A History of the Yorùbá People. By S. Adebanji Akintoye. (Dakar, Senegal: AmalionPublishing, 2010. Pp. 498. $45.00.)
The Yorùbá constitute, perhaps, the most studied African ethnolinguistic group.This is hardly surprising for a people known for a long history and a vibrant,enduring culture who, in precolonial times, evolved complex economic, political,and social institutions and built powerful centralized states. Arguably, the Yorùbáboast one of the highest levels of literacy in contemporary Africa.
The latest important addition to the rich historiography of the Yorùbá is S.Adebanji Akintoye’s work, A History of the Yorùbá People. In eighteen well-researched chapters, the author audaciously attempts a comprehensive synthesisof the major historical themes that have defined the Yorùbá from the earliest timesto the present. The wide range of themes covered in the book includes traditionsof origin; political and economic developments before the European imperialintrusion; the agencies of change in the nineteenth century, such as Islamic andChristian penetration into Africa; the collapse of the greatest of the precolonialstates, the Great Oyo Empire; and the subsequent tumultuous Yorùbá civil wars.The author also explores more contemporary history, focusing on social transfor-mations and politics in the twentieth century. An important component of thebook is the chapter on the Yorùbá diaspora.
Of course, the themes addressed in the book have been amply treated in theexisting literature, indeed, since the publication of Samuel Johnson’s ground-breaking book, The History of the Yorùbás, nearly a century ago. But Akintoye’sstudy is not a rehearsal of extant and familiar themes. It combines critical analysisof established facts with new interpretations to produce an up-to-date scholarlyhistory of the Yorùbá. A product of four decades of painstaking and systematicresearch, Akintoye draws richly from diverse historical sources ranging from oralaccounts to written materials. The result, not surprisingly, is a compendium thatis comprehensive both in scope and coverage. Not only does the book cover everyaspect of Yorùbá history from the earliest existence of the people to the presenttime, but, unlike similar works, the discourse also integrates the Yorùbá diasporaas an integral part of Yorùbá history. Although predominantly located in south-western Nigeria, the Yorùbá are also found in significant numbers in other partsof West Africa, namely Benin and Togo. Also, small communities of descendantsof enslaved Yorùbá exist today in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, andin other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, a legacy of the Atlantic slavetrade.
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A History of the Yorùbá People could safely be said to be the best thing tohappen to Yorùbá historiography since Johnson’s famous work, which has con-tinued to remain an invaluable source for the reconstruction of Yorùbá history.Akintoye’s stated purpose in this project, “to present to readers a lucid account ofYorùbá history,” is largely achieved. The author, indeed, is eminently qualified towrite a book of such monumental stature. He is a veteran academic, a collegeprofessor of African history for over four decades, and author of a number ofnotable works on the Yorùbá. Also, he has been a leading figure in the intellectualmovement dedicated to the construction of an enduring body of academic historyof the Yorùbá and is an eminent Yorùbá political leader who once served as asenator of the Nigerian state.
In conclusion, A History of the Yorùbá People is a well-written, clearly pre-sented, and readable volume that will no doubt stand the test of time as a majorcontribution to Yorùbá historiography in particular and African history ingeneral. Elements of both the scholarly community and the popular arena inter-ested in the history of one of the most important ethnic groups in Africa will findit indispensable.
Tennessee State University Adebayo Oyebade
The Ottoman Age of Exploration. By Giancarlo Casale. (Oxford, England: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010. Pp. xix, 281. $49.95.)
The Age of Discovery is a period widely associated with European expansion andconquest. Colonial adventures in the Americas and the development of new traderoutes to Asia have been given as explanations for the rise of European dominanceand have been associated with the development of a truly global system. While notdisputing the importance of European expansion, Giancarlo Casale, in TheOttoman Age of Exploration, argues that discovery, expansion, conquest, and thedesire for global domination were also goals pursued by the Ottoman Empire.Relying heavily on Ottoman sources, Casale situates Ottoman political policies,commercial strategies, and military ambitions within this traditionally Europeanparadigm and within the framework of comparative global history.
In attempting to make this connection, the author seeks to challenge “thoseaccustomed to thinking” that the Ottoman Empire represented “the primaryobstacle to exploration” and its “principal victim” (6). The book looks to achievethis goal by focusing on five individuals central to Ottoman expansion: SultanSelim I; the military leader Ibrahim Pasha; and three grand vezirs, Hadim
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Suleiman Pasha, Rustem Pasha, and Mehmed Pasha. Casale discusses the ways inwhich these and other Ottoman officials engaged in conquest, peace negotiations,alliance building, and large-scale warfare.
The chapter on Sultan Selim I represents a good example of how negativestereotyping of Ottoman leaders obscures similarities between Ottoman andEuropean policies. Here Casale argues that although Dom Henrique of Portugal,or Henry the Navigator, has been thought of as “laying the foundation of futureEuropean maritime expansion,” Selim I has become better known as “the infa-mous Selim the Grim, . . . the very picture of an oriental despot” (13). Challengingthis stereotype, the author does a good job in chapter 1 of illustrating the waysin which the Ottomans pursued a similar strategy of information gathering,exploration, and expansion of trade.
In connecting Ottoman history to “discovery,” Casale realizes the importanceof using certain terminology to drive home major points. For example, in thechapter on Ibrahim Pasha, Casale focuses on reconnaissance as an aspect ofOttoman exploration. In this context, the term serves as an entry point todiscussions on new types of Ottoman strategies to expand. Similarly, in thechapter on Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, one of the subheadings refers to “The SpiceTrade as an Engine of Ottoman Foreign Policy” (145). This choice of terms helpsthe author demonstrate the ways in which Ottoman foreign policy was related toobjectives other than conquest.
Although this line of argumentation supports the notion that Ottoman expan-sion needs to be thought of within the context of European discovery, one is leftwondering if the study could have touched a little more on developments in otherparts of the world. Zheng He has emerged as a figure who has been compared toColumbus. Though his expeditions were in lands familiar to the Chinese, hisvoyages served to develop better types of reconnaissance, trade relationships, andimperial reach. These potential areas of comparison are what make The OttomanAge of Exploration such an important work and what also make it a jumping offpoint for further studies on global comparisons.
Simmons College Stephen Ortega
Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State. By Richard Cockett. (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. vii, 315. $22.00.)
Relying on scholarly books, articles, and written and oral primary sources,Richard Cockett not only traces the origins of but also examines the conflicting
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internal and external forces responsible for the nearly fifty-year civil war betweensouthern Christians and northern Muslims in the Sudan that caused the deaths ofapproximately 2.5 million people and displaced millions of mostly southernSudanese from 1955 through 2005.
Cockett describes Britain as the architect of colonial Sudan and adds that theimperial attempt began in 1884 under General Charles Gordon’s command, butGordon’s attempt was stopped when he and most of his men were killed in 1885by Sudanese Muslim nationalists led by Muhammad Ahmad, who had declaredhimself Mahdi. Cockett maintains that, despite this setback, Britain succeeded inbringing the people of Sudan under colonial rule after the death of the Mahdi andthe defeat of his troops in 1898 by British forces commanded by General HerbertKitchener. The author notes that the conquest was followed by the reconstructionof Khartoum and the formulation of new administrative subdivisions and eco-nomic initiatives that were mainly designed to promote the leadership and eco-nomic interests of Britain at the expense of the Sudanese people. The fact thatKhartoum was restructured to enhance Britain’s economic and political interestsbears testimony to the above point.
Also implied is that although Sudanese nationalists opposed the new imperialorder, they failed to remain unified in such an effort because of their ethnic,geographical, racial, religious, and social differences. As the author explains, likethe Egyptians before them, and the Americans, Chinese, Libyans, Malaysians,Kuwaitis, Russians, Turks, Saudi Arabians, United Nations, and the new Sudaneseleaders after them, the British exploited these differences to maximize their eco-nomic and political interests from 1898 to 1956.
As Cockett argues, aspects of Britain’s introduced imperial initiatives such asone-cash-crop or one-item economy, centralization of political and economicpowers, “divide and rule,” opposition to dissension, and unwillingness to acceptmistakes would continue in one form or another under the new Sudanese lead-erships of General Aboub, General Jafaar Nimeiri, and President Omaral-Bashir and their foreign allies after Sudan became independent in 1956.Against the foregoing background, Cockett informs us that the main causesand continuation of the disaster of Sudan, especially of Darfur, can be wellunderstood.
This book is an excellent contribution to our understanding of the variousinternal and external forces responsible for the deaths of 2.5 million and thedislocation of millions of Sudanese people. Indeed, the dominant themes of thebook could well be applied to Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the civil warsfought in the 1980s and 1990s killed more than three hundred thousand
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people. Cockett should therefore be commended for writing such an importantwork.
Western Michigan University Amos J. Beyan
Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967. By HillelCohen. Translated by Haim Watzman. (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2010. Pp. xiii, 296. $29.95.)
There have been a number of in-depth studies of the Arab-Palestinian citizens ofIsrael, among them Ian Lustick’s Arabs in the Jewish State [1980] and DanRabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker’s Coffins on Our Shoulders [2005]. HillelCohen’s new study is unique in that it relies on recently released materials fromthe Israeli State Archives. These materials include police dossiers on Arab citizens,reports written by both Arab collaborators and Israeli-Jewish interrogators, andthe protocols of meetings between police officers, military officers, and agents ofthe security services. Cohen notes in his preface that “these documents are theprincipal raw material of this book.”
With this new material at his disposal, Cohen has fashioned a readable, and attimes riveting, narrative. In the book’s introduction, Cohen sketches the historicalbackground of the Israeli-Arab predicament when “the Jewish state (in 1949)found itself with an unwelcome 156,000 Arabs, approximately 15 percent of thenew country’s population” (7). Cohen takes these facts and figures and explainshow the founding of Israel presented those Arabs who remained in what had beenBritish-Mandate Palestine in a troubling predicament. “Instead of being in amajority, as they had been in Mandatory Palestine, they became a minority as aresult of the uprooting of some seven hundred thousand who became refugees”(1). One of the consequences of this new situation was that “the Israeli authoritiesviewed the Arab population as hostile and potentially seditious” (2).
In the book’s seven chapters, the author describes and analyzes the mechanismsof control that the Israelis created, the collaboration of some Arabs in thatmechanism, and the resistance of some other Arabs to it. In chapters 1 and 2,Cohen presents the reader with the two extremes on the spectrum of Arabresponses to Israeli rule. First we read of “the rise of the collaborator class,” themost “cooperative” and influential of whom “enjoyed many perquisites, and theirposition as intermediaries between the population and the regime . . . becamewell-founded” (37). At the other end of the spectrum were the Arab leaders andmembers of the Israeli Communist Party. The electoral strength of the party
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fluctuated over the nineteen-year period covered by the book [1948–1967]. Cohenpoints out that, despite those fluctuations in popularity, the communists’ “inten-sive, diverse, and sometimes mass activity throughout these years remained aunique instance of popular resistance under military rule” (41).
Although careful to identify the ideological and political commitments of thevarious players in his story, Cohen does not overlook personal details that give hisstudy a novelistic flavor. He brings his characters—Arabs and Jews of variousideological, political, and religious tendencies—to life.
After having identified in the first two chapters the ideological extremesamong Israel’s Arabs, Cohen shows how ideology plays out in real life. Espe-cially engaging are the stories told in chapter 3, “Boundary Breakers: Infiltra-tors, Smugglers, Spies.” Here Cohen takes up the thorny issue of official Israeliattitudes towards its Arab citizens. He describes “the prevailing Israeli discoursethat celebrated the Jewish state’s humanitarian treatment of its Arab minority,in contrast with the harsh treatment that Arab regimes meted out to their ownpopulations” (73). But Cohen cannot fully accept that argument. And, althoughcritical of many of Israel’s policies of the period, Cohen asserts that Israel “cer-tainly did not behave like the worst of military regimes. Israel’s Arab citizensenjoyed a certain measure of freedom of expression as well as other individualfreedoms” (73).
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Cohen’s conclusions, readers will beengaged and informed by his skillful narrative and analysis of a much-contendedtopic.
Emory University Shalom Goldman
Gods in the Desert: Religions of the Ancient Near East. By Glenn S. Holland.(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Pp. xxx, 309. $39.95.)
This book’s purpose seems to be twofold: 1) to describe the complexities ofreligious practice in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine and 2) tocontextualize ancient Israelite religion within this Near Eastern world. The bookis divided according to the three geographical regions cited above, and eachsection provides chapters on the following topics: 1) a historical survey; 2) anintroduction of the gods and their perceived activities; 3) the role of kings andother leaders; 4) approaches to the world of the dead and human suffering; and 5)human involvement in religious practice, both at official and popular levels in
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society. Framing this discussion is an introduction that presents Glenn S.Holland’s approach to the study of religion and a conclusion that briefly summa-rizes the significance of these religions during the Hellenistic age.
In agreement with Émile Durkheim’s view of religion as a social system,Holland analyzes his material from a sociological perspective (xxv). The authoraccurately emphasizes the connection between rulers and official religious prac-tice, describes well the various traditions that existed in each of these regions(from popular approaches of “magical” practices to officially promoted rituals intemples), and offers the best analysis of the gods in ancient Egypt and Mesopota-mia that the reviewer has seen in a survey. In particular, he resists the temptationof systematizing the pantheons into neat structures, and he discusses the specificrelationships between geographical places and/or royal powers and certain gods(e.g., Amun in Karnak and Marduk in Babylon).
At times, however, Holland’s discussion appears to be outdated. Forexample, Egyptologists now suggest that the divine status of pharaohs was morecomplicated than the view that pharaohs were gods; Assyriologists challenge theidea that the ritually enacted hieros gamos occurred; and “sacred prostitution”has proven to be a scholarly misperception. More importantly, although thisbook aims to teach about “the religious cultures of the ancient Mediterraneanworld,” Holland’s presentation creates the overwhelming, but misleading, sensethat ancient Israel was unique among ancient Near Eastern religions (xix).Holland correctly identifies that ancient Israelite literature (and not all Israelites,many of whom were polytheistic) was mostly “henotheistic” (versus monothe-istic), but his emphasis on the influence and distinct skills of Israelite prophetsoverlooks the fact that the editing process of the Hebrew Bible far exceeds allother literary evidence analyzed in this book (and thus, it is difficult to deter-mine the “real” Israelite writings) and that divination experts varied in the“real” Israel just as they did in Mesopotamian societies. The impression ofuniqueness is further highlighted in Holland’s Syria-Palestine discussions, inwhich he spends insufficient time on the Ugaritic texts, some of which referto rituals (such as animal sacrifices) that were similar to those of ancientIsrael.
Survey books tend to oversimplify, but this book provides a nuanced presen-tation of ancient religious practice. If used for undergraduate teaching, this bookwould be useful as a resource, providing general depictions of ancient Egyptianand Mesopotamian religions but less so of that in Syria-Palestine.
Ohio Wesleyan University Patricia Ahearne-Kroll
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THE AMERICAS
Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President. Editedby Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams. (Lexington, KY: University Press ofKentucky, 2010. Pp. 263. $40.00.)
On September 25, 1860, Republican Party presidential candidate Abraham Lincolnanswered some mail. He wrote to John M. Brockman, who had written Lincolnasking him about “the best modes of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law.”Lincoln told the potential lawyer that “the mode is very simple, though laborious,and tedious.” He then suggested some hornbooks to start digging into and then,abruptly, concluded the letter with insight from his own experiences as an attorney.Lincoln admonished Brockman, “Work, work, work, is the main thing.”
This collection of essays plumbs the latest research on the least-understoodaspect of the career of Abraham Lincoln, his work as an attorney. Popular cultureand legions of Lincoln scholars have noted Lincoln’s law career, but only recentlyhas the task yielded new insights. With the completion of the Lincoln Legal Papersproject, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, an enormous trove of new materials isnow available that highlights Lincoln’s legal practice. This volume brings some ofthe fruits of those researches to both the scholar and the general reading public.
Divided into three broad areas, “Evaluating Lincoln’s Career,” “The IllinoisYears,” and “The Washington Years,” the editors provide a brief introduction tothis collection of twelve essays. Readers of the law reviews will recognize that fourof these articles first appeared in the summer 2005 issue of the Journal of IllinoisHistory, while three more of the articles came out of a symposium cosponsored bythe New York City Bar Association and Scribes: The American Society of LegalWriters. Other contributors authored the rest of the essays for this volume.
Strongest among the essays collected in this volume are Harold Holzer’s“Reassessing Lincoln’s Legal Career,” Mark E. Steiner’s “Does Lawyer LincolnMatter?”, and Brian Dirck’s piece, “A. Lincoln, Respectable ‘Prairie Lawyer’”; thelast two provide a gloss on their books on Lincoln as a lawyer. Editor RogerBillings contributes essays interpreting aspects of Lincoln’s legal practice, such asLincoln and debt collection, Lincoln as mortgage lawyer, and Lincoln and his lawclients. Other scholars who contributed essays to this volume include Frank J.Williams, John A. Lupton, William T. Ellis, Billie J. Ellis Jr., Christopher A.Schnell, Mackubin Thomas Owens, and William D. Pederson.
These essays suggest that Lincoln’s career as an attorney was both typical andatypical. Typically, Lincoln’s practice ran the gauntlet from minor debt collectionto appellate arguments before the Illinois courts and four cases before the United
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States Supreme Court. Atypically, Lincoln pursued the practice of law as a socialservice, and, in 1854, when Congress enacted the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincolnreentered politics having established the legal and political networks needed to besuccessful in Illinois politics. His forensic skills as an attorney served Lincoln wellas a debater, political candidate, and, after March 4, 1861, president. Assessmentsof Lincoln can no longer overlook Lincoln as attorney in their assessments ofLincoln’s life, career, and significance. This book is recommended for public andundergraduate libraries.
University of Louisville Thomas C. Mackey
At the Precipice: Americans North and South During the Secession Crisis. By ShearerDavis Bowman. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.Pp. 379. $30.00.)
With the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and the sesquicentennial of hiselection falling within a two-year span, the renewed interest in the Civil War eraon the part of both scholars and general readers should come as no surprise. Asthe recent controversies over Confederate Heritage Month and Virginia’s historytextbooks suggest, however, the public appears to be less certain as to warcausation than is the profession. As a result, a book that is as both elegantlywritten and historically grounded as is At the Precipice will please specialists andinform lay readers alike.
Rather than focus on one aspect of the months leading up to the attack on FortSumter, such as the 1860 election or deliberations in Washington and Montgom-ery that resulted in war, the late Shearer Davis Bowman explores what a youngHenry Adams dubbed the “secession winter” from a number of angles. Topicalchapters survey the development of Southern states’ rights theory, notions ofhonor, the collapse of the second party system, and race and gender. In most cases,Bowman employs important actors—some well known, such as Jefferson Davisand Sojourner Truth, others less so, such as Horace Kent and Keziah Brevard—toillustrate his larger investigations of free labor ideology or the impact of faith onthe politics of the late 1850s. Bowman also engages historiography throughout hisnarrative, which makes this study a natural for graduate students. Unfortunately,his lengthy, discursive notes are hidden at the end of the text.
Specialists will find much to ponder in this text and, sometimes, to disagreewith. In his chapter on slaveholders and secession, Bowman insists that, althoughplanters admitted that “the stability of slavery” and the dangers posed by
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Lincoln’s election were the causes of disunion, they could also “believe sincerelyin the principle of state sovereignty” (50). Yet, as an exasperated Stephen Douglasnever tired of observing, fire-eaters’ demands for the Alabama platform—unmentioned here—and federal protection of slavery in the territories requiredenormous national power. Some readers might also dissent from Bowman’s viewthat William Lowndes Yancey believed that the victory of candidate John C.Breckinridge would guarantee slaveholders’ security within the Union, since theAlabaman clearly hoped the Southern Democrat would lose to Lincoln and justifysecession. Curiously, Bowman, the author of the impressive (and equally debat-able) comparative study of American planters and Prussian junkers, Masters andLords, says almost nothing here about capitalism and slavery apart from notingthat profitability for “individual plantation entrepreneurs” did not necessarilytranslate into general economic growth for their region (194).
The very fact that Bowman raises so many irresolvable issues is, of course,precisely why scholars will wish to read this book, as is the fact that he clearly(and always politely) states his positions on these debates, as, for example, whenhe explains that his views “both complement and modify” recent monographs onConfederate identity and Northern responses to the problem of Fort Sumter (17).The lengthy introduction and bibliography reveal that Bowman knew these criti-cal years as well as any writer, and it is a tragedy that he did not live to see thepublication of this fine volume.
Le Moyne College Douglas R. Egerton
Pat Nixon: Embattled First Lady. By Mary C. Brennan. (Lawrence, KS: UniversityPress of Kansas, 2011. Pp. xiii, 234. $34.95.)
Pat Nixon is in many ways America’s forgotten First Lady. Sandwiched between herimmediate predecessors, the stylish Jacqueline Kennedy and the environmentallyactive Lady Bird Johnson, and her successor, the upfront Betty Ford, the womanderided as “plastic Pat” is easily overlooked (1). Early biographies offered fewinsights. Lester David’s The Lonely Lady of San Clemente [1978] depicted “Pat” asyet another victim of her husband, while Pat Nixon: The Untold Story [1986] byher daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, proved adoring. Scholarly studies of Pat havebeen nonexistent, until the publication of Mary C. Brennan’s book.
Brennan succeeds in portraying Pat Nixon as a complex person and a less-than-equal partner in her husband’s career. The author emphasizes three themes.First, Pat exuded an “of the people” persona that impressed almost everyone she
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encountered (177). Her common touch is not difficult to grasp. Thelma Catherine“Pat” Ryan came from a working-class background, was orphaned at eighteen,and had to work her way through college. She became an inspiring high schoolteacher before marrying Richard Nixon in 1940. Throughout much of her hus-band’s public life, Pat excelled at political events, on trips overseas, and beforehostile audiences. Criticism that she was a “Republican Coppelia,” a doll capableof “smiling while the world broke,” missed the mark (66). “Her genuinely kindheart,” Brennan avers, “endeared her to the people she met” (62). As First Lady,Pat visited college campuses to promote volunteerism and “hit it off” withleft-leaning students who regarded her as “relevant” and “real” (111). Sherepeated such feats in China and Russia, where she accompanied her husband onhistory-making journeys, and in Africa, where she traveled solo and charmed somany that she became “the darling of the media” in America—a title few membersof the administration could claim (130).
The second theme of Brennan’s book is Pat’s oft-troubled marriage. Life withDick Nixon began happily, as the couple expressed love for one another and madeplans to go places and do things. Politics enabled them to travel and ascend to everlarger stages. But Pat never cottoned to her husband’s career; it interfered withfamily time, exposed the Nixons to a prying press and campaign sallies, andinflicted stinging defeats. Pat was “devastated” by Dick’s loss to John Kennedy(78). She mustered scant enthusiasm for her husband’s run in 1968, definingherself as a campaign “volunteer” rather than a member of his team—a role shehad accepted in the 1950s (98). As First Lady, Pat became increasingly embattled,which is the third subject of Brennan’s study. Pat’s troubles derived less fromexternal criticism than from internal disputes between the First Lady and thepresident’s staff over her schedule and responsibilities. Watergate and the post-presidency restored some of the intimacy between Pat and Dick, as the presidentbecame politically isolated in 1973 and 1974 and as both Nixons enduredillnesses in the years afterward. The former First Lady knew how to bear suchburdens, because “Pat learned at an early age that life was hard” (2).
Brennan’s book combines explorations in newly opened collections with sharpanalysis and page-turning narration. Since additional documents relating to thefirst lady have yet to be released, this study is the standard, rather than thedefinitive, account of Pat’s life. That said, its modest length and accessible prosewill appeal especially to general readers and undergraduate students, while itsfresh research and sound judgments will please scholars.
Salisbury University Dean J. Kotlowski
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Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina. By JudkinBrowning. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xiii,250. $37.50.)
Given the substantial presence of United States troops in a number of placesaround the world today, this account of the Union occupation of Carteret andCraven Counties, beginning in 1862, has a real contemporary relevance. Theauthor puts the towns of Beaufort and New Bern under a microscope. He focuseson three groups: white residents, black residents, and Union soldiers. Whathappened immediately after each town fell to the Union determined in a signifi-cant way how the military occupation played out. Many white residents left NewBern, while many white residents of Beaufort stayed. That fact alone leads theauthor to draw more important insights from Beaufort, the smaller communitywith a deep harbor that served the needs of Union ships securing the Confederateblockade.
In an elegantly written and persuasive narrative, Judkin Browning argues thatthe loyalties of white residents depended on their own individual circumstances.Early on, the whites of Beaufort displayed a “tenuous” attachment to the Con-federacy. Many were eager to exploit the Union presence to their own economicadvantage. This was, essentially, a “honeymoon” period. But as the occupationcontinued, one factor, more than any other, began to “shift loyalties” back to theConfederate side: racism. As Browning shows, the white men and women ofBeaufort may have been against secession, but they were definitely not opposed toslavery—a truth exacerbated by the Emancipation Proclamation and the percep-tion that the black population received better treatment from the Union troops.
One strength of this study is the analysis of the experience of the occupyingtroops. Through their own words, Browning reveals the thoughts of ordinarysoldiers about the goals of the war, about slavery, and about the monotony of theirdays. Perhaps even more valuable is the author’s effort to examine the experienceof the black population. If white loyalties were driven by practical concerns, blackloyalties were clearly driven by the opportunities for independence and freedom.This fact underscores a crucial theme—racism trumped everything. Two years ofUnion occupation definitely had an impact on the social and economic policies ofBeaufort and New Bern, but, in the end, issues of slavery and racism turned somelukewarm Confederates into real rebels. The occupation, however, also paved theway for a degree of black autonomy.
Perhaps the author might have focused a bit more on the occupation experienceof women, white and black. Their narrative is superficial. Too often he concludesthat “many” thought this or that or acted in this or that way—without much more
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than anecdotal data. But these are minor concerns, because, overall, this studymakes a very timely contribution to what might be called today “military occu-pation history.” Readers learn that political loyalties are fragile and that theduration of a military occupation can have a huge impact on those loyalties.Readers also learn that the course of black-white relationships in these twocommunities during the Union occupation provides an uncanny predictor of whatwould occur in the postwar South.
Marshall University Donna J. Spindel
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. ByBenjamin L. Carp. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xv, 311.$30.00.)
To aid the foundering East India Company, Parliament, in 1773, passed the TeaAct, which allowed the company to dump a surplus of taxed tea on the Americanmarket. Colonists opposed this, since it created a monopoly on the tea trade andinvolved taxation without representation. On the evening of December 16, 1773,American insurgents boarded three ships and threw more than forty-six tons oftea into Boston Harbor. The audacious act occurred after years of Americanresistance to Great Britain’s efforts at reorganizing its empire following thesuccessful, but very costly, Seven Years’ War.
According to Benjamin L. Carp, in his fine study Defiance of the Patriots, thedestruction of the tea, which became known as “The Boston Tea Party” fifty yearslater, was a bold expression of political ideology about rights and authority. Butit also offers a window into American society and culture at that time. Althoughthis was an age when only the elite were considered fit to rule, the Tea Partyinvolved a relatively broad section of the population. Indeed, “what made it trulyrevolutionary” was that it demonstrated how ordinary men could engage in adefiant, democratic protest (233). “The destruction of the tea,” asserts Carp, “wasa quintessential rejection of authority that became a cherished American tradi-tion. . . . By reading the tea leaves at the bottom of Boston harbor, we can see theAmerican character itself taking shape” (3–4).
While providing a very insightful discussion of the political, economic, andcultural life of late colonial Boston, Carp shows that the town’s insurgents camefrom a loose coalition of overlapping groups and represented different socialranks. Moreover, he offers a provocative analysis of the various layers of meaningregarding the patriots’ decision to disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians whenthey destroyed the tea.
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After the British government enacted the Coercive Acts, in 1774, to punish theBay Colony for the destruction of the tea, the other colonies began to support thebeleaguered people of Massachusetts. Carp’s analysis thus ties into T. H. Breen’sinterpretation of the late colonial period in his recently published AmericanInsurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, in which he arguesthat a de facto nation came into existence among Britain’s rebellious NorthAmerican colonies between the spring and fall of 1774 when the people respondedto the Coercive Acts by creating viable rebel governments.
Carp also asserts that most Americans seemed unaware of the global connec-tions between tea, sugar, and slavery. Despite its rhetoric, the American Revolu-tion was not immediately an example for universal freedom. White Americanswould gain their independence, “but they were also struggling to figure out theirown identity—and that identity wasn’t always ready to embrace people of color”(217).
