Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China – By Martin J. Powers

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RICHARD SPALL

Ohio Wesleyan University

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Framingham State College

Douglas R. Bisson(Early Modern Europe)Belmont University

Betty Dessants(United States Since 1865)

Shippensburg University

Helen S. Hundley(Russia and Eastern Europe)Wichita State University

Nigel Kennell & Stefanie Kennell(Ancient World)

Memorial University of Newfoundland

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University of New Haven

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Ohio Wesleyan University

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Texas Christian University

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AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Taken Hostage: The Iranian Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter WithRadical Islam. By David Farber. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.Pp. viii, 212. $39.95.)

The 1970s did not constitute a halcyon time in American history. In addition tothe resignation of a president under the imminent threat of impeachment, the erabrought an ignominious end to a disastrous war in Vietnam, high unemployment,double-digit inflation, unprecedented interest rates, skyrocketing gasoline prices,shortages that caused long lines at service stations, garish clothing styles, and badmusic. President Jimmy Carter, as ineffectual in the presidency as he becamestatesmanlike in later years, called attention to the malaise that had overtakenAmerican life. Not least among the problems of the decade was a crisis with Iranresulting from revolutionary students’ seizure of the American embassy in Teheranand the holding of over fifty U.S. hostages for 444 days.

The hostage crisis had its origins deep in Iranian–American relations. Althoughmost Americans had no awareness of the U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow of thegovernment of Muhammad Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah RezaPalavi in power, or of the U.S. exploitation of the alliance, or the extensive sale ofweapons to his government to recycle petrodollars and contain the Soviet Union,Iranians were acutely aware of such things. They also knew of the huge disparityof wealth in their country and the brutality of the Shah’s security police, SAVAK.As the Shah’s position became untenable; as revolutionary momentum spreadthrough the country; and as President Carter, against his better judgment, allowedthe Shah to enter the United States for medical treatment, a band of Islamicstudents executed a carefully conceived plan to occupy the U.S. embassy. Thestudents were not acting at the behest of fundamentalist clergy led by theAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini but clearly drew inspiration from radical Islam.Khomeini, who returned to Iran to take over the revolution, understood the valueof the hostage episode to his cause and kept it going far longer than some of hiscountrymen and his American adversaries thought likely.

David Farber tells the story of the hostage crisis exceedingly well. He does so,appropriately, within the context of the failed expectations of the 1970s; and heshows how President Carter’s foreign policy team responded to the crisis, and tofundamentalist Islam, through the Cold War paradigm. He does not cast excessiveblame on Carter, who took extraordinary personal command over the crisis, buthe does demonstrate the highs and lows of the President’s attempts to bring thehostages home while serving his own political fortunes.

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This is solid narrative history. It does not attempt a generalized analysis of thebehavior of revolutionary regimes, nor does it seek to place the response to thishostage crisis within a larger historical context. Farber’s epilogue, moreover,offers no especially dramatic observations, though he does point toward the factthat Ronald Reagan, as Carter’s successor, despite his tough rhetoric, was Presi-dent when there were more Americans killed by terrorists than during all U.S.administrations put together up to that time. Apart from the author’s excessiveuse of the parenthetical expression, the book is skillfully written. It deserves awide audience.

University of Missouri, Rolla Russell Bohite

Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936.By Abdeslam M. Maghraoui. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.Pp. 192. $21.95.)

This is an important and powerful book, even if the author carries his argumentfurther than the evidence allows. Abdeslam M. Maghraoui asserts that the reasondemocracy has thus far not thrived in the Middle East is that it came accompaniedwith Eurocentric assumptions about liberalism and the Middle East. The contem-porary scene where the United States is attempting to impose a liberal, democraticorder on Iraq is very much on Maghraoui’s mind, but he grounds his analysis ina finely grained and deeply researched case study of Egypt from 1922 to 1936.Historians of Egypt agree with Maghraoui’s claim that the period from Egypt’sfirst treaty of independence from the British in 1922 to its second fuller treatyof independence in 1936 generated a liberal and democratic era in Egypt. Thecountry had a parliamentary democracy, a wide franchise, regular elections, anda ruling elite, most of whose members were committed ideologically to the goalsof liberalism and democracy. Nonetheless, the experiment in liberal democracyfailed. Maghraoui wants to understand why.

Early in the book the author challenges the prevailing explanations for Egypt’sfailure to embrace a democratic polity. In his view, neither the interferences ofKing Fuad and the British nor the impact of the Great Depression were sufficientcauses of the failure, though he readily concedes that they were contributingfactors. The primary and underlying cause was ideological and discursive. Egypt’swestern-educated liberals were so deeply steeped in a European-based form ofliberalism that they could not distinguish what applied well to Egypt’s culture andwhat did not. To be precise, they accepted European stereotypes about thebackwardness of Egyptians and Egyptian society, and hence tried to erect a

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political and cultural order that scorned behavior and practices that were rootedin Egyptian history and culture. What they sought to create in Egypt was a secular,anti-Muslim, and highly elitist social order that left little space for ordinaryMuslim men and women. To buttress his argument, Maghraoui cites the work ofFrantz Fanon, the Francophone Caribbean intellectual, particularly his bookBlack Skin, White Masks, in which Fanon argues that the racial biases of Euro-pean colonialism led many people of color to despise their skin color and theirtraditional ways. In such a fashion, Egypt’s liberal elite—men like Taha Husayn,Muhammad Husayn Heikal, Ahmad Amin, and Salama Musa, usually the heroesof European historiography about this period—tried to create a society that wasso tied to European values as to offer no solace to the vast majority of Egyptians.

The research in this book is impressive and comprehensive. Maghraoui hasdone his homework, reading the essays of the liberal intellectuals and diggingdeeply into their major daily and weekly journals. In the reviewer’s view, however,he goes some distance beyond what his evidence would permit. To begin with, heexaggerates the extent to which these liberals were as Egypt-hating as he wouldhave us believe. They may have agitated against such practices as veiling andfemale circumcision, but they did so using arguments that had solid Muslimreferences. Moreover, these liberals were only a tiny part of the elements thatexercised power. They encountered hostility from the British and the king whentheir projects did not appeal, and they always ran amuck with growing conser-vative Muslim forces that led to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in1928. Ideas and discourses have their role to play in societies and historicalexplanations, but they do not command as much attention generally, or in Egyptfor that matter, as the author claims for them or the evidence permits.

Princeton University Robert L. Tignor

THE AMERICAS

Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America. By MichaelBeschloss. (New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Pp. xii, 727. $28.00.)

Employing the theme of courage, the author here runs the gamut of presidentialhistory and finds courage everywhere, which may not be a theme all that plentifulif one, say, puts it into a shallow container; turns it here and there; takes a slice atvarious angles; and looks, perhaps medically speaking, at both the innards and theoutards to see the entirety of the body itself. One has the feeling that these slicesas distributed here are not much better than textbook cases; despite the apparatus


of manuscripts, individual bibliographies for each courageous act, and a long listof books used, the kaleidoscopic examples seem to have been cut out of historysince 1789 and hoisted up on each page. Consider, for example, the episode fromthe administration of Harry S. Truman that is about the independence of Israelin 1948. The reader gets ins and outs, but was this Truman’s finest hour? Thereviewer thinks not; at the time it seemed somewhat allowable, although the statedepartment, including Secretary George C. Marshall, was adamantly against it. Inthe presumed aftermath of the second Iraq War, with Israel taking almost weeklylunges at the Arabs to no discernible effect, does this assist America’s cause in theMiddle East in the year 2007? Among the many problems inherited from 1948 isthe polarization of feelings on this subject. One of the reviewer’s first studentsof half a century ago called up recently and told him, without much diplomacy,that anyone who was against Israel is anti-Semitic. One wonders if courageproduced judgments like that. The news magazine Newsweek, excerpting thisbook, selected, of all choices, the chapter on Truman and Israel.

The publisher Simon and Schuster, which is adept at selling books, has broughtout this one with paragraphs that stand with single sentences, or at most two, orthree, or four, as if it were a newspaper where the rule seems to be that all a readerwill peruse in a paragraph is a one-inch composition, copyedited by a ruler.

Indiana University Robert H. Ferrell

The Kentucky Tragedy: A Story of Conflict and Change in Antebellum America.By Dickson D. Bruce Jr. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.Pp. ix, 183. $40.00.)

Early on the morning of 7 November 1825, Jereboam O. Beauchamp stabbed todeath Colonel Solomon P. Sharp in the entryway of Sharp’s Frankfort, Kentucky,home. Beauchamp killed Sharp because he had allegedly seduced and impregnatedAnn Cooke about six years earlier and thereafter denied the affair, describingCooke’s stillborn child as a mulatto. Beauchamp had married Cooke in June1824. He was tried and convicted for murder in June 1826. On the day he was tobe hanged, Beauchamp and his wife attempted to execute a suicide pact in whichthey first drank laudanum and then stabbed themselves. She died, but he survivedlong enough to make the trip to the gallows. Shortly after the execution,Beauchamp’s lengthy confession was published. In this monograph, the authordescribes and analyzes the political and cultural contexts of this affair, whichbecame the subject of more literature than any other of its kind in the antebellumUnited States.


The tragedy affected Kentucky’s politics because Sharp was a prominentmember of the prorelief New Court Party and was about to be elected speaker ofthe commonwealth’s House of Representatives. New Court partisans charged thatSharp’s murder, in addition to an affair of honor, constituted a political assassi-nation. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. not only traces the evolution of the tragedy’s placein Kentucky’s political conflicts, but also positions it in the context of a morenational debate about order versus freedom. Antebellum America witnessed anexplosion of individualism in social norms and economic practices that causedsome to celebrate the newly established freedoms and others to call for legalrestraints on the excesses of freedom. The tragedy fits within that debate becausealthough some saw it as a justified act of honorable vengeance, others saw it as anexample of freedom run amok.

The tragedy became a rich source of literary inspiration for novelists, poets,and playwrights such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Barnes, and William GilmoreSimms, as well as other less prominent writers. The inspired literature, meticu-lously analyzed by the author, treated a wide range of social, cultural, andintellectual issues that divided antebellum America. In many of the literary prod-ucts, the characters representing Beauchamp became more heroic and the Sharpfigure more sinister than they were in historical reality. The literary Beauchampbecame the implementer of the code of honor, justifiably killing a scoundrel whorichly deserved his fate. Bruce admits that the historical record is not conclusiveabout whether or not there was a seduction. Complicating the matter, there is alsosome evidence that Sharp tried to bribe Beauchamp and his wife into silenceduring the 1825 legislative campaign and then reneged on his promised paymentof bribery. Subsequent to the “Kentucky Tragedy,” the American legal systeminvented an unwritten law that sometimes acquitted husbands who killed theirwives’ paramours, an invention that could not have occurred in the Beauchamptrial because the defendant denied his guilt.

Bruce has written a splendid little book that definitively identifies and analyzesthe various contexts of the “Kentucky Tragedy” and the intellectual and politicalresponses to that episode.

University of Kentucky Robert M. Ireland

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. By W. Fitzhugh Brundage.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 418. $29.95.)

Historians of the U.S. South have long debated why—and whether—the regionstands apart from the rest of the country. Differing from scholars who identify


poverty or the legacy of Confederate defeat as the source of Southern distinctive-ness, W. Fitzhugh Brundage persuasively argues that the South’s central themeconsists of the “enduring presence of white memory in the South’s public spacesand black resistance to it” (7). By viewing Southern history through the lens ofmemory, Brundage demonstrates how Southern distinctiveness still matters.

Historical memory, as Brundage defines it, consists of an “active, ongoingprocess of ordering the past”—it is an “intentional creation” and not simply the“articulation of some shared subconscious” (4). Most importantly, memory“forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms” (4). By relyingon several case studies, Brundage alternately focuses on the ways that Southernwhites and blacks created memory through their public-sphere activities. In thewake of Appomattox, self-appointed elites created the white South’s narrative—one that affirmed white supremacy by emphasizing the “moonlight-and-magnoliaimagery of the old South” (31). Meanwhile, Southern blacks constructed theirown counternarrative—one that rejected white supremacy, celebrated theirrecently won emancipation with parades and speeches, and affirmed Reconstruc-tion as a noble enterprise. African Americans “tweaked white sensibilities”through such cultural resistance and used public festivities to occupy “spaces thatwere traditionally off-limits to blacks or especially hallowed by whites” (66).

During the early twentieth century, as Southern whites created museums,established archives, and employed white professional historians to documenttheir version of the past, black professional historians, led by Carter Woodson andLuther P. Jackson, incorporated “Negro history” into segregated schools’ cur-ricula and “argued for historical truths that would hasten racial equality” (141).After World War I, as whites developed a passion for historic preservation, theypreserved only the buildings and cities important to whites. Urban renewal ofthe 1950s and 1960s, in contrast, destroyed numerous structures significant toSouthern blacks, leaving many cities without the infrastructure that preservedblack memory.

Shifts in the ways Southerners understand their past have paralleled the pasthalf-century’s political and social changes. Although desegregation destroyed thetradition of black history taught in segregated schools, black history presentlyenjoys a broader presence through civil rights museums, monuments, and heritagetourism—one that was “unimaginable as recently as two decades ago” (315). Thisstill-modest representation “poses a more serious challenge to the privileged statusof white history than if blacks had aspired to keep their history separate” (314).Consequently, battles over memory, particularly those surrounding the Confeder-ate battle flag, “continue to flare because they touch on fundamental issues of


power and identity” (317). This important and lucidly written book will berequired reading for all serious students of the U.S. South.

Shippensburg University John W. Quist

Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America. By Susan Clair Imbarrato.(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 254. $42.95.)

In this well-written study of women’s travel narratives, the author shows thattraveling in early America was not predominantly a male enterprise. On thecontrary, women actively participated in the westward settlement and even joinedthe public literary and social discourse when they recorded their findings in traveljournals and letters. Susan Clair Imbarrato’s close study of women’s accountsof their journeys from 1700 to 1830 complicates our understanding of earlyAmerican culture by shedding light on women’s important role in the culturalconstruction of early America. At a time when traveling was physically demand-ing, characterized by up to fourteen-hour rides in uncomfortable stagecoaches andaccommodations in taverns with shared beds and dirty sheets, women were“mobile, curious and opinionated” (213). Women’s critical observations of natureand social order indicate that some ignored gender norms excluding them fromadventurous endeavors and literary discussions.

Imbarrato’s study is well organized. In the first chapter she places women’stravel accounts into the larger context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelwriting. In contrast to nineteenth-century romantic travel writings that aimed toplease a larger audience, women’s narratives were descriptive and plain, with thegoal to inform a small audience of friends and relatives. The second chapterexplains how taverns served as intermediate spaces where women negotiatedbetween their own genteel standards and frontier life. Writing about conditions inpublic houses was an attempt to confirm their own identity and helped with thetransition from a settlement to a frontier society. In the third chapter, the authorfocuses on narratives that evaluate the sociability of open lands and concludes thatin the judgment of the frontier women they did not embrace a new egalitariansociety but rather insisted on social hierarchy. The next, probably most important,chapter of the book, “Literary Crossroads,” corrects the prevailing suggestionthat women did not read fiction because they feared it might corrupt theircharacter. It reveals how popular literature served as an inspiration and model forwomen’s travel narratives. The last chapter compares travel narratives, lettersfrom home, letters from the road, and official reports. This analysis of her sources


as literary genres clearly identifies Imbarrato as a scholar of English. The chapteris still useful for the historian because it helps one understand how to read andcategorize the sources.

Traveling Women is a remarkable study that every historian of early Americancultural, social, and women’s history should read. Although the study is based onabout fifty journals and many more letters, Imbarrato quotes from a selectednumber of sources. This continuity offers a feeling of familiarity to the reader, buta greater variety would strengthen support for her argument. Imbarrato seeswomen’s discomfort as an indicator for the clash between civilization andwilderness. She does not connect this with early American nationalism that onecould argue was defined by a combination of both.

Boston University Stephanie Kermes

Social Change in America From the Revolution Through the Civil War. By ChristopherClark. (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Pp. xiii, 349. $27.50.)

This author’s latest effort, like all good books, yields many rewards. Students andinstructors, especially those who need lucid explanations to write lectures for afreshman survey class, will learn that the household, by which Christopher Clarkmeans the family with father, mother, and children, served as the foundation forAmerican economic success between 1770 and 1870. In the north, the householdprovided the labor and capital for farming. Later, as prosperity increased, somefamilies used their profits to invest in manufacturing or shipping. Over time,family patriarchs erected transportation and banking networks to improve theirbusiness prospects. To the south, the household, especially the households ofprominent planters, used slaves to grow crops like tobacco, rice, and cotton forexport. A few planters grew so wealthy that some regions in the antebellum Southranked as the richest parts of the Union.

For the discerning reader, Clark presents ideas that provoke deeper thought.The author, for example, probes the meaning of freedom. Freedom, which tomany Americans suggests the privilege of participating in the political process orthe confidence that government cannot intrude in one’s life without due process,has long aroused great feeling. Inspired by God, and the expectation of riches,many Americans in the early 1800s sought to spread freedom’s blessings acrossthe continent, and even beyond it. Indeed, the urge to advance freedom becameentwined with the American identity and invited the thought that history movedever forward to a happy future. The celebration of freedom continues into modern


times. The public hears of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the terrorists’ hatredof “our freedom,” and, yes, “freedom fries.” Freedom’s constant mention maydrain the term of its significance; however, Clark shows that from the beginningof the nation’s history, there was no guarantee that all people born in the UnitedStates would enjoy freedom’s benefits. Slaves, as would be no surprise, had nofreedom, and neither did women; white, indigenous, or otherwise. Men, too, andwhite men at that, especially if toiling as indentured servants or apprentices, hadlimited freedom because they lacked the property qualifications allowing themto vote. True enough, with the exception of women and Native Americans whowaited until the twentieth century, more individuals enjoyed freedom as timepassed. States relaxed property requirements and opened up the ballot to poorwhite men. By the end of the Civil War and with the passage of the Fourteenth andFifteenth Amendments, African-American men, at least on paper, received thepromise of freedom. Still, freedom remained a tenuous proposition in the latenineteenth century.

Clark shows that employers, and later industrialists, used the ethos of thehousehold to assert their will. Property and wealth convinced the rich that theycould play the patriarch and direct the nation’s affairs. Thus, it would be well toremember that in the nation’s first century—like the present?—freedom’s progressfaced obstruction. As Clark suggests, perhaps Americans, regardless of the timeperiod, should first secure freedom at home before seeking to impose it abroad.

University of San Diego Michael J. Gonzalez

Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s.Edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UniversityPress, 2006, Pp. x, 406. $28.95.)

Historians of sexuality and biomedicine have recently revised the chronologyof the American eugenics movement. Rather than narratives stressing the declineof scientific racism in the 1930s and the death of hereditarianism in the wake ofNazi atrocities, scholars have stressed the continuity of eugenic concernsin the pre- and post-1945 eras. The question about eugenics is no longerwhen or why it disappeared from the American landscape, but rather how itschanging logic and location ensured its longevity. If the term “eugenics” wasbanished to the social and scientific margins, underlying anxieties about race,reproduction, and individual and national fitness hardly went underground.Indeed, the new story of eugenics tracks their incorporation into the fabric ofeveryday life.


This fascinating collection on eugenics during the 1930s offers a vantage pointon “ordinary eugenics.” Unlike scholars who have concentrated on the scientific,legislative, or organizational leaders who directed eugenic research and advocatedprograms like institutionalization and sterilization, editors Susan Currell andChristina Cogdell explore how eugenic sensibilities were expressed and dissemi-nated through popular culture. Their most provocative argument is that theubiquity of eugenics in mass culture may be the most important explanation forwhy draconian policies attracted widespread support during the New Deal. Thenumber of sterilization operations performed in the United States peaked between1935 and 1945, not earlier in the century, and some states (including Virginia andNorth Carolina) performed even more sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s.Movies, magazines, and even the design of toilet seats kept the spirit of eugenicsalive by reinforcing entrenched associations between biological efficiency andnational destiny.

Part one, on print culture, includes articles on self-improvement literature, lifehistories gathered by the Federal Writers Project among poor Southern whites,and William Faulkner, among other topics. Part two, on visual culture, is espe-cially interesting. It includes a number of lively and original essays. Mary Coffey’sanalysis of “The Average American Male,” a twenty-two-inch plaster sculptureexhibited twice at the American Museum of Natural History, is noteworthy. So isCogdell’s intriguing discussion of streamlining, which she argues was an aestheticthat unified pursuits as diverse as colonic cleansing, industrial design, and therationalization of labor and reproductive policies.

By highlighting popular culture, this book adds texture to themes alreadycirculated in recent treatments of eugenics. The shift from anxieties about badblood and degeneration early in the twentieth century to worries about femalesexual and maternal behavior significantly erodes the view that eugenics couldnot survive the “environmentalist” climate of the 1930s or the 1960s. Theoriesemphasizing socialization and early intervention gained momentum at midcen-tury, and they transformed eugenics by making its mandates of self-control andsocial control relevant not only to discouraging inferior and encouraging superiorhuman specimens, but to managing all “average” Americans. Ideologies of natureand nurture seesawed toward nurture after 1945, just as they have shifted backtoward nature since the 1960s. In contrast, the deep structure of eugenics wentundisturbed and frequently unnoticed, rooted as it was in mass culture andmentality.

University of Oregon Ellen Herman


The Patriotic Business of Seeking Office: James K. Polk and the Patronage. By JohnDevoti. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006. Pp. xvi, 146. $25.00.)

The issue raised consistently in this brief volume is whether continuity ordiscontinuity characterized President James K. Polk’s patronage policies. Theanswer, the author suggests, had significant consequences for the fate of theantebellum Democratic Party and the nation. Some historians argue AndrewJackson’s administration initiated the spoils system to augment his party’spower and that later presidents followed that proscriptive policy. John Devotidisagrees; Polk’s policy was George Washington’s and that of all who followedhim. Qualifications to do the actual job took precedence over partisan consid-erations. Dealing with office-seekers was the bane of every president, and sat-isfying party factions as well as regional and state interests were serious matters.Serving the nation, however, remained paramount to Polk even if his ownDemocratic Party suffered.

Despite Devoti’s clearly articulated characterization of Polk’s appointmentpriorities, his evidence of the precedents and Polk’s behavior depicts a far murkiersituation. Thomas Jefferson planned to appoint only Democratic-Republicanfederal attorneys and marshals until a proper balance with Federalists wasachieved. The proportion changed during his presidency. Devoti notes that JamesMonroe “refused to adopt Jefferson’s program of inclusion of disenfranchisedFederalists, preferring instead to appoint only staunchly perennial Republicans”(9). Andrew Jackson “probably dismissed only 10–15 percent of officeholders,”but “he did appoint only Democrats to office” (11). When Polk’s definition of“fitness of character” had to accompany agreement with his administration’spolicies, it would seem that party considerations loomed larger than Devotiacknowledges (38). After he turned to congressmen for assistance, “Polkappointed Democrats almost exclusively, possibly because Whig candidatessimply were not recommended” (63). Did Democratic congressmen review ap-plicants as rigorously as Polk presumably did? There is little evidence here ofthe qualifications of these appointees. Unfortunately we also lack details ofPolk’s implementation of his criteria for specific appointments. Devoti has a nicesummary of the Polk administration’s accomplishments, but he is unconvincing inhis assertion that “possibly due to his insistence upon qualified appointees Polkfailed as a party leader” (110).

An interesting chapter that hints at revolutionary reform revolves around NavySecretary George Bancroft’s creation of an academy at Annapolis. Not only wouldthe school provide more and consistent training, but it accompanied a policy of


promotion based on merit and not seniority. What President Polk thought of thisis not developed.

This volume suffers from a lack of rigorous editing. Problems with punctua-tion, capitalization, and repetition are too frequent. Jackson’s first attorneygeneral was John MacPherson Berrien, not John Barrien MacPherson, and hispostmaster general was John McLean (12). Several extended digressions couldhave been pruned.

Colorful and interesting examples of office-seekers and patronage dilemmasabound here. Devoti has conducted some detailed tracking of applications andappointments. Nevertheless, too much ambiguity in the evidence and thesisrenders this work less effective than it could have been. The analysis of patronagein the antebellum decades still awaits its historian.

Cornell College M. Philip Lucas

Corruption in Cuba: Castro and Beyond. By Sergio Díaz-Diquets and JorgePérez-López. (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 286. $21.95.)

The authors of this study add a new, exciting dimension to the growing literatureon Cuba’s transition once Fidel Castro is removed from the island’s politicalscene, by analyzing both the short- and long-term effect that corruption will haveon this process. They provide an excellent review of both the general literature oncorruption and a history of corruption in Cuba from the colonial period to thepresent day. They conclude that corruption will have a large impact on Cuba’stransition as it has been impossible to wage a successful campaign against itthroughout the island’s history regardless of the type of government in Havana.

The argument of the endemic quality of corruption in the revolutionary periodand its impact on all aspects of everyday life is particularly persuasive. This isgraphically illustrated by the study of the language or slang that has subsequentlyappeared in Cuba. A variety of factors are blamed for corruption in contemporaryCuba, including the all-encompassing role of the state, which has reduced elec-toral accountability; the lack of free and independent trade unions and media; anda weak civil society and legal framework. When this is coupled with the particu-larities that are found in socialist states, the argument becomes even stronger. Theauthors make excellent comparisons with the former socialist states in EasternEurope and the Soviet Union.

The analysis offered by the authors on the many complicated legal problemsthat will surface in a post-Castro Cuba is extremely insightful, not least withregards to ownership of property and land expropriated in the first years of the


revolution. Moreover, the detailed account of the international help that Cubawill receive, including aid from the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for Interna-tional Development, is also excellent. Using this, and comparisons of other social-ist states’ transitions, Sergio Díaz-Diquets and Jorge Pérez-López suggest variousscenarios and institutions that should be created in the short and long term thatwill help a post-Castro Cuba avoid the problems that endemic corruption maycause.

Throughout the book, examples of corruption in other societies are provided,which is an important addition to the argument, but on reading the book thereader is left with the impression that corruption in Cuba is somehow worse thanelsewhere in the region or the world. This counterbalance is important as corrup-tion in Cuba was, or is, by no means unique in Latin America. Moreover, there arecontemporary examples of governmental corruption in the West that are currentlybeing investigated.

Sergio Díaz-Diquets and Jorge Pérez-López have produced a significant andinsightful book on both Cuba’s history and its future. They provide an excellentand compelling argument for the endemic quality of corruption throughoutCuba’s history and the effects that it not only has had but will continue to haveon its future. Anyone with an interest in Cuba’s past or in events that are aboutto unfold will find this book immensely useful.

