the years have penned their
impressions of Cuba and its capital city of Havana. A cursory “subject heading”
search of the online catalog of the United States Library of Congress lists over five
hundred books on the topic. The voluminous subject list includes such intellectual
luminaries as scientist Alexander von Humboldt, suffragette Julia Ward Howe,
and existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. What does Alfredo José Estrada
bring that is new to the literature? For historians, political scientists, and sociologists, the answer is nothing at all from empirical and analytical perspectives. This,
however, should not be the only criterion for evaluating the book. For scholars
interested in how Cubans born on the island and then raised and educated outside
of Cuba remember, represent, and, most of all, seek to have their country of birth
portrayed to an English-speaking audience, the author offers an entertaining
assessment of Cuban history.
The title and subtitle of the book are both accurate and misleading. The book
is not just a traveler’s account of Havana; Estrada also includes other cities and
regions of the island, which enables the reader to learn much more about Cuba
than just its capital. The subtitle is accurate in that it is autobiographical, but not
from the perspective of the residents of Havana, and it is not “an autobiography,
if you will, told from the city’s point of view,” despite the authors claim (17).
Rather, it is most definitely Estrada’s autobiographical perspective that frames the
book. The author left Cuba in 1961 and then returned several times during the
1990s and 2000s. The major theme that runs through the book is the author’s
process of Cuban discovery and rediscovery through history, travel, and writing
that resulted in his own reaffirmation of cubanidad (Cuban identity or Cubanness). Given that the author made several trips to Havana, he falls short in
conveying what Havana means to the residents of the city. There is very little
information either in quoted, anecdotal, or interview format from average habaneros (residents of Havana). Instead Estrada tells readers much more about past
foreign visitors to the island such as Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway,
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and well-known characters from Cuban history such as José Marti, Fulgencio
Batista, and Fidel Castro.
The book is artfully written, and Estrada has a gift for striking the right
adjective to get at the emotion that Havana often elicits from its residents and
travelers. One of the major strengths of the book is that it does not dwell
disproportionately on Fidel Castro and the 1959 Revolution to the neglect of
everything else that makes the history of Cuba, and Havana in particular, such a
fascinating topic of study. His account of Cuba covers the Conquest, pirate raids
by Drake, the English occupation in the eighteenth century, and the expansion of
slavery and struggle for independence in the nineteenth century. When Estrada
does deal with the Cuban Revolution, he does a judicious job of presenting the
radical event as a product of history, even if he seems to have nostalgic memories
for the prerevolutionary era.
For scholars interested in studies of Havana for their own research or for
recommending titles to students in their classes, Antoni Kapcia’s Havana: The
Making of Cuban Culture [2005] and Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and
Mario Coyula’s Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis [rev. ed., 2002]
would be much better choices. But if one is looking for a book to recommend to
a friend who is traveling to Havana or just curious about Cubans, CubanAmericans, and Cuban history, and is not concerned about errors of dates and
facts, or that names of historical figures change from one chapter to the next and
often do not match the entry in the index, Alfredo José Estrada’s Havana may be
the right book.
University of South Carolina
Matt D. Childs
James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. By Wayne Franklin. (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxxiv, 708. $40.00.)
This year’s much anticipated publication of the first volume of Wayne Franklin’s
biography of James Fenimore Cooper, covering the author’s life to the eve of
his six-year sojourn to Europe in 1826, marks an annus mirabilis for students of
Cooper and early American culture alike. Enlisting for the first time the full range
of the extant Cooper archive, Franklin’s authoritative biography offers a richly
crafted narrative of Cooper’s life and times while providing a major revaluation
of his literary and historical significance.
Such a revaluation, Franklin understands, must begin with the signature points
of Cooper’s authorial résumé: progenitor of the frontier romance, the sea tale,
and the revolutionary novel; pathfinder in the professional career of authorship;
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elegiac early champion of Native Americans; and founder of American environmental consciousness in literature. Yet, as Franklin demonstrates, the deeper
causes and implications of this list of extraordinary firsts are grounded in the
political, economic, and social textures of the major phases of Cooper’s early life.
Here, in enlightening and unprecedented detail, the reader finds the formative
contexts of Cooper’s early literary output, in what Franklin calls a “biography
of the books”: in the speculative frontier economies of upstate New York (The
Pioneers); onboard ships in the merchant marine and Navy (The Pilot); in the
social and legal intrigues of life in Westchester (The Spy); and in the increasingly
cosmopolitan cultural industry of New York City in the 1820s (xxxii). Drawing
judiciously from Cooper’s own writings to evoke the character of that history,
Franklin recognizes that a “biography of the books” is at times best served by
allowing the books themselves to speak. Implicit in this recognition is Franklin’s
subtle yet powerful understanding of Cooper’s representativeness as an interlocutor of his times, a figure whose vigorous authorial temperament indexes the
partisan energies of his moment as well as his own urgent personal, political, and
financial concerns.
Indeed, as Franklin shows, Cooper was driven to his improbable choice to write
novels by his precarious and frequently embattled personal finances, “madly
reasoning” that the success of Walter Scott might easily be replicated (xx). Perhaps
the most rewarding aspect of Franklin’s discussion is the profound historical
understanding with which he situates Cooper’s fateful career choice within the
commercial and material conditions of a rapidly transforming international literary
marketplace, a largely ad hoc setting that lacked “articulation between authors and
publishers on opposing sides of the ocean,” and that frequently left authors “in
a boggy middle ground” (269). Here, in the complex “middle ground” between
writers, booksellers, publishers, and compositors, where questions of copyright,
reproduction, editing, and distribution seldom favored authors, Franklin demonstrates how Cooper shrewdly negotiated his rights, capitalized on his burgeoning
celebrity, and in so doing shifted forever the balance that had defined relations
between authors and publishers in the United States to that time.
Although the biography is monumental in scope (the discussion in the copious
notes alone is a trove of insight), Franklin is a gifted storyteller who manages the
details of his subject with a graceful and seemingly effortless command. It promises to set the standard for a new era in Cooper studies and history of the book
studies, and will find grateful readers from a host of backgrounds.
University of Texas, El Paso
Robert Gunn
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No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. By
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago
Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 419. $30.00.)
No Caption Needed is a snappy title. However, the subtitle, Iconic Photographs,
Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, needs some sort of cultural caveat. An
icon is a totem; each one is not capable of global recognition.
That parameter aside, this book is aptly titled. The authors select nine photojournalistic images to illustrate “why any icon continues to define the past, how
it is evoked in contemporary public debate, and what its continuing history of
appropriation reveals about public culture” (173). Often the photographs share
an incongruous cultural context. The chapter “Borders of the Genre” contrasts
“Migrant Mother” and “The Times Square Kiss.” Although each is thoroughly
explored, the introductory link is their iconic value for a Samsonite camera bag
advertising campaign.
“The Flag Raising at Iwo Jima” is a historical, cultural, and political, as well
as visual, symbol for most of the western world. The authors review its iconic
values, including those of civic representation and as a dialectic for democratic
public address. However, in this work the reader discovers the icon’s commercial
use as an image on a condom wrapper or as an edible prop in an episode of “The
Simpsons.”
It is clear that there are two authors, and that they enjoy implementing
their research in their writing. One voice is engaging and humanistic. The
other uses words like “hermeneutics” and “enthymematically,” usually in reference to the thesis involving liberal democracy. Sometimes the sentences are
simply too long for this reviewer’s taste: iconic photographs “articulate patterns
of moral intelligence that run deeper than pragmatic deliberation about matters
of policy and that disrupt conventional discourses of institutional legitimacy”
(194).
Occasionally the authors venture onto subjective or descriptive quicksand.
“Kent State University Massacre” [1970] is included in the book, as is a current
image of Mary Ann Vecchio (the central figure) who is meeting photojournalist
John Filo for the first time [1995]. They are “posed in a manner eerily similar to
a snapshot of a couple comfortably settled into married life” (164). The white
vapor cloud caused by the “Explosion of the Challenger” is “a Life magazine
image of a live egg yolk within its gauzy white solution” (254).
The quality of the paper used is typical for a volume of prose. The ability of the
paper to translate halftones is less-than-ideal. Fortunately, the imagery is iconic,
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and the dust jacket image of “Migrant Mother” gradually pixillating is visually
and culturally prophetic.
The authors devote nearly a quarter of the book to endnotes, which are much
fuller and more entertaining than “normal” footnotes or citations. They expand
wonderfully on primary textual statements and provide an invaluable bibliographical resource.
Although the writing style is occasionally difficult, the reviewer would not miss
the opportunity to read this book, or any book that includes a 1999 painting of
the Pieta with a “large, red, throbbing form” of the Hindenburg on her lap (262).
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
Alma Davenport
The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the
United States, 1870–1920. By Timothy A. Hickman. (Amherst, Mass.: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 190. $22.95.)
The author has written an important, yet ultimately unsatisfying, book. His goal
is to describe how widely held ideas about habitual narcotic use, which he calls
“the addiction concept,” simultaneously grew out of, and helped create, the
“cultural crisis of modernity” that gripped the imaginations of a wide variety of
observers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (4). By reading
the concept of addiction and the concept of modernity into one another, he
suggests that ideas about addiction were deeply embedded in the broader social
and cultural context of the time, including “the struggle to redefine the terms of
human agency in the face of rapid technological, economic, and political change”
that lay at the heart of the cultural crisis he describes (4–5). He also suggests that
unlike the now-familiar disease model of addiction, the concept of addiction
implied that habitual drug use could be either voluntary or compelled; this
“double meaning of addiction” led to the development of two distinct classes of
addicts, the criminal and the patient, and was later codified into law by the
passage of the 1914 Harrison Act (7).
Timothy A. Hickman’s work is part of a recent body of scholarship that
documents the construction of addiction as a social and cultural phenomenon
over the course of the last two centuries. It is an extremely important contribution
to this literature. By drawing on the insights of contemporary cultural history,
which historians of addiction have to date largely ignored, Hickman pushes the
study of addiction in a vital new direction. Yet his methodological approach also
means that his insights are surprisingly limited in scope. The book is based
primarily on a series of close readings of a number of what Hickman calls
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“canonical” texts (13). As a result, there is a tendency in his work for human
culture to be reduced to the written word instead of analyzing the dense web of
meaning that animated people’s lives. In other words, Hickman studies a relatively
small set of books and articles written by a group of people who thought seriously
about habitual narcotic use. The distinction is not a quibble. The concept of
addiction infused the lives of countless people who never wrote a word about it;
addiction extended far beyond the texts Hickman describes, and at times it
operated in ways that defied the types of claims made by his writers.
To his credit, Hickman is quite explicit about his methodology, and his honesty
on the topic is refreshing. Yet his unwillingness to move beyond textual analysis
and make claims about how people actually lived is frustrating. Given the
immense amount of promise in the direction that Hickman’s work points and the
intriguing and at times fascinating readings that he provides, the reader is left
wanting something more than his methodology allows.
Florida State University
Joseph M. Gabrie
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West. By Robert V. Hine and John Mack
Faragher. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. vii, 248. $28.00.)
This volume is the abridged, updated edition of the authors’ now classic study The
American West: A New Interpretive History [2000], which in turn was a major
revision, if not a rewriting, of Robert V. Hine’s survey, American West: An
Interpretive History [1973, 2d ed. 1984]. The American West was warmly welcomed by academics because it provided a readable and intelligent text that
straddled the infighting between Old and New Western historians. Ranging from
the first contacts between native peoples and European immigrants to the turn of
the twenty-first century, it offered students a history that included diverse ethnicities and cultures while at the same time being hard hitting about events and
“popular heroes.” The emphasis of the book is the nineteenth century, but
material before and after these years is present.
Clearly the 2000 edition of 616 pages has been a great success and has become
the standard in college history courses, replacing the now outdated classic by Ray
Allen Billington, Westward Expansion. However, it is long. Students, increasingly
attuned to visual and electronic means of learning, may find it too long. So too
may the general reading population who are interested in the past and who want
to access “historical facts” rather than docu-dramas and popular films. Hence
Yale University Press has published a shorter version in both hardback and
paperback.
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It is difficult to be precise about how much shorter is the text of Frontiers than
that of The American West. The abridged version certainly condenses paragraphs
and occasionally omits two or three pages. Yet other paragraphs are identical. Any
additions to the 2007 edition come mainly in updating, as for example, the
inclusion of George W. Bush as a Western President. What has been cut out are the
pictures that accompanied virtually every part of the 2000 edition. These have
been replaced by eighty-one illustrations drawn from Yale University’s Beinecke
Collection, interleaved at four specific points. Certainly these are wonderful
historic images, some published for the first time. However, the 2000 edition with
its 233 historic illustrations, many also from the Beinecke Collection, is improved
and is currently a better value than the hardback edition of Frontiers. Fortunately
the twenty-three splendid maps have been retained in the abridged version. As the
targeted audience for the 2007 edition is the reading public, endnotes have also
been eliminated and the bibliography condensed. A selection of scholarly volumes
published after 2000 are included in the shortened bibliography, but it is difficult
to work out why these particular books have been chosen or why other pre-2000
eminent works have been omitted.
Yes, the new edition will probably become popular, if only because it is shorter.
Its audience may, however, be college students as much as other readers. Certainly
the paperback edition of Frontiers is a cheaper option. Students may be advised,
however, that the text really is not under half the length of the 2000 edition.
University of Nottingham
Margaret Walsh
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. By Woody Holton. (New York,
N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2007. Pp. 370. $27.00.)
This book follows a neo-Beardian interpretation of the Constitution. The author
presents a more subtle and nuanced perspective than Charles Beard by arguing
that the fifty-five Framers at Philadelphia in 1787 were upset by the economic
decisions of state governments during the Confederation period. Most states had
yielded to the demands of “unruly average Americans” who led rebellions and
demanded debt relief such as paper money, tax abatements, and postponement
of debt collection. These determined Framers—elitists with antidemocratic
intentions—wanted to reverse the economic trends shaped by and for the benefit
of debtors. This would make America a secure environment for creditors, attract
investment, and provide relief for debtors caught in the postwar depression.
This book greatly benefits from its sharp focus on the economic motives of the
Framers. Woody Holton has adeptly mined rich resources of letters, diaries, and
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newspapers. He also takes a careful look at the motives and thinking of the
Anti-Federalists. In the process, Holton comes up with some profound new
insights into the Constitution. For example, he points out that most state constitutions drafted in the 1770s dramatically increased the membership of their
legislatures. In sharp contrast, the Framers deliberately made the federal election
districts huge so the average American would have less influence on elected
representatives. He astutely argues that the Constitution would have contained
even more antidemocratic features had the Framers thought it could get ratified.
In fact, this fear of the “people” resulted in a quick adoption of the Bill of Rights.
Ironically, this book is not so much a book on the Constitution as a rich
exploration into the troubled Confederation era. In fact, Holton’s careful analysis
of the period makes his book a “must buy.” Holton brilliantly explains why the
Framers took away economic powers from state governments. Consequently,
the book focuses almost exclusively on two key clauses in the Constitution—the
national government’s power to tax and the enforceability of contracts—while
hardly analyzing most other clauses in the Constitution.
One can also question some elements of Holton’s main argument. That the
Framers quickly adopted the Bill of Rights to save the Constitution from major
alterations cannot be a valid position when only one in three Framers were
involved in passing the Bill of Rights. A better argument might be that Framer
James Madison skillfully persuaded non-Framers in the First Congress to adopt
the Bill of Rights. Holton should have traced the antecedents of the Bill of Rights
in both the Articles of Confederation and the fifteen state constitutions drafted
before the Federal Constitution. Many Framers in fact rehearsed key clauses in the
Constitution when they had written earlier founding documents.
Despite these few caveats, this book deserves a wide readership for its provocative interpretations.
Wheaton College
David E. Maas
Lincoln and the American Manifesto. By Allen Jayne. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus
Books, 2007. Pp. 392. $28.00.)
Although the author wants to give the impression that this book is about
Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence (hence the
title), it starts to disappoint the reader on the first page. Instead of grappling with
the deepest questions raised by the Declaration of Independence—our “ancient
faith”—in Lincoln’s powerful mind and statesmanship, the author turns immediately to Thomas Jefferson’s “deism” and how that deism—as the author asserts
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more than once—is rooted in the European Enlightenment. Therefore, Allen Jayne
asserts, the self-evident truths and natural rights of our founding are not dependent on—and indeed are disjoined from—Christianity and even Judeo-Christian
morality. His repetitious and sledgehammer-like approach quickly becomes an
agenda-laden argument in favor of deism.
And this, of course, is too bad because it is the Declaration of Independence
that sets up “the standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to
all, and revered by all.” It is, according to Lincoln, “the great fundamental
principle on which our free institutions rest.” Furthermore, Lincoln asserts that
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments
embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” In short, Lincoln’s understanding of that “apple of gold” and its relation to the “picture of silver” (the
Constitution) is at the heart of his thinking and his statesmanship. The reader
has reason to expect the volume to address this great and consequential issue
with clarity and thoughtfulness.
But Lincoln becomes, for Jayne, a “democrat” rather than a “theist,” and
around this everything revolves. This becomes the essence of Lincoln’s political
faith and thought. There are no other possibilities. In other words, the Declaration
is against all absolutism—because it is rooted in Enlightenment thinking—and
absolute truth, and it claims that nothing or no one has authority over human
beings. This reviewer suggests that self-evidence is a claim to knowledge of
the truth and its moral authority and is not diminished by the fact that—in
principle—it applies universally to all men through all time. Indeed, it is strengthened. Individual human beings, to the extent that they are human, cannot reject
this axiom of political reasoning with impunity, as Jayne claims. Natural rights are
inalienable because they are founded on human equality, and human beings would
not know that they are human without having a sense, understanding, or even
faith, of those above or below them.
Jayne gets to his major point by arguing that because Lincoln read Thomas
Paine and other deists, he must have adopted their views. This assumption may be
examined by coming to grips with Lincoln’s own words and thoughts (as Guelzo,
Carwardine, et al., have done), but the author manifestly does not do that in a
comprehensive and persuasive manner. It is not so much that everything the
author writes about Lincoln is wrong or misleading. He gets much of it right. Yet
the reader is forced into artificial and simple-minded boxes that Jayne constructs.
There is no nuance, no subtlety, very little clear thinking, merely a monologue
claiming that those “imbued with all-inclusive, universal, moral ideas—like the
deistic equal rights of all human beings contained in the Declaration—will be
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large-minded and tolerant human beings.” This is Jayne’s aspiration and hope,
and in the process he makes Lincoln’s poetry into prose and his political philosophy into ideology.
Ashland University
Peter W. Schramm
The Black Hawk War of 1832. By Patrick J. Jung. (Norman, Okla.: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 275. $29.95.)
In this book, the author provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes, the
confrontations, and the aftermath of one of the last Native American wars fought
east of the Mississippi River. The author turns to a wealth of primary documents
and uses them to reassess the considerable amount of literature written on the
revolt that took place in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory during the summer
of 1832. The result is an in-depth study of the complexities that existed in the
United States between Native Americans and whites as well as among Indian
nations and subsets of tribal groups that existed during the presidency of Andrew
Jackson.
The Black Hawk War was named for the Sauk and Fox chief who refused to give
up a portion of land allegedly ceded to the United States in 1804. He and his British
Band—so-called because of their earlier alliances with the British—asked to remain
on the land until after their harvest. Indian negotiations were met with hostility by
Illinois volunteers, which, according to Patrick J. Jung, precipitated the conflict.
The facts of the war have long been established, and Jung’s goal is not
revisionist. What he aims to do is shed fresh light on the war’s causes and
consequences. He does an excellent job with the causes. First, he places the conflict
into the political milieu that existed in North America by explaining how Native
American tribes related to and allied with Britain, France, Spain, and the United
States. Next, he explains nativism and the pan-Indian movement of Tecumseh and
the Shawnee Prophet. He then explores the complex relationships that existed
between groups such as the Sauks and Foxes, Winnebagos, Menominees, and
Santee Sioux in the upper Mississippi River basin. Using the intricacies of these
interactions, Jung sets the stage for the war and provides exacting detail about the
people, places, and events of the war. His descriptions are of great value. People
who live in Northwest Illinois and Southwest Wisconsin, especially, will be able to
see the region in an entirely different light.
As strong as the first chapters of this book are, the final chapter, which traces
the war’s aftermath, fails to consult many of the contemporary documents about
the events or provide as much depth. Dozens of newspaper accounts discussed
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Black Hawk’s visits to major Eastern cities, but these are glossed over in comparison with the details of the war’s prelude and conflict. One of the more famous
quotes from Black Hawk, who reportedly said, “I am a man and you are another”
when he met Jackson, is said to be of “dubious provenance” (191). But the quote
appeared in newspapers immediately after the two met in the White House. With
such attention to detail, Jung should have dealt with the war’s aftermath and with
explaining away such engrained parts of the story with the exacting detail that is
evident in most places in this study.
Even though the consequences portion lacks the depth of the rest of the study,
Jung provides a fresh perspective about an event of momentous importance that
is largely overshadowed by the pan-Indian movement before it and the Second
Seminole War after.
Elon University
David A. Copeland
The Jamestown Project. By Karen Ordahl Kupperman. (Cambridge, Mass.: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 380. $29.95.)
Every society has a creation myth, but the United States of America has two: the
comfortable story of the founding of Plymouth by God-fearing and hardworking
religious separatists, and the unsettling story of the founding of Jamestown by
greedy selfish English gentlemen literally dying to get rich quick from gold in
Virginia or to discover a quick and easy passage to the lucrative ports of the Far
East. Karen Ordahl Kupperman looks anew at these two stereotypical first colony
tales. She admits upfront that the Jamestown story is a “creation story from hell,”
wrought with episodes of trial and deadly error (1). But she concludes that rumors
of complete failure were unfounded.
With skillful and well-written reexamination of the records of the first two
decades of the Jamestown experience, she reveals how and why the colony
ultimately succeeded and argues that what happened at Jamestown created the
formula for English colonization to follow. Kupperman suggests the forces leading
to stabilization in the wobbly colony were the discovery of a profitable export,
tobacco; the decision of the sponsoring Virginia Company to give land to those
who ventured to Virginia, the headright system; and the establishment of a form
of self-government for the new landholders, the elected Burgesses. As the
Company parceled out such incentives to those already in Virginia and made them
known at home in Britain, much of the whining of the “ancient planters” abated
and suddenly there were not enough ships to meet the demand for emigration.