Whether it is considered a lawless act of destruction or a heroic defense ofliberty, the Boston Tea Party was a global story that Carp tells thoroughly andvividly.
Baldwin-Wallace College Steven E. Siry
The Notorious “Bull” Nelson: Murdered Civil War General. By Donald A. Clark.(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi, 254. $29.95.)
William “Bull” Nelson represents the type of general to whom mission comes firstand the humane treatment of subordinates is a minor concern. Despite his well-demonstrated combat abilities, Nelson is better remembered for enforcing harshdiscipline by the use of courts-martial, executions, corporal punishment, andpublic humiliation, including profane tongue-lashings.
Nelson is unique among Civil War generals in that his early career was in thenavy. After attending Norwich, he enrolled in the first class at the NavalAcademy where, upon graduation, he saw action in the Mexican-American Warat Vera Cruz. Norwich had a long tradition of hazing, while the navy toleratedbullying and rough fighting, and Nelson undoubtedly acquired dubious leader-ship lessons from both institutions that influenced his behavior during the CivilWar.
Although he was a Democrat who came from Kentucky, he chose to remainwith the Union when war broke out. He visited with Abraham Lincoln, whodispatched him to his native state to arm loyal citizens. Nelson had great success
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preventing secession, and, by September 1861, he had been detached from navalduty and commissioned a brigadier general.
Nelson served gallantly in many battles, including Shiloh, but his hot temperand lack of sympathy with subordinates ultimately brought about his demisewhen he relieved Union commander Jefferson Davis, after the latter could notprovide the number of troops presumably serving under his command. Theaggrieved Davis confronted Nelson at the Galt House in Louisville, pulling apistol and fatally wounding Nelson. According to army regulations, Davis shouldhave been tried for his actions; even insubordination or striking a fellow officercould bring harsh punishment, much less the crime of murder.
However, Davis would escape punishment. While Salmon Chase urged thepresident to allow a trial, Governor Oliver Morton of Indiana, who had accom-panied Davis to the Galt House, believed that Nelson’s firing of Davis was anaffront to Indiana and that Nelson got what he deserved. Secretary of War EdwinStanton and the president decided to take no action, and Davis ultimately returnedto duty.
There is a bit of a mystery as to why no historian before Donald A. Clark hasattempted a full-scale biography of Nelson, for his story is interesting. Perhaps,since biographers often come to like or admire their subject, his hot-temperedpersonality repelled those who sought to research his life. Also, although manyhistorians now acknowledge that the war was won in the western theater, therehas still been relatively less attention paid to western battles and generals.
Lincoln famously remarked, when asked if God was on the Union’s side, thathe hoped God was, but he must have Kentucky. “Bull” Nelson, who was soinstrumental in keeping Kentucky in the Union, has not been well served either byhistorians or those who let his murderer go free. Clark has, at last, remedied thisoversight, although his attention to battle details may still make his book moreattractive to military historians than to those looking for full coverage of Nelson’slife and career.
Bridgewater State University Thomas R. Turner
The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison. By Stephen Cox. (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 222. $26.00.)
The Big House was prepared for Mark Crispin Miller’s Icons of America seriesat Yale University Press, and it sticks closely to the task of Miller’s series: toexplicate, in their luminous variety, American artifacts and institutions that have
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also served as forms of cultural expression. In this case, the subject is the massive,self-sufficient penitentiary with its ranges of cells stacked in tiers. Stephen Coxscrutinizes this dread enclosure as a fully formed and universally disseminatedcultural symbol. In this task of wide-ranging cultural exploration, he is almostcompletely successful. Incisive, wry, balanced, based on a wide range of secondarysources, and unflinching in its distinctly nonpanoptic gaze, The Big House pro-vides at once a jolt of nonpartisan realism and a new perspective on a ubiquitousimage.
As a functioning institution, the big house had a definite life span. Firstappearing as a total institution in the form of Zebulon Brockway’s New YorkReformatory in 1876 in Elmira—“the first really large prison with a total programfor the confinement and transformation of inmates”—it had expired by the 1960s,by which time reformers, penologists, and legislators on the left and right soughtto practice rehabilitation and punishment in smaller, more numerous, decentral-ized, and presumably easier-to-control “facilities” and “correctional institutions”(11). Yet, clearly, the big house has had a prolonged “afterlife” in genres rangingfrom novels, movies, TV shows, and souvenirs, to video games and card games,thereby making it a true icon, “America’s notion of what a prison is supposed tobe”—notwithstanding the fact that it passed away a half century ago (12, 11). Thepreposterous 2005–2009 television series Prison Break, for example, was shot inthe long-abandoned big house in Joliet, Illinois.
Historians of criminal justice will find little new information in this study, butthey will benefit nevertheless from its sometimes startling combination of culturalcriticism and pragmatic analysis. Critical appraisals of Michel Foucault’s conjec-tures about penal history are familiar to historians, but Cox adds two newelements to such criticisms. The first is that prisons, far from being isolated spacescompletely separate from and antithetical to ordinary modern society, are in facta fully integrated part of that society—their boundaries far more permeable thanthe widely accepted Foucaultian paradigm imagines. From the beginning, “bighouse” souvenirs like convict salt-and-pepper shakers, postcards, plates, andlithographs, along with prison tourism and fawning magazine articles, appearedsimultaneously with the prison buildings themselves. Second, the panoptic imageof modern society, derived from Jeremy Bentham’s fevered utopian dreams, nevercame close to being realized but were from the start invalidated even at such aplatonic big house as Alcatraz.
Cox devotes his study to such topics as prison architecture, convict processing,forms of inmate humiliation, sex in prison, and certain reformers who have beenas nutty as the politicians who established the prisons in the first place; but he has
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missed a scarce opportunity to include such great modern “big house” novels inhis almost-comprehensive study as John Cheever’s Falconer and Malcolm Braly’sOn the Yard.
Saint Louis University Matthew J. Mancini
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (New York,NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Pp. xxi, 426. $29.95.)
The well-known author of this book does not attempt a full biography ofAbraham Lincoln but instead seeks only to trace the evolution of Lincoln’s ideasand policies about slavery. His main theme is a familiar one: how Lincoln’scapacity for growth enabled him to transcend his earlier limitations and achievegreatness during the trying years of his wartime presidency. But if the theme isfamiliar, the execution is not. Eric Foner’s prodigious research and his deepknowledge of the era allow him to provide perhaps the best account of this subjectavailable today. Even seasoned scholars will find facts in this volume that are newto them and fresh insights that they will want to consider.
Foner begins his story with a Lincoln who had little contact with AfricanAmericans, who seldom thought about race, who rarely contemplated the harsh-ness of the lives lived by American slaves, and who practiced the law with littleconcern for the moral justice of the outcome of a case. In the early chapters ofFoner’s book, it appears that Lincoln is not going to be the hero of the story of hisown rise to greatness. Lincoln’s constant search for the lowest common denomi-nator of antislavery sentiment, his desire never to outrun public opinion, and hiswish to act always within the limits of the possible suggest that the real heroes willbe those who change public opinion and make new positions possible for apolitician like Lincoln. Abolitionists and Radicals are of prime importance toFoner because “their agitation helped to establish the context within whichpoliticians like Lincoln operated” (xix).
As the book goes on, however, Foner gives Lincoln more credit for thechanges he experienced. Lincoln’s contact with African Americans, abolitionists,and Radical Republicans increased substantially when he became president, andhis views began to evolve. Foner makes it clear that most of the positionsLincoln eventually took were laid out much earlier by those in the vanguard ofthe antislavery movement. Yet Foner’s Lincoln gets credit for demonstrating awillingness to listen to others and to adopt new ideas as he and the countrywere transformed by war. Moreover, Lincoln’s firm moral compass provided a
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steely resolve that kept him from backsliding when weaker men might havedone so and from reneging on promises once he had publicly made them.Increasingly, Foner defends Lincoln from those who denigrate his commitmentto equality because of his support for colonization, compensation, gradualism,and voluntary state action on emancipation. In an almost shocking statement,Foner chides historians for their attempts to uncover Lincoln’s racial outlook,asserting that “race is our obsession, not Lincoln’s” (120). In the end, thoughFoner reminds us that Lincoln was influenced by more radical antislaveryfigures than himself and was carried along by changes in public opinion, Foner’sLincoln is admirable for being more compassionate, more principled, and morevisionary than when he entered the White House. This is definitely a “glass halffull” view of Lincoln and slavery.
Despite the excellence of Foner’s book, however, one must keep in mind thatany such work will necessarily distort and perhaps even misrepresent a fullunderstanding of Lincoln and slavery. By extracting this one thread from themyriad of which the past is woven, it threatens to exaggerate slavery’s importanceat times and present a narrow view of its context. Though Foner readily admitsthat military victory and union were always uppermost in Lincoln’s mind, they aresharply subordinated to other concerns in this book. Radical voices are alsoprobably much more prominent in Foner’s narrative than conservative ones, and,when conservatives do speak here, they tend to talk disproportionately aboutslavery and race. Any topical history is liable to the same flaws, but, beforedeclaring any book the definitive one on its subject, we should keep this in mind.
University of Alabama Lawrence Frederick Kohl
The Furnace of Affliction: Prison and Religion in Antebellum America. By JenniferGraber. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 234.$39.95.)
The main thesis of this book concerns the role of Protestantism in antebellumprisons. Jennifer Graber makes a convincing argument that Protestant prisonreformers were central to the development of the idea that prisons exist torehabilitate convicts. Relying on the records of reform societies, periodicals, andconvict narratives, Graber traces the evolution of prison policies that culminatedwith the modern notion of inmates participating in physical labor and extendedsolitude. Her description of this process, through case studies of several prisons, isconvincing and a much-needed contribution to the literature. Protestants had a long
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history with ideas about reformation, but there was nothing inevitable about theirembrace of incarceration practices centered on redemption through punishments.
Quaker activists, like Thomas Eddy, were the first to respond to a colonial-erajudicial system obsessed with capital punishment and public spectacle. Eddybelieved prisons should reform the entire person; they should be like gardens (aQuaker trope concerning childrearing) where prisoners could be kept isolatedfrom negative influences and learn correct physical and mental habits. Eddy andthe builders of Newgate Prison could never fully implement their vision becauseof lack of funds, the constant need for more prison space, and opposition frompoliticians. This failure is a recurring theme in Graber’s book, and she argues thatit led to unintended consequences.
Because of these frustrations, Protestants quickly did away with the gardenmetaphor. They came to see the prison as a furnace, adopting language from theOld Testament prophet Isaiah. This disciplinary system, based on productivelabor and solitary contemplation, was designed to refine the soul. The rest ofGraber’s book focuses on a handful of Calvinist prison reformers who developedthis scheme, first at a prison in Auburn, New York, and then exported it through-out the country.
One of these locations was the prison “Sing Sing.” Graber uses this example toshow how the Auburn prison system could encourage excessive punishment.Prison conditions became deplorable with prisoner abuse, rampant sickness, andovercrowding. In response, reform groups called for the amelioration of jailhouselife and a return to the moral instruction of prisoners. Politics prevented thisreformation from ever fully taking hold in the 1840s, but Protestants came tocommon cause with these prison reform groups in other ways. Together, theymade sin a public problem. This meant that jails now worked to convert prisonersto a new faith: that of virtuous citizenship.
This conflict and cooperation between politicians and Protestant reformersunderscores another major theme of the book. Throughout her account, politi-cians accepted that Protestantism was necessary to the proper functioning ofprisons. However, these policymakers excised the theological content of Calvinistreformers. Drawing on many secondary sources, Graber argues that antebellumprisons consequently became spaces where Protestants debated the role of faith ina disestablished nation. Protestants ultimately made a Faustian bargain in order toremain relevant. They replaced concepts of sin and grace from their message ofreform with fuzzier notions of ethical living and obedience to secular authorities.
University of Delaware Nathaniel Wiewora
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We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in theUnited States. By James N. Green. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp.xiv, 450. $26.95.)
This book is an effort on the part of the author to address the prevailing viewamong Brazilians that little was done in the United States to oppose the brutalBrazilian military dictatorship established in 1964. James N. Green asserts thatthese critics fail to distinguish between the government and the citizens of theUnited States. It was among these citizens, scholars, and Brazilian exiles that agrassroots movement formed that publicized the human rights abuses of thedictatorship. In addition, this grassroots movement introduced human rights intothe discussion of U.S.-Latin American relations and provided the model forstrategies used in other cases of human rights abuses in Latin America. By focusingon this grassroots movement, Green also provides an alternative narrative to anepisode in Brazilian history that falls outside of the traditional, economic, orpolitical framework.
Green prefaces his analysis by addressing assumptions concerning Brazil in theUnited States before 1959. This view was of something exotic and nonthreatening,a viewpoint that changed, however, with the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and thespecter of communism in Latin America. In 1961, President Jânio Quadrossuddenly resigned, leaving his vice president, João Goulart, to assume the office.This event frightened not only the conservatives in Brazil but also those inWashington, D.C. As Goulart instituted nationalist reforms, opposition in Brazilgrew, culminating in a military coup. The military regime would last two decadeswith U.S. support despite its practice of brutal repression.
Although Green’s analysis spans the period between the coup of 1964 to Brazil’sreturn to democracy in 1985, the focus is primarily on the dictatorship’s mostrepressive phase, 1969 to 1974, characterized by the widespread use of torture,censorship, and the suspension of political rights. It was during this period thatpublic opinion in the U.S. toward the regime shifted, thanks in great part to publiccampaigns waged by scholars, church activists, and Brazilian exiles who targetedCongress and major newspapers, detailing the torture and other human rightsabuses perpetrated by the Brazilian government and questioning the U.S. aidsupporting the brutal regime. These efforts contributed to an atmosphere thatserved to make human rights an issue of congressional concern. Though Green doesnot assert a direct connection between the Brazilian human rights campaign and theconsideration of human rights legislation and foreign aid, he does note that itcoincided with a “crisis in confidence in the U.S. government” that could no longerjustify brutal regimes in the name of fighting communism (254).
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We Cannot Remain Silent is a valuable addition to the historiography of Braziland Brazilian-U.S. relations. The presentation allows readers from various disci-plines as well as the general reader access. Green is successful in exploring the roleof nongovernmental actors in the U.S. fighting against human rights abuses inBrazil, thus providing a new narrative in U.S.-Brazilian relations. The transna-tional approach makes it a suitable addition to a series of works focusing onradical historical perspectives from Radical History Review.
Westmont College Monica I. Orozco
Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1890–1920. By Andrew P. Haley. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,2011. Pp. xiv, 356. $45.00.)
One of the best things about Turning the Tables is that the author spends so muchtime in restaurants. Readers gather a sense of the ambiance of the finest and themore middling sort of establishments around the turn of the twentieth century,including the dress and habits of the clientele, their relationships with the waitstaff, the character of the menus, and the nature—not to mention the astonishingquantity—of the food itself. Andrew P. Haley’s devotion to the details of the era’sdining experiences is not just entertaining but important for making his ambitiousargument that restaurants were the site where the middle class “supplanted elitesas the arbiters of taste” in American society and “came to know itself as a socialand consumer class” (3, 17).
Haley divides the era into three phases of urban dining that roughly follow thelife span of Delmonico’s, New York City’s most exclusive restaurant, which wasfounded in the 1830s and catered to its wealthy customers’ taste for big, elaborate,multicourse meals of the finest French cuisine before closing its doors in 1923. Hecharacterized the first era, in the mid-nineteenth century, by this Delmonicoexperience, which was as alienating for members of the middle class, who couldnot read the French language menu, much less afford the bill, as it was terrific forelites, who could easily do both. Next he follows middle-class urbanites, both menand women, in the last decades of the century as they sought out more modest andaccessible eateries, including especially the variety of ethnic restaurants scatteredthroughout American cities. Finally, in his last four chapters, Haley describes theways the fancy restaurants in the 1910s and 1920s began to accommodatemiddle-class tastes by shrinking the size of meals and diversifying the cuisine,switching to English-language menus, and accommodating women who wanted to
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dine on their own. In this process, Haley argues, middle-class Americans exertedtheir influence over the upper classes to become the arbiters of American taste.
Haley refers to the process of seeking out culturally diverse dining experiencesand a distinct class identity as cosmopolitanism, but this reviewer was neversatisfied with his limited definition of the term in regards to appetites for exoticcuisines rather than actual cultural relations among different groups of people.Although his focus is class, not ethnicity, cosmopolitanism is so core to hisargument that it would have been helpful to develop it more and include the voicesof the people in the cities who prepared ethnic cuisine. Instead, the author leavesthe impression that they were no more important than the meals they served. Incontrast, his analysis of the ways women overturned restaurant protocols thatbarred them from smoking a cigarette or enjoying a meal on their own is both richin colorful detail and sharp in cultural critique. Haley makes great use of anastonishing collection of sources, such as menus, trade journals, popular maga-zines, and cartoons, to produce an engaging history that sheds fresh light on thecreation and meaning of the American middle class and that will encouragereaders to think more deeply about their decision about where to go for dinner.
Saint Louis University Cindy Ott
Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945. By ChristopherHamner. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Pp. xi, 281. $29.95.)
Few concepts in military history enjoy the near universal acceptance accorded toprimary group cohesion. The argument that soldiers fight to preserve and main-tain their place in a “band of brothers” has been applied to virtually every modernconflict. Christopher Hamner challenges and expands this concept, arguing thatdramatic changes in the nature of combat over the last two centuries render itimpossible to apply any one theory universally. Although the time frame discussedhere is vast, Hamner limits his analysis to three major conflicts. American infan-trymen in the Revolution and Civil War fought shoulder to shoulder with theircomrades and under the watchful eye of superiors. By the Second World War,tremendous advances in firepower made such tactics suicidal, and troops, instead,were dispersed across much larger battlefields.
With the changes in organization came new inducements to fight. The imme-diate presence of fellow soldiers, and officers, reassured warriors on nineteenth-century battlefields and minimized opportunities to flee. World War II GIs,however, often lacked any reassuring presence and could easily lay low and sit out
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much of the battle undetected. Training discouraged this, with drill instructorsand manuals constantly reinforcing the theme that obedience to orders increasedone’s chances of survival.
Hamner presents his argument through topical chapters that compare andcontrast the three major conflicts, maximizing his ability to show the evolutionof the battlefield. Changes in training, weaponry, and leadership all receiveexcellent analysis. Hamner’s most significant contribution, though, is placingthe idea of primary group cohesion in the context of changing battlefield con-ditions. Though it might encourage men to fight, loyalty to the group might,instead, lead soldiers to ignore the commands of the military hierarchy, prefer-ring small-group self-preservation over combat performance. More importantthan identification with each other, then, was “task cohesion,” in which allmembers of the group, regardless of their opinions of each other, identified withthe significance of their assignment. Of course, soldiers still relied on oneanother to lay suppressing fire, maintain defenses, and provide what interactionwas possible on the lonely, dispersed battlefield, but the nature of their inter-dependence was radically different from that of Civil War soldiers standingelbow-to-elbow facing enemy lines.
Although Hamner’s choice of conflicts makes perfect sense, the three wars seemto spring up from a vacuum, and some mention of the transitional periodsbetween them would strengthen the argument and provide a better overall frame-work. At a mere 220 pages of text, there is plenty of room for such a discussion,yet, with the exception of a few brief comments on the First World War, theevolution of combat between the major wars is almost wholly absent. The dis-tinctions between the Revolution and Civil War are given minimal attention aswell. Politically, culturally, technologically, and tactically, these were two verydistinct conflicts, yet the phrase “nineteenth-century warfare” is often used asshorthand for both. That said, his work makes an invaluable contribution bycomplicating our understanding of the nature of combat and will certainly becomea standard work for historians of soldiers’ experiences under fire.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Thomas Sheppard
Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the SouthernAppalachians. By Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour. (Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 218. $35.00.)
To some degree, the title of this book is misleading, because the authors reallyfocus their attention on a subregion of western North Carolina, including the
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counties of Swain, Jackson, and Graham, and to a lesser extent on the countiesbordering them. Within this limited area, however, folklorist Alan Jabbour care-fully documents a wide variety of patterns and customs in decorating graves aspart of a family and community ritual known as Decoration Day. Excellentphotographs by his wife, Karen Singer Jabbour, corroborate the details offlowers—real or paper—mounding, arrangement of both graves and decorations,and the occasional use of sand or white gravel prompted by the belief of some thatmowers should not intrude in the sacred space.
Jabbour is especially careful to reiterate, constantly, that a cemetery is adynamic cultural creation undergoing inevitable modification and change as fami-lies unite to honor their dead and celebrate their particular sense of place in aritual, which often, nevertheless, seems timeless. Amid the wealth of details onexactly how the graves are cleaned and decorated, he points out that somereligious ceremony usually occurs, there is provision for “dinner on the ground,”and a concerted communal effort is made to see that every grave in the cemeteryhas some decoration if no family member is there to attend to it (20).
What lends this study special poignancy is its focus on cemeteries abandonedas a consequence of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s construction of FontanaDam in 1943–1944. Local communities were displaced twice, once as a result ofland being taken as part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and againas people were forced out of their homes when the dam was completed. Familiesremoved from the north shore of Fontana Dam were denied access to their formerhomes and cemeteries, but a famous 1943 “memorandum of agreement” prom-ised the construction of a new road on the north shore of the dam to be completedafter World War II (97). Failure to build this promised road around the northshore, as it came to be known, resulted from postwar financial difficulties but alsofrom the growing power of environmentalists, who in the 1970s insisted such aroad would destroy or impair the wilderness environment of the national park.
After years of neglect, volunteers like Helen C. Vance and Ruth V. Hicksorganized the first reunion to decorate cemeteries along the north shore. By 1978,a full-scale revolution was underway, according to Jabbour, to decorate all thecemeteries in this area accessible only by boats across Fontana Lake. Growingpublicity and public controversy eventually forced the National Park Service toprovide transportation for these Decoration Days as well as assistance in cleaningup neglected cemeteries under their jurisdiction. Although the infamous “Road toNowhere” was never built, an uneasy coexistence now prevails between descen-dants and the National Park Service to cooperate in maintaining and decoratingthese graves annually.
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Jabbour’s study is successful within the geographic and chronological limits hesets, but students wishing to understand cemetery decoration within a largercontext of rituals surrounding death in Appalachia should consult James K.Crissman’s 1994 book Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Atti-tudes and Practices.
Tennessee Wesleyan College Durwood Dunn
The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil: Porto Alegre, 1845–1895. By Roger A.Kittleson. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Pp. 296. $27.95.)
This monograph is elegantly written, convincing, and very instructive on politicsand political culture in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, over thelatter half of the nineteenth century. Roger Kittleson focuses on the informalpolitical realm from 1845–1895, the period during which state politics underwenta transition from elitist and exclusionary “seigniorial liberalism” to embrace apositivist republicanism—“a more inclusionary, but also more authoritarian,”political arrangement. This transition mirrored Brazil’s wider shift from a mon-archy to a republic in 1889. However, by focusing on informal politics in RioGrande do Sul, Kittleson shows how events in the state differed, particularly howpolitical actors after 1845 forced elites to take their claims to citizenship moreseriously, establishing patterns that influenced the more inclusionary nature ofpost-1889 state politics in the region. In making this argument, the author drawson and contributes to the growing body of subaltern studies literature onnineteenth-century Latin America, and he has provided something of a correctiveto the view that Brazil lacked vertically integrated political arrangements beyondtraditional patron-client relationships during its process of early modernization.Rio Grande do Sul was also the region where Latin American variants of posi-tivism had their greatest influence on both the theory and practice of (republican)government. The book, therefore, contributes to our appreciation of the influenceof this branch of social theory in Latin America. Like liberalism elsewhere inBrazil and Latin America, in 1880s and 1890s Rio Grande do Sul it was positivismthat most contributed to “create the political opportunity for an incipient incor-poration of plebeians into the formal Political realm” (11).
To make his case, Kittleson devotes a chapter each to four arenas of informalpolitical discourse and social interaction. He argues that the emergence of asemiproletariat in Porto Alegre, the growth of European small-holder immigrantcommunities (colonias) in the countryside, the gradual transition from slave tofree labor, and the rising tide of abolitionism all encouraged emerging social
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groups to become both formal and informal political actors pushing for greaterinfluence over their lives and even government policy. Not surprisingly, theseactions destabilized the relatively rigid structure of seigniorial relations in thestate. The ensuing period of uncertainty and insecurity among local elites forcedthem, by the 1880s especially, to rethink their relationships with these emergingsocial groups. For example, elites debated proposals for greater educational andmoral instruction for workers and (free and freed) people of color, sought greaterregulation of domestic service in an effort “to preempt popular initiatives andinterpretations,” and began to consider ways to integrate segments of the immi-grant population into their own bases of political power (148). To do so, Kittlesonpoints out, elites (in keeping with the fundamental controlling elitism of positiv-ism) introduced or heightened the presence of the power of the state to smoothover tensions within the relationship between the dominant and subordinateclasses. This shift in elite-plebeian relations became most visible after 1889 whennational elites rebelled against the constitutional monarchy and declared a federalrepublic. Liberals, conservatives, and even dissident republicans also came to relyon greater inclusion of the masses to justify their claims to political power. Playinga central role in Kittleson’s rendering of this narrative of a briefly budding, butnever in danger of flowering, democracy was popular pressure from “near-elite”and nonelite groups and individuals, including workers and slaves.
It is a tad disappointing that Kittleson opts to end his analysis in 1895. Perhapsan epilogue would have allowed the reader, unfamiliar with the region’s history,to satisfy his curiosity on a number of points. For example, extending the narra-tive may have helped drive home the importance of the rhetoric of positivism inplebeian agency during the 1890s, which Kittleson suggests the popular classespreferred over that of liberalism or republicanism. Indeed, one weak point of thebook is that Kittleson fails to draw a clear enough picture of the differencesbetween positivism and liberalism in the region and does not provide enoughconvincing evidence of the plebeian preference for positivism in their rhetoricalpositioning. Nonetheless it is clear from Kittleson’s carefully deployed sourcesthat plebeians did play a bigger role in state politics after 1845—at first informallyand then more formally over time. The author is skillfully attentive to the impor-tance of race and gender within his wider class framework, and his assessment ofthe informal ways that plebeians influenced elite politics is theoretically sophisti-cated and nuanced. It has to be, as ordinary people were much less involved inpolitical parties in Spanish America, which produced more straightforward politi-cal sources. Kittleson’s analysis of male and female honor, as revealed in courtcases, provides further evidence of subaltern influence on late-nineteenth-century
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power relations and political relationships. Moreover, the author’s attempts todemonstrate that subalterns sought to claim greater control over their lives is acreative use of court documents, if a bit tenuous to this reviewer. Finally, hisemphasis on a “reformulation of hierarchical power relations” and on theregional importance of positivism as the rhetorical basis for (ultimately successful,if limited) nonelite demands to influence the shaping of state government policy isan important contribution to the current genre of subalternista interpretations ofLatin America’s social and political development. This book contributes much toour knowledge of regional specificity in Brazil during a key phase of the country’sprocess of modern nation building and state formation.
University of South Florida Scott Ickes
Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War. By A. J.Langguth. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Pp. 466. $30.00.)
Just as the British imperial government struggled with the problem of the Ameri-can frontier, the U.S. government faced the ongoing challenge of keeping the peacein regions that citizens wanted to settle but were already occupied by nativepopulations. The founding generation, as true children of the Enlightenment,seized upon the idea of civilizing Indians to transform them from exotic andsometimes hostile obstacles into familiar neighbors and fellow farmers. The idealooked better on paper than it worked in practice, and, by the 1820s, impatientAmericans had devised another plan. Removal policies that had been in de factooperation since the War of 1812, especially in the old Northwest, became insti-tutionalized with one of James Monroe’s final statements as president. Yet themechanism for removal—the legislation enacted in 1830—was the brainchild ofthe Jacksonians, and thus unfolded one of the most disreputable episodes inAmerican history.
A. J. Langguth’s book is not about this story, however, despite the apparentmeaning of its title. Neither is it about Andrew Jackson, whose role in removalafter his aggressive Indian fighting days is strangely depicted as oddly passive andat times even avuncular toward Indians. It is only marginally about the Trail ofTears, the rigors of which span just a little more than a brief chapter. That said,it is difficult to say what Langguth meant to do. The description on the dust jacketmakes the claim that “in time, the fierce national collision set off by Jackson’sIndian policy would encompass the Mexican War, the bloody frontier wars overthe expansion of slavery, the doctrines of nullification and secession, and finally,the Civil War itself.” Yet Langguth mentions this line of reasoning just twice in the
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narrative, and that only in passing, when he describes the removal debate as “thenation’s first civil war,” which he says the South won, and again in one of thebook’s concluding paragraphs, where he observes that the South lost the real CivilWar of the 1860s (158).