University of Aberdeen Mervyn J. Bain

Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Envi-ronmentalism. By J. Brooks Flippen. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 2006. Pp. ix, 278. $29.95.)

In a blog commentary on the Mother Jones website in October 2004, Russell E.Train commented that the George W. Bush administration’s approach to environ-mental policy constituted an “ideological antagonism.” Train clarified that as aRepublican he winced at what had happened to environmental politics since heleft government service at the end of the Gerald R. Ford administration. Train’sviewpoint, as J. Brooks Flippen explains with copious and persuasive evidence,represented a centrist approach to environmental policy during the heyday yearsof the post-Earth Day resurgence of conservation politics. A tax lawyer bytraining, but a lifelong advocate for nature, Train became one of the architects ofenvironmental policy during the Richard M. Nixon administrations, first as headof the Council on Environmental Quality and later as head of the EnvironmentalProtection Agency. Known for his mannered and persuasive style of politicking,


Train did what seemed impossible by keeping lines of communication openbetween his conservative political bedfellows and the single-minded advocatesof environmental protection who pressed him to advance their cause. He was,as National Park Service director George Herzog quipped, “so nice that even theopposition didn’t manifest itself with any degree of openness or intensity” (7).

Conservative Conservationist is best when the author takes readers inside thecritical meetings where administration officials hashed out environmental policyoptions and often made decisions. As Flippen argues, Train made sure that heapproached all contentious situations with expert and informed diplomacy. Evenwhen Train disagreed and squabbled with other administrators, such as hisone-time boss, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, he escaped acrimony andhard feelings. He was not a weak negotiator; whether it was regulation of waterquality in the Great Lakes, implementation of the Clean Air Act of 1970, orbanning dangerous chemical substances from the marketplace, he never lost sightof what was politically possible. Often, as Flippen documents, Train bridled whenhe faced ideological resistance to good policy, and he quickly determined thatNixon cared nothing for environmentalism, save what it might deliver him inpolitical advantage.

Conservative Conservationist is weakest in providing context for the fluores-cence of modern environmentalism. Flippen correctly focuses on Train’s career,but he is often too interested in his subject’s incidental activities—political gossip,important social connections, and international travel. Flippen could have ben-efited from consulting works by Robert Gottlieb and Phillip Shabecoff for impor-tant influences on emergent environmentalism during the 1970s. Flippenincorrectly attributes Earth Day to Denis Hayes, for example, when it was thebrainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, arguably the most importantenvironmentalist senator during the 1970s.

Russell E. Train, as Flippen successfully argues, was perhaps the penultimateexample of Theodore Rooseveltian conservationist political sensibility amongRepublicans in the Nixon era. In a contentious time, when the nation began totrend toward hard-edged conservative politics, Train succeeded, as Sierra Clubexecutive Michael McCloskey noted, by using “subtle, legalistic ways of crankingback on the environment” (219). Flippen explains how Train did it and potentiallywhat could have happened if he had succeeded in all his battles for wiser envi-ronmental policies.

Portland State University William L. Lang


A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance inMexico City, 1750–1920. By Marie Eileen Francois. (Lincoln, Neb.: University ofNebraska Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 415. $29.95.)

Mexico City’s poor relied on credit to allow basic consumption of foodstuffs,while their slightly wealthier compatriots sought financing to permit them tocontinue consuming the goods associated with their middle-class status. As theauthor of this well-written and interesting book demonstrates, to obtain the“everyday credit” that they badly needed, the city’s population turned to localmerchants and the state, both of which developed institutions to address thisfinancial need.

Marie Eileen Francois explores the business of pawnbroking, the provision ofsmall loans guaranteed by a borrower’s deposit of collateral security. Francois’sportrayal of this critical and omnipresent urban practice is based on amammoth database she collected from a variety of pawning institutions. Shebegins her story in the late eighteenth century, when the colonial governmentestablished Mexico’s Monte de Piedad, a charitable pawning institutiondesigned to provide credit to needy Mexicans. Francois also examines privatecommercial establishments that supplied credit secured by pawns, most promi-nently the many neighborhood corner stores (pulperías). According to Francois,this was a two-tiered system of credit; the majority of the clientele at bothestablishments was female, but the neighborhood pawnbrokers catered topoorer Mexicans while the Monte de Piedad was frequented by women of themiddle class. The discourse surrounding the founding of the Monte de Piedadand the regulating of the private brokers was decidedly patriarchal. The Crownsought to create a reputable space where Mexican women could safely pawntheir possessions in order to help fulfill their domestic obligation of maintainingtheir homes.

Both governmental and private institutions dedicated to the business of pawningbecame targets of public condemnation. Although recognizing the needs of mostMexicans to obtain credit on a regular basis, popular outcry was directed at thealleged “usury” of the “Gachupines” who were believed to dominate the business.Policy makers from Bourbon reformers to Porfirian Liberals promoted legislationto regulate pawnbroking, but often regulations were simply ignored. The defensivearguments put forward by private pawnbrokers echoed the ideologies of the day. Inthe late colonial period, storekeepers claimed that their pawning services wereinstrumental in assisting poor women to obtain their subsistence, a typicallypatriarchal, colonial contention. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pawn-


brokers appealed to the government’s commitment to laissez-faire Liberalism,maintaining that they were simply businessmen trying to operate in a competitiveenvironment.

Francois does an admirable job highlighting policy makers’ attention to thisindustry from the late colonial period through the Revolution. Despite theirconsiderable attention and concern, the industry did not change too radically.Colonial and early Republican attempts to regulate private pawnbrokers’ inter-est rates were largely ignored. During the Porfiriato, regulations were relaxed onthe industry. It took the Revolution to transform pawnbroking. Many of theestablishments were sacked during the Revolution, and the Monte de Piedadeven closed its doors for a time. As new and more rigid restrictions wereimposed, many of the pawnbrokers left the business, recasting themselves asconsignment shops that were able to skirt the laws that applied to pawning.Importantly, these new institutions still satisfied consumers’ need to convertprivate possessions into cash quickly because consigners received a monetaryadvance on the sale of their goods.

One of the author’s central interests is to display the “material culture” ofnineteenth-century Mexico. She approaches the question through careful exami-nation of the items pawned at the pulperías and the Monte de Piedad. In bothestablishments, clothing represented by far the item most frequently pawned,but other objects were also hocked, including jewelry, silverware, and a varietyof housewares. Officials often feared that poorer individuals pawning theselatter goods had pilfered them from the wealthy households in which theyworked as servants. According to the author, there was considerable competi-tion between the private pawnbrokers, allowing customers to visit several estab-lishments and haggle for better terms. This was important, Francois argues,because pawning became a central strategy pursued by Mexicans to financehousehold consumption. Pawning goods allowed the poor to feed themselvesand the middle class to juggle their many expenses and maintain their socialpositions.

Francois also explores the business end of both public and private pawnbrok-ing. Although issues such as the cost of credit and the profitability of the industryare addressed in both the text and appendices, the data is not easy to interpret. Ingeneral, interest rates rose toward the end of the period under investigation,reaching astronomical rates during the Porfiriato.

Francois addresses an important issue that has never received much attention.She paints a vivid picture of an urban commerce dominated by women and madepossible by the credit secured through pawnbroking. One of the work’s strengths


is its multidisciplinary approach; it combines business and gender history, whichshould make it appealing to a wider variety of scholars. It is highly recommended.

Ohio Wesleyan University Jeremy Baskes

Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York. By Lori D.Ginzberg. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xiv,222. $49.95.)

It all began at Seneca Falls. As much as historians of women in the United Stateshave challenged conventional narratives of the nation’s past, they have alsocreated narratives of their own, replete with Revolutionary women masqueradingas soldiers and serving as Founding Mothers and republican mothers as well as thesuffragists who issued the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments in 1848. Thesenarratives are warranted, and welcome, but also lamentable, in that they haveattained iconic status seemingly immune to debate (especially in seminar papersand dissertations in which women play “roles” and in books written in the “addwomen and stir” mode). Women’s history has always been healthier for the debateabout power, narrative, and meaning and not merely to defend the inclusion andrepresentation of women in the national story.

It all began at kitchen tables. Lori D. Ginzberg writes not the story but a storyof woman’s rights. In so doing, she offers the opportunity to expand historians’comprehension of the complex flow of ideas in a given time and place, even whenthose ideas may have been considered too dangerous or indecorous to be heard.She examines a petition for women’s rights signed in 1846 by six women inupstate New York’s Jefferson County by exploring “the history of ideas as theyemerge from the experiences (personal, local, and national) of actual people” toshow “how those ideas enter wider conversations” and thereby alter or endorsepolitical identity and cause or abet change (5). Rather than emphasize events asmeaningful in and of themselves, Ginzberg argues that even in everyday life “ideasmatter” and that historians “attend pointedly to the local, to the specificity ofpeople’s daily intellectual lives, in order to make claims about the national and theabstraction we call political identity” (6). These six women, even without the vote,in some cases without property, without many rights, thought of themselves asAmericans. How? Why?

In six well-ordered and equally well-paced chapters, Ginzberg reveals the storyof the 1846 petition, adding key evidence in each chapter to aid in solving thepuzzles she introduces in the first chapter. The historian’s craft is on full displayhere; evidence is fragmentary, seemingly resistant to interpretation, but Ginzberg


skillfully measures her words and interpretation. After introducing the reader tothe six women and their families, she considers the shifting definitions of citizen-ship in the new nation; the roles of property and of place in that discussion;the network of ideas created by and around these women in newspapers; asso-ciations and especially churches in the years of the Second Great Awakening;political party debates concerning antislavery and women’s rights; and lastly, NewYork’s 1846 constitutional convention, the debates of which engaged, at timesonly rhetorically, these concerns of citizenship and property and rights andthe vote. In “Concluding Remarks,” Ginzberg deliberates the strategy of the“unthinkable” in nineteenth-century America, when woman’s rights and antisla-very petitions were tabled by legislatures when such discussion was dismissed forbeing offensive. The linkage of women’s roles to religious belief and sexualmorality “provided us with categories of exclusion and habits of thinking aboutcivic belonging that are still in use today” (167).

Kent State University Shirley Teresa Wajda

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacyduring the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton. (Chicago, Ill.: University of ChicagoPress, 2007. Pp. 231. $39.00.)

The decade of the Civil War played a pivotal role in shaping American law, somuch so that Professor Morton Horwitz of Harvard has suggested it forms one ofthree great eras of American legal history. No one has yet written a definitivehistory of the era, but in recent years a steady flow of studies of midnineteenth-century public and private law has greatly increased our understanding of its placein American legal history. Daniel W. Hamilton, in his study of wartime propertyconfiscation laws, illuminates another heretofore obscure element of the decade.

In modern America, it is axiomatic that government cannot take property fromindividuals without providing compensation and due process of law. Hamiltonreminds us it was not always so. During the Revolution, the Continental Congressand the states routinely confiscated property of those loyal to the British Crown,consistent with the eighteenth-century view that property rights depended onloyalty to the state. By 1861, that view had changed dramatically. CongressionalRepublicans took many drastic measures to combat the Confederacy, but whenasked to renew the Revolutionary tradition of confiscation, many balked. Somesaw property rights as so intimately connected to the ideal of liberty that the warwas being fought to preserve that they could not support any sort of confiscation,even though it would deprive the Confederacy of vital resources. Centrist legis-


lators, with support from Abraham Lincoln, ultimately consented to confiscationonly on condition that it be carried out by courts rather than the executive branchand that rebels’ property be confiscated only for their lifetimes so that theirchildren could inherit. The only important concession radical Republicansobtained was that slaves who were confiscated would be permanently freed.

Hamilton also looks at the Confederacy’s experience with confiscation. South-ern lawmakers had no interest in reunion, thus Confederate confiscation lawswere harsher and more thoroughly enforced than their Northern counterparts.But the South had its share of dissenters who believed that in the long run the lawswould harm more than help the Confederacy. Hamilton devotes the final portionof his book to the Supreme Court’s postwar treatment of confiscation laws. Heconcludes that Justice Stephen Field covertly prompted his colleagues to upholdthe laws in name but gut them in practice as part of Field’s larger mission toenshrine a rigid conception of private property rights in the Constitution—aconception that continues to play an important role in modern American law.

Making legal history interesting and comprehensible to nonlawyers is often adifficult task. Hamilton performs it skillfully, blending detailed analysis of legis-lative process and court decisions with anecdotes about the authors of the con-fiscation laws and the laws’ human impact. Hamilton fails to examine Southernstate courts’ postwar treatment of confiscation laws, which provides an interestingcontrast to the Supreme Court’s treatment, and he arguably paints Field as a moredominating figure on the Court than Field actually was. But these are minorquibbles; Hamilton has made a valuable contribution to nineteenth-century legalhistory.

Marquette Law School Joseph A. Ranney

Don’t Give Up the Ship! Myths of the War of 1812. By Donald R. Hickey. (Urbana,Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xxix, 430. $34.95.)

The author of this book has devoted decades to the study of the War of 1812. Inrecent years it may be “A Forgotten Conflict,” as he called it in the subtitle of his1989 book on the war, but it was neither forgotten nor neglected by historiansduring the nineteenth century, when it was deemed “the second American War forIndependence” and textbooks devoted as many pages to it as to the Mexican War.This priority was reversed as Anglophobia receded to be replaced by a “special”Anglo–American relationship that came to include Canada by the mid-twentiethcentury.


Once considered central to the development of a sense of identity in the youngUnited States, the events of 1812–1815 have slipped into the misty past, the factsbecoming clouded by myth and legend. Nineteenth-century hagiographers assistedin this as they embellished the role of the heroes—Andrew Jackson, WilliamHenry Harrison, and Richard M. Johnson—who gained fame as military com-manders during the war, while biographers of political leaders whose careersbegan at the same time—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and JohnQuincy Adams—skipped quickly over the roles they played as war hawks gettingthe United States into the war or as diplomats negotiating the Treaty of Ghent,which seemed in retrospect to gain nothing for the nation. Memory of theembarrassing disasters of the conflict—the collapse of American attempts toinvade Canada, the inability of U.S. Navy gunboats to block invasions of Chesa-peake Bay and Louisiana, and the burning of Washington, D.C.—were replacedby celebration of victories in frigate battles, on Lakes Erie and Champlain, and atNew Orleans and Baltimore.

Donald R. Hickey traces the roots of much misinformation in the writings ofthe English naval historian William James [1780–1827], the popular Americanwriter Benson J. Lossing [1813–1891], and the acerbic Henry Adams [1838–1918], whose views were colored by ancestral fealty. Contemporaries of Adams,naval historians Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt, added to distor-tions as they traced the origins of American naval prowess to the war.

After a brief prologue that places the war in international context—to Britainit was a sidebar lost in its decade-long struggle against France—Hickey orga-nizes his topics in six broad categories: 1) “The Causes of the War”; 2) “Battlesand Campaign”; 3) “The Maritime War”; 4) “Soldiers, Sailors, and Civilians”;5) “The Mechanics of Waging War”; and 6) “The End of the War.” Then, in anepilogue, he assesses “The Legacy of the War.” Hickey’s writing is clear; hisresearch is meticulous; and his evaluations of the “facts,” myths, and legendsare sound. Some of his evaluations are so inconclusive—for example, that of theeffectiveness of the U.S. Navy’s gunboats—that they are apt to generate addi-tional discussion, as will his view that “it is hard to imagine how [Madison] canbe ranked in the top half of American presidents,” a judgment that ignores thefact that the fourth president has consistently been ranked just that way sincethe first poll was conducted in 1948 (140). Cavils aside, this is an interestingand rewarding book that can be enjoyed when read straight through or insnippets.

Texas A&M University James C. Bradford


Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation. By ElizabethJacoway. (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 461. $30.00.)

The author began work on this book thirty years ago. Her labor has not been invain. She has written a riveting history of the Little Rock school desegregationcrisis. It is difficult to imagine a more commanding account of that crisis on itsfiftieth anniversary.

Turn Away Thy Son warrants comparison to Diane McWhorter’s Carry MeHome, the Pulitzer-prize winning study of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham,Alabama. Both are products of authors who grew up amid the racial tumult intheir respective communities. Both are big books full of vivid details and charac-ters and are enriched by intimate knowledge of the cities under inspection. Bothare based on prodigious research. And both examine cities that became symbolsfor racial strife in the South.

Elizabeth Jacoway covers essentially two years, a narrower span of time thanthat by McWhorter, and it is a less sprawling study, better grounded in historicalscholarship and organized around chapters based on leading figures in the LittleRock drama. Jacoway brings to life the terrifying experiences of the Little RockNine, the nine black students who integrated Central High in 1957, and theremarkable fortitude of their foremost adult supporter, Daisy Bates. But the realemphasis (and contribution of her study) is on explaining the actions of whites inLittle Rock.

Jacoway makes readers feel like they were present at every school-boardmeeting, segregationist rally, Chamber of Commerce gathering, court hearing,and secret session in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock from 1957 to1959. Her retelling of the local white response to the Brown decisionand President Dwight Eisenhower’s efforts to ensure compliance with afederal court order without alienating the entire white South is superb. Shepaints an especially incisive portrait of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor.Faubus is something of a tragic figure here. A southern moderate on race,Faubus became a hero to segregationists only after he found the ground cutfrom underneath him by the state’s white progressives and potential politicalrivals. Jacoway also highlights the role of the Women’s Emergency Committeeto Open Our Schools, a group of affluent white women outraged that publiceducation had become a pawn in political maneuverings in response to thethreat of desegregation.

Jacoway challenges the conventional reading of the Little Rock crisis first laidout and then vigorously promoted by Harry Ashmore, the gifted editor of the


Arkansas Gazette. Ashmore mistakenly, she argues, insisted that Faubus hadfomented the racial unrest for political advantage. Jacoway contends that therewas a far deeper cause: “the fear in white minds of pollution, of race-mixing, ofmiscegenation, of ‘mongrelization’” (8). Some readers will wish that she hadexplained more fully how this phobia was propagated across generations of whiteresidents in Little Rock (and the South). Jacoway’s insistence on the depth of thisfear underlies her bleak assessment of racial change in Little Rock over the pasthalf century.

Middlebury College James Ralph

Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’sRepublic. By Mary Kelley. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,2006. Pp. x, 294. $39.95.)

This superb book persuasively and gracefully makes the case that education—access to books, periodicals, and institutions of higher learning—was thedecisive factor propelling women’s entrance into the public sphere during thenineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, elite women used learning andthe pursuit of learning to establish a place in what Mary Kelley calls “civilsociety,” a realm they defined as distinct from both electoral politics and themarketplace. Civil society, Kelley explains, was a “national public in whichcitizens were secured in basic freedoms. . . . [T]hese freedoms included speech,press, and assembly” (7). Women’s encounters with books, teachers, and fellowstudents emboldened them to cast education not only, or even principally, as arealm for fostering moral virtue, but instead as a field for achievement—theachievement of intellectual equality with and even authority over men, of mentaldiscipline and even of professionalism, of public authority in civil society and evenin political debates.

Women’s historians have long known, thanks to the earlier work of Kelleyherself and of other pioneering historians of gender history, that some women—the likes of Sarah Hale, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, forexample—followed this trajectory and translated their educations into careers aswriters and as makers of public opinion. But Kelley’s new book does more thanany previous work to elucidate that process of translation and to map out itsbroader implications for U.S. history. She builds her case on a series of inter-locking arguments. First she casts female academies and seminaries in a newlight, arguing that they offered female students an education that was compa-


rable in its curriculum, its rigor, and its demands to the education offered tomen at the nation’s top colleges and universities. Moreover, she notes, thiseducation was surprisingly accessible. There were hundreds of such schools, andthey welcomed thousands of students—not only the “daughters of affluence”but also “women from families of farmers and shopkeepers” (82). Most impor-tantly, Kelley explains, access to education transformed the “subjectivities” offemale students. Young women who embraced books and reading came to seethemselves in new ways—as connected to other women readers, as inheritorsand transmitters of cultural capital, as part of a stream of history shaped byother learned women, and as arbiters of and contributors to public discourse.

Kelley stresses the unity of the antebellum world of letters. She argues thatliterary culture bridged the North and South and the class divide, that womensucceeded in establishing their intellectual equality and authority, and that booksand reading enabled individual women to balance the demands of domesticitywith their intellectual aspirations. On this last subject, this book is deeply moving.Any modern-day reader who has sought refuge from the demands of their daytimeresponsibilities in late-night reading will feel a connection to Kelley’s femalesubjects, one of whom observed, quoting the poet William Blake, “‘the nights aremy own—They cannot steal my nights’” (259).

But Kelley’s emphasis on unity has one drawback. That is, she de-emphasizesthe extent to which women’s learnedness could and did create bitter contro-versy, especially over slavery and sectionalism. When antiabolitionists in theNorth and in the South assailed antislavery women as purveyors of radical“isms,” they were accusing them of intellectual transgressions—of having aheretical frame of mind and of defying the boundaries of female intellectualauthority. In other words, over the course of the antebellum period, the sharedliterary culture of North and South became a site of sectional contention andcompetition; historian Jonathan Daniel Wells’s recent work on the Southernmiddle class elucidates that process, but much more remains to be said. In theend, Kelley’s crystal clear prose and prodigious research notwithstanding, itremains a paradox that learned women, and women’s learning, could achievesuch respectability in the eyes of some antebellum Americans and yet appear sodangerous to others.

Kelley quotes one of her sources as observing that “books are the best companyyou can have” (187). Thanks to Kelley’s empathetic engagement with her subjects,this book is good company indeed, and it deserves the widest possible readership.

Temple University Elizabeth R. Varon


Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. By Stephen E. Kercher.(Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 553. $35.00.)

This excellent book joins a growing list of studies showing that the period fromthe end of World War II into the 1960s was far more than an age of politicalconservatism and anticommunist fears. That era also included a notable culture ofdissent and opposition—”the other side of the Fifties,” as one anthology describedit. Stephen E. Kercher’s work is exceptionally well researched, very readable, andcovers an impressive range of examples.

The well-chosen examples include cartoonists such as Herblock, Bill Mauldin,Walt Kelly, and Jules Feiffer; comedians such as Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, andLenny Bruce; songwriters like Tom Lehrer; magazines like the Realist; performinggroups such as the Second City; fiction such as Catch-22; movies, most notablyDr. Strangelove; and television programs such as That Was the Week That Was.

Kercher does not downplay the suffocating atmosphere of the early Cold War,with its investigations, emphasis on fealty to the “American Way,” and fear ofcommunism. But he argues that, during the 1950s “a variety of subterraneancultural channels”—including MAD Magazine, film noir, and comic strips likePogo—provided a sense of community for dissenters, reassuring people “whothought they were alone that they aren’t alone,” as Feiffer put it (127, 159). By theearly 1960s, “the politics of laughter” merged with the dazzling promise of JohnF. Kennedy’s New Frontier to produce a golden age of liberal political satire. Suchsatire began to influence even television, where advertising revenues and thesearch for large audiences favored caution over risk taking.

Although Kercher writes sympathetically, even affectionately, of the liberalsatirists, he is not uncritical. He notes their elitist tendencies, their tendency to pulltheir punches somewhat when treating Kennedy, and their own compromises withpolitical pressures. With a few exceptions, they constituted “a thoroughly mas-culine enterprise” (3). Still, Kercher emphasizes how liberal satire often providedtelling critiques of American foreign policy, racism, nuclear weapons, commer-cialism, and bureaucratic conformity.

By the mid-1960s, however, hard-hitting political satire was losing its clout.Some humorists—Mort Sahl, for example—reportedly “sold out” to success.Others, particularly Bruce, who fell victim to a series of legal actions, becamemore preachy than funny. Some, such as Dick Gregory, opted for political engage-ment rather than laughs. Increasingly, “for those young Americans indignant overthe war in Southeast Asia, the lack of voting rights in Mississippi, and restrictionson free speech on college campuses, there were more effective modes of protest


than satire” (440). Outrage seemed more appropriate than humor. Althoughliberal satire lost much of its political edge by the late 1960s, it left a powerfullegacy of irreverence.

Through meticulous research, including interviews with the era’sparticipants—ranging from Feiffer to Victor Navasky, Paul Sills, and BarbaraHarris—Kercher has gained valuable insights into the struggles over liberal satire.A prime example is his discussion of That Was the Week That Was. The result isa book that is informative, engaging, thoughtful, and, for individuals who livedthrough those times, nostalgic.

Washington State University LeRoy Ashby

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era. By Wilma King.(Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 290. $39.95.)

Free blacks were never truly free in the United States of America. Despite this fact,black women carved out an existence, an identity, and a future for themselves andfor their communities. In this volume, the author has done a meritorious job incollecting and analyzing data about the lives and impact of free black women,ranging from colonial times through emancipation. Stories of individual blackwomen are recounted, as well as collective statistics on their status. She tells aboutthe types of work women pursued to provide for their families and to purchasefreedom for themselves and family members.

In these stories, Wilma King depicts the diverse experiences of free blackwomen influenced by region, time, context, laws, and individual personalities. Sheexposes the variables of skin color, education, and class standing that separatedfree blacks from the enslaved. She notes that the color distinctions came morefrom the white community through their novels, stereotypes, and treatment thanfrom the free black community, which had to separate from the slave communityto protect their own precarious freedoms.

The author describes the researcher’s difficulties working with the limitedresources available: court records, narratives, census data, property records,manumission papers, wills, diaries, letters, and newspaper information. Evenwhen these resources are lacking in the deep South, she is able to give someinterpretation from comparative experiences. She also utilizes the currently exist-ing research on free black women in Latin America to compare their experiencesto those of women in the United States. The reader can see how different culturaland regional contexts created the complexity and diversity of experiences for freeblack women.


In addition to racial barriers, free black women felt the common constraintsof their gender, which defined women of both races. King provides numerousexamples of black women affected by the “cult of true womanhood” and avariation of the “republican mother.” Legal subordination of women to theirhusbands affected outcomes of court cases, as with Dred Scott’s wife, Harriet. Theblack press and black church defined acceptable female behavior, and social clubsostracized women who failed to behave accordingly. Many of the ideals of beautyfollowed European standards. Nineteenth-century black literature revealed thesame virtues for an ideal wife as was found in white literature.

Despite the pressures to conform to these gendered roles, women continued tobreak down the barriers to achieve their goals for social justice, education, andfreedom. They reshaped their realities and became mentors for other blackwomen: Maria Stewart, the first American woman to speak in public; Zilpha Elawand Sojourner Truth, evangelists within a male-dominated religious sphere; MaryShadd Cary, the first female editor of a newspaper; and the groups of women whoinfluenced the enfranchised men in the South. These women are now visible to anyreader interested in the true breadth of American history.

Cuyahoga Community College Dorothy C. Salem

Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. By Louise W. Knight. (Chicago,Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 412. $35.00.)

Jane Addams, the Progressive reformer, public intellectual, suffragist, and NobelPeace Prize winner who authored ten books and hundreds of essays, is the subjectof at least three new book-length studies. Of these, this book is a remarkablyrespectful intellectual biography that adds significantly to our understanding andappreciation of Addams and her times and will be of special interest to scholars ofthe Progressive Era, women’s activism, urban history, and pragmatism.

Louise W. Knight examines Addams from 1860 to 1899, by which time she hademerged as a reform intellectual of national significance and was, in the author’swords, “fully political” (363). Even a reader who knows the outlines of JaneAddams’s life—the tragic early loss of her mother and then father; the troubledrelations with her stepmother; the disappointment of early academic and profes-sional ambitions; and the profound, drawn-out crisis of her young adulthood andits personal and political resolution in the founding of Hull House, a settlementhouse in an immigrant working-class Chicago neighborhood—will be captivatedby Knight’s retelling.


Observing that Jane Addams inherited one life and chose another, Knightdivides the volume into “The Given Life, 1860–88” and “The Chosen Life,1889–99” (2–3). Knight carefully shows how, from a quite privileged and con-ventional background, Addams developed a philosophy that propelled her to a lifeof activism and conferred important new public responsibilities on women as agender. Knight traces this significant intellectual and moral evolution “from moralabsolutism, rigid intellectualism, self-absorption, to pragmatism and openness toothers” (349–350). Along the way she supplies readers with just enough back-ground information on dozens of topics, from Chicago politics, to settlementhouse activities, to the campaign against sweatshops. She offers a fine account ofthe industrial strife that raged in Chicago in the 1890s, showing how settlementresidents moved from prounion sympathy, including lobbying, to efforts at con-ciliation. Her discussion of Addams’s reaction to the Pullman strike is especiallycompelling.

The central focus of the narrative is how Jane Addams developed as a moralphilosopher, a process the author documents by showing us the choices as Addamsexperienced them herself at each stage. Previous accounts, following Addams’selusive semiautobiographical Twenty Years at Hull House [1910], portrayAddams as learning from the day-to-day encounters with working-class neighborsof the settlement house. Knight (like Victoria Brown, another recent biographer)notes the shortcomings and erasures of that account. She acknowledges thatAddams learned from her life among Chicago’s immigrants, but insists that booksand reading were as important in shaping the philosophy of the sheltered, bookishwoman as real-life experience. The author details the reading that challengedAddams’s comfortable assumptions about the moral superiority of her own class,as well as the discussions with philosophers such as John Dewey that led her toreassess the immutability of her received ideals and to formulate pragmatic ethics.Knight also presents a nuanced account of Addams’s relationships with reformcolleagues, such as Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop, and of her personal andemotional life with partners Ellen Gates Starr and Mary Rozet Smith, relation-ships that undergirded her career financially as well as emotionally. In fact,Knight’s achievement is that despite the formidable scholarship displayed in overone hundred pages of endnotes, her biography of Addams is accessible to a generalreader.

Much about this story of Jane Addams and Hull House is familiar, yet thisreader found new insights in Knight’s account. Readers are acquainted with theiconic Addams, the suffragist, peace activist, and social reformer she later became.But Knight reveals that in the 1880s and 1890s, Addams was still a conservative


thinker who rejected the possibility that progress might come from antagonism(whether of class or gender). Addams was late to embrace labor unions; she onlygradually accepted the idea that women had a role to play in civic life, includingelectoral politics. As late as 1896, she still had not publicly spoken in favor ofwomen’s suffrage (362, 397). However, by 1899 Addams had arrived at all thesepositions and rejected the older individualism for a broader “social ethic” thatincluded the promise that “uncultured people” could set their own course, hencethe “citizen” of the title (355, 331). Yet in one or two places the reader is broughtface to face with the paradox that the settlement house, a demonstration projectfor communitarian ethics, was sustained by the money of wealthy women such asHelen Culver and Mary Wilmarth. Knight acknowledges this fact, but she doesnot let it dim her portrait of Addams as a prophet of democracy. In one example,Knight explains that Hull House, with its continuous stream of visitors, was noplace for a writer: “When Addams needed a quiet place to think and write,she would often go to Mary Wilmarth’s suite of rooms at the Congress Hotel(Wilmarth owned it)” (335). In that quick aside we are reminded of the privilegeof class and whiteness that undergirded Addams’s role as philosopher andsocial critic.

Auburn University Ruth Crocker

Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. By Bruce Kuklick.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 241. $29.95.)

“Knowledge is power” goes the old saying. Not so, says the author of this book,an extraordinarily thoughtful and well-written study of the role played by defenseintellectuals in the formulation and execution of U.S. foreign policy in the firstthree decades of the Cold War. Although defense intellectuals were “the highpriests of the national security state,” they were essentially subalterns who,according to Bruce Kuklick, made few substantive contributions to Americanforeign policy (229). For the most part, their formulations provided reassuringrationalizations for policy makers and, in instances of policy failure, they offered“ways of thinking that absolved leadership of liability, deserved or not” (229).

Kuklick divides his intellectuals into two camps. The first was populatedby social-scientific types, best exemplified by the people associated with theRAND Corporation, who believed in the Holy Grail of objective and quantifiableanalyses and recommendations. A countertradition, whose best-known figureswere George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Morgenthau, and Henry Kissinger,approached policy more from a humanistic, antipositivist standpoint, though in


their own way they claimed to be realists. Institutionally, the RAND Corporationtends to occupy center stage, but the author also provides some useful andinteresting descriptions of the emergence of centers of foreign policy and defensestudies inside and outside the academy at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, andother locales.

Most of the attention is devoted to technocratic RAND-types who self-consciously abstained from contemplating the ends of foreign policy or the role ofhistory in favor of focusing strictly on the means of achieving objectives. Kuklickdoes a fine job of providing capsule summaries and critiques of succeedinggenerations of trendy theories: systems analysis, game theory, operations research,and studies of bureaucratic and organizational behavior. RAND, says Kuklick,“had a hyperrational idea of what policymakers might achieve, especially whenbrilliant social scientists joined enlightened leaders” (127). The countertraditionwas perhaps best represented by Morgenthau, who was critical of the claim thatthe social sciences could provide objective, universally applicable conclusions. ForMorgenthau, technocracy was a species of idealism, and even of Wilsonianism.

Overall, the story is one of failure. Even apparent successes like the CubanMissile Crisis, presumably a vindication of the rational actor theory, come in forcriticism by the author. More so than any other event, it was the Vietnam War andits demonstration of the vapidity of theories of graduated response that demon-strated the failure of the defense intellectuals. In the aftermath, avoiding blamebecame a preoccupation. Rather than place responsibility on policy makers andthemselves, the onus was shifted to the shoulders of the bureaucracy and itsapparently pathological behaviors. These intellectuals were failures in an institu-tional sense, also, because they were unable to penetrate the inner circles of power.The chief exception was Henry Kissinger, who was in any case never comfortablewith the defense intellectual establishment, was more philosophically grounded,and possessed a sense of international structures that was absent among many ofhis academic peers.

Kuklick’s view, that scholars provided little in the way of knowledge during theCold War, is a gloomy one—“distasteful medicine,” as he puts it. But the conclu-sion that “politics trumps knowledge” should not come as a surprise, and in someways it may even be reassuring, for politics necessarily makes room for debateover values. And, as Kuklick realizes, whether or not one agrees with his critiquedepends, to some extent, on the soundness of his historical interpretation of theCold War. As he acknowledges, history is a contested discipline, and from adifferent perspective the failures that he criticizes could well be perceived aspluses. There is indeed much to contest in this book, although limitations of space


preclude such discussion here. What is incontestable, however, is that this brief butrich study offers more insights per page than just about any other work on theCold War of which this reader knows.

St. John’s University Frank Ninkovich

Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965. Editedby Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri. (Baltimore, Md.:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 363. $24.95.)

The study of the practice of Protestantism in American history appears rathernascent when compared to the fairly extended list of studies pertaining to thepractice of Roman Catholicism and nonwestern religious traditions. The editorsintend to amend this discrepancy in this volume. They join nine other historiansin trying to understand “the nature of the Christian life and the practices thatconstitute it” by utilizing social theories of practice, constructive theology, moralphilosophy, and historical methods (1). By standing on the shoulders of historianslike David Hall and Robert Orsi, these articles represent a benchmark in the fieldof religious studies and a prompt for more complicated renderings of “the historyof Christian practice in the context of American cultural history” (7).

Practicing Protestants begins with a useful introduction to the study of reli-gious practice. The editors attempt to temper their approaches to the subject ofProtestant practices by mediating between social analysis, which usually focuseson the restrictive and repressive aspects of religion, and practical theology, whichusually highlights the humane and supportive aspects of religion. The editors thenorganize the book into four chronological and thematic parts, each article bothstanding alone and complementing the overall objective of the volume. CatherineBrekus and Mark Valeri contribute to the section on “Puritan and EvangelicalPractice in New England, 1630–1800.” Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Michael McNally,David Yoo, and Roberto Sagarena contribute to the section on “Mission, Nation,and Christian Practice, 1820–1940.” Heather Curtis, Anthea Butler, and RickOstrander contribute to the section on “Devotional Practices and Modern Pre-dicaments, 1880–1920,” and Leigh E. Schmidt, Tisa Wenger, and Sally Promeycontribute to the section on “Liberal Protestants and Universalizing Practices,1850–1965.”

Several themes stand out in the course of reading the works of such an all-starcast of historians. Each of the articles shares the contention that religious practicesmediate larger social, cultural, theological, and denominational changes overtime. From this perspective, practically everything can be practiced, from faith and


morality to religious nationalism and religious identity. Valeri’s study of themeaning of forgiveness under the Puritan canopy of colonial America reiteratesthis point, conceding that “forgiveness resists static formulation” and warrants“moral deliberation and ambivalence” (48). McNally’s consideration of theChristian formulation of Ojibwe practices raises a second shared argument,namely that religious practices have as much to do with meaningful rituals as theydo with mundane experiences of everyday life. Furthermore, Curtis’s conceptionof “acting faith” complicates the relationship between belief and behavior, as doesPromey’s respect for “emotion, sensation, and image” in the context of “visualpractice” (140, 251). The list of exemplary ideas could go on.

Suffice it to say, Practicing Protestants is both comprehensive in its introduc-tion to the study of religious practice and specialized in its consideration of manyand varied subjects pertaining to religion in America. It is a book long overdue,and thus a starting point for more collaborative efforts to understand the com-plicated lives of American Christians.

Florida State University Michael Pasquier

We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II. By Robert L.McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry. (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press,2006. Pp. ix, 357. $40.00.)

After World War II, a plethora of films appeared that attempted to explain andsometimes to rewrite the American war experience, and film scholarship has, forthe most part, focused on these postwar films. We’ll Always Have the Movies,however, concentrates on the Hollywood films made during the war era, eventhose that may have been heretofore rejected as propaganda. In their exhaustivestudy, Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry posit that films were the means forhelping Americans grasp what the war entailed. These films took the horrific andchaotic events of the war and transformed them into narratives for an anxious andconfused public. This book is the result of the authors’ screening of over sixhundred films from a variety of genres, ranging from before the attack on PearlHarbor to those made within a year of the war’s end [1937–1946].

The work’s title, of course, echoes the famous line of Casablanca [1942],“We’ll always have Paris,” which recalls a more idyllic, romantic, and thus mythictime for the two lead characters, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) and Rick Blain(Humphrey Bogart). Fittingly, this classic film becomes the unifying paradigm ofthe study. In the introduction, McLaughlin and Parry assert that Rick’s CaféAméricain is the United Nations in microcosm, and Rick is the personification of


isolationist America. Like Rick, the United States will be compelled to enter thefight and defeat the Axis powers. Notable in their concomitant analysis of Casa-blanca is the authors’ inclusion of the history of the film’s conception, writing andrewriting, filming, and marketing, referred to as a “brilliant stew that was theproduct of innumerable chefs” (15). Within this cinematic “stew” are ideologicalintents that range from criticism of the Nazis’ rampant anti-Semitism, to what wasthen an unfashionable condemnation of Hitler, to New Deal liberalism, to Com-munist sympathies, to political conservatism. The overlay of ideology and voicesin Casablanca is a prime example of the collaboration inherent in Hollywoodfilms of the period. The subsequent chapters provide a compelling appraisal—aesthetic and cultural—of films (including Casablanca) that eventually wouldform a mythic history of World War II.

Rather than a discovery, this is a recovery of many films that have beenignored, forgotten, and dismissed by film scholarship. Collectively this compre-hensive film study (referencing films as well known as Casablanca and Mrs.Miniver and the lesser known, such as None Shall Escape) chronicles the prewardichotomy of political isolationism and prointervention forces with respect to theU.S. entry into the Pacific theater. The major discussion centers on films during thewar era, especially looking at the presentation of enemies and allies, constructionof male/female roles in film, and life on the home front. The book concludes witha cogent discussion of films produced immediately after the war, those films thataddress the apprehension over what type of society was evolving in postwarAmerica. Overall, this is a masterful study of film narrativity of the wartimeera—especially on its impact on American citizens and on the long-term mythosthat resulted from it.

Penn State University, Schuylkill Anita M. Vickers

The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. By Gary B. Nash.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 235. $19.95.)

The Revolutionary generation in America did not end slavery—that is a fact; but the subject enthralled many leaders throughout their

lifetimes. Moreover, enslaved black Americans were not idle bystanders; theylaunched a resistance movement, which the author claims identifies them as blackfounding fathers. But this is not the lesson school children learn; they are taughtwhat the slaveholding minority believed: that ending slavery meant disunion. Thisis the story eloquently told by Gary B. Nash in this book. Nash does not intendto “destabilize history”; rather, he wants to portray a more diverse picture of the


United States (vii). He organizes the book around three lectures and includesreferences. His elegant prose makes the book accessible virtually to anyoneinterested in historical literature.

Chapter one explains that the scant attention scholars have historically givento blacks during the Revolutionary War leaves the false impression that “half amillion African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent” (4).Nash argues that countless African-Americans acted as agents to secure theirfreedom by joining the army, seeking emancipation in the courts, or by runningaway. They did not walk alone. Some whites, including John Laurens, a wealthySouth Carolina aide to General Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, believedearly on that liberating enslaved blacks might tip the scales of war in favor of thefledgling United States.

Chapter two suggests that the Revolutionary era was an opportune time fordoing away with slavery, and Nash presents five factors to support his thesis. First,antislavery sentiments were high during this period, driving northern legislaturesand courts to take steps gradually to abolish slavery. Second, the precarious statusof at least two states made the threat of southern secession hollow. Third, culturalenvironmentalism was strong, as many whites believed slavery, not genetics, heldblacks back. Fourth, British evacuation of the western territory opened newpossibilities for compensated emancipation there, as a Connecticut minister hadpresented in 1775. Lastly, the African rebellion in the French West Indies in 1791and England’s ban on the international slave trade in 1794 strengthened themovement against slavery in the western world.

Chapter three suggests that African-Americans saw themselves as citizens ofthe new republic, while whites were divided. The constitution did not definecitizenship; yet, the common belief at the time was that citizenship was a productof birth. When Missouri tried to ban the entry of free African-Americans in 1820,“Many northern Congressmen strongly objected to this denial of a prime citizen-ship right of free movement” (152). The debate continued until the bloodyCivil War.

These essays show that the catalyst for the Civil War was shaped during the ageof the Revolution, and it centered on the status of Africans in America. Thedefenders of slavery maintained their grip on the peculiar institution, but it wasnot unanimous. This skillful historian provides many examples of how African-Americans and their supporters engaged the fight for liberty to include all thepeople.

Mississippi State University Stephen Middleton


The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and theTriumph of Antislavery. By James Oakes. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton &Company, 2007. Pp. xxii, 297. $26.95.)

The author of this book, a prominent historian of nineteenth-century America andthe American South, explores in this study the relationship between FrederickDouglass and Abraham Lincoln. Although both despised slavery, they oftendiffered on strategies as well as goals. From the late 1850s—when Douglassprobably first knew of Lincoln—through the middle of the Civil War, Douglass,the uncompromising radical, considered Lincoln, the pragmatic politician, insuf-ficiently dedicated to antislavery and racial equality. The author traces why andhow Douglass changed his view of Lincoln. Moreover, James Oakes suggests thatantislavery ultimately triumphed because each man played his respective role; ittook both the passionate reformer and the practical president to eliminate thepeculiar institution.

Douglass and Lincoln hated slavery for different reasons, and their means ofopposing it prior to the Civil War also differed. Born into slavery, Douglass knewits dehumanizing aspects firsthand, and that experience led him into the aboli-tionist movement. For Lincoln, who rose to middle-class respectability throughhard work, the institution offended his faith in the Declaration of Independence’spromise of equal opportunity for social mobility. As Oakes shows, in Douglass’stwo decades of antislavery activism before secession, the former slave oftenchanged tactics but always kept his goals of immediate abolition and racialequality. No abolitionist, Lincoln attacked slavery in the 1850s in ways acceptableto the constitutional order and to a largely racist voting public, including denyingsuffrage to free black men as well as the colonization of free blacks abroad. Suchpositions made presidential candidate Lincoln so suspect to Douglass that he didnot vote for the man from Illinois.

During the Civil War, Douglass often harshly criticized the president for failingto act more forcefully for emancipation. Over time, Douglass came to supportLincoln as the president took action against slavery when he believed publicopinion warranted it. Meanwhile, Douglass’s criticism of Lincoln gave the presi-dent political cover from charges of radicalism lodged by Democrats.

In August 1862, for example, Lincoln delivered a condescending lecture toblack leaders about the necessity for colonization, which Douglass decried. Oakesargues that Lincoln here used racism strategically, in order to achieve radical endswith conservative means. The president hoped press reports of this meeting wouldcalm white Northerners fearful about a deluge of free blacks washing over them


in the event of an emancipation order. Few individuals, however, knew such aproclamation then lay in Lincoln’s desk drawer, awaiting a Union victory. Afterthe proclamation’s post-Antietam promulgation, Douglass appreciated Lincoln’ssincerity about ending slavery and attacking racial inequality. By late 1864, theradical abolitionist identified himself as a Republican and a Lincoln loyalist. Laterin the century, Douglass chastised Republicans for abandoning Southern blacksto Democratic injustices by invoking the memory of the man who had warmlywelcomed him to two private White House meetings.

Anyone interested in the Civil War era will profit by reading this engaginglywritten book, as will those looking for a case study in how apparent politicalmoderation can accomplish more radical goals.

California State University, Chico Robert Tinkler

A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business. ByRowena Olegario. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 274.$39.95.)

Businesses finance their operations internally by reinvesting past profits andexternally by selling securities (notes, bonds, equities) or borrowing from financialintermediaries or suppliers. The last mentioned method, known as trade credit, isthe focus of this monograph, which cannot help but make a positive contributionto business history, because scholars have long neglected its topic. Trade creditstatistics are notoriously rare, and the subject tends to fall into the crack betweeneconomic history, which typically focuses on banks and securities markets, andbusiness history, which hitherto has paid more attention to consumer credit.Rowena Olegario clearly writes more in the latter tradition than the former, whichis dominated by economists likely to be put off by the dearth of quantitativeevidence; testable hypotheses; and underutilization of relevant economic concepts,including such concepts as asymmetric information; network externalities; andgame, intermediation, and portfolio theory.

Nonspecialists can safely pass over this book as well. The writing is competentbut pedestrian. The research is a solid mix of secondary and primary sources butis by no means comprehensive or authoritative. The overall message is that asAmerica’s population increased, its geographical boundaries expanded, itseconomy grew, demand for business-to-business credit information outstrippedthe capabilities of traditional and informal information networks, and creditinformation became a commodity increasingly supplied by specialized profession-als. Although well played, that interpretation is hardly novel. The approach is


roughly chronological, with Chapter one covering mercantile credit in Britain andAmerica to 1860, Chapter two addressing the origins of credit reporting firmsat midcentury, Chapter five examining the growth of credit reporting firmsBradstreet and R. G. Dun in the late nineteenth century, and the final chapter (six)exploring the professionalization of credit assessment in the early twentiethcentury. Chapters three and four are more topical, exploring, respectively, thecharacteristics of creditworthiness (honesty, punctuality, thrift, energy, focus,experience, and only then, capital and other financial variables) and the difficultiesthat Jews encountered obtaining trade credit from gentiles as a result of therelative opacity and peripatetic nature of Jewish businesses. A short epiloguequickly brings the story up to the present and places credit reporting and tradecredit in a broad international context.

In the first footnote to the epilogue, Olegario belatedly acknowledges that“trade creditors often rely on bank loans as the basis for their own creditgranting” (266). In other words, firms that borrowed from banks, or, this reviewermight add, directly in securities markets, often became lenders in turn. That creditextended down, like a pyramid, from large, well-known companies to progres-sively smaller ones via regular trade channels accords well with important theoriesof finance. And that insight, Olegario notes with some truth, “has not beensystematically studied” (266). One therefore wonders why she shied away from anobvious opportunity to render her study more valuable.

Stern School of Business, New York University Robert E. Wright

Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions ofPennsylvania, 1840–1868. By Grace Palladino. (New York, N.Y.: Fordham Uni-versity Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 195. $15.00.)

This classic study has been republished by the Fordham University Press. Origi-nally published in 1990, this book has not lost any of its relevance or force as itdissects the alliance that emerged between the federal government and big busi-ness during the Civil War. Using a case study approach, Grace Palladino looks ateastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal industry and shows how that alliance wasused to block unionization.

According to Palladino, the anthracite industry had originally been composedof small coal operators selling to local markets. As such, these businessmen sawthemselves as the embodiment of the egalitarian ideal central to the view ofAmerica as the artisan’s republic. In accordance with this belief, the coal operatorsstressed that there was a “harmony of interests” between themselves and the


miners they employed, with class antagonisms nonexistent. In addition, there werestate laws in place designed to preserve the existing order by preventing businesscombination.

This notwithstanding, other business interests, including the Philadelphia &Reading Railroad and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, managed to getaround these regulations. Because of this, a new reality was already emerging bythe late 1830s: small coal operators were being replaced by large corporations.These companies, because of their access to transportation, as well as their abilityto employ greater economies of scale, were able to undersell their competition andthereby came to dominate the industry.

Palladino characterizes this as economic centralization. The miners, for theirpart, attempted to meet this new reality by joining together into unions and werefairly successful at winning demands for modest pay increases. However, theseevents took place roughly at the same time that the Civil War broke out. Althoughthe federal government was originally able to meet its manpower needs withvolunteers, it eventually had to resort to conscription. Draft resistance was strongin eastern Pennsylvania, particularly among Irish coal miners. With the Conscrip-tion Act of 1863, Provost Marshals were appointed in every congressional districtin the nation to enforce the law. What transpired in eastern Pennsylvania was thefollowing scenario: large coal companies made the case that union leaders, manyof them Irish miners, were at the forefront of draft resistance. The ProvostMarshals, using their authority under the Conscription Act, had these peoplearrested, thus breaking, or at least blunting, union activity in the coal fields for thewar’s duration.

This marked the first time that the federal government intervened in laborrelations at the workers’ expense, creating a model that would continue up to andincluding the Pullman Strike in 1894. Palladino is at her best describing the eventsthat led to the creation of the alliance mentioned earlier, as well as its results. Herwriting style is vigorous and engaging, and the story she presents unfolds as a trulyAmerican tragedy. It underscores the point that wherever economic and politicalpower is concentrated, justice suffers.

University of Pittsburgh at Titusville Richard P. Mulcahy

American Reformers 1870–1920: Progressives in Word and Deed. By Steven L. Piott.(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. Pp. 225. $26.95.)

The author of this book traces the lives of a dozen individuals who helped todefine the meaning of progressivism in the United States. Each of these individuals


left a distinct mark on reform. Lester Frank Ward forged the invention of soci-ology and challenged social Darwinism in the process. Henry George proposeda single tax (on land) as a way of reducing economic inequality. Charles W.Macune saw cooperatives and the subtreasury plan as a way to release farmersfrom their economic feudalism. Ida B. Wells spent a lifetime attempting tounmask racial stereotypes and eradicate the lynchings they fostered. WalterRauschenbusch envisioned a Protestant-based socialism as the salvation forsocial ills. Jane Addams used Hull House to modulate the social dysfunctionattendant to Chicago’s rapid growth. Florence Kelley introduced Americans tothe concept of consumers’ rights and led the fight to ban child labor. LouisBrandeis applied social realism to the labor law. Lincoln Steffens documentedhow business corrupted politics in the cities and states. Harvey W. Wileyworked a lifetime to secure a federal food and drug law and then to make iteffective. John Randolph Haynes led the movement to secure the referendumand recall in California. Alice Paul illustrated how strategic militancy contrib-uted to the adoption of female suffrage.

Written for classroom use in an engaging style, all of Steven L. Piott’s reformersexcept Haynes are familiar figures to historians of the Gilded Age and ProgressiveEra. With each biography Piott offers an instructive glimpse into the problems ofthe period and the reformers who devoted their lives to ameliorating social ills.Biography is a tried and true way of easing undergraduates into the study ofhistory, particularly of eras so maligned as the Gilded Age. A key to this techniqueis picking the subjects. Steven Piott offers no justification for his selections, but hisdozen share some common attributes. None were elected officials; most dedicateda sizeable portion of their lives to reform efforts, and, most significantly, theycontributed influential ideas for change. A case can be made, however, that awider array of subjects would have offered a more balanced portrait of the reformimpulse during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The ideas of Henry George and Walter Rauschenbusch surely deserve his-torical notice, but one might argue that William Jennings Bryan, TheodoreRoosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson contributed more to the achievement of realchange. Whether Alice Paul played as large a part as Carrie C. Catt in theadoption of the Nineteenth Amendment is debatable. Politics, after all, is the artof the possible.

A second reservation about this collection is the author’s emphasis on life-time achievements to the detriment of developing context for critical reforms.With John Randolph Haynes, for example, we learn a lot about his tenacity inthe adoption of the referendum in California but very little about how progres-


sive reformers split between a plebiscitary remedy for fixing the political systemversus reliance on administration and “neutral” experts. Of course historians,not college students, argue these fine points. For younger readers, Piott hasauthored a fine, short book about why we should remember what HenryGeorge, Charles Macune, Ida Wells, and the others in his volume gave toAmerican reform.

Northeastern University Ballard C. Campbell

Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. By John Prados. (Chicago, Ill.: IvanR. Dee, 2006. Pp. xxxv, 696. $35.00.)

In this major revision of his 1986 book the Presidents’ Secret Wars, the authoroffers a more extensive account of the CIA’s covert operations from the Trumanadministration to George W. Bush, using newly declassified documents, inter-views, and memoirs. John Prados, an independent scholar affiliated with theNational Security Archives, opts to evaluate these actions in terms of their com-patibility with America’s quest for democracy and democratic institutions aroundthe world.

The late Senator Frank Church (a Democrat from Idaho), who chaired a reviewof CIA activities in the mid-1970s, characterized the CIA as a “rogue elephant,”an unsupervised agency acting on its own initiatives (439). Prados, however, saysthe problem is “more one of the ‘rogue’ president than it is about an out-of-control” CIA (xiv). Although emphasizing that the intelligence agencies wereresponding to presidential orders, Prados concludes that “American undercoveractions have resulted in upheavals and untold suffering in many nations whilecontributing little to Washington’s quest for democracy” (xv).

In arriving at this conclusion, Prados examines a long history of CIA opera-tions, most of them familiar to historians of American foreign relations: Italy,Korea, Poland, Iran, Guatemala, Hungary, China, Tibet, the Philippines, Indone-sia, Syria, Iraq, Cuba, Bolivia, the Congo, Ghana, Vietnam and Laos, Kurdistan,Chile, Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. He also looks at more recent activ-ities in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq.

The book has many strengths. The author has considerable experience withthe subject, having previously authored a series of well-received books onnational security affairs. He introduces a mountain of newly declassified docu-ments and information from memoirs and interviews. The book thus containsmuch new detail about individuals involved in covert operations and project


costs. The result, Prados writes, “is the closest we can come at this juncture toa definitive history of U.S. covert operations” (xvi). Readers also will appreciatethe author’s helpful lists of major participants in the narrative and acronyms.

Among the new information discovered, the author says, is evidence confirmingRobert Kennedy’s collusion in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. Pradosclaims that “CIA insistence on a covert penetration of Cuba during the missilecrisis might have provoked World War III” and offers extensive treatment of theKennedy and Johnson administrations’ covert operations in Chile (back flap).

Although the volume is an encyclopedia of CIA operations, the lack of exten-sive footnoting makes it difficult for reviewers to revisit the evidence and toevaluate Prados’s conclusions. Perhaps the most serious flaw is the author’sattempt to judge narrowly the CIA’s record in terms of whether its covert opera-tions promoted democracy and democratic institutions in developing nations. It isat least arguable that a more appropriate standard for evaluating covert opera-tions would be whether such activities succeeded in advancing broader nationalsecurity objectives, including containment of, and victory over, the Soviet Unionin the Cold War.

Ohio University Alfred E. Eckes

South Carolina Scalawags. By Hyman Rubin III. (Columbia, S.C.: University of SouthCarolina Press, 2006. Pp. xxviii, 192. $29.95.)

South Carolina’s majority black population after the American Civil War made itthe prototype for what came to be known as black Reconstruction. African-Americans held the lieutenant governor and the secretary of state’s officesthroughout this period and the position of treasurer for one term. They consti-tuted a majority in the state’s House of Representatives and controlled thelegislative process. They secured innumerable local offices. Scholars of theDunning school viewed black participation as the cause of the ills of Reconstruc-tion. Revisionists have drawn different conclusions but still emphasize the impor-tance of African-Americans and their carpetbag allies in South Carolina. With thisemphasis on African-Americans, scholars have paid relatively little attention tothe third component of the postbellum Republican coalition—the native whites orscalawags. This study fills in that part of the Reconstruction story, reexaminingthe state’s Reconstruction through the eyes of these native whites.

In this study, Hyman Rubin III addresses many of the questions that have beenposed regarding scalawags across the South. Who were they? What were their


goals? What drove them to join the Republican Party—a risky step that madethem the object of criticism, social and economic ostracism, and sometimes evenviolence? What produced their failure to effect long-term reform in the state? Andwhat happened to them after the end of Reconstruction?

As to scalawag identity, Rubin moves beyond the dominant revisionist argu-ment, showing the variations that can exist in local Reconstruction. Like otherscholars, he finds scalawags coming from varied backgrounds—prewar Unionists,upcountry yeoman farmers, prominent planters, businessmen, and even secession-ists and Confederate soldiers. Unlike other scholars, who have seen scalawagslinked by their persistent Unionism, he views the central ideological linkage as theirdesire to displace the prewar elite and democratize South Carolina’s politicalprocess.

The author also sees scalawags as a group changing over time. When the warended, scalawags sought to secure political change but failed because they did notunderstand the centrality of the race issue at this time. Pursuing reform in atraditional political manner, they did not expect the vitriolic attack visited onanyone willing to accept even modest concessions to the freedmen. At this point,many scalawags gave up their efforts and melted into the Conservative Party andlater into the Democratic Party.

The failure of moderate reform represented a crucial point in the evolutionof the scalawag identity. Some men, such as James L. Orr and SimeonCorley, embraced Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party,seeing black voters as the only means to achieve their political goals. Whatseparated those willing to make this change from those who did not is notmade clear, however. In the short run, the decision to link with CongressionalReconstruction allowed them to democratize South Carolina politics and societyto some extent. The racism of the scalawags, however, made the biracial coa-lition always a marriage of convenience, and Rubin sees Democratic violence asthe force that helped to exacerbate internal tensions within the RepublicanParty, differences that led to the long-term failure of scalawag reform and thevirtual disappearance of scalawags as an element in post-Reconstruction statepolitics.

This work is an important contribution to the literature on Reconstruction thatshows the complexity of local politics during this era. Even in South Carolina,scalawags were present, and Rubin shows that they played a disproportionatelyimportant role in the state’s postwar politics.

University of Arkansas, Little Rock Carl H. Moneyhon


Sherman Invades Georgia: Planning the North Georgia Campaign Using a ModernPerspective. By John R. Scales. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006.Pp. xix, 213. $32.95.)

As the subtitle of this short book indicates, this is not a history of William T.Sherman’s invasion of North Georgia, but is rather a modern analysis of thatmilitary action. The author, retired Brigadier General John R. Scales, uses in hisanalysis an “estimate of the situation,” which is “a logical decision-makingprocess formulated in modern times” (xv). He points out that his book is designedprimarily for military professionals and those interested in viewing Sherman’sGeorgia campaign from a new angle.

Not surprisingly, the book is organized like a military textbook for useby current officers or cadets-in-training, and even contains work forms onvarious pages so the reader may try his or her hand at campaign planning(72–73, 103–104, 107, 113, etc.). The arrangement, the numerous work forms,the multiple accompanying tables and maps, the “staff ride” over the battlefieldsite in Appendix A, and the useful glossary of military terminology, allcommend the book for use in classes on military planning, but may make thevolume less than optimal for the lay reader or even the historian (171–186,189–200).

Scales does provide some limited insight of value to students and historians ofthe Civil War. For example, the author maintains that because of the failure ofGeneral John B. McPherson to follow up his success in taking the undefendedSnake Creek Gap in May 1864 with “a bold attack” as directed by GeneralSherman, General Ulysses S. Grant’s primary directive to “break up” JosephJohnston’s Confederate Army was not quickly fulfilled (75, 161–163). This earlyfailure in the campaign led to a prolonged and more costly series of engagementsbefore the fall of Atlanta in the autumn of 1864. Scales concludes that if Shermanhad sent a more experienced and aggressive commander to take Snake CreekGap, the “bold attack” recommended by Sherman would have taken place andthe Confederate Army of Tennessee’s military effectiveness would have beendestroyed in the spring of 1864.

As General Scales makes clear early in his study, “this book is not . . . adefinitive history of the campaign,” but rather focuses on “campaign planning,”which should yield “pertinent lessons for modern military commanders andplanners” (xvii–xviii). Scales does this effectively, but it is therefore of only limitedinterest to most historians and students of the Civil War period. The book isespecially suited for institutions that have military science programs, but is


otherwise recommended only for those schools attempting relatively comprehen-sive collections of Civil War literature.

Campbell University Ronnie W. Faulkner

Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage, and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy.By David Curtis Skaggs. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006. Pp. xxi,301. $34.95.)

Before this biography of Oliver Hazard Perry, the author of this study wrote afirst-rate book about Perry’s colleague, Thomas Macdonough. If Perry is thebetter known, it is largely because of his summation of the American navalvictory on Lake Erie during the War of 1812: “We have met the enemy and theyare ours . . .” David Curtis Skaggs suggests that Perry’s terse victory messagerivals Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici”—although without its irresistible alliteration(118).

But as the author makes clear, Perry himself could not be summed up in a singlephrase. Skaggs takes the reader through Perry’s upbringing with a forceful motherand a spendthrift father, a naval captain who got the boy launched as a midship-man at age thirteen, when the median age was four years older than that (11).Skaggs’s early chapters—“Joining the Navy” and “Apprenticeship”—not onlyoffer insights into Perry’s character and later career, they also provide a fascinatinglook at the beginnings of the U.S. Navy.

Perry sailed for the Barbary states when President Jefferson resisted payingbribes to its rulers and became close to a fellow sailor, James Lawrence. WhenLawrence died in battle earlier in the War of 1812, Perry honored his memory byordering a large blue banner with Lawrence’s own memorable last words: “Don’tGive Up the Ship.”

On September 10, 1813, Perry secured his reputation on Lake Erie, and Skaggsdoes justice to the legendary events of that day. First, though, Perry must build andequip ships for his armada. Here, Skaggs’s treatment of Perry’s background hasprepared us for both the hard-driving energy that got the job done and also forthose moments when less attractive aspects of Perry’s character emerged.

Skaggs tells the reader that the young Perry worshipped in the Trinity Churchin Newport, Rhode Island, where “Trinity’s vestry required its African-Americancongregants to sit in the balcony close to the church’s highly ornate organ. In frontof these people was a frame with pear-shaped apertures, through which theNegroes could see but not be seen” (7). At Lake Erie, Perry, now twenty-eight, hadgrown impatient for the arrival of crews for his ships, but when the sailors arrived,


he complained bitterly to his commander, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, that theirranks included “a motley set, blacks, soldiers and boys” (73). In what Skaggsdescribes as “one of the great put-downs in American history,” Chauncey boxedPerry’s ears, “I have yet to learn that the color of the skin, or the cut andtrimmings of a coat, can affect a man’s qualifications or usefulness,” adding thathe had fifty black sailors on his own ship and many of them were “amongst mybest men” (73).

All was forgiven when Perry overcame the fever that had left him and his crewweak from vomiting and diarrhea and sailed against Robert Heriot Barclay’sBritish fleet (89). When every gun on Perry’s Lawrence was destroyed, he hauleddown “Don’t Give Up the Ship” and gave up the ship. He boarded anotherAmerican vessel, turned the course of the fighting, and won the battle—and, to asignificant degree, the war. It was then that Perry wrote his exultant note toGeneral William Henry Harrison on the back of an envelope (118).

In 1819, Perry contracted a fatal fever during a mission to Venezuela and diedon 23 August, his thirty-fourth birthday. Skaggs devotes the last chapter of his textto Perry’s wrangle with his second-in-command, Jesse Duncan Elliott, who hadinexplicably failed to bring his ship, the Niagara, into play early in the Lake Eriebattle. The controversy over Elliott’s dereliction did not die with Perry. In 1840,he was found guilty of new and different charges, although the prevailing hostilityto him stemmed from his conduct twenty-seven years earlier.

Skaggs handles that sorry epilogue with the same evenhandedness that distin-guishes the rest of this fine book.

University of Southern California A. J. Langguth

Radical Conservatism: The Right’s Political Religion. By Robert Brent Toplin.(Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Pp. 306. $34.95.)

In the wake of the Ronald Reagan presidency and the rise to power of theRight, the American Historical Review in 1994 brought several historianstogether to consider what Alan Brinkley called “the problem of American con-servatives.” Historians had failed to mainstream conservatives in their accountsof American history and instead either dismissed them as reactionaries andspoilers or focused on the bigotry of extremists. These historians called upontheir colleagues to put aside their own political leanings and attempt to seeconservatives as legitimate contenders for power and not as enemies to defeat inthe past or present.


In books and articles, historians have heeded this call and attempted a morebalanced approach to the conservative movement, its leaders, appeal, andagenda. Thus, it comes as a surprise when Robert Brent Toplin’s Radical Con-servatism jerks readers back to the 1960s to Richard Hofstadter’s essay “TheParanoid Style in American Politics” for insight about American conservatives.Appearing in 1964, the piece maintained that conspiracy theorists had aManichaean perspective and the fervid passion of religious converts. But, ifHofstadter focused on extremists, Toplin argues more expansively: “Today thesyndrome is evident across a much broader spectrum of conservative groups.Political fundamentalism has gone ‘mainstream’” (31–32). For Toplin, there areno differences of opinion or shades of nuance on the Right. The movement ispeopled by “radcons,” fundamentalist “zealots,” and “polemicists” who seek torestore the past, brook no dissension in combat with liberals, and show greatrespect for “their canon.” Who are Toplin’s “True Believers,” plying the “sim-plistic,” “eccentric,” “filled with fantasy,” and “bogus” canon? George Will,Allan Bloom, Milton Friedman, and Irving Kristol, among many others, are thepurveyors of ignorance. Pity the good guys, the liberals, who are “flexible andevolving,” “idealistic,” and “strong minded” in the pursuit of altruism. In sucha contest, it is a wonder that liberalism unraveled and lost not only its imagi-nation but also its touch with the people. Repeatedly sledgehammering thereader with loaded terms and proving by assertion is more the work of a pros-ecutor than a historian. Such work makes this liberal blush.

In making an argument for the uniqueness of conservative fundamentalism,Toplin must ignore certain inconvenient truths about all activists on the currentpolitical scene. Liberals, too, can be arrogant and self-delusional. They alsofervently defend a canon and heroes like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.Do liberals brook dissension in their ranks about issues like abortion, busing, gaymarriage, or 9/11 conspiracy theories? Does Toplin, when lambasting the currentwar in Iraq as the work of “radcons,” not realize that liberals in the U.S. Senatehave supported the effort in words and votes? Recall also that the Vietnam Warwas fought by liberals mired in liberal myths about America and the world.Finally, one must be in a state of denial to claim that liberal professors do notcontrol hiring and curriculum decisions in humanities and social science depart-ments in major American universities.

When readers see books with university press imprints, they expect reasonedand balanced analyses. Sadly, neither the author nor press deliver.

University of Utah Robert A. Goldberg


Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas. By Alan Trachtenberg. (New York, N.Y.: Hill andWang, 2007. Pp. xix, 378. $30.00.)

The author of this volume has collected nineteen essays written over a span offour decades, organized them topically, and provided a provocative preface. Partone consists of five pieces concerning the era of daguerreotype images, brilliantlylinked with literary texts of the mid-nineteenth century and historical context. Thefocus of part two is primarily literature of the later nineteenth century in itscultural setting, with emphasis upon Walt Whitman, Horatio Alger, HuckleberryFinn, Stephen Crane’s city sketches, and civic idealism in Louis Sullivan’s famousAuditorium Building in Chicago [1890], which the author reads as a “culturaltext,” as he does the Brooklyn Bridge in Part three. The remainder of the finalsection is devoted to photography and cinematography, much of which seems toemerge in the wake of Alan Trachtenberg’s pioneering work, Reading AmericanPhotographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans [1989].

In these last chapters, the author not only has fresh things to say about familiarfigures like Evans and the Farm Security Administration photographs ofthe later 1930s, but also introduces the reader to less familiar photographers,such as Eugene Smith (and his antipathetic relationship with Pittsburgh) andthe enigmatic Wright Morris, whose images, once again, must be “read” cre-atively as texts, which Trachtenberg does with deft analysis. His penultimatechapter, “Realms of Shadow: Film Noir and the City,” provides the reader withilluminating insights into the influence of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon[1941], and classics like Murder, My Sweet; Double Indemnity; and The Big Sleep.

Trachtenberg himself is very much urban-oriented. Consequently he is mostattracted to texts concerned with urban life, ranging from Whitman’s poetry andAlger’s tales of so-called “Street Arabs” to what he calls “Reading the Gilded AgeCity,” Crane’s journalism, and the menacing urban settings of American film noirin the 1940s and 1950s. As he writes in one intensely characteristic passageconcerning Raymond Chandler’s Murder, My Sweet:

The camera takes its cues from Marlowe’s voice-over narrative as theopening interrogation scene beautifully flows into the pulsing city street likea gesture in a dream, and then an exquisitely measured montage of cityimages—the location not specified but probably in the Los Angeles area—brings us to that moment in the past when the formidable Moose Malloyappears as a reflection in Marlowe’s office window (333).

In addition to heightening our sensitivity to the historical importance of visualculture, another motif that surfaces repeatedly is the author’s invocation of Van


Wyck Brooks’s cri de coeur for an American “usable past.” By citing that notionin diverse contexts, especially a fine essay on Lewis Mumford’s work in the 1920s,Trachtenberg helps us to understand just exactly what this concept meant to thosewho voiced it during the interwar years and subsequently. The book is distin-guished by its nuanced originality and clarity of exposition. We are fortunate tohave these fugitive pieces gathered and now so accessible.

Cornell University Michael Kammen

William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War. By Eric H. Walther.(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 477. $39.95.)

William Yancey has long been a caricature in Southern history, the stereotypicalfire-eater brought on stage to play his role and then vanish into the wings. Theonly biography of him was a hagiography published in 1892 by James W. DuBose.In this detailed study, Eric H. Walther gives historians their first close look at thisstraw man of secession. The result produces a few surprises and some insights butdoes little to disturb the stereotype.

Born in Georgia in 1814, Yancey endured a turbulent childhood spent mainlyin the North as the son of an emotionally disturbed mother and with a stepfatherwho was a fiery abolitionist as well as a bully. “It was not common in the early1800s,” notes Walther, “for parents and stepparents to repeatedly threaten andbeat their children, for husbands to nail wives in closets, for wives to try to destroytheir husband’s public reputations, or for stepchildren to assist in that effort, yetthis was the environment Yancey confronted as a child and adolescent” (2). Fromthese unstable roots, Yancey emerged as an insecure man forever seeking publicadulation, one whose friends puzzled over his peculiar blend of sincerity andshallowness. After three years at Williams College, he returned to Georgia, readlaw, and ultimately migrated to Alabama, where he became a lawyer, farmer,editor, and political gadfly.

Yancey’s one consummate talent was that of orator. In an age that prized publicspeaking, he could mesmerize an audience. In politics he began as a staunchUnionist but soon fled to the opposite pole. Although he served a term in Congressand then in the Confederate Senate, most of his influence took place within theparty and on the stump. For well over a decade, he vigorously advocated states’rights and secession. When the separation finally came, he went to England on adiplomatic mission for the Confederacy. His career in the independent South wascut short by death in 1863.


Walther portrays Yancey as a man shaped, indeed haunted, by the scars of hisupbringing. Because Yancey talked and wrote far more than he acted, Waltheroverwhelms the reader with a seemingly endless exposition of the man’s words.Although one gets a solid sense of Yancey’s views, the same points keep recurringwhere summary would have better served. Yancey was dogged, if not alwaysconsistent, in his defense of states’ rights, yet in the end he failed to reconcile themwith the broader needs of a Southern nation. Here, as with Yancey’s personal life,Walther amasses an impressive amount of detail but does not always probe itsimplications for larger meaning.

The research is impressive; the writing solid if not lively. Scholars will thankWalther for finally giving them a full portrait of this intriguing figure. Ironically,however, Yancey seen as a whole turns out to be remarkably similar to hisstereotype. His lack of complexity as a person can hardly be blamed on the author.

University of Rhode Island Maury Klein

Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom. By Robert C. Williams. (New York,N.Y.: New York University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 413. $34.95.)

The author of this laudatory work on the nineteenth-century editor, essayist, andpolitician, Horace Greeley, seeks to place his subject in clearer relief against thepolitical, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the day. The reader will not bedisappointed with the topical breadth and obvious extensive research that resultedin this well-written biography.

For the first time, Greeley’s views on everything from free labor to Fourierismare simply, though not simplistically, explained. The Greeley who emerges is muchmore than the editor of the New York Tribune or the champion of westernexpansion. Greeley, the author maintains, was a lifelong advocate of Americanfreedom—freedom for slaves and wageworkers alike—whose great gift to theRepublic was a broadening of the debate on the nature of democracy in Americaand beyond. Robert C. Williams clearly establishes that, for Greeley, the blessingof free labor could never be fully realized in a nation divided by chattel slavery.Williams is especially prescient in his discussion of the election of 1848, which heclearly demonstrates had a profound impact on Greeley and his conception offreedom. No abolitionist, Greeley nonetheless was antislavery by the early 1840s,and worked diligently (abolitionist critics to the contrary notwithstanding) to endslavery through the pages of his newspaper and by his vigorous support of theWhig and Republican parties.


There is much more here, however, than a political consideration of Greeley’swork. Greeley emerges as a thinker who worked closely with many of the leadingintellectuals of his day, supporting a number of them, such as Henry David Thoreauand Margaret Fuller, by soliciting their work for publication in the pages of theTribune. It is a bit surprising, however, that the author includes no discussion ofGreeley’s relation with the most “hard hitting” (according to Perry Miller) of theTranscendentalists—Orestes A. Brownson—or references to him. Indeed, Greeleywas lavish in his praise of Brownson in the 1840s when he was associated withthe Transcendental movement and when he converted to Catholicism and wrotean article [1861] in support of emancipation. Brownson provided a provocativeassessment of Greeley’s politics in the 1870s, suggesting that his interest inFourierism and socialism were real enough and that Greeley was, in fact, norespecter of the constitutional rights of the minority as evinced by his stance onReconstruction.

Although well written, there are a few errors in the work. It is, for example,imprecise at best to state that “The Whig Party developed out of divisions withinThomas Jefferson’s National Republican Party,” for the National Republicanscoalesced around the leadership of Clay and Adams and contained the majority ofthe remaining Federalists whom Jefferson had opposed (31). Perhaps Greeley’sassertion that the Whigs were composed partly of National Republicans—withthe assumption that they were “Jefferson’s party”—was misleading (46). Publiclycommitted to state sovereignty and limited government, Jackson and the Demo-crats understandably claimed the mantle of Jefferson, and thus the NationalRepublicans of 1828 were not Jefferson’s party. Similarly, it was not James K. Polkwho annexed Texas on 1 March 1845, but John Tyler who, on that day, signed thejoint resolution passed by Congress (103).

Nonetheless, this work clearly establishes a more complete understanding ofHorace Greeley than any previous work, and it deserves the attention of anyscholar interested in the idea of freedom and its applications in nineteenth-centuryAmerica.

University of Dallas William Atto

Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law. By John Fabian Witt.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 392. $29.95.)

There are some books that simply take your breath away for their daring. Patriotsand Cosmopolitans is one of these. In this work the author covers the entire sweep


of legal and constitutional history, from the founding generation to the latetwentieth century. He tackles private law, lawyering, politics, reform, and legaltheory; as well as war, peace, race, gender, and ideas of nationalism.

John Fabian Witt focuses on individuals and their legal fate, and he does notplay favorites. Some, like James Wilson, were famous. Others, like Elias Hill,the author has rescued from undeserved anonymity. Some, like CatherineCrystal Eastman and Roscoe Pound, were true cosmopolitans andintellectuals—although she was a radical and he a moderate reformer turnedconservative. Others, like Marvin Belli, the “king of torts,” were simply verysuccessful advocates.

The tension between progressive ideas and conservative instincts, a kind ofHegelian dialectic that lies at the center of American law, becomes clear by the endof the book. We have a tradition of “American exceptionalism” that accepts theinfluence of the world on our nation but denies that foreign institutions and ideasare better than native grown. We believe that American constitutionalism is farsuperior to any other, and that continental legal systems are alien at best andpernicious at worst.

Yet our intellectuals look to Europe with admiration. Thus Witt’s concern isthat our “nationalism” is at heart divided. Are we part of the world or isolatedfrom it? The question is not an academic one, for today in our highest courtspatriots and cosmopolitans carry different banners. “Here and elsewhere,” Wittconcludes, “we can see the dynamic of American nationhood at work almostevery day” (283). Universal ideals expressed in law are bounded by narrowself-interests; some rooted in fearful patriotism, and some in racism and otherforms of discrimination.

Although this argument is not especially new, Witt tells his stories well.James Wilson should have been a hero of the post-Revolution era, but he wasout of touch with the world he had helped create. His model pyramid of thegood society was soon replaced by the republican machine metaphor, a noisier,less-harmonious representation of competing interests. Minister Hill and hiscongregation found no freedom in the freeing of the slaves, and migrated toLiberia after the Civil War. Promises of civil liberties and civil rights in Recon-struction legalism were empty words. Eastman spoke freely of a more egalitar-ian economic system, but the law did not protect her freedom of speech duringWorld War I. Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, and Belli, a flamboyantlitigator, were friends from very different generations, each in his own waymaking peace with existing law, accepting the boundaries it imposed onmeaningful reform.


As cautionary as these tales may be, Witt’s conclusion is not a concession togloom. His argument itself is proof that well-written and forcefully argued legalhistory can still elevate, inspire, and improve our thinking.

University of Georgia Peter Charles Hoffer

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture andthe Culture of Politics. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. v, 625. $59.95.)

As one of the greatest emperor-artists in Chinese history, Huizong [r. 1100–1125]was renowned for his skill in music, painting, poetry, and calligraphy as well ashis treatises on such diverse topics as Daoism and tea. He was also infamous,however, for imperial excesses and administrative corruption that brought foreigninvasion, enslavement to the imperial court, and an ignominious end to theNorthern Song dynasty [960–1126]. In their historical accounts of this period,officials of the Southern Song [1127–1276] blamed Huizong’s preoccupation withart and his chief advisors’ despotic abuse of power for dynastic collapse.

The thirteen authors in this collection reexamine this assessment. Throughclose reading and critical analysis of extant documents, these scholars of Songhistory, music, art, literature, and medicine build a strong case for a revisionistinterpretation of the Huizong period. They reject the emperor-artist/ministerdichotomy, emphasizing instead the dynamic role played by the emperor in bothcontinuing his father’s reforms and reimagining imperial authority. Huizong, theyargue, was an engaged ruler who governed through a combination of enlightenedreform and cosmic revelation. He aspired to the persona of ancient sage-emperors,honing his artistic talents to mirror his perfected being.

The various essays provide substantial evidence for this interpretation. AsafGoldshmidt argues that Huizong directed the implementation of health carereforms that established new medical schools and provided prescriptive drugs,public hospitals, and pauper cemeteries for the indigent. Essays by TsuyoshiKojima and Joseph Lam emphasize Huizong’s role in establishing musical as wellas cosmic harmony. Shin-yi Chao contends that the emperor’s promotion ofDaoism was intended to “legitimatize his rule” and establish himself as a “mes-sianic ‘true lord’ in Daoist theocracy” (357). Patricia Ebrey notes that widespreaddissemination of steles carved in Huizong’s distinctive “Slender Gold” calligraphyserved as a “public relations” campaign, proclaiming his power and divine


presence throughout the empire. Maggie Bickford argues that specially trainedartists mass-produced Huizong’s art and calligraphy, creating paintings that are“as much works of state as they are works of art” (454). Indeed, this theme of“works of state” in reference to the artwork, policies, and philosophy of thisperiod resonates throughout the collection, reinforcing the editors’ contentionthat Huizong used “the politics of culture and the culture of politics” to maintainhis power.

This collection provides fresh insights into late Northern Song historiographyand the Huizong period. Its multiperspective analysis makes it an attractivereference source for specialists in Song history, but scholars outside this field mayfind the study too narrowly focused. Of additional concern to a more generalaudience is the book’s generous length. Strict editing and the imposition of a pagelimit for the essays could have resulted in an equally compelling and effectivecollection with broader appeal and application.

Marquette University Daniel J. Meissner

The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou. BySteven Miles. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Pp. 450.$49.95.)

This book is in the tradition of using local sources to study scholarly or intellec-tual development in a specific area in China. This approach for explaining theformation of the local elite, how the criteria of the scholarly elite class changedwith the educational and examinational landscape, has dominated Americanstudies on traditional Chinese history for over twenty years. It is useful to seeanother addition to the list of what is now a “normal science.”

The author’s focus is on an academy founded in the late eighteenth century byRuan Yuan, who was in Guangdong as a governor and established a newacademy, called “Sea of Learning” (Xuehai), to bring about changes to scholarlyorientation in Guangdong.

The academy brought about a realignment of literati and affected the intellec-tual interests and educational emphasis in the Guangdong area. In the process, ofcourse, there ensued intellectual conflicts, such as Zhu Ciqi’s critical review ofRuan Yuan’s premises (Zhu represented the older, Delta, and rural-based schol-arly community in opposition to the new urban elite), but overall the academyachieved what Ruan Yuan sought to implant in Guangdong, a quite new scholarlypredilection for the more kaozheng (textual criticism) oriented methodology andagenda. In so doing, Ruan Yuan brought Jiangnan scholarship to Guangdong and


effected a significant transformation that actually brought Guangdong moreclosely into the fold of “Chinese” scholarship.

The reviewer puts “Chinese” in quotation marks because he has found that“Chinese” has become problematic in this book; one wonders where China is inthis entire picture. One of the most serious problems with the study of “localhistory” is, of course, whether any area or district belongs to a higher-ordercomplex society. It should be readily clear to any student of Chinese history thattraditional China was not a “nation” or “nation-state” (the index does not havean entry for “state,” nor does it have “nation”; that it has no “China” is anothermatter), and yet its control reaches the local level in a significant way. Any studyof Chinese local history can scarcely afford not to take this into account. After somany years of reading local histories based almost exclusively on gazetteers andfamily genealogies, one begins to wonder if it is time to remember that there wasa higher authority that interacted with local communities and that not all Chinesepolitics was local.

Another matter is, in the words of the author, “[Wang Zhaoming] in his youthfollowed a pattern quite typical of Wang children . . . before turning in surprising[reviewer’s emphasis] new directions” (21). This would have not been “surpris-ing” if the author had paid more attention to the external forces that were shapingthe destiny of China (and notably Guangdong). The Opium War figures almostnot at all in this book, making one wonder if Guangzhou was insulated from theturmoil of nineteenth-century China. Relying too heavily on local gazetteers oftenleads to this drawback.

Overall, however, this is another useful addition to what we have already heardfrom people like Benjamin A. Elman, et al. And people will now know that theXuehai Academy made a significant impact on Guangdong education and literati,thanks to the useful materials the author has painstakingly put together.

National Chiao-Tung University Thomas H. C. Lee

Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China. By Martin J.Powers. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 374. $44.95.)

This book is an elegant and scholarly monograph that traces the historicalrelationship between ornament and personhood in China between the fifth andsecond centuries B.C. Asserting that the graphic designs provide a “substrate forabstract thinking,” and that “artifacts create scales of value,” Martin J. Powersplaces the historical development of ornamental design against a simultaneouslyevolving concept of personhood in classical China to show the reader both the


mutually productive nature of craft and social subjectivity, and the degree towhich aesthetic values remain encoded in the society long after the substratesthemselves are gone (i, 1). Powers, a distinguished art historian, has impeccablecredentials in his field and is at his best when dealing directly with his data. Theseinclude both a comprehensive selection of classical texts and specific graphicmotifs that appear on a variety of artifacts including vehicles, utensils, caskets,and personal furnishings. The detailed and superbly informative chapters seemsomewhat random, but in addressing a wide range of aesthetic, practical, andideological concerns, they contribute effectively to Powers’s argument that thecomplexity of ornamentation reflects and produces a parallel complexity in thedevelopment of self-definition in classical China.

Although Powers’s arguments are sound, his scholarship excellent, and hisexamples persuasive, it can be difficult hacking through the dense undergrowthof critical jargon to get to the truly interesting observations on aesthetics anddesign this book has to offer. Powers’s methodology, which he offers as a kindof postmodern critique of conventional history, seems to work at cross-purposesto his larger conclusions, which are, by and large, conventionally modern. Theidea that artistic production is invested with political and social power andreveals the priorities and values of individual members of the dominant classesis not exactly original—nor is Powers’s criticism of what he refers to as“Romantic” historians and their “tired, old historical narratives” (viii). Inrecent decades, the cultural essentialism that informed so much modern schol-arship has thankfully given way to more nuanced treatments of the nonwesternother, and the belief that the complexity of reality is best expressed through thelavish use of critical vocabulary is itself an ornamental fashion—perhaps onethat is also becoming “old and tired.” Powers’s heavily philological approach tosuch notions as “novelty” (pi) and “taste” (guan), and “craft/rules” or “law”(fa) and “degree” or “standards” (du), although expertly done, is also mani-festly traditional. Had Powers relied on the strength of his evidence and exper-tise and not packaged this book as an edgy attack on outdated historiography,it would be a fine piece of good modern scholarship. As it is, from the theo-retical perspective, the study comes off as a less-than-convincing attempt atpostmodern critique.

Nevertheless, Pattern and Person is an excellent resource for all students ofChinese art history and premodern Chinese history in general, and should alsoserve as a valuable reader’s guide to the field of critical theory in art history.

Gonzaga University Eric Cunningham


Saving The Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China. By Margherita Zanasi.(Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 320. $55.00.)

In this creative work, the author explores the connection between a moderneconomy and nationhood in the first few decades after the establishment of theChinese Republic in 1911. Lively discourse on nationhood and national identity,as this reviewer, a former student of the late George Taylor (University of Wash-ington), would know, characterized this period. Margherita Zanasi referencesTaylor and argues that it is the political ideas of the early Chinese leaders thathelped shape Chinese institutions and economy. It would have been useful toexplore the early influence of Chinese socialist and anarchist study groups orparties such as the Chinese Socialist Party (founded by Chiang Kang-hu) and thePure Socialist Party (main organizer Sha K’an) on nationhood debates.

The Warlord Era [1911–1927] and the following Nationalist Decade [1928–1937] (also called the Nanjing or GND Decade) saw the explosion, exploration,and discarding of many political ideas by the Chinese populace. Zanasi focuseson Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei) in the struggle with Jiang Jieshi (ChiangKai-shek). Jiang, inspired by the German “authoritarian militarist model,”tried to subordinate the economy to the military needs of the nation (3).

The Wang/Chen Gongbo (Chen Kung-po—an economist with a master’sdegree from Columbia University) Group favored an indigenous socioeconomicforce, which is labeled the minzu, as the driving force and basis of the Chineseeconomy. The author argues that these ideas were firmly rooted in Sun Yat-sen’sprogram. Zanasi also opines that this group borrows some ideas from the Italianfascist model of the corporatist state. In actuality, both groups borrowed ideasfrom the Italian model. During this time, Jiang developed the Chinese air forcebased on Italian designs and tactics.

This book is divided into four parts. Part one explores the intellectual foun-dations of the nation building project initiated by Wang and Chen. Part twoillustrates how differing visions slowed overall economic development. Part threedeals with the concept of the minzu (national economy as developed by Wang andChen), the main example of which is the Cotton Control Commission. Part fouremphasizes the impact of the intellectual constructs of nation building on thepolitical life of Republican China. The last chapter carries the story of theJiang/Wang conflict into the post–Marco Polo Incident [1937] period. Attached tothis volume is a useful glossary of people and institutions with their Chinesecharacter equivalents. There is also an extensive bibliography.

Zanasi concludes that in the


simplified reading of the Nanjing Decade, the rivalry between Wang andJiang is too often reduced to a struggle for personal power, devoid ofsignificant political implications. In reality . . . this rivalry was based to alarge extent on important differences in their visions of nation building andmodern nationhood (7).

University of Hartford Bruce J. Esposito

EUROPE

Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma.By Ann Taylor Allen. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. x, 354.$75.00.)

The conflict between women’s individuality and the self-sacrificing aspects of theirroles as mothers has a long history. In her thorough and sweeping new study, thisauthor seeks to illuminate this particular dilemma for “modern” women, thosecoming of age in a climate of feminist thought and organizations. The authorinvestigates the tension between feminist demands, which were based on liberalnotions of autonomy and individual rights, and those that celebrated women quawomen as possessing different qualities from men but being no less deserving ofrights. In contrast to late twentieth-century notions that feminism was or isinherently hostile to motherhood and that has seen motherhood as being rootedin the very biology that feminists deny is women’s “destiny,” feminist movementsfrom the heyday of the suffrage campaigns of the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries often placed maternal values or the rights of mothers at thecore of their campaigns. Through the world wars and postwar rebuilding, controlover fertility and motherhood as a matter of national concern have both made theallegedly private domestic sphere an object of widespread public policy.

The author’s aims and scope are impressive. She begins with discussions of thedebates about the historical and legal status of mothers prior to 1914. Of par-ticular concern was the status of unmarried mothers and the role of the state insecuring the well-being of both mother and child. Such efforts often occurredsimultaneously with attempts to promote a more egalitarian vision of marriageand legitimate parenting. In any case, public debates hinging on how best topromote the status of mothers became a preoccupation of feminist social reform-ers in the decade before the outbreak of World War I. As Ann Taylor Allensummarizes, “at the turn of the twentieth century the discourse on motherhood,work, and the work of mothers was transformed by a new view of health, andchild welfare as concerns of the state” (65). This took roughly two forms: making


motherhood compatible with waged labor or providing an “endowment” formotherhood, which recognized reproduction and child rearing as essential to thenation and therefore worthy of state support. This controversial issue—there wasno uniform feminist response to these questions—would provoke differentresponses in varying states throughout the twentieth century.

Concern with the reproductive health of the nation only intensified in thepronatalist climate of the First World War and its aftermath. Understandably,Allen devotes one chapter to the wartime debates about maternity and three to theinterwar decades, a period when new (and sometimes failed) initiatives acrossEurope emphasized the centrality of motherhood for national politics. This leavesrelatively little space for the post-1945 years, and it is here that the story feels themost hurried and schematic.

University of Mississippi Susan R. Grayzel

A Concise History of the Third Reich. By Wolfgang Benz. Translated by ThomasDunlap. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 309.$35.00.)

Considering the tens of thousands of books written about the Third Reich (includ-ing a book reissued this year called A Concise History of Nazi Germany by JosephBendersky), the author of this book begins with a logical challenge that “[y]etanother book about National Socialist ideology and rule calls for justification”(xvii). “That justification,” writes noted historian Wolfgang Benz, “is to providereaders with concise historical insights without retracing in detail the scholarlyefforts behind those insights . . .” The text contains no notes or source references.Readers, therefore, must rely entirely on the historical scholarship of Benz and theaccuracy of his translator.

Fortunately, readers will be quite pleased. Following an eight-page excursionthrough pre-Nazi history included exclusively for the English edition, the ConciseHistory embarks on fifteen brief chapters that take the reader through the stagesof the Third Reich—from the call for a “national revolution” and the “consoli-dation of power,” to “economic and social policy,” “terror and Persecution,” “theRoad to War,” and “the Murder of the Jews.” Relevant photographs appear onevery third or fourth page, many seldom previously seen. One is a striking aerialpicture of the workers at the Blohm and Voss shipyard in Hamburg in 1938,all with their arms extended in the standard Nazi salute. A single man in theenormous crowd stands with his arms folded in defiance (122). Opposition to theregime, lonely and dangerous, could not be better demonstrated.


The persecution and murder of the Jews, separated into two chapters, is ofparticular interest, because Benz is the director of the Center for Research onAnti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. The first chapter unfolds withthe speed and legal entanglements of actual events as Germany marginalized analready disliked minority. German Jews quickly found themselves in a dilemma:they were clearly unwelcome and were being encouraged to emigrate while atthe same time their ability to leave the country was hampered by a thicket ofobstructionist regulations and a national program of robbery. The author’s dra-matic descriptions of crowd behavior against Jews in towns across Germanyduring Kristallnacht is sobering and insightful. After three excellent chaptersabout the road to war, daily life in wartime Germany, and total war, Benz turns tothe chapter on the “Final Solution.”

With the coming of the war, the Nazis lurched toward what may well havealways been their ultimate goal: the horrific mass murder of millions. Benzauthoritatively and sensitively takes the reader on the twisted road to Auschwitz(in the words of historian Karl Schleunes’s classic title), through the ghettoes;a proposed deportation program to Madagascar; random murders of tens ofthousands in Poland and Russia; to the elevation by Himmler, Heydrich, andEichmann of bureaucratic murder and robbery to a raison d’être. The author deftlysidesteps the debate between those who believe that mass murder was the Nazis’original goal and the alternative school of thought, which points to the opportunitypresented by the war. The chapter closes with a mea culpa for German guilt, awelcome grounding after a lengthy discussion of shared responsibility amongBaltic and Ukrainian killers, Nazi propaganda, fear of violence, herd behavior,and the bureaucratic flypaper that trapped both victims and perpetrators.

Of the last two chapters, the one on the history of resistance has little new tooffer since Theodore Hamerow’s seminal volume On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair.The author closes with an excellent, dramatic chapter on the collapse of the ThirdReich. The reader is convinced that Benz’s original challenge to provide a useful,accurate, and well-written, if occasionally dense, history of the Third Reichwithout footnotes or references has been accomplished.

Texas A&M University Arnold Krammer

Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy. By Mario Biagioli.(Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 302. $35.00.)

One might be forgiven for assuming from its title that this book is about thefinancial transactions of a seventeenth-century scientist. With Galileo Courtier


[1993], the author made his name as one of the leading exponents of what hasbeen called the new historicism in the history of science, with a rich anddetailed account of how Galileo fashioned himself to exploit the system ofpatronage at the early modern court, and how in the end he suffered the classicfate of the courtier—the fall of the favorite. In the present book, he goes further,to describe the “instruments” (means) Galileo used to exploit the opportunitiesoffered within the various “economies” (circumstances) in which he foundhimself (as professor, author, client, and theological controversialist) to extract“credit” (rewards of various kinds, including patronage, credibility, priority, andfame). And in doing so, the author claims, Galileo in fact helped to invent thoseinstruments and construct those economies.

Mario Biagioli examines three episodes in Galileo’s career to illustrate thedifferent economies, the various instruments Galileo used, and the sort of credit hesought. When Galileo published the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 to announce hisfirst telescopic discoveries, Biagioli argues, he had to balance the desire to keep theconstruction of the telescope secret (to forestall competitors) against the need tohave his discoveries confirmed (to get credit for them). So he had to finesse thesupport of the Medicis, who were his prospective patrons, through incompleteevidence and premature endorsements, all aided by the delays and partial infor-mation caused by distance. (The role of distance and partial information inestablishing the credibility of the Royal Society is the subject of a long—andomittable—section of this chapter.) For the author, this suggests limitations in theusual accounts of the establishment of scientific credibility given in the sociologyof scientific knowledge (or SSK, as it is familiarly called here). The second episodeis Galileo’s controversy with Scheiner over the nature of sunspots. Here Biagiolisuggests that Galileo adopted a new way of using illustrations in scientific con-troversy, where what matters is not whether they are either schematic or realistic,but that they reveal through a sequence of changing patterns the reality and natureof the phenomena. This has ontological implications: only things in motion,according to Biagioli, are real for Galileo. The third episode concerns the eventsleading up to the condemnation of Copernicus in 1616, especially the “Letter tothe Grand Duchess Christina,” in which Galileo argued that the Copernicansystem was not necessarily opposed to scripture. Drawing on Derrida, Biagiolianalyzes Galileo’s development there of the topos of God’s book of nature, ascounterpoise to scripture and within the same “logocentric economy”—a rhetori-cal gambit that ultimately failed (238).

Although the sources are readily available and the episodes well-known, thisbook is full of new and surprising insights and controversial historiographical


claims. Whether the history of science is best treated as a branch of economics,however, remains in doubt.

Carleton University W. R. Laird

Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History.By Alon Confino. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Pp. xvii, 306. $24.95.)

In his latest book, the author offers excellent intellectual fodder not only forGermanists, but also for a much broader audience. Using concrete, accessibleexamples, he explores how Germans have constructed a sense of national identityvia artificially constructed images and pseudomemories. He then draws examplesfrom modern German history to review the impact of memory studies on schol-arship, demonstrating clearly and concisely how historical narratives and identi-ties evolve, and raising thought-provoking issues for both specialists and generalreaders.

Part one, “The Local Life of Nationhood,” reviews the German quest for acohesive national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alon Confinoargues that local, regional, and national actors across the political spectrumembraced the ambiguous concept of Heimat (homeland) as a way to unite theGerman nation via a positive, seemingly timeless collective identity. Many expla-nations of national identity, observes Confino, focus on the apparent failures ofthe German nation (its inability to produce a bourgeois revolution, for example).In contrast, the idea of Heimat excluded negativity—and politics, for thatmatter—in favor of sterile, but safe, images of home, hearth, and nature. In short,Heimat transcended regional differences by promoting “a set of mental represen-tations that endowed the abstract national territory with intimacy, familiarity anda sense of home” (96). Over the course of the twentieth century, Heimat imageryhelped legitimize everything from the Hitler Youth to the postwar tourist industry.

Part two widens the scope. Confino rightly recognizes contemporary interest inHeimat imagery as linked to the expanding field of memory studies, and as partof a paradigm shift within both the historical profession itself and contemporaryculture. Moving beyond social history’s focus on institutions and behaviors,memory scholars assert even more strongly the role of perception and reconstruc-tion in shaping historical narratives and collective identities. Confino warns,however, that the uncritical use of memory reduces the useable past to a kind ofsmorgasbord; researchers, not to mention politicians and interest groups, choosedishes that fit their palate, leaving behind those they find distasteful. To counter


such oversimplified misuse of memory, Confino urges conscious contextualizationand points out that memory-based narratives, like political and social histories,come with their own inherent assumptions and weaknesses. Memory studies,Confino argues, should reveal the “overlap [and] incongruity between individualand collective, public and private, celebratory and everyday, and official andunderground memories” (206).

Like historical narratives and national identities, collective memories areneither uniform nor static. Rather than lament this fact, Confino employs hismastery of topical, theoretical, and methodological literature to draw attention tothe potential of memory studies. Used critically, collective memories, as well astheir cultural representations, can launch scholars and students alike into explo-rations of the past that embrace both individual and collective identities ascomplicated and everchanging.

Carroll College Kimberly Redding

The World of the Vikings. By Richard Hall. (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson,2007. Pp. 240. $34.95.)

The systematic investigation into the material evidence of the Viking age began inthe late nineteenth century, most notably with the investigations of the Dane J. J.A. Worsaae, who catalogued the striking similarities between material remains ofthe Viking age in Britain and Ireland, and those in Denmark. Before this, ideasabout the Vikings had all too often been falsely premised on romantic nostalgia.Although modern archaeological techniques have established much more reliablehistorical premises, little could be done to repair the damage caused by amateursand the rather less romantic activities of treasure hunters. If this has been aproblem for archaeologists, another has been the widespread developments thathave trapped and obscured the secrets of the past. Remarkable it is, then, justwhat archaeologists of the Viking age have achieved, for it is tantamount to acomprehensive reconstruction of the world as it was in the Viking regions—thatis to say, most of Europe—from the middle to shortly after the end of the firstmillennium. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Richard Hall, himself one ofBritain’s most renowned archaeologists, gives the nonspecialist reader a fascinat-ingly detailed picture of the state of his art thus far.

The World of the Vikings contains nine chapters, each one replete withmagazine-style articles devoted to some aspect of the chapter’s theme. After twochapters that aim to identify the Vikings in their Scandinavian homeland, Halloffers five broadly chronological chapters dealing with those phases of Viking


activity that led them from raiders to invaders, settlers and explorers, and finallyto conquerors. Giving context to this is an examination of Viking identity via thematerial expressions of their religious beliefs and artistry. The penultimate chapterexamines the last throes of the Viking expansion, the hubris of later Vikingwarlords, the assimilation of the Vikings into broader European culture, and theoutcomes for their bold settlements across the North Atlantic, including theirmiserable centuries-long decline in Greenland and the precocious republicanism ofthe Icelanders. The final chapter reviews the bizarre and often disturbingly nation-alistic reception of the Vikings since the eighteenth century.

Without doubt the most attractively presented study of the Vikings currentlyavailable, this book is nevertheless a sober examination of the facts. As Hall’sstudy is ordered around material evidence, it is on those places where the evidenceis most plentiful that he concentrates. Although this approach has many virtues,for example, in the examinations of the Viking settlements at York and Dublin,one criticism would be that what the author gains in presenting the specifics ofarchaeological endeavour he loses in narrative flow. If it is the theatrics andpersonalities of Viking-age history that the reader wants, then there are otherbooks that could better fill that need, but if it is a comprehensive survey of whatis actually known thus far that is required, then Hall’s book has no rival.

University of Hull Martin Arnold

The Shotgun Method: The Demography of the Ancient Greek City-State Culture.By Mogens Herman Hansen. (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006.Pp. ix, 140. $39.95.)

The author’s new book, originally presented as the Fordyce W. Mitchell MemorialLectures at the University of Missouri in 2004, draws on the data collected by theCopenhagen Polis Centre to propose a new method for estimating the populationof the classical Greek world, calculating from the character of urban space andhabitation and the relation of urban settlement to that of the hinterland. Althoughthe book is modest in size and pretends to be only “hunting small game,” itsconclusion is hardly that. Rather, with his “shotgun method” of going for hishistorical quarry with a wide range of data/shot, Mogens Herman Hansen pro-duces an estimate for “the entire population of the Greek homeland, and, in thecolonial regions, . . . the entire population of Greek colonies and Hellenized com-munities” of at least 7.5 million (3). That is roughly double the usual estimate, andhe uses that figure to issue a challenge to some established views on the character


of the Greek economy (that, on the usual view, it was primarily subsistence),settlement patterns (that it was primarily rural), and urban culture (that it con-sumed rather than produced).

The first chapter sets out the principles of the argument against the backgroundof previous discussion. Hansen considers and rejects four prior methods of calcu-lating the population of Greece in the fourth century: 1) Beloch’s dependence onmilitary figures; 2) Ruschenbusch’s use of the Athenian tribute lists; 3) Corvisier’sargument from population density; and 4) Sallares’s suggestion about the “carryingcapacity” of fourth-century Greece. That all four methods produce a result ofapproximately three million is an indication of the extent to which they rely,explicitly or implicitly, on the same nineteenth-century population data, rather thanindependent confirmation of the correctness of the figure (or the method). Hansenthen summarizes his “fifth and completely different approach” (15). Using the datafrom the Polis Centre in Copenhagen, he calculates the urban space of the fourthcentury and, using an estimate of 150 persons per urban hectare, reaches a result of3,333,250 people within urban centers. Then, calculations based on the variousproportions of urban to rural settlement throughout the Greek world produce atotal population for the Centre’s approximate 1,000 poleis of 6,789,750. Adding inEpirus and Macedonia brings the population of mainland Greece in the fourthcentury to about 7.5 million. Chapter one ends by asserting that this demographicresult “must lead to a rejection of the view of the ancient economy advanced byMoses Finley” (33). This is hardly “small game”! The following three chapters(“The Population of Walled Cities,” “The Proportion of the Population Settled inthe Hinterland,” and “The Carrying Capacity of the Ancient Greek Polis World”)develop in greater detail the series of approximations and “guesstimates”, the“shotgun” spraying its shot, which produce the dramatic result of 7.5 millionfourth-century people (including Greeks, free foreigners, and slaves).

What should a historian make of all this? Has Hansen captured a real quarry ora mythical beast? Perhaps others will take up his hunt, now better armed with thedata of the Copenhagen Polis Center, and will confirm or qualify his results. Thespecific challenges to Greek social history, to the views of Finley and others onthe character of the Greek economy and Greek urban culture, however, will requirea return to smaller-scale and evidence-based argument. In his “Preface” to TheShotgun Method, Hansen characterizes the scholarship of Fordyce Mitchell as achandelier rather than a spotlight. Hansen’s new book has thrown out a broad“chandelier” challenge that should prompt the turning on of some spotlights.

Emory University Cynthia Patterson


King Alfred: Burnt Cakes and Other Legends. By David Horspool. (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 216. $19.95.)

As the title suggests, the author of this book, who is editor of the Times LiterarySupplement, has not written an ordinary biography, for few other historicalfigures are surrounded by so many myths as Alfred the Great, king of the WestSaxons [871–899]. David Horspool argues that Alfred has been, and still is,regarded as “great” not so much because of his actual accomplishments, butbecause the sources have from the start presented “a mythical Alfred as much asa genuine one” (14). Horspool’s purpose, though, is not simply to debunk themyths about the king, as many others have, but rather to use them as evidence forhow Alfred has been remembered and why. Thus, King Alfred is as much aboutthe monarch people have “created” as it is about the king who really lived. Indeed,the author contends that, because Alfred himself exercised great control over thedocuments that form the basis of his legend, such as Asser’s Life of Alfred and TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, the “genuine” and the “mythical” Alfred are so inter-twined that they cannot completely be separated. Although his scope is technicallyninth-century England, the author reveals much about the outlooks and prioritiesof people in subsequent centuries.

The well-known story of the unrecognized king allowing some cakes to burnwhile hiding from his Viking enemies in a swineherd’s hovel is just one of themany legends that the author recounts and analyzes, tracing each from its medi-eval origins through subsequent embellishments to its ultimate survival or demise.Such stories, which have Alfred winning a book of poetry in a childhood contestor spying on an enemy camp disguised as a minstrel, as well as burning cakes,made the king early on into a flesh-and-blood human being rather than just acollection of official acts and military engagements. Although Alfred did makeimportant strides in his visionary promotion of scholarship and by holding theline against the Danes, the process of mythmaking served to focus disproportion-ate historical attention on him, in contrast to other Anglo-Saxon kings whoseaccomplishments may have been just as “great.” Alfred’s fame in turn led peoplein subsequent centuries, with a variety of agendas, to attribute to him everythingfrom the creation of juries and the formation of the Royal Navy to the establish-ment of constitutional monarchy and the foundation of the University of Oxford.

Because King Alfred deals primarily with popular myths, it is appropriate thatit was written for a popular audience. Yet Horspool’s thorough familiarity withthe sources, both primary and secondary, make it a work of solid scholarship.Although some may be frustrated by the lack of notes and a serious bibliography,


undergraduates, and even higher-level academics, will also benefit from its lessons:that history is a past constructed by people, that it is often based as much onpreconception as it is on evidence, and that the very evidence we use to createhistory was constructed by people in their own times for their own purposes.

Saint Vincent College Gilbert M. Bogner

Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy 1793–1815. ByTimothy Jenks. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x,325. $99.00.)

Scholars have long wondered how the ideological wreck of seventeenth-centuryEngland developed enough cultural cohesion to become the most powerfulnation-state of the nineteenth century. Linda Colley’s Britons has dominatedthis discussion for the last fifteen years. Colley argues that the shared experienceof continuous war with eighteenth-century France forged a nationalism thattranscended Britain’s ancient regional, ethnic, and class divisions. Timothy Jenksjoins the welter of scholarly response to Colley’s thesis, using a study of navalsymbolism in public discourse to refine Colley’s vision of late-Georgian patrioticculture.

He establishes beyond doubt that the navy was a key element in that identity.The navy’s strategic importance to an island kingdom and its success in that rolecombined neatly with its symbolic potential as an analogue to British society as awhole. Rhetorically, the country could become the ship of state, and crew lifeaboard a man o’ war in which Jack Tar followed his aristocratic officers to sharedglory could become a potent analogue to British society. Small wonder that duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the navy figured prominently in Britishculture, from parliamentary elections to newspapers, theater productions topoetry, street celebrations to state funerals. As the navy’s meaning was up forgrabs, political parties deployed naval stereotypes differently in their propaganda.Loyalists, Whigs, and radicals each put their own spin on naval victories from theGlorious First of June to Trafalgar, on naval celebrities such as Howe andCochrane, on naval practices such as promotion and recruitment, and on navalevents such as the mutinies of 1797 and Nelson’s funeral. This political partisan-ship was evidently synonymous with class interest; the government was the tool ofaristocratic hierarchy, while its radical opponents voiced the apparently uniformconcerns of a “plebeian” class. (The Whigs and middling sorts both tend to fadefrom the picture when this dialectic rears its fuzzy head.)


These double-layered, multisided contests indicate that late-Georgian Britonscould understand their Britishness in many conflicting ways: their commonnationality was itself a point of controversy. It follows that the story of Britishnational development “cannot be a progressive one of order out of chaos, or unityout of division” (2). In this respect, Jenks’s work offers a valuable caution to anyscholars who may be tempted to distill a simplistic story from Colley’s sophisti-cated account.

Students of British history, naval history, nationalism, identity, and the longeighteenth century will want to account for this highly suggestive book in theirown work. No doubt they will look forward to seeing Jenks explore the role ofthis complex naval discourse in personal and factional, as well as party, politics,and in regional and ethnic, as well as class, identities. It would also beinstructive—and acutely relevant to modern concerns—to know whether and howthis discourse shaped the governmental policies and military behavior of early-modern Britons.

Private Scholar Timothy Feist

Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England. By KatherineC Little. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. vii, 196.$27.50.)

In this book, the author looks at the Wycliffite movement in late fourteenth- andearly fifteenth-century England to examine not its theology but its importance forthe history of self-definition. The discussion is based on the theories of Foucaultand Benveniste about the uses of the sacrament of confession, language,and narrative to form late medieval selves. The author’s argument is that theWycliffites had a different approach to defining the self than did the mainstreamchurch at the time, and that that approach brought a crisis in the language ofself-definition to the general Christian culture in England, which can be seen insome famous literary works of the time by non- or anti-Wycliffites: Chaucer’sParson’s Tale, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes.

Katherine C. Little spends the first two of her four chapters looking at thecontrasting approaches to confession, use of narrative, and the nature of languagein orthodox and Wycliffite sermons and pastoral manuals. She concludes thatorthodox instructions about confession encourage penitents to recognize them-selves and their sins in biblical and other examples of human conduct; butWycliffite writings reject nonbiblical narratives and use biblical ones to criticizethe corrupt church rather than the individual. This radically changes narratives


centered on confession “from those that offer an identity in terms of exculpationand reintegration to those that offer an identity in terms of persecution andresistance” (47). But alas, orthodox writings say nothing about problems with thecapacities of language itself to define sin, while Wycliffite writings often questionthe adequacy of language to get at the inner truth of persons. This producesa “crisis of the speaking subject” that Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve deal with invarious ways, as seen in the last two chapters (64). Chaucer’s Parson displays aWycliffite inability to use narrative to personalize sin; Gower represents theLollards as disarmed by traditional confession; and Hoccleve, hostile to Lollards,has assimilated their objections to confession so much that he cannot represent itas bringing comfort or self-illumination.

This book has solid scholarship, with copious use of primary sources, anextensive bibliography, and intelligent reinterpretations. It is also very abstruseand difficult to read. The description of its not uninteresting main points thatappears above was quarried from the granite of the text with a good deal of effort.Its audience may primarily consist of scholars who are in sympathy with the verytheoretical approach pioneered by Foucault to the question of how people of thepast thought about or defined themselves. Other medievalists may questionwhether any writer in the period ever had a single thought about such things as“the absence of interpretive links between the text and the self-definition of hislisteners” (86). Little has established that the Wycliffites realized that not every-thing can be expressed in language; she has not established that this reasonablehuman insight amounted to a “crisis” that affected anybody’s self-definition inpractical terms. One can see how it might have done so, but more evidence isneeded that it did.

The Citadel Jane Bishop

The Sea Rover’s Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630–1730. By BenersonLittle. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2007. Pp. xv, 302. $17.95.)

This book on Golden Age piracy is as lively as its subject matter. With consider-able gusto and an impressive understanding of the strategies of violence at sea, theauthor explores the material practices of piracy from the beginning to the end ofa voyage. Using “pirate” diaries, journals, and narratives from the period,Benerson Little fashions a persuasive account of the ways crews were recruitedand ships fitted out, the day-to-day reality of life on a pirate vessel (includinginformation about both the humdrum and the extraordinary), and details con-cerning the most common practices of the “mart” of plunder and division of


profits at the end of the expedition. Further, the book offers useful definitions ofthe different types and terminology for the men (and women) who were employedin sea-roving activities, explaining in Chapter two, for instance, the differencesbetween “Freebooters, Filibusters, Cruisers, Corsairs, Buccaneers, Privateers, andPirates” (10–22).

Little’s book is particularly strong in its descriptions of the armaments andtactics of warfare at sea. Chapter five on “Piraguas, Sloops and Ships,” Chaptersix, “Of Small Arms and Firework,” and chapter fourteen, which provides infor-mation on “Great Guns,” are informative and well-illustrated, enabling the readerto understand the material reality of violence at sea. We find out, for example,about the different weights of shot used by the great guns of the period, how theguns changed and developed, and how pirates used them, exploding some of thepopular myths of pirate behavior, such as the firing of all guns at once: “ ‘Firingas quickly as possible’ was still a fairly slow process given the loading procedure,maneuvering, and the desire to avoid overheating the guns” (150). The tactics bywhich engagement was sought, and avoided, is an especially impressive part ofthis book, as the author’s naval background (he was a SEAL) is harnessed toexplain both the complexities of violent encounter, such as strengths and weak-nesses of various boarding positions, and also of the importance of seamanship indetermining the outcome of any engagement. The scholarship is also strong asLittle engages with key writers on early modern piracy such as Marcus Rediker,Hans Turley, and David Cordingly (though, surprisingly, references to the argu-ments of Peter Earle’s recent book The Pirate Wars [2003] and J. E. Thomson’simportant Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterrito-rial Violence in Early Modern Europe [1994] are omitted).

If this reviewer was to be picky, then perhaps more information could havebeen given concerning the ways sea rovers disposed of their plunder (in thisperiod, markets were regularly held on board pirate ships in Studland Bay inDorset where the gentry would purchase goods, for example); and the bookincludes far less information about violence at sea in the years 1630–1660 thanit does for the later years, nor does it explain why 1630 in particular waschosen as the terminus a quo. However, these are minor niggles. Little’s achieve-ment in The Sea Rover’s Practice is a considerable one; this well-priced andabsorbing book allows the reader to appreciate the terms of engagement, andthe stakes, in the much romanticized but little understood phenomena of earlymodern piracy.

Nottingham Trent University Claire Jowitt


Voting About God in Early Church Councils. By Ramsay MacMullen. (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 270. $30.00.)

Although Christians remember the councils of the early church for their articu-lation of developing Christian doctrine, scholars of late antiquity have long beeninterested in the geopolitical struggles that shaped these gatherings of bishops.Ramsay MacMullen takes an uncommon approach to the subject of early churchcouncils, exploring the mechanics of the decision-making process, rather thanthe theological issues at stake. He lists 255 known councils that occurred from thethird to the sixth centuries. These assemblies represent only a fraction of thefifteen thousand councils that probably took place, because bishops in eachprovince were supposed to gather twice a year. He focuses his analysis, however,on those twenty-five synods summoned by emperors, including those later judged“ecumenical,” and he dedicates substantive attention in his final chapter to theCouncil of Chalcedon in 451, which offered a creedal statement on Christ’shumanity and divinity and also deposed Dioscorus, the powerful Patriarch ofAlexandria.

MacMullen strives to explore the experiences of the “ordinary bishop,” ratherthan the starring personalities of revered church fathers or notorious heretics. Thisis quite a challenge given the scarcity of surviving evidence, but he effectively usesthe often neglected counciliar acta, records of the proceedings, which includeactual verbal exchanges, as well as letters and archaeological evidence. Mac-Mullen renders a valuable sketch of where an ordinary bishop might sit (far fromthe main protagonists, near to others from his diocese), whom he might come with(his own servants and lower clergy), how he might participate (by chantingacclamations with the crowd to be duly recorded), and what he might fear (tohave his own words used to condemn him at a later synod). Even with his bestefforts to ignore the ecclesiastical celebrities and to understand the masses, Mac-Mullen still falls back on details from the well-documented careers of Augustine,Ambrose, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Perhaps to help his readers draw generali-zations and avoid invoking popular images of well-known figures, he tends toavoid calling famous bishops or councils by name, sending the curious readerscrambling through his endnotes to verify identities.

MacMullen traces four components at work in the deliberations: the demo-cratic, the cognitive, the “supernaturalist,” and the violent. Even in an empireruled by an absolute sovereign, Roman citizens exercised power by assembling tochant acclamations, which were carefully recorded and dispatched to the emperor.Because ecclesiastical deliberations mirrored the form of civil courts, the loudly


expressed sentiments of ordinary bishops, although open to possible manipulationby crowd “managers,” could influence the outcomes of councils. MacMullenemphasizes the substantive cognitive aspect of theological controversies. Educatedbishops communicated weighty theological ideas to their congregations throughsermons and songs and by dubbing abstract theological suppositions with thename of a well-known heretic, such as Arius or Nestorius. Less well-educatedbishops struggled to keep up with their more intellectually inclined peers. Theburden of making sense out of complex and competing doctrinal statementsweighed heavily on bishops (and lay Christians) because of the eternal significanceof each verdict. MacMullen’s idealization of the earlier pagan elite who hadceased to fear the gods betrays his distaste for the faith of late-antique Christians,whom he refers to as “superstitious” and “irrational.” This perspective sets thestage for his final compilation of violent acts committed in the name of “ortho-doxy,” which led by his estimate to twenty-five thousand deaths. The late Romanworld was permeated by brutality, and the church was not immune.

Read this book for the author’s insight into the practical mechanics throughwhich consensus emerged from church councils and the bottom-up view of theirproceedings. For students of early Christianity it is a valuable complement toprevious scholarly treatments that focused exclusively on well-known ecclesiasti-cal personalities and separated the study of theology from the messy entangle-ments of late antique civic life.

Gordon College Jennifer L. Hevelone-Harper

Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain. Edited by Peter Mandler. (Oxford,England: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 214. $99.00.)

Edited collections are notoriously hard to sell, and the price of this volume atteststo Oxford University Press’s low opinion of its marketability. Occasionally,though, a collection comes along that is so well conceived and coherent, itscontributions so uniformly high in quality, as to merit publication in a format thatwould make it accessible to a wide audience. This is one such volume. Most of theessays here were written for a 2001 conference on the state of the field of Victorianstudies, a conference whose call for papers, revealingly, yielded virtually nosubmissions in political history. At this point, Peter Mandler was asked to orga-nize sessions and commission contributions. The volume’s coherence, then, stemslargely from his sure sense of the topics to be surveyed and the historians whowould best survey them.


The subject at hand—“liberty and authority”—is broadly conceived. AsMandler points out in his introduction, the Victorian polity saw both a steadyretraction of the state’s coercive and fiscal apparatuses and an expansion of formsof discipline enacted through the workplace, the civic sphere, and the home. Boththe overt coercive apparatuses and the societal structures are accorded attentionhere, with essays by Philip Harling and Peter Baldwin on the powers and com-parative weight of the Victorian state, by Margot Finn (a particularly fine contri-bution) and Arthur Burns on the authority of the law and the church, respectively,and by Paul Johnson and Boyd Hilton on the way a liberalized market andchanging moral values disciplined the populace. Three essays by J. P. Parry,Eugenio Biagini, and Helen Rogers round out the collection by evaluating howliberals, radicals, and politicized women understood and sought to operate politi-cally within this shifting landscape. The fact that several essays (especially thoseby Parry, Biagini, Harling, and Hilton) essentially reprise the authors’ books doesnot detract from their usefulness; it is, in fact, the sole research paper (Rogers’sessay on the Contagious Diseases Acts) that, in this company, seems narrow andout of place.

Many of these essays subscribe to a view of the nature of the Victorian polityassociated with Hilton and with the late Colin Matthew, to whose memory thebook is dedicated. This is fitting, for Hilton’s arguments about liberalism’s debtto evangelicalism and Matthew’s portrait of Gladstone’s sometimes anguishedworking-out of this genealogy within his psyche and his party alike, have beenrightly influential. We now better understand why and how the drive towardseconomic and political liberalization coexisted with, and was sustained by,repressive religious and cultural norms. At times, however, this argumentbecomes too schematic, and the anxieties of a governing elite are read as thevoluntary choices of “the Victorians” as a whole. When Philip Harling tells us,for example, that “the mid-Victorians . . . sought to preserve an unobtrusiveframework of government that left them to get on with the business of living,”and that, “[f]or the most part, they got what they wanted,” it is surely reason-able to ask what slice of the mostly unenfranchised mid-Victorian populace hehas in mind (43). Insightful arguments have a tendency to become the neworthodoxy, and in view of that danger, Johnson’s stubborn insistence on thecoercive and class-ridden nature of a market economy, that (for example) con-tinued to imprison significant numbers of workpeople for breach of contract,is most welcome.

Columbia University Susan Pedersen


France in 1938. By Benjamin F. Martin. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 2005. Pp. x, 252. $18.95.)

This author’s latest book offers a chronologically organized narrative history of1938 in France that focuses on France’s response to Nazism, culminating in theMunich Accords. Although films by Marcel Carné, novels by Jean-Paul Sartre,and newspaper sources are used to reconstruct the mood of the period, France in1938 is mostly based on secondary materials.

The intended audience of general readers will likely appreciate the verve ofBenjamin F. Martin’s prose. The portraits of Léon Blum and Edouard Daladier arevivid and powerful. The murder stories that begin each chapter capture thereader’s attention as do curious details such as André Maginot’s death from eatingbad oysters. Also engaging are Martin’s recounting of public foreign policydebates and his use of colorful analogies, such as that between F. Scott Fitzgerald’sdecline and that of the Third Republic.

Martin uses his abundant narrative skill to tell a tale of “moral collapse” (177).France suffered from “failure of nerve, absence of character, and cynical interne-cine hatred” (45). Failing to live up to its responsibilities, France let everyone else“go to the devil” as it passively reacted to Nazi advances (80). Self-righteous, theFrench were hypocritical and dishonorable. The moral bankruptcy of France’sforeign policy paralleled the acquittals of the murderers who introduce the book’schapters. In sum: “So much in France during these years was vile and pernicious”(221).

Martin believes that France was wrong to avoid war in 1938 as it “would havefavored the Western democracies just as war in 1939 favored Germany” (220).The abdication of 1938 was a dress rehearsal for that of 1940, in which Francedeluded itself into believing that Hitler would not attack. The year 1938 alsoforeshadowed the subsequent occupation by revealing “the relish with whichsome of the French would submit to Nazi wishes and the indifference to thisprostitution by almost everyone else” (214). For Martin, 1938 was a decisive yearin which the crucial moral decisions were made that determined France’s laterconduct.

Martin’s argument is weak because it gives short shrift to questions of rear-mament and military preparedness. Contrary to Martin, French leaders had goodreason to believe that they would be better prepared to fight Hitler after 1938.Intensive rearmament programs began in 1936 and were redoubled in 1938, butthey would only bear fruit in 1939 and 1940. From this perspective, the signingof the Munich Accords was a rational decision. Further, following Munich there


was a major shift in French opinion such that France met war in 1939 with adetermination similar to that of 1914. By 1940, the French army was actuallymore motorized and had more and better tanks than the Germans. France wasdefeated neither by a failure of morale nor lack of arms, but because Hitlersuccessfully gambled everything on a risky offensive that took advantage ofstructural weaknesses in French military doctrine. If the war was lost primarily formilitary reasons, it matters little whether a few murderers were acquitted forcrimes of passion in 1938. Martin spins an eloquent morality tale, but historio-graphically speaking, it is beside the point.

Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Michael Scott Christofferson

The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953. By Billie Melman.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 363. $19.00.)

How did English men and women view their past? Indeed, what past did theyview? These are the two questions the author asks in this fascinating book. Fromthe arrival of Marie Tussaud in England with thirty wax figures to the coronationof Elizabeth II and the advent of mass television, the author describes a past thatdiffers very much from the “Merrie” and rural England we often envision.Madame Tussaud’s waxworks transformed the past from a rural utopia to anurban scene filled with violence and horror. As a result, she made the FrenchRevolution English and, in a sense, respectable. She also began what would laterbe called “hands-on” history and the democratization of museums.

The continuing revolutions of 1830 and 1848 kept interest in the FrenchRevolution high, and Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens continued whatTussaud had begun. Carlyle invited his reader to “view” the Revolution fromvarious prominent spots. He also shifted the driving force from Tussaud’s greatman to the urban lower classes and highlighted the role of women. Dickens’sA Tale of Two Cities continued this trend while stressing that “the prison andgallows” were necessary for “making sense of history” (97). Emphasis on theprison and gallows made Lady Jane Grey an unlikely hero to the Victorians.Playing on the older “Newgate novels” whose heroes escaped, the nine-days’queen became the symbol of a kind of prison that existed for women everywhere,in the home as well as the Tower.

The later Victorians’ appetite for “historical tourism” led to a debate over whoowned history. Hampton Court, which was considered safe, had free admission,but the Tower of London was dangerous, so its fees kept it out of reach of the


poorer classes. Even on reduced-fee days, their numbers were restricted and accessstrictly regimented.

After the Second Reform Bill, the English shifted their gaze to the glorificationof the empire and the Elizabethan age. These themes were particularly emphasizedin historical films that brought the monarchy back to the “centre of a past worthremembering” (188). Indeed, film, mass-circulation newspapers, and the wirelesscreated a common mass culture for the first time. But films like The Private Lifeof Henry VIII reopened the question: who owns history—the experts who criticizeits accuracy or the public who enthusiastically consume it?

The twentieth century saw further change in the use of the past. As Britainbecame more democratic, popular biographers shifted their focus from ordinarypeople towards the elite. Ironically it was another foreigner, Baroness EmmuskaOrczy, whose book, The Scarlet Pimpernel, led this aristocratic revival.

Billie Melman concludes with the disappointing reception of Benjamin Britten’sopera Gloriana, which was planned to highlight Elizabeth II’s coronation. Itsscore may have been the new English music for which critics had called, but itstheme of a decaying queen was not one his audiences were ready to hear. Sheconcludes that the consumers of history had become the shapers of history.

Saginaw Valley State University Robert C. Braddock

A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II, 408–450. By FergusMillar. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xxvi, 279.$49.95.)

As early as the third century, the Greek-speaking eastern half of the RomanEmpire began to separate itself administratively from the Latin-speaking westernlands. Diocletian legitimized that tendency with his constitutional reforms, and,by the death of Theodosius I [395], the principle of separate eastern and westernRoman regimes was firmly entrenched. From that point on, according to FergusMillar, the two regimes acted more often as “twin empires” than as a singleRoman state.

In A Greek Roman Empire, Millar focuses exclusively on documents pertain-ing to the eastern court of Theodosius II, primarily the relevant portions of theCodex Theodosianus, the Novellae of Theodosius, the Codex Justinianus, and theActa of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Source studies are, of course,invaluable to the study of Late Antiquity, a period when nearly every branch ofliterature presents its own unique problems of interpretation. Unfortunately,Millar adds little to the textual criticism of fifth-century sources. His primary


argument, extraordinarily enough, is that the Eastern Empire spoke and wrote inGreek, rather than in Latin—a point so banal as to be obvious to any competentWestern Civilization student. Millar frequently comments on how “remarkable”a source is, but his analysis seldom reaches any deeper than his observation thatthe sources were written in Greek, a point he repeats at least a hundred times overthe course of the text, much like his equally banal and repetitive assertion thatmost imperial laws were merely letters. Millar never follows through on hispromise of examining the sources as literature. Nor does he extract from thesources any new or unique insights into the administration, religion, or cultureof the period.

A Greek Roman Empire is based on the Sather Lectures that Millar deliveredin 2002–2003. Sadly, the book betrays its lecture roots all too often and wasallowed to reach publication as a rambling, seemingly unedited volume withoutany clear direction. At times, one even wonders if the book was peer-reviewedprior to publication. For example, Millar asserts that the division of the empirewas the accidental result of Theodosius I having to divide the throne between histwo sons (3). Of course, Theodosius would never have made such a division hadthere not already been clear precedent, going back into the third century, for anEast/West split, but Millar omits this and inexplicably speaks of the twin empiresas if they had begun during the reigns of Arcadius and Honorius—a spectacularomission for a book ostensibly arguing for the development of a separate Greekempire.

Millar’s final chapter has some interesting observations about the practice ofapproaching the imperial court. However, in general, this reviewer cannot findanything in A Greek Roman Empire sufficient to recommend it for readers atany level.

Eastern Connecticut State University David Frye

International Mobility in the Military Orders (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries):Travelling on Christ’s Business. Edited by Helen Nicholson and Jochen Burgtorf.(Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 218. $59.75.)

The rise of Islamic militancy and the terrorist attacks on the United States andother countries have helped fuel a renaissance in crusader studies. This collectionof fifteen essays, originating as sessions of the 2002 International MedievalCongress at Leeds, contributes to this revival.

A complete list of the contents and contributors to this volume can be found onthe web site of the European publisher, the University of Wales Press (http://


www.uwp.co.uk/holding_frame. html). An introductory essay by Alan Forey pro-vides a useful guide to the contents and contribution of each article, as well as ajudicious assessment of the overall significance of the collection.

This is not a volume for beginners. There is no general background on thecharacter or evolution of the several medieval military orders. The essays launchimmediately into the single theme that unites the diverse studies in the book: thegeographical mobility of members of the many European military orders. Thetravels described in this volume are mostly political or administrative in nature,not military, and are confined, for the most part, to movements within Europe.

Two general conclusions unite these disparate studies: first, that many, perhapsmost, members of these famously mobile institutions traveled rarely, if ever,beyond their journeys to and from fighting fronts. Only the upper-class membersof the orders undertook the danger, expense, and discomforts of travel andrelocation, which were often, as today, the price for personal advancement.Second, the extent of travel is difficult to estimate owing to a general paucity ofevidence during the twelfth- and thirteenth-century flowering of the militaryorders. The activist, nonintellectual military orders left nothing like the relativelyvoluminous records of the more learned and sedentary religious orders. Many ofthe conclusions of these studies are necessarily tentative owing to their reliance onprosopographical studies. These are based on individuals who carry a few verycommon first names, to which other useful identifying markers, such as place oforigin or personal epithet, might or might not be added.

Most of the essays are quite brief, reflecting their origin as conference papers.One exception is David Macomb’s seventeen-page minihistory of the Order ofSt. Lazarus in England. Read together with a brief paper by J. P. Jankrift on themilitary Order of Lepers, these two studies offer a fascinating picture of themobility and combat readiness of fighting monk-lepers and the destabilizingconsequences of the disappearance of the disease in the fourteenth century.Macomb’s article is also useful in highlighting the importance of fund-raising inthe military orders. The complexities and difficulties of financing costly militaryactivities are also the focus of Theresa Vann’s essay on the Hospitallers onRhodes. This latter article also highlights the importance of the Hospitallers whostruggled against rising powers in the later Middle Ages, such as the Mamelukesand Ottomans. A second essay on the Hospitallers on Rhodes, by J. Sarnowsky,departs from the “travel” theme to paint a rich and detailed portrait of Hospitallerlife on Rhodes in the fifteenth century. His description of sexual offenses anddisputatious encounters reminds the reader of the “barracks and barroom”dimension of these fighting monastic orders.


http://www.uwp.co.uk/holding_frame

The essays in this volume shed light on our very imperfect understanding of theinternal history of the crusading orders, particularly within Europe. This in turnwill contribute to a more sophisticated general understanding of the Crusades andof the evolution of religious orders in the High and late Middle Ages.

Kalamazoo College John B. Wickstrom

Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History. By Cormac Ó Gráda.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 294. $35.00.)

As an academic subject, the history of Irish Jewry has often drawn interest fromthe notoriety of the Irish-Jewish protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom.Louis Hyman’s work, The Jews of Ireland from Earliest Times to the Year 1910[1972] included a “Jewish Backgrounds of Ulysses” chapter, and Dermot Keogh’sJews in Twentieth-Century Ireland [1998] continually made references to thenovel. In light of this, Cormac Ó Gráda’s study brings new research and inter-viewee narratives to our understanding of the religious and socioeconomic cultureof an immigrant community that, although never large or widely influential,nonetheless remains a test case for Ireland because of the “unimportance ofimmigration in modern Irish history, at least before the era of the Celtic Tiger inthe 1990’s [sic]” (1–2). This recognition acknowledges Joyce as a cultural histo-rian: his Irish-Jew was constructed in part to disclose how republicanism, racialand religious prejudice, and xenophobia shaped turn-of-the-century nationalistDublin. Ó Gráda expands on this to include revealing statistics and witnesstestimony on the circumspect Irish interest in this group of “strangers” who livedcheek-to-jowl among Catholics, lent money at fair rates (known as “theJewmen”), became reliable small businessmen, and were more insular and obser-vant than Joyce included in his portrait of the marginally Jewish, converted,assimilated Bloom.

One compelling area of interest here is the religious practices (including dietarylaws), hygiene, and educational choices of the primarily Lithuanian immigrantswho made up the Cork, Limerick, and Dublin communities. Although aware ofthe pitfalls of oral histories, these sections relate narratives that confirm DublinJews predominantly kept kosher, attended the community ritual bathhouse ormikvah, were more likely to employ laundresses and charwomen, and consumedmuch less alcohol than their Catholic socioeconomic counterparts (164–177).Statistics bare out that these practices played a role in the health, vitality, andeconomic success of the community from its early impoverished period onward.


Yet, such practices also kept the immigrant and host communities from integrat-ing or intermarrying.

Perhaps the most significant contribution this study makes to both Joycescholarship and questions of Irish cultural inclusions and exclusions is its discus-sion of how Irish communities received the Jewish newcomers and, in turn, howthe newcomers perceived the native Irish. Unfortunately, high-profile events suchas the 1904 Limerick boycott of Jewish business, the recognition of Judaism in the1937 Irish constitution, and the election of Robert Briscoe as Lord Mayor ofDublin in 1956 and 1961 have previously overshadowed detailed analysis of thetwo-way negotiations of difference (179). Though before the arrival of the“Litvak” community, the idea of an Irish Jew was foreign to most natives. ÓGráda concludes that, aside from nationalist and militant Catholic anti-Semitism,only occasional economic-based activities provoked anti-Jewish feelings. He alsorelates Yiddish expressions that reveal “Litvaks” often arrived with prejudicestoward their new countrymen as drunken or dim-witted “goyim” (183–184).Although some interviewees recalled taunting between Jewish and Catholic chil-dren, others claimed that, although adult communities never dined or socializedtogether, many of their close friends while young were from the other side(184–200). A final schism surrounded the fact that much of the Jewish communityremained unionists before the troubles, and given the choice, did not attendCatholic schools.

For both Joyce scholars and historians of immigrant groups in Britain, thisstudy is a fascinating piece of research that, much to its credit, relates a host ofinterview testimony to fill out the flavor and nuance of the Irish-Jewish commu-nity during what would prove to be its heyday.

Oregon State University Neil R. Davison

Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. By Scott W.Palmer. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xx, 307. $40.00.)

The author asks “What is ‘Russian’ about Russian aviation?” With this book hehas written a cultural history of Russian and Soviet aviation up to 1945. Thestudy has three sections bounded chronologically by Blériot’s cross-Channel flight[1909], the Bolshevik Revolution [1917], Stalin’s “Great Breakthrough” [1929],and victory over Germany [1945]. It draws on the Russian archives and contem-porary publications, together with a substantial secondary literature, and repro-duces (in monochrome) many fascinating photographs and posters.


The main feature of Russia’s “culture of flight,” Scott W. Palmer suggests,was that aviation symbolized the advancement of the West. This was perceivedas both threat and opportunity. Responding to the threat before a single aircrafthad reached Russia, the secret police enacted border controls on aviation (15).After that, attitudes changed quickly. Public spirit embraced aviation as asymbol of modernity and an opportunity to modernize Russia. Through avia-tion, Russia would prove to be the West’s equal, and would be born again asa civilized country. Through aviation Russia could defend itself, because thecivilized countries that had brought aviation into being might use it to attackRussia.

In comparing Soviet air-mindedness with that of Russia before the revolution,Palmer comes out strongly for continuity (82). The Bolsheviks inherited the ideathat the Soviet Union could catch up and overtake the West in a single great leap,by focusing a vast collective effort on aviation technology. Similarities included theemphasis on public spirit over private initiative, the advertisement of domesticpioneers in preference to foreign achievements, and the illusory goal of nationalself-sufficiency contrasted with persistent dependence on foreign designs andadvances in reality. Some themes became more elaborate, including the potentialof aviation to integrate a large, poor society, to promote the image of the Sovietstate abroad, and to counter aerial attack. The Bolsheviks differed from theirpredecessors mainly in the Stalinist readiness to sacrifice living standards and livesto achieve these goals (8).

The story that Palmer tells is intriguing but not wholly convincing. He claimsit is specific to Russia, but did Japan not follow a similar path (2)? Palmercriticizes the Soviet strategy of “institutionalising dependence on the West,” butwhat alternative was there? Aviation technology has always been global, not theproperty of any one country; it would not have made sense for the Soviet Unionto aspire to true self-sufficiency (285). Anyway, the strategy deserves more creditthan that; Soviet industry developed a capacity for rapid copying and appropriatemodification without which it could have made little use of what was borrowed.How else did the Soviet Union have aircraft that could win air superiority overGermany in World War II (262, 266)? Finally, it is a pity to see yet another historyof the Stalin period that could not resist adding a cursory survey of the next fiftyyears to underpin a subtitle about “The Fate of Modern Russia” (75–281).

That said, historians and air enthusiasts will enjoy this book and learn muchfrom it.

University of Warwick Mark Harrison


Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. ByKatharine Park. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 419. $36.95.)

With this ground-breaking, beautifully written book, the author debunks twomyths about the relationship between science, religion, and gender in medievalItaly. Like numerous other historians of medieval science, the author attacks thelong-standing misconception, first posed by Cornell president Andrew DicksonWhite, that “presents religion and science as diametrically opposed” and “theChurch as deeply hostile to dissection” (21). Instead, Katharine Park looksbeyond the practice of dissection in university medical study, examining othercontexts in which human bodies were opened, such as funerary practices, thecult of relics surrounding medieval saints, and caesarian sections performed onwomen who died in childbirth. She convincingly shows that religious practicesregarding the human body—most notably that “holy anatomies” aimed atconfirming the miraculous bodies of female candidates for sainthood—were infact critical to the emergence of dissection in late medieval and early modernItaly.

More importantly, Park is the first to show the centrality of gender to theorigins of anatomical practice in the West. In the process, Park deflates the“wishful fiction” propagated by the modern women’s health movement thatcharacterizes medieval Europe as a “lost age” when knowledge about women’sbodies was the sole province of midwives and other “wise women,” until theywere stripped of this knowledge during the infamous witch trials of the latesixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In other words, says Park, “there wereno Martha Ballards in late medieval Italy” (258). In fact, observes Park, thepressure on elite married couples to produce male heirs, combined with highmaternal and infant mortality rates and deaths from epidemic disease, compelledthese families in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to turn increasingly tolearned male physicians for advice in treating infertility, supervising pregnancyand childbirth, and caring for infants and young children. This expanding marketfor medical treatment of women and children in turn led male physicians, theo-logians, natural philosophers, and even literate laymen to explore the innerworkings of female bodies in order fully to understand the “secrets of women”that governed reproduction. Even holy women’s bodies were subject to thisintensified scrutiny of the female reproductive system, since the presence of Christin female bodies was likened to that of the father’s seed in the womb. The endresult of these studies of female anatomy was that women’s bodies, both saintlyand secular, became defined almost exclusively in terms of sexuality and repro-


duction. At the same time, women were systematically excluded from universities,medical societies, and other sources of learned knowledge.

In summary, this book represents a major contribution to the history ofanatomy as well as to a growing historical literature that shows the continuitybetween late medieval and early modern science and medicine. Although thisreviewer is a historian of women’s health in the twentieth-century United States,she found this book very accessible and relevant to her own work. The reviewerhighly recommends this not only to specialists, but to anyone interested in learn-ing more about the roots of modern-day views about the female body. Park’s clearand elegant writing, as well as the rich illustrations, make this book suitable forboth undergraduate and graduate courses in medieval history, history of scienceand medicine, and women’s history.

Central Connecticut State University Heather Munro Prescott

The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: The Origins of the Spanish CivilWar. By Stanley Payne. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. viii,420. $40.00.)

A producer of thorough scholarship, the author has published fifteen tomes ontwentieth-century Spain. He relates the convoluted history of Spain’s SecondRepublic from June 1931 to July 1936 when a military junta, soon led byFrancisco Franco, sought to overthrow the tottering Republic. This book’s greatstrength is its notes. But this detailed study is difficult to read and review becauseof too many “ifs” and “could have beens.” Stanley Payne is tempted to settle oldscores with historians, journalists, and Spanish politicians, living and dead, whomhe deems too tolerant of revolutionary ideas and actions. However, the authoris almost as harsh on Spanish right-wing politicians as he is on the left wing.He spotlights the period of right-wing ascendancy between the elections ofNovember 1933 and February 1936.

One theme of this study is the undercutting by leading Spanish politicians ofthe flawed 1931 Constitution, and the author should have published its text. MostSpanish leaders did not respect their multiparty constitution, which was modeledon the French Third Republic anyway. Major parliamentary figures ManuelAzaña, Niceto Acalá Zamora, Alessandro Lerroux, José Gil Robles, and IndalecioPrieto; Socialist labor leader Francisco Largo Caballero Union General de Traba-jadores (UGT); and the anarchists in the Confederacion del Trabajo (CNT) unionall contributed to undermining the government. Thus, egoists, unable to compro-mise, failed a negotiated cabinet system. This book is imaginative and original, but


the real Spaniards of the 1930s did not possess the author’s retrospective spyglasson their times.

The author proves his point of excessive party factionalism by listing the resultsof the much-disputed election of 16 February 1936 (177). The winners were aseventeen-party Popular Front coalition on the Left; the losers were nine partieson the Right. The six parties in the center lost the bargaining power they hadenjoyed in 1935.

The author suggests that Lerroux might have co-opted the Socialists and theCatholics, who were two big parties. But in the eyes of both the Right and the Left,Lerroux was too old and too tinged with big city corruption as boss of Barcelona.

The author favors “conservatives” or “moderates,” words that do not fit thepassionate politicians who convulsed Spain from 1931 to July 1936, termingthemselves monarchists, Catholics, Socialists, democrats, republicans, liberals,leftists, rightists, radicals, anarchists, Communists, spiritual fascists and formalFalangists, Carlists, Castilians, Basques, Catalans, Andalusians, and even a fewTrotskyites and Leninists. A clever turn of rhetoric makes the ideological “fas-cists” or “radical right” either a major or a minor movement. Payne underplaysthese Carlists or Traditionalists who spurred the growth of the quasifascistNationalist Movement.

According to the author, the Francoist generals and colonels did not fire thefirst shots. He implies that Republicans from 1931 to 1936—plus the disorders hedetails from February to July—killed the spirit of democracy. This made militaryrebellion almost necessary, if not inevitable.

After the civil war the united Nationalists dominated Spain until Franco’sdeath in 1975. Payne dedicates this study to early post-Franco leader AdolfoSuarez, whose party’s history he calls “brief but glorious” (v).

Ohio University Robert H. Whealey

Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century. ByMaria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams. (New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang,1996. Pp. xiii, 181. $66.95.)

Less a biography and more a brief glimpse into Renaissance Florence, this bookcenters on the role of Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici to reveal one aspect of thepowerful and prominent Medici clan. The authors delicately balance severalaspects to flesh out the entire cultural sphere of a medieval household: a study ofLucrezia along with her husband and son; some general background context on


the Italian Renaissance and humanism; and a description of the Medicis’ posses-sions, art, and clients.

The key for this study is in fact the extended family of Medicis, not limited torelations but also including its clients, friends, and allies. Lucrezia did not haveany power in her own right, but her connections among this network of familyallowed her to influence decisions and actions. Lucrezia was both ordinary andextraordinary. She was a typical woman of the late-medieval world, because sheplayed an integral part in the decision-making process of the family, but withoutany public role. She was extraordinary, however, because her family was theMedicis. Two of her grandsons would become popes, and her great-great-granddaughter was the mother of Louis XIV. As such, scholars with an interest inthe role of women in political or royal households will find much to consider here.

In terms of understanding Lucrezia’s unique contributions to Renaissancesociety, the final chapters of the book are the most revealing. Following herhusband’s death, and with her relatively young son Lorenzo leading the family,Lucrezia became an empowered figure. Her son relied on her advice and socialconnections as political tools. She gained financial independence in order toobtain a greater role in public life, including investing in a business and sponsor-ing artists and poets in her own right. Interestingly, Lucrezia also composed aseries of poems on apocryphal subjects, including Judith, Esther, and Susanna. Inthis section, the authors make a particularly effective argument about Lucrezia’sability to use these poems to explore themes of value for her own life, includingpoems on the dominance of men.

Some minor issues detract from the usefulness of the study. The casual use ofItalian throughout the text can be frustrating; certainly a translation could havebeen provided in the notes, if not in the text itself, to assist the nonspecialistreader. The discussion of the material culture should have been better integratedwithin each chapter. Frequently lists of jewels or clothes seem more like theinventory from which the authors mined the data rather than evidence for apresentation of Lucrezia’s world. As a result, the significance of owning suchwealth is underplayed.

In the end, the weakness here seems to be primarily the book’s short length.The insights provided on Lucrezia and her role within the Medici family prove thesubject worthy of more attention. For taking a positive step toward uncoveringthe significant role of women during the Renaissance, the authors can only becomplimented.

University of Hawai’i at Manoa Matthew P. Romaniello


The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935. ByEva Plach. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 262. $42.95.)

As one of the so-called “Successor States” in East-Central Europe after the FirstWorld War, the Second Polish Republic experienced a baptism of fire. Economicand political crises, coupled with implacable hostility from her neighbors,Germany and the Soviet Union, helped create an unstable parliamentary demo-cratic system of government that finally fell victim to Marshal Józef Piłsudski’scoup d’état in May 1926, which ushered in the epoch of the Sanacja regime.

Eva Plach’s monograph eschews the traditional preoccupations of historianswith the political and institutional dimensions of the coup. Instead, it focuses onthe contemporary debates, particularly among the left-liberal intelligentsia ofWarsaw, about the regime’s self-proclaimed mission to inaugurate a fresh andbetter era of moral regeneration; spiritual renewal; civic responsibility; and politi-cal, social, and sexual reform. Many of the regime’s supporters aspired to “mod-ernise” Poland’s national identity, to divorce it from the conservative values ofCatholicism and traditional patriotism in favor of a broadly secular, “progressive”model. By 1930, however, most of this politically and culturally left-wing idealism(or, in some cases, self-interest) behind the nebulous concept of a “new Poland”had evaporated in the face of governmental authoritarianism, while by the time ofPiłsudski’s death, in 1935, it had vanished altogether. In short, Plach examines atransient and ultimately inefficacious phenomenon.

Plach also provides interesting information about some of the influencesseeking to set the agenda for radical change after 1926. These include leadingpersonalities, notably the controversial maverick, Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski; organi-zations, for example, the Society for Moral Rebirth and the Women’s Union forCitizenship Work; literary periodicals like The Way (Droga); and other writings,among them letters sent to Piłsudski by atypical members of the public. However,this study is undermined by the tendentious emphasis and interpretation thatreflect Plach’s predilection for the left-liberal outlook she discusses, and thecorollary, her implicit aversion to anything or anyone representative of the nation-alist Right, which had its own distinctive ideas about how to mold Poland. Thus,both the narrative and analysis lack an objectively balanced perspective. Thisessential weakness is compounded by the disproportionate prominence given tothe input of individual women, such as the socialist, Zofia Moraczewska, and tothe debate about women’s rights and gender roles because, in reality, only ahandful of feminist writers and activists were involved and their wider influencewas exiguous.


The text also reveals throughout a disconcerting susceptibility to hyperbole.Phrases such as “incredibly powerful,” “fantastically wide range,” “politicalpolarization had reached fever pitch,” and, more seriously, “the profound failureof each successive government of newly independent Poland” and “Poland’spostwar moral panic,” are particularly jarring. More disappointingly, there is noacknowledgement of Poland’s undoubted successes before 1926: her resoundingdefeat of the Bolsheviks in 1920, the currency reform of 1924, the rebuilding ofher infrastructure, and the even-handed treatment of her ethnic minorities, all ofwhich importantly shaped the country’s development. That is the context in whichthis otherwise useful study should have been more assertively situated.

University of Stirling Peter D. Stachura

Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. By Geoffrey Roberts. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 468. $39.00.)

Joseph Stalin plays an odd role in the historiography of the twentieth century. Onthe one hand, he is readily included among the century’s other monsters: Hitler,Mao, and Mussolini. On the other hand, he was an essential ally of the West in thegreat struggle against Nazi Germany. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the endof the Cold War, along with the opening of numerous Russian archives, have madereappraisals of Stalin’s career both possible and necessary.

Geoffrey Roberts has made good use of the Foreign Policy Archives of theRussian Federation, Peoples Commissariat of International Affairs (NKVD)reports, numerous Russian newspapers, and a wide range of secondary sources inRussian and English to provide both specialists and general readers with a usefuland detailed narrative of the Soviet dictator, especially his role as warlord and hisleadership during the early years of the Cold War. Although he explicitly rejectsany rehabilitation of the dictator and does not try to hide his ruthless actions, hedoes attempt a “revision” of this “great man” (xii, 370).

Roberts’s thesis is that Stalin was far more pragmatic, idealistic, and defensivethan commonly believed. When Britain and France sought to aid Finland duringthe Winter War, Stalin pulled back rather than risk conflict with the West. Heturned the war against Hitler into a patriotic rather than a communist crusade,and was willing to make compromises at the Allied conferences in Teheran, Yalta,and Potsdam. He called off the Berlin blockade in 1948 when he realized that itwas only alienating the German people. Although he authorized the North Koreaninvasion, he avoided a confrontation with the United States.


None of these claims is especially controversial. Far more questionable is theauthor’s contention that the Cold War was provoked by Churchill’s “IronCurtain” speech, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the “overly defen-sive actions” of the West (354). Roberts ignores the brutal tactics of Russianpolice organs in deporting democratic representatives from Poland and Hungaryand the impact of the communist coup in Prague, although he does admit thatStalin wanted to create “an ideological buffer zone” (245).

Almost ludicrous is the author’s contention that “without Stalin’s leadershipthe war against Nazi Germany probably would have been lost” (xi). Who elsecould have led the Soviet Union after Stalin had centralized all powers in his handsand purged all possible rivals including the most competent military leaders?Roberts never mentions the abandonment of the Stalin Line after 1939, and holdsthe High Command equally responsible for the next forty years (after Stalin’sdeath in 1953). Roberts’s contention that “the Soviet system was seen ([bywhom?!]) as a viable alternative to western liberal democratic capitalism, a statethat competed effectively with the West economically, politically and ideologi-cally” raises the question: why then did this flourishing state collapse (4)?

University of Central Florida Bruce F. Pauley

Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. By James A.Schultz. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 242. $39.00.)

Historians’ study of sexuality has been informed by critical theory since MichelFoucault—a quote from whom begins this book’s introduction. Here the authorapplies such theoretical approaches to medieval courtly texts that glorified roman-tic love. Studying primarily poems written in Middle High German around theyear 1200, most notably Parzival, Tristan und Isold, and the Nibelungenlied, heapplies some of the same methods that have been used to study transgressivesexuality to the study of “courtly love.” He brushes off arguments about theterm’s problematic nature (it is a modern, not a medieval term, and scholars havebeen unable to agree whether its heart was adultery or distant yearnings), using itin a broad sense for heterosexual romance in an aristocratic context.

The history of both love and sexuality has moved rapidly, and sometimes theauthor’s analysis does not seem to have kept up with the field. For example, he stillaccepts Thomas Laqueur’s theory of a “one-sex” model of the body in the MiddleAges, in spite of the highly convincing critique by Joan Cadden, The Meanings ofSex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993). The application of modern theoretical approaches to courtly litera-


ture is less novel than he suggests; for example, he overlooks Sarah Kay’s CourtlyContradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), with its extensive discussion ofLacanian psychoanalysis. In his final chapter, he offers some interesting sugges-tions as to why noblemen would have sponsored literature that showed them ina subservient position to women, in particular, that such literature helped noblesdeal psychologically with the increased constraints on them from royal power, thechurch, and even the civilizing effects of courtly behavior. But his conception ofthe twelfth-century society within which this literature was written is based onlittle scholarship more recent than Georges Duby, and the author thus misses theargument that medieval noblemen often really were subservient to women lords—see, for example, Fredric L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World ofthe Troubadours (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

This said, James A. Schultz raises a number of intriguing points about medievalliterature and sexuality. His most important contribution, and one which perhapswould work even better without the apparatus of critical theory, is that we shouldnot take modern ideas of heterosexuality as natural and normal and project themas such onto the twelfth century. For example, although all the stories discussedinvolve love between a man and a woman, the ways that their bodies wereportrayed were remarkably congruent. Both parties were attracted to the other’slovely form: his or her radiant skin; red lips; and beautiful face, arms, and legs.Similarly, medieval figures who fled heterosexual unions generally sought chastity,not same-sex unions. Sometimes a penis just marked an infant as male rather thanserving as an erotic object. Schultz helpfully provides both the Middle HighGerman and an English translation for all his quotations, but one still wishes fornotes at the bottom of the page.

University of Akron Constance B. Bouchard

Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II. By Kenneth Slepyan. (Lawrence,Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Pp. xi, 409. $34.95.)

The title of this study is the key to the author’s intention. In Stalin’s Guerrillas, theauthor focuses on the struggle between the Soviet regime and those fighting behindGerman lines over who would control and, more importantly, who would definethe identity of the partizan. In place of the usual focus on military operations,Kenneth Slepyan provides a political history of a movement largely outside thephysical control of the Stalinist regime and yet determined to retain its Sovietcredentials. The anchor of this story is clearly Panteleimon Kondrat’evich


Ponomarenko, the Belarussian Party chief who headed the central staff of thepartisan movement from Moscow throughout most of its existence, here shownmediating between the various interests involved, including Stalin; the party; thearmy; and, not least, the partisans themselves. Slepyan argues rather convincinglythat the partisan movement was central to the process of reasserting a Sovietpresence in territories conquered by the Germans and also to reestablishing Sovietrule once these territories were retaken.

Slepyan’s research base is impressive, ranging from Soviet archives and con-temporary press accounts to memoirs written by partisans and novels based ontheir experiences. The organization of the book, especially in the repetitiveness ofthe early chapters, betrays its origin as a University of Michigan doctoral thesis,but the final chapter, entitled “The Imagined Stalinist Community,” is a stunninglyoriginal examination of partisan self-identity.

There are also issues of proportion that arise. The extensive material onpartisan relations with Jews fleeing Nazi horrors is both interesting andappalling—the Soviet and partisan distrust of Jews could itself be murderous. Butas a case in how Soviet national identity was redefined during World War II, Jewsand Tatars, who get the most attention here, are hard to accept as typical. Alsounderplayed are the various non-Soviet resistance movements, most notable in thewestern borderlands annexed by the Soviets in 1939 and 1940. Slepyan mentionscompetition with separatist bands, and even with self-defense units protectingpeasant villages from both sides, but gives no sense of the scale of resistancemovements outside Soviet control. In the Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Baltic States,these movements would seriously resist the reimposition of Soviet control at theend of the war, and to some extent it was against them that the partisans definedthemselves during the war.

On another Ukrainian-centered issue, Slepyan goes into great detail on the1943 campaign to attract those tainted by collaboration with the Germans to thepartisan movement, part of Moscow’s desire to use the shift in momentum onthe battlefield to build a broad popular uprising against the retreating enemy.Presumably all these “redefectors” were either shot or sent to the gulag at the endof the war, but on this issue the book offers no more than hints. But this cannotdetract from a solid study and, through defining the political nature and achieve-ment of the Soviet partisan movement, Slepyan makes a serious contribution tothe debate on how the Stalinist regime both survived and was changed by theSecond World War.

Portland State University John R. Braun


The Bonapartes: The History of a Dynasty. By William H. C. Smith. (New York, N.Y.:Hambledon, 2005. Pp. ix, 252. $29.95.)

According to the author of this book, Napoleon was one of the “great men” ofhistory, a leader whose “astonishing career” was a “reflection of his genius” (4).William H. C. Smith takes at face value Napoleon’s self-assessment as “a superiorbeing” and is consequently reluctant to criticize anything about the man whoseized power in a coup d’état, ruled as a dictator, and waged a series of wars thatcost three million lives (12). “The decision to leave his army blockaded in Egyptand to return to France,” Smith tells us, referring to Napoleon’s failed 1799campaign against the Ottoman Empire, “was a bold one, for it risked being seenas treason, cowardice; [sic] or indifference to the fate of his troops” (14). Usingthis logic, one could classify any act of treachery or cowardice as “bold.” Smithdoes acknowledge that Napoleon “abandoned” his army in Russia in 1812,though he rationalizes it by referring to an anti-Napoleonic conspiracy in Paristhat the emperor only learned of after he left his troops. As to Waterloo, whereNapoleon once again fled, the most the author can say is that the emperor had“decided to play a political game by returning to Paris” (76). Nevertheless, thereader is supposed to feel sorry for the ex-emperor imprisoned on St. Helena,where “[t]he constant surveillance, the limitations imposed on his movements, notto mention the debilitating effects of the climate, when added to the wholeclaustrophobic atmosphere, were factors which conspired to make the imprison-ment a torment” (92).

The Bonapartes: The History of a Dynasty is not only about Napoleon I,though nearly half of it is. It is also about his nephew, Louis Napoleon, who ruledFrance, first as President of the Republic after the Revolution of 1848, then,following a coup d’état in 1851 and subsequent proclamation of Empire in 1852,as Emperor Napoleon III. Smith is quick to deny that Napoleon III was a dictator,claiming, “had he been a dictator he could have achieved a great deal more”(158). Of course, a more convincing argument against the charge of dictatorshipwould be that Napoleon III was limited by the institutions of representativegovernment. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and Smith’s vague reference tothe “liberalization” policy the emperor pursued toward the end of his reign begsthe question of what needed to be liberalized. As with Napoleon I, Smith says littleabout the councils and assemblies that provided the illusion of a free constitutionwhile a single man ruled on the basis of his perceived “destiny.”

Napoleon III lost his throne in 1870 as a result of a war he launched againstPrussia, and France lost Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine in the process. But


the Franco-Prussian War was not the emperor’s only misguided adventure. Therehad also been the failed attempt to colonize Mexico during the 1860s; and beforethat, Napoleon III had pursued the Crimean War [1853–1856], in which 750,000people died over a dispute between France and Russia concerning which church(the Catholic or the Orthodox) would have the keys to the Holy Places ofJerusalem. Smith defends the emperor: “Those who accuse Napoleon III of havinggone to war on a frivolous pretext miss the point. He chose to take up the issueprecisely because he thought it could not possibly lead to war” (163). Besides, theauthor adds, the war (in which Britain fought alongside France) was “far frombeing a wasted effort, since it gave rise to the visit of the imperial couple toEngland, and the return visit of Victoria and Albert to Paris” (163). Panglosscould not have put it better himself.

Other members of the Bonaparte clan make largely cameo appearances: Napo-leon’s many siblings (who briefly divided several European thrones among them),his mother, his two wives, his children (legitimate, adoptive, and natural),nephews, nieces, and other descendants and their spouses. Given the author’sfocus on the two emperors and in light of the multiplicity of their family members,however, the result is a superficial treatment of the lesser Bonapartes.

Insofar as it has a thesis, The Bonapartes: The History of a Dynasty claims thatthe Bonapartes constituted France’s “Fourth Dynasty” and that the family wasdisproportionately influential. Precisely what is meant by “Fourth Dynasty” isnever made clear; Smith does not say what the first three were. As to the questionof influence, no one would dispute the impact the two emperors had on Frenchand indeed world history, and in the end Smith’s book is merely the retelling oftwo familiar stories from a remarkably uncritical perspective. It does not help thatthe book is poorly written and riddled with factual, typographical, and editingerrors.

The College of William and Mary Ronald Schechter

Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. By Laura J.Snyder. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x, 386. $45.00.)

This book is an examination of two views on the nature of political and socialreform in the early Victorian age: that of William Whewell, a Cambridge professorof moral philosophy, master of Trinity College, and creator of the natural andmoral sciences triposes at Cambridge, on the one hand, and that of John StuartMill, the utilitarian philosophical radical, on the other. Laura J. Snyder’s massivestudy of the fundamentally different understandings of science and reform that


Whewell and Mill offered Victorian society examines the ways in which each mandeveloped his own understanding of science and its connections to political andsocial behavior, as well as the debates between the two men and their followers.Snyder argues that the differences between the two men’s understanding of scienceand mathematical research shaped not just their scholarship, but the ways inwhich the nature of research and the study of philosophy—and with it otheracademic endeavors—were pursued. Both constructed a reform philosophy thateach believed would effect social and political change in an age when reform wasnecessary, desirable, and chronic. Both saw the future as a direct adaptation of theways in which humans think; construct a scientific understanding of the naturalworld; develop a moral understanding of human behavior; and, ultimately, chooseto correct the failings of that behavior within a political and social structureof reform.

To understand how man viewed the relationship between morality, politics,and science was, for both men, the key to how reform legislation would be shapedand implemented. Mill adapted the ideas of Jeremy Bentham with those of SamuelTaylor Coleridge, articulating a position that the nineteenth-century social sci-ences were best understood through an inductive process of reasoning. Whewell’sphilosophical approach to understanding science and society also utilized theinductive method, bringing together a union of empiricism and priorism to makesense of the universe. They differed as to whether empirical truths about unob-served causes and entities provided true knowledge about causal relationships innature. Their differences in understanding the nature of knowledge and scienceextended into moral and political differences as to the role played by educationand law in reforming the existing sociopolitical world into one more attuned toliberty and individual freedom. As a result, Mill criticized Whewell as an antire-former, and the two debated and criticized each other’s work in one of the moreheated debates of the Victorian reform era.

Snyder concludes that the “particular positions expressed by each [man]. . . [have] a value that goes beyond the historical” (29). To compare Mill’s viewof liberty and Whewell’s inductive reasoning “can provide a starting point fordeveloping a view of the kind of reasoning used in discovering scientific theories,”and the sociopolitical theories for reform that inevitably follow (30). For Snyder,a self-described historian of philosophy and, in particular, the philosophy ofscience, the debate is rich, detailed, and a blueprint for the larger issues of reformin the Victorian age. It is a very challenging study for those who are moreaccustomed to reform philosophy taking the shape of legislation and socialcritique. But tracing the intellectual origins of how two men came to understand


the needs for Victorian reform is, without question, a worthwhile and interestingexamination for the more traditional political or social historian.

University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Nancy LoPatin-Lummis

The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The True Story of a Forgotten Hero inWellington’s Army. By Mark Urban. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers,2003. Pp. 348. $13.95.)

As he prepared to take the offensive against French Imperial armies in the IberianPeninsula in the year 1812, the Duke of Wellington faced a strategic conundrum.Although the French possessed superior numbers, their armies were widely dis-persed to control a hostile population. This offered the possibility of defeatingthem in detail, but what if they were able to concentrate against him? The IronDuke had not survived to this point by taking reckless chances. He needed toknow the enemy’s intentions, and for this he turned to a hardworking staff officerGeorge Scovell [1774–1861], “the man who broke Napoleon’s codes.” Welling-ton had considerable intelligence advantages over his opponents, because Spanishguerillas frequently intercepted French dispatches and sold them to his headquar-ters for hard cash. Scovell, a self-taught code breaker, had become proficient inreading French military codes that were by their nature relatively simple and quickto decipher. Now, however, he was faced with a more formidable challenge.Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph, the King of Spain, was seeking to coordinatethe movement of French armies through the use of a “grand cipher” based uponFrench diplomatic code tables of far greater complexity and difficulty. The “grandcipher” thus concealed the strategic information vital to the execution ofWellington’s plans. Scovell’s success in partially breaking this key code gaveWellington the confidence to attack and defeat the French army of MarshalMarmont at the Battle of Salamanca. Henceforth the initiative would pass to theBritish and their allies in the Peninsula.

Mark Urban has rescued Scovell from relative obscurity. For example, he isunmentioned in David Kahn’s authoritative survey The Code Breakers. CharlesOman devoted an appendix to “The Scovell Ciphers” in Volume V of his Historyof the Peninsula War, which prompted Urban to do further research at the PublicRecord Office at Kew where he found Scovell’s journal and other papers, includ-ing copies of many unpublished French dispatches. From these materials theauthor has provided an account that is satisfying at many levels, for it providesinsight not only into the technical business of code breaking, but also into thenature and practice of military intelligence during one of history’s most important


campaigns. In addition, the author, although recognizing the limitations of hissources, has succeeded in bringing to life an officer of vision, ambition, endurance,and critical intelligence. This is no small achievement, for few officers of Scovell’srank leave more than scant traces of their true selves.

Scovell came from what Urban calls a relatively modest background and wasoriginally apprenticed to an engraver. He portrays him as a hardworking staffofficer, unappreciated by Wellington, but essential to him in many ways. Forexample, not only did Scovell have important intelligence duties, but also hesupervised the British army’s postal system, commanded a detachment ofmounted guides, and created a staff cavalry corps to serve as a kind of militarypolice. Scovell’s sympathies were with the “scientific officers,” graduates of theRoyal Military Academy who sought to impose order and rationality on war.Wellington preferred officers of privileged backgrounds as the best defenders ofthe social order. At the end of the war, Wellington proved ungrateful to Scovell,ignored his plea for assistance, and was content to leave him to wither on halfpay.

It is at this point that one may question Urban’s portrait of a meritoriousmiddle-class officer denied advancement in the fossilized army of the early nine-teenth century. As Urban makes clear, Scovell did not attend a military academynor was he a “scientific officer,” a term usually applied to officers of the artilleryand engineers. Scovell entered the regular army along a privileged path, purchas-ing in 1803 a captain’s commission in the elite Fourth Dragoons for the astro-nomical sum of £3,150. One wonders where a man of modest background foundsuch money. Although he eventually transferred to a cheaper and less fashionableinfantry regiment, the initial investment paid off handsomely in professional termsthrough contacts and friendships that carried over to Wellington’s staff. Scovellnever forgot that he was a cavalry officer, and thus a “member of the club.”Moreover, an appointment to Wellington’s staff was one of the army’s mostsought after prizes, something to which an obscure officer could scarcely aspire.Urban notes that Scovell did not receive the home leaves that were granted officersof higher social rank, but his time in the Peninsula Campaign was eased by thepresence of his wife Mary. After the war, Wellington may have forgotten him, buthis aristocratic friends did not. They provided him with cozy, if unchallenging,appointments. Scovell died a full general and left a fortune of £60,000. In thisstudy, Urban clearly establishes Scovell’s value and accomplishments as a staffofficer and provides an absorbing account of “breaking the code,” but overstateshis role as a meritorious outsider. One might as easily conclude that, rather thanbeing a “scientific officer,” Scovell was one of those highly gifted amateurs that


somehow made the British army work so well. Whatever his faults as a humanbeing, Wellington knew how to pick them.

Adelphi University Armstrong Starkey

The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. By Wolfram Wette. Translated by DeborahLucas Schneider. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xix, 372.$29.95.)

With this major study of the military in Nazi Germany, the author achieves threeimportant goals. First, he establishes the ideological convergence between theGerman generals and the Nazi regime that resulted in the Wehrmacht’s command-ers’ enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler’s unprecedented racial war against theSoviet Union in 1941. Second, he demonstrates the centrality of the Wehrmacht tothe Holocaust and other war crimes of the Nazi regime. Third, he examines indetail the construction of the postwar myth of the Wehrmacht’s supposedly “cleanhands” in the Federal Republic of Germany. Additionally, he describes the recentdestruction of this myth and contributes to this unfolding demythologization. Tosustain his indictment, Wolfram Wette has synthesized a large body of scholarlystudies written by critical military historians in the past thirty years and makesthem accessible to a nonspecialist audience.

The weakest chapter is the one that explores the generals’ perceptions of Russiaand Bolshevism. Whether most generals fully adhered to Hitler’s views of demonicJudeo-Bolshevism as an existential peril to Germany does not emerge clearly. In achapter on the mentality of generals and ordinary soldiers, Wette argues persua-sively that despite tensions between Hitler and his generals, most commandersshared Hitler’s basic assumptions and remained loyalists to the end. Likewise,most of the twenty million rank-and-file soldiers who served in the armed forceswholeheartedly supported the fight against Bolshevism and unquestioninglyabsorbed the regime’s racial ideology.

The chapter on the army and the murder of the Jews contains few surprises.Wette thoroughly documents the indispensable role played by the military in themass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union and Serbia. Far from being honorable,the Wehrmacht was beyond doubt a willing agent of Hitler’s racial crusade andthe Holocaust.

The most rewarding and original section of the book is the one dedicated toexposing the postwar construction of the myth of the Wehrmacht’s “clean hands.”Although war crimes trials conclusively established the Wehrmacht’s criminalacts, Cold War realpolitik intervened. Rapid integration of the Federal Republic in


the Western alliance and rearmament abetted the suppression of the record. TheHistorical Division of the U.S. Army enabled a pro-Nazi general to direct a projectthat systematically covered up the military’s crimes. Eisenhower and Adenauerdeclared that most German soldiers and officers had served honorably. Within theFederal Republic the new Bundeswehr invoked traditions of the Wehrmacht until1982; politicians applied pressure to the Central Bureau for the Prosecution ofNational Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg to exclude war crimes; and a rider to a1968 Misdemeanors Bill exempted war criminals from further prosecution. Thisabysmal record of politically motivated falsification did not begin to unravel untilthe 1980s, when critical military historians began to reexamine the evidence. Thetraveling Wehrmacht exhibition of 1995–1999 mounted by the Hamburg Institutefor Social Research brought this reexamination to the attention of a broaderGerman public for the first time. Wette considers the naming of a barracks in 2000after Anton Schmid, an Austrian soldier executed for rescuing hundreds of Jews inLithuania, as a symbolic turning point in overcoming the postwar coverup of theWehrmacht’s criminal legacy. This book is an important contribution to the recenthistorical literature that reveals the much resisted and painful process by whichGermans learned to deal honestly with the unmasterable past.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges Derek S. Linton

Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945. By David Fairbank White.(New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Pp. 350. $26.00.)

The memory of allied soldiers who perished fighting in Europe during World WarII has been preserved in the manicured cemeteries that cross Europe’s landscape.But as journalist David Fairbank White observes, the 72,000 allied sailors andmerchant seamen who fell victim to U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic haveonly the vast expanse of the sea as their headstone. Bitter Ocean is a testament totheir sacrifice; a narrative that seeks to convey the magnitude of the struggle tosecure the Atlantic maritime lifelines against the U-boats.

White’s narrative takes the reader across the breadth and depth of the war inthe Atlantic. Germany’s defeat in World War I only intensified planning for asecond opportunity. German naval officers instigated what the author describes asa collaborative and informal process of doctrinal debate during the interwar yearsto address the failures of the first Battle of the Atlantic. The years of planningreaped immense dividends in 1939. Although night surface attacks scored earlysuccess, the acquisition of French ports in June 1940 permitted U-boat com-mander Karl Dönitz to coordinate multiple submarine attacks on allied convoys.


From the fall of 1940 until the end of the war, Rudeltactik threatened to close thevital trade routes that kept Britons fed and fighting Germany.

To White, the ensuing Battle of the Atlantic was the determining struggle ofWorld War II. He takes readers across the expanses of the Atlantic and describesin colorfully grim detail the brutal nature of war at sea against an enemy thatattacked without warning. Yet, by May 1943, the U-boat war was virtually over.Although the menace would persist until the war’s end, the combination oftechnology, tactical adaptation, antisubmarine escort ships, intelligence, and theNelsonian virtues of Royal Navy officers prevented Dönitz from achieving histonnage goals long enough for U.S. maritime power to push the war over thetipping point.

Readers unfamiliar with the Battle of the Atlantic will find in this book ariveting story that places a human face on a war fought far from the public eye.The ease with which White moves from the operational and strategic dimensionsof the war to the plight of merchant convoys reflects an impressive understandingof both earlier scholarship and the documents that serve his narrative. Yet themagnitude of the book leaves important issues unanswered. Hitler’s failure tofully implement Dönitz’s vision raises the specter of divided strategic prioritieswithin the Third Reich, an issue critical to the Atlantic war not fully explored. Noris the true nature of the U-boat crews fully revealed. Commanders like OttoKretschmer may have been chivalric at times, but other accounts of U-boatsstranding merchant crews in the vast cold North Atlantic, or machine gunningthem in the water, are grim reminders that these sea wolves, like their counterpartson the eastern front, were also Nazis. They too share a watery grave with theirvictims, which is all the more reason to keep the crews’ memory alive.

United States Naval Academy Craig C. Felker

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World. By John W. Garver.(Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. 392. $24.95.)

With this study, the author has written on a rarely discussed topic: Chinese–Iranian relations. He has done us a great service in doing so, not only by takingon an unusual topic, but also in doing it with gratifying depth.

John W. Garver begins by noting that, although both civilizations knew of eachother over the centuries, they only rarely had direct contact because of theirmutual remoteness. Consequently, the ability and motive to cooperate was never


strong; with few adversaries in common, they rarely had reason to form alliances.On the other hand, their mutual remoteness also meant that they scarcely hadreason to fight each other, either. Iranian and Chinese policy makers in the latetwentieth century could portray what was in fact a tenuous relationship as one ofmutual respect and nonaggression between the two empires/civilizations, demon-strative of their civility, in pointed contrast to predatory western behavior. (Onemight wish for more coverage of each empire’s less civil behavior toward moreproximate neighbors here.)

In the second section of the work, the author discusses more recent dynamicsin Chinese–Iranian relations. As much as the initial, more historical part of thework focuses on a relatively distant Sino–Iranian relationship, Garver focuses ontheir increased mutual utility, starting with the relationship between the People’sRepublic and the Shah of Iran. Each country found the other useful in asuperpower-dominated world and could paper over mutually antagonistic ideolo-gies with rhetoric about millennia of mutual respect and noninterference. Garverdeftly portrays a fascinating tension between ideology and realpolitik. One seesfirst Mao’s China flirting with the Iranian government of the Shah, a moreunproletarian figure, but one equally concerned about the Soviet Union’s reach.(Indeed, it is here that Iranian and Chinese rhetoric about a two-thousand-year-old relationship, based on mutual respect and cultural exchange, came into fullflower.) Thereafter, a pragmatic, post-Maoist China flirted with a militantlyIslamic Iran. Here, again, practicality dominated over ideological incompatibility.For China, Iran still proved a useful counterweight to India and to Russia and asupplement to its relationship with the United States. For a now-isolated Iran,China proved a rare partner and a useful source of weaponry.

Garver also notes both powers’ longer-term geopolitical interests. Iran hassought to be the major power in southwestern Asia, able to exert its own influencesecure from America and Russia, and sees in China a useful trading partner in aworld of American, European, and Arab adversaries sufficiently remote not topose a threat itself. China for its part is pursuing a network of political andeconomic relationships tying its neighbors to itself, not to mention securing accessto vital resources such as petroleum; Iran is likewise useful.

What comes across, especially, is China’s (thus far) masterful simultaneousmanagement of its relationships with both the United States and Iran, mindful ofthe importance of both Sino-American trade, of Iran’s value in securing itssouthwestern periphery and as a petroleum supplier, and of the need not toalienate one partner too much with overtures to the other. China preserved itsstrong trade ties to the United States in part by condemning Iran at the United


Nations, for example, but nonetheless mediated sufficiently on Iran’s behalf at theUN (and provided weapons, but not too many) so as not to alienate Iran. Iran’smore strident diplomacy, practicing realpolitik only with China, comes acrossas self-limiting.

Garver has succeeded in capturing both the current context of the Sino-Iranianrelationship and the much deeper historical context of their goals and attitudes.Many might initially overlook this well-crafted work as too specialized, whichwould be a great pity. Garver succeeds not only in giving us rare scholarship onthe Sino-Iranian relationship, but also in using this relationship to provide insightinto Chinese and Iranian diplomacy more generally. This in turn generates usefulinsight into the complexity of global relationships as a context for Americanpolicy. The book thus deserves a wide audience.

University of Texas, Permian Basin Roland Spickermann

The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. ByGerd-Rainer Horn. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 254.$65.00.)

This ambitious and provocative work exemplifies the current trend toward tran-snational history. Ranging across decades and continents, it presents 1968 as a“moment of crisis and opportunity,” when millions saw at least the potential forrevolutionary change, especially in southern Europe, where worker protest wasmore common and radical than in northern Europe or the United States (4). Theauthor also echoes E. P. Thompson when he asserts, in a defiantly revisionist tone,that for scholars “the most important task remains to rescue these experiments in‘participatory democracy’ and the corresponding social struggles from the histori-cal distortion and condescension to which most recent historiography appears tocondemn that promising era of revolt” (1–2).

In this book, Gerd-Rainer Horn rises to the challenge. He does not attempt toanalyze precisely why the revolutionary moment arrived or exactly why it failedto uncover the “beach beneath the cobblestones.” Nor does he attempt theimpossible—to document and detail everything that took place in 1968. Instead,in little more than two hundred pages, the author uses selected individuals,episodes, and movements to highlight larger trends and deeper developments.Ultimately, he agrees with Arthur Marwick and other scholars, who contend thatthe most significant aspect of the period was the “socio-cultural paradigm shift,”which transformed the moral values of many millions (231). But the author alsoasserts that previous accounts have paid disproportionate attention to the protests


at elite universities like the Sorbonne, and ignored or dismissed demonstrations inimprobable places like Leuven in Belgium, Nantes in France, and Trento in Italy,where students and workers formed close alliances and contemplated a funda-mental political and economic transformation of the world in which they lived.

The author presents a compelling model of comparative history. As such, itillustrates many of the strengths—and a few of the weaknesses—of the genre. Onthe one hand, it draws fascinating cultural connections between such groups asthe Situationists in Belgium and the Beats in the U.S. The author also offersperceptive observations on the global impact of the Berkeley Free Speech Move-ment, and displays an impressive command of the secondary sources in variouslanguages. On the other hand, the author makes no meaningful effort to placethese movements on the left within a broader political context, which weakens thecase for the revolutionary potential of 1968. What of the tens or even hundredsof millions who opposed radical change in all forms? And at times the authorrelies, perhaps unavoidably, on dated sources and overlooks more recent schol-arship on important topics like the New Left and the civil rights movement.

Nevertheless, this is an important and original work. The dense prose andobscure examples (at least to many readers) will make this book of limited use tononspecialists, who may not wish to wade through the thickets of European laborand leftist history. But the broad focus, revisionist argument, and transnationalcomparisons will make it of considerable value to scholars of the 1960s.

Ohio Wesleyan University Michael W. Flamm

Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. By Mark Moyar. (New York, N.Y.:Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxvi, 512. $32.00.)

For many years, a small but tireless group of historians has bucked the tide ofscholarly writing about the Vietnam War. Although most authors describe theAmerican intervention as unwise, unjust, and foredoomed to failure, this contrar-ian minority contends the opposite. Not only was Washington sensible andwell-intentioned, these historians say, but it also could have succeeded by choos-ing different political and military strategies.

In this first volume of a projected two-part study of the war from 1954 to 1975,Mark Moyar aims to update this line of argument by drawing on fresh evidence,including newly accessible material from Vietnam. In the process, Moyar alsoaspires to expose misinterpretations and errors that, he claims, litter the scholar-ship, reflecting the dominant liberal-to-left line of thought. The result is a pas-sionately argued but highly problematic book that, in its zeal to overturn the


conventional wisdom, suffers from the same flaws that it criticizes in other works.Moyar uses evidence selectively to suit his thesis and flattens history in anapparent effort to advance a political agenda—a strongly conservative one.

To be sure, Moyar makes a number of incisive observations that deserve carefulconsideration by scholars of the war. He argues intriguingly, for example, thatcommunist forces were often weaker and more vulnerable than historians haveacknowledged and that different military choices (especially moves to block the HoChi Mihn Trail in Laos) might have produced better results for the United States.Moreover, he persuasively argues that U.S. leaders were reasonable in believing thata communist victory in Vietnam would imperil western interests across Asia.

Moyar is far less convincing, however, in making the point closest to the heartof his overall argument. Most historians, he rightly observes, view Ho as theembodiment of Vietnamese nationalism and dismiss the U.S.-sponsored presidentof South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, as an ineffective and tyrannical puppet.Moyar reverses the judgment 180 degrees, describing Ho Chi Minh as a tool offoreign powers and Diem as “a very wise and effective leader” who was well onhis way to creating a viable South Vietnam when Washington made the graveerror of backing a coup against him in 1963 (xiv). Moyar is undoubtedly ontosomething in challenging old caricatures. But he merely substitutes new carica-tures by ignoring vast evidence suggesting the depth of Ho’s nationalist appealand the degree to which Diem floundered when confronted with a powerfulCommunist insurgency.

The book also suffers from an ideologically charged tone that undermines itscredibility. Moyar seems to delight in recounting torture and other brutalitieswhen perpetrated by Communists while ignoring similar abuses on the other sideand even gratuitously extolling the heroism of U.S. soldiers under fire. At otherpoints, he decries the Communists’ “Maoist barbarism” and breezily dismissesadvocates of western-style democracy in South Vietnam as “tea-sipping intellec-tuals” (59, 169–170). The overall effect is to raise doubts about Moyar’s willing-ness to grapple fairly with the war’s great complexity.

University of Texas at Austin Mark Atwood Lawrence

The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas. By AvielRoshwald. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 349.$29.99.)

It seems that anyone who challenges the notion that nationalism is anything butan outgrowth of nineteenth-century modernization is a primordialist who


believes that nationality is predetermined by blood and genes. Aviel Roshwald’sthesis, which is found in the title of this work, starts with the example of theancient Israelites. Moreover, because of their various travails, the Jews havemaintained a separate identity throughout history, which Roshwald believesmodern Israelis can use. The author also includes the Athenians as an exampleof this primordialism, but evidently this example is not as useful as the Israeliparadigm.

Roshwald supports his thesis with the concepts of victimhood and violation.Almost any group can imagine both of these concepts. Nationalists especiallylike defeated dead heroes. The Alamo, Thermopylae, and Masada are only afew examples. He then goes further by comparing the volatile issue of owner-ship of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Alamo. In Roshwald’s book,modern Jews, who have been victimized for ages, ultimately transform intovictorious Texans, whereas Arabs become discriminated Mexicans in a disputeover a symbol of national union. Roshwald then takes this rather tame Latinoversus Anglo-Texan argument and contrasts it to the militant marching seasonin Northern Ireland.

The author then proceeds to the issues of chosenness and mission. Once againhe takes the biblical paradigm and applies it to America and France. Chosennessfor Roshwald is “closely linked to the sense of national mission” (183). Theauthor relates Jewish chosenness with America’s global mission of spreadingdemocracy and freedom. However, Roshwald is no Pat Robertson. He under-stands that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had their bouts of messianism andthat the war in Iraq has deleterious effects on America’s perceived mission in theworld.

Broadening the characteristics of nationalism allows Roshwald to integratecivic and ethnic nationalism. This allows for his Endurance of Nationalism.One can find most societies leaning on a scale toward the civic or ethnicextreme. For example, he makes the Mosaic covenant of the Jews into a socialcontract much like the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, civic nationslike America have ethnic dimensions created by the mixing of races and themingling of blood in war.

Nor does Roshwald divide civic and ethnic nationalism along moral lines. Bothcan foster fanaticism. Yet, nationalism endures even in the face of pluralism andglobalization. Whether the examples are the Arab–Israeli conflict, the disintegra-tion of Yugoslavia, or the persistence of problems in Northern Ireland,Roshwald’s contention that nationalism is a fundamental characteristic of acollective psychology seems quite persuasive.


The symbols and rituals that create a nation may be initially imagined by elites,but nationalism has also been used to mediate between conflicting social classes,religions, and language groups. As an antidote to the doctrine that nationalismwas strictly a creation of nineteenth-century European imaginations, Roshwald’sbook is a necessity.

Chowan University Virgil Krapauskas


Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China – By Martin J. Powers

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