historian volume 72 issue 1 2010 dionysios stathakopoulos -- constantinople- capital of byzantium...

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BOOK REVIEWS

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EDITORhisn_260 151..252

Richard SpallOhio Wesleyan University

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Douglas R. Bisson(Early Modern Europe)Belmont University

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Framingham State College

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

Betty Dessants(United States Since 1865)

Shippensburg University

Jose C. Moya(Latin America)University of California at Los Angeles

Paulette L. Pepin(Medieval Europe)

University of New Haven

Susan Mitchell Sommers(Britain and the Empire)Saint Vincent College

Richard Spall(Historiography)

Ohio Wesleyan University

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Peter Worthing(East Asia and the Pacific)

Texas Christian University

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SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

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WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. ByJamil M. Abun-Nasr. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. x,280. $27.50.)

Where and with whom religious “authority” resides within the Muslim commu-nity are questions that have especially absorbed scholars of Islam in recent years.Though this might seem like a presentist concern posed by the Islamist challenge,the roots of this thorny problem go back to the very origins of Islam. Disputes ofvarious kinds—whether between Sunnis and Shìis or Salafiyya reformers andcharismatic Sufi shaykhs—have at their heart the question of who are the “true”successors of the Prophet Muhammad.

Jamil M. Abun-Nasr examines the claim of the awliyâ’ to spiritual leadership.The awliyâ’, most commonly translated as “saints” or “the friends of God,” arelegendary mystics initially revered and later immortalized in hagiography. Succes-sors of these early saints became the eponymous founders of Sufi tariqas or ordersand the most populous “brotherhoods” that emerged in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Abun-Nasr himself defines awliyâ’ as “confederates of God”or “guardians” of the believers in an effort to underscore the social preeminencethat these spiritually endowed shaykhs held for their followers (1). His centralthesis is that Sufism took shape as a distinctive social movement due to the abilityof the awliyâ’ to fill a spiritual void left first by the caliphs and later by the ‘ulama’.This idea is in itself not startlingly original, but it allows Abun-Nasr to create acoherent narrative that spans fourteen hundred years.

Abun-Nasr describes this work as a “synthesis” and not a “Sufi work ofreference” (4). Readers will nonetheless find it a useful Baedaker. Its early chapterscontain lucid explanations of Sufi doctrine, especially as they relate to the conceptof walâya or “guardianship.” Later chapters provide capsule histories of impor-tant Sufi figures and the major tariqas. Abun-Nasr is best at putting individualSufis and Sufi movements in their immediate historical and social contexts. As theauthor of the pathbreaking 1965 study, The Tijaniyya, Abun-Nasr not surpris-ingly devotes much of his attention to developments in North and West Africa. Inthe final chapters, the author attempts to parse the ways different Sufi shaykhsresponded to European colonial rule and its aftermath.

Despite the book’s merits, in more than a few areas the author skates over anapparent difficulty or misses an opportunity to consider alternative explanations.For example, Abun-Nasr makes no mention of the “neo-Sufism” controversy that

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raged a decade ago, even though his discussion of how tariqas morphed intobroad-based brotherhoods bears directly on the question. He makes only aperfunctory nod toward the later history of Sufi movements in Central andSoutheast Asia. Shi’ism’s influence on Sufi doctrine is not mentioned at all, and thebook ends wanly with a mere three pages devoted to the prospects of contempo-rary Sufism. Lastly, Abun-Nasr makes little use of the growing monograph litera-ture of the past fifteen years that deals precisely with his concerns.

These reservations aside, Muslim Communities of Grace remains an informa-tive, accessible book, written with empathy and erudition. Students will find itbeneficial but not entirely up-to-date.

Oregon State University Jonathan G. Katz

Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900. By Kristin Mann.(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 473. $55.00.)