Kupperman’s thesis is that the lessons at Jamestown did not go unheeded by the
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Pilgrims at Plymouth. Consequently, she writes that “[t]he key to building English
societies abroad, however messy and incomplete, was discovered in Virginia and
all successful colonies henceforth followed its model” (327). So there is really only
one American creation story and it begins thirteen years before anyone set foot on
Plymouth Rock.
Although the central thesis of the book is this development of the successful
English colonial business plan at Jamestown, two-thirds of the text makes sure
the reader first knows that Jamestown did not happen in a vacuum. The colonial
“projectors” had plenty of other more promising ventures elsewhere. Though
forging this context for the Jamestown project is important to know, a reader
buying a book with the word “JAMESTOWN” in super-size font on the cover
may become impatient with the number of early chapters that merely set the scene.
That being said, the account of the actual Jamestown project is eye-opening, with
imaginative use of the standard documentary sources and, uniquely, a draw on
recent archaeological finds. The author cites the newly discovered 1607–1624
Jamestown site and makes the point that artifacts left by even the earliest struggling settlers show they were hard at work desperately searching for ways to
succeed even before free land, a cash crop, and the right to self-rule were an
option.
APVA Jamestown Rediscovery
William M. Kelso
1812: War with America. By Jon Latimer. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 637. $35.00.)
In many respects, the author provides an engaging and thorough version of the
War of 1812 from the often-neglected British perspective. He draws on vivid
primary accounts and has exhaustively consulted the secondary literature to bring
the obscure to light and further illuminate the familiar. As military history, his
book excels.
When Jon Latimer takes on other matters, he is less convincing. Apparently
the “British perspective” persuaded this British author to adopt a callous attitude
toward Americans. They are depicted as cowardly louts, incompetent in the field,
and cynical about their government. According to Latimer, they exaggerated their
indignation over minor matters such as impressment and frontier Indian depredations to mask venal appetites for expansion at the expense of peaceful neighbors. He dismisses Americans’ stated desire to defend their national honor and
neutral rights and instead sees an enduring Anglophobia and a desire for Canada
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as the real reasons America declared war on Britain in 1812. In addition, Latimer
believes that the war made Americans into Bonaparte’s “friends across the Atlantic,” an offense that apparently justifies everything bad that happened to those
erstwhile colonists, upstarts who might have distracted Britain from the hard task
of stopping the Corsican upstart (241).
In that spirit, Latimer details American transgressions and glosses over similar
British offenses. The sack of Hampton probably was not as bad as reported in
“outraged American propaganda”; the destruction of the Capitol, Executive
Mansion, and Library of Congress “brought no pleasure” to the British burning
Washington; and George Cockburn trades quips with pretty American girls
“apparently abandoned by their menfolk” (172, 317, 320). In any case, Latimer
insists that because the Americans started the war, they had what happened in
Washington and elsewhere coming to them.
Greater care would have avoided errors such as misdating the Embargo Act
(22); describing Andrew Jackson as a senator in 1811 (29); stating that William
Henry Harrison “provoked a quarrel with Tecumseh by violating a treaty signed
two years earlier,” although it was actually the Treaty of Fort Wayne itself, not
a violation of it, that inflamed the Indians (29); having Thomas Pinckney lead
the Patriots into East Florida in March 1812 instead of George Mathews (33);
saying the army captain in command of Fort Washington in 1814 was a naval
officer (325); speaking of the “ever inventive Richard Fulton” (349); or declaring
that the Treaty of Fort Jackson removed Indians to the West, when it did no such
thing (370).
Readers can overlook these mistakes as the normal pitfalls that snare any
author on unfamiliar ground, as Latimer’s previous work is about World War II.
Harder to understand is Latimer’s peculiar assertion that America’s Anglophobia
and desire to conquer Canada endured well into the twentieth century. For
evidence, he points to U.S. War Plan Red, a military contingency created in the
1920s for the invasion of Canada in case of war with Britain, and cites the late
Richard A. Preston as his authority. But Preston made clear in his 1977 book The
Defence of the Undefended Border that the color plans were contingencies in
every sense of that word and “did not signify anticipation of war with the country
concerned” (Preston, 219). Coming at the end of a lengthy conclusion, which has
other problems, this strange insistence that Franklin Roosevelt’s government had
designs on Canada is beyond absurd, but it does reveal a flaw that occasionally
mars an otherwise estimable depiction of military events in the War of 1812.
Colorado State University–Pueblo
David S. Heidler
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Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. By
Bruce Lenthall. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. x, 288.
$20.00.)
In the 1930s, Americans listened to radio four to five hours a day. What did radio
mean to them? A lot, apparently. When the vaudeville comedian Eddie Cantor
divulged his shirt and sock sizes on the air, fifteen thousand fans sent birthday
gifts; when Amos and Andy complained they could not afford a typewriter, NBC
received 1,880 machines from listeners wanting to help their radio friends. Thousands of letters were mailed every week to radio’s musicians, announcers, domestic advisors, and soap opera characters. Some offered advice, some asked for
help, and some simply said thanks. “You are not giving us a fairy story,” wrote an
admirer of the eponymous heroine of The Story of Mary Marlin, “You are giving
us Life” (71).
Modern readers may think imagining an intimate relationship with voices on
the air is nuts; Bruce Lenthall concludes otherwise. Reading the letters collected in
radio archives while doing research for his dissertation, Lenthall saw irony, not
insanity. Depression-era Americans, he reminds readers, felt overwhelmed by
change. On guard against distant forces of government and commercial empire
that increasingly mattered in their lives, Americans relied on one of the leading
change agents of mass culture, broadcasting, to personalize an impersonal and
potentially threatening public sphere, even imagining ways that the medium could
help them count and perhaps be noticed by those wielding power in the broader
world. Yes, readers should question the adequacy of this remarkable use of radio,
Lenthall allows. But he asks us to appreciate how and why so many found radio
useful for humanizing mass society.
Lenthall begins with the concerns of public intellectuals in the 1930s who
provide him with his theoretical frame. Some, such as the economist William
Orton and the Marxist journalist James Rorty, feared that mass culture would
overwhelm individual voices and choices, cordoning off public speech to all but
the powerful, who would use the airwaves to engineer a mass mind. Cheerleaders
for radio countered that the commercial nature of radio’s ownership guaranteed
that ultimate power over programming lay with the masses. Lenthall assesses
these claims through a series of case studies analyzing important understandings
and practices that developed around radio. Examining the ethereal relationships
listeners formed with radio characters—the radio democracy exemplified by
Roosevelt’s fireside chats, the faith in popular radio champions such as Father
Charles Coughlin and Dr. John Brinkley, the birth of media studies, and the hope
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that radio could make art matter—Lenthall concludes that neither critics nor
defenders got the significance of radio completely right.
The meaning of radio, argues Lenthall, can be found “in some delicate
balances” between individual authority and centralized mass culture (210). If
Americans learned to accept the new rules of mass culture, such as the power of
corporations to control broadcast programming, they also found ways to push
back as individuals, leaving their stamp on the culture they inhabited.
A welcome development in recent years is that a number of scholars have set
out to update Erik Barnouw’s classic three-volume work, A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Lenthall’s book is less comprehensive and descriptive
than Susan Douglas’s Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. But
advanced students will find it valuable for its clear and undistracted focus on
important analytical questions raised by the rise of mass culture.
Augustana College
Lendol Calder
George Kennan: A Study in Character. By John Lukacs. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 207. $26.00.)
This slim book sketches the highlights of diplomat-scholar George Kennan’s
remarkable life and character. The author tells readers upfront that his is not a
comprehensive biography of Kennan, but instead, “a biographical study of
George Kennan’s character” (8). For John Lukacs, character is a man’s “conscious
decisions, choices, acts and words, but nothing of his so-called subconscious; that
is, no attributions of psychoanalytic categories, no ham-handed projections or
propositions of secret or hidden motives” (127).
The book is a broad overview of Kennan’s life and intellectual contributions
recounted by a friend with an intimate knowledge of Kennan’s personal traits, one
of the most important and impressive of which was “the consistency of his mind”
(127). Lukacs with great merit observes that “George Kennan’s writing—his ‘use
of letters’—had become the principal quality that distinguished him from a herd
of otherwise educated people less and less capable of knowledge and reflection”
(4). Kennan wrote for some eighty years, before dying at age 101, “to clarify
his own mind—and, on occasion, when he so chose, the minds of others” (4).
Kennan’s unquenchable desire to think and write left behind a mountain of
publications, including letters, editorials, speeches, articles, and books that will
intimidate even the most intrepid of future biographers, historians, and other
scholars.
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Lukacs looks at Kennan’s lonely and unhappy childhood as a Midwestern boy
and as a college student at Princeton University. Then he turns to Kennan’s early
days in the American Foreign Service, or diplomatic corps, “marked by another
large accumulation of his learning” and expertise on the Soviet Union, Germany,
and Europe. He discusses Kennan’s heady days in the cabal of the American
national security process laying the intellectual foundations in his famous “Long
Telegram” from his post in Moscow and subsequently in his Foreign Affairs “X”
article for the policy of containment that would guide American national security
for the Cold War. Lukacs traces Kennan’s fall from favor in Washington power
circles and escape to a second career at midlife as a diplomatic historian par
excellence, working from the Institute for Advanced Study temporarily interrupted by ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Belgrade. Kennan wrote in 1940
that “No people is great enough to establish world hegemony,” a sentence, for
Lukacs, that “sums up much—perhaps everything—of George Kennan’s view of
the world, and of the United States too. Upon that he insisted and thought and
spoke and wrote till the farthest end of his life” (48). Lukacs judges that Kennan
grew intellectually and emotionally in his last stages of life to become “a conscience of a nation” and “a national treasure” (125).
This admiring tribute to George Kennan is a rewarding, easy, and refreshing
read at a time in which dense prose that is loaded with jargon and coupled with
unsparing criticism seems the norm. And Lukacs, throughout the book, lays down
some important recommendations and markers for those scholars who would
be interested in more fully exploring Kennan’s life and contributions. Scholars,
citizens, and decision makers would do well to take a step back from the twentyfour-hour, seven-day-per-week news cycle to read Lukacs’s book and to reflect on
Kennan’s realistic, moral, Christian, and philosophic approach to international
politics and American foreign policy as an antidote to today’s popular mindsets.
National Defense University
Richard L. Russell
Maryland Voices of the Civil War. Edited by Charles W. Mitchell. (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 548. $35.00.)
In this handsomely designed book, the author tells the story of the divisions that
kept Marylanders in contention with one another during the Civil War. Nevertheless, he also shows that most Maryland citizens experienced no sense of
contradiction in supporting Unionist and proslavery sentiments during the sectional controversy and well into the war. Charles W. Mitchell’s most fervent desire
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is to “puncture the enduring myth that Maryland ever stood at the abyss of
secession.” He argues convincingly that Maryland secessionists lacked leadership
and organization, although he acknowledges that Lincoln worried that the state
did stand at the abyss and, as a result, used the suspension of habeas corpus with
increasing frequency to squelch opposition to the Union war effort. Given the
record of arrests on which Mitchell draws, he inadvertently leaves readers with the
impression that Confederate sympathizers in Maryland seriously did undermine
the Union cause. Although he does not say so explicitly, Mitchell seems also to
believe that Lincoln’s policy of arrests succeeded in solidifying Unionist sentiment
in Maryland as the war dragged on.
Unfortunately, Mitchell’s effort to narrate “Maryland’s Civil War story” falls
short of the mark (x). At first glance, the book appears to be a documentary
history of the war years—a fact seemingly underscored by the designation of
Mitchell as an “editor” rather than as an author of this work. But Maryland
Voices is actually an amalgam, in the style of Richard S. Wheeler’s popular Civil
War books, that pieces together brief narration with long extracted quotations
from an impressive array of documents (although some of those “documents” are
actually quotations lifted from secondary sources). In that sense, then, this work
is neither narrative history nor a documentary edition. In fact, more than anything
else, the book resembles antiquarian histories that were published in profusion
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The organization of the work into three parts, with each part containing four
to five separate chapters, is unnecessarily confusing. The story in part one is told
chronologically. In parts two and three, chapters are thematic (although arranged
according to an internal chronology). His arrangement of lengthy block quotations is sometimes misleading. At the opening of chapter one, Mitchell uses two
extracts from two different newspapers published in Carroll County. These quotations are placed together in a two-paragraph extract that appears to come from
a single source. Only footnotes reveal that the first paragraph is from one newspaper and the second from another. Worse, perhaps, is the fact that Mitchell
introduces these paragraphs with the comment that they express “contrasting
views” on the issue of secession. Actually, the first paragraph states that South
Carolina’s secession was unconstitutional; the second sets forth the belief that
“dissolution is madness” (15). Where is the contrast between the two?
Mitchell does tell interesting and illuminating Maryland war stories, but
reading this book has left the reviewer asking two nagging questions: Why did not
Mitchell, a talented writer, simply use his prodigious research to write a straightforward narrative history of Maryland during the Civil War? Or, why did not he
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simply compile a documentary history of Maryland in the war years and let those
documents speak for themselves? Instead, he has produced a book that is neither
fish nor fowl.
Western Kentucky University
Glenn W. LaFantasie
Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home. By Susan Hardman Moore. (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 336. $35.00.)
As an undergraduate nearly twenty years ago, the reviewer participated in an
Introduction to English Literature class. Arriving at the seventeenth century, the
professor chuckled at the Puritans who fled to New England in the 1630s only to
see the changes they sought in England taking place there in the 1640s and 1650s.
His point: the American Puritans had been sidelined by their move to New
England.
Building on the research of the last two decades, Susan Hardman Moore
demonstrates that the North Atlantic was a two-way thoroughfare. She concludes
(with evidence shown in detailed appendices) that one-third of the ministers
arriving in New England during the Great Migration returned whence they came
after 1640, and almost half of the Harvard graduates through 1659 took passage
to England. New England population figures are sketchy, and, as is so often sadly
the case, evidence concerning common folk is sparse; even so, Moore estimates
that 7 to 11 percent of colonists returned to Albion after 1640.
Moving beyond statistics, Moore examines the angst often generated by Puritans torn between their uniquely strong commitment to a local New England
congregation and the prospect of influencing British life and politics during
pivotal times. Colonial “radicals” quickly headed home, but for the majority of
Puritans the theology developed in 1630s New England (known as the New
England Way) required, in part, a strong commitment to a local congregation;
returning to England meant tearing one’s self from the heart of a covenantal
community and often separation from family, yet many left. These prodigal
daughters and sons set sail for many reasons: better economic opportunities, to
defend the New England Way against critics, to fight alongside Cromwell, and
to feel, once again, the familiar comfort of home. Like the decision to migrate
to the colonies, boarding a ship bound for England came only after significant
deliberation.
Most of the returnees only marginally impacted Britain. Some Massachusetts
Artillery Company members fought with Cromwell, and he encouraged New
Englanders to settle in Ireland or Scotland or take navy appointments. Returned
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ministers frequently found themselves integrating their understanding of the New
England Way’s visible covenanted church with England’s parish system. These
ministers cultivated small cliques of people they considered godly within the
parish community and then performed their parish pastoral and teaching duties
throughout the community but administered the sacraments only to the godly.
(Perhaps a new term should be coined to describe this amalgamation: “The New
Old England Way.”) Merchants also returned to England and used their contacts
on both sides of the Atlantic to further their business interests.
Because the return Puritan migration is so intricately linked to English events
of the 1640s and 1650s, additional background information on England’s civil
wars and the Protectorate would have increased the book’s accessibility for the
general reader. That small issue notwithstanding, Moore’s Pilgrims fits nicely with
the growing pedagogical trend of placing American history into a global context
and demonstrates that the Puritans of the Great Migration are no laughing matter.
Shasta College
Dave Bush
Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds. By
John E. Murray. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 313.
$40.00.)
In this book, economist John E. Murray challenges historians who contend that
Progressive activists’ attempts to enact compulsory state insurance plans failed
because of strong opposition from unions, physicians, and insurance companies.
Instead, he argues that Progressives failed because workers were generally content
with the existing industrial sickness funds offered to them through unions and
employers. “From all available evidence,” Murray writes, “sickness funds appeared where workers needed them . . . and until the late 1930s, provided a
degree of financial protection equal to or better than that available from commercial insurers or proposed government programs” (241).
One way that Murray demonstrates the effectiveness of sickness funds is by
analyzing moral hazard, or the “tendency of insurance to remove an incentive to
prevent the insured-agent event, which thereby increases the probability of its
occurrence” (169). Testing the correlation between availability of sick pay and
worker absenteeism, he finds that access to sick pay did cause a rise in absenteeism, but that sickness funds were able to counter this effect by hiring their own
physicians to determine when sick workers were fit to return to work. Murray also
shows that industrial sickness funds mitigated issues related to adverse selection
by employing probationary periods to “screen out high-risk applicants” (196).
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Progressives argued that government insurance was necessary because workers
were unable to accumulate enough personal savings to support themselves
through long illnesses, but Murray offers evidence to the contrary. His statistical
analyses show that older workers were often able to save for such contingencies
and that many of the uninsured chose to be so, especially young, healthy men who
“did not want to buy insurance because they did not expect to need it” (168).
Murray bases his conclusions on wage statistics from the “average” American
worker. The reader wonders, however, about the utility of identifying an
“average” American worker when sex, race, ethnicity, age, and union status are
removed from the equation. This book is largely about the economic behavior of
white men employed in industrial labor. Murray could go further to address the
implications of studying this specific population, especially in the final chapter
when he enters contemporary debates about government health insurance.
Industrial sickness funds declined in the late 1930s, not as a result of the
Depression (which benefited the funds as unhealthy workers lost their jobs and
their coverage), but instead because commercial insurance companies developed
superior actuarial technologies that allowed them to lower the price of their
services while also accepting higher risk clients. In addition, commercial companies began to offer medical coverage in the 1930s, something sickness funds
did not. Lack of medical coverage did not become a liability for sickness funds
until medical advances like the development of sulfonamides increased physicians’ ability to heal patients. That industrial sickness funds did not decline
because of incompetence, but instead because of technological and medical
advances, Murray argues, reinforces their strength. Overall, Murray offers a
convincing story of early American health insurance, one that is accessible to
scholars familiar with but not fluent in regression techniques and other statistical methods.
California State University, Sacramento
Rebecca M. Kluchin
The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. By Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville, Va.: University of
Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. 281. $19.50.)
In these eleven previously published essays, the author, the Dean of American
Jefferson scholars, addresses many of the contested aspects of Jefferson’s thought.
This brief review will concentrate on his consideration of the policies Jefferson
believed central to American success: republicanism, territorial expansion, and the
abolition of slavery accompanied by the return of the freemen to Africa.
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Jefferson’s republicanism sought to guarantee the near autonomy of selfgoverning, rural territories isolated from the modernizing national government.
He believed these new territories and nascent states should have even greater
economic and political latitude than the original colonies. Peter S. Onuf argues
that:
Jefferson’s conception of the American nation imaginatively countered the
centrifugal forces, the tendency toward anarchy and disunion, that republicanism authorized and unleashed. Devotion to the union would reverse
these tendencies, drawing Americans together even as their private pursuits
of happiness drew them to the far frontiers of their continental domain. It
was a paradoxical, mystifying formulation. (104)
Confidence in self-government and agrarianism stimulated Jefferson’s goal of the
creation of new utopias on the Western frontiers by doubling American territory
through his opportunistic purchase of Louisiana. However, his “appeal to the
‘federative principle’ disguised . . . the concrete interests—of land speculators,
Republican politicos . . . [and] Jefferson’s original core constituency, the stapleproducing, slave-holding planters of the South” (133). The Jeffersonians’ republicanism ultimately yielded incalculable advantages to the nation because even
without the strong central government favored by the Federalists, “the [Republicans] showed a genius for party and state building that successfully linked an
expanding periphery to the centers of power” (133).
Though Jefferson’s republican policies were initially successful, they eventually
failed due to the absence of an antislavery policy. Onuf argues that Jefferson’s
view of slavery was guided not by the Declaration’s Lockean natural right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but by the conservative thought of Lord
Kames. He writes:
The lesson he drew from Kames was that moral problems always arise
within particular historical frameworks and that effective solutions depend
on taking historical reality into account. . . . A revolution in Virginia’s racial
order would not advance the progress of civilization. The only solution was
to eliminate the institution of slavery and expatriate the former slaves to
some distant location so that white Virginians could fulfill their moral
potential as a civilized community. (252)
Moreover, “the failure to emancipate and expatriate Virginia’s slaves . . . would
unleash a horrific race war that would reduce both ‘nations’ to the barbaric
conditions of an anarchic state of nature in which any sort of moral life—much
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less its progressive refinement—would be impossible” (260). Given the myriad of
African Americans who had been on the land for almost two centuries, Jefferson
must have known his demand for removal was a rhetorical solution at best.
Besides, there was very little chance of a race war. Emancipating the slaves would
neither destroy Virginia’s civilized community nor invite such a war. Only after a
century of emancipation, and segregation, were lunch counter sit-ins unleashed.
In addition to the essays on the central political issues, Onuf includes excellent
studies of “Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, and Self” (with Jan Ellen Lewis),
and on Jefferson’s religion, diplomacy, education, the Military Academy at West
Point, miscegenation, the fate of Jefferson’s children, and finally, “Jefferson,
Morality, and the Problem of Slavery”(with Ari Helo). Altogether, Onuf offers a
savory intellectual feast for scholar and neophyte alike.
Loyola University Chicago
Thomas S. Engeman
Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic. By Mark Padilla. (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. vii,
294. $21.00.)
Tourism is nowadays the principal industry in most of the Caribbean, including
the Dominican Republic; one of its facets, sex tourism, has recently received
significant scholarly attention. However, this author focuses on a barely broached
area: gay sex tourism and the relation between foreign gay men and local sex
workers. The work results from a three-year study that combined ethnographic
fieldwork and quantitative surveys of two hundred male sex workers undertaken
in close collaboration with ASA (Amigos Siempre Amigos), the country’s only
incorporated gay organization (13). From his research on gay enclaves of the
capital Santo Domingo and the nearby beach town Boca Chica, Mark Padilla
arrives at the following conclusion and paradox: although gay tourism contributes to the transmission of “gay global culture” (taken up mostly by middle-class
and elite gays), what gay tourists search out and thereby reinforce is a “Dominican
(hyper)masculinity that is . . . defined in opposition to a ‘modern’ gay identity”
(207).