It is therefore baffling how Indian removal encompassed many of the otherpolitical clashes of the period. The author’s eccentric organization—the bookopens with an extended discussion of the presidential election of 1824—haschapters focus on individuals, although the focus is frequently diffuse and thestory wanders to other people and topics. The chapter on Andrew Jackson, forexample, mostly covers the Margaret Eaton controversy. Jackson elsewhere is astrange amalgam of stern resolve against the Indians and genuine concern overtheir fate. He was implacable, but he “saw himself as a friend of the Indian” who“preferred to focus on the benefits for the tribes in removal” (167). Langguth tellsus that Major Ridge even visited the Hermitage on his way west, as did his sonJohn, finding Jackson “unfailingly gracious to these Cherokees who had bowed tohis will” (200).
Aside from these touching interludes, Langguth often digresses into a generalpolitical history that covers opposition to the Panama Congress, the Clay-Randolph Duel, the Tariff of 1828, anti-Masonry, Rachel Jackson’s marital woes,the Bank of the United States veto, the Texas Revolution, the Panic of 1837, theMexican War, the Compromise of 1850, and the sectional crises of the 1850s,including Dred Scott and the Harpers Ferry Raid. The scope and aimlessness ofthis wide meander make it superficial enough to be simplistic, sometimes to thepoint of distortion. Occasionally it is marred by glaring errors. A sampling:Langguth says that Henry Clay secured John Tyler’s support in 1839 by promisingto back him for the vice presidency; that John C. Calhoun went “home” to dieafter his March 4, 1850, swansong; that the British commanded Red Stick Creeksat Horseshoe Bend; and that Stand Watie became a brigadier general in “Lee’sarmy.”
Clearly, Langguth regards as repugnant the physical treatment of those Chero-kees driven to the Indian Territory, and his chronicles of that incident, as well asthe profound divisions removal caused among the Cherokee people, are thebook’s best facets. It would have been better to have more of that, for almost halfof Langguth’s story has nothing to do with Indians, let alone their coercedjourneys to the west. In the end, it is anything but a systematic examination ofremoval policy and the consequences for its victims and the nation.
Colorado Springs, Colorado David S. Heidler
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Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era. By CarolynHerbst Lewis. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.Pp. xi, 228. $34.95.)
During the 1950s and 1960s, the American medical profession was on the frontline of domestic Cold War politics by promoting a “sexual defense” (14). Doctorsregarded family stability as crucial for maintaining national stability. Thus,human sexuality within the context of traditional marriage was stressed. Due tothe anxieties of the Cold War as well as the shift to white-collar work with its lackof physical challenge, masculinity was “especially fragile” (73). Consequently, itwas all the more important for doctors, who were generally male, to convincewives of the importance of being passive sexual partners so that their husbandscould be initiators in bed and not have their masculinity further weakened. At thesame time, physicians sought to “contain the homosexual threat” to the nation’ssocial health (6). By the mid-1960s, however, the sexual revolution was like “aFifth Column attack,” challenging the conservative medical community’s perspec-tive on sexual health (151). This is the gist of the narrative offered by CarolynHerbst Lewis in Prescription for Heterosexuality.
Lewis approaches her subject by culling articles from medical journals of theperiod under study. She supplements these with writings found in popular pub-lications such as Reader’s Digest, Ladies’ Home Journal, Newsweek, andPlayboy. In most cases, these texts were authored by doctors. In sifting throughthe material, Lewis focuses on the specific topics of female sexual frigidity,impotence, the premarital pelvic examination, and artificial insemination. AsLewis acknowledges, the overall analysis is based on the prescriptive: what themedical profession at the time was stating about human sexuality. Conse-quently, there is largely an absence of the descriptive: what doctors told theirpatients and what the patients themselves felt. Obviously, conversations wereseldom, if ever, tape-recorded, and any extant written records largely remainsealed to protect patient privacy. At any rate, it is unclear how important thearticles in medical journals were to practicing physicians—it is unlikely busydoctors studied them with the same intensity Lewis has. Also, the author doesnot offer a quantitative content analysis of the medical journals, so it is unclearhow representative these “sexual” texts were of the medical profession’s overallconcern.
Prescription for Heterosexuality is a useful contribution to postwar genderstudies, augmenting, for example, the work of historian Elaine Tyler May. Evenso, the book is rather thin in size (the introduction, five chapters, and epiloguetotal to 152 pages). Disappointingly, the thesis development is weak, and,
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contrary to the book’s subtitle, there is little here about the Cold War. Ingeneral, the few references to the Cold War are statements of assertion (such isthe case at the end of the second chapter). The author should have simplypresented the findings as a postwar time capsule of American views on humansexuality. Many readers, however, will hardly regard the findings of this work asrevelatory. It practically ranks as banal the conclusion that doctors during the1950s and 1960s viewed the traditional family structure and its correspondingheterosexuality as normative.
Palm Beach Atlantic University Roger Chapman
Every Home A Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesa-peake. By Sarah Hand Meacham. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,2009. Pp. xi, 187. $48.00.)
Few topics command the attention of undergraduate students of history and of theprofessors who teach them more than habits of drinking and alcoholic beverageproduction. Ever since the appearance of W. J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Repub-lic, professors can count on vignettes and statistics about drinking in earlyAmerica to enliven even the earliest morning lecture. Since then, books on tavernculture, individual beverages (especially rum), their role in the Atlantic economy(David Hancock’s Oceans of Wine), and moral attitudes toward drinking haveflourished in North American history. In this slim volume (137 pages of text), theauthor provides additional information about the production and distribution ofAmerican-made beverages in the Chesapeake during the colonial period as well assuggesting the social and economic networks that made local networks for bothpossible.
Sarah Hand Meacham succeeds in demonstrating the differences betweenChesapeake production and that of the other mainland North American coloniesand England. In the late seventeenth century, when the addition of hops trans-formed beer brewing in England and shifted alcohol production from small-scale,household production run by women to a larger-scale, male-dominated enterprise,the Chesapeake colonists continued to rely on old-fashioned and seasonal(autumn and winter) hard cider making, eschewing the new technology andlimiting their access to cider during much of the year. In addition, alcoholicbeverage production demonstrated a further way that colonists adapted to theirnew setting by expanding their choice of suitable fruit for use to include thepervasive persimmon.
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As historians have pointed out, Chesapeake planters allocated most of theirresources, including labor, to producing tobacco for export, leaving little time todevote to more diversified enterprises and limiting the capital available forpurchasing the expensive new equipment. Meacham found that the larger plantersstepped in to take advantage of the market and of economies of scale in produc-tion and storage of beverages for off-season sales, thereby providing a significantincome stream to themselves, supplies to their customers, and wholesale quantitiesto tavern-keeping neighbors. This analysis expands on our understanding of theeconomic role of larger planters who, before Scots and English factors moved intosupplying tidewater stores during the eighteenth century, served as the importersof tools and consumer goods.
Although Meacham contributes to our understanding of local economies, thebook appears to have been researched and written in haste. Though claiming toprovide a history of the colonial period in the Chesapeake, much of the evi-dence is from the very late colonial period, the early Republic, or even theantebellum period. Analysis of the primary source material pertaining to womenand gender seems limited, as well. On the first page of the preface, Meachamasserts that prior to 1800 “most Chesapeake women of all races were illiterate,and no diaries or letters from colonial Chesapeake women are known to remaintoday” and again that “no women’s journals, diaries, or letters have survived”for eighteenth-century women (ix, 23). On the contrary, extensive published andmanuscript primary source material exists, much of it at the research librariesand microfilm collections she cites in her notes. Decades of work (some of itovertly feminist in its agenda) improving or creating new finding aids haveallowed persistent scholars to analyze these primary sources, and a growingnumber of secondary works draw on these sources. Catherine Kerrison’s Claim-ing the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South is anexcellent place to begin a study of the complexity of eighteenth-century South-ern women’s reading and writing.
Despite these oversights, Meacham’s study is a welcome addition to the eco-nomic history approaches of historians like Jacob Price, who worked on theoperation of transatlantic trading networks, and Lorena Walsh, Ann SmartMartin, and Joanne Bowen in their study, Provisioning Early American Towns. Byfocusing her narrative on the production side of the alcohol market, Meachamestablishes the basis for the ultimate microbrewery—the home, but, in her case,the plantation.
Beloit College Linda L. Sturtz
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What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed AmericanDemocracy. By Edward P. Morgan. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,2010. Pp. xiii, 405. $39.95.)
After the “Summer of Love” in 1967, disgruntled residents of the Haight-Ashburydistrict in San Francisco held a mock “Death of Hippie” funeral to register theirprotest of the destructive impact of runaway youths on their community. Thecoffin for the event bore a banner, which read “Hippie, Son of Media,” a pointedcommentary on the harmful effect of media attention on the counterculture (152).In a similar vein, author Edward P. Morgan, a scholar of the 1960s and professorof political science, has fashioned a broad indictment of how the media misrep-resented and misinterpreted the social movements of that turbulent era, withdamaging consequences both for them, at the time, and for the radical democraticpromise they held. As a result, the images and interpretations of the era now oftenserve as conservative weapons in the culture wars of recent decades.
Morgan’s study examines how the print and visual media portrayed iconicevents, movements, and individuals from the 1960s. He combines historicalaccounts and critical theory—the names of Noam Chomsky, Antonio Gramsci,and Jürgen Habermas appear frequently—with a close reading of contemporarycoverage in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. What the author finds isthat the mass media repeatedly and selectively distorted the deeper message andmeaning of the antiwar, civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements byfocusing disproportionate attention on the most radical or violent elements withinthem, which in turn facilitated a conservative backlash. At the same time, publicdiscourse continually trivialized the issues at stake by framing them as an out-growth of the “generation gap” rather than the by-products of capitalism orimperialism. Ultimately, Morgan contends that this analysis was “politicallyimpotent and irrelevant” (286). It also reflected the “victory of a self-satiricalconsumer culture incessantly distracting and co-opting impulses that might rise upagainst it” (286).
What Really Happened to the 1960s offers a clear and compelling look athow the mass media has shaped our understanding—or misunderstanding—ofthis critical period. But the book has a number of flaws that damage theauthor’s larger argument. First, there is no discussion of how conservative pub-lications like National Review depicted the events of the 1960s and subse-quently influenced the “sixties nostalgia” exemplified by films like The Big Chillor Forrest Gump. Second, Morgan does not demonstrate convincingly that itwas the mass media, above all, that robbed the social movements of their demo-cratic potential. Perhaps other factors better explain their path as well as the
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ascendance of capitalism and conservatism. Finally, and perhaps inevitably in abroad study of this kind, some of the secondary sources used are rather datedin their interpretations.
Nevertheless, the author has produced an important corrective to contempo-rary, media-saturated perceptions of the 1960s. Although the book is rather denseand repetitive in places, it contains numerous insights that scholars can profitablyemploy to show students how media attention proved to be a double-edged swordfor young radicals. As Yippie leader Jerry Rubin once put it, “Television createsmyths bigger than reality. . . . [It] packs all the action into two minutes—a com-mercial for the revolution” (16). In a sense, he was correct—network televisioncoverage of the Birmingham demonstrations in 1963, for example, aided the civilrights cause immeasurably. But presumably Rubin, at the time, also had in minda different outcome than the conservative revolution to come.
Ohio Wesleyan University Michael W. Flamm
The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas forthe Heart and Soul of America. By Roy Morris Jr. (Lincoln, NE: University ofNebraska, 2010. Pp. xii, 254. $18.95.)
One of the great political rivalries in American history was the one betweenAbraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas from the 1830s to the 1860s.Strangely, that colossal rivalry never has been exclusively examined in a book;and, just as oddly, the life of Lincoln’s main antagonist, Douglas, has not evena handful of books about it. Poet Dylan Thomas once asked the question,“Who kills my history?” Historians know history dies through neglect: by beingignored and overlooked. Luckily, historian Roy Morris Jr. has pointed new lighton a neglected aspect of antebellum history in his book The Long Pursuit:Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heartand Soul of America.
From the time Lincoln and Douglas both first arrived in Illinois in the early1830s from other states, the two men vied not only at the local, state, and nationalpolitical levels but also personally in their mutual courtship of the vivacious MaryTodd. Although Lincoln won the woman, Douglas won everything else. The LongPursuit is the story of this thirty-year rivalry as well as the lives of the two menwho fought it. From the statehouse in Vandalia to the White House in Washing-ton, Morris lays out the epic struggle between these two giants in a fascinating andcompelling narrative.
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Morris shows that whatever the heights of myth Lincoln has reached today,during his life he was just a man who had more failures than successes; likewise,Douglas was perhaps the most gifted politician of his generation with feats andaccomplishments to match his reputation. While Douglas toured the country androamed the marble halls of Congress, Lincoln loped the muddy streets of Spring-field. Lincoln attached himself to Douglas, actively opposing his politics, as theonly way he could be heard over the stentorian voice and reputation of the LittleGiant. “If, as Lincoln said, there was a ‘race of ambition’ between the two men,until 1860 Douglas not only led the race, he virtually lapped Lincoln in thebackstretch,” Morris states (x). And had it not been for Douglas, “Lincoln wouldhave remained merely a good trial lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, known locally forhis droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife” (ix–x).
Morris, editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of five books onthe Civil War and post-Civil War eras, has done a wonderful job breathing newlife into both Lincoln and Douglas by virtue of examining their long-standingpolitical battles. The narrative is well written, lively, and does an expert job ofshowing Lincoln and Douglas as individuals as well as rivals and of mixing thepersonal stories with the political. The book is based on secondary research,which also includes edited works of primary materials such as the correspondenceof Lincoln, Douglas, and their political peers.
The Long Pursuit takes its reader to an original place in history—not merelyto the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates or the familiar 1860 presidentialelection but into the lives, the failures and successes, and the chases and con-frontations of the two greatest men of their age.
Independent Scholar Jason Emerson
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. By Kim Phillips-Fein. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2010. Pp. xii, 360. $16.95.)
Especially amidst today’s academic fiscal crunch, the claim that history is writtenby the winners is a tough sell. But, after a political season in which words andworldviews formerly dismissed as vestigial or vulpine worked Tea Party politicalmagic, this timely study is written about the winners: the business executives whowaged a decades-long mobilization to undo the New Deal liberal order and itsintellectual defenses, to discredit regulation and progressive taxes, to break unionpower and welfare-state expansion, and to celebrate free-market income inequali-ties. Ranging from the 1930s through the 1970s and beyond, prize-winninghistorian Kim Phillips-Fein crisply tracks the corporate think tank nexus that
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displaced a more government and labor friendly political culture and forged a newcommon sense that propelled the Age of Reagan.
Phillips-Fein asks a lot of the reader in grounding “the origin of modernconservative politics” in this small, reactionary corps of money men, a libertarianpantheon, distinguished by their “crystalline vision of the free market,” includingvarious du Ponts, Hayek, Mises, the Mont Pelerin Society, Jasper Crane, Pew, theFoundation for Economic Education, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Lemuel Boul-ware, General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan, and the American EnterpriseAssociation (xii, 27). Few would have predicted after Goldwater’s drubbing in the1964 election that the ideas promoted by this book’s principals would rise fromtheir crypt and transform American political life. But their ghostly work outsidethe electoral arena—thus the title’s play on Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”—leftits mark, from right-to-work laws to a network underpinned by businessmen’sdonations to conservative think tanks, Christian leaders, radio stations, and suchpublications as National Review. Surely the key to their ultimate successes wasnot their libertarian ideas themselves or even their largesse in promoting them.Otherwise more Americans would have shared their “shocked dismay” at Eisen-hower’s accommodation with the New Deal welfare state, and other businessleaders would not have styled themselves as corporate liberals who could endorsereigning Keynesian approaches to economic growth, a “Treaty of Detroit” withauto workers, or the election of Lyndon Johnson (57).
Giving voice to libertarian icons who pursued well-funded communicationsstrategies can make short work of the straw man of a postwar liberal consensus(if consensus is equated with unanimity). But it cannot displace prevailing expla-nations for the multifaceted New Right’s ascension, from culture-war backlashesto suburban modernism to the reordered politics and ballooning economicinequalities of a vertiginous high-tech and high-finance economy. Empoweringbusiness, as Phillips-Fein expertly recounts, was not primarily a matter of ideas,an alternate agenda, or academic legitimation for their debating points from an“intellectual infrastructure” (267). What fundamentally mattered was that herprotagonists were poised to ally with, or to opportunistically cash in on, congenialascendant forces: frustrations over liberal failures, an evangelical surge, racialresentments, the broader triumphant corporate public relations and lobbyingcounterattack against 1970s “over-regulation,” and the Reagan Revolution. Incontributing to our understanding of those interactions, Invisible Hands gives thewinners their due.
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Mark H. Leff
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God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. ByGeorge C. Rable. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.Pp. 600. $35.00.)
Inspired by George Pickett’s alleged remark about Confederate failure on July 3,1863, George C. Rable ends his excellent religious history of the Civil War withan assertion: its participants would likely have attributed the origins, operations,and outcomes of civil strife to their unshaking belief that “God had something todo with it” (397). Rable’s seemingly imprecise conclusion to this splendid con-tribution to the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era is profound. In an eracharacterized by religious values that animated both abolitionism and proslaveryapologetics, nothing was more protean than religion. Every event displayed God’shandiwork. Despite Lincoln’s warnings to the contrary, the Lord Almighty didseem to be “for and against the same thing.” In the end, the triumph of the Unionarmies proved that God marched with their righteous battalions. The defeat of theConfederacy only proved that God was testing white Southerners. The war settledthe military outcome but not which side was right about God.
Rable adds to an understanding of the worldview and motivation of the CivilWar generation. Fundamentally, they believed in a God who directed humanhistory. Rable’s skilled pen and keen insights reveal a welter of ironies as thisworldview intersected with the vicissitudes of fratricide. The progress of warlessened church attendance, especially in the Confederacy, while making a firmerlink in the civil religions in both North and South. Revivals in the ranks occurred,notably in the Army of Northern Virginia, especially later in the course of the war,but armies are largely the society of young men, not necessarily a gender and agegroup given to restraint and religious reflection. Pious religion and pervasive viceuneasily coexisted in the Civil War’s armies. Voluntary religious societies like theUnited States Christian Commission struggled for resources with the United StatesSanitary Commission. And African Americans’ belief in the day of jubilo vied withthe essential social conservatism of much of white Christianity. Fundamentally, forall the links between cross and sword and church and state, the business of wardid not mix easily with the message of the Prince of Peace.
Arranging his work both chronologically and thematically (chapters onchurches, soldiers, and chaplains), Rable mixes traditional denominationalhistory with the religious expressions of soldiers, statesmen, and ordinary folk onthe home front. His wide-ranging sources include denominational publicationsand records, clerical sermons, vast troves of published and unpublished corre-spondence, and a slew of diaries. Perhaps only African Americans and PresidentLincoln found in their fiery trial a sense of theological profundity. In the end, most
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believers found solace not in a deeper religious insight but in an abiding, andperhaps deeper, belief in Providence; their suffering and sacrifice was part of alarger cosmic drama.
Adams State College Edward R. Crowther
Governing Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898–1956. By Reinaldo Román. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,2007. Pp. 273. $25.95.)
This masterful and innovative study explores state policies and attitudes towardsreligious phenomena derided as superstition in Puerto Rico and Cuba in the earlytwentieth century. It is highly original in several respects. Going against the grainof much previous research on African-derived religious formations, this studyhones in on European-derived practices such as Espiritismo and popular Catholi-cism, which were equally, if not arguably even more, prevalent in the early decadesof the twentieth century. And, although studies of Caribbean religion often neglectthe political context, this study brings the state and religious deviancy squarelyinto dialogue, as indeed they should be, since the first decade of the twentiethcentury was such a charged moment for Cuba and Puerto Rico. Ever since theybecame protectorates in 1898, there were strong pressures to persuade the UnitedStates of their capacity to govern, which, in part, explains the extent of officialconcern over “irrational” behavior. Yet there was also a dramatic rise in popularreligiosity in the form of self-appointed lay preachers, or what Reinaldo Románterms “man gods,” who drew large popular followings. Several scrupulouslydefended their role as Catholic missionaries, yet these holy men worried clergywho wondered if they were actually Spiritists or Protestants. The fact that thesetwo nations were newly minted republics meant that both police and the presstracked these religious communities, providing a wealth of evidence to examinewhile shaping these movements in important ways through their efforts at man-agement and regulation, as Román very effectively demonstrates. By revealinghow closely these two republics’ patterns of popular religiosity paralleled oneanother, the study also challenges the paradigm of Cuban exceptionalism preva-lent in the literature.
The book is organized into six chapters. It begins with a pair of living saintsfrom Puerto Rico who practiced a creole version of Spiritualism with clairvoyanceand spirit mediumship, featuring one Hilario Mustelier, who landed in an asylumand eventually in court in San Juan, and Juan Manso, who also administered
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water cures and prayers in Havana. In the next chapter, Román charts severalhealers who arose in Puerto Rico in 1898 at a time when many Spanish parishpriests had defected and left the country. A discussion of the role of the press ina witchcraft and baby-snatching panic in Cuba that resulted in the arrests anddeaths of several black Cubans and West Indian contract laborers follows. Inchapter 4, on Spiritism, Román focuses on a “Catholic” healer who was claimedby the Spiritist community and whose fame spread through the astute use of massmarketing strategies such as buttons and postcards with her image. Chapter 5covers President Fulgencio Batista’s cultivation of two miraculous faith healers in1956 just as disaffection from the Cuban regime was approaching crisis-levelproportions: one who suffered from recurrent stigmata and a second, a showmanwho baptized water during his radio show. In the final chapter, the authorconsiders a Marian apparition in a Puerto Rican schoolyard that was inspired bya Lady Fatima movie, which naysayers claimed was not the Holy Mother at all butrather a common ghost. These reservations did not deter Puerto Ricans stationedin Korea from carrying amulets of holy water to embolden them in battle,however. In a final interpretive chapter, Román considers the 1994 chupacabrasrumors and seeks to account for the attitude of satire and bacilón with which theissue was approached by Puerto Ricans, as well as how these alleged bloodsuckingbeasts articulated a crisis of credibility with government.
In this fascinating study, the author approaches religious practice and beliefin a sociological light, one in which religious belief is not cordoned off but ratheris intimately linked to other phenomena. If at times microhistorical context isoverlooked, it is due to Román’s objective of locating these religious figures aspart of a broader moment and conversation that Cuba and Puerto Rico shared,one in which the state, commerce, and media participated. He portrays these“man gods,” for example, not as recidivist throwbacks but rather popular par-ticipants in the national call for regeneration and progress heralded by liberals.Indeed, as Patricia Pessar (2005) has effectively demonstrated, millenarian move-ments often define themselves in relation to one another and spread in a kind ofdemonstration effect. The eclectic and hybrid religious forms examined here havebeen neglected by scholars searching for retentions and survivals, yet these rep-resent a deeply creole, everyday language of religious expression in the HispanicCaribbean. Román documents the complexity of these composite movements in alanguage that dignifies rather than denigrates practitioners. The study is scrupu-lously researched, drawing upon oral history, newspaper accounts, rumors, andregional and national archival materials in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Washington.Román is a true wordsmith, and his elegant and lyrical prose is a pleasure to read.
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This pathbreaking study deserves a wide readership and surely will inspire morework on everyday syncretic religious practice in the Caribbean.
University of California, Los Angeles Lauren Derby
ReferencePatricia Pessar, From Fanatics to Folk: Brazillan Millenarianism and Popular Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán,1800–1880. By Terry Rugeley. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.Pp. xii, 488. $65.00.)
More historical ink has been spilled on the Caste War [1847–1902] than on anyother topic in Yucatán’s storied past. Ever since nineteenth-century peninsularhistorians first cast the rebellion as an epic struggle between civilization andbarbarism and erroneously labeled it a race war, more heat than light has beenshed on who fought, for what purposes, and why the rebellious Maya proved sodifficult to defeat. Seemingly every angle has been examined, from the insurgents’tantalizing Cult of the Speaking Cross to the destabilizing elite political faction-alism in the peninsula’s three cities that precipitated the rebellion. A third of thepeninsula’s population were casualties of this conflict, and the war left an indeliblemark on peninsular politics and the regional economy.
Historian Terry Rugeley already has made an important contribution to thisscholarly conversation; his first book focused on the revolt’s rural origins. InRebellion Now and Forever, he argues that the war was first precipitated and thenextended by a persistent culture of violence that permeated regional politicsbetween 1830 and 1880. Rugeley finds parallels in similar sanguinary strugglessuch as Colombia’s La Violencia, Guatemala’s civil war [1954–1985], and theThirty Years’ War in Europe. He contends that such long running violencias are theresult of weak states that are unable to secure control over peripheral regions,the relative ease of acquiring arms, a clientelistic political culture driven by regionalpowerbrokers, and the parity of the combatants. In such bloodletting, violence issporadic but coldly calculated; political agendas take a backseat to “hereditaryvendettas” as “eyes are taken for eyes; draconian rulers seem justified”; and“peasant insurgents or guerrilla irregulars at times defeat conventional armies” (7).
In this impeccably researched monograph, Rugeley gives the lie to a number oflongstanding myths in the literature, most notably one first propagated in pro-vincial histories and then given fresh legs in Nelson Reed’s The Caste War of
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Yucatan [1964], that the rebel Maya were a tribal throwback to their precontactancestors. Instead, he paints their capital of Chan Santa Cruz as a “peasantamalgam of earlier experiences with village government, the parish church, andabove all the militias” (33). In fact, the insurgents were keen to establish politicaland economic alliances with Hispanics both before and during the war. Moreover,the ethnic composition of rebel forces, although it changed over the war’s dura-tion, boasted Hispanics in both leadership and auxiliary positions. Even as fearsof a race war developed and Hispanics and mestizos closed ranks, “non-Mayas”continued to serve in the rebel army as “secretaries, advisers, and arms traffickers”(102). Atrocities committed by the state militias were among the insurgents’ bestrecruitment strategies.
Rebellion Now and Forever is less about the war itself and more about thepolitical landscape that enveloped and nurtured the struggle. Unlike previousscholars, Rugeley pays special attention to the numerous Maya who either foughtalongside Hispanic elites or sought imaginative ways to sit out the war entirely.Following up on his earlier work, the author devotes special attention to whathappened to batabs, traditional leaders of indigenous communities, who wereplaced in the impossible position of having to defend their people against maraud-ing rebels while they pushed back against an unpopular military draft and theonerous exactions of regional prefects.
Politics is at the heart of this narrative, so it is not surprising to find a panoply ofnational, regional, and local politicians, coups, and invading armies suffusing, andin some cases overwhelming, the core chapters. Rugeley does introduce arrestingcharacters, like Buenaventura Martínez, “an insider turned outsider” who helpeddefeat Maximilian’s forces, and, the reviewer’s favorite, the flim-flam man JoséMaría Martínez de Arredondo, a ne’er-do-well from a prominent family who, afterunsuccessfully wheeling and dealing in the state capital, attempted to ply his tradein the countryside only to get his comeuppance from outraged Maya who machetedhim to death, cut his “silver tongue” out and stuffed it up his nose, and then, forgood measure, severed one of his private parts and stuck it where his tongue hadbeen. Even with gems like these rescued for posterity from regional archives, ajudicious pruning of the infighting would have been well worth the effort.
To scholars, however, this book is a godsend. Thanks to the author’s tirelessresearch, we now know a great deal more than we did about the Caste War, thefailings of the liberal reform and imperial rule, and how the endless cycle ofviolence helped shape future generations.
Bowdoin College Allen Wells
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Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America. By Peter Schrag.(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. 320. $26.95.)
If one wanted to sort the ever-lengthening row of books on American immigrationinto categories, two groups would almost immediately come to mind. On the onehand, there is the groaning bookshelf of works about particular immigrant groupsor communities, whose stories from penniless arrival to comfort and stability inAmerica are told in countless memoirs, monographs, and collections. On the otherhand, there is the shelf of books on the politics of immigration and immigrationcontrol. Although some of these works are addressed to policy wonks, the major-ity seek a more general audience. These works are often animated by theirauthors’ strong political views and, at times, their white-hot anger about Ameri-can immigration policy. With some notable exceptions, the most thesis-drivenbooks within this category often have a thin research base. The complex interplayof political, legal, and social history that is the foundation of immigration historydoes not easily lend itself to one-track storytelling.
Peter Schrag, in his ambitious and thesis-driven Not Fit for Our Society, triesto provide us not only with both a detailed history and a clear message, but alsoa good read. A veteran journalist and commentator, Schrag is a lively writer withan eye for the telling anecdote and the skill to weave thumbnail biographies intothe larger story without detracting from the larger theme. Schrag has thoughtdeeply about the history of nativism and immigration policy, and his research baseis solid. Schrag’s thesis that the rise of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment inthe United States is inextricably linked to the country’s immigration history is nota revision of established scholarship. Schrag acknowledges that other books, fromthe foundational study of John Higham to the recent work of Mae Ngai, havecovered similar territory, and he frequently relies on their interpretations. But,though generously footnoted, the book carries this heritage lightly, and the authornever overwhelms the reader with heavy doses of historiography.
The author begins with a broad chapter on immigration and nativism from theera of the American Revolution to the Gilded Age. In the next three chapters,which cover the history of nativism from the Irish migration of the 1840s to theQuota Act of 1924, Schrag’s thesis takes on its own distinctive shape. Its wide-ranging descriptions repeatedly emphasize that nativists almost always used racistarguments in their anti-immigrant campaigns from the antebellum era to thepresent.
In chapter 5, which covers the postwar decades up to the 1960s, events, laws,and campaigns begin to cascade in Schrag’s narrative. Readers who are new to the
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materials may have trouble keeping up. Anti-Semitic inflection in the DisplacedPersons Act, continued prejudice against “Polacks,” Asian exclusion, and abuse ofbraceros are all important topics that deserve more in-depth treatment than theyget in this somewhat unwieldy chapter, clumsily titled “The Great Awhitening.”The final two chapters speak the loudest about the not-so-covert racist agenda ofimmigration restriction. In a narrative with many details and polemical asides, theauthor covers the most recent fifty years of immigration control legislation, fromthe passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 to the efforts at immigration reformduring the second presidential term of George W. Bush. Schrag weaves togetherthis recent story of ineffective immigration control and a revitalized nativismskillfully without losing his direction in the shoals of legislative and policy detailor a flood of polemics.
The many official documents that Schrag uses to weave together his sometimesknobby fabric of history often provide surprises, even for readers well versed inthis subject. In his description of 1930s nativism, for example, Schrag goes intosome detail about the activities of Charles R. Goethe, a California multimillion-aire and Nazi sympathizer little known to historians today; Goethe not onlybecame a big supporter of Yosemite National Park but was also prominent in theanti-Mexican movement. Like the Hearst press, Goethe deplored what he saw asa “Mexican invasion” and linked it to increased marijuana smuggling as one ofthe core evils of Western life in the 1930s.
For historians, Schrag’s narrative may offer too little nuance, propelled as it isby the author’s strong opinions. At the same time, it forcefully reminds us thathatred and ignorance in immigration policy are nothing new, as this book amplydemonstrates. This is a remarkably compact survey, covering nativism and immi-gration in the United States from the early days of the Republic to the present injust 230 pages. With its abundant anecdotes and strong authorial voice, Not Fitfor Our Society is an important addition, even on a crowded bookshelf.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dorothee Schneider
The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance. ByJames Roger Sharp. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Pp. xiv, 239.$34.95.)
Scholars of the early Republic know that Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration inMarch 1801 represented a dangerous watershed for the young United States.Stories circulated that the Francophile Jefferson would bring the horrors of the
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French Revolution to America. Many opponents anticipated that the new presi-dent would disassemble the Federalist foundations of government enactedduring Washington’s presidency, and the edifice of power would collapse.Others insisted that the godless Jefferson would even destroy institutionalizedreligion and burn bibles. Thus, Thomas Jefferson’s potential election in 1800,according to historian James Roger Sharp, seemed to be the catalyst for divi-siveness that could result in violence, secession, and potential armed conflictthat would ruin America.
The United States had suffered through a troubling political decade during the1790s, and Sharp describes the turmoil by using vivid descriptions of protagonistsand events. The emergence of political factions and organized opposition hadresulted in bitter and acrimonious debate concerning the future of the youngcountry. Moreover, as the country moved toward 1800, many Americans believedthat the United States faced a crisis. After all, the Constitution was but a decadeold, and some expected that the government would falter just as had the Articlesof Confederation. The Constitution had increased the power of the federal gov-ernment at the expense of the states. Additionally, the struggle between Britainand France divided Americans, prompting each to question the loyalty of theother. When the election of 1800 resulted in a tie in the Electoral College, itpermitted the House of Representatives to decide between Republican candidatesThomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The Union hung in the balance amid rumors ofviolence, civil war, and secession.
Basing his synthetic work on the research of many historians of the earlyAmerican Republic, Sharp’s well-written account maintains that Jefferson’s elec-tion in 1800 was one of the most critical events in American history, overshad-owed only by the election of 1860, which plunged the country into civil war. Healso posits that the election embodied the first peaceful and orderly transition ofpower from one political party to another. Yet, Sharp disagrees with John Ferling’sAdams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, in which Ferling arguesthat the contest dramatically altered the political direction for the country andcreated a more egalitarian nation. Instead, he argues that the election “stimulatedthe development of a more democratic politics, especially in the states, [but it didnot suggest] ‘a mandate from the People for sweeping transformation’” (178).Egalitarian politics and a two-party system did not develop until well afterAndrew Jackson’s election in 1828.
Thomas Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800” did not represent a short-termRepublican victory. Instead, Jefferson epitomized a profoundly defining and trans-formative period in American history, and, in hindsight, modern readers will
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witness that the debate represented a question between means and ends—bothparties envisioned a similar end but disagreed over the means as to how to achieveit.
Texas Christian University Gene Allen Smith
Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America. ByHarvard Sitkoff. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Pp. vii, 232.$50.00.)
At the start of this marvelous collection of Harvard Sitkoff’s civil rights writings,he observes: “This is not to suggest that individuals do not matter in history. . . . Itis, however, to emphasize the preconditions for such an endeavor to prevail” (17).The same could be said for this volume, which is simultaneously a history of thecivil rights movement and a history of the historian who has devoted his life to it.Sitkoff joined the movement in those heady days of grassroots organizing but soonrealized his talents equipped him best to serve the cause by teaching and writingthe kinds of history that could provide the movement with a “usable past.” Andthat he did, publishing books and articles on the history of race relations, theimpact of racial discrimination, and the fits and starts of progress toward racialjustice. His subjects ranged from angry white workers to frustrated black ghettodwellers, from white and black political leaders to lesser-known bureaucrats who,by implementing or refusing to implement specific policies, shaped the lives ofthousands of people.
Ten of these “greatest hits” have been collected here. Sitkoff introduces each,explaining his intentions in writing it, commenting on critiques it received, andupdating or clarifying his views. The essays then appear as originally written. Theresult is a sweeping view of the development of a civil rights consciousness thattook many forms over time and the development of a gifted historian whose skilland understanding also took many forms.
The essays in this volume span the years from the Depression to the Reaganera. Most focus on an event (such as the Detroit riot of 1943), policy (the NewDeal), individual (Wendell Willkie), or coalition strategy (Jews and the Holo-caust). A few offer broader reflections, including the last piece, written in 1984,which celebrates the advances of the movement but fears that the momentum forracial justice has faded. In his introduction to that essay, written after the electionof Barack Obama, Sitkoff glories in the inaccuracy of that fear. Each essay is adelight to read, with the lucid prose, careful research, and insightful analysis that
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make Sitkoff the excellent historian he is. Although neither the information northe arguments are new, the essays remain both fresh and instructive.
Taken as a whole, these essays argue for the contingent nature of the civil rightsstruggle; although the goal of black equality never changed, Sitkoff emphasizes,the approaches, opportunities, and results certainly did. The essays depict themovement as the product of many singular events and dramatic shifts in focus,sometimes propelling the cause of black equality forward, sometimes redirectingit or even setting it back. And these events were themselves not inevitable but wererather shaped by their own historical context. Each moment offered uniqueopportunities to those struggling for justice and equality, and they also placedsignificant constraints around what was possible. Sitkoff hoped such historicalstudies could provide both inspiration and strategic lessons for contemporaryactivists.
For example, World War II’s struggles against fascism provided an opportunityto equate Nazism with racism and energized black demands for, and expectationsof, equal treatment. But the war also diverted political leaders’ attention fromdomestic issues, and racial tensions exploded into violent confrontations and riotsthat turned liberals, black and white, away from mass action tactics and towardlegal and legislative approaches. This, argues Sitkoff, “smothered the embryonicblack movement for equality by tying it even more closely to liberal interracialism,which all too easily accepted the appearance of racial peace for the reality of racialjustice” (66).
That his views remain contested only reminds us how important his writingsare and how much he remains in the midst of the historical and political fray. Ashe writes, “Let the debate go on” (65).
Trinity College Cheryl Greenberg
Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006.Book Three, The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. By Steve J. Stern. (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. xxxiv, 584. $99.95.)
This is the last of three volumes the author has written on the polarized memo-ries about Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. The first two volumes carried the issuesand narrative from the coup of 1973 to the end of his dictatorship and willstrengthen an understanding of this one. This work examines “memoryknots”—events, personalities, and public scandals—that evolved after a plebi-scite forced him from office. Steve J. Stern explains the gradual dismantling of
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Pinochet’s pretensions of having “saved” the nation and the acceptance by amajority of Chileans that his sixteen-year regime had murdered, tortured, andforced Chileans into exile on a massive scale. The revelations appeared in asteady drip of discoveries of bodies, of official investigations, and of judicialinnovations that weakened the dictator’s 1978 amnesty law. Stern argues thatthis contest of memories between Pinochet’s supporters and his victims wasfundamental. People had to know the truth before any civil society could beconsolidated. In all this, Chile led a struggle for “human rights” that continuesas an international movement.
The administrations after 1989 centered on a pact between the ChristianDemocrats and the Socialists: the Concertacíon. Pinochet’s Constitution of 1980and many of his decrees remained Chile’s basic laws. Pinochet continued his roleas “savior” and commander-in-chief, and he threatened to return to power if thearmy was defamed or any of his key decisions on the economy were undone. Bycomparison, his many victims were weak, having a degree of cultural influence butlittle political power, and the new administration of President Patricio Aylwin waslimited in its capacity to respond to their demands for justice. Stern provides thebest defense of Aylwin this reviewer has read: insuring a transition to a civilsociety took precedence over all other goals, even basic justice for those persecutedby the dictator. Even so, the many organizations of victims never gave up, andtheir demonstrations, cultural events, and memorials pushed the truth to theforefront.
This volume concludes a monumental work, and, in writing it, Stern hasprovided an erudite and insightful study of the entire period. This reviewerdisagrees with many of its observations and finds the author’s conclusions circularbut can in this brief review emphasize only a couple of problems. The book is toolong. Stern’s every thought and rumination seem to have been printed. The workof Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, tracing a pattern in Chile’s long history ofsuppressing the truth of barbaric acts by various governments, seems a betterstudy. Pinochet is hardly the first regime to count on el olvido. Even so, Stern givesa fine description of how uneven and prolonged the struggle for truth became:every step toward revelation often led to more than one step back. Eventually, thedictator lost his public position and died at ninety-one, facing charges of taxevasion. But the truth, once discovered, has lost its moral immediacy to a neolib-eral elite, a supercilious media that it controls, the suppression of any serious civilmobilization, and a depoliticized, consumer-oriented youth.
University of California, San Diego Michael Monteón
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Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. ByAndrea Stone and Marc Zender. (London, England: Thames and Hudson, 2011.Pp. 248. $34.95.)
The ancient Maya created the most extensive iconographic system and sophisti-cated script in the ancient Americas. Although there are now a number of usefulreference works for the writing system, Maya iconography has not been treatedcomprehensively. Such a study would indeed be daunting, encompassing a vastarray of gods, regalia, and objects. Reading Maya Art, written by two of the mostprominent Mayanist scholars, brings us one step closer to an encyclopedia ofMaya iconography, providing a discussion of over one hundred of the mostimportant icons in Maya art.
To accomplish this, the authors recognize the extraordinary degree to whichlinguistic concepts are embedded in Maya iconography through the use of glyphicelements. Though presented in a fairly naturalistic style, these glyphs infuse Mayaart with a profoundly symbolic quality that also renders it largely opaque to theuninitiated. Selecting one hundred of the most prominent of these glyphic ele-ments (mostly nouns but also a few adjectives and verbs), the authors provide thestudent of Maya iconography with a much-needed key to the decipherment of itssemantic component.
To use the book, one simply scans the two pages at the beginning to find thedesired concept represented by a glyph. These are organized into broad conceptualcategories: people, gods, body parts, regalia, and so on. Then one only has tothumb through the catalog to find the appropriate entry. Each entry consists ofone page of discussion of the glyph, with four or five relevant illustrations (linedrawings and photographs) on the facing page. Because Maya art is so complex,the designers use red highlighting in the drawings to call attention to relevantmotifs. The entries are also cross referenced, and there is a handy glossary. Theendnotes make reference to a large body of literature, which is current andauthoritative. A brief, but very useful, introduction to Maya art prefaces thecatalog and highlights a number of important ways in which the Maya script andpictorial art interact. Though it is directed at novices and provides specificexamples of how images can and should be “read,” the introduction points theway for future research in the complex and vast field of text and image relation-ships in Maya art.
With regard to scope, it is probably unfair to fault the authors for not includingcertain signs, given the vast symbolic vocabulary of Maya art. Still, one wonderswhy certain rare or obscure signs were included, such as the god of the numbersix, yet others were left out, in particular the glyphs for “white” and “headband.”
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Nevertheless, as an art history instructor, this reviewer immediately recognized theutility of this work. Although it is particularly suited to undergraduate courses inMaya art and iconography, its clever concept, excellent illustrations, accessiblewriting style, and top-notch scholarship give it a much broader appeal.
California State University, Chico Matthew G. Looper
Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. BySteven E. Woodworth. (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Pp. xi, 412.$30.00.)
With Manifest Destinies the author ventures beyond the scholarship that hasdefined his scholastic career. After over two dozen books dealing with some aspectof the American Civil War, Steven E. Woodworth has taken on the 1840s, apivotal period in America’s descent into civil war. The book has much to offer,although it does not fulfill the promise at the outset of analyzing how “America’smanifest destiny to overspread the continent became its manifest destiny to facethe issue of slavery” (xiv). The book is predominantly a synthesis of existingsecondary literature with some primary material, and Woodworth mostlydescribes the nation’s westward expansion rather than analyzing how the journeyitself led to civil war.
The book is essentially a political and military history of the 1840s with aserving of western history on the side. The chapters on politics and the AmericanWest tend to be recitations of the standard stories: elections, politics, and the sagaof immigrants moving to Oregon and California along with the Mormon migra-tion. Although predictable, the chapters covering these areas are not without talesof human triumph and tragedy and interesting characters. Robert Stockton andthe debacle aboard the U.S.S. Princeton in September 1843 is a good example.However, midway through the book, Woodworth turns his attention to theMexican-American War, and the story of the war, which covers roughly one-thirdof the manuscript, is its strongest feature.
Detailed and well supplemented with battlefield maps, Woodworth’s story ofmanifest destiny is recommended for those who enjoy the military events of theera and find wanting works that discuss the war’s effects but ignore the war itself.That is not the case here. The coverage of the war not only provides a solid,concise history of the conflict but has abundant stories and asides of the men whowill later play prominent roles in the American Civil War. Woodworth manages toweave in Johnston, Grant, Lee, Pickett, Reynolds, Longstreet, and others withoutalluding to their future exploits, almost understating who they would become in
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favor of explaining who they were then and what they did. Not only are thecampaigns in Mexico well covered, but the war in both New Mexico and Cali-fornia enjoys much the same level of detail.
The book’s strength is, in many ways, its major weakness. With one-third ofthe book devoted to roughly one year of the entire decade, the remainder of theperiod and the many issues that dominate the era get less attention. Abolition, forexample, is relegated to a brief chapter early in the book and does not resurfaceexcept in the context of political matters, particularly the presidential electionsin 1844 and 1848. In the end, a little less coverage of the war might have allowedWoodworth to develop more adequately the theme laid out in the preface and toldreaders something more about how our manifest destiny was our destiny toconfront the institution of slavery.
Weitz Morgan PLLC Mark A. Weitz
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea. Edited by Byung-KookKim and Ezra F. Vogel. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 744.$55.00.)
South Korea’s spectacular rise from among the poorer new nations of the post-1945 era to a wealthy, dynamic member of the developed world has been thesubject of a sizable literature. Much of it has focused on the period under ParkChung Hee’s rule, 1961–1979, during which, it is generally agreed, the economictakeoff began. This collection of twenty-one essays by twenty-four scholars makesan important contribution to this literature. It is well organized and admirablyfocused on the topic, and the individual essays are consistently insightful. Theessays are grouped into those dealing with the background to the Park era,politics, economics and society, and international relations. Four essays thenexamine the Park regime in comparative perspective.
Although most of the studies of South Korea’s economic development duringthis time have concentrated on either state policies or on the chaebols, Korea’slarge business conglomerates, the essays in this book center around the role ofPark Chung Hee. This is a useful corrective, for, as the authors persuasively argue,it was his force of personality and his ability to manipulate the levels of power andto implement economic policies that are central to understanding just how thistransformation occurred. Studies on this topic have been influenced by the “devel-opmental model” that sees South Korea as a classic case of a bureaucratic-rational
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state that gave priority to economic development and that was insulated enoughfrom powerful vested interests to see that its policies were carried out. This was amodel pioneered by Japan and successfully adopted by South Korea and Taiwan.Though not rejecting this model, the authors have modified it by examining thepaternalistic nature of the state under Park, his domineering influence, and thepolitical calculations involved in decision making. Park negotiated directly withbusiness leaders while creating a praetorial guard of military and security officersto secure his power and carry out his will; the bureaucracy and the technocratswere clearly subordinate to him and were, in effect, his servants.
Park emerges in these essays as a remarkably skillful politician, and the politi-cal dimensions of almost all economic policies were foremost in his calculations.He was driven by a desire to secure and strengthen his own political power inwhat was becoming a “life presidency.” But he was also driven by a vision, whatcoeditor Byung-Kook Kim calls a desire to make Korea “a second Japan.” It wasa nationalist vision of a Korea that was militarily strong and secure, economicallyprosperous, and free from its dependency on the United States or any other foreignpower. Park, in his published writings, was always clear about his own aims.What the authors show is his ability to learn through trial and error how toachieve these aims while always focusing on his ambitions both for his countryand for himself. His mistakes are also pointed out in the essays, including thefinancial guarantees given to business groups that resulted in frequent liquiditycrises and his failure to appreciate that the economic transformation was creatinga large middle class and urban industrial class growing restless with the restraintsof his political system.
This excellent collection of essays convincingly argues that any examination ofSouth Korea as a model of how a poor country can climb out of poverty needs tofactor in the personality of Park Chung Hee and the domestic and internationalpolitics of the time. However, the study, by focusing on the bold, risky, butultimately successful, strategic moves made by Park, may overestimate hisachievements. The authors also sometimes imply that his authoritarian regimewas indispensable to the country’s modernization. For example, coeditor EzraVogel, examining Park in a comparative perspective with other late starters toindustrialization, states that “no country where fundamental changes were intro-duced from within and that achieved sustained rapid growth did so withouthaving a strong authoritarian leader who guided those changes” (513). Yetunderneath the political instability and slow economic growth of the pre-1961 erawas a rapidly urbanizing society open to new ideas, an educational systemundergoing an explosive rate of expansion, and a bureaucracy and a small
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entrepreneurial class that were acquiring the skills that would be indispensable toPark’s project. Park carried out a successful transformation of South Korea intoa modern, industrial society, but many of the elements of that achievement werealready there. His regime has sometimes been held as an example of the necessity,or at least usefulness, of a ruthlessly authoritarian, yet competent, state to jump-start economic modernization. Still, it can be argued that the country would havemoved onto a successful trajectory of growth under a less repressive government,perhaps not quite as fast, but with less social cost.
James Madison University Michael J. Seth
Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi. By Vu Trong Phung.Translated, with an introduction, by Shaun Kingsley Malarney. (Honolulu, HI:University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. Pp. 176. $45.00.)
Vu Trong Phung [1912–1939] is one of the most famous and intriguing authors ofmodern Vietnamese literature. His writings are numerous, especially consideringhis brief life, and bring to light, in a witty, thoughtful, and sarcastic manner, thelife in Vietnam during the 1930s under French colonial occupation. Shaun Kings-ley Malarney’s translation of his writings on prostitution is a welcome addition tothe growing body of English language translations of Vu Trong Phung’s works.But this work significantly differs from translations of Vu Trong Phung’s otherworks. Unlike his novels or novelistic essays, Luc Xi is a reportage, which doesnot weave a web with an alluring plot full of funny characters that mirror multiplefacets of Vietnamese society. Luc Xi is a dry, straightforward account of socialmaladies permeating Vietnamese society, with prostitution as its center. However,Luc Xi’s dryness should not detract from the quality of the work and its trans-lation. On the contrary, it gives readers of English an opportunity to appreciate adifferent set of Vu Trong Phung’s writing skills, while simultaneously recognizingthe same tones and undertones that fill the pages of his novels.
Originally published in a Hanoi newspaper in 1937, this reportage decries thepitiful decline of morals in Vietnamese society, especially “the scourge” of pros-titution and the subsequent rise of venereal diseases. The author believes thatprostitution in Vietnam increased dramatically during French rule; according tohim, the number of prostitutes in Hanoi is comparable, in proportion to the totalpopulation, to the number of prostitutes in Paris (45).
Vu Trong Phung connects this catching up with Paris in the “prostitution race”to “the surge of materialism, meaning the Westernization of male and femaleyoung people” (121). It seems clear that Westernization has a negative connota-
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tion to the author, however he does not put the blame solely on French shoulders.Although one might suggest this should be attributed to the censorship practice incolonial Vietnam, this reviewer suggests that it was different for Vu Trong Phung:he does not want to see, or at least he does not wish to portray, his countrymensimply as victims preyed on by an imperial villain. Without diminishing thesufferings of prostitutes, he implies that his countrymen did contribute signifi-cantly to deficiencies in their society by choosing what aspects of Westernizationto emulate and how to do it; he thereby transforms the Vietnamese into agents ofdevelopment in their own country rather than victimized subjects.
Malarney should be highly praised, not only for giving us the gift of anopportunity to see this unique work in English but also for his meticulous workon the introduction to Luc Xi, which illuminates for us the situation in colonialHanoi, putting Vu Trong Phung’s work into historical context. His archival workgets readers acquainted with the documents that further our knowledge of thattime, in general, and the plight of prostitutes and their treatment, in particular,something that has not been studied in any depth before him. Luc Xi is verysignificant, not only for scholars and students of Vietnam but for a much broaderaudience with interests in colonial societies, gender studies, and comparativestudies.
Texas A&M University Olga Dror
Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. By Nicholas Thomas. (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. x, 336. $35.00.)
Now the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cam-bridge, the author of this study is a well-known historian of the scattered islandsof the Pacific. Islanders describes the contact experiences of Pacific peoples withEuropeans between the late 1700s and early 1900s. The book is not intended asa comprehensive history of all of Oceania, and, indeed, only selected archipelagosof Polynesia and eastern Melanesia receive detailed treatment. Aside from fash-ionably noting that Pacific peoples were actors/agents rather than mereresponders/victims to the actions of foreigners, Islanders has no obvious concep-tual or theoretical focus. The monograph recounts important events and actionsof Western explorers, whalers, traders, missionaries, colonial officers, beachcomb-ers, and the like. However, Nicholas Thomas’s research about individuals—bothislanders and Westerners—and their specific experiences gives the book a distinc-tive flavor.
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Islanders includes substantive descriptions of several topics and themes. Thequality and detail of Thomas’s coverage are especially notable for the following:missionary efforts and their ultimate success in most islands, thickly described forPolynesia; the construction of popular Western images of the Pacific through thevoyages and writing of explorers, like James Cook and Jules Dumont d’Urville; theBritish annexation of Fiji and its historical effects; the impact of firearms, which notonly upset former relations between islanders, but on Tahiti and Hawai’i resultedin one chief conquering large regions; France’s colonization of the Society Islands,the Marquesas, and New Caledonia; and the story of Rapa Nui (“Easter Island”),including the horrible effects of diseases and forced labor (blackbirding) in Peru inmines and on plantations. Thomas disperses many of these and other themesthroughout the book rather than covering each in a single chapter.
Polynesian archipelagos like Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Hawai’i,and New Zealand receive extensive attention. Thomas also focuses on events andpersonages in the Cook Islands, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Fiji, and the Solomons,although in less detail. Those interested in other islands—e.g., New Guinea andMicronesia—will be disappointed, as Thomas himself recognizes (25).
Islanders offers much to scholars of Oceania. Thomas skillfully interweaves thebiographies and experiences of both islanders and foreigners into descriptionsof events and long-term patterns. In covering particular archipelagos, Thomasusefully includes a brief summary of precontact customs (e.g., tattoos), beliefs(e.g., healing), and structures (e.g., chiefly powers and privileges). There area few points that might be controversial. For example, Thomas correctly pointsout that many Pacific peoples were not confined to their home islands even inprecontact centuries but voyaged widely within their own archipelagos andbeyond. However, whether the term “cosmopolitan”—used in several passages—appropriately applies to those islanders who voyaged between islands they or theirancestors knew well is debatable.
Islanders is blessedly free of the scholarly jargon that nowadays too often makesthe obvious appear insightful. The length is appropriate for a work of this scope.Should undergraduates be required to read Islanders, most will wonder whyThomas gives such attention to small details and why so many names appear.Scholars unfamiliar with Oceania likewise may find some descriptions excessive.Occasionally, this reviewer could not grasp the objective of some sections or howthey fit into the text as a whole. Despite that minor criticism, Pacific scholars appearto be the intended audience of Islanders, and the book belongs on all their shelves.
Ohio Wesleyan University James G. Peoples
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EUROPE
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land. By ThomasAsbridge. (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010. Pp. xi, 767. $34.99.)
The general reader, wishing to purchase a general account of the Crusades tothe Latin East, covering the period from 1095 (First Crusade) through to 1291(fall of Acre), is currently spoiled for choice. There are many such histories,many of which have been published recently and by highly regarded academics.When Thomas Asbridge published this study, therefore, he was entering a highlycompetitive market. Nevertheless, his written style sets this work apart. In boththis volume and his previous book, The First Crusade: A New History [2004],Asbridge adopts a tone that captures the excitement and drama of these times,building a sense of momentum that inspires a reader without prejudicing in anyway its scholarly credentials. This approach is extremely well executed andreflects the demands of the contemporary consumer to be engaged, as well asinformed.
Structurally, each chapter is broken into a number of subsections that considerthe Crusades from both Christian and Muslim perspectives, demonstrating howpressures and influences on individuals and groups on all sides shaped the courseof events. Within this narrative, Asbridge specifically pinpoints a number of themore morally charged questions that shape the reputation of the Crusades today.These include: the motivation of crusaders, the reason for the launch of the FirstCrusade, and the reputation of Saladin. In doing so, the author recognizes that thegeneral reader—aware of the controversies surrounding the Crusades—will oftenapproach this topic seeking clarification on these very issues. His discussion onthese key points of interest is clearly explained and firmly rooted in a criticalunderstanding of the primary sources.
Although the book covers the period 1095–1291, some areas receive moreattention than others. The Third Crusade, in particular 1187–1193, accounts fora sizeable 151 pages. This campaign, of course, provides the arena within whichRichard the Lionheart and Saladin famously vied with one another for supremacyand is handsomely described. However, there are other episodes—particularly inthe late twelfth and early thirteenth century—which are passed over rather briefly.These include the crusade launched by Henry VI, the civil war of 1229–1243, andthe Barons’ Crusade.
The concluding section on the “Legacy of the Crusades” looks at the way inwhich the memory of crusading has been harnessed to drive later agendas. Itexplores the recent manipulation and misrepresentation of the past, particularly
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by various Muslim groups, and the subsequent creation of histories that bear littleresemblance to the surviving sources. In highlighting the inherent dangers of suchapproaches, Asbridge pinpoints a serious and present challenge to all thosecurrently committed to the objective study of history.
Overall, Asbridge provides his reader with an “authoritative” history of theCrusades that makes full use of the most recent studies, whilst adding furtheroriginal insights and ideas. It is extremely readable, highly relevant for a contem-porary reader, and stands as testimony to Asbridge’s considerable skill as a writerand historian.
Nottingham Trent University Nicholas Morton
The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter. ByKees Boterbloem. (London, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. iv, 315.$80.00.)
Sometime in 1668, Jan Struys, a Dutch sailmaker, accepted an offer from theMuscovite government to help man its fledgling Caspian fleet. There was lessdemand for his trade at home now that peace had returned to the United Prov-inces after yet another English war, and the Russians promised the newly remar-ried craftsman a handsome salary. Joined by about a dozen countrymen, hereached the Caspian port of Astrakhan the following year. By then the tsarapparently had lost interest in his maritime venture, and he dismissed the for-eigners. However, before Struys could leave, he found himself swept up in amajor Cossack rising. Barely escaping certain death at the hands of the rebels byfleeing to the Caucasus, the unfortunate Dutchman soon found himself sold intoslavery. Changing hands several times, Struys eventually became the property ofa shifty Polish diplomat in Iran, who consented to let the Dutch East IndiaCompany buy his freedom. Five years after beginning his journey, Struysreturned to his family in Amsterdam with little cash but a fascinating tale totell.
First published in 1676, his adventure, Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspo-edige reysen (Three Remarkable and Most Disastrous Voyages), was quicklytranslated into French, German, and English and remained something of a best-seller well into the eighteenth century. Like many of its genre, Struys’s travelogueis hardly an accurate source. For one thing, the illiterate worker dictated his storyto a professional author, who liberally embellished it with passages from earlieraccounts. Voltaire declared Disastrous Voyages to be little more than a fantasy. Of
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what use then is this early modern text to the historian? This is the question KeesBoterbloem sets out to answer in The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys.
Boterbloem began his academic career as a specialist of the Stalin era, anexcellent starting point for learning to navigate the often nebulous boundariesbetween fiction and reality in Russian history. Taking him back three centuries, theauthor studies Struys’s account in its historical context. Based on archival workin Amsterdam, Moscow, and London, as well as published sources in Dutch,Russian, and English, this study succeeds in piecing together the elusive details ofthe intrepid sailmaker’s life. In addition to the famous sojourn in Muscovy andIran, there were two earlier journeys at sea, a subsequent trip to Moscow, and anattempt to interest the Danish king in a scheme for an unsinkable warship.Boterbloem also surveys the Netherlands during its seventeenth-century goldenage; Russia under Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexis; as well as relations betweenthe Dutch mercantile republic and Muscovy.
The latter is particularly useful, since there is little in English on the subject. Ifsome are dimly aware of Elizabethan England’s ties to Ivan the Terrible’s Muscovya hundred years earlier, the Dutch role in pre-Petrine Russia’s past has largelyremained terra incognita. Nevertheless, as Boterbloem reminds us, it was hardlynegligible. During the seventeenth century, the Netherlands not only dominatedRussian foreign trade but also played a major role in Tsar Alexis’s halting effortsto import Western modernity into his realm. As another historian put it, the Dutchwere “midwives of the [Russian] empire” at the time (52).
Boterbloem notes that Disastrous Voyages paraphrases a number of othertravelogues, such as the 1647 account by the Holstein diplomat Adam Olearius ofan embassy to Muscovy and Iran (attitudes towards plagiarism were more relaxedthan today). There are even traces of Herodotus. At the same time, Struys’sdescriptions of Stenka Razin’s Cossack Rebellion and Alexis’s attempts to founda navy proved valuable to nineteenth-century Russian historians. More impor-tantly, whether real or imagined, the text yields interesting insights into theworldview of an early modern Dutchman of relatively humble birth. With hisgenuflections to Marx, Foucault, Said, and Benedict Anderson, the author over-analyzes at times. Nor is the reviewer sure that the bloodcurdling accounts ofviolence to women are necessarily indicative of misogyny. These minor cavilsaside, Boterbloem is to be congratulated for his fine scholarship. Apparently he isnow contemplating a new edition of Disastrous Voyages. Having learned muchfrom the hors d’oeuvre, one looks forward to reading that too.
Brock University David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
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The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Scienceto the Dark Ages. By Nancy Marie Brown. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010.Pp. 288. $27.95.)
Pope Sylvester II [999–1003] had a great reputation as a scholar before ascendingthe throne of Saint Peter. As Gerbert of Aurillac, he studied and taught astronomyand mathematics in France, Spain, Italy, and at the court of Otto III, the GermanRoman Emperor. He is credited with being the first in the West to use Arabicnumerals. Here Nancy Marie Brown gives an intellectual biography of Gerbert,the “scientific pope,” portraying him as a light in a dark time that ended with hisdeath. Her intended audience is a general readership with an interest in medievalhistory but little detailed knowledge of the period. Her central arguments, whichwill not seem odd to any medievalist, are that around the year 1000, unlike now,science and religion were not seen as antitheses and that, in spite of religiousdifferences, Christian scholars were happy to learn from the Muslims.
Brown traces Gerbert’s life from his boyhood as a monk; to his three years inSpain, where he became acquainted with Arabic learning; to his elevation, first, tothe archbishopric of Reims and then to that of Ravenna; and, finally, to his rolein complex royal politics before he became an advisor to Emperor Otto III, whoeventually made him pope. Along the way, Brown describes how medieval parch-ment and ink were made and the construction and use of an abacus. Her discus-sion of the ways medieval people thought of geometry, astronomy, calendars, andmathematics is the strongest part of the book.
From a historian’s point of view, the weakest aspect is making Gerbert soexceptional. Brown consistently calls the Middle Ages “the Dark Ages” and seemsto believe—although Gerbert did not—in a widespread fear of apocalypse in theyear 1000. He and Otto III, she says, planned for a “Christian empire based onpeace, tolerance, law, and the love of learning,” but this unlikely hope died withthem, ushering in an era of superstition, fear, and intolerance that lasted until theRenaissance (7). Most medievalists, though recognizing Gerbert’s many strengths,would disagree strongly, noting how much science and learning continued to bevalued throughout the Middle Ages. They certainly did not disappear in theeleventh century, as Brown asserts (237–238).
In spite of such misgivings, the book could be recommended to a nonspecialistinterested in the history of science or tensions between science and religion. It iswritten in a clear and lively style and illustrated with images from medievalmanuscripts and sculptures, most in black and white, though eight in color arebound in. Although there are no footnotes, unsurprising in a trade book like this,there are extensive supporting references in the back, as well as a ten-page
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bibliography of both primary and secondary sources on Gerbert and his times—including more scholarly biographies. A science writer rather than a historian,Brown has still tried to be as historically accurate as possible, even if she overstatesher case; she consulted a number of historians, credited in the acknowledgments.
University of Akron Constance B. Bouchard
Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. By CarolineWalker Bynum. (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2011. Pp. 408. $32.95.)
The operative word in Caroline Walker Bynum’s latest examination of medievalreligious practice is “paradox.” Paradox, she writes, “is not a combination orsynthesis of differing aspects, nor is it a violation of the integrity of opposingconcerns through compromise. It is the simultaneous assertion and performanceof opposing values” (268). And, in a Christian society, which generally acceptedthat all matter was created by God, that God himself had “materialized” as thehuman Christ, and that God’s omnipotence allowed him to make matter behavein ways that actually violated the laws of nature, the simultaneous assertion ofopposing views about holy matter was inevitable. Such “radical ambivalence,”Bynum contends, increased in the years between 1300 and 1500. The decidedmateriality of late-medieval devotion, which manifested itself in a profusion oftransformative miracles (bleeding relics, animated statues, and somatic changes,like the stigmata), made believers anxious and challenged the learned. Althoughtheologians might try to delimit the number of objects venerated because of theirsupposed miraculous powers, they could not altogether deny that matter mightbecome holy, just as the humble eucharistic species of bread and wine became thebody and blood of Christ at each mass.
Subtitled as an essay, Christian Materiality is based on a series of lecturesdelivered at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, expanded to include four chap-ters, an introduction, a conclusion, and exhaustive references. Chapter 1,“Visual Matter,” is not only an indispensable introduction to what follows butmight also stand alone as required reading for anyone approaching the study oflate-medieval religious art. The examples presented here also serve to nuancerecent scholarly arguments about the essentially visual and visionary characterof late-medieval piety: even when visions prompted the rise of a particular cult,“visionary experiences tended to result in holy matter that itself animated ortransformed, both authenticating and reproducing the original eruption of thesacred” (110). In chapter 2, “The Power of Objects,” Bynum deals with
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sacramentals, relics, and prodigies, from the familiar (holy water) to the not-so-familiar (the foreskin from Christ’s circumcision). In chapter 3, “HolyPieces,” the author demonstrates how the widely accepted theory of concomi-tance, which saw the whole in fragments of the holy, relates to the cult of relicsas well as to the particular late-medieval devotion to the five wounds of Christ.Chapter 4, “Matter and Miracles,” discusses learned theories of matter ingeneral, calling special attention to scholastic arguments about the miraculous“cases where matter, under the direct action of God ruptures the order of natureGod himself has established” (218).
“Paradox,” as the author states in her conclusion, “is by definition impossibleto explain in discursive language. One cannot simultaneously assert contraries.. . . Their simultaneity cannot be stated; it can only be evoked” (286). By givingreaders countless examples of late-medieval devotion accompanied by incisiveanalysis rather than reductive theorizing about “superstitious” practice, Bynumhas, miraculously, transformed the discursive into the evocative.
Texas State University Elizabeth Makowski
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins on the Road to World War I. ByMiranda Carter. (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Pp. xxv, 498. $30.00.)
This author’s eminently readable study of three cousins—George V of England,Nicholas II of Russia, and Wilhelm II of Germany—uses the biographies of thesethree descendants of Queen Victoria to trace not only the coming of World WarI but, more centrally, to capture the twilight of these monarchies as they gave wayto “democracy, self-determination, and greater brutality” (xxiv). Along the way,the reader is treated to the personal foibles of each man as well as their moreserious flaws; none of the men, by training or temperament, were truly suited totheir positions and certainly not to the grave challenges their respective countriesfaced, especially in wartime Germany and Russia.
Miranda Carter, after briefly visiting her chief protagonists in early 1917, tracestheir respective upbringings, their tutors of varying quality, their dearth of expo-sure to the broader world, their military service, and, in the case of Wilhelm II, arelatively youthful accession after his father’s death from cancer in 1888. In theseearly chapters, Carter sketches the character traits of each, qualities that wouldbecome more pronounced as each gained their respective thrones: Wilhelm II’sinability to deal with contrary opinions, George V’s rather shy demeanor in publicyet fussy autocracy in the home, and Nicholas II’s devotion as a family man but
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cluelessness about the broader world. Indeed, a common theme runs throughoutthe education, and often later lives, of all three men, and that was their disasso-ciation from, and indeed often opprobrium for, the outside world. For George V,working within the British monarchy, such insularity was not a horrific handicap.For Nicholas II, such isolation would prove fatal. It should also be noted that forthe first two-thirds of the work George often falls by the wayside in favor of hisgrandmother, Victoria, and his father, Edward VII, since George did not take thethrone until 1910; thus, the “George” of the title serves as much as a symbol ofthe British line as it does of George himself.
On the whole, none of the three men shone as rulers. George comes throughthe narrative best: a diffident public figure who often pestered his ministers withtrivialities to the point where ministers before World War I groaned when it wastheir turn to brief the king. Chastened by war and revolution abroad, George Vsought to refashion the monarchy into a more ceremonial but more popularinstitution. Nicholas II, in contrast, emerges as a caring father who poorlyunderstood the troubles in his kingdom, often remained physically aloof fromhis subjects, and, more importantly, dealt poorly with challenges to his oftenincorrect understanding of the world, whether during the Russo-Japanese Warand the ensuing revolution, in the guise of Rasputin’s pernicious influence onhis family, or especially during the dire months before the February Revolution.Wilhelm II, however, comes off worst. A leader who often intervened in theaffairs of his state, Wilhelm II contributed, in ways both direct and indirect, tothe deficiencies of the German Empire’s political and administrative structures.Moreover, Wilhelm was not only isolated and unwilling to hear contrary opin-ions, but he also had the unfortunate habit of interpreting conversations andcorrespondence with his uncle Edward VII and two cousins in ways that regu-larly inhibited Germany’s dealings with Russia and England. Indeed, Wilhelmoften serves as the fulcrum for Carter’s exploration of the path to World WarI; Wilhelm’s blustering mannerism in public and private, and his wishful think-ing, paralleled, and often contributed to, Germany’s maladroit foreign policy inthe decades before 1914.
Carter is also not afraid, at times, to speed quickly by moments where otherhistorians might have tarried at length. The famous German War Council ofDecember 1912, over which much ink was spilled in the wake of the work of FritzFischer, is dispatched quickly as a session for Wilhelm II to blow off steam ratherthan a nefarious moment of German war planning. Many of Carter’s judgmentsare fair, and definitely surefooted, but they also elide nuance. Douglas Haig, forexample, is given a more ignominious sendoff than his record perhaps merits.
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Carter’s focus on these three monarchies also leaves Austria-Hungary largely offthe hook for its part in the war, an issue that scholars such as Samuel R.Williamson Jr. have long sought to address.
In her concluding chapters on the July Crisis and especially the war, Carterdrives home the point that the three monarchs had become increasingly out oftouch and even irrelevant to the fate of Europe. Carter evokes such limits at otherpoints: Nicholas II’s reluctance at the creation of the Duma in 1906 after therevolutionary upheavals; Edward VII’s skepticism over the Liberal victory in1906; and Wilhelm II’s frustration during the Daily Telegraph Affair. She alsonotes clearly in reference to dynastic celebrations of 1913 that “the disconnectbetween the ceremonial public life of the monarchs and the realities of politics andeconomics was more than ever demonstrated by . . . celebrations” (346). Theseare points well made, yet the reader, unfortunately, gets too little of these newrealities of the social, political, and economic dynamism of Russia and Germanyto sense the truly tectonic shifts in both countries. Moreover, public pressures,through sensationalist press or through large public organizations such as theGerman Naval League, contributed as much to the tensions before 1914 as anyactions of Wilhelm or his fellow monarchs.
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm is an excellent read and captures the decliningfortunes of the three monarchies as they pitched over the precipice into war, a warthat would see the British monarchy left largely to a symbolic role, the Germanmonarchy terminate with Wilhelm II’s exile to the Netherlands, and Nicholas IIand his family meet their tragic end at the hand of what was both one of theproducts of war and a new political force destroying the old world of royalty:revolution.
Indiana State University Christopher Fischer
London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London’sGeorgian Age. By Dan Cruickshank. (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.Pp. xvii, 654. $40.00.)
Despite the sensationalism of the title and introduction, London’s Sinful Secretquickly develops into an insightful and well-considered exploration of commer-cial sex in eighteenth-century London. The author’s topics range from the builtenvironments associated with prostitution, including Covent Garden, the coffeehouses, and certain speculatively built terraces, to upper-class associations thatshaped attitudes towards sexuality, such as the Hell Fire Clubs and the Society
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of Dilettanti. Institutional histories of the Magdalen House, the FoundlingHospital, and the Society for the Reformation of Manners are interspersed withaccounts of masquerades and Sunday entertainments in the more exclusivebagnios. Often favoring the conventions of popular history over sociologicalanalysis, Dan Cruickshank’s picture of prostitution is advanced through dozensof individual stories of upper-class courtesans, lower-class streetwalkers, andtheir clients.
Although the details might seem excessive at times, they are regularly used toinform a larger picture, such as in the chapter-length discussion of The Beggar’sOpera. Appearing near the middle of the volume, Cruickshank’s analysis of JohnGay’s work is so compelling because he has already introduced many of the realhistorical individuals, locations, and events that made the 1728 performance sucha sensation (readers learn a great deal about Lavinia Fenton, for example, theprostitute actress in the role of Polly Peachum who would go on to marry theDuke of Bolton). Cruickshank’s ability to connect familiar historical landmarkswith unknown or unexpected details is also demonstrated in his examinations ofHogarth prints, paintings, novels, advertisements, and other cultural artifacts. Allof this adds weight to one of his most important arguments: the centrality of thesex industry to the culture and economics of Georgian London.
It is difficult to do justice to the level of insight that Cruickshank is able to bringto the analysis of a pleasure garden or a painting, although these numerousinsights, along the way, make the conclusion a disappointment by comparison.The final chapter is too taken up with long narrations of court cases (similar towhat appeared in earlier chapters) instead of overall synthesis. The book culmi-nates in a case of a prostitute put on trial as the result of an erotic asphyxiationrequest gone wrong. Other such stories appear as chapter-length “Interludes”between the four sections of the book, as a “Postlude” following the last regularchapter, and in three appendices of a similar nature. The weight of all theindividual anecdotes might overwhelm the efforts of a less skilled author, butCruickshank’s excellent writing and range of topics go a long way towardskeeping the reader engaged.
This book most likely will not find its way onto a syllabus, as it is a bit too longon detail and short on overarching analysis to be included in its entirety within theclassroom. Even so, scholars of the period will learn much from Cruickshank’saccount, and, by the end of the book, it is hard not to have caught at least a littleof the enthusiasm that the author clearly has for his subject.
Florida State University Charles Upchurch
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Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France. Edited by Suzanne Desan andJeffrey Merrick. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.Pp. 304. $55.00.)
This is a volume by American historians, dedicated to the work of “our teachers”(Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemor Davis, Peter Gay, Lynn Hunt, and R. R. Palmer),and based on a symposium at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Exceptperhaps for the treatment of gender, the volume is not a contribution to any“new” history but in many ways a return to conventional social history. There iscertainly nothing new in basing research on the “experience” rather than the“prescription” of legal sources and not much in the idea of “cultural construc-tion” except the terminology. The introduction starts with the notion of the familyas a “civil society,” attributed to Jean D’Alembert, though it figures prominentlyin the seminal book by Jean Bodin. The examination of the relation of “conjugaldynamics and collective welfare” refers to case studies and literary as well associal, economic, and legal sources. Though family is a social institution at thecenter of politics, it is, however, the individual and the local that figure centrallyin this volume, which thus inclines, in this post-Marxist age, to the micro- ratherthan the macrohistorical dimension of research.
Editor Suzanne Desan studies marriage as a social practice with attention tomarital conflict, legal separation, and gender options—“making and breakingmarriage”—and the establishment of family alliances; she finds that some couplesfound “true companionship though others fought day and night.” DenaGoodman looks at courtship and marriage decisions, especially through letters butalso through literary sources. Clare Crowston examines female economic activity,especially credit transactions “within legal parameters,” both with documents andcase studies, such as Mme. De Genlis and “the education of women for credit.”Using depositions in particular, Julie Hardwick studies “the family politics oflitigation” and the role and social distribution of witnesses—many of them unableto sign—attending to masculinity and the behavior of men and women, again witharchival documents, and with an eye to marriages as “building blocks for thegreatness of France.” Editor Jeffrey Merrick looks at “marital conflict in politicalcontext,” especially in Langeac and Chambonne, also with documents concerningstatements and correspondence of husbands, wives, and witnesses within theextremes of formal expectations and changing gender categories. ChristopherCorley analyzes “gender, kin, and guardianship” in early modern Burgundy withattention to legal reform of the Burgundian custom and courtroom behavior,again with documents, illustrating a shift from the northern communal model tothe southern lineal model of the family. Matthew Gerber views bastardy and
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legitimacy, including legitimation by royal rescript and its practical revival and the“destigmatization” of bastards, “on the contested margins of the family” in thecontext of early modern jurisprudence, still caught between written (Roman) lawin the south and customary law in the north, with tables as well as documents.
Except for some of the language, this collection resembles old-fashioned socialhistory and is still based on some of the older literature (French material cited inthe notes but English sources only in “selected readings”), except for the noveltiesinsisted on by the practitioners—and of course for the anecdotal cases preservedin the documentation. A good case is made for legal history and legal sources,though the thematic focus comes from more modern concerns and individualbehavior. What about the “new directions,” which a blurb represents the collec-tion as moving in? Apparently it is marriage itself, its mechanics within old regimelaw and its reinforcement of gender, and it is true that the documentation doesillustrate some of this, especially when garnished by the rhetoric of gender conflict.The main novelty seems to be that no one has really taken the trouble to examinelegal sources with these topics in mind, and light is indeed shed on the details ofprivate life and individual experience in the processes of litigation and witnessing,but the jump from the private remains speculative and controversial.
Rutgers University D. R. Kelley
Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Social-ism. By Juliane Fürst. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv,391. $99.00.)
According to the author of this study, the generation of Soviet youth that came ofage during the last years of Josef Stalin’s reign differed significantly from previousgenerations. The postwar generation was committed ideologically to the Sovietsystem but gradually recognized the glaring internal contradictions. Stalin’s lastgeneration led the way in experimentation and constantly sought to challenge theSoviet “ideal” of youth.
Juliane Fürst explores a number of experiences that forged the Stalin genera-tion. For her, the seminal event was the Great Fatherland War. She argues thatSoviet youth who had witnessed the war in all of its brutality, as well as the hungerand lack of basics it brought on, soon realized that the regime’s depiction of Sovietlife was vastly different from the reality. Her conclusion about the war’s impact isthat “[d]espite attempts at reform, despite desperate campaigns to rejuvenate thesystem, and despite short flames of new enthusiasm, the era of revolutionary
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youth ended with the Great Fatherland War. Instead, consumption, subcultures,and shirking the system became the hallmarks of Soviet Youth” (19).
Ultimately, the regime’s recognition that postwar youth had not experiencedthe Bolshevik Revolution or participated in the Great Patriotic War led to ideo-logical campaigns that sought to “socialize” the new generation. However, thesecampaigns fell flat because they used catchphrases, such as “cosmopolitanism”and “toadying to the West,” that lacked meaning. Moreover, the campaigns wereoften contradictory and their purposes unclear, which fostered confusion insteadof inspiration. In addition, when postwar youth recognized the hollowness ofmany of the forms and rituals of the regime, they lost faith in the system. One ofthe most dramatic influences that shaped postwar youth was the infiltration ofWestern pop culture following the end of World War II. American movies, music,fashion styles, and dance were the rage among Soviet urban youth. Significantly,the young generation saw no contradiction between Western pop culture and theSoviet system.
Overall, Fürst’s contention is that Soviet youth were not attempting a confron-tation with the system but sought to fashion an individualistic means of coexistingwithin that system. Consequently, the postwar period often contained very con-tradictory images of youth. Some were purists who sought to return to the glorydays of the revolution. Most found ways to adapt the system to their own needs,while others chose to drop out entirely. Nonetheless, disengagement from thesystem contributed to the dramatic and speedy collapse of the Soviet Union.
Fürst’s book, which is based on an extensive selection of sources that includesarchival material, interviews, memoirs, letters, and a multitude of secondaryworks, offers convincing arguments for the transformation of the postwar gen-eration of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, her book is a major contribution to agrowing literature that helps our understanding of how and why the Soviet Unioncollapsed.
University of Central Arkansas Donald G. Jones
Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War. By Emma Gilligan.(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. xxii, 271. $35.00.)
Three years after the 1996 Khasav-Yurt agreement ended the First Chechen War,Moscow launched a ruthless military campaign in the region, triggered by acts ofterrorism by radical Chechen groups. This new conflict attracted some opposition,but what is remarkable is how little critical comment was directed at the newPutin government for failing to take action against human rights abuses and war
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crimes conducted in the course of the Second Chechen War and its aftermath. Thisbook makes the reader understand how deplorable this failure really was. EmmaGilligan also looks behind official explanations of the war to identify deepercauses for the abuses, including a revival of Russian nationalism, which waspromoted by the Putin government.
The analysis is divided into two parts. The first four chapters detail some of theworst forms of abuse committed by Russian forces, including the bombing ofcivilians, the use of zachistka (sweep operations) that were linked to massacresand torture, and the disappearances and treatment of refugees. Each chapter isbased on primary sources (interviews and documents) that present a compellingcase against the Russian authorities. Gilligan also includes photographs that helpto underscore the extent of the devastation inflicted on the Chechen people.
The second part of the book concentrates on responses to the Russian actions.In chapter 5, Gilligan analyzes the “Chechen retaliation,” with particular empha-sis on the taking of hostages at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002 andSchool No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004. Gilligan condemns these actionsand points out how damaging they were for the Chechen cause, but she makes twointeresting points. The first is that although there were jihadist elements present inboth incidents, she doubts that the main motivation of many Chechens involvedin these operations was religious. In the Dubrovka case, she refers to a “disso-nance between the Islamic veneer and the nationalist discourse” of the hostagetakers (135). The second point is that, after Dubrovka, the Western media was tooquick to play up the accusation of al-Qaeda connections and failed to contextu-alize the Chechen separatist movement.
In the remaining chapters, Gilligan examines civil society reactions in Russiaand the responses of international actors. Although she points to some positiveexamples, Gilligan cannot hide her disappointment and offers several reasons forinaction. These include the intimidation of the independent media in Russia, a“timorousness” on the part of Western governments, the willingness of many toaccept Putin’s explanation that this was part of the global “War on Terror” (a warin which Western governments were also guilty of torture and disappearances),and tight control of access to Chechnya itself. The one ray of hope for victims isthe European Court of Human Rights, which has already ruled against Russia inseveral cases and where there is a backlog of others waiting to be heard. Gilliganwould like to supplement this with an international tribunal that could conduct acomprehensive investigation into events in Chechnya since 1999.
University of Ulster Stephen Ryan
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The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon. By MarieA. Kelleher. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 217.$55.00.)
The role that women have played in Iberian history, in particular medievalqueenship, a once neglected field of study, has been intensively examined in recentdecades by several noteworthy medieval scholars, including Theresa Vann,Theresa Earenfight, and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez. Their insightful and significantscholarship has enhanced our knowledge and understanding of the concept ofqueenship and its relationship to how these royal women, whether as rulers,consorts, or regents, exercised their power and authority. Likewise renownedmedievalist Marie A. Kelleher, in her recent work, The Measure of Woman,contributes even further to our scholarly understanding of medieval Iberianwomen, not in a monarchical position, but women’s relationship to the law andhow their roles were defined within the crown of Aragon.
Kelleher initiates her study by establishing two primary objectives: that Iberianwomen are not exceptional but their experiences are an integral part of thebroader picture of women’s issues in the development of medieval society, andthat “the relationship between women, gender, and the legal culture” can beviewed within the litigation process (2). Through her extensive analysis ofunedited archival documents, Kelleher is able to achieve these objectives as well asto demonstrate, through the lives of ordinary women, the formulation of “arevolution in legal culture” (2, 3).
This penetrating and illumining work begins by addressing the importance inthe West of the recovery of Roman law and its amalgamation into canon law (i.e.,ius commune). Thus, in her introductory chapter, Kelleher stipulates how mostterritorial princes saw Roman law as a source to enhance their authority, whilethis same law saw women’s legal presence as inferior, but, in context, “canon lawcould provide women with important leverage in the courts” (145). Yet, as thelater medieval legal systems were being formulated vis-á-vis the legal status ofwomen, as concerns the control of their property, etc., a new legal and societalculture was developing based on all aspects of defined and/or practiced laws.
Nevertheless, within the context of her study, Kelleher persuasively argues thatwomen’s legal status was viewed as “the vital interaction between the genderassumptions encoded in the law and those of ordinary people as revealed inrecords of actual legal cases” (7). For the most part, the participants in these legalcases were middle-class, Catalano-Aragonese, Christian women who found theirlegal identity being measured in three ways: 1) by their legally prescribed gender;2) their relationship to specific men; and 3) their personal reputation or behavior.
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Through these various legal identities, one is able to see women not from a totallysubmissive perspective but more in a formative role as they were learning thevocabulary of litigation. Kelleher’s incomparable scholarship provides us with theunique opportunity to witness the active and at times contradictory progression ofthe legal system through one woman’s attempts to avoid presenting herself incourt, another woman’s attempts to recover her dowry from a financially unsup-portive husband, and even those who attempted retribution in some cases ofdomestic violence.
University of New Haven Paulette L. Pepin
Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins. By J. E. Lendon. (New York, NY:Basic Books, 2010. Pp. vii, 566. $35.00.)
The Peloponnesian War, as defined by its original historian Thucydides, was thegreatest upheaval Greece had ever known, a twenty-seven-year struggle betweenAthens, Sparta, and their respective allies [431–404 BCE]. Yet the Greeks’ “GreatWar” was in fact a series of shorter wars, and the newest treatment devotes itselfentirely to the initial ten-year conflict [431–421 BCE]. J. E. Lendon’s brilliantstudy, exhaustive in its scholarship and delightful in its prose, places the decade-long struggle in the context of Greek cultural values.
Lendon argues that the primary purpose of Greek military operations was towin honor while shaming opponents. Warring city-states followed a competitivecode of action and reaction: the ability to repay harm with measured vengeanceproved equality with one’s rivals, and one might show superiority by inflicting alevel of damage that the enemy could not return. At the beginning of the war,Sparta wished to retain its status as the most respected Greek polis, while Athens,helmed by the cautious statesman Pericles, sought to force Sparta to recognize itas an equal power. Sparta tried to provoke infantry battle by invading theAthenian hinterland of Attica, while Athens drew its rural population within theprotection of its city defenses and counterattacked in naval raids. Lendon’s modeladds an extra dimension to these events by explaining how both sides hoped towin. Sparta expected that Athens would lose face by refusing to give battle andthereby could not achieve equality of honor. Pericles’ Athens would try to dem-onstrate a parity of honor by harming Spartan allies, embarrassing the Spartans inthe eyes of the other Greeks. Lendon argues that, after Pericles’ death, theAthenians retaliated more aggressively, attacking Spartan allies even in years whenSparta had done little or no damage to them, trying to prove not only theirequality but their superiority to Sparta in the hierarchy of powers.
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This explanation of the Peloponnesian War’s first decade as a competition forhonor is thoroughly convincing and allows Lendon to declare Athens the clearvictor, despite the failure of either side to achieve a decisive advantage in ter-ritorial acquisition or the destruction of enemy armed forces. Its success atSphacteria in 425 raised its honor ranking above that of Sparta, and evendefeats at Amphipolis in 424 and 422 left a common perception of Athenianequality with Sparta, for which Athens originally fought. This lends additionalpoignancy to Athens’s subsequent disaster in Sicily and surrender to Sparta atthe long war’s conclusion.
Apart from the ingenuity of this thesis, Lendon also deserves praise for brilliantstory-telling, bringing characters, like the Spartan Brasidas, vividly to life, andreminding readers of the rich layer of myth and religious cult through which theGreeks viewed their wars. His tongue-in-cheek treatments of Aristophanes’ warcomedies are genuinely funny, too rarely the case in academic prose. Song ofWrath will not only provoke reevaluation of the subject among specialists but willalso draw in new students to the story of Classical Greece’s most tragic conflict.
Christopher Newport University John O. Hyland
Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France. By Brian Joseph Martin. (Dunham, NH: University of New Hamp-shire Press/Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011. Pp. xvii, 379.$39.95.)
Was the visibility of homosexual soldiers in the trenches of World War I in Francea result of the evolution of military friendship during the nineteenth century? InNapoleonic Friendship, Brian Joseph Martin argues that this was indeed the case.Although the rigid and hierarchical structure of the Old Regime military haddiscouraged close relations among foot soldiers and their commanders, militaryreforms led to immense changes in the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies.According to Martin,
a new emphasis on fraternity and meritocracy fostered an unprecedentedsense of camaraderie among soldiers in the armies of Napoleon. For many,the hardships of combat led to intimate friendships based on mutualcomfort and support. For some, the homosociality of military life inspiredfeelings of great affection, lifelong commitment, and homoerotic desire. (12)
Martin tests his hypothesis by first examining ideas about fraternity in the earlyphases of the French Revolution of 1789 and during the revolutionary wars that
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began in 1792. He argues that “fraternity served as an underlying ideology forpolicy change, radical reform, and strategic innovation” (38). Under Napoleon,friendship, if not fraternity, remained key to military life, “not only in policy andstrategy but in the affection and intimacy shared between officers and soldiers ofevery rank in the Grande Armée” (39). Napoleon himself provided the model forthis: his close friendships with Marshal Lannes, General Duroc, and GeneralJunot were widely known, while, among the ranks, the memoirs of his juniorofficers and foot soldiers “express how fraternity and friendship took on a newand more intimate significance on the battlefield,” especially among those whosurvived the deadly campaign in Russia (67). Martin then moves to an analysis ofthe ways in which fictional writers incorporated these tales of intimate malefriendships among military comrades and neglected veterans into their stories.According to Martin, Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola all drew ontheir memories or knowledge of the intensity of these friendships formed underfire. Finally, in the memoirs and fiction of World War I, including that of Proust,intimate friendships become openly homoerotic.
Although informed by history, Martin’s book is a work of literary analysis withthe strengths and limitations of that genre. Though the blurb on the back suggestsextensive archival research, it is, in fact, based entirely on published sources,including correspondence and memoirs. However, fictional texts are at the heartof his argument. Although much of his analysis, and especially his deconstructionof these tender relations between men, which challenges traditional notions aboutmale homoerotic relations, especially in a military setting, as essentially sexualrather than affectionate, is fascinating, his thesis falls short. Ultimately, Martindoes not show that loving relations between soldiers were new; in fact, by citingthe models of Achilles and Patroclus, as well as Roland and Olivier, he indicatesthat these tropes existed well before the revolutionary armies adopted fraternity asa key value. And, for the historian, the link Martin posits between affectionateand overt sexual relations between military men is suggestive rather thancompelling.
St. Mary’s College of Maryland Christine Adams
On the Wings of Eagles: The Reforms of Gaius Marius and the Creation of Rome’sFirst Professional Soldiers. By Christopher Anthony Matthew. (Newcastle uponTyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Pp. xvii, 102. $52.99.)
This is a short book, with some deficiencies, but nevertheless an importantcontribution to the study of Gaius Marius [157–86 BCE] and the army of the
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Roman Republic. The author takes on those historians who see the “MarianReform” as the culmination of a long evolutionary process and restores Mariusas an important military innovator. Two introductory chapters describe the pre-Marian army and Marius’s career. Christopher Anthony Matthew then coversfive military changes attributed to Marius in as many chapters. The first is thebest known: the recruitment of proletarians—those previously too poor to servein the Republican army. Matthew argues, convincingly, that this was a sudden,dramatic change and not the result of a gradual lowering of the minimumwealth requirement. Matthew goes on to connect other Marian changes, such asthe introduction of the cohort, the use of soldiers to carry supplies, and theinvention of a new style of javelin, both to each other and to specific historicalconditions. Most importantly, he insists on Marius’s agency in directing thesechanges.
Matthew’s weakest argument is that Marius introduced the cohort, an inno-vation attributed by some military historians to Scipio Africanus a century earlierand by others to the interval between Scipio and Marius. Although Matthewargues that this change is linked to Marius’s other reforms, he is not persuasive inthis regard. He does, however, make a convincing case for a new interpretation ofMarius’s change in the design of the pilum, or javelin. He postulates that thechange was in the heavy, not the light, javelin and was designed specifically tocounter the mass charge used by the Germans. He also shows that this reform wasnot, as the others were, made permanent.
The major strength of Matthew’s work is how he describes the Marian reformsas linked to specific military challenges, such as the Jugurthine and the GermanWars. Matthew’s work is also important in showing how the Marian reforms aremost plausibly seen as related and occurring in a short period of directed inno-vation, rather than randomly developing over the long term. In this regard it isdisappointing to see him dismiss the forked pack, or furca, as merely “attributedto Marius.” Matthew mentions the argument that the furca functioned as a“quick release pack” but does not see its importance with reference to soldierscarrying their own baggage.
Matthew does not refer specifically to the controversy over military revolutionsthrough history, to which the Marian case is important. He might have placedMarius alongside other military reformers, such as Philip II of Macedon, ShangYang of Qin, Maurice of Nassau of the Netherlands, and Lazare Carnot of France.Military histories suggest that changes in weaponry, organization, and tactics aremore commonly linked than not and that dramatic reform is more common thangradual development. Despite its faults, largely a function of its brevity, On the
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Wings of Eagles is an important contribution, placing Marius and the Marianreforms back into proper perspective in Roman military history.
San Jose State University Jonathan P. Roth
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. By Mark Mazower. (New York, NY:Penguin, 2008. Pp. 725. $20.00.)
“No nation belonging to the white race has ever before had such conditions forcedupon it,” wrote a contemporary observer during World War II of the nature of theNazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia; the imposed policies “constituted thefirst German colonial statute in modern history for a white and civilized nation”(59–60). This idea—however peculiar its now outdated formulation may seem—serves as the point of departure for the work at hand. Mark Mazower, a first-classhistorian of southeastern Europe, has chosen to add another hefty volume to theexisting library on Hitler’s Germany, because he wants to examine Nazis ascolonizers; he is investigating the Third Reich and its New Order as an especiallymalignant variant of nineteenth-century global imperialism.
That Nazi colonialism was radically different from others is the conclusion atwhich Mazower arrives as he presents a view of the Nazis’ obsession with theirEuropean war and genocides as transformative or “catalytic” (11). The GermanVolk was to be toughened and morally reconstituted through the construction ofempire, and the vast ranks of Germany’s supposed enemies and human impedi-ments were to be crushed. In pursuing these objectives, Mazower points outsimilarities between Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany, eschews the “totalitarianmodel” for explaining the behavior of the government and people of the ThirdReich, and adopts a functionalist, rather than intentionalist, view of the origins ofthe Holocaust.
Mazower’s work reads extremely well, and while building his argument, hesupplies effective insights into a great many aspects of Nazi government and partylife, especially in terms of policy, military strategy, and internal factionalism anddebate. The book does not cover daily life for Germans or politics and ideologyfrom the point of view of the occupied lands and conquered peoples—we must becontent, for example, with the (correct) assertion that most Hungarians balked atthe Nazi imposition of the Final Solution out of a kind of emotional-tacticalcalculus, because the reader is not told to what degree or why or how theHungarians resisted these measures (397–398).
Ultimately, Mazower sees the turbo-charged fascist German version of impe-rialism as not only morally bankrupt but practically and intellectually flawed.
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Hitler’s “fatal provincialism” about the “aspirations of those beyond [Germany’s]borders” prevented him from making common cause with Ukraine, the BalticStates, Spain, and many others (540). And his childish belief that the world couldeffectively be carved up and ruled in concert by predatory nations of similarlyintrepid ethnic stock, such as the Germans and the British, had little grounding inreality. In terms of less well known domestic policy, Hitler made massive use offoreign forced and slave labor even while sniffing out new bands of Lebensraumto be conquered, depopulated, and filled with German settlers he hoped to enticethere—or hybridize from the local population. Mazower tellingly describes Hitleras “intoxicated by the numbers” and the potential of this pronatalist and eugeni-cist experiment reaching the proportions of science fiction (206).
This book is recommended for all libraries and specialists on twentieth-centuryGermany and on World War II.
North Dakota State University John K. Cox
Wellington’s Two-Front War: The Peninsular Campaigns, at Home and Abroad,1808–1814. By Joshua Moon. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.Pp. xv, 285. $34.95.)
The role of domestic pressures on wartime effectiveness and policy is not a newtheme, and there has been coverage of this topic for the British contribution to theNapoleonic Wars, notably by Christopher Hall and Rory Muir. Nevertheless, thisis still a subject that repays attention, and Joshua Moon’s well-crafted andscholarly study offers much. It does so, in particular, at the present momentbecause we are approaching key anniversaries of Wellington’s campaigning inSpain, and it is appropriate, therefore, to be reminded of the political context.Moon focuses on the duke’s endless need for resources and on the extent to whichthe multiple commitments of the British government permitted a response that theduke could accept. Moon shows how this relationship was a dynamic one andaffected by changes both in London and in the campaigning. The rise to power ofRobert, second Earl of Liverpool, gave Wellington firm support in London, notthat that stopped him from complaining, while the duke’s victories in Portugaland Spain gave him greater political clout. The latter encouraged more govern-ment support, but, despite a series of victories, Wellington was not master of thesituation until 1813. It was, for example, all too easy, considering 1812, to focuson his victory at Salamanca and to neglect the extent to which he was subse-quently unsuccessful when he tried to storm the fortress of Burgos. Then, in theface of larger French forces, Wellington had to abandon Madrid. As a reminder
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that politics extended to the army, his failure led to criticism of his generalship anddisputes with his subordinates, a frequent feature of generalship in this period.
Moon’s perspective is valuable for an understanding of the War of 1812. Noneof the British commanders in North America enjoyed much political clout, andWellington’s unwillingness to commit to the war there in 1814 both reflected hisawareness of its peripheral character to British politics and strategy and furtherhelped to ensure this quality. Already, in 1813, Wellington had pressed that onlyso many resources should be sent to North America. He was always doubtful thatthe Americans could be attacked in a way that would compel them to capitulate.He also pressed the value of the British remaining on the defensive in order tothwart an appearance of American success. Wellington was aware of the impor-tance of ensuring the perception of success in a limited war. Conversely, Moon’swork underlines the serious problems faced by the Americans in the War of 1812as their political and governmental system did not match their military ambitions.This is an important study that has much to offer.
University of Exeter Jeremy Black
Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. By Kenneth Morgan.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. viii, 221. $32.00.)
Atlantic studies has long attracted historians of diverse fields and specializationsto reevaluate the movement of people across the ocean, the development of socialand economic institutions, and political resistance to European rule. Such histo-rians have debated the impact of this global region on the construction of themodern world—the contributions of the West Indies to the Industrial Revolution,the effects of the slave trade on Africa, and the rise of independent Americanstates. Certainly the field has benefitted from the offerings of Latin American,colonial American, precolonial African, and European specialists who havebroadened the paradigm of Atlantic studies. Liberated from continental andnational structures, the findings of Atlantic historians have often been provoca-tive. Kenneth Morgan, in Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America,distills the general currents of slavery within the British Atlantic from an imperialperspective. The author synthesizes the major themes related to the rise of Britishpower: its monopoly of the slave trade, its production of tropical plantations, andits control over American colonies.
For Morgan, the British Empire played a paramount role in shaping theAtlantic world. This study displays the author’s encyclopedic command of
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complex issues spanning both sides of the British Atlantic world. For the survey-level undergraduate, Morgan provides a lucid and well-written evaluation ofpertinent themes. He distills intricate historiographical issues and focuses insteadon overarching themes that contributed to the ascendency of British power. Theauthor deftly and concisely evaluates the evolution of slavery and its connectionto indentured servitude and the rise of the plantation. He skillfully and preciselyexamines the most pertinent tropical and semitropical commodities—namelysugar, tobacco, and rice—while examining economic, political, and social influ-ences of the American colonies on the empire. His brief characterization of theAfrican dimensions of the Atlantic trade that Britain dominated is particularlyinstructive. Even the growth of antislavery advocates—both in the enslaved popu-lations in the colonial world and evangelical groups in Britain—is handled withskill. Morgan produces a narrative of broad dimensions that is highly readable.
Slavery and the British Empire attempts to recast the examination of Anglo-Atlantic activities through the author’s unique background in British and imperialstudies. One of the foremost scholars in British imperial studies, Morgan seeks torecast his work within the paradigm of Atlantic studies. Much like Philip D.Curtin’s The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History,Morgan’s work is authoritative because of his broad and diverse understandingof complex historiographical arguments and his ability to distill these argumentsin an encyclopedic manner to a broader audience. This book draws heavily onthe author’s previous studies, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the EighteenthCentury and Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800,making use of established conclusions.
The major problem of Slavery and the British Empire is its attempt to recast theparadigm of British imperial studies into the construct of Atlantic studies. Thoughsurvey-level undergraduates will find the author’s synthesis of the major currentsof the field useful, specialists will be disappointed, as it only reiterates establishedconclusions. And although other established scholars have succeeded in recastingtheir specialties, it has been because of the uniqueness of the author’s understand-ing and mastery of specialized regions; Curtin’s pioneering role in precolonialAfrican history and his influence on global and comparative studies are a case inpoint. Unfortunately, the major currents of the first British Empire are largelyunderstood. Slavery and the British Empire, then, is miscast into the paradigm ofAtlantic history, a field whose practitioners have sought to liberate themselvesfrom imperial studies.
Hannibal-LaGrange University Mark S. Quintanilla
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Spain: A Unique History. By Stanley G. Payne. (Madison, WI: University of WisconsinPress, 2011. Pp. 304. $26.95.)
The author of this study is undoubtedly one of the premier Hispanists of thetwentieth century, especially concerning the 1930s Spanish Civil War, fascism, andFrancisco Franco, for which he has produced a prolific series of volumes.Although only the latter chapters of this work, originally published in Spanish in2008 and recently translated into English, deal explicitly with these topics, StanleyG. Payne has chosen to provide the reader with a more intensely analyticaloverview of Spanish history. Consequently, some readers who only possess aperipheral or imprecise knowledge of Iberian historical developments may findthis work difficult to digest. Yet, if readers desire to indulge their intellectualhorizons, then they can certainly learn much from Payne’s perceptive and enlight-ened evaluation of Spain’s varied history, particularly in understanding how Spainwas able to transition from a dictatorship to the democratic society it is today.
Indeed, for Payne, the story of Spain’s progress as a nation is “unique,” filledwith diverse and transformative happenings, but, at the same time, many of thesedistinctive experiences are similar to those of other European nations’ develop-ment. Like those other regions of Western Europe that experienced the collapseof the Roman Empire and the fifth-century onslaught of Germanic invasions,Hispania saw the Visigoths establish their own kingdom within the context ofthe peninsula, a kingdom that Payne describes as “now increasingly recognized”as maintaining “a higher level of learning and culture than any other part of[W]estern Europe” (47). The reader is then initiated into the most “unique” aspectof Spain’s history and that of the Iberian Peninsula: the advent of the Musliminvasion. Moreover, it was this conquest that instigated the eventual prolongedinternal struggle between the Christians, which some earlier Christian rulers, aswell as modern historians, claim as the Visigoth heirs, and these Muslim inter-lopers. It is in this context that Payne criticizes those scholars such as Maria RosaMenocal, who, he asserts, have offered romanticized theories characterizing thistricultural encounter as a period of convivencia, or cultural tolerance amongstChristians, Jews, and Muslims. In some respects, one can see both sides of thisargument, because, as Payne indicates, the eleventh and twelfth centuries’Almoravids and Almohads were fanatical Islamic forces who perpetrated violentacts against nonbelievers. Yet, if one thoroughly examines Menocal’s wide-ranging evidence, one can also see the validity of her discerning thesis.
As one delves further into Payne’s Iberian narrative, one becomes intrigued bythe author’s quest not only to narrate Spain’s unique history in which, at times, he
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implores the reader to understand its “differentness” but also to dispel what hecalls, “the content of foreign images and stereotypes of Spain” (5). Through acritical and distinctive lens of erudition, Payne is able to offer the reader a rationalassessment of the various perpetuating stereotypes, including the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries’ Black Legend, negativity imposed on the Spanish politicalmilieu of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the romantic Spain of thenineteenth century; and, what Payne terms, a “composite stereotype of the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries” (5).
University of New Haven Paulette L. Pepin
Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of HenryVIII. By Linda Porter. (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Pp. 381. $27.99.)
Katherine Parr, the subject of this biography, was born in 1512 and died in 1548after childbirth at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire. She married four times: in 1529to Edward Borough; in 1534 to John, Lord Latimer; in 1543 to Henry VIII; andin 1547 to her child’s father, Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley. As Queen Jane’sbrother, Seymour was uncle of the youthful Edward VI, who succeeded his father,Henry, as king.
This is a beautifully written, engaging biography that presents Katherine as oneof the most important, politically active English queens consort, partly becauseshe served as regent in 1544 when Henry was absent on his French war. It is trueshe signed royal documents and kept his children with her, but the authoremphasizes too much her decision-making autonomy.
Author Linda Porter’s descriptions of the places where Katherine lived with herfirst two husbands are impressive. Porter gives a vivid account of the Boroughhome, Gainsborough Old Hall, a surviving fifteenth-century Lincolnshire manor.As Katherine’s second husband, Latimer, became involved in the Pilgrimage ofGrace—a rebellion in 1536—Porter narrates its events. In his absence, someadherents held Katherine hostage, briefly, at their home, Snape, in Richmondshire.Little is known about the occurrence; Latimer referred to it only succinctly. Still,Porter devotes twenty-eight pages to the rebellion, providing an unnecessarilylengthy context for Katherine’s briefly referenced experience.
Some statements are creative musings. Porter begins the book with Henry’santicipated death, declaring: “The queen did not detect any difference in theatmosphere of the palace when she awoke,” but no record of her feelings hassurvived. Although this assertion is obviously fictional, others are less easily
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characterized (1). The “sensuous” queen may have bathed with milk, but nosource is credited (150).
Porter’s bibliography is quite impressive; she cites unprinted sources as well asnumerous modern histories. It is well known, for example, that Katherine, asdowager queen, had a dispute with Anne, Duchess of Somerset, wife of EdwardSeymour, Lord Somerset, who was Edward VI’s lord protector and the elderbrother of Katherine’s last husband. Porter concedes recent scholarship denies thesisters-in-law’s dispute concerned precedence, that is, whether the lord protector’swife had court precedence over a dowager queen. Reluctant to discard evidencedefining the duchess as haughty, Porter claims the unverifiable assertion has “thering of truth” and assumes Lady Somerset, as Edward III’s descendant, resentedKatherine’s royal marriage (295). Porter seems unaware that Katherine was alsoEdward III’s descendant. The dispute probably arose because Katherine flouteddeath customs. She married Seymour about four months after Henry’s death, asPorter admits, failing to observe the customary widow’s mourning year andalienating Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor.
In her author’s note, Porter credits Susan James’s study of Katherine and theParr family “as an important source” for any biography of the queen (350).Readers would be better informed about the historical Katherine if they read thisbook, which prints some of her manuscripts.
Arizona State University Retha M. Warnicke
Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creationof the Soviet State, 1914–1922. By Aaron B. Retish. (Cambridge, England: Cam-bridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 294. $110.00.)
This volume chronicles and analyzes the outlooks, aspirations, and, above all,experiences of Viatka Province peasants between 1914 and 1922. It suggests, asdo other recent studies, that the revolutions of 1917 and the horrors of the civilwar are best understood within a framework that stretches from the outbreak ofWorld War I to the Bolshevik civil war victory and the party’s final consolidationof power, which the author dates to 1922 rather than 1921. As regards thedisjunction between the title (Russia’s peasants) and the contents (Viatka Prov-ince’s peasants), the publisher is likely at fault. Perhaps the greatest (but not only)weakness in the historiography of this turbulent era pertains to localities andregions, yet publishers insist, presumably for commercial reasons, on titles withbroad geographical scope. Even so, this scrupulously researched volume, based ona huge array of archival and other pertinent materials, has much to offer.
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Aaron B. Retish provides by far the fullest account in English of the early 1918Law of Land Socialization and of the actual land redistribution that followed,albeit, of course, in one province. The book’s chronological sweep has distinctexplanatory value. Its close narrative and discussion of how peasants experiencedlate tsarism during the war, then the 1917 Provisional Government, and thenSoviet power, the civil war, and the troubled relations with the Bolsheviks disclosethe developments’ interconnectedness. His analysis of grain requisitioning, thecommittees of the poor, and bag men (people who illegally hauled grain in sacksto sell privately) all constitute genuine contributions to matters about which westill know too little. Joining the ranks of recent peasant studies, the author alsosteadfastly rejects ideas of peasant backwardness, isolation, and political feckless-ness. Viatka peasants had clear notions of what they wanted, understood currentsituations at national and international levels, and strived to achieve, not alwayssuccessfully, their goals. As rational actors, when faced with force majeure, theycompromised or yielded.
The volume also presents some problems. No province is a synecdoche fora nation, especially one as variegated as Russia, and Viatka’s peasants were,if anything, atypical of European Russian peasants. Retish clearly indicatesthat gentry landholding and its concomitant, serfdom, hardly existed in pre-emancipation Viatka Province, in which respect Viatka typified some northernand Siberian provinces. Consequently, land hunger did not exist in Viatka, and,during the 1918–1919 land redistribution, Viatka peasants increased their landholdings by only roughly 3 percent, whereas, as Retish notes, peasants of someblack-earth southern provinces more than doubled theirs. Most redistributed landin Viatka was state, church, and non-gentry private lands, whereas elsewhere inEuropean Russia the issue at hand was huge expanses of gentry land. The absenceof the landlord-peasant relationship (pre- and postserfdom) acutely altered theentire economic and political dynamic of peasant experience. Retish might haveeased the problem by devoting more effort to explaining why the Viatka case stillhas broad significance.
In another vein, the author does not spare the Bolsheviks in clearly describingtheir propensity for arbitrariness and force and the consequent collapses (debaclesreally) of virtually all their programs. Even so, in the end a relatively favorablepicture emerges of a 1921–1922 peasant-Soviet (Bolshevik) rapprochement. Peas-ants ultimately accepted Soviet power, turned to Soviet institutions to adjudicatetheir problems, and became Soviet citizens. In the process, they helped shapeSoviet reality by forcing the ruling party to modify its policies toward the coun-tryside. In a sense this is all true and important, yet the ending analysis almost
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seems to be an overlay on quite unclear data. Peasants, after all, were sublimepragmatists, and, when no real alternative existed, they accepted, for the timebeing, the regime in power—as did most other population segments. If Viatkapeasants had gotten the politics they wanted, this would have been in connectionwith the populist (Socialist Revolutionary, Left Socialist Revolutionary, or Maxi-malist) parties, which would likely have also entailed Soviet power but in adifferent version. Until authors chronicling Russian peasant experience duringthese transformative times take seriously (at least in outline) these parties’ pro-grams and indicate their influence and role, we will not really understand peasantpolitical aspirations nor will we understand the tense, often hostile peasant-Bolshevik negotiations. Ultimately, the story of peasant-Soviet relations during the1914–1922 period can probably not be fully comprehended as “turning peasantsinto Soviet citizens.” Even so, Retish’s data and narrative are fascinating. Noexisting study has brought us closer to the drama and tragedy of the era’s peasantexperience. In this reviewer’s opinion, this is a high recommendation.
Auburn University Michael Melancon
Household Servants in Early Modern England. By R. C. Richardson. (Manchester,England: Manchester University Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 259. $35.00.)
Servants were everywhere in early modern England. Aristocrats employed dozensof them and even modest households could often afford a maid-of-all-work. Theywere at once part of the family and also employees who sold their labor on theopen market. Service brought honor to nobles who waited on the king, yetservility entailed dishonor and dependence. Some claimed that servants livedcarefree lives, but, for others, servitude was uncomfortably close to slavery.Service was indispensable to the economy, central to the household, and a fun-damental aspect of this hierarchical society.
R. C. Richardson’s survey of household servants in England from the sixteenththrough the eighteenth centuries convincingly demonstrates their importance. Hedraws together much recent scholarship and adds his own readings of prescriptiveand dramatic literature to show that servants were considered vital to the socialorder. A godly, obedient servant, Richardson shows, was said to be an importantpart of a functioning household. But servants’ failure to achieve such high stan-dards prompted writers like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift to wring their handsover the “servant problem.” Though they were often victimized by cruel employ-ers or unsympathetic magistrates, Richardson argues, servants were far frompassive. Their places within the homes of England’s elites could make them
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powerful, and many masters and mistresses lived in fear of their servants’ abilityto defame them through gossip or litigation. In Richardson’s account, then,servants lived hard lives and yet, despite the ideals of obedience and humilitypreached in didactic literature, also took steps to improve their own condition.
Richardson claims to provide a “social-cultural history,” and, in many ways,he succeeds (viii). Readers learn much about representations, norms, and expec-tations. Additionally there is a wealth of detail describing the lives of real peopleworking in service, particularly in chapter 5, which explores “housing, diet, dress,welfare, recreation, and education” (96). Specialists will appreciate the ways inwhich familiar material, such as William Petty’s resuscitation of Anne Green orthe popular politics of the English Civil War, are now seen in a new light whenviewed through the lens of service.
But such details, though often interesting, are too rarely synthesized into largerarguments regarding change over time. We read, for example, about the femini-zation of service during the early modern period and of the transition frompaternal to contractual relationships, but exactly when, how, or why these devel-opments occurred is not explored. There is almost nothing on how demographicgrowth or economic expansion changed household service nor the effects onservants of class formation, urbanization, empire, or changing family structures.Altogether the reader gains the impression that service did not change much,despite the profound transformations associated with early modernity. Richard-son shows, then, how the study of household servants contributes to our under-standing of early modern English society and how much more there is to learn.This work will, therefore, be useful to specialists and to students as a survey ofwhat is known and as a prompt towards future research.
Cambridge University William Cavert
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris. By Graham Robb. (New York, NY: W. W.Norton & Co., 2010. Pp. xii, 375. $28.95.)
This author has written not the histoire, the history of Paris, but a series ofhistoires, stories set in Paris, with the goal of creating a “mini-Human Comedy.”Like Honoré de Balzac, Graham Robb intends for the reader to make connections,i.e., between his chapter on Charles-Axel Guillaumot, who mapped the Parisunderground in the late eighteenth century, and Marie Antoinette, whose escapefrom Paris ended with her capture in Varennes and was stymied by her compan-ions’ ignorance of the layout of Paris, which had been completely and accuratelymapped for the first time only recently. However, Robb does not seek to
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characterize either the city or its inhabitants. These are stories of Paris andParisians in the plural. Each place Robb takes us has a history we cannot see rightaway and which may or may not explain the tale he tells; individuals carry withinthemselves traces of stories and events not immediately accessible to the reader.The Adolf Hitler who reveals his thoughts and plans for Paris when he tours it in1940 is a different figure than the Hitler the student of history usually meets.
Robb sets challenges for himself and for the reader. He wants to write onlywhat can be derived from or is implied by a verifiable documentary base. In turn,he challenges the reader by introducing historical figures in revealing situationswithout immediately identifying them. Like a good short-story writer, Robb letsthe reader get to know the main character in the tale before revealing theiridentity, whether it be Napoléon Bonaparte or François Mitterrand. In this way,the reader is introduced to an individual they may have known previously only asa world-historical figure.
Parisians will reveal new facets of the city and its inhabitants to all readers. Thework is also an exploration of the genres in which history can be presented outsidethe historiographic (what scholars have said) and the research mode (hypothesesand methods to test them). The best essays explore the dialectic of literary creationand historical facts, narratives, and environments. Many pieces set in pre-1945Paris, like that on Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, address in arevealing fashion the ways literature and life construct one another. However, thelast few essays in the book—i.e., the film script on Juliette Greco and Miles Davis,the ironic radical sociology of Nanterre in 1968, and the bande dessinée (graphic-novel-like) text in the essay on development in Fifth Republic Paris—in whichRobb draws on genres outside the literary mainstream, are less successful. In thesefinal essays, Robb’s engagement with alternative genres dulls the aesthetic andanalytic success that characterize the rest of the book and in which he hassuccessfully created his own space, neither literature nor history but true to both.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Donald Reid
An Atlas of the Peninsular War. By Ian Robertson. Cartography by Martin Brown.(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 144. $55.00.)
For long into the nineteenth century, the Peninsular War [1808–1814] occupiedthe intense interest not only of military historians but also that of many survivingofficers who had fought in it. It was a subject of enduring fascination, but itscartography came under the increasing scrutiny of mapmakers, well aware thatthe maps and plans in William Napier’s History were perfunctory at best. During
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the war, reconnaissance maps and siege plans drawn under the supervision ofWellington’s quartermaster general, Sir George Murray, provided officers in thefield with invaluable tools for conducting battles and sieges alike. Even at the time,maps and plans created for strategic purposes became a source of national pride,and some were published. By 1840, cartography would be elevated to a symbol ofBritain’s imperial grandeur with the issue of an atlas of the Peninsular War byJames Wyld. Sponsored by Murray and largely compiled from the topographicaldrawings of Thomas Mitchell, what became known as “Wyld’s Atlas” was amonumental tour de force that fixed the cartographic paradigm for the PeninsularWar for over a century and a half.
Primarily reproduced by lithography, the plates in this atlas were executedthrough the hachure marks that had previously served etchers and copper engrav-ers so well in reproducing the drawn lines of the field surveyors. With the technicalexcellence of lithography and steel engraving, those hachure marks produceddramatic effects beyond their primary function in defining three-dimensionalrelief. As a result, spectacular topographical images came to trump clear rendi-tions of the battlefield sites and troop movements during the progress of anengagement. Even Fortescue’s maps, printed in the early twentieth century, pro-duced cluttered images that until recently have characterized Peninsular Warcartography.
In a commensurately fine but more functional work, An Atlas of the PeninsularWar, Ian Robertson has resolved the problem for the twenty-first century.Through the extensive maps and plans drawn by Martin Brown under his con-stant supervision, Robertson has provided an accessible and intelligently under-stated atlas of the battlefields, siege sites, and maneuvers of the war, substantiallytransforming them from dense accretions of topographical detail into instrumentsthat make the dynamic of those actions visually accessible. Although earliercartographers adhered to the precedents established by engineers for officers in thefield, Robertson and Brown use cartography to elucidate troop movements andthe shifting positions of the forces as they became engaged in battle.
In a brief, but highly informative, introduction, Robertson recapitulates thehistory of the cartography that led up to Wyld’s Atlas. Further commentaryregarding the historical context of the war and an intelligent selection of illustra-tions prepare the reader for the subsequent fifty-three chapters, or files, withBrown’s maps and plans of individual actions and maneuvers, covering the warfrom Roliça to Toulouse. Each of them is described by the author’s succinct andinsightful complementary text of approximately 250 words. These provide acogent background to the event at hand, explain the relative significance of the
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encounter, the number of each force, and put the action in the context of the widertheater of the war in the Peninsula. As supplements to the atlas, he also includeshelpful and literate reference sections: a five-page chronology, a key to carto-graphic symbols, an eight-page glossary of terms, a selective bibliography, and anindex.
The maps compiled by Brown are eminently clear. Appropriately delicatecontour lines allow the reader to identify relief features and elevation in coordi-nation with an equally subtle color palette of brown and green. Rivers, streams,and the approximate lines of roads are as clearly delineated but in a subordinatepattern that does not distract from the prominent red and blue lines marking theprogress of British and French forces, together with brown and orange for thePortuguese and Spanish, respectively. For the more complex open-field battles,Brown has created multiple maps to reconstruct the complexities of the engage-ments. In the battle of Salamanca on July 22, 1812, for example, four smallerplans chart the evolution of the battle in addition to a previous page that reflectsthe full battlefield. Thanks to Rory Muir, we now have a fuller understanding ofthat battle, but, thanks to Robertson and Brown, we also have intelligible car-tography to guide us graphically through its intricacies.
A broad spectrum of readers will find many reasons to be grateful for thepublication of this important work. Amateur and professional historians alike canbe the beneficiaries of Robertson’s unique background, which includes his widereading of both contemporary narratives of the war and subsequent histories, andexceptional knowledge of British travelers to the Peninsula in the ensuing decades,among them Richard Ford, on whom he has also written. His earlier authorshipof several editions in the Blue Guides series to Portugal, Spain, and France gavehim valuable experience in mastering the art of presenting material in a coherentform, while his former residence in Spain furnished him with both personalexperience of the climate of the Peninsula in all seasons and numerous opportu-nities to gather detailed knowledge of its terrain, all components that are essentialto a fuller appreciation of a complex and fascinating subject.
Ohio Wesleyan University Conrad Kent
Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution. ByBarry M. Shapiro. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press,2009. Pp. x, 204. $65.00.)
Readers of this author’s earlier work on Parisian justice in the early Revolutionwill be familiar with his skill in using archival and printed sources to contribute
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to the wider debate on the nature of the events of 1789 and 1790. They will notbe disappointed with this book, in which he analyzes the mood and motivation ofdeputies within the Estates General and National Assembly over a similar period.The ground has already been well trodden by Michael Fitzsimmons and TimothyTackett, among others, but Barry M. Shapiro provides several new insights intothe issues involved and the solutions adopted. However, the book is written ontwo levels. The full version explains the radicalization of attitudes during thisperiod through the concept of psychological trauma, which, he argues, waspivotal to events, particularly in July when deputies saw themselves as living in “adesperate and terrifying world.” Using models elaborated by trauma psycholo-gists, he argues that deputies alternated between feelings of affection for andmistrust of the monarchy from the July crisis until the early spring of 1790,veering from love for the king as the father of his people to terror at the prospectof military coups and counterrevolutionary violence. As a result, they followedinconsistent policies, driven by both cooperation and mistrust, which destroyedthe chances of constructing a viable constitutional monarchy.
The problem is that the psychological argument is based on very little empiricalevidence. Fear and terror certainly existed, but to label them as clinical trauma andmake that the main explanatory tool of events over these nine months is uncon-vincing. Shapiro himself concedes that there is little empirical evidence and, in thechapters dealing with the period after the storming of the Bastille, is often reducedto arguing that deputies behaved in a way that “individuals who had experiencedwhat they had experienced were likely to behave” (16). Yet eighteenth-centurymentalities were very different from our own, and his approach leads too frequentlyto conjecture on what deputies “must” have felt. This reviewer was not convinced,but this should not take away from the book’s many other virtues because, read onits second level as political analysis, it is interesting, engaging, and in many placesoriginal. It provides a detailed contextualization of the July crisis, of the crucialconstitutional debates of September, and the October decision on ministerial power.In doing that, Shapiro convincingly dismantles several key elements of the revision-ist argument, including the contention that the suspensive veto, granted to the kingin September, was driven by a Rousseauist concept of direct democracy. It is notalways a straightforward read. Several sentences are too long and packed withmultiple subclauses. Yet readers who, like this reviewer, remain skeptical over thepsychology will still find a great deal to interest them here, and those who accept thetrauma approach will find even more.
University College Dublin Hugh Gough
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Maxime Weygand: A Biography of the French General in Two World Wars. By BarnettSinger. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing Company, 2008. Pp. 255. $35.00.)
Overshadowed by both Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle in postwar narra-tives of the French ordeal of 1940–1944, Maxime Weygand represents, perhapsas well as either of those two did, the military establishment that confrontedthe defeat to the Germans and the subsequent choices that produced and guidedthe Vichy regime. During the period spanning from the First World War until hisdismissal under German pressure as Vichy governor of North Africa in 1941,Weygand served at the highest levels in a variety of roles that set him consistentlyat the center of the French military leadership, culminating in his being recalledfrom retirement to become supreme commander of the French forces in 1940 andthen appointed briefly as Pétain’s minister of national defense before accepting hisfinal position in Algiers. A formidable figure, Weygand’s legacy has been cloudedby the so-called “Vichy syndrome.” Barnett Singer challenges this legacy in thisbrief biographical appreciation but overshoots the mark by going beyond reas-sessing Weygand and attempting to rehabilitate his historical reputation.
Singer uses the word “marvelous” frequently in describing Weygand’s militaryacumen, administrative ability, writing skill, and artistic talent, and his adulationof Weygand appears at times to approach hagiography. Weygand’s only short-coming, according to Singer, was an unwavering loyalty to father figures likeFerdinand Foch (and perhaps Pétain), attributable to a psychological quest tofill the place of parents missing as a result of Weygand’s mysterious—andfascinating—family origins. This explanation seems to excuse Weygand fromfailing to criticize policies that he presumably understood to be flawed. Singerraises this point in the last paragraphs of the introduction and reprises it occa-sionally throughout the book but provides little to substantiate such a controver-sial and tenuous assertion. Even if one were to accept this interpretation, suchpolitical and cultural factors occurring during his formative development as aFrench military officer—the Boulanger Crisis, the Dreyfus Affair, the republicanmilitary reforms led by Minister of War General Louis André—likely account forthe way Weygand processed the military and political dilemmas he faced more sothan insecurities about his upbringing.
Also unconvincing is Singer’s attempt to recast Weygand as a crypto-resistantwhose actions protected Jews in North Africa. If he is justified in challengingMichael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton’s assessment in Vichy France and theJews as “over-simplified,” the quality of the evidence Singer provides does notsupport claims that “Weygand was a kind of hero to Moroccan Jewry” or that
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“North African Jews were well served by having such an obdurate anti-Nazi inpower” (143, 147, 148). Singer more effectively substantiates the view thatWeygand actively guarded the autonomy and resources the French needed tochallenge German power once it showed signs of weakening.
Singer bases his biography on a strong foundation of primary sources, and thebibliography of secondary sources and commentary in the “Chapter Notes” sectionare assets for students embarking on a study of Vichy, its complex legacy, and thepeople associated with it. This reviewer’s concern has to do with Singer’s interpre-tation of these sources beyond what is sustainable. Maxime Weygand deservesreconsideration by historians, but a more convincing portrait of this complex andcapable man will situate him somewhere between the denunciation he has receivedsince Vichy’s demise and the adulation offered by Singer in this book.
Gwynedd-Mercy College Michael Clinton
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder. (New York, NY:Basic Books, 2010. Pp. 432. $29.95.)
The author of this book achieves another milestone by combining separate strandsof historiography into one compact volume. Described as a study of deliberatemass murder, the author investigates the impact of two totalitarian regimes inEastern Europe where, between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people weredeliberately killed (vii). His stark conclusion: the killing constituted the centralprinciple of both Nazi and Soviet regimes. Hitler and Stalin both perceived thefuture as one of ethnically homogenous states. Bold and original, Bloodlandsrepresents an effort to break through barriers of interpretation and discipline andwill influence scholarly discussion for years to come.
Where were the “bloodlands”? Although initially defining the author’s focus asthe region of the farthest expanse of German armies in 1942, Timothy Snyderdoes venture into the history of Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia as well.But the main emphasis lies in Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, andSoviet territories under Nazi occupation. In the author’s words, the regionsconstitute “no political territory, real or imagined; they are simply where Europe’smost murderous regimes did their most murderous work” (xviii).
The appeal of the geographic approach lies in the ability to contrast andcompare German and Soviet rule. Snyder’s account begins with a brilliant outlineof the state-induced famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1933. He then correctly identifiesthe “nation bent” of Stalin’s persecutions, highlighting the “Polish operation”starting in 1933 as the “bloodiest chapter of the Great Terror” (103). Like no
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other ethnicity under Soviet rule, Poles suffered tremendously: a Pole living underStalin was forty times more likely to be killed than any other Soviet citizen. Snyderdoes not shy away from direct comparisons, claiming that Hermann Göring’sfood procurement policies in Ukraine in 1941 resembled Lazar Kaganovich’spolicies in 1933: both “guaranteed death for millions of people” (170).
By consulting a massive array of sources and giving victims a voice, Snyderavoids charges of bias. In outlining Nazi atrocities, he does not claim to presentnew findings for the specialist. In Belarus, the German invasion resulted in thekilling or displacing of half the population. No other European nation sufferedlikewise (251). Yet, the juxtaposition with Soviet policies represents a welcomeattempt to overcome fractured memory. Many students of the Holocaust and theSecond World War will learn from Snyder’s integration of recent Eastern Euro-pean sources. For the author, the Soviet system was most lethal when the USSRwas not at war, whereas the Nazis committed their atrocities mostly during thewar. His claim that the image of the Nazi concentration camp is misleadingbecause most killings happened elsewhere may arouse debate. Clearly, Snyder’sassertions will be controversial, not least because the Soviet state benefitted fromthe more public violence of the Nazis, and post-Communist scholarship in EasternEurope has yet to make a major impact in Western textbooks. Bloodlands shouldbe required reading for all students of modern European history.
California State University, Northridge Dónal O’Sullivan
English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847–1902. By Eric G. Tenbus.(London, England: Pickering and Chatto Ltd., 2010. Pp. viii, 209. $99.00.)
Catholic schools have earned marked respect in Britain today, a testament to thelong history of Catholic efforts to build a solid educational system from inauspi-cious beginnings. Eric G. Tenbus ably chronicles the early years of these efforts inhis account of English Catholic schools from 1847 (when the governmentannounced that Catholic schools would be eligible for state education grants) to1902 (when the Balfour Act provided access to local property taxes by denomi-national schools). Indeed, Tenbus argues that the story of Catholic education inthis period played a decisive role in the forging of a more united and confidentEnglish Catholic community and culture.
Tenbus describes the early-nineteenth-century Catholic community as sociallydivided and generally ill-equipped to meet the needs of its growing, but impover-ished, population. But a fundamental Catholic philosophy of education, stressingparental control and the primacy of moral and religious instruction, fueled the drive
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to build a comprehensive Catholic educational system. Catholic efforts buttedheads with an increasingly secular and utilitarian public attitude regarding educa-tion. The ensuing conflict shaped an emerging Catholic political consciousness.
The receipt of Privy Council grants after 1848 inspired a greater organizationin Catholic educational circles but could not forestall the passage of the 1870Forster Education Act, which established local boards (supported by propertytaxes) empowered to build nondenominational schools in underserved areas. The1870 act galvanized Catholic opposition, which considered “board schools” athreat to the very principles that underlay Catholic education.
After the Forster Act, Archbishop Henry Manning elevated education to pri-ority status in his episcopate. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as governmentregulation increased and additional bills threatened even more restrictions ondenominational schools, Manning and other Catholic leaders became increasinglyvocal advocates of Catholic interests.
The 1890s witnessed the culmination of Catholic political efforts. With Arch-bishop Herbert Vaughan at Westminster, a largely sympathetic, Conservativeministry in control of Parliament, and the issue of Home Rule temporarily shelved(allowing Irish Catholic MPs to focus more on educational issues), Catholicswaged a vigorous campaign for full equality with board schools, especially duringthe debates over the 1902 Balfour Bill. Although the final act compromised onsome provisions, it did allow access to board-controlled funds for denominationalschools and proved the climax of the decades-long Catholic educational crusade.According to Tenbus, “This more than any other issue enabled their maturationfrom a reclusive and rather passive community to a conspicuous, self-confidentand, when appropriate, tenaciously aggressive community committed to obtainingequal treatment under the law” (139).
Tenbus employs a wide variety of sources, including the writings and corre-spondence of English Catholic bishops, school logbooks, notes from governmentschool inspectors, parliamentary proceedings and other public documents, con-temporary pamphlets, press reports, and secondary scholarship. The result is atightly argued history that appropriately places nineteenth-century Englishdebates over education into a broader social and cultural context. This is morethan a book about Victorian Catholic educational policy. It is a valuable contri-bution to the history of the Catholic community in England that provides impor-tant insights on the transformation of a despised religious minority into animportant segment of British society.
Rockhurst University, Kansas City Richard J. Janet
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The Insurgent Barricade. By Mark Traugott. (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2010. Pp. xviii, 436. $39.95.)
Mark Traugott, author of a study of Parisian workers during France’s 1848Revolution, offers a comprehensive history of the barricade, covering its origins,construction, and spread. The author argues that the barricade concept enduredfrom generation to generation, despite long gaps in its use, and later took on a lifeof its own. In effect, it became not only a standard tactic in an uprising but alsoa symbol of revolution. Understanding the history of the barricade is to under-stand the history of modern revolution.
Traugott devotes the first six chapters to tracing barricade history. Tradition-ally, the Parisian resistance against Henry III in 1588, the so-called First Day ofthe Barricades, is seen as the beginning. Traugott’s research refutes this withevidence that they were used in 1569 and 1571, both instances probablyinspired by some unknown earlier examples. The main contribution of the 1588event was establishing a “barricade consciousness,” essentially the collectivememory that brought the automatic use of the technique in subsequent rebel-lions (52). This is seen in their reappearance sixty years later during the Frondein 1648. Traugott argues that this revolt also established the basic pattern forsubsequent use.
Although barricades are normally not seen as part of the French Revolution,Traugott again takes a revisionist stance, finding numerous appearances startingwith the anti-Bourbon activity in 1789 and continuing through the 1790s. Theauthor believes that these events enabled the idea to survive, in effect connectingthe early barricades with the ones that dominated revolutions in the 1800s.
After the barricade phenomenon exploded in France’s 1830 Revolution, theidea internationalized when it spread to Belgium. By 1848, the idea had infil-trated popular culture, so it was no surprise to see it return that year. Numerousforeign residents in Paris apparently also caught the fever and helped theconcept spread throughout Europe, establishing it as an integral part of anyrevolution and as a symbolic defiance of state authority. Inspired by the ParisCommune, the idea spread globally during the 1900s, but Traugott’s narrativedoes not go into this.
The author then analyzes the barricade concept itself, beginning with theirtactical employment during an insurrection. These often formidable piles ofrubble, and whatever else was handy, served to protect the rebels, rally support,create liberated zones, undermine military and police loyalty to the regime, andproclaim to the citizenry that resistance had begun and that it was time to commit.
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Traugott believes that they also serve a psychic purpose by connecting the uprisingto the previous ones, which had never vanished from popular memory. To builda barricade is to revolt, and vice versa.
Insurgent Barricades is a work that should have been written ages ago, fillinga gaping hole in revolutionary studies. In particular, the appendices include amassive database listing every barricade incident in Europe from 1569 to 1898.Each entry includes descriptions of the involved barricades and extensive histori-cal notes. This section alone makes the work invaluable to revolutionary scholars.
Bridgewater State University Peter L. de Rosa
History and the Enlightenment. By Hugh Trevor-Roper. Edited by John Robertson.(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xxvi, 314. $40.00.)
Hugh Trevor-Roper [1914–2003] had been writing history for more than twentyyears and had already begun to develop his elegant, and occasionally sardonic,narrative style as an essayist when his attention became focused on the historicalwriting of the Enlightenment. Theodore Besterman invited him to speak on “TheHistorical Philosophy of The Enlightenment” at the First International Confer-ence on the Enlightenment in 1963 (x). The published version of that speech servesas the author’s introduction to the present volume. Trevor-Roper’s irritation atJohn Wesley’s conservative disdain for virtually all major Enlightenment histori-ans deeply influenced research done to prepare for this project, and it led Trevor-Roper to a serious exploration of Enlightenment historiography covering morethan thirty years and illustrated by this collection of thirteen essays, all but one ofwhich were previously published and all but two of which focus on individualhistorians or historical works.
The one new essay, “From Deism to History: Conyers Middleton,” begun in1982 as another invited lecture, is the longest in the collection. Continuingresearch covering several years ultimately led Trevor-Roper to answer an inter-esting question for Enlightenment historiography; he concluded that it wasMiddleton’s influence that accounted for the skeptical, Deist attitude of EdwardGibbon toward Christianity that pervades The History of the Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire.
“The Scottish Enlightenment” and “The Romantic Movement and the Study ofHistory” provide critical contextual material for understanding major eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century historiographic traditions. The first locates theorigins of the Scottish Enlightenment in the resumption of contact by a primitiveScottish society with the rapidly commercializing continent after 1688, especially
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by Jacobite exiles; liberal Presbyterians who imported Dutch models for universityreform; and a new class of educated laity trained primarily in law and medicinein Holland, France, and Switzerland. Trevor-Roper argues that the unavoidablecontrast between their experiences of continental cosmopolitanism and their ownprimitive roots, coupled with the reading of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws,account for a near obsession with the causes of social progress among Scotsintellectuals from David Hume through William Robertson, Adam Ferguson,Adam Smith, and John Millar. The reviewer thinks so highly of this essay that, fornearly forty years, he has assigned it as the first reading whenever he teaches acourse on the Enlightenment in Scotland. The essay on romanticism finds thesources of a new anti-universalist historical philosophy in the “recovery” ofancient poetry by James Macpherson and Thomas Percy in the 1760s. Developedin Scotland by Walter Scott in his historical novels and carried into Germany byJohann Herder, this insistence that past cultures be valued for their own sakesrather than as steps toward the present pervaded the new historical trends of thenineteenth century. Again, there is much insight here, but Trevor-Roper’s antago-nism to conservative Christianity leads him to ignore the central role of JohannGeorg Hamann in this story.
The remaining essays—three on Edward Gibbon and one each on the works ofPietro Giannone, Dimitrie Cantemir, David Hume, Thomas Babington Macaulay,Thomas Carlyle, and Jacob Burckhardt—are all minor masterpieces, which usecase studies to illuminate major Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historio-graphic issues.
Harvey Mudd College Richard G. Olson
Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis. By Anna von der Goltz. (Oxford,England: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 325. $55.00.)
Few individuals have had a greater impact on the history of the twentieth centurythan Field Marshall Paul Freiherr von Hindenburg. After serving as army chief ofstaff and virtual codictator of imperial Germany during the First World War,Hindenburg was elected president of the Weimar Republic in 1925. Eight tumul-tuous years later, the eighty-four-year-old “Hero of Tannenberg” made the fatefuldecision to appoint Adolf Hitler German chancellor, directly facilitating the ThirdReich. It is this final, unquestionably ignominious chapter in an otherwise distin-guished career that continues to define historical interest in Hindenburg, thepolitician.
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According to Anna von der Goltz, however, we have consistently underesti-mated the role of Hindenburg, the myth. After all, Hindenburg’s meteoric risefrom relative obscurity in 1914 to field marshall, war hero, and reich presidentcoincided with the proliferation of the modern mass media, democratic politics,and consumerism. Already in the wake of Hindenburg’s remarkable victory atTannenberg in September 1914, journalists, politicians, and advertisers fromacross the political spectrum embraced the field marshall as the mythic embodi-ment of German strength and solidarity. By the end of the war, von der Goltzargues, the Hindenburg myth had even displaced the kaiser as the transcendentimage of German unity.
Had he not come out of retirement for a second time in the 1920s, thearchconservative Junker “might in fact be remembered as a force for stability,continuity, and tranquility that expedited demobilization and helped to ease thetransition from monarchy to Republic” (63). But Hindenburg did reenter politics.Indeed, through his 1919 Reichstag testimony on the reasons for Germany’sdefeat, the field marshall almost single-handedly created the “stab-in-the-back”legend that Jews and socialists had conspired to undermine Germany’s chances forvictory. Hindenburg eventually began to stump for right-wing causes, agreeing torun as a conservative candidate for president in 1925. Unwilling to attack the fieldmarshall’s heroic image, which they had helped produce, the republican center-leftfound it difficult to carry out a successful electoral campaign, and their candidate,Wilhelm Marx, lost in a runoff.
Most impressive in von der Goltz’s account is her subsequent analysis of theHindenburg myth at the intersection of politics and consumer culture. Tracingthe new reich president’s remarkably malleable image in film, fiction, advertis-ing, and the media, the author shows how millions of Germans produced andconsumed representations of Hindenburg for political and financial gain. Par-ticularly interesting is the way that liberals and Social Democrats appropriatedthe Hindenburg myth as a “protective shield,” in the words of Josef Goebbels,for defending republican domestic and foreign policy (140). In fact, by thepresidential elections of April 1932, the two fronts from 1925 had becomeinverted. While the center-left (save the Communists) campaigned for Hinden-burg, the conservative and radical right, who had voted almost exclusively forHindenburg in 1925, now defected to the Nazi Party candidate, Adolf Hitler,who lost a relatively close race.
The last section on Hindenburg and “the rise of the Nazis” is the least originalpart of the book. Part of the reason, of course, is that the political narrative of thisperiod is so exceedingly well trammeled. The author might have carried out a
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more systematic comparison of the similarities and differences between the“Hindenburg Myth” and the “Hitler Myth” as analyzed by Ian Kershaw, as well.Despite these minor criticisms, however, Hindenburg is a crisply written, stimu-lating, and important work that deserves wide readership from historians ofWeimar politics and consumer culture alike.
Stetson University Eric Kurlander
Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and his Times. By William E. Wallace. (New York,NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 401. $30.00.)
Art historian William Wallace is unquestionably a major authority on Michelan-gelo who has published extensively on the subject. In one study, Michelangelo atSan Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur [1994], Wallace struck the note thatwould become consistent in his treatment of the artist: Michelangelo di Lodovicodi Buonarotti Simoni was not, or at least not only, the epitome of the lonely,tormented, quarrelsome genius. He was also a man deeply invested in his familyand his friends; although his pretensions to noble status made him insist that hehad “never run a shop,” he was nevertheless a professional who was constantlyengaged in managing a large and diverse workforce.
The author’s aim has been to write a modern biography that would “bring theman to life in conversation with his family, friends, patrons, numerous acquain-tances, and occasional enemies” (xvi). He notes that, although Michelangelo is aniconic figure in Western culture, there are relatively few true biographies of theman. The popular perception of Michelangelo has been dominated by IrvingStone’s frankly novelized life, The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Many biographies end with the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. ButMichelangelo lived—and worked—for another fifty-two years, dying just beforehis eighty-ninth birthday and putting in a full day’s work on the Rondanini Pietàthe previous week.
The book includes some unusual departures for a scholarly biography. Thoughit is solidly based on documentary evidence, some events and conversations arereconstructed and read like works of fiction. The most daring offers a “typical”week in the artist’s working life. Here we observe Michelangelo at his least “IrvingStonesque”: this is a flesh and blood Renaissance man, deeply involved with hisworld and his time.
Michelangelo’s letters to his family are full of advice, reproach, and exhorta-tion. He sent money with instructions to invest in real estate; he insisted that the
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family was both Florentine and of noble origin (in fact, they were probablyneither).
Michelangelo was profoundly pious. He worried about his sins, past andpresent, and took great pains to ensure that his many charitable contributionsreached the most needy, especially widows and orphans.
Wallace neither ignores nor dwells on the subject of Michelangelo’s sexuality.Although he assumes that as a boy he participated (probably passively) in thefashionable homosexuality of the Medici court and may have entertained feelingsfor some of his later male assistants and employees, he does not ignore his deepaffection for women such as Vittoria Colonna. Michelangelo seems to haveconsidered sexual activity unhealthy: “About [refraining from] sexual intercourse:this I have always done, and if you want to prolong your life do not indulge in itor at least as little as you can” (96).
There is nothing unusual in his not marrying. This was a common part ofItalian family strategy, especially in families trying to hold on to property andsocial pretensions, as the Buonarotti family was certainly doing. One brotherwould marry and sire children; the uncles carried on the sort of activities that gave“nepotism” (nephew- or grandson-ism) its name.
Wallace writes with skill, clarity, and charm, and the design of the book iswell matched to the text both in layout and in choice of typeface. This wouldmake an excellent text or alternative reading for courses in Renaissance art orhistory.
The book contains two useful appendices: an alphabetical “cast of characters”and a chronological list of the popes of Michelangelo’s lifetime (there werethirteen, and he worked for at least nine of them). Although the artist’s work isnot the main focus of the book, the author does include eight pages of carefullyselected color plates.
The reviewer has one complaint. As part of his investigation of Michelangelo’sfriendships and nonartistic life, Wallace includes a fair amount of the artist’spoetry. This is very revealing and welcome; however, one could wish that at leastsome of it were included in the language in which it was written, since poetry, evenmore than prose, is changed by translation, no matter how good the translationmay be.
This is not the last word on Michelangelo studies, nor is it meant to be. Thisis a modern biography that introduces us to the human realities of a towering,often caricatured man.
University of Louisiana at Lafayette Susan Vandiver Nicassio
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A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and HenriettaMaria of France. By Katie Whitaker. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company,2010. Pp. xxi, 374. $26.95.)
Even for those familiar with the story, few would recognize the marriage ofCharles I and Henrietta Maria as “one of the greatest romances of all time” (xvii).Katie Whitaker hopes to correct this in A Royal Passion—a double biography ofthe royal couple examining their marriage “in all its intimacy of detail” (xviii).The work is structured chronologically, with twelve chapters divided into threeparts. The first section traces roughly the first five years of the royal union. Thiswas a period marked by fierce quarrels between the couple over matters such asthe French Catholic members of the queen’s household and the ever-presentGeorge Villiers, “who occupied first place in his [the king’s] affections” (93).
Part 2 covers the 1630s, a decade Whitaker describes as “a golden age” (123).After Buckingham’s assassination, the king would have “no other favorites” saveHenrietta, and, as the decade advanced, “Charles began to draw her into his ownpolitical world” (101). The results of Henrietta’s increased power included thegrowth of Catholicism at court (with the presence there of papal representatives)and a lapse in the enforcement of penal laws against Catholics (137).
The last section concentrates on the civil wars, ending with the queen’s deathin 1669. Explored here are all Henrietta’s efforts to secure aid for her husband aswell as her unrelenting advice to Charles “to be more resolute, more ruthless andbold” (274).
Whitaker has caught the wave of burgeoning interest in the royal couple;unfortunately, she has failed to engage with the rich historiography on the queenthat has been produced over the last five years. Three monographs and one editedvolume on Henrietta have appeared since 2006, none of which are referenced inthe endnotes. The most obvious oversight is the author’s failure to acknowledgeSarah Poynting’s discovery (made public in 2007) of Charles’s now infamous“swiving” letter to Jane Whorwood. Surely, the possibility that Charles may havebeen unfaithful to his wife sheds important light on this marriage that, accordingto the author, “shaped the course of British and world history” (xxi).
Also problematic is Whitaker’s evaluation of royal correspondence. To helpreconstruct this love story, the author places significant emphasis on Charles’sletters to Henrietta. What the author fails to do, however, is contextualize theking’s writings. This is apparent when one considers that the general tone of theking’s letters to his wife was strikingly similar to many of the letters Charles hadwritten to Villiers. For example, consider these words the king penned to hisfavorite: “[N]o distance of place, nor length of time, can make me slacken, much
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less diminish my love to you” (93–94). Such tender expressions of platonic lovereveal much about the king’s writing style (and his form of written self-expression)and should have been taken into account when assessing Charles’s written senti-ments to his queen.
Overall, Stuart scholars will find little here that is new or surprising. In fact,much of the book reiterates Caroline Hibbard’s thesis (as advanced in Charles Iand the Popish Plot, 1983) that Protestant fears of an international, “popish”conspiracy to re-Catholicize England had some basis in reality. Whitaker actuallycites Hibbard’s book no less than twenty-two times.
No one who reads this book would doubt the genuine love and affectionCharles and Henrietta felt for one another; however, with respect to the claim thatthis marriage was one of history’s greatest love stories, in the end, this reviewerremains skeptical.
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Michelle White
Alexander the Great: Lessons from History’s Undefeated General. By Bill Yenne.Foreword by General Wesley K. Clark. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Pp. ix, 224. $22.00.)
There are two extremes of the literary spectrum for reviewers: professional lit-erature and popular books. Neither genre should be judged by the standards ofthe other. Bill Yenne is a well-published writer who has produced books oneverything from Sitting Bull to Tommy Guns and Guinness, but he is not aprofessional historian. His new biography on Alexander the Great is aimed at ageneral audience that may not mind the lack of references to scholarship. One willfind no trace of the historiographical problems involved in writing about Alex-ander. Yenne treats all ancient sources as if they were equally reliable. He seemsoblivious to the fact that ancient historians could, and did, make things up if itsuited their particular moral or literary purpose. With this kind of “research,”what can one produce but a rehash of the standard narrative on Alexander?
The “Lessons from History’s Undefeated General” promised in the subtitleseem rather pedestrian: be self-confident, lead from the front, use maneuvers tobreak up the enemy’s plans, aim your strengths at the enemy’s weaknesses, etc.Indeed, if Alexander the Great is studied by “war colleges throughout the world,”then why another book? What can Yenne say about Alexander’s battles that Carlvon Clausewitz has not already said? Although this book is certainly a betterbargain than Brill’s Companion to Alexander the Great, priced at $321.00,readers would be better served by J. R. Hamilton’s fine biography Alexander the
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Great. The strategic implications and leadership lessons are treated in much moredetail by Partha Bose’s Alexander the Great’s Art of Strategy, and a better historyof the conquests, with full attention to the sources, is Waldemar Heckel’s work,The Conquests of Alexander the Great.
The problem with writing a biography of Alexander is that sources do not tellus what we need to know, so we fill in the details with our own lives and visions.Yenne’s Alexander is reduced to a simplistic caricature created by repeatedphrases about military conquest. There are no open questions, no controversies,no disagreements. It is feel-good history at its best. Skepticism is not the aim ofthis author; like Plutarch, he wants to inspire readers with the tales of heroes.There are too many overawed assessments and superficial modern analogiesmeant to resonate with a modern military audience. Thus, the Delian League isreally NATO; the Spitamenes campaign is the Little Bighorn; Parmenio is Patton;Philip II in Thebes is like Peter the Great in the West; and Athens and Sparta arelike Germany and Britain before the First World War. Generals are akin to NFLquarterbacks.
Yenne’s portrayal of Alexander as the perfect commander, who was alwaystireless, generous, and unfailingly brave, never shows the negatives. Alexander’sheavy drinking is a manly trait, not a personality flaw that clouded his judgmentand caused him to kill one of his most competent generals. His victim, Cleitus, isportrayed as drunken and insubordinate rather than just speaking out in Mace-donian fashion against the pomp and majesty that were becoming the outwardsigns of Alexander’s increasingly swollen head. Missing are the many attempts onAlexander’s life by his own Macedonians or the fact that he read his men’s mail.His relationship with Hephaestion or his eunuch lover, Bagoas, would simply notfit this macho image.
Although Alexander’s tactical brilliance is agreed upon, Yenne’s assertion thathis diplomacy and governance were superb would not be accepted by manyhistorians. He did not “build an infrastructure,” nor was he a “visionary politicalleader.” There is little evidence to suggest Alexander understood the ideologicalimplications of Achaemenid kingship. He failed to maintain an empire and controlit for any length of time. And, although no one would dispute that Alexander’sconquests had a cultural effect on the areas he traversed, the suggestion that thiswas Alexander’s intent would not be accurate. Alexander was a brilliant tacticianwhose true genius was as a field commander. His business was war and conquest,not administration. He spent his life in pursuit of personal glory, not the broth-erhood of man. He created no new state structures, and his plan to meld thePersians and Macedonians into one empire failed both politically and militarily.
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His legacy was carved up, not by brilliant younger marshals, but by lesser men.And, if he was so beloved by the Greeks and had a “mandate” to crush the PersianEmpire, then why did more Greeks go over and fight for the Persians than joinAlexander’s army?
Only a handful of generals in history have made conquests on the scale ofAlexander, and none of them died as young. He inspired generals because he wasundefeated and he did something that can never be done again: “attempt toconquer the world.” No longer can a commander be “first on the wall” likeAlexander at Gaza. This is nostalgia for a time when a general could “smell thefear of the impending clash of arms”—or napalm in the morning (ix). This is justthe kind of manly cornpone camaraderie that makes soldiers feel good aboutthemselves and America’s foreign policy. For readers looking for a serious bookon Alexander in an already crowded field, this book simply makes us recallSeneca’s admonition: non multa sed multum (not many but much).
Virginia Military Institute Rose Mary Sheldon
GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL
Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World. ByLarrie D. Ferreiro. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011. Pp. xix, 353. $28.00.)
From 1735 through 1743, three academicians from the Parisian Académie Royaledes Sciences, accompanied by two Spanish naval officers and support staff,sojourned in what is modern-day Ecuador. There, they laboriously measured onedegree of arc on the Earth’s surface to determine the shape of the Earth and so testthe science and worldviews of Newton and Descartes.
This famous Franco-Spanish geodesic expedition has not “fallen off the map”as has been claimed, but, in this well- researched volume that taps archival sourcesas well as the published primary and secondary literature, the science writer LarrieD. Ferreiro presents a detailed and lively narrative of this “bold adventure” (289,290). His comprehensive account is especially strong in setting the expedition inthe contexts of contemporary European politics, the Enlightenment, and colonialdevelopment. The book is nicely illustrated, even if the illustrations are not alwaystied tightly to the text. The author’s treatment of one episode (the surgeonSeniergues’s murder) is original and adds much new knowledge.
Historians of science and experts on South American history will find much ofinterest in this book, yet it recommends itself primarily as a good read. It belongson our night tables more than in our libraries.
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Small errors will annoy experts. Newton’s Principia was one volume, not three,and its title in English is the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, notPrinciples of Mathematics; the end of slavery was hardly “in the offing” in oldHaiti in the 1740s; and officer and honorary positions in the French scienceacademy are not exactly as presented in the book. A bibliography would eliminatea bothersome repetition found in the notes.
This book has an epilogue but no conclusion, which is telling because the bookis more about what happened than about what it meant or what we are to make ofit. Yes, the results helped decide in favor of Newton over Descartes, but the impacton navigation (an argument used to drum up government support) was negligible,certainly compared to the later development of the marine chronometer. Becausethe author is intent on telling a story and not developing an analysis, his claims forhow the mission “reshaped our world” seem overly broad. Were an emerging SouthAmerican identity or struggles for independence in the nineteenth century the“direct result” of the expedition (277)? Are Darwin and the Beagle to be linked toit? Does the story really connect with today’s GPS systems or the Quito airport?
Ferreiro positions his as a “complete history” of the expedition, and, undoubt-edly, he has succeeded as far as the details are concerned, but historians of sciencesuch as Bruno Latour (Science in Action, 1987) and, more recently, Neil Safier, inhis meta-study of the expedition (Measuring the New World, 2008) have upendedour understanding of how scientific knowledge is made, especially involvingexpeditions far away from “centers of calculation.” Such subtleties do not enterthe picture here, but they also do not detract from the pleasure of the tale Ferreirotells.
Stevens Institute of Technology James E. McClellan III
Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires. By Kris Lane.(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xviii, 280. $40.00.)
Because they dazzled with a hue sacred to Islam, emeralds were prized in thecourts of Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and Ottoman Turkey during the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries. The best quality stones, however, came only froma tiny, remote mining zone in South America in the mountainous interior ofColumbia. How these sparkling gems made their way from the New World,through the hands of European merchants, to the treasuries of Asian Muslimpotentates is the subject of Kris Lane’s fascinating book.
Lane is a master at weaving a broad tapestry; this is history on a global scalebut blended with individual threads that illustrate every leg of a journey. Lane’s
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characters are as diverse as pre-Columbian indigenous Americans with theirritual uses for emeralds, Spanish conquistadores and their slave laborers (NativeAmerican and African) who painstakingly drew the green stones from the earth,the crypto-Jewish merchants from Portugal and Spain who marketed themthrough Indian Ocean trade ports, the inquisitors who persecuted the conversotraders but coveted their stones, and finally the Muslim rulers who adornedthemselves with emeralds that were valued above all other gems because theyglowed with the shade of Muhammed’s garden in paradise. Lane’s engaging,highly innovative thesis is that “the trade in emeralds helped draw disparatecultures into an emerging globalized economy and caused greater economicinteraction—as well as consequent cross-cultural and technological exchanges.”Whether for a general student or specialist, the result is a first-rate read thatilluminates the oft-neglected margins of early global maritime commerce and thelow-bulk, high-value items like gemstones that always filled in the edges of thattrade.
Lane has drawn on a remarkable breadth of source material, including muchoriginal primary source research undertaken at repositories in Columbia andEcuador as well as Iberian archives in Lisbon, Seville, and Madrid. Further, he hasused a wide selection of rare published primary sources to flesh out the details ofhis well-crafted, geographically far-ranging story. Lane has made especially stronguse of tax and court records to tease out the story of clandestine mining andtransport of unregistered emeralds—a recurrent preoccupation of colonialSpanish revenue officials. Another strength of the book is the effective manner inwhich Lane melds the global histories of Portuguese and Spanish colonial com-merce during the era of the union of the Iberian crowns [1580–1640]. Forpurposes of moving emeralds from South America to South Asia and the PersianGulf, it was absolutely essential that Luso-Spanish merchants had access to portslike Goa, Bombay, Bandar Abbas, and Hormuz. Few historians have the skill orinclination successfully to integrate such geographically remote but closely linkedstory lines. Lane deftly describes worldwide networks of Iberian gem dealers,allowing the all-too-often-left-out Portuguese dimension of this chronicle toemerge fully.
The text is complimented by well-chosen—indeed, awe-inspiring—color pho-tographs of emerald artifacts, an appendix of tables showing production ofemeralds in Brazil and the valuation of emeralds in Europe, and a postscript onColumbian mining that carries the story to the present day.
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Timothy D. Walker
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Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. By Deirdre N.McCloskey. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 571. $35.00.)
This is the second of six projected books that the author proposes on the topic ofthe modern bourgeoisie. The books are intended to be “a full scale defense of ourmodern form of innovation universally—if misleadingly—called ‘capitalism.’”And, Deirdre N. McCloskey says, “The argument is: Markets and innovation. . . [which] recently have grown dignified and free, are consistent with an ethicallife” (40). The first volume laid out what she sees as the virtues of the bourgeoisie.This volume considers the topic of modern economic growth and its causation.She criticizes fellow economists for materialism and only considering the virtue ofprudence, whereas the bourgeoisie possess other virtues such as justice, temper-ance, love, courage, hope, and faith. This bourgeoisie created the moderneconomy through its innovation and ideas, the foremost of which was liberty. Thiswas revealed by language and rhetoric used in the “Bourgeois Revaluation” of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the bourgeoisie was accorded a newdignity in a civilization that respected business. The appreciation of an economicculture as the product of ideas and attitudes, rather than merely materialism, is thelargest contribution of the book.
McCloskey seeks to see how we got here and to argue an ideological position.The libertarian argument of the book for “the obvious and simple system ofnatural liberty” is aimed at conservatives “sneering at innovation” and the bour-geoisie and the clerisy (progressives) “sneering at markets and the bourgeoisie”(400). The Left takes the brunt of the attack for turning against liberal innovationin the nineteenth century, which led to the twentieth century’s “pathologies,nationalism, socialism and national socialism” and the twenty-first century’s“radical environmentalism” (41). Her history is scientific and describes what“actually happened,” because “the purpose of science is to uncover causes”(xii, 181). In this very American-spirited book, the policy prescription is: agovernment/culture that gives people the liberty to work, invent, and invest andwhich treats them with dignity will produce modern wealth for any nation to thebenefit of all.
This is an essay, not a monograph, for the educated reader. Based over-whelmingly on secondary sources, the traditional causations of the moderneconomy are propped up one at a time and struck down like so many strawmen: sometimes by assertion, sometimes by proof. There are some thirty chap-ters denying, among other causes, the slave trade, capital accumulation, science,the Protestant work ethic, the exploitation of workers, and imperialism. Often
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the case against these is based on either that the cause was not new or that itwas too small to explain the factor of a sixteen-fold increase in per capitaincome of the modern world.
The biggest constraint, in what is often McCloskey’s witty and clever derision,is that history as the imagined past of the historian is neither scientific nornecessarily linguistically accessible when examined for contemporary concerns.
Middle Tennessee State University F. E. Beemon
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for WorldPower. By Sean McMeekin. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 2010. Pp. xv, 461. $29.95.)
This is a well-spun yarn of mystery, intrigue, and romance. With the exception of,at best, two chapters, it has little to do with the Berlin-Baghdad Express, using the“railroad to nowhere” mainly as a backdrop for “Hajji” Wilhelm II’s “GreatGame” to unseat British and French power in the Middle East and beyond (49).What the author sees as the Reich’s true Drang nach Osten was the brainchild ofMax von Oppenheim, the “wayward son” of the Cologne banking dynasty, whonot only conceived of this drive to the Hindu Kush but also financed a good dealof it. Recruiting an exotic collection of academics, adventurers, diplomats, andofficers—all worthy of an Agatha Christie murder mystery—Oppenheim schemedto use Islamist jihad to decide the world war, which was stuck in the mud andblood of the Western Front. Revising Ulrich Trumpener’s classic study, Germanyand the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 [1968], author Sean McMeekin argues thatthere existed a coherent strategy behind the German actions in Egypt, Arabia,Persia, and Afghanistan.
The “first ever global jihad” was formally launched on 14 November 1914in the Fatih Sultan Mehmed Mosque, when, after a series of holy war fetvas,Urgüplü Hayri Bey, the sheikh-ul-Islam, handed Sultan-Caliph Mehmed ReshadV the Sword of the Prophet (124). The “traveling circus” of Oskar von Nied-ermayer perhaps best symbolizes the hopes and the reality of the German jiha-dist effort. On 2 October 1915 the Bavarian, a “classic Teutonic type” with“the ruthlessness and precise mathematical discipline of a German artilleryofficer,” crossed the mountains into Kabul with an “army” of ninety to onehundred men (213). Therewith, “the German jihad stood at the Gates of India”(227). For ten million pounds sterling (five billion dollars today), HabibullahKhan, Emir of Afghanistan, promised to invade India via the fabled Khyber
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Pass. The days of the Raj were numbered. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy stoodbetween Niedermayer and Berlin’s gold, and the British (and French) alwayshad the men, the gold, and the weapons to do more. The Allies, rather than theGermans, McMeekin finds, spoke the lingua franca of the Islamic world: supe-rior power.
The story of what McMeekin calls the “ineluctable tragedy unfolding inTurkish Armenia in 1914–15” is sprinkled throughout the book (245). Theauthor sees the genocide as the result of the Turkish “overreaction” to a per-ceived Armenian internal threat as well as the panic created by the Allied land-ings at Gallipoli. Although he initially suggests that the Germans set the tablefor the genocide with their “global jihad,” the documentary record soon leadshim to acknowledge that officers such as Chief of the General Staff Erich vonFalkenhayn and diplomats such as Ambassador Hans von Wangenheimstruggled to prevent its execution. A brief epilogue on the “Nazi-Muslim Con-nection” between Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and the grand mufti ofJerusalem ends this stirring saga.
The multinational primary research that went into this book is simply stagger-ing. The scope is breathtaking. The style is vibrant and alive. It is not only a “mustread” for any scholar of the Great War, but it is above all a most enjoyable andfascinating one.
University of Calgary Holger H. Herwig
Yalta: The Price of Peace. By S. M. Plokhy. (New York, NY: Viking, 2010. Pp. xxviii,451. $29.95.)
The author of this study deploys Soviet archives to attack the myth of Yalta as a“synonym for betrayal of freedom and the appeasement of world communism”(xxiv). He achieves notable successes. Soviet intelligence aided Stalin’s prepara-tions, thanks to the Cambridge Five, but failed to utilize Alger Hiss effectively.Looking over Stalin’s shoulder, readers see his desire for postwar peace, though hedefined peace as gaining “time to become the most powerful state in Europe andAsia and continental Europe time to embrace socialism” (123). S. M. Plokhyusefully situates the abhorrent, forced repatriation of POWs in concern aboutWestern POWs. The partners properly prioritized wartime cooperation becausethis was a “wartime summit convened at a time when the common enemy was notyet defeated” (xxvi).
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But although Plokhy correctly notes the West’s “poor bargaining position,”and Roosevelt’s deft brokering of crucial issues dismisses the conspiratorial viewof sickly fellow travelers, Plokhy’s praise finally rests on the assumption thatRoosevelt wisely prioritized a Soviet role in the United Nations (392). Roosevelthad to choose:
The president, with his two main prizes in hand—Soviet membership in theUnited Nations and participation in the war on Japan—apparently decidedthat he could not risk them by forcing the Soviets to do what they obviouslydid not want to do: form a truly democratic and representative Polishgovernment. (243)
Absent the then uncertain atomic bomb, concessions in East Asia and EasternEurope were arguably worth the American lives then likely to be lost defeatingJapan (though Stalin was eager to assist). This was prudent realpolitik, notappeasement, but undertaken to achieve a vision that rejected realpolitik. Poland’sfate could not be reconciled with this vision.
Plokhy acknowledges the existence of “profoundly different geopolitical aspi-rations and underlying differences in political culture” but mistakenly asserts that“[i]f the Allies wanted any say in Eastern Europe, they would have to maintainfriendly relations with the Soviets” (396, 262). No such “say” was possible. No“leverage” remained (398).
Anthony Eden “believed there could be no true cooperation in the future worldpeace organization unless Stalin treated Poland with ‘some decency’” (32–33).Neither Truman nor the American public could reconcile realpolitik in a “contestof geopolitical aspirations” with Roosevelt’s vision of postwar cooperation withthe Soviets in the UN (xxiii). Roosevelt’s failure was not naïveté, as Cold Warmythologists suggest, but rather that he overestimated and oversold the prospectsfor real cooperation to the American people. A backlash followed. Plokhyacknowledges this indirectly, saying “democratic leaders and societies should beprepared to pay a price for close involvement with those who do not share theirvalues” (xxviii).
All three nations’ belated reaction to Hitler’s aggressions locked them into analliance of convenience until Hitler was defeated. As the last conference beforeHitler’s death (and Roosevelt’s), Yalta remains important not as the cause of theCold War but as the final testament to the utmost possible level of cooperation. Itwas enough to win the war but not to bring the peace Roosevelt envisioned.
Ball State University Kevin Smith
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The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. By JonathanSchneer. (New York, NY: Random House, 2010. Pp. 469. $30.00.)
Having published two books in recent decades that deal in part with the BalfourDeclaration, this reviewer has long been aware of the subject, most of the oldarchival and new secondary sources in English, as well as some of the challengesof writing about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a topic that continues tostir strong passions and suspicions. Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur [London:Jonathan Cape, 1975] was critically well received in Britain but virtually ignoredin the United States, because Sir Mark was unknown in the United States apartfrom the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which Britain and France carved upthe Ottoman Empire in western Asia. Very few Britons knew that Sykes was apivotal figure in London making British wartime policy towards the Middle Eastuntil early 1919, when he died at the age of thirty-nine at the Paris PeaceConference. Skimming Jonathan Schneer’s index for The Balfour Declarationreveals that Sykes is mentioned more than any other British figure. Schneer getsSykes right, not only the Conservative MP’s peculiarly engaging personality, butthe extent to which his views changed from being a pre-World War I anti-Semiteand Turkophile to becoming a champion of the Arabs, Armenians, and Jewsagainst the Turks during that war, his views resonating with so many other Britishpolicymakers. No less significant to this review is this reviewer’s book Londonand the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922 [NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1995], which was better received in the UnitedStates than in Britain perhaps because it was so critical of the policies made by asmall number of British leaders, most of whom knew little and cared even lessabout the vast area between the Mediterranean Sea and subcontinent of India thatBritain influenced and ruled more than any other foreign power from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Schneer rightly grasps that British poli-cymakers were far more concerned about protecting British imperial influence andsecuring British strategic interests throughout the Middle East than in champion-ing smaller countries and other nationalities against empires, much less abandon-ing secret negotiations and British imperialism in favor of open diplomacy andnational self-determination. Schneer’s conclusion uses the metaphor of a spiderwhen referring to “the very tangled web Great Britain wove for that eastern shoreof the Mediterranean Sea” (368).
Schneer’s book is important because he approaches this controversial topic asa professional historian, having worked through the archives mainly in Britain butalso in the United States and Israel, and he read most secondary sources. By
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reminding readers that there was nothing inevitable about the Balfour Declarationof November 1917, Schneer deflates myths attached to Chaim Weizmann andthose Jews and non-Jews who loved and/or loathed Zionism. Schneer similarlymakes clear that there was nothing inevitable about the Arab Revolt and themythical importance attached to T. E. Lawrence, “of Arabia” fame, which makesthis complicated topic accessible to general readers. For example, contrastSchneer’s straightforward narratives with the convoluted treatments by the lateElie Kedourie. Schneer’s organization is crystal clear. After a brief, but very useful,geographical and historical introduction to the Ottoman region of Palestine,Schneer covers the Arabs and the British in the Middle East before turning to theZionists and the British in London, the battles that the Arabs and the Zionists hadwith the Foreign Office and Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, as well as the latter’sefforts to make a separate peace with the Turks before and after the BalfourDeclaration was made public at the end of 1917. Although Schneer carefullyseparates both the Anglo-Arab and Anglo-Zionist narratives before and duringthe war, he does suggest when and where those narratives intersected to demon-strate that Palestine was more than twice promised by the British to the Arabs andthe Jews. Schneer understands British officialdom, but he might have given moreconsideration to how differently the British officials in India viewed the Arabs andthe Turks than did the British officials in Cairo and London. Nevertheless, Schneerfully grasps how greasy was the pole that British politicians climbed up and down.
This book should also interest historical specialists, so many of whom havealready made up their minds on Palestine in World War I, such that they fail torecognize how contingency operates in the politics and policies of the past, as wellas the present, in order to avoid caricaturing all politicians and policymakersas either good or bad. Often in Schneer’s prose, one notes his appropriate use ofsuch words as “probably,” “conceivably,” or “certainly” when dealing with themotivations of individuals. He is generally more willing than others have been toassign motives to such individuals as Sykes and such institutions as the ForeignOffice. Finally, the backdrop of Schneer’s book is the Great War of Europe from1914 to 1918, which was first mistakenly called a “world war” in the House ofLords by Lord Bryce late in 1914. One would have liked for Schneer to keep thespotlight on the fighting taking place on the campaigns of the Western and EasternFronts of Europe, which always upstaged the so-called “side shows” in the MiddleEast, instead of only offering token reminders of the Western Front, the campaignsin Russia and the Balkans, the crucial divide between British Western and Easternstrategists and among the British Eastern strategists themselves, the disastrousDardanelles naval expedition and ghastly military campaign on the peninsula of
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Gallipoli, India’s foolhardy expansion up to Baghdad being reversed at Kut, theenormous costs associated with the British capture of Baghdad and Jerusalem in1917, and the British forward movements into northern Mesopotamia and Syria,neither of which brought the Turks to their knees and were probably less decisivethan Bulgaria suing for peace late in 1918. Important as Palestine remains today,that area meant much less to the British engaged in waging war against theOttoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim empire.