This study is an impressive addition to the several books on slavery and theAtlantic slave trade in West Africa previously written by scholars such as RobinLaw, Paul Lovejoy, and Martin A. Klein. The primary focus is on the economictransition from slavery to palm oil production and the emergence of Lagos as acommercial city on the Nigerian coast. The arrival of the English, Dutch, French,and Portuguese for slaves changed the economic history of Lagos. As a result ofthe expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, villages and cities in West Africa becamevictims of the European quest for slaves because of their strategic location alongthe coast. Aside from Lagos, the Portuguese and British built castles in Elmina andCape Coast in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to pursue their economic interests.

This book is significant for its contribution towards developing an enhancedunderstanding of the transatlantic economy as well as the centrality of Lagos inthe economic history of Nigeria. Kristin Mann presents an excellent analysisexplaining how the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the beginning of thenew European imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century transformed Lagos intoa nexus for legitimate European trade. As the author argues, palm oil productionled to the increased use of slave labor, which explained why the rulers of Lagoswere reluctant to end the slave trade. However, with the eventual abolition of theslave trade, Lagos developed rapidly not only as an economic, urban, and indus-trial center, but also as a seat of political power for the British.

Mann explains the land tenure system and emphasizes the centrality of land asa major source of wealth, power, and control, especially for the kings who notonly derived enormous income from the increasing demand for slaves, but also

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held control over land. The centrality of land became more apparent with thetransition from slavery to palm products. Lagosians, according to the author,adapted to changes and new economic opportunities that were open to them as aresult of the introduction of legitimate trade. The end of the slave trade led to areorganization of labor and gave a new perspective to land ownership and the useof land.

The use of oral narratives, archival documents, and extensive literature givesthis book a level of authenticity. Oral narratives, especially relating to land, areimportant to reconstruct the economic history of West Africa. However, Mann didnot appear to have conducted enough interviews to have a good overall, inclusiverepresentation of the entire society, which needed to include additional royal,commoner, and gender commentaries. Since Nigerian oral history is replete onland, slavery, and Lagosian economics, the author should have provided morenarratives. A map of Nigeria showing the location of Lagos would have beenhelpful to a reader unfamiliar with the geography of West Africa as well.

Slavery and the Birth of an African City is an original and insightful work. Thisbook is well written and well organized. It is an important guide to the history ofthe Atlantic slave trade, to the economic history of Lagos, and to the interventionof the British, especially since 1861 when Lagos was annexed. Overflowing withanthropological, cultural, and historical information, this book will be of interestto general readers and undergraduate and graduate students of West Africanhistory and anthropology.

Monmouth University Julius O. Adekunle

Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood. By JohnRenard. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 346.$24.95.)

Since the seventh-century rise of Islam, literate Muslims have recorded accounts of“Friends of God,” a term signifying men and women whose acts and beliefs set astandard for devotion among the larger society in which they live and die. Theseindividuals are not prophets, but they live exemplary lives, sometimes even com-muning with the divine through miraculous deeds. John Renard is a professor oftheological studies, and in his newest book he examines an impressive range ofsources that range from twelfth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Senegal(with stops also in Andalusia, Indonesia, and Morocco), showing that this bodyof literature is not anchored to a specific time or place.


The author rightfully advises his scholarly readers to begin this book byreading part three, which offers a useful discussion of the methodological ques-tions for students of such a genre of literature. “Hagiography,” Renard writes, “isnot historiography” (247). And yet, in chapters ten and eleven he offers a per-ceptive set of questions and analyses that make this book an ideal reading ingraduate seminars that focus not only on Islamic studies, but also on method-ological issues in history, anthropology, or religious studies tout court. It shows atwenty-first-century English speaker how to understand these accounts of saintlypeople in Arab-speaking, non-Western societies over the past thirteen centuries.

The substance of the book is found in parts one and two, which offer acomprehensive overview of this multilayered body of literature that includes morethan twenty primary sources as well as a host of descriptive secondary sources.Part one consists of five chapters that show that these hagiographies adhere to anarrative arc encompassing all stages of life and religious experience. These are:birth, conversion, dreams, miracles, and death. The four chapters of part twosurvey the sociopolitical significance of these saints.