In fact, as Padilla notes, male Dominican sex workers—whose sexual behavior
is described as “fluid behavioral bisexuality”—largely reject the stigmatized
maricón (gay) identity and cover-up their involvement in the gay sex industry
vis-à-vis family, friends, and female partners (22). This stigma management
through “sexual silence” (a concept developed in Hector Carrillo’s work in
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Mexico on queer male sexualities) provides male sex workers with a certain social
flexibility but also puts their female partners at an increased risk for HIV transmission. The role that male sex workers may play as a “bisexual bridge” in HIV
transmission in the Dominican Republic (and more broadly in the Caribbean)
is, according to Padilla, “dangerously under-recognized,” partly because HIV in
the Caribbean has been depicted as primarily a “heterosexual epidemic” (172,
174). Padilla critiques the use of “bipolar categories” (heterosexual or homosexual) to define the HIV epidemic in regions where these dichotomies do not
apply and particularly the conflation of “gay sexual identity with homosexual
behavior,” which prevents HIV prevention programs from reaching men who
have sex with men but who do not identify as “gay” (26, 176).
Padilla incisively problematizes some other premises and categories tied to the
globalization of gay discourses and practices. First, he notes how during the first
Dominican public LGBTQ protest in 1999 the appropriation of “global gay
cultural symbols and modes of protest,” rather than being an effective political
vehicle, problematically dissolved broader alliances and “eclipsed local voices and
discursive practices” (78, 79). Second, he notes how the global gay sex market,
rather than eradicating “traditional” forms of nonheteronormative male sexualities (here the “non-gay” identified hypermasculine activo), as scholars have
argued in other cases in Latin America, “somewhat ironically” reinforces them in
the Dominican Republic (207).
The particular strength of Padilla’s work is how it apprehends the intrinsic
relation between local identities and global processes. Moreover, what makes this
work stand out in comparison to other similar studies is how Padilla lucidly
indicates the implications of his findings for various different fields (public health,
Latin American gender, and sexuality studies) and shows how they trouble some
of their prevalent assumptions. The only fault a reader might find is that one
wishes he could have developed some of these ideas further.
Barnard College
Maja Horn
The Populist Vision. By Charles Postel. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,
2007. Pp. xiv, 397. $35.00.)
Over the past ten years, a new generation of historians have reassessed the
Populist movement in the United States. This author’s excellent intellectual history
of Populism fits into this new scholarship because he persuasively argues that
Populism was a modern, forward-looking, and transformative movement. The
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significance of Charles Postel’s work lies in its national scope and its focus on the
ideas and the writings of key leaders.
Postel begins with an analysis of the Farmers Alliance’s vision. This is the most
compelling section of the narrative as Postel expertly weaves together various
Alliance leaders’ modernist views on the need for rural reform to help the commercial viability of farming and to reorient society. For example, Postel explains
that the Alliance supported science-based education to provide the tools for
material progress, espoused the merits of scientific farming, and sought cooperation to enact positive change through centralization and professionalism throughout society. Utilizing secondary sources and primary documents, particularly
newspapers, Postel’s nuanced vignettes of Alliance leaders, such as Charles
Macune in Texas and Marion Cannon in California, illustrate the Alliance’s
modernizing thrust. Postel’s most illuminating chapter discusses the role of
women in the Alliance, where he focuses on leaders’ extensive rights within the
organization, a chance to escape the monotony of rural life, and a set of reforms
attractive to most women. Postel correctly discerns that as the Alliance moved
toward political insurgency, it jettisoned controversial issues such as voting rights
for women but still pushed for better homes and education.
In section two, Postel analyzes the Populist Party’s political framework and
vision to run the nation along scientific, nonpartisan, and businesslike lines. He
notes that Populism involved a melding of rural reform with working-class organizations and urban middle-class activists, all of whom campaigned for a modern
economy with large-scale cooperative enterprises and state-centered regulation.
This argument is quite familiar to historians, but Postel does refute the contention
that Populists were radicals and backward-looking idealists. However, his discussion of Populism and race and the role of Black Populists tends to reiterate the
claims of well-known scholarship.
Although there is much to praise in this well-written and deftly argued work,
there are areas that require attention. Throughout the book, the reader wonders
how the Populist vision played out at the grassroots and how local Populists
responded to the modernist vision. In addition, there is little on the political
culture of Populism as it attempted to turn its vision into electoral reality.
Although Postel’s work is well researched, several key manuscript collections are
missing from the bibliography. In addition, Postel engages with the historiography
on the Populist movement but omits several recent works.
However, these points do not detract from an excellent book. This is the best
intellectual history of Populism since the work of Norman Pollack. Postel’s book
will cause historians of the Gilded Age to rethink the Populist vision and
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blueprints for society. Scholars should read this stimulating, provocative, and
exemplary study.
Indiana University Southeast
James M. Beeby
When the World Was Young. By Tony Romano. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2007. Pp. 320. $24.95.)
In a novel about an Italian-American family during a period popularly thought of
as an age of innocence, the author weaves a fascinating story of intergenerational
conflict between immigrant parents and their American-born children. His story
of the Peccatori family reveals the sins and weaknesses of both, as well as the
profound sacrifices and hardships endured by all as a result of the sins of the father
and the tragedy that strikes this tight-knit yet conflicted family.
Set in Chicago in the late 1950s, When the World Was Young moves forward
and back in time in the voices of various family members revealing the innermost
thoughts and personal struggles of each character.
In some ways, Tony Romano’s characters reflect popularly held stereotypes
of Italian men and women. Agostino is a husband who “roams,” and Angela Rosa
is a wife who pretends to be unaware of her husband’s sexual transgressions. After
all, “He came home each night, which was more than one could say about some
of the other fathers in the neighborhood. He came home sober. And never raised
a hand to her” (258). However, Agostino is not a heartless cheat, and Angela Rosa
is not a passive Italian wife. The fullness and complexity of these individuals
evolves as tragedies change each character forever. Agostino, in a moment of
self-indulgent weakness, gets a young Italian American girl pregnant. A confrontation between the girl’s mother, who demands restitution from Agostino, is
witnessed by his eighteen-year-old son, Santo.
Just as a repentant Agostino is about to tell his wife the truth about his tryst
with the young girl and the shame it has brought the Peccatori family, Benito, their
youngest son, becomes gravely ill and dies. His death impacts not only the lives
of Angela Rosa and Agostino, but also leads to an unyielding grief among the
remaining children.
While Agostino vows never to be unfaithful to his wife again, his eldest
children, Santo and Victoria, channel their grief and sorrow into rebellious behaviors that permanently alter the family dynamics. Victoria, a sixteen year old who
has been challenging her mother’s authority since before her brother’s death, seeks
solace in the arms of a young man, Eddie. Her brother, Santo, exhibiting the
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383
traditional Italian role of protector of his sister’s virtue, warns both Victoria and
Eddie to stay away from each other. In defiance of “old world values,” Victoria
refuses and ends up pregnant.
Santo, whose motives are difficult to ascertain, pursues the girl that his father
got pregnant and risks the loss of his own family to “father” his half brother, while
Angela Rosa risks the trust of her husband and pretends to be the mother of
Victoria’s son, Nicholas. In the end, no one sacrifices as much as the oncerebellious Victoria, who must forever pretend to be the sister of her own son.
When the World Was Young is an immigrant tale of seeking to find oneself in
a strange land and of the intergenerational conflicts typical between immigrant
parents and their American-born children. It is also a heartwarming novel of the
strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of family and the personal redemption that
each character finally attains after struggles, sorrows, and tragedy.
Furman University
Diane C. Vecchio
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. By Amity Shlaes. (New
York, N.Y.: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. Pp. 461. $26.95.)
The author, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalist
specializing in issues of political economy and taxation, offers a spirited and
accessible contribution to the revisionist literature critiquing the New Deal from
the Right. Amity Shlaes contends that economic stagnation persisted throughout
the 1930s because “government intervention”—underwritten by both the Hoover
and the Roosevelt administrations—“helped to make the Depression Great” (9).
She seeks to redress what she regards as an imbalance in the existing historiography, in which state action is valorized while private initiative is undervalued and
regarded with skepticism. Various federal monetary, tax, and tariff policies, as
well as a wide range of regulatory programs, attract her critical attention.
Shlaes credits Roosevelt’s proliferation of federal entitlement programs with
systematizing interest-group politics and transforming the very concept of liberalism for the worse. Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” was a member not only of the
dispossessed “one-third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” of which he
spoke in his second inaugural address, but also of such robust and rewarding
electoral constituencies as union workers, farmers, and senior citizens (298).
William Graham Sumner’s “Forgotten Man,” Shlaes reminds readers, was the
productive, self-reliant citizen who paid the (often unforeseen or underappreciated) costs of well-intentioned progressive reforms. Her exemplary forgotten men
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are such small business owners as the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers of
Brooklyn prosecuted for violating provisions of the National Recovery Administration’s Live Poultry Code. Other private-sector figures receiving sympathetic
treatment are former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who persisted in
his longstanding plan to donate his magnificent art collection to the United States
to create the National Gallery even as the Roosevelt Administration pursued
him over bogus charges of tax evasion; Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull,
fingered by some as a scapegoat for the stock market crash, yet ultimately
acquitted of charges of criminally defrauding his shareholders; Father Divine,
the charismatic, transgressive African American religious leader who could be
reached by a letter addressed to “God, Harlem, USA”; utilities executive and 1940
Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie; and Bill Wilson, the founder
of Alcoholics Anonymous, “who taught Americans that the solution to their
troubles lay not with a federal program but within a new sort of entity—the
self-help community” (14).
Shlaes relies principally on secondary sources, contemporary newspapers and
periodicals, and a handful of manuscript collections. In lieu of footnotes, there is
a brief bibliographic essay keyed to quotations in the text. Although the narrative
jumps around a bit in an effort to integrate all of its subjects, the writing is clear,
if occasionally plagued by the stray factual or typographical error. The discussion
of Supreme Court decisions is not always handled with the greatest precision, and
conjecture concerning the mental states of the justices is sometimes presented as
fact. The author has a nice eye for engaging vignettes and revealing quotations.
Although the book is aimed at a general audience, many scholars will find it a
breezy, entertaining, and provocative read.
University of Virginia School of Law
Barry Cushman
U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents. Edited by Steven
Stoll. (Boston, Mass., and New York, N.Y.: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. Pp. xiv,
175. $14.95.)
Environmental history became an important field for research and teaching during
the past thirty years. For the most part, the field remains centered in the American
West with comparatively little scholarly work on the area east of the Mississippi
River, particularly on the Great Lakes or Gulf Coast. Essentially, environmental
history is a synthesis of other fields and disciplines, such as political science,
economics, and social history, as well as science in its multiplicity of forms. It is
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a flexible, ever-changing field given the subject matter and any individual scholar’s
approach to it.
Steven Stoll presents a good, brief introduction to the main events that created
the environmentalist movement and subsequent field of environmental history
since World War II. For Stoll, the environmentalist movement had its origin in the
explosion of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, because
it marked the beginning of a new age during which environmentalism emerged as
a philosophy and a political movement. Stoll provides a brief sketch of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century antecedents of the environmentalist movement, and
he clearly notes its distinction from conservation, particularly in relation to the
use of natural resources. He does not precisely define environmentalism, however,
perhaps because the movement’s origin is rather amorphous and because environmentalists have multiple and not always mutual agendas.
Stoll distinguishes ecology from environmentalism as the science of biological
interdependence. Like environmentalists, the ecologists attribute the decline of
landscapes to people while holding wilderness as sacred. Most important, Stoll
contends that ecology has provided environmentalists with data for political
action, for example, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the government ban on
DDT, and public awareness of global warming. Indeed, the science of ecology gave
the environmentalists the ability to seek government regulation of nature’s public
use for the general welfare, but he also notes setbacks, such as the Reagan years,
failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and congressional rejection of the Climate
Stewardship Bill.
Stoll has selected thirty documents that enable students and scholars coming
to the subject for the first time to grapple with the complexity and expansion of
the environmentalist moment. He begins with Ansel Adams’s 1944 photograph
Clearing Winter Storm in Yosemite National Park and ends with a chronology of
key events in U.S. environmental history through 2004. With this selection of
documents, Stoll moves beyond environmentalism and environmental history as
provenances of the American West to show their national foundations, including
overpopulation, ethics, spirituality, ideological certainty, naiveté, principle, and
good will.
Stoll’s introduction, documents, and questions for consideration will give
students much to discuss. It is not, however, a book for a one-week study in an
environmental history course as the editors proclaim, but it will be a useful
supplemental book for a semester’s read. It merits a long shelf life.
Purdue University
R. Douglas Hurt
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Henry Kissinger and the American Century. By Jeremi Suri. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 358. $27.95.)
The author of this study provides readers with both a brief overview of Henry
Kissinger’s career and an interesting conceptualization of that career based on
Kissinger’s religion and early life experiences. Kissinger is presented as a “bridge
figure” throughout his career, thanks to his Jewish background. According to
Jeremi Suri, while Kissinger was in the army, at Harvard, and during the NixonFord administration, he was an “insider outsider,” a useful tool for his “Establishment” patrons. Kissinger’s undeniable gifts aside, the author consistently
attributes Kissinger’s progress to his religion and formative experiences.
There are really two separate issues that need to be addressed in this review.
The first is the utility of the book as a historical biography of Henry Kissinger.
Suri’s work is an adequate, brief, and selective overview of Kissinger’s life and
professional accomplishments. Drawing from both established secondary sources
and several interviews with Kissinger himself, Suri spends four chapters discussing
Kissinger’s life—his youth in Germany, his transition to America, his service in the
army as an occupation administrator in Germany, and his career at Harvard. The
final two chapters are devoted to his service as National Security Advisor and
Secretary of State. There are no new revelations here; indeed, the richest area of
newly declassified material, relations with the People’s Republic of China, receives
minimal attention, as it is lumped together with Africa and Latin America. Thus,
it is not the best or most interesting historical work on Kissinger’s career. Suri is
respectful of Kissinger’s talents, but critical of his limited vision, one that was
shaped by his formative experiences.
It is this aspect of the book, the discussion of Kissinger’s intellectual and
personal formative experiences, that is most important to Suri and is thought
provoking for the reader. Suri’s core argument is that Kissinger’s prominence is
due primarily to his Jewish background. For example, Suri argues that his initial
attraction for army officers was the fact that as a German Jew, Kissinger could
both ferret out potential Nazis while being perfectly reliable as a result of Hitler’s
slaughter of the Jews. At Harvard, Kissinger is portrayed as the stereotypical
overachieving, well-connected Jewish student and then professor, a stereotype that
Kissinger fulfilled through his exceptional administrative skills and his ability to
make contacts to forward his career. For Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger represented everything the President disliked and distrusted; yet, Suri argues, he used
Kissinger the way European monarchs used Jews in their courts centuries earlier:
as counselors who were never fully trusted.
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The final chapter discusses how Kissinger utilized this image of himself in the
Middle East. Both the Israelis and the Arabs viewed Kissinger similarly; they
believed he could produce progress because he was both an insider and an
outsider. Kissinger’s skills and life experiences came together to enable him to
stabilize relations between Israel and Egypt. Suri concludes that Kissinger’s
actions laid the groundwork for the twenty-first century, for better and worse, and
that the world “awaits Kissinger’s successor” (274).
Western Illinois University
Richard M. Filipink
Against the President: Dissent and Decision-Making in the White House: A Historical
Perspective. By Mark J. White. (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. Pp. 384. $28.95.)
For those intrigued by how U.S. presidents make important decisions, this
author has provided a well-written and enjoyable book on this subject.
Although this aspect of presidential policy making has been intensely investigated by others, Mark J. White focuses on what he claims is a neglected component of this process: the dissenter within a president’s administration. White
analyzes the conflict between Harry Truman and his advisers, Harry Hopkins
and Joseph Davies, over the Polish question; the clash between Truman and
Henry Wallace on how to respond to Stalin’s Soviet Union; Defense Secretary
Charles Wilson’s efforts to persuade President Eisenhower not to commit to the
defense of South Vietnam; Adlai Stevenson’s struggles with John Kennedy over
policy toward Cuba; and George Ball’s endeavors to prevent Lyndon Johnson
from waging war in Vietnam.
Although White defines a dissenter as someone who breaks away from the
herd and thinks for himself, the dissenters he chooses to write about may speak
to his own ideological preferences. Dismissing those advisers whose policy proposals he may disagree with, he states, “[v]arious aides encouraged their presidents to adopt a tougher approach to [C]old [W]ar issues.” The reviewer does
not include these harder-line officials because, although they promoted different
Cold War strategies, they generally shared the same assumptions as the presidents under whom they worked. In this sense, these truculent advisers were not
dissenters: “[T]hey did not disagree with the fundamental beliefs underlying
U.S. foreign policy” (5).
Because much is already known about the national security decisions the
author discusses, the value of White’s book is dependent on whether his study of
dissenters’ roles in presidential decision making can improve the rationality of the
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process. White believes that if presidents could be convinced to listen more
carefully to dissenters, they would be less likely to make such costly errors as
George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. However, White spends less than ten pages in
his concluding chapter summarizing the lessons he has derived from his five case
studies. He concludes that,
[w]hat these episodes demonstrate is that when policy options are being
discussed, presidents should resist the impulse to strengthen consensus and
nullify opposition within their administrations. Paradoxically, they need to
encourage opposition, to allow dissenters to articulate their views in an
unrestrained fashion and win converts to their points of view. (319)
Dissenters deserve respect within the president’s advisory system, according to
White, because they are the most likely to uncover the weaknesses in the hidden
assumptions that frequently limit the options considered. If one accepts the
validity of the domino theory, for example, then South Vietnam has strategic value
and one must prevent its fall to the Communists. When assumptions are not
questioned, the decision makers will focus on selecting the best methods to achieve
their objectives, not taking into consideration whether the objective can be
achieved at a reasonable cost.
White does not address the question of why it will be difficult for chief
executives to accept his recommendations. The research of several political
scientists—including Richard Neustadt, Larry Berman, John Burke, Alexander
George, and Fred Greenstein—suggests that most chief executives feel overwhelmed by their domestic and foreign responsibilities. Presidents try to recruit
advisers who have demonstrated their loyalty and who will be responsive and
competent in serving them. Believing that they already face too much antagonism
from the opposition political party, an independent Congress, and an adversarial
press, presidents are not likely to adopt procedures within their administration
that will increase internal dissent. Advisers want to tell the president what he
wants to hear, and most presidents feel comforted when their advisers, after
deliberation, reach a consensus in support of a particular option. No president is
going to be pleased with a recommendation to change the direction of policy. For
the president to reverse policy, he must concede that he made major mistakes. Few
presidents are willing to hand their opponents that advantage.
University of Houston
John W. Sloan
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ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
From The May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and the
Chinese Path to Communism. By Xiaoming Chen. (Albany, N.Y.: State University
of New York Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 156. $60.00.)
In 1925 Guo Moruo [1892–1978], who was giving up medicine to pursue a
literary career and who had converted to Communism one year earlier, commended Confucius “for having already developed a concept of Communism over
two thousand years ago” (101). To readers who follow current developments in
China in popular magazines, newspapers, or blogs, this may no longer seem so
surprising; Confucius has made a comeback. In recent years, statues of him have
gone up across China, and Confucius Centers are being established across the
world. Xiaoming Chen’s work may suggest that this does not represent a new
phenomenon in modern Chinese society, but rather another twist in the history of
the synthetic relationship between Confucianism and Chinese modernity.
Chen traces the personal and intellectual trajectory of one of modern China’s
foremost writers. He limits himself to the 1910s and 1920s when Guo and other
young Chinese enthusiastically engaged in debates about the meaning of tradition
and modernity for the individual, the nation, and humanity at large. This intellectual biography aims to contribute answers to questions that transcend the
narrow scope of its subject matter. It asks why and how Chinese intellectuals
became interested in Marxism-Leninism. Why did their interpretation of it diverge
from competing interpretations in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, or Japan?
Chen demonstrates convincingly that, in the case of Guo Moruo, a commitment
to and critical engagement with Confucian values played a very significant role not
only in his attraction to Marxism-Leninism but also in the particular ways in
which he interpreted Marx and Lenin.
In four chapters, the author contrasts Guo’s stance towards individual emancipation, national salvation, the liberation of humanity, and modern China’s
intellectual crisis in the May Fourth period (1910s to the early 1920s) and the
mid-1920s. He argues persuasively that Confucianism remained a constant frame
of reference even as Guo first struggled with Confucian family ethics (refusing
to abide by an arranged marriage and marrying a Japanese friend instead) and
embraced romantic individualism, then opened up to collective concerns, and
gradually turned to Communist revolution. His perception of Confucius, the
embodiment of Confucian values, changed in accordance with these intellectual
transitions. From a romantic hero critical of the status quo, he turned into a model
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of spiritual cultivation, social idealism, and activism. Why was Confucianism
relevant? The author proposes that, for Guo, personal and social crises could only
be resolved through a synthesis of Western and Chinese traditions. The egalitarianism Guo detected in the Confucian ideal society could only be accomplished
through Marxist social theory; at the same time, the Confucian emphasis on moral
cultivation and human subjectivity led him to question and modify historical
materialism and the primacy of the industrial proletariat in the revolution.
This short book offers a different perspective on the role of Confucianism in the
May Fourth period and shows in meticulous detail how commitment to Confucian values as well as critiques of it justified at least one intellectual’s turn to
Marxism. It is less successful in substantiating the claim that the Confucian
element in Guo’s Communist thinking “could also be found one way or another
in Maoist thinking and practice” (5). Those with a general interest in modern
intellectual history or in Chinese history will enjoy reading this highly readable
piece of scholarship. They may be left wondering how representative Guo is
among Chinese Communists in his commitment to Confucian ideals and adulation of Confucian thinkers, how his interpretive strategies compare to those of
predecessors and successors who tried to achieve a comparable synthesis between
Western and Chinese thinking, or how he related to nineteenth-century thinkers
who had reinvented Confucianism in similar ways.
University of Oxford
Hilde De Weerdt
The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics. By Vincent
Goossaert. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. Pp. xviii,
395. $49.95.)
The Baiyun Guan (White Cloud Abbey) in Peking (modern Beijing) emerged in the
thirteenth century to become the preeminent Taoist monastic compound of China.
Now a popular tourist site and home of the government-controlled National
Taoist Association, this abbey continues to serve as the headquarters of the
dominant Taoist order known as Quanzhen. Across town on the east side stands
the Dongyue Miao (Eastern Peak Temple), the corresponding seat of authority
for the largely hereditary order known as Zhengyi. Dozens of additional temples
in and around Peking generally fell under the management of Quanzhen or
Zhengyi clerics during the latter half of the Qing [1644–1911] and Republican
[1912–1949] periods.
Vincent Goossaert’s broadly defined survey of Taoist clerical activity in Peking
during this time takes the prestigious Baiyun Guan as its institutional anchor. This
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book stems from and was shaped by the author’s participation in “Peking as a
Holy City,” an epigraphically centered research project led by Kristofer Schipper
from 1996 to 2000. Epigraphy similarly lies at the heart of this effort, with data
drawn from stele inscriptions spanning five centuries. Additional resources range
from imperial court records, Beijing Municipal Archives, and Taoist writings to
ethnographic accounts, local gazetteers, and press reports. Goossaert also makes
good use of Susan Naquin’s monumental Peking Temples and City Life, 1400–
1900 [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000], seldom parting
company with her analysis. But unlike Naquin, he leaves many Chinese terms
untranslated and provides no translations whatsoever for titles of Chinese writings discussed. The generous incorporation of Chinese script throughout the
book, however, should please anyone at home with the language. Readers unfamiliar with Taoist terminology may wish to consult the recently published Encyclopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio Pregadio [London, England: Routledge,
2007].
Goossaert presents his local case study as a constructive alternative to “anticlerical prejudices in the scholarly tradition of Taoist studies” (15). The notion of
“Taoists as mystical beings” he also leaves aside, opting instead to provide a
concrete account of how Taoist clerics answered the needs of a changing urban
population over time (5). He sets the scene in part one by outlining the history of
the two major clerical lineages, the atypical social setting of Peking, and the
various administrative systems set up to oversee Taoist affairs. Part two turns to
the training and activities of Baiyun Guan monastics, imperial chaplains, eunuch
monks, and temple managers hired by a lay community or clerical lineage. Part
three summarizes the performative repertoire on which clerics drew to oblige
diverse patrons, from their requests for healing and death rituals to the liturgical
program for a temple festival. Two appendices provide historical surveys of Taoist
death rituals and the Taoist Canon in Peking.
Goossaert argues that the role of Peking Taoist clerics can only be understood
in terms of “their niche in the larger market of spiritual masters” (19). The market
for spiritual guidance may have changed over time, but spirit mediums, mostly
female, were among those likely to give the Taoist cleric a run for his or her
money. As a social historian would, Goossaert claims no interest in “representative” or “eminent” figures in his effort to “trace all documented Peking Taoists,
the anonymous as much as the famous” (15).
Some of his most riveting accounts in fact concern the lives of both the famous
and infamous. A singular example of the latter is recalled with the story of how
the controversial Baiyun Guan abbot, An Shilin, perished in 1946 on a courtyard
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THE HISTORIAN
pyre lighted by his opponents. This unfortunate episode could easily, but need not,
overshadow the memory of clerics celebrated for exemplary leadership. Quanzhen
master Zhang Yuanxuan, for example, who won acclaim for successfully leading monks into battle against rebel forces in 1860, was later invited to oversee
consecration ceremonies at the Baiyun Guan. One of his disciples, the influential
eunuch Liu Chengyin, was recognized not only for his generous financial support
of the abbey but also for paving the way toward the ordination of many of his
fellow eunuchs. Liu’s putative sworn brother, abbot Gao Rentong, left his mark
by organizing a soup kitchen at the Baiyun Guan, which helped ensure patronage
of the abbey during a time of heightened political tension. Such was his charisma
that Gao is known to have been sought as mentor by artists and courtiers as well
as lay female adepts. He is also remembered for having been the only abbot of the
Baiyun Guan to preside over the consecration of as many as 1,599 clerics and to
see his collected writings published by the abbey.
Infelicitous wordings only occasionally mar this richly detailed account. Goossaert refers to normative texts, for example, as “descriptions of clerical life,” when
he clearly means “prescriptions of clerical life” (155). In the absence of local
sources, he is often led to paint a tentative picture of Peking, shaped in part by
drawing on comparative data from other sites. He also does not hesitate to flesh
out missing details by citing evidence from accounts of Buddhist clerical activity,
astutely demonstrating in the process its many parallels with Taoist practice. But
it is Goossaert’s skill in casting a critical eye both forward and backward in time
across a wide spectrum of testimony pertinent to Peking that provides the most
leverage in support of the unavoidable speculative aspects of his account. This
book should prove to be not only of lasting value to specialists in Taoist studies
but also of keen interest to anyone seeking new perspectives on the socioeconomic
foundations of the clerical professions. It merits special consideration by all
concerned with how governmental regulation shapes the nature and future of
clerical activity.
University of Washington, Seattle
Judith Magee Boltz
A History of the Modern Chinese Army. By Xiaobing Li. (Lexington, Ky.: University
of Kentucky Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 413. $39.95.)
The author of this book has written an excellent and highly readable broad-brush
political and military history of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Xiaobing
Li discusses its roots in the warlord period, Nationalist Army, and Republican
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393
China. His use of original, newly available archival materials from China provides
new information about the People’s Liberation Army, or the PLA, as it is known.
More importantly, this new information is made real and human by three other
factors: Li’s own service as a soldier in the PLA, his personal insights into the lives
and the motivations of some of his fellow soldiers, and a rich group of oral history
interviews that the author conducted with former soldiers and military leaders in
Taiwan and in China.
One feature that makes the book useful is that Li provides a good introductory
summary of each chapter at its start. There is also a remarkably accurate discussion of the effects of altitude on the newly deployed troops in Tibet when the PLA
invaded and took over that territory. The description of the difficulties in acclimating new troops in that challenging environment tracks with this reviewer’s
own experience and conversations with PLA officers in Tibet. Readers interested
in the Korean War or the U.S. war in Vietnam will like Li’s coverage. He combines
oral history with solid data on the number of troops China deployed (950,000
PLA “volunteers” into Korea, 320,000 troops in Vietnam).
The reader should not expect the sort of detail on unit histories, organization,
leadership, and honorifics one sees in other works. Nor does Li give the same
detailed treatment to politico-military affairs one sees in the seminal William
Whitson book, The Chinese High Command. Still, this is perhaps the best sourced
history this reviewer has seen on the PLA to date.
The book relies on an “alphabet soup” of acronyms to save space. There are far
too many of them, and all of them are standard. Readers expect many acronyms
when dealing with military and government bureaucracies, but the publisher
would have done better to let the author spell things out. For example, the
Huangpu (or Whampoa) Military Academy is abbreviated as HMA. It would be
more readable to have used a couple of extra words and referred to the HMA
as “the Huangpu Academy” or “Huangpu,” Fujian Front Command as “FFC,” or
Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps as “HPCC.” After all, how
many times will a reader see these again? Li chooses to use Pinyin transliteration,
but at one point, quoting another author, he uses the Wade-Giles transliteration,
switching between Kuomintang (KMT) and Guomindang (GMD) when referring
to the Nationalist Party (40).
Li’s access to Chinese sources did not hold him hostage to self-censorship. He
has good information on the losses suffered by the PLA during its 1979 attack on
Vietnam. Also, based on this reviewer’s experience in the U.S. Defense Attaché
Office in China during the Tiananmen Massacre, Li managed to get what may be
the most accurate figures available on civilian deaths (364, note 93).
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A History of the Modern Chinese Army should be on the shelf of every
historian of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It is a superb resource for
graduate students or undergraduates that want to understand the military culture,
traditions, and history of the Chinese army.
U.S. Army, Retired
Larry M. Wortzel
150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port: Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade.
By Roxani Eleni Margariti. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 344. $55.00.)
In this book, the author gives a portrait of medieval Aden and traces its development under the Zurayid and Ayyubid dynasties, from the late fifth/eleventh
century to the early decades of the seventh/thirteenth century. The author divides
the book into two parts: the city’s physical world and its commercial institutions.
The first section, “The Physical Environment,” covers the environment, the topography of the harbor, and the typography of the port city; and the second, “The
Commercial Entrepôt,” examines the customs house, ships and shipping, and
mercantile and legal services.
This is an interesting book. Roxani Eleni Margariti uses primary sources well
to construct a detailed analysis of the port of Aden and of its commercial activity.
She stresses Aden’s “unique combination of geographical and ecological advantages, built infrastructure, and urban institutions,” questions various assumptions
about trading practice, and highlights contrasts between the commerce of the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (6).
As Margariti notes, little scholarly attention has been paid to the port cities
of the Islamic world “and less still to their physical components” (69). In line with
recent research, she questions the common assumption that harbors in the southern and eastern Mediterranean declined in the early Islamic period, and argues
that the prevailing view that harbors in the Indian Ocean generally lacked formal
built features is a generalization that obscures the reality (70).
In relation to trading practices, Margariti’s research suggests that the wakil
al-tujjar in Aden worked from his residence rather than the dar al-wakala, as
commonly thought; that he did not, again in contrast to the usual assumption,
belong to a foreign merchant group, and that he may have rendered his services
within a flexible framework of mercantile collaboration rather than acting as an
appointee to a well-defined office (192, 181–82, 179). In contrast to the usual
definition of the word “karim,” Margariti argues that in this period it was not a
confessionally exclusive term (152).
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Margariti draws attention to various differences between Mediterranean and
Indian Ocean commerce. Import taxes were much higher at Aden than those in
the Mediterranean, and dues do not appear to have been calculated strictly on
an ad valorem basis but on a combination of ad valorem and ad naturam charges
(114, 132). Despite the normal Muslim legal injunction that non-Muslims pay
twice as much as Muslims, customs rates apparently did not distinguish between
native subjects on the basis of their religion (113). Noting that there is no
reference in the sources to a funduq, han, or caravansary, Margariti suggests that
although this may be coincidental, it is more likely to indicate a difference in the
organization of transient residence between the two regions (104).
This is very much a book about trade, which, in Margariti’s words, “functioned as the main force behind urban development” in Aden, and as such is a
useful contribution to the scholarship on this area (2).
Cambridge University
Kate Fleet
ˇ
Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination System in Late Choson
Korea, 1600–1894. By Eugene Y. Park. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 273. $39.95.)
ˇ dynasty founder, Yi Song-gye (King T’aejo), was a military man.
The Choson
Part of his legacy—introduced in 1402 by his son King T’aejon—was a military
examination system (mukwa) that lasted until the Kabo reforms nearly five
hundred years later and was appreciated across a broader cross-section of Korean
society than the more prestigious civil service recruitment examination (munkwa)
it complemented. If its contribution to the defense either of the country against
foreign invaders or of the establishment against internally induced change was
relatively insignificant, its place in Korean social history nevertheless fully deserves
Eugene Y. Park’s meticulous and fair analysis.
Over the centuries mukwa tests were taken by millions of men and had
something to offer elites and nonelites alike. Whereas the munkwa was really only
accessible to the 5 percent of the population who comprised the yangban aristocracy, the mukwa provided a larger umbrella, under which there sheltered not only
yangban from the central region and the provinces, but also as time passed
members of the lower classes, chungin, sangmin, and even slaves. True, many
successful candidates failed to obtain appointments in the military bureaucracy
and most of those who did were already yangban, so that by the eighteenth
century a military aristocracy had evolved that enjoyed advantageous links with
the civil aristocracy. Yet the standing in the community and the cultural satisfac-
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THE HISTORIAN
tion offered by mukwa training in practical and literary skills were sufficiently
attractive to make the investment of time and effort involved in preparing for it
worthwhile to a far wider clientele.
Among many interesting revelations documented by Park on the basis of his
exhaustive database of military examination and other contemporary records, the
reviewer particularly notes the involvement of mukwa graduates in the seventeenth factional strife; the knee-jerk response of the authorities to the Japanese
and Manchu wars and the spread of internal discontent in the nineteenth century,
increasing the frequency of the exams without any improvement in military
effectiveness; the effect on fiscal policy of the growing number of mukwa graduates; the development of lineage patterns within the military bureaucracy; discrimination against the northern provinces from the Seoul region and the southern
ˇ
merchants in the examination
provinces; the participation of the Kaesong
system; and the connection between the mukwa and the spread of cultural forms,
including vernacular literature and p’ansori.
The reviewer’s initial apprehension about reviewing this book as a nonspecialist in military history was quickly dispelled, for it is really a sociopolitical study
that avoids both narrow specialization and excessive complexity. The structure
and clarity of Park’s writing help. Each chapter begins with an identification of its
theme and ends with a summary of its findings. Points of particular importance
are reiterated and reinforced with concrete examples, and a graduate student
could not do better than see how Park assembles, draws on, and interprets his
original data (though a graduate thesis would certainly require a better index than
the one provided here). This is a groundbreaking book that sheds light on many
ˇ history.
aspects of Choson
University of Durham
Keith Pratt
“A Constituency Suitable for Ladies” and Other Social Histories of Indian Elections.
By Wendy Singer. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 246.
$24.00.)
Separate electorates for India’s Muslim minority were first introduced early in the
last century by the British and were later extended to other minorities as well, as
part of British India’s “affirmative action” process with which many are familiar.
The author of this scholarly social history focuses on less well-known ways in which
India has of late sought to increase electoral representation of women, providing a
comprehensive account of various legislative attempts to insure that strong female
voices may be heard in Lok Sabha, rectifying India’s traditional male dominance.
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397
Several Indian women’s organizations united to help educated women win the
right to vote as early as 1920. Thanks to those suffragette pioneers, British officials
as well as enlightened leaders of India’s National Congress took interest in
advancing the cause of “equality for women,” supporting “the notion that women
can best represent other women of all classes” (36). Sarojini Naidu and Rajkumari
Amrit Kaur were among the most famous early leaders of Indian women’s valiant
fight to win universal suffrage.
Separate electorate constituencies for women were introduced by the British
Raj in the provincial elections of 1936–1937 and 1946, but were abandoned by
independent India as imperial restraints incompatible with democracy. By the
1950s, however, India’s ruling Congress Party treated women as a “special category,” determined to ticket women for at least 15 percent of all its Lok Sabha
candidates. Other parties followed Congress’s lead, selecting other women as their
candidates for the same constituencies, so that after 1957 one-fifth of all the
members elected to Lok Sabha were women. Most “constituencies suitable for
ladies” were in large cities, where the best-educated female candidates generally
lived.
The Panchayati Raj Act, established by Constitutional Amendment 73 in 1992,
brought many village women into the electoral process as Women Sarpanches,
intensifying popular demands for one-third of all elective representatives to be
women. The debate over the Women’s Reservation Bill, which started in 1996,
has yet to be resolved, stalled by the demand for “backward class” subquotas
within the overall body of elected women representatives. Many NGOs led by and
focusing on “gender equality” and the “feminist perspective in politics” have
flourished throughout India during the past few decades and continue to raise the
consciousness of Indian women as well as men to the barbarous realities of male
chauvinism.
“Some women’s groups proposed their own political party and in 1999
mooted . . . running a candidate on a unified women’s platform,” Wendy Singer
reports. “Other groups fought for women’s reservations in Parliament and state
legislatures” (182). In February 2005, Women Power Connect (WPC) was born,
lobbying nationwide for one-third reservations for women in all of India’s legislative bodies. The “Women’s Bill,” first presented as the Eighty-first Amendment
in India’s Constitution in 1996, was to have achieved that elusive goal. This
excellent book helps explain why to date it has not been enacted by India’s
Parliament.
University of California at Los Angeles
Stanley Wolpert
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THE HISTORIAN
Shadow of the Silk Road. By Colin Thubron. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2007.
Pp. 363. $25.95.)
One of the most distinguished English travel writers, Colin Thubron, prepares
himself very seriously for his journeys. Apart from wide reading in preparation
for each trip, he learned Russian in the early 1980s for Among the Russians
[1983] and continued to use the language when travelling in the newly independent Central Asian Republics [The Lost Heart of Asia, 1994], through Siberia
[In Siberia, 1999], and while researching this book. He learned Chinese in
preparation for Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China [1987] and found it
still possible to converse in Chinese when travelling along the Silk Road once
again.
As the title hints, the Silk Road now barely survives, and Thubron was, indeed,
following shadows as he made his way from Xi’an, skirting the southern edge of
the Taklamakan Desert, through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, northern Afghanistan,
Iran, to Antioch on the Turkish coast of Syria. It is true that some talk of a “new
Silk Road” of convoys of trucks hurtling across Asia, but the Silk Road of
legend—the fabled route of supremely luxurious commodities and major
religions—has become, in Thubron’s account, elusive, part buried, and fast
fading.
Not only does Thubron study the history of the places he visits, but he also
brings his own experiences to the narrative. Revisiting Xi’an after eighteen years,
in place of the low-rise concrete drabness and a guarded, slow-moving population, he finds “a hectic procession of overcrowded shopping malls, restaurants
and high-tech industrial suburbs.” In Samarkand after twelve years, “[s]treets
have been renamed. Statues of Turkic grandees have arisen. And the Bibi Khanum
mosque is no longer a gaping ruin but a thunderous restoration . . . restoration,
little by little, is snuffing out the strange vitality of ruin, and building in its place
a shining blandness” (196, 199). And in Afghanistan, “[n]o memory surfaced
from the place I had known. My hotel had gone. The streets laid out by the
modernising [K]ing Amanullah in the 1920s, once jingling with pony-carts, now
converged in a ramshackle cavalcade of trucks, motor-scooters, horses and cabs.
Diesel fumes stank the air I remembered pure” (245).
Very English in his preference for properly ruinous ruins, Thubron seeks out
the tomb of the Emperor Hulagu, the ruins of Oljeitu’s capital, the Assassin’s
stronghold, and the abandoned caravanserai of Miandasht. Many of the characters Thubron encounters are as much ruined as the buildings. For example, the
Uighur who says, with justification in the light of the destruction of much of old,
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399
Uighur, Kashgar, “We’re just a persecuted minority. Nobody wants to marry a
Uighur,” or the elderly Chinese man in poverty-stricken Gansu with split shoes
and watery eyes, or a Russian ex-convict encountered on the road to Bukhara
begging—all, like the ruins, are beautifully described (150). When Thubron says
of Kashgar that “it lies where the maps in people’s minds dissolve,” where “the
southern and northern Silk Roads converge . . . and the desert dies against the
mountains,” this is beautiful, but also absolutely accurate (139).
British Library
Frances Wood
EUROPE
Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome. By Gregory S. Aldrette. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 338. $60.00.)
Floods are a neglected topic among historians. Many early cities lay in vulnerable
flood plains where fertile soils and irrigation agriculture produced high crop
yields, but often at considerable risk. Ancient Egypt is a case in point for the
annual Nile inundations were unpredictable and always potentially destructive. In
Floods of the Tiber, the author examines the complex relationship between the
vagaries of floodwaters and ancient Rome, the earliest city with over a million
inhabitants.
Gregory S. Aldrette assembles an impressive array of sources to document the
links between the city and the river that nourished it. He begins with a literary
database of forty-two primary sources for floods between 414 BC and AD 398.
The written records, as well as archaeological and geographical sources, yield a
topography of the city that establishes the extent of floods under different hypothetical scenarios. For example, a flood reaching twenty meters (sixty-six feet)
above sea level would have engulfed many public buildings and residential districts. Chapter two surveys the hydrology of the Tiber and reveals a pattern of
more severe inundations in the spring as a result of heavier snowfall and higher
winter rainfall than today. Whether these floods were the result of climatic
changes, or, more likely, human activity such as forest clearance, is a matter for
debate. Two chapters then assess the effects of floods on the densely inhabited city.
Aldrette rightly makes a distinction between the immediate and long-term consequences of a major flood and rightly includes the task of cleanup and such factors
as undermined buildings, food spoilage, and disease. He also discusses the oftneglected psychological effects of disaster, a major concern of contemporary
disaster studies.
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THE HISTORIAN
From effects, Aldrette moves on to the various flood control methods developed by such officials as Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who even traveled through
the sewers by boat in 33 BC. Such efforts tended to be piecemeal, often short-term
reactions to a specific disaster. Why, then, did the Romans not use their engineering ability better to protect their city? Aldrette points out that most victims were
poor and marginal groups, who often lived closest to the river. There were few
incentives for the governing elite to protect crowded minority quarters or odiferous workshops in obnoxious slums. Indeed, a flood might wash them away for
awhile and create open space in a crude form of urban renewal. Uncertainty about
how to proceed with flood protection and religious concerns may also have played
a role. It was not until 1876–1890 that massive embankments provided the first
truly effective protection for Rome’s historic buildings.
Floods of the Tiber is a meticulously researched, well-written, and thoroughly
referenced study of a little known aspect of Rome’s history. And, like all good
historical research, Aldrette’s synthesis raises important questions. As tree-rings
and other fine-grained climatological and environmental data accumulate, one
may be able to look at the Tiber floods in a wider climatic and human context.
Such a day is still a long way away. In the meantime, Aldrette provides an
exemplary baseline for future research.
University of California, Santa Barbara
Brian Fagan
Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. By Michael Alexander. (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxvii, 306. $45.00.)
In this book, the author offers up a history of the Medieval Revival, focusing on
the period from 1760 to 1971, and engaging the social, political, artistic, religious,
and, perhaps most interestingly, architectural manifestations of medievalism. As
a literary scholar, Michael Alexander’s focus is on the ways these are produced
within literary texts, although the 106 illustrations provide a rich visual context
as well. This combination gives the book an odd effect; for all its scholarly
interest, its size and pictures create the effect of a coffee table book. And like those,
Medievalism provides interesting browsing.
Alexander sees his task as tracing “the evolution of a neglected movement in
English cultural history,” which he suggests is often overly identified by the Gothic
Revival. However, he attempts to use this book to show the larger scope of the
Medieval Revival, which has languished in an obscurity created by this very large
architectural shadow. He makes no apologies for focusing his study on England,
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401
noting that “in no other country does the Medieval Revival seem as central,
perhaps because the origins of the English Church, monarchy and Parliament (in
that order) are medieval” (xxi).
Medievalism, Alexander points out, is the “offspring of two impulses: the
recovery by antiquarians and historians of materials for the study of the Middle
Ages; and the imaginative adoption of medieval ideals and forms” (xxii). His
interests lie in the second principle, essentially studying the imaginative output of
the Revival, with chapters focusing, among other subjects, on chivalric romances,
religious Gothicism, building and craft, Arthurianism, history and legend, and
design. He ends with two investigations of Modernist medievalism, one focusing
specifically on Christian contexts, and finishes with an epilogue that treats both
academic medievalism and the increasing portrayal of medieval stories on television, film, and other visual media. In answer to what many people no doubt asked
him as he prepared this volume, Alexander states emphatically that J. K. Rowling
“is no medievalist” (267).
Alexander’s chapters are cogent, clear, enjoyable, and often insightful;
although his goal seems more to identify than to theorize. He often makes pointed
observations about what led to this persistent fascination with examining and
remaking the Middle Ages, arguing that it provides not an escape from history
but an attempt to reconstruct it. His broad scope puts to rest the idea that the
Medieval Revival was solely a Victorian phenomenon, showing this “conscious
adoption of, or devotion to, medieval ideals or usages” to be a long-standing and
continuing movement that reaches from the 1760s to the present. Although one
would have wished for more revelations about why the Middle Ages capture the
imagination so fervently and have for so long, as a medievalist, finding that the
period was not the obscure distant past of which it forms a part, but a continuous
portion of aesthetic and social history, was affirming.
Seton Hall University
Angela Jane Weisl
Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615. By
Virginia Blanton. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
Pp. xiv, 349. $65.00.)
This book joins a diverse body of criticism that examines saints as cultural
symbols whose study can illuminate not only medieval religious practices but also
an array of social, economic, and political issues. Many of these culturally oriented studies have focused on individual saints, and Virginia Blanton’s monograph ranks with the best, comparable to Kathleen Ashley’s and Pamela
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THE HISTORIAN
Sheingorn’s collaborative work on Saints Anne and Foy, Katherine Jansen’s and
Theresa Coletti’s monographs on Mary Magdalene, and Katherine Lewis’s study
of Katherine of Alexandria.
Æthelthryth (Etheldreda, Audrey) is a fascinating figure, a seventh-century
East-Anglian princess who preserved her virginity despite two marriages and went
on to both found and preside as abbess over a monastery at Ely. Her broad appeal
for nearly a millennium following her death is attested in twenty-five surviving
versions of her life in Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin, as well
as in Church dedications, rood screens, altar panels, and many other artifacts. In
a multidisciplinary study of wide temporal range, Blanton does a splendid job of
explaining that appeal. She begins with Æthelthryth’s contemporary, Bede, whose
writings established her on a par with the time-honored virgin martyrs of the early
Church. Blanton then turns to the use of Æthelthryth’s life by Bishop Æthelwold
and other advocates of the tenth-century Benedictine reform, who shaped her into
an emblem not only of the commitment to chastity that they were promoting for
the clergy but also of the urge to celibacy that they wished to kindle among
potential lay converts to monastic life.
Moving ahead to post-Conquest England, Blanton examines the representation
of Æthelthryth in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, produced by the monastery
at Ely that housed the saint’s relics. By presenting their patron both as a
vulnerable—but ultimately inviolable—body and as a virago jealously protecting
her devotees, the monks warned Norman prospectors against infringing on their
wealth and autonomy. Blanton dedicates her final two chapters to works aimed at
lay audiences, first analyzing a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman life composed
by one who identifies herself only as “Marie.” That life, which presents the saint
as a model for aristocratic women, and particularly of aristocratic patronage to
religious houses, survives only in a manuscript owned by the wealthy priory of
Campsey Ash, and Blanton discusses how the priory might have used the life
to encourage financial support by its wealthy lay associates. Her final chapter
contrasts the paucity of surviving lives of Æthelthryth in Middle English with
the saint’s frequent depiction on late medieval rood screens; this visual evidence
suggests that she was truly popular in late medieval England.
Blanton’s study is by no means comprehensive—she offers detailed discussions
of only a handful of literary texts and a sampling of images. This reviewer wishes
that the final chapter, in particular, had said more about the late lives. But overall,
by judiciously choosing her materials and detailing their social, religious, and
political contexts, Blanton clearly conveys the trajectory of Æthelthryth’s cult
and provides insight not just into that cult but into devotional life in medieval
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England. The book is richly illustrated and includes a useful apparatus of tables,
maps, and genealogies as well as an appendix listing evidence of Æthelthryth’s
cult, from surviving images and artifacts to references to guilds, fairs, and church
dedications.
The Ohio State University
Karen A. Winstead
Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism and the Common
Good. Edited by Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti.
(Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x, 306. $60.00.)
This collection of fourteen essays, originally papers presented by eminent political
historians at a conference held at the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenthcentury Studies at UCLA, explores and assesses the concept and practice of
monarchical systems from the late seventeenth century to the reign of George III.
Research draws on Europe-wide sources and does not exclude Asia and the
Americas. The volume is divided into four parts. Part one consists of five essays on
canonic theories of “monarchisms and republicanisms”; part two has three essays
on “enlightened Christian and millenarian monarchisms”; part three presents
five essays on the defense and resistance to absolute monarchy; and part four
contains a substantial essay on “the case” of George III. Many of these interesting,
well-documented essays are anchored to the thought of specific thinkers such as
Pieter de la Court, Spinoza, Bayle, Hume, Fénelon, Vico, Condillac, Castillon, and
Mandeville; others offer more thematically focused studies of early and late
Enlightenment practice across a wide range of constitutions.
The editors have sought to challenge entrenched orthodoxies, which tend to
promote the virtues of republicanism to the detriment of those of monarchism,
and to reaffirm the notion of monarchy as the “unexamined Other” of republicanism. In this they have largely succeeded. The central proposition and organizing principle of the volume is that republicanism and monarchy are not separate,
monolithic polarities, but are intimately linked in a symbiotic relationship. This
approach facilitates the emergence from the shadows of past oversimplifications
of a long overdue historical reappraisal of government theory and practice in the
early modern period. Contributions highlight neglected positive aspects of the
“mixes and blends” of differing monarchical systems as forces for stability in
the modern world without recourse to narrow dogmatic argument, a selective use
of sources, and evidence of any committed political stance.
Essays by Hans Blom, Luisa Simonutti, Sally Jenkinson, Patrick Riley,
and Michael Mosher set the seventeenth-century theoretical background with
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impressive scholarly authority, and this hinterland of political theory is extended
to the Age of Enlightenment in part two by George Wright, Gianni Paganini, and
Richard Popkin. The meat of this book is to be found, however, in parts three and
four with excellent analyses of the debate around monarchy and the workings of
monarchical governments in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Prussia, and Britain
by Henrik Horstbøll, Johan Van Der Zande, Michael Sauter, Simone Zurbuchen,
John Christian Laursen, and J. G. A. Pocock. A rich menu of themes includes
contrasting theories of Dutch republicanism, the problem of the stateless in the
form of the Protestant diaspora from France, Huguenots and the right to resistance in the face of state persecution, the concept of “republican monarchy” and
its Rousseauist legacy, the “reinvention” of French monarchy, and the notion
of “monarchical liberty” heralding the emergence of modern liberalism. The
scope of contributions covers also the monarchism of enlightened Christian
orthodoxy, civil Christianity, millenarianism, “heavenly” monarchy and its postEnlightenment extensions, the paradoxical nature of absolute monarchy and the
exceptional nature of “Norse” monarchy with its emphasis on justice and security,
“enlightened” monarchy in Prussia, the subtleties of the British “compound of
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy,” and the modern monarchy of the United
States (13). Chapters are well written, and sources are extensive and judiciously
deployed. There is a useful index, but a consolidated bibliography would also
have been helpful.
Inevitably, in a book whose contents are entirely dependent on conference
proceedings, there are always elements of the random and the arbitrary. The
four-part structure is a little artificial and unbalanced, with the isolation of
Pocock’s contribution on the British monarchy as the whole of part four being
particularly unnecessary. As an overview of theories and practices of monarchy
and republicanism, the territory covered is patchy and the choice of material for
analysis is sometimes tangential. There is nothing here on the progressive desacrilization of monarchy or the European impact of the 1688 settlement, for example, and the elephant in the room is, of course, the French Revolution and its
immediate aftermath. Republicanism as a mode of discourse barely makes an
appearance. On its own terms, however, this collection has much to offer, particularly to specialists in the areas of history, political theory, and philosophy. The
complexities of government in a key period of transition and upheaval, and in
specific, sometimes unfamiliar contexts, are vividly exposed, and the dilemmas
arising for the civil order from the conflicting imperatives of individual freedom,
collective security, economic life, and constitutional change are all explored with
striking contemporary relevance. The UCLA conference has resulted in a volume
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of essays of distinguished scholarly quality which advances readers’ knowledge of
the political life, hopes, and aspirations of a period in history whose influence on
modernity has not yet been fully understood.
University of Sheffield
David Williams
The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. By Rita Chin. (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 281. $75.00.)
This is a timely and eloquent exploration of what is surely the most debated issue
about German society, culture, and identity today: the increasing reality of a
multicultural society. The book is artfully framed by the illustrated portrayal of a
peak media event of the initial foreign labor importation program, the arrival of
the one-millionth guest worker in September 1964, and its historical commemoration in the Federal Republic’s fiftieth-anniversary exhibition in 1999, featuring
the motorcycle that had been awarded to that Portuguese worker at his arrival
thirty-five years before. Rita Chin follows this up with a concise historical description of the essential legislation, administration, and practice of the guest-worker
program. But her focus is much broader. She “understands the [foreign] labor
migration as a foundational event in the constitution of the modern German
nation” (272). National identity in this context is not static but in a continuous
process of transformation, based on “a conception of culture that was far more
dynamic, fluid, and syncretic” than is often assumed (203). She clearly and
convincingly adds this labor migration as a third powerful motor of fundamental
change in post-World War II Germany to the generally recognized transforming
events of westernization/Cold War and the even more massive migration of
eastern German expellees and refugees.
Although Chin depicts the overwhelmingly young and male imported workers’
lives in social isolation and often hostile surroundings with great sympathy, she
follows the German public debates on the “guest-worker problem” without the
haughty indignation and snap moral judgments a reader often finds on this topic.
She lays out even the most conservative mainline arguments for full assimilation
or immediate expulsion fully and fairly, and she expertly explains the political
reasons for the frustratingly slow citizenship reform. But she devotes the greater
part of the book to an extensive discussion of the rich array of migrant art and
especially German-language literature and film. The first chapter sets the tone
here, entitled “Aras Ören and the Guest Worker Question.” Her literary analysis
and her explanation of the strategies these writers and artists have followed to find
their voice and gain a hearing in Germany are extraordinary. These voices seem
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even more essential to her for the evolution of a multicultural society than the
German public debate. For she believes in “the central importance of cultural
practices” for “the constitution of the modern German nation”: “As we have seen,
literature, poetry, and film were at the heart of the . . . debates . . . during the
[critical] 1970s and early 1980s” (213).
Ultimately, Chin is optimistic that Germans will achieve a “modern nation,”
whose society is not just “multicultural,” which she rightly considers still a poorly
defined term, but is syncretic and transnational, with the cultures speaking to and
influencing each other.
Carleton College
Diethelm Prowe
The Making of the Middle Ages: Liverpool Essays. Edited by Marios Costambeys,
Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale. (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University
Press, 2007. Pp. x, 252. $80.00.)
The 2007 octocentenary of the founding of Liverpool was inspiration for a series
of lectures by some of Britain’s most distinguished medievalists; most of these
have been collected in this finely edited and well-illustrated volume. But if King
John’s letters patent announced the foundation of the borough of Liverpool eight
hundred years ago, the population of the city remained very modest until well into
the seventeenth century. In view of this fact, the essays in this volume focus not
(because they cannot) on the medieval history of Liverpool, but rather on medievalism in post-medieval Liverpool and the metropolitan county of Merseyside,
where interest in the Middle Ages has flourished in and especially outside of
academia since the Enlightenment. The “Making of the Middle Ages” is understood, therefore, not in the historical sense implied by Sir Richard Southern’s
celebrated book of the same title, but in the more historiographical sense implied
by the study of medievalism (the meaning of which is explored in Pauline Strafford’s introduction).
Ten essays of roughly equal length follow Strafford’s introduction to medievalism in Merseyside. T. M. Charles-Edwards opens with a study of the history of
Celtic philology between the middle of the nineteenth century and World War I,
charting its efflorescence at the turn of the twentieth century while lamenting its
comparative decline at the turn of the twenty-first century. This is followed by an
excursion into “The Uses and Abuses of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000” by
Ian Wood, who calls attention to the ideological agendas of Enlightenment scholars, the nationalist agendas of nineteenth-century scholars, and, most recently, the
political agendas of the European Union, all of whom have turned to the Early
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Middle Ages for less-than-historical purposes. David Matthews continues the
theme of Enlightenment-inspired medievalism and protonationalism with a study
of legendary heroes Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century literary circles, while articles by Helen Phillips, John Marshall,
and David Mills examine gender in Chaucer’s writings, Robin Hood’s embodiment of pageantry, and the Chester Plays, respectively. Andrew Wawn expands on
his earlier work by examining Victorian makers of the Viking Middle Ages active
in Merseyside and Edward Morris surveys early nineteenth-century Liverpool
collectors of illuminated manuscripts, devoting considerable attention to restituting the scholarly reputation of Sir John Tobin, a retired seaman, former slave
trader, and pioneer in the acquisition of medieval manuscripts whose collection,
amassed between 1823 and 1835, was “perhaps the most important small group
of late medieval illuminated manuscripts ever assembled by a private individual”
(166). Morris discusses Tobin in connection with two other gentlemen scholars of
the same generation, Charles Blundell and William Roscoe, the second of whom
also wrote a very successful biography of Lorenzo de Medici, which is the focus
of Arline Wilson’s essay. Joseph Sharples concludes the volume with an elegant
and well-illustrated architectural tour through Liverpool’s mid-nineteenth-century
revival of secular Gothic aesthetics, a must-read for anyone interested in appreciating the urban development of one of England’s most important cities during
industrialization.
This fine collection of essays not only provides intriguing snapshots of Liverpool’s admirable contribution to medieval studies, but also serves as a useful
reminder that medievalism can hold historical implications as interesting and
important as the Middle Ages themselves.
St. Joseph’s University
Alex Novikoff
The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty. By Anne Crawford. (New York, N.Y.:
Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. xxiv, 200. $29.95.)
It is difficult to know of whom the publishers were thinking as readers of this
book; not scholars, certainly, as eight out of the eleven chapters are a quick-fire
history of the fifteenth century along lines already familiar to those who work in
the field. It is also history along family lines: some of the Yorkists were the
Forsytes. Most of the rest of what elsewhere passes for history these days (the
sociology of politics; the discourse of economics; the linguistic analysis of public
rhetoric; the issues of war and peace; and the relevance of social disorder, social
malaise, and social class, to political dialogue and civic mentality) is missing. The
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author is an authority on royalty and it is the remaining three chapters on Cecily
of York and Elizabeth Woodville, on Edward IV’s brothers, and on his sisters that
are the best. But, of course, the Yorkists were not Forsytes; they ruled England and
had to make decisions that touched the lives of the whole nation. They mostly
made wrong ones.
Nowhere in the book is their disastrous record as a ruling dynasty brought out.
Richard, Duke of York, never “got his act together” and perished miserably in a
battle he should not have fought. Edward IV lost his throne, famously regained it,
and then sat back and ate, drank, and womanized himself into an early grave, as
if he were any run of the mill English aristocrat rather than the king of England.
Contrast Henry V, who was also not born to be king yet was every inch of one.
Edward’s irresponsibility is shown by what happened after his premature death.
His brother Richard usurped the throne, had his nephews murdered, came close
to marrying his niece, and perished in a battle he ought to have won. It was
fortunate for Englishmen and women that such a flaky family governed for only
twenty-five years. That they self-destructed in so short a time demonstrates their
unfitness to rule. All the hopes placed on them in the 1450s as the purveyors of a
New Deal turned out to be sadly misplaced. They were a spectacular failure.
Much more might (indeed should) have been made of that failure in this book.
For whom then is the book intended? The writing shows signs of haste. As this
is not narrative history, there is a good deal of repetition. Is it in essence an airport
book for the slightly more discerning and world-weary traveller? Yet, might it not
be too taxing even for such a person? It cannot be for students either: far too outré
for them. The reviewer is at a loss to come up with a readership, but for the
author’s sake he hopes there will be one, for those three quite good chapters at any
rate.
Woodbridge Suffolk, England
Colin Richmond
Sport in Ancient Times. By Nigel B. Crowther. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007.
Pp. vii, 183. $49.95.)
The history of Greek athletics has become such a specialized field that the
discovery of a hitherto unknown terra-cotta statuette, black-figured vase, or
ten-word inscription can occasion a lengthy essay in Nikephoros, the journal
established in 1988 for the study of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other ancient
sports. Nigel B. Crowther has been among the most frequent contributors to that
prestigious journal. Nikephoros sponsored Athletika, a large collection of
Crowther’s scholarly essays, published by Weidmann in 2004.
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Sport in Ancient Times targets readers towards the other end of the educational
spectrum. It is meant for anyone with a high school education and a modicum of
curiosity about the distant past. (Surveys have shown that an interest in sports,
especially team sports, can be assumed for over 90 percent of the population of
every modern society.)
Crowther is a very skillful popularizer. Although he does not shy away from
difficult concepts and technical terms, he writes clearly and without excessive
“dumbing down.” Realizing, however, that even college-educated readers are
liable to be a little hazy about the dates of Chinese and Egyptian dynasties and
the periodization of Greek and Roman antiquity, he includes a helpful set of
“timelines” (xiv–20).
Crowther casts a wide net. His first chapter discusses the sports of China,
Japan, and Korea (but not India). There are short chapters on Egyptian, Minoan,
Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Mesoamerican sports. The book’s main focus,
however, is on Greek and Rome, which is clearly Crowther’s terra cognita. There
are excellent summaries of what scholars know about Greek athletics, Roman
gladiatorial combats, and Byzantine chariot races. There are also brief chapters on
women’s sports and on three “sporting heroes”: the fifth-century-B.C.E. Olympic
champion Theogenes of Thasos, the first-century-C.E. Roman gladiator Hermes,
and the sixth-century-C.E. Byzantine charioteer Porphyrius (about whom Alan
Cameron has published an entire monograph).
Inevitably, the attempt to cover so much in so few pages resulted in short
chapters and a somewhat hurried pace. Readers can pause to catch their breath by
studying the thirty-seven carefully chosen black-and-white illustrations. It is a
shame, however, that none of the images, except for the dust jacket illustration of
two black-figured Greek boxers, is in color. Although there are no footnotes,
Crowther has provided helpful suggestions for further reading (in English).
“To some,” writes Crowther, “the major attraction of studying ancient sport
lies in the numerous parallels that one finds with sports today” (xii). Crowther
sometimes—too often for this reviewer’s taste—caters to these present-centered
readers. In the page and a half he devotes to Porphyrius the charioteer, he refers,
for example, to baseball’s Hall of Fame, to Michael Schumacher’s career as a
Formula I Ferrari driver, and to Willie Shoemaker’s winning the Kentucky Derby
at the age of twenty-three and then again at fifty-four (145). If such deference to
popular taste brings a few new readers to Nikephoros, the reviewer will reconsider
his cavil.
Amherst College
Allen Guttmann
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Budapest: A Cultural History. By Bob Dent. (Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 237. $15.00.)
In this work, the author of travel guides and a cultural history, Budapest 1956:
Locations of Drama, amalgamates two strains of his earlier study of Budapest,
masterfully weaving together the history of places and events related to Budapest,
covering the narrative of Hungarian history from the early nineteenth century to
the present day.
In twelve chapters, Bob Dent familiarizes the reader with the history of the
architecture of Budapest, with Hungarian music and literature, and with “Budapest’s present-day identity and its links with the past” (ix). Dent’s sources range
from an impressive array of Hungarian literary works to English and American
travelogues and memoirs; from classical and popular music to movies; and from
the cityscape to its historical interpretations. Dent is “mainly focused on locations . . . and the stories they tell about the city,” but his extraordinarily rich
source base allows him to tell these stories through the poetry of Attila József, the
writing and cultural politics of Lajos Kassák, and the music of Zoltán Kodály and
Béla Bartók, to mention a few of many notable short sections of the book.
The first two chapters take the reader on an imaginary stroll along the city’s
north–south axis (“By the Danube”) and from east to west along the Andrássy
Street (“Avenue of Dreams”), introducing the city’s geography and the basic
narrative of Hungarian history. The following eight chapters present different
faces of Budapest from bath and coffee culture through monuments and markets,
all the way to the culture of music. These chapters range widely in length and
depth. The chapters “Hearts and Minds,” with a fascinating discussion on the
Council’s Republic, and “Jews and Gentiles,” with a section on Hungarian
Holocaust literature and Jewish architecture in Budapest, attest to the author’s
erudition. The last two chapters, “Above the City” and “. . . And Below,” complete the frame of the book, in a geographic and social sense, covering the ruling
elite of the castle district and the literature arising from and reflecting on workingclass neighborhoods with a foray into the history of criminality.
For Dent, Budapest is a city constantly in the making. Controversial architectural and cultural projects, such as the House of Terror or the construction of
the National Theatre in Erzsébet tér, introduce the reader to the complexities of
contemporary Hungarian identity politics. The reviewer adds that the “Hole”
(Gödör)—the abandoned construction site of the National Theatre—not only is
an underground car park as Dent writes, but also functions as a concert and
exhibition venue (27).
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The reader should not be deceived by the older man with a giant mustache on
the cover of the book posing in Hungarian national attire. This is a rich, thoughtful, and engaging cultural history of a city characterized by “traditions and
discontinuities, progress and paradoxes” (221).
Harvard University
Heléna Tóth
Tropic of Venice. By Margaret Doody. (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007. Pp. 345. $32.50.)