Parts one and two whet the curiosity of scholarly readers, pointing themtowards new research projects. Given the vast number of times and places treatedin this book, Renard cannot place each saint’s story within his or her historicalcontext. Thus, when Friends of God, like Ahmad Yasawi, provide wheat to thepoor, the author cannot analyze why there was such a pressing need for charitabledistributions of a filling starch in Central Asia at that time (38). In a like manner,the same can be said for other stories in this book, which suggests that there isinteresting work to be done on the topics of women or urban trades.

In truth, the author expresses a desire to see “hagiographical narratives . . . lib-erated from the tyranny of bland facticity,” but Renard’s book provides evidenceof the rich data available in them (257). Clearly, these sources provide untoldamounts of information about the social and economic conditions of the period inwhich they were written. For this reason, this book should be a staple on libraryshelves and on graduate reading lists.

Purdue University Stacy E. Holden

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. By Ibn Warraq.(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007. Pp. 556. $29.95.)

The lives of the late Edward Said and of Ibn Warraq (pen name) exhibit a fewparallels. Born in British-ruled Palestine, Said was in his midteens when his Arab


parents sent him to a New England prep school. He remained in the United Statesand taught comparative literature at Columbia University for several decades.Born in British-ruled India, Warraq began his schooling at a Pakistani madrasah,but his father soon sent him abroad to acquire a British education. Said’s familywas Christian, but he became a secular humanist and agnostic. Although he neverwas a Muslim, he championed Palestinian and Arab nationalisms that increasinglyacquired an Islamic identity. Warraq’s family was Muslim, but he, too, became asecular humanist and agnostic. In 1995 he published a book called Why I Am Nota Muslim. There are also major differences between their points of view. Said isknown for his criticism of the West, particularly in his famous book Orientalism[1978], while Warraq correctly titles his new book Defending the West.

With scorn and personal insult, Warraq criticizes Orientalism as badlyresearched and even more badly argued. According to Warraq, Said smears thereputation of Western scholars who devoted their lives to a study of the MiddleEast and South Asia, the so-called Orientalists. They were not lackeys of Europeanimperialism, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, who portrayed the Oriental “other” asunchanging and passive, and so naturally inferior to the virile, creative West. Heis outraged when Said declares that “every European, in what he could say aboutthe Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethno-centric” (32). What angers Warraq most of all is that, he argues, Said encouragedself-pity and victimhood among Muslims that gave them an excuse not to recog-nize and correct their own failings.

Warraq had planned to compile an anthology that would dispute Orientalism.This original plan explains the organization into short sections, the abundantquotations, and over a hundred pages called “Orientalism in Painting and Sculp-ture, Music and Literature.” However, only a small part of Warraq’s book directlyanalyzes Said’s work. Mostly, with a convert’s passion, Warraq defends andpraises Western civilization. Its values—rationalism, universalism, self-criticism—contrast, he says, with the Islamic world—self-satisfied, narrow-minded, andlacking in curiosity about non-Islamic peoples and times. Although enthusiasticabout the West, Warraq has only contempt for the French intellectuals associatedwith postmodernism who denied the possibility of objective truth and whodespised their own heritage. Drawing upon these “confidence tricks,” Said creates“a master fraud that bound American academics and Middle East tyrants inunstated bonds of anti-American complicity” (247). Warraq describes Said’s toneas one of “intellectual terrorism” (18).

Is Warraq beating the proverbial dead horse? Was Robert Irwin’s For Lust ofKnowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies [2006] sufficient refutation?


Perhaps Said’s Orientalism is a book that survives attack because readers like itsthesis.

Miami University David M. Fahey

THE AMERICAS

The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War. By William L. Barney.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv, 245. $22.00.)

Professional historians of the Civil War have long recognized that slavery, asAbraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, was “somehow the causeof the war.” The key word is “somehow”; the consensus on the centrality ofslavery has opened up many new questions, especially with regard to the UpperSouth, where the secession movement had little strength before April 1861. Whywere slaveholders in states like North Carolina so reluctant to secede, and evenmore significant, why did they fight so loyally for the Confederacy, not just withtheir muskets and swords during the war, but with their pens and votes afterward?This author seeks answers to these questions in the life of a single western NorthCarolina farmer, slaveholder, and soldier named Walter Lenoir.

Lenoir was one of eight children reared in a house grandly named “FortDefiance” by his grandfather, a Revolutionary War hero. The Lenoirs ownedslaves but were never comfortable with the practice. Walter was particularlydisenchanted with the institution, which he considered both immoral and trouble-some, and in 1860 he traveled to Minnesota to find a place where he could farmin freedom. He disliked punishing his slaves and tried to avoid selling them, butcould not bring himself to give up the human property that made possible his lifeas an upper-class landowner. He opposed secession, but when Lincoln called fortroops to suppress the rebellion after Fort Sumter was fired upon, he enlisted inthe 37th North Carolina infantry regiment, fought at Second Bull Run, and wasseriously wounded at Ox Hill in 1862.

Walter Lenoir was transformed by his wartime experience. From the momentthe war began, he conceived of it as a defense of his homeland against Northernaggression, rather than a war to defend slavery. He found an identity as a soldier,and longed to rejoin the ranks even after his wounded leg was amputated. Hecame close to undergoing a religious conversion, and instead adopted the cause ofthe Confederacy as the subject of his lifelong devotion. After the war, he acceptedemancipation as a relief from the burden of caring for slaves but resisted the ideathat black (or poor white) people should share any of the political and social


authority that he and other landowners had monopolized before the war. Thereluctant slaveholder had become a diehard Confederate.

In The Making of a Confederate, the author addresses important issues—including the relationship between slaveholding and secession, the causes ofConfederate defeat, the surprising prevalence of white land tenancy before Recon-struction, and the workings of postwar memory—by examining a single case inclear, enthralling detail. This is a highly readable book, with scholarly apparatuswisely limited to brief essays at the end of each chapter. The author does notattempt to provide universal answers for the large questions he raises, but insteadoffers a beautifully crafted example of brick-in-the-wall historiography thatanswers those questions convincingly for one person, leaving to other historiansthe task of arguing whether Lenoir was the rule or the exception.

East Carolina University Gerald J. Prokopowicz

Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders and the Troubled Ending of theAmerican Revolution. By Terry Bouton. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,2007. Pp. v, 332. $29.95.)

The author’s engrossing and passionate neo-Progressive analysis of the AmericanRevolution in Pennsylvania depicts “a struggle between the ordinary many andthe elite few”—and the “few” won (14).

The book is divided into three sections. “The Rise of Democracy (1763–1776)”describes a prewar consensus in which rich and poor Pennsylvanians supported ademocratic polity that shrunk the gap between rich and poor. “Confronting theCounter-Revolution (1776–1787)” chronicles the elite’s challenge to economicand political democracy. In a “stunning reversal,” the “moneyed men” espousedvalues that had “far more in common with the beliefs of their former Britishmasters than they did with the ideals of 1776” (61). “Taming Democracy (1787–1799)” focuses on the state Constitution of 1790 and the Whiskey and FriesRebellions to document the failure to halt the trend toward elite rule.

Terry Bouton adds richness to a story that has been told before. Givingordinary Pennsylvanians a voice, he reminds readers that most Americans did notshare the vision of the “founders” and that many risked their lives to preservetheir ideals. He enables readers to appreciate the very real costs people paid whenmen like Robert Morris implemented policies designed to line the pockets of theirfriends. As farmers faced the loss of their homes and livelihoods, they strovevaliantly to defend what little they had. In the end, the elite triumphed anddemocracy was tamed.