Margaret Doody loves Venice. Her opening chapter reads like the narrative of a
conversion experience. She evokes the mythical foundation of the city itself when
she recalls first seeing the floating paradise, “around six in the afternoon of 27
August, in 1961” (7). Her joy becomes clear as she discovers “a depth of delight
immediately produced by Venice—an ineffable delight something between painful
longing and recognition. To put it simply, I had not known that human beings
were capable of anything this good” (8). Venice has a habit of eliciting this kind
of response; the city forces hyperbole on the visitor. In fact, every scholar of Venice
this reviewer has ever met has a similar story, a similar response, a similar
overwhelming desire to proselytize and defend Venice against the uninitiated. Very
few use their memories as an opening to a work of scholarship. This is not an
indulgence on Doody’s part. Rather, this is a topos that will provide a unifying
point of departure for the work. The Venice of literature is not made of marble
tottering on piles, but instead of something even more ephemeral. Writers view
Venice through the lens of their own discontents, infatuations, and fears.
Doody uses her own arrival to segue into and as a central feature of her study
of literary treatments of Venice. The trope of arrival, resulting either in ecstasy or
disappointment, figures heavily in the works of Venetian commentators. Doody
shows that travelers to the city read their own deaths into Venice’s death. As the
city, conquered so fully by Napoleon, the Hapsburgs, neglect, the modern world,
and, most convincingly, the tides of the lagoon, dies, so too does the viewer. Both
the hospitable—art, music, play—and the sinister, as represented by the terrific
Council of Ten, loom large in the imagination. From its foundation as a place
of hiding from the northern invaders to its status as romantic travel destination,
even the physical appearance of the city was subject to interpretation. This leads
naturally to Doody’s treatment of Venetian art, though she spends most of her
time on Venice’s painters instead of painters of Venice. Representations of the
city’s women mirror representations of the city itself, as justice, as love, and as
beauty. She closes with a treatment of the Venetian carnevale, imposing the annual
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celebration on the geography of the city. Both are unusual and demanding; both
hide considerably more than they give away.
So, too, does Doody’s book. The author meanders through Venetian history,
literature, and art much like a tourist or part-time resident. Occasionally a feature
catches her eye and she pauses to observe, to explain and analyze, before moving
on to a new topic. Doody is likely to leave historians cold with her personal spin
and lack of archival research or rigorous historical analysis. However, this book
is a thoroughly satisfying read for the Venice-lover and would be a welcome
addition to any personal library.
Whitman College
Jana Byars
Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. By Anne
Goldgar. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 426. $30.00.)
One of the most notorious events in Dutch history is the “tulipmania” in the
1630s. The frenzied trading in tulip bulbs, which reached its peak in February
1637, has become famous as the first great economic bubble in history. But what
was it really all about? Many historians, economists, and novelists have written
about it (including recently Anna Pavord, Mike Dash, Peter Garber, and Deborah
Moggach), but few have actually taken a hard and serious look at the original
sources. This is exactly what Anne Goldgar has done for her new book. She
wondered why people traded in bulbs; who these people were; how the craze
affected the economy, culture, and society; and why it has left such a lasting
impression. To answer these basic questions, she immersed herself in the archives
of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and other Dutch cities; studied prints, paintings, and
drawings; and read all the relevant pamphlets, tracts, and songbooks she could
find.
Goldgar deftly deflates the myths. Trading in bulbs was not some irrational
activity, she argues, but a normal practice like buying paintings or curiosities, born
from a desire to make profit or show connoisseurship in special areas. Contrary
to legend, tulipmania did not affect everyone in Dutch society, from “nobleman”
to “chimney-sweep.” Tulip traders, Goldgar found, formed a rather small group,
mainly consisting of “middle-level to well-off merchants . . . wealthy manufacturers, and professionals, artists and high-level artisans,” who bought and sold bulbs
as a sideline to their normal activities (147–148).
The crash of 1637 barely led to bankruptcies; it scarcely influenced the
economy; and it did not make people suddenly averse to growing or trading tulip
bulbs. And yet, the craze did leave traces in Dutch society and culture, because it
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413
created uncertainty about “the whole notion of how to assess value” (17). Expertise, authority, and trust for a brief, alarming moment seemed to rest on shaky
foundations indeed. That experience has served as a cautionary tale ever since.
Goldgar’s research can hardly be bettered. Yet even her meticulous inquiries
have not led to entirely conclusive answers. Much of her interpretation of tulip
trading and traders is based on data about people who are actually mentioned by
name in various sources. Thus she has been able to find particulars about hundreds of bulb traders. But a not-insignificant part of the buying public remains
unknown, as Goldgar herself notes, namely, most of those who bought bulbs at
auctions held by urban Orphan Chambers (137). Whether these obscure buyers
came from different backgrounds than the regular ones and whether their swelling
number may have caused the dramatic rise in prices in the early weeks of 1637 will
probably never be established. The veil of mystery around the tulip craze thus can
not be completely lifted. Regardless, Goldgar’s book is the most authoritative
study on the subject and it will be the statutory starting point for fresh research.
VU University Amsterdam
Karel Davids
Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe. By Nancy Goldstone. (New
York, N.Y.: Viking, 2007. Pp. xv, 336. $24.95.)
With all the passion and pace of a novel, this is a beautiful introduction to the
politics of thirteenth-century Europe for the general reader. The four queens of the
title were the daughters of Raymond Berenger V, Count of Provence. Marguerite
and Eleanor married Louis IX of France and Henry III of England, respectively.
Both queens proved their mettle during the greatest crises of their husbands’
reigns. Marguerite’s diplomacy from her childbed in Damietta was crucial to the
terms of her crusading husband’s release from captivity. Eleanor proved herself a
fierce opponent of England’s baronial reform movement. Their younger sisters
married the ambitious younger brothers of these kings: Sanchia wed Richard, earl
of Cornwall, who effectively bought himself the title of King of the Romans but
who was unable to exert authority in his German lands. Beatrice, who inherited
Provence itself to her sisters’ chagrin, became the wife of Charles, count of Anjou,
and led an army through the Alps to help her husband win the kingdom of Sicily
but died just eighteen months later.
Although there is nothing new in the story told, Nancy Goldstone’s approach
elegantly interweaves the sisters’ lives to make a highly accessible account. Unfortunately, in attempting to make sense of the thirteenth century for modern readers,
Goldstone’s interpretations frequently fail to take account of the medieval mindset
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as well as overplay the influence of queens during the period. For example, she
claims that Sanchia was pious but ignores the political motivations for religious
actions: “Sanchia named her son after St. Edmund the Confessor [sic]” (210).
Quite apart from mixing up England’s royal saints and assuming that Sanchia
rather than her husband chose the name, this argument overlooks the obvious
compliment being paid to Henry III who had named his own son Edmund four
years earlier.
The book is clearly not written for an academic audience. There are no
footnotes and there is a great deal of conjecture about emotions and motivation.
She skillfully uses chroniclers such as Matthew Paris and Joinville to draw the
reader into her narrative, but is rarely critical of these chroniclers’ own agendas.
Her colorful evocations of the thirteenth-century world from England to the Holy
Land capture the imagination but are sometimes drawn too broadly. There are
overly simplistic explanations of phenomena such as courtly love and Catharism
or events like the death of Arthur of Brittany. Astonishingly, Goldstone fails to
realize that Gwynedd was an independent principality at this time, instead she
paints Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as a mere recalcitrant baron.
Despite these limitations, Four Queens succeeds in convincing the reader that
determined women could influence medieval politics. The queens did not “rule
Europe,” and indeed Sanchia is depicted as the stereotypical powerless pawn.
Nonetheless, Marguerite, Eleanor, and Beatrice formed the heart of an extended
family of crucial significance to the course of thirteenth-century European history.
Goldstone is an impressive storyteller and this is a tale that was worth retelling
from the sisters’ perspective.
Reading, England
J. L. Laynesmith
Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy. By Samantha
Kahn Herrick. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 256.
$49.95.)
Assessing the historical value of medieval hagiography has engaged researchers for
more than three centuries. Miracle stories, reliance on topoi, and the fabrication
of events often rendered the sources suspicious. When applied to such texts, the
historical-critical method aimed to sift the paucity of fact from the abundance of
fiction. Yet the pursuit of “historical kernels” did not occur without an awareness
of what might be lost. Even some of the more “scientifically” minded researchers
sensed they were asking questions that hagiography, as religious literature glorifying saints and edifying the faithful, could hardly answer.
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As her introduction shows, Samantha Kahn Herrick knows these pitfalls. In
light of that knowledge, she asks questions that yield remarkable, far-reaching
results. The author focuses on three saints: Taurinus, Vigor, and Nicasius. All have
a murky past in the history of early Gallic Christianity, but they come to prominence during the eleventh century, within clearly demarcated geographical boundaries. Why did such obscure saints become so important in the 1020s and 1030s?
The author addresses this question at different levels of complexity. Her answers
will likely impress specialists in Norman history as well as thinkers exploring the
interconnectedness of medieval religion and society.
The study itself is tightly constructed, with the answers to highly specific
questions leading to broader and more probing observations. For example, determining the sources’ dates of composition becomes crucial for considering the
political function of the hagiographic corpus under investigation. She compellingly
argues that the lives of Taurinus, Vigor, and Nicasius “all appear to have enjoyed
marked attention at particular moments in the early eleventh century” (33). In
telling readers why they received such attention then, Herrick exposes the characteristics of a distinctive Norman hagiography, which she links to the political
aspirations of the dukes whose authority these literary productions legitimized
(115).
What follows the dating is fascinating, with the elaborate geographic, monastic,
and political ties explicated carefully and clearly. Each of the main texts receives
sustained treatment that uncovers the distinctive circumstances surrounding the
source’s function in specific locations. Impressive is the way the author creates an
interlocking explanation out of the most disparate kinds of evidence, including the
way the texts reflect their natural environment. The bike rides through the Norman
countryside that the author mentions served her well (x). Most readers would likely
miss the way this hagiography relates to rivers, islands, purification, and the Viking
raids (107). Such evidence, especially the depictions of religious conversion, shows
hagiographers turning to an obscure Christian past to make sense out of the
region’s violence and to justify ducal claims to political power.
What emerges, then, is a view of history. By placing the sources in various
contextual layers, Herrick captures hagiography appropriating a religious past to
validate, as part of a “divine plan,” the Norman present. She thus demonstrates
the potential saints’ lives offer contemporary historians, for the hagiographer’s
imaginative projections are rendered here as valuable to current historical knowledge as any “reliable” document might be.
University of Alberta
John Kitchen
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The Druids. By Ronald Hutton. (London, England: Continuum Books, 2007. Pp. xvi,
240. $29.95.)
Recent books about the Druids are generally either surveys of the ancient priestly
class of the Celts by notable archaeologists or discourses by New Age authors on
various aspects of modern druidic wisdom, including mysticism, nature lore, and
tips for improving one’s love life. This author’s new book on the Druids fits
neither category. Ronald Hutton has very little to say about Druids before the
modern era and indeed argues that “we can know virtually nothing of certainty
about the ancient Druids” (xi). Although this may be overstating the case, Hutton
chooses instead to focus on the history and practices of those who have identified
themselves as Druids in recent centuries. The result is a unique and engaging look
at modern druidic movements with a particular focus on the British Isles.
Rather than divide his book into chapters on different druidic organizations
or deal with the modern Druids chronologically, Hutton instead uses a thematic
approach. The first chapter, “The Patriotic Druids,” covers the history of Druids
as political leaders resisting foreign threats, from early British priests fighting the
Roman legions to modern Welsh dramatists resisting English cultural assimilation.
“The Wise Druids” details the colorful tradition of Druids as guardians of secret
wisdom and traces the dubious history of identifying megalithic monuments with
the Druids. “The Green Druids” covers the romantic notion of Druids possessing
a special relationship with the natural world, while “The Demonic Druids” traces
the literary tradition of Druids as practitioners of barbaric rites of human sacrifice
(e.g., the high camp of the 1973 film The Wicker Man). “The Fraternal Druids”
surveys the many modern organizations which have claimed, often with a wink,
that they continue the ancient and noble order of druidic priests while devoting
themselves more to drink and fellowship than religious rites. The final chapters
on “The Rebel Druids” and “The Future Druids” cover the appropriation of the
druidic legacy in political battles and the prospects for modern Druids in the
twenty-first century.
This book is written for a popular audience, though Hutton is planning a larger
volume on the same subject that may be more useful to serious scholars of modern
druidic movements. For readers interested in thorough studies of the Druids from
all eras, Stuart Piggott’s The Druids and Miranda Green’s The World of the Druids
both provide excellent overviews of the ancient Druids with final sections on
modern druidic movements. Nevertheless, Hutton’s current book will well serve
those interested in a brief and reliable introduction to Druids of modern times.
Luther College
Philip Freeman
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Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History. By Hugh F. Kearney. (New
York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 309. $39.00.)
This collection of reflections on nationalism in Ireland, Britain, and further afield
represents a record and summation of the evolving thought of the author—a
historian so deeply rooted in the English, Irish, and now American academies that
his fundamental originality and iconoclasm have sometimes been obscured. The
first two essays set the tone for the entire volume and signal the author’s determination to subject every tradition and interpretation to withering scrutiny. Some
will feel uncomfortable, and like Fr. John Ryan, SJ, leave the room (291).
In the opening essay, Hugh F. Kearney charts his own intellectual evolution
via Peterhouse (Cambridge); University College (Dublin); the Universities of
Manchester, Sussex, and Edinburgh; and most recently, the University of Pittsburgh. In the second, Kearney reviews the current state of scholarly writing about
nationalism in order to discover models and methods through which to understand the Irish experience. Kearney will not allow readers to sidestep comparisons
with other national experiences by invoking an Irish exceptionalism. Together
these two essays constitute an introduction, and the essays which follow are
divided into two sections—“Contested Ideas of Nationhood” and “Contested
Ideas of National History.”
Kearney is clearly influenced, but apparently not limited, by the work of
Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner. Missing in the work of
these scholars is a recognition of “the role played by individual decision making”
(31). An acknowledged influence on Kearney’s thinking is the work of Rogers
Brubaker whose 1992 Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
proposes contrasting models of civic and ethnic nationalism, a distinction that is
central to the author’s understanding of the course of modern Irish history.
One assertion likely to be particularly unpalatable concerns the claim that Irish
nationalism has frequently been dependent on British originals, and that “ethnoculturalists in Ireland followed the example of their counterparts in England”
(73). When it comes to the “Faith and Fatherland” paradigm of Irish nationalism,
so central to Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, Kearney exposes this as a construct that
emerged in the 1870s, particularly during the 1875 O’Connell centenary celebrations. Having recognized the achievement of Emmet Larkin in demonstrating the
central role of the Roman Catholic Church in the making of modern Ireland,
Kearney clearly sees the Catholic Church as one of the “groups who fought” over
the memory of O’Connell in the 1870s, and were thus “guilty of trying to use the
past for their own purposes” (94).
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Kearney’s sharpest barbs are reserved for Fr. Brendan Bradshaw, whose claims
that Catholicism provided the basis for a nationalist ideology from the 1570s are
shown to be far from “irresistible” (98). For Kearney, the problem with nationalist history is its need for a “total emotional commitment,” thus placing it in
polar opposition to academic history, which is open to “a variety of hypotheses”
(109).
Kearney is at his most pugnacious in the 1994 essay, “The Irish and Their
History.” Bradshaw is once again taken to task for apparently justifying the
dissemination of “bowdlerized history of a paternalist kind” on the grounds that
it represents a beneficent legacy (204, 205). Perhaps Kearney is incensed at the
attempt to appeal to his own former mentor, Herbert Butterfield, in order to create
an Irish version of the Whig interpretation of history.
In an essay on “Mercantilism and Ireland, 1620–1640,” Kearney criticizes the
tendency of some Irish historians to ascribe personality to England and Ireland,
rather than recognizing that these were “complex, articulated societies in which
different economic interests could create tension” (221). Such anthropomorphism
together with the tendency to see English policy as always motivated by “calculated Machiavellianism” is “superfluous” to say the least.
This varied collection of Hugh Kearney’s ruminations on Irish history and the
troubled course of Irish historical writing will shed much light—and perhaps also
some heat.
Texas A&M University
David Hudson
National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. By Joep Leerssen. (Amsterdam, The
Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Pp. 304. $32.50.)
This is a fascinating and erudite account of national images. The author does
not engage in debates about the modernity of nations or nationalism, or treat
“ethnics” as a stock of myths and memories transmitted across generations.
Rather he inquires into how images of one’s own and other nations are formed
and change over time.
Joep Leerssen argues that up to 1800 these were elite conceptions. In “Source
Traditions 1200–1800,” he argues that medieval stereotypes of self and others in
other terms, for example barbarians versus civilized, were more important than
national ones. The influence of Tacitus is considered as well as how terms such
as Germania, Belgae, and Batavians acquired significance. National stereotyping
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe deploys notions such as the four
humors to classify national character. “Character” shifts from meaning external
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conduct to inner state or disposition. Writers then seek explanations, from climate
and social circumstances (Montesquieu, Hume) to national spirit (Rousseau,
Herder, Fichte).
The section “The Politics of the Nation” is a more standard account of the
historicizing of humanities disciplines to envisage a Europe of nations. Leerssen
considers how this idea plays out within states assumed to be national and uses
it to justify projects of unification or separation. However, what is now an
intellectual rather than cultural history is detached from power and accounts of
how and why such ideas become popular. National ideas, politics, and popular
culture combined in different ways in “national” states like Britain and France.
The politics of unification in the German and Italian lands have arguably little
popular resonance and use national ideas more diverse than those considered here.
Leerssen then considers the rise of new components of the national idea such
as race. However, this reviewer disputes that this constitutes a “rightward” shift
in nationalism. Ideas of the nation as democratic and chosen also become more
important, for example with socialist appropriations of national values.
The third section, “Identity Rampant,” deals with a world of nation-states in
which public culture is “nationalized” and governments pursue nationalist policies against each other and internal minorities. The problem is how far this is a
broadening out of prior national traditions or a selection or transformation from
more diverse themes to suit the interests of new states. That has implications for
debates over possible shift from ethnonationalism to the “civic” state, which
Leerssen advocates in a concluding section. There is also an invaluable appendix
on the politics of language.
The opening part of the book relates images to ways of seeing the world,
especially on the period c. 1600–1800. However, the account then shifts from
“images” to “ideas,” from cultural to intellectual history, with connections to
power and popular culture and sentiments assumed rather than demonstrated.
The significance and originality of this book lies in its wide-ranging consideration
of images of national self and other, linked to culture and mentality, and this
works better for the earlier than the later period.
London School of Economics
John Breuilly
Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c. 1067–1137). By Kimberly A. LoPrete. (Dublin,
Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2007. Pp. 663. $95.00.)
In this impressive tome, the author utilizes a vast array of sources, many of them
previously unknown to scholars, to provide a detailed narrative of the events
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that transpired in the Anglo-Norman realm of the late eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, a pivotal period in the evolution of the feudal kingdoms of England
and France that would ultimately dominate the High Middle Ages. Kimberly A.
LoPrete assesses significant political developments that occurred during this
transformative period from the perspective of the counts of Blois-Chartres, positioning the enigmatic Adela at the center. The daughter of William I of England,
wife of count Stephen-Henry of Blois, and mother of King Stephen of England,
Adela was an active political player in her own right for more than six decades,
drawing upon familial connections when necessary to consolidate her marital
family’s position vis-á-vis the other feudal powers of the region. Until her retirement to the abbey of Marcigny in 1120, Adela tirelessly worked to promote the
Thibaudians through a masterful combination of diplomatic savvy and military
might.
By assessing events on the continent from the perspective of Adela and her
Thibaudian kin, LoPrete is able to provide a more detailed and accurate understanding of key political developments of the period. Events during this period
are typically viewed from the vantage point of either the kingdoms of England
or France. LoPrete offers an alternative view of these political developments, one
that integrates a number of key regional feudal powers involved, including the
Thibaudians, providing a more complex and inclusive history. LoPrete portrays
Adela as particularly adept at balancing her family’s alliance with the AngloNormans (especially after the ascension of her brother Henry to the English
throne) while continuing to maintain good relations with the Capetians.
Throughout the period, the counts of Blois-Charters found themselves forced to
jockey for position with a number of other aspiring regional feudal powers, most
notably the dukes of Normandy. Adela’s success in these endeavors is reflected
in the ability of the later Thibaudians to emerge as one of the most powerful
comital families in France.
Assessing events from a Thibaudian perspective also expands the available
primary sources, which LoPrete mines exhaustively. Although her knowledge of
the secondary material allows her to engage in frequent historiographical debates,
her familiarity with primary documents provides the foundation for the historical
narrative. Her survey and analysis of political events across discrete chronological
segments is based primarily on charters and letters, supplemented by chronicles
(both monastic and secular) and commentaries when possible. All of these sources
are carefully evaluated in regards to the context within which they were produced,
resulting in an interpretation that accounts for a myriad of influences and agendas
that may cloud the presentation of events and individuals. Ultimately, these
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sources allow LoPrete to untangle the complex web of relations, both local and
regional, within which the Thibaudian counts were enmeshed, and which Adela
so ably navigated.
In addition to exploring the experience of Adela and measuring the extent of
her political agency, LoPrete’s familiarity with extant documents allows her to
challenge current historiography. She takes issue with studies that assume that the
position of the counts of Blois-Charters in the eleventh century was the same as
that in later centuries, significantly underestimating their importance and influence in the formative decades of Capetian rule. Such studies also interpret the
relationship between the Thibaudians and the kings of France and England in the
twelfth century as predetermined, rather than as the outcome of careful maneuvering on the part of the eleventh century counts and countess. Through her
careful use of primary documents and her facility with the secondary literature,
LoPrete suggests a more complex understanding of Thibaudian strategy in these
years, using Adela as a fulcrum to explore their multifaceted approach to consolidating their position and establishing control over their scattered domains.
Although LoPrete never loses sight of the fact that Adela was first and foremost
a woman, she is able to explore the full range of her agency as a powerful lord in
a pivotal period of history. The extent to which Adela’s gender impacted her
ability to maneuver in a world otherwise dominated by men raises important
questions about our understanding of politics and gender in the High Middle
Ages. What is perhaps most striking about the portraits of Adela that emerges here
is the absence of any strong indication that her actions were overtly constrained
by perceptions of gender. Although Adela does engage in certain activities (such as
arranging marriages) uniquely associated with members of her sex, other than her
inability to lead men into battle, her actions are typical of those of a lord, male or
female. The experience of Adela challenges the assumption that noble women
functioned merely to transmit power from one generation of males to another.
Not only was Adela a strong political presence during her husband’s lifetime, but
also she continued to direct the family’s interests until well after her eldest son
reached the age of majority, refusing to relinquish power until she was in her early
fifties and an opportune moment presented itself. As LoPrete so aptly demonstrates, in the case of Adela, gender was clearly secondary to social status in
determining one’s ability to access and wield political power.
LoPrete not only presents a new, and more expansive, interpretation of events
as they transpired in northern Europe during the decades preceding the ascendancy of the Capetians under Philip II, but she provides an invaluable source for
future scholars. LoPrete’s careful reading of archival sources enables her to set the
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record straight regarding a number of current historiographical disputes, and her
appendix makes a number of key charters accessible to scholars for the first time.
She also provides valuable information about the complex cast of characters that
inhabited the world of Adela, both in the text and in the number of genealogical
charts included. In her familiarity with the relevant sources, both primary and
secondary, LoPrete has laid the groundwork on which historians can build and
has made it virtually impossible for future scholars to ignore the role played by the
counties of Blois, Chartres, and Champagne (and other counties) in the political
evolution of medieval France.
University of Northern Colorado
Erin Jordan
Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia. By
Gary Marker. (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 309.
$42.00.)
Scholarship on Russia in the eighteenth century has tended to stress discontinuities
from the past. In the master narrative, Peter the Great transformed Russia’s
intellectual and governmental elite, rejecting Muscovite traditionalism and religiosity and substituting western rationalism. However, a number of recent scholars
have advanced a cogent alternative reading, documenting continuities between
Muscovite and Imperial culture. This author is among them.
In this book, Gary Marker undertakes an explanation of one of the most
striking innovations in Russian political culture in the eighteenth century: the
advent of female rule. Catherine I, Peter the Great’s second wife, imperial consort,
and successor, was Russia’s first female monarch. Further, Catherine I ushered in
a century dominated by empresses: Anna, Elizabeth, and finally her namesake,
Catherine II (the Great). Marker is less concerned with why Peter’s court circle
decided upon his widow, Catherine, as the heir of choice; despite her foreign and
plebeian background, there were no politically attractive alternatives. Instead,
Marker focuses on “the state’s appropriation and redeployment of symbols of
sacralization on behalf of its modernizing and secularizing agendas” (155).
Although St. Catherine provides the organizing theme, Marker examines a wide
range of religious topoi that were put to political use in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Russia.
In the first half of the book, Marker traces the deep roots of the cult of St.
Catherine, which he presents as the primary vehicle for inspiring confidence in
female rule. St. Catherine was an early Christian martyr who, according to the
legends that developed in Eastern and Western Christendom, was marked by her
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mastery of secular learning, her purity of faith, and her mystical marriage to
Christ. In seventeenth-century Muscovy, St. Catherine became emblematic of the
pious virtue of Romanov imperial women. In the second half of the book, Marker
documents how Peter and his churchmen deliberately fused the images of
Catherine-the-saint and Catherine-the-empress. But far from dismissing religious
language as a superficial façade for secular power, Marker presents it as a richly
nuanced system of symbols that legitimized earthly authority. He draws upon a
myriad of little-known published and unpublished sources—particularly hagiography, sermons, liturgies, and accounts of ceremonies—all placed within their
complex historiographical contexts.
Marker’s book, then, is a pioneering study of religious culture and ideology
of Russia, rather than a familiar reiteration of court politics. His text presumes
familiarity with the details of early modern Russia’s narrative history, though, so
despite Marker’s hope (as enunciated in the preface) to use common questions
of political theology to bridge the chasm between Russianists and Western
Europeanists, the latter may (unfortunately) be deterred. For Russianists,
however, Marker’s work should inspire a serious reconsideration not only of
Catherine I and her female successors, but also of the Petrine era as a whole.
University of Kansas
Eve Levin
The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport. By Fik Meijer. Translated by Liz Waters.
(New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007. Pp. xvii, 266. $14.95.)
In this English translation of a work first published in Dutch in the Netherlands
in 2003, the author suggests that the gladiator mania and the supposed “lust for
blood” of ancient Rome has parallels, in various virtual and brutal forms, in
modern society, and that “we are closer to the gladiatorial shows than we might
admit” (12).
Aiming to detail the realities of the phenomenon of gladiatorial and beast
combats over several centuries, Fik Meijer explains the possible origins and early
history of shows, the background, training, life expectancy, and “love life” of
gladiators; the architectural settings; the sequence of events in the arena; purchase
prices of gladiators and animals; and later opposition and decline (68). Drawing
on a wealth of information from relevant scholarship, ancient authors from
Martial to St. Augustine, and physical evidence from mosaics and equipment to
inscriptions and tombstones, the author investigates the allure of combat for
fighters and viewers, and the political wisdom of emperors in providing but
controlling the shows of the arena. Quite properly, he clarifies that gladiatorial
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combats were well-organized duels—not mass murderous mayhem and not
always to the death, where other victims, condemned convicts, and exotic beasts
faced certain brutal death.
After a brief introduction, eight chapters cover the early history of the combats,
the recruitment, preparation, equipment, fighting styles, and daily life of gladiators, the architecture of amphitheaters (including construction techniques and
dimensions), the beast spectacles, a speculative reconstruction of “a day at the
Colosseum,” staged sea battles (naumachiae), the burial or disposal of corpses and
carcasses, the decline of gladiatorial shows, the later history of the Colosseum,
and a discussion of gladiator films, which ranks Spartacus above Gladiator for
historical accuracy concerning arena combats. Meijer closes with an epilogue
suggesting that he himself “would not have been capable of resisting the appeal of
the Colosseum” (235). Meijer’s lively and informal style and over fifty black and
white illustrations of settings and combats suggest a very broad popular audience,
but his work perhaps invites classroom use by including a chronology, glossary,
list of amphitheaters, notes, bibliography [to 2001], and index.
Reminiscent of Michael Grant’s Gladiators [1967] or Roland Auguet’s Cruelty
and Civilization [1972], The Gladiators is not very profound or original, but it
is a provocative and quick read. Neither the first nor the last such book, it offers
an energetic, economical, sound, and clear synthesis of scholarship on a topic of
enduring fascination.
University of Texas at Arlington
Donald G. Kyle
The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War. By Philip
Morgan. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 263. $29.95.)
This fine monograph does much more than describe the end of Mussolini’s regime.
It asks why Italians remember the war the way that they do, emphasizing the
brutality of the German occupation and the victimization of Italians rather than
memorializing the victims of Italy’s 1940 to 1943 war of aggression. In casting
about for an answer, Philip Morgan’s social history concentrates on the lives of
ordinary Italians and their testimony about their experiences in the war. He writes
of the gradual deterioration of their living standards during the war, the increasing
threat of Allied and German occupation, and the resulting erosion of Italians’
support for Mussolini’s war and regime. After the overlapping palace coups that
removed Mussolini from power, the Badoglio government botched its attempt to
withdraw from the war, leading to dual occupations, with the United Nations in
the South and the Germans in the North. This situation set off a series of civil and
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425
resistance wars, and Italians had to determine how to respond in order to survive.
No one could be passive, simply awaiting events. Some chose active resistance and
some collaboration, but more did what was necessary from day to day, collaborating one day and perhaps resisting the next.
Morgan’s book contains little new research, but it brings Italians’ testimony to
an English audience largely unaware of Italians’ harrowing experiences during the
last years of the war. Morgan writes ably, telling their stories in effective language
and without pathos. His use of evidence is judicious, and he reaches reasonable
conclusions. Italians have good reason to forget the unpleasant activities of their
governments and good reason to forget their compatriots’ often ambivalent
responses to the wartime challenges that they faced.
The Fall of Mussolini has some flaws. First, Morgan generally reserves the
use of endnotes only for citing the source of quotations. Given that this book
is not based on his own archival research, it seems unusual not to cite his debts
to other historians’ prior work, and it seems a doubly odd choice in a book
produced by a university press. Second, the book’s organization is unusual. It
starts with Mussolini’s fall, backtracks to 1940 through 1943 to discuss the
reasons for the collapse of the fascist regime, then jumps to the forty-five days
of Badoglio’s regime and the armistice, and then forward to cover the occupations and civil wars in both the north and the south. The last chapter—on the
second fall of Mussolini—deals with postwar purges before backtracking to
deal with Mussolini’s death in April 1945. This reviewer thinks that a more
straightforward structure, dealing with thematic chapters building towards a
conclusion while maintaining some concession to chronology, would have
served Morgan better. The reviewer can imagine many undergraduates struggling with the author’s structural choices and sees no compensatory benefit
from the current approach. Third, and most importantly, the book’s cover, with
its abbreviated title and photograph of a stern looking Mussolini, is rather
misleading. This book is not primarily about Mussolini or either of his falls
from power. Mussolini appears in the first chapter, largely disappears from the
book, and only reappears for a four-page denouement on page 223. The title
understates this book’s real importance as an effective and often compelling
account of ordinary Italians and their lives during the war and as a meditation
on history and memory. A different title and cover art could better advertise the
book and its genuine accomplishments.
These criticisms do not outweigh the real strengths of this monograph. Morgan
tells the Italians’ story well, highlighting the tremendous complexity of their
responses to fascism, occupation, and the resistance. The reviewer very much
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appreciates that his book brings their testimony and their story to an English
audience, and his discussion of historical memory and politicians’ uses and abuses
of history is a welcome caution for his audience.
Lakehead University
G. Bruce Strang
Communists and British Society 1920–1991. By Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen, and
Andrew Flinn. (Chicago, Ill.: Rivers Oram Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 356. $25.95.)
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was formed in 1920 as an affiliate
of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern). It was dissolved in
1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It never attained great heights of
power. It never had more than two members of parliament at any one time (and
none after 1950). Its membership never reached sixty thousand, and peaked at
the height of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union in World War II. This very lack of
success has, however, fascinated numerous historians, and, with the opening of
archives from the early 1990s onwards, new opportunities for its study have
opened up.
Much of this new interest has focused on the party’s development over time,
and especially its high politics and relations with Moscow, but there were
always other research possibilities, and some of them are developed in this
volume with considerable success by three British historians, Kevin Morgan,
Gidon Cohen, and Andrew Flinn. The product of a major prosopographical
project, it makes use of more than three thousand autobiographical questionnaires completed by members, as well as over a hundred interviews with former
party members. And, in combining these unique sources with a deep knowledge
of the archival record and a very thorough grounding in the wider literature on
Communist parties the world over, the authors offer a brilliantly illuminated
insight into what it meant to be a Communist, and how this changed—or did
not change—over time. Rather than treat the subject chronologically, the book
focuses on a number of themes: how far the party was of “a new type”; the
nature of the party as a community or collection of communities within it; cults
of leadership; gender and party membership; national and international identities; and career and life “trajectories.”
In a short review it is not possible to do full justice to the book’s texture and
nuance, but all the chapters are full of insights and new perspectives, and it is
fitting that it should be dedicated to that most sensitive of historians of Communist milieux, Raphael Samuel. The chapter on cults of leadership was particularly
impressive to this reviewer. It focuses, obviously, on Lenin, Stalin, and Dimitrov,
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but it also asks penetrating questions about attitudes toward leadership more
generally. The book, by its nature, cannot offer any kind of definitive view of why
people did or did not become or remain Communists; indeed, its willingness to
leave loose ends untied is one of its most attractive features. Nonetheless, it goes
a long way towards explaining why British Communism attracted some and
repelled many more, and it raises a very high bar for subsequent works to try to
surmount. The final irony, perhaps even perversity, is that Morgan, Cohen, and
Flinn offer a far deeper insight into the lives and beliefs of ordinary Communists
in their historical setting than is available for members of the far larger Conservative, Labour, or Liberal Parties in the same period. If nothing else, Communists
knew how to keep good records.
University of Exeter
Andrew Thorpe
Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage. By Anka Muhlstein. Translated
by John Brownjohn. (London, England: Haus Publishing, 2007. Pp. 408. $26.95.)
The author of this study is not the first biographer to bring Elizabeth I and Mary
Stuart together, but her study of these queens applies a specific lens to the
enterprise: the negotiation and influence of marriage on their lives and reigns.
Beginning with the question of how marriage “affected queens regnant in the age
of absolute monarchies,” Anka Muhlstein proceeds to explore how marriage
affected Elizabeth and Mary from their earliest years as young princesses through
the constant pressures to find appropriate husbands amidst political and religious
rivalries (1). Elizabeth never married, and Muhlstein’s central argument is that
Elizabeth’s ability to navigate her long reign as an unmarried queen is a result, in
large part, of her witnessing the mistakes and misfortunes of the marriages
surrounding her, particularly those of her cousin Mary, who was betrothed in the
cradle and married no less than three times.
A major task for any biographer of Mary Stuart is to unpack the disastrous
three-month period following the murder of Mary’s second husband, the roundly
unpopular Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Mary could not avoid being implicated in
Darnley’s murder, but the extent to which Mary was an agent in what has become
known as the “Bothwell Plot” is more difficult to unravel. Muhlstein explains the
difficulty in picking up a unifying strand of evidence in the discordant events
surrounding Darnley’s murder and Mary’s marriage to James Hepburn, Earl of
Bothwell: “We reconstruct; we reflect on psychological data that are merely
hypotheses because the incessant upheavals that occurred in the relations between
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the various actors give rise to a troublesome discontinuity that thwarts all our
efforts to discern some method in their doings” (139).
Ultimately, Muhlstein situates herself in familiar territory. Like other recent
biographers of Mary Stuart, such as Jenny Wormald, Muhlstein interprets Mary’s
“demented” behavior during the Bothwell episode without painting her as the
easily manipulated victim of the more powerful political forces swirling about her.
She writes, “Cynics, of whom the present author is one, think the worst: that
Mary and her loyalists had concluded a pact” (134). On the question of Mary’s
guilt, Muhlstein suggests Mary’s complicity in both Darnley’s assassination and
her marriage to Bothwell. In contrast, Retha M. Warnicke casts Mary more clearly
as Bothwell’s unwilling victim, arguing that Mary was not only raped by Bothwell, but also abducted and held as his captive until their marriage. Between
Muhlstein and Wormald on one hand and Warnicke on the other is Susan Doran,
who doubts Mary colluded in the abduction, although she concedes that the rape
is much more difficult to prove.
Despite the fact that Muhlstein refuses to romanticize Mary, she does not treat
her unsympathetically. Muhlstein posits that Mary’s ardor for Bothwell may have
been born out of an awakened desire understandable in a woman whose previous
marriages provided little sensual fulfillment. Mary is ultimately most sympathetic
in moments of extreme crisis, paradoxically, when she seems most able to rise to
the level of majesty. Such an example is found in the moments immediately
following the assassination of David Riccio, when Mary’s “[s]peed, daring and a
vigour remarkable for a woman in her [pregnant] condition had won the day”
(125).
Muhlstein is careful to avoid easy dichotomies by refusing to cast either queen
as antagonist, although early in the text Elizabeth emerges as the more traditional
heroine, partly because her character is given more time to develop through the
reigns of her father as well as her younger brother, Edward, and older sister, Mary.
By nature of her long life and reign, Elizabeth’s narrative stretches for three
chapters beyond Mary’s execution. Because of this framework, Elizabeth gets the
last word, so to speak, in Muhlstein’s text.
If Elizabeth is this book’s heroine, she earns the title through reflection.
Muhlstein’s inquiry illustrates that Elizabeth, like her cousin, often kept her
most intimate feelings guarded, even from her closest associates. In presenting the lives of these two queens, the disparity is in unpacking the chaos of
Mary’s marriages while Elizabeth’s deft maneuvers around marriage form a
less elusive pattern. Where the motivations behind Mary’s actions are ambiguous, Muhlstein more easily traces Elizabeth’s actions (or inaction) back to her
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observance of the real dangers inflicted by matrimony. What is clear is that
neither queen could be easily intimidated by the question of marriage. Muhlstein’s book is engaging and well written and should appeal to a wide audience.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Amber Harris Leichner and Carole Levin
Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Film. By Chloe Paver.
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. vi, 174. $74.00.)
Studies of the cultural meanings of the Third Reich are becoming increasingly
common in considerations of German history and identity. The author of this
book seeks to move beyond ascertaining a canon of texts on Nazi Germany,
providing snapshots of significant themes in the postwar representations of individual and collective behaviors under dictatorship and their ability to shed light
on the complex process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Chloe Paver offers new
perspectives on Verhoeven’s Das Schreckliche Mädchen and Schlink’s Der Vorleser and original analyses of the documentary form; the effect of accent, language, and sound; and memorialization through a thought-provoking discussion
of the commemorative spaces at Mauthausen and Ebensee.
Paver does not draw on an extensive body of traditional empirical and contextual materials and does not openly engage with the dominant debates in
contemporary historiography of Nazi Germany. But this is not her intention, and
she acknowledges that in order to “gauge the general validity of [her] interpretations of historical evidence [she] would have to test them out on a much bigger
corpus of material from the Third Reich and against established disciplinary
criteria.” Rather, she sees texts as a means by which to “formulate the kind of
questions we would need to pose of that material in order to understand . . . status
and room for manouevre in the Third Reich” (59). Paver is right to emphasize the
value of reading cultural texts and spaces to provide an alternative framework for
analyzing the meaning of National Socialism and its effect on the national conscience. Her examination of remembering the victims, for example, brings into
sharp focus the fact that history is often written by those who have representation.
As Paver notes, whilst the “asocial” cause has the potential to attract a group
willing to “fight for recognition, . . . it is less easy to see who might take up the
commemorative cause of the ‘Criminals,’ but growing interest in the National
Socialist justice system . . . may lead to a greater public awareness of their experience” (127). It is this interface between cultural, scholarly, and public discourses
that lies at the heart of Paver’s study.
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Although not explicit, the connections to current historiography are evident
throughout Paver’s work, notably in the reconstruction of conceptions of complicity, guilt, identity, gender, and representation, all of which are at the forefront
of current historical research into the inner workings of the Reich and the postwar
attempt to come to terms with the past. Equally, her commentary on the nature of
courses is also illuminating to the historian, because she draws attention to the
placing of artifacts in public spaces and, in particular, the way in which they can
be read. Readers should not imagine, she argues in relation to the exhibition at
Schloss Hartheim—the site of the notorious “euthanasia” program—that historical evidence is “static”: how visitors react to its objects can “highlight discrepancies between a museum’s script and its performance” (136). Paver’s study is a
timely reminder, therefore, that interdisciplinary perspectives can provide debate
and new ways of thinking about the past.
Durham University
Joanne Fox
Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence. By Patricia Lee Rubin. (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 418. $60.00.)
The author of this interdisciplinary study of fifteenth-century Florence is an art
historian. She writes in the preface of Images and Identity that she is “one among
a number of art historians interested in examining the ways that form, style and
subject matter might be related to specific social, political and institutional contexts” (xi). To this ambitious objective, Patricia Lee Rubin brings a comprehensive
knowledge of Florentine history in the quattrocento together with the insights and
perspectives gleaned from a professional lifetime dedicated to the study of “a time
and place that made beauty a defining and definitive social value” (xix).
In the book’s first section, “Moral Imperatives and Material Considerations,”
the author describes the social and cultural context of the works of fifteenthcentury Florentine artists. She stresses in particular the universal desire for honor
through display and the ethical justification for that “necessary” expenditure by
citing humanist texts that were being circulated. In chapter three, “The Economy
of Honor,” she argues that painters, sculptors, smiths, and architects were striving
to achieve honor through their talents, but that as a professional category, they did
not achieve either the wealth or status of Florence’s social and political elite. For
example, Donatello achieved fame and enjoyed the patronage of Cosimo de’
Medici, but he died in poverty. Cosimo did arrange for his burial in the Medici
family church of San Lorenzo.
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In part two, “The Eye and the Beholder,” Rubin examines visual experience in
quattrocentro Florence, exploring “the attitudes and assumptions that form the
context for the visual sensitivity that characterizes the artistic production of the
city” (xv). Chapter four, “Seeing and Being Seen,” is a compendium of references
to modes of seeing by prominent authors (Alberti, Landino, Lorenzo de’ Medici)
and by such major artists as Masaccio, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli. She acknowledges the contribution to this topic by Michael
Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Renaissance Italy [1972], although she
suggests that his influential book requires revision and elaboration. In the fifth
chapter, Rubin analyzes Dante’s visual reaction (in Purgatory, canto X) to a series
of sculptures of religious themes, a description that influenced a number of
Renaissance authors and artists. In part three, “Seeing and Being,” Rubin
describes how Florentine artists created images that motivated viewers to reaffirm
their Christian faith, and their identity in a fluid society.
Images and Identity is an important contribution to the historiography of
Renaissance Florence. Most impressive is the clarity and precision with which the
author describes her objectives, her methodology, and her conclusions. The bibliographical notes testify to the range of her reading, and the hundreds of superb
illustrations provide the visual background to her analysis.
University of California, Berkeley
Gene Brucker
Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor; Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. By Ulf
Schmidt. (London, England: Hambledon Continuum, 2007, Pp. xvi, 462. $29.95.)
Many historians are wary of biography, but this author’s study of Karl Brandt
ought to challenge suspicions about this genre of history. This biography of the
doctor who began his ascent in the hierarchy of the Third Reich as Adolf Hitler’s
escort physician and ended up on trial as a war criminal offers insight into
personal relations as well as the power dynamics within Hitler’s inner circle. The
dearth of literature on figures in the second and third tiers of leadership is a serious
gap in the voluminous literature on Nazi Germany; this volume contributes to the
filling of that gap.
A difficulty facing the historian studying these lesser figures is the limited
documentary base, which is ironic given the vast ocean of documents surviving
from the Nazi era. Ulf Schmidt has cast his nets broadly, drawing from conventional and unconventional sources. He effectively uses Brandt’s own words,
including his Nuremberg diary, trial notebook, interrogation, and trial transcripts,
as well as the words of others in his search for fuller understanding of Brandt and
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the Nazi administrative system. During the postwar interrogation and trial Brandt
sought to evade and to dissemble, repeatedly understating his role in the Nazi
hierarchy. Schmidt critically evaluates Brandt’s words to distinguish truth from
distortion, presenting a man who actively and successfully sought and exercised
power. By the end of 1943, he had become the supreme medical authority in the
Third Reich. But Schmidt acknowledges the limits of his documentation. Where
the record is incomplete, he engages in informed speculation, laying out various
possible scenarios and offering “likely” or probable explanations.
An unconventional source is photographs from the archives of Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. This visual record repeatedly demonstrates
Brandt’s proximity to Hitler at important moments and, although the photographs cannot tell what was said or decided, the combination of the photographs
with other sources demonstrate that Brandt was far from the peripheral figure or
the medical man he sought to portray after the war. These photographs complement the conventional sources.
Schmidt uses Brandt’s story to illustrate how power was gained and used in the
Third Reich. “Hitler’s personalized and amateurish style of government . . . was
almost totally devoid of any systematic and rational form of governance” (205–6).
One key to power rested in access to Hitler. Other historians have emphasized the
importance of access, but here is an effective case study of access parlayed into
power. Brandt actually drafted for Hitler’s signature directives that increased his
own power and authority. Part of his expanded role in the Third Reich included
the so-called euthanasia program and the revival of the killing of incurable and
mentally ill patients later in the war to make bed space for the tens of thousands
of wounded soldiers and civilians.
This is a fine study, marred only by a tendency to state and restate the same
point time and again. Schmidt’s readers benefit from this study of one man and the
administration of the Third Reich.
Hanover College
Larry Thornton
The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837. Edited by Brendan Simms
and Torsten Riotte. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Pp. xi, 337. $105.00.)
This elegantly produced volume of thirteen essays stems from papers given at
a 2004 Peterhouse colloquium that have been appropriately revised, expanded,
and organized by the German Historical Institute in London and the Centre for
International Studies at the University of Cambridge. The essays in general are so
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insightful that it seems invidious to highlight in this review only those few whose
theses were particularly revelatory or meaningful to one reviewer. Jeremy Black,
fresh from his magisterial biography of George III, which firmly located the third
Hanoverian ruler in the German political scene, reiterates here that Britain,
despite the Protestant succession, did not follow a Protestant foreign policy
after 1714. He also finds more coherence and stability in Pitt the Elder’s overall
Hanoverian policy than is normally allowed. Torsten Riotte, in his article on
George III and Hanover, offers an even more detailed analysis than Black’s book
did on George’s separation of his electoral role from British foreign policy aims in
the empire. Riotte also stresses the independence of George III’s Hanoverian
ministers. In 1801, for example, they even suggested that Hanover join the
anti-British alliance! Christopher Thompson challenges the orthodox viewpoint
that the new Hanoverian kingdom meant little to British sovereigns or ministers
after 1815. Thomas Biskup offers a pathbreaking analysis of the crucial post-1737
scientific and cultural ties between Oxbridge and the Royal Society with the
University of Göttingen. Andrew Thompson’s sensitive article on the confessional
dimensions of British-Hanoverian relations only whets the appetite for his forthcoming biography in the Yale English Monarchs Series of that much-neglected
monarch, George II. Hamish Scott examines the Personal Union through the
eyes of French foreign policy and military experts, and emphasizes the degree to
which their British counterparts overplayed any French desire to occupy and
hold Hanover. Clarissa Campbell Orr discusses the intricate royal British-German
interactions implicit in the Personal Union and in the process continues her
important study of the dynastic and cultural influence of George III’s consort,
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Running through many of the essays, perhaps not surprisingly, is an insistence
on the overriding historical importance of the Personal Union and an attack on
those modern British historians who downplay or ignore this factor of the long
eighteenth century. Norman Gash, Christopher Hibbert, E. A. Smith, Philip
Ziegler, Roy Porter, Jonathan Clark, and, especially, Linda Colley—both in her
role as an early Tory historian and as a theorist of British national identity—come
in for quite a drubbing. Sometimes, however, this Hanoverphilia becomes overwrought as when Christopher Thompson suggests that only the Hanoverian
connection prevented a “complete apotheosis of the royal family as the embodiment of British identity” (90). In an age that featured Butcher Cumberland, Queen
Caroline Matilda, George IV, Queen Caroline of Brunswick, Mrs. Clarke, and the
Duke of Cumberland’s valet, such special pleading seems excessive. Also, the royal
commemorations of August 1814 in London’s parks did not exactly celebrate the
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centenary of the Personal Union, as Brendan Simms would have it, but the
accession of the House of Hanover to the British throne, which is not quite the
same thing.
Finally, Mijndert Bertram engages in some interesting counterfactuals when he
speculates that if the Personal Union had not been broken in 1837, Prussia would
never have dared annex Hanover in 1866, and the World Wars of the 1914–1945
period would never have happened!
University of Illinois at Chicago
James J. Sack
The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany. By
Jonathan Zatlin. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii,
377. $75.00.)
As a student living in East Germany, this reviewer’s idée fixe about the problems it
faced realizing communist utopian ideals was that one could not simply transplant
a nineteenth-century Marxist ideology onto a modern consumer society. This
proved to be an even more difficult task in a country like East Germany that had a
strong capitalistic consumer-oriented Western neighbor with the same cultural
traditions and history. Of course, economic historians present more complex
analyses of such societies, emphasizing prices and the limits of planned economies.
In this detailed research monograph, Jonathan Zatlin offers a refreshingly
different approach to analyzing the failures of the East German economic experiment by replacing the prices explanation with one focusing on the leadership’s
attitude toward money. He argues that it was the regime’s antipathy toward
money that led to a dysfunctional economy. Further, it even attempted to create a
new society of “inexhaustible plenty and limitless good by eliminating money”
(3). This more philosophical approach presents an alternative backdrop to an
analysis of production and consumption.
The first part of the book (“Production”) is an economic and political history
of the Eric Honecker period [1971–1989]. After an introductory chapter on
monetary theory and economic planning in East Germany, Zatlin turns to three
chapters on the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) material debt to West
Germany and the growing influence of the sycophantic, disliked Günter Mittag.
The author likely pays scant attention to the founding years when the philosophical basis for the antipathy toward money was forged because of the absence of
sources. For it is clear from the book’s weighty footnotes that it is thoroughly
researched in the Communist Party archives and well documented using the
relevant literature.
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The second half of the book focuses on money as a cultural category and
desired consumer goods like the automobile and items from the Intershops. Zatlin
closes the book with a chapter on letters of complaint about East Germany’s
inability to satisfy consumer desires and an epilogue on German unification.
Although beyond the scope of the volume, a comparative analysis with the Soviet
Union and other Eastern-Bloc countries may have illuminated the peculiarities of
the East German experience.
The author is best when he illustrates abstract concepts with specific stories.
The most memorable and emblematic story the author has dug up is East Germany’s attempt to bottle and sell the Western-trademarked Pepsi-Cola. Typically,
the GDR ended up reneging on the contract and used the bottles to sell beer and
not Pepsi.
The Currency of Socialism will appeal to specialists in GDR history and offers
a richly documented alternative to traditional accounts about the failures of the
East German economy. Paradoxically, money was never eliminated, but rather
East Germans’ desire for Western consumer goods led to a quest for hard currency.
In a globally interdependent world, the bankrupt economy also became increasingly dependent on the West in other areas like modern technology to keep the
society functioning. Finally, instead of continuing to import goods from the West,
East Germany became part of it through unification.
Michigan State University
Kristie Macrakis
GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL
Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. By Cecil
D. Eby. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. xv,
510. $39.95.)
On 17 July 1936, the Spanish military revolted against the legally elected centerleft Republican government. While Hitler and Mussolini backed the insurgents,
the Soviet Union provided military aid and promoted the recruitment of over
thirty-five thousand volunteers to join what became known as the International
Brigades to assist the Republican government in the fight against its fascist
foes.
From the onset of hostilities, a debate has raged over the place of the Spanish
Civil War in U.S. history. Many see the struggle of the Spanish Republic against
its enemies as part of the global fight against exploitation, and they hold the
appeasement policies pursued by the U.S. along with other Western democracies
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responsible for the defeat of the Republic and for encouraging further Fascist
aggression. Others, including Cecil D. Eby, dismiss Moscow’s intervention in the
conflict and its decision to recruit international volunteers, including 2,800 Americans, as an expression of Stalin’s global expansionist designs. The work most cited
as evidence of Moscow’s nefarious designs over Spain is George Orwell’s Homage
to Catalonia [1938], in which he accused Soviet agents of crushing the antiStalinist and anarchist movement in Barcelona in 1937. The Barcelona events, as
described by Orwell, provide a common foundation for the interpretations offered
by anti-Soviet leftists and conservatives. Although the first group claims that
Soviet-inspired repression of the anti-Stalinist forces undermined popular support
for the Republic, the second sees it as proof that a Republican victory would have
turned Spain into a satellite of the Soviet Union.
Significantly those who use Homage to Catalonia as the centerpiece of their
interpretation ignore Orwell’s later writings on the subject. In 1943, with Hitler
in control over continental Europe, Orwell revised his earlier assessment of the
reasons for the fall of the Spanish Republic in an essay titled “Looking Back on
the Spanish War.” This time, rather than blaming Communists and Moscow for
the defeat of the Republic, Orwell wrote that the “outcome of the Spanish
war . . . was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin—at any rate, not in Spain.”
The Fascists won, he wrote, not in response to Moscow’s expansionist aims but
rather “because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others
hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.”
The author claims that Comrades and Commissars is an “updated” version of
his earlier book, Between the Bullet and the Lie [1969]. Unlike Orwell, nothing is
new in Eby’s second work. The author ignores the wealth of new documentation,
including personnel files of international volunteers that have emerged from the
archives of the former Soviet Union and, instead, continues to rely on discredited
sources, repeats disproved rumors, and “cherry picks” through secondary works
for information that supposedly supports earlier claims while ignoring what does
not. Readers are presented with a litany of clichés, errors of fact, and sloppy
translations; even worse, the author’s extensive claims of Soviet malfeasance and
heavy-handed activities in Spain are made without reference to documentary
evidence. In the end, Comrades and Commissars does not add to the ongoing
historical discussion on the Spanish Civil war and the book’s shoddy editing does
not reflect favorably on the press that published it.
University of South Florida,
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
Fraser Ottanelli
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The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. By David Edgerton.
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 270. $26.00.)
In this pathbreaking book, the author presents a radical reinterpretation of
technology and invention, and in so doing he rereads not only the history of
technology, but modern history itself. David Edgerton rejects the standard
innovation-centered history of technology, one that looks to a succession of
great technological inventions (and inventors) of high cultural visibility—Watt’s
steam engine, Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, Jobs’s and Wozniak’s personal
computer—as transformative events characteristic of nations and of technological
eras. Instead, he substitutes a “use-centered” vision of technology, one that
focuses on how technologies become integrated into longstanding practices or are
reworked in different cultural contexts. The result is a visionary panorama of
unexpected continuities in technological history, a new view of the timelines of
technological progress, a rejection of technological futurism, an emphasis on
global perspectives transcending the local, and a devastating historiographical
critique of the existing literature. For these reasons this book should be required
reading for anyone concerned not only with technology and its history, but also
with the making of the modern world.
Edgerton makes his case in a series of thematic chapters concerning timelines
and the impact of technologies, production, maintenance, nations, war, killing,
and invention. In each, he contrasts received notions of technological progress
with a more nuanced and informed vision that does not deny that fundamental
technological changes took place in the twentieth century, particularly during
the “long boom” of the three decades following World War II. But Edgerton’s
accounts contextualize these changes in ways that cause us to rethink the place of
the “seemingly old.” In his revision, the condom eclipses nuclear power. Production is not limited to great industrial enterprises, but must include the household
and building “bidonvilles” throughout the “poor world,” where “creole technologies” redefine technological change.
The necessity of maintaining technological systems undermines the analytical
importance of their flashy creation. The Kalashnikov and their ilk killed more
people in the twentieth century than more dramatic aerial bombing or other
high-tech mechanisms of death. The lowly machete is as much an instrument
of genocide as was high-tech Zyklon-B. “Techno-nationalism” misleadingly
attributes civilian origins to modern military technologies (e.g., the airplane).
Today’s slaughterhouse is a killing factory that differs in scale, but less in technology, from earlier antecedents. The rickshaw and the bicycle are as emblematic
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of technology today as are iPods or the Internet. That shipbuilding is a high-tech
industrial marvel, whereas ship breaking today is a low-tech operation conducted
on the beaches of the “poor world” and gives pause to reconsider notions of
technological time and technological “progress.”
The “shock of the old” in this book comes only partly from the realization that
many “seemingly old” technologies are still with us today. The real shock is
historiographical and stems from taking Edgerton seriously and what that means
for understanding technological change. As the author rightly concludes: “To
rethink the history of technology is necessarily to rethink the history of the world”
(220). He succeeds in both.
Stevens Institute of Technology
James E. McClellan III
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to
Darfur. By Ben Kiernan. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. viii,
724. $40.00.)
The author of this book is internationally known for his extensive writings on
the Pol Pot regime and other subjects related to Southeast Asian Communism. He
offers a magisterial and wide-ranging account of genocides and exterminations
from ancient times to the present day. Although there have been a number of
previous comprehensive histories of genocide and extermination—the publisher’s
claim that this is “the first global history of genocide and extermination from
ancient times” is inaccurate—it is certainly among the most far reaching and best
written. If Ben Kiernan has a general thesis about the origins of genocide, which
is not always clear, he appears to root most modern genocides in the drive by
nation-states or regimes for “blood and soil,” expansion and space at the expense
of indigenous peoples, minorities, classes and ethnic “enemies,” and anyone who
stands in their way.
Kiernan ranges very widely in his work, which would clearly be useful for any
college-level course on this subject or a related one. His chapters extend from
ancient times to the Spanish Conquest of the New World, to the European
settlement of North America, to the more obvious genocides of the twentieth
century. Kiernan’s coverage of recent massacres is balanced, devoting as much
space to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as to Hitler and the genocide of the Armenians
by the Turks during the First World War. As noted, it is exceptionally well written,
and is accompanied by many useful, well-drawn maps. Kiernan frankly expounds
on the unspeakable horrors of genocide in every chapter: this work is not for the
squeamish.
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However, Kiernan’s book, his subjects, and his main theses are anything but
unproblematic, at least to this reviewer, and it is also important to note these
caveats. The more general point might be made, too, that few subjects in historiography have engendered more bitter and hostile debate than the question of
genocide, and especially the uniqueness or otherwise of the Jewish Holocaust. The
highly intemperate nature of these exchanges may be flavored from, for example,
the essays by various historians in Alan S. Rosenbaum’s collection, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocides [revised edition 2001],
which includes discussions of many genocides and massacres.
As imposing as Kiernan’s work clearly is, there are a number of important
areas where, in this reviewer’s opinion, it can be legitimately criticized. Kiernan
has little to say about the demographic element in defining and assessing alleged
genocides and continuously understates its importance. It seems absolutely clear,
for example, that the catastrophic demographic declines which occurred among
both American Indians and Australian Aborigines following European settlement
were primarily caused by the introduction of virulent diseases and not by direct
slaughter and deliberate “genocide.” According to Steven T. Katz, only 3.7
percent of the decline in the number of American Indians between 1775 and 1900
can be attributed to killings by white settlers. In Australia, Judy Campbell’s 2002
work Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia,
1780–1880 makes a convincing case that, again, it was the introduction of
smallpox and other diseases that produced the apparently sharp decline in
aboriginal numbers, while Sydney scholar Keith Windschuttle has been responsible for launching a fiercely contested debate in Australia about the extent of
European killings of aborigines in Tasmania, which he claims were minimal.
This points to the ambiguities in the very definition of “genocide” which
Kiernan avoids addressing, bearing in mind the considerable difficulties in offering
a universally accepted definition. Kiernan rightly stresses the “intent” by those
committing genocide, but also includes in his discussions a number of cases where
there was no “intent” at genocide (and no genocide in reality). For example, he
includes a highly original but somewhat peculiar chapter on “The English Conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603,” an event that certainly comprised some appalling
massacres but only with difficulty might be described as genocide. The number of
killings involved, given its early date and the lack of real statistics, is surely
dubious. Curiously, the author does not examine the Irish Potato Famine of the
1840s, in which one million died and another million emigrated, and which is
often alleged by Irish nationalists to have been an example of genocide by the
British government.
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Although Kiernan certainly ranges widely in this work, the thrust of this
book—as is the case in virtually all recent general discussions of genocide by
scholars—is to show that genocide is a component of western expansionism, or
an explicit aspect of Western racism, social Darwinism, and “modernism,” while
omitting a range of slaughters carried out by non-western and non-European
people against one another. With his extensive coverage of many massacres
undertaken by Asian peoples, Kiernan is less guilty of this than most, but he still
omits any number of non-western mass murders, from those of the Aztecs (whose
horrifyingly murderous society is mentioned only in footnotes) to the Taiping
Rebellion in midnineteenth-century China, in which perhaps ten million Chinese
were murdered by other Chinese. His discussion also omits the beneficial effects of
western expansionism, from the suppression of innumerable barbaric indigenous
practices to the introduction of western medicine and education.
The subject of genocide is always likely to be extremely controversial, and
Kiernan’s magisterial work succeeds better than most: it is certainly more readable, and—if this does not sound like black humor—more enjoyable. But massacres were no monopoly of the European settler, nor were the settlers’ incursions
without positive aspects.
University of Aberystwyth
William D. Rubinstein
Impotence: A Cultural History. By Angus McLaren. (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University
Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 332. $30.00.)
It is impossible to open an e-mail account today without encountering a tidal wave
of words about potency, or lack of it. The historian of the future would be
forgiven for concluding that the erect, pleasure-giving penis was the key preoccupation of the early twenty-first-century West. Angus McLaren’s timely and
intriguing book will set them right on that score. McLaren casts his net wide, and
this is both the work’s strength and at times its weakness. The historical range is
important and necessary to give a sense of both change and continuity in the
West’s obsession with impotence. However, the treatment across the ages from
classical antiquity through Christianity’s gradual hegemony, to the rise of sexual
science via Freud that fostered a cultural preoccupation with (male) sexual performance, is at times a little unbalanced. In terms of quantity, the majority of the
book (more than half) is concerned with impotence from the nineteenth century
onwards. Nevertheless, the latter chapters that deal with impotence in modernity
are especially detailed, articulate, and informative, so this, ultimately, does not
“grate.”
BOOK REVIEWS
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McLaren identifies from the outset the complex meanings that are associated
with the preoccupation with sexual performance; the relationship with definitions
of masculinity (which both shift and stay the same); the misogyny that seems
always to wait in the wings; the intertwining with a wider framework of sexual
morality whether its logic is religious or secular. The role played by the cultural
focus of this work strengthens and binds the sometimes selective evidence, and it
is here that McLaren’s details bond into something that keeps the past relevant to
the present: impotence as a joke; females being rapacious and demanding while
being “passive”; sexual performance as a marker of physical decrepitude. The
book is especially strong in identifying the growing link between impotence as a
fearsome but ever-present phenomenon and sexuality that is both masculinist and
phallocentric.
In parts the author is uneven in his treatment of historical detail: like the topic
itself, the text has a curious relationship to the history of sexuality. At times he
treads familiar paths (the role of the Church; masturbation phobia and the
two-seed theory); at others he tends to impose a pattern on complexities that are
best understood as fragmented and complex. The weakest chapter is on the
eighteenth century, in which the role of bourgeois morals especially in relation to
women’s sexuality is overstated. However, he redeems himself, for this reviewer,
in the chapters that deal with the early twentieth century. His discussion of Marie
Stopes and Freud illuminates some unfamiliar commonalities and shows how
complex, yet how inevitably negative, was the impact of what both saw as
“civilization” on the sexual performance of both men and women. The final
chapter deals with the emergence of the “little blue pill,” and here McLaren shows
clearly the interaction between “anxiety-making” and commercial clothed-asscientific imperatives. The reader is left with the uncomfortable yet inescapable
conclusion that impotence is itself a potent weapon in social control.
University of New England
Gail L. Hawkes
A Natural History of Time. By Pascal Richet. Translated by John Venerella. (Chicago,
Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 471. $29.00.)
Anyone who has paid attention to nonfiction in the last decade cannot help but
have noticed a subgenre characterized by works that view history through a lens
provided by a commodity (say, codfish) or an artifact (say, the pencil). Pascal
Richet’s A Natural History of Time (ably translated by John Venerella) undertakes
the same sort of endeavor, but achieves greater success because the lens at issue
offers a wider field of view; Richet’s work is nothing less than the history of the
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inquiry into the age of the cosmos, that word defined variously as the known
world, the earth, and, finally, the universe.
The author begins with an overview of human and cosmic origins as depicted
in myth, and moves quickly through the cyclic conceptions of time favored by the
Greeks. Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a linear history—the world created
at a particular moment, and the patriarchs and generations of Israel appearing in
purposeful sequence—and an implicit requirement (if the Pentateuch is taken
literally) that all of natural history be confined to a span of several thousand years.
In a particularly interesting chapter, the author describes doubts raised long before
the age of Darwin. This is from English naturalist John Ray, writing (in 1673) of
sediments a hundred feet deep: “which is yet a strange thing, considering the
novity of the World, the age whereof, according to the usual Account, is not yet
5600 years” (112). In the eighteenth century, Buffon published his conclusion that
the earth was 75,000 years old, and confided his more controversial belief of a far
greater age to a private journal. Arguments for a youthful earth were becoming
even more difficult to defend, and estimates of the age of the earth’s environs were
increasing as well; by the early nineteenth century, astronomers realized that some
stars were millions of years old.
By 1850 geologists and paleontologists had developed a timeline marked at
intervals by the appearance of biological groups. Meanwhile, Kelvin’s application
of the laws of thermodynamics to the question gave an estimate for the earth’s age
whose lower range was twenty million years, far less than that proffered by many
geologists. After discussing physical sciences in the 1890s, the author turns to the
development of radioactive dating techniques in the first years of the twentieth
century and then to British geologist Arthur Holmes, who determined an age for
the Earth on the order of several billion years. The book’s concluding chapter
discusses the work of American geochemist Clair Patterson, who, in part by
applying the new dating methods to meteorites, settled on what remains the best
estimate: 4.55 billion years.
Richet, a senior geophysicist at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, has
composed a rich, wide-ranging, and authoritative history, well-spiced with anecdote, some rather arresting illustrations, and welcome flashes of humor.
University of Massachusetts—Amherst
David Toomey