Despite its virtues, Taming Democracy is flawed. Convinced of the virtue of“the people” and the perfidy of the elite, Bouton’s argument resembles a brief forthe prosecution rather than a judicious analysis. While the poorer sort wereinvariably selfless and public spirited, Federalists were “duplicitous,” “shame-less,” and “corrupt” men whose “masterful and ruthless” campaign to ratify theConstitution meant nothing less than a “tragic” tale of “democracy betrayed”(74, 81, 257).

Bouton’s repeated claim that the postwar elite engaged in a “replay of Britishtransgressions” ignores a crucial constitutional difference between American andBritish leaders. The colonists saw “taxation without representation” as a funda-mental attack on liberty as well as a threat to the economic status of the poor.Bouton, however, sees constitutional issues as almost irrelevant; indeed this is theonly way that he can claim that Pennsylvania’s leaders (who were elected) were nodifferent from the English tyrants they replaced.

Bouton correctly highlights Pennsylvania’s class divisions and argues thateconomic issues were a major source of antagonism throughout the state. But hepaints his argument too broadly. The ethnic and religious issues that dividedPennsylvanians mattered; they were not simply unfortunate obstacles keepingpeople from recognizing their “real” interests. Similarly, elite Pennsylvanianscared about more than their pocketbooks. Benjamin Franklin, for example, didnot oppose the proprietors solely because he advocated progressive taxation orbecause the Penns were speculators. His concerns were constitutional as well aseconomic. And although Robert Morris and his ilk were undeniably aristocratic,one can argue that the movement to checks and balances, however undemocratic,was not a betrayal of the spirit of 1776, but a return to prewar Republicanideology. Finally, the debates at the Constitutional Convention reveal that somefounders hoped to check tyranny as well as to subvert democracy.

University of Mississippi Sheila L. Skemp

The Age of Lincoln. By Orville Vernon Burton. (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang,2007. Pp. 420. $27.00.)

In this detailed and insightful synthesis of nineteenth- century America, the authorexamines how Abraham Lincoln’s “hopeful determination of the human spirit”shaped nineteenth-century America but ultimately faltered (3). While the Age ofJackson ushered in “the extraordinary opening of democracy,” the Age of Lincolndrew on that democratic momentum and fused it with “a millennial impulse,”


propelling Americans in the North and the South “to believe in the near attain-ment of Christian perfection and a patriotic certainty that America was meant towitness it” (4). The Civil War and Reconstruction gave shape to a new order offreedom, one grounded in monumental constitutional changes, but post-Reconstruction America’s embrace of materialism, combined with the economicinequity of a new industrial order, resulted in the eclipse of antebellum America’smillennial aspirations.

Orville Vernon Burton begins with an overview of territorial expansion, eco-nomic change, and the emergence of sectional politics during the first four decadesof the nineteenth century. Although many Americans shared a belief “that theycould advance the millennium by right living,” citizens also expressed anxiety overgeographical change, slavery, and “unrestrained capitalism” (11, 30). By the1850s, slavery and sectionalism had catapulted Americans away from a commonideological understanding of national destiny. Preston Brooks’s 1856 caning ofCharles Sumner on the U.S. Senate floor particularly politicized the emotionaldivide between the North and the South, making millennial hopes for Americaseem fragile and threatened. When war began five years later, Abraham Lincoln,influenced by the Southern concept of honor yet firmly opposed to slavery, madea commitment to the Union his first priority. Once it became likely that the borderslave states that remained in the Union would not join the Confederacy, however,Lincoln moved rapidly to dismantle slavery, transforming “America’s centralmeaning” by signing the Emancipation Proclamation and pushing the country ina millennial direction already well advanced by African Americans (167). “IfAmericans had not yet realized the millennium, surely their Lord had come adecisive step closer,” Burton argues (167).

Lincoln’s assassination did not immediately thwart millennial hopes forfreedom in America; throughout and after Reconstruction, African Americans andsome white Republicans fought for legal equality for all men (but, to the anger ofwomen suffragists, not for all women). Lincoln’s “new meaning of freedom,”however, contained a fundamental flaw: “It had to be vigorously defended” (313).Although African Americans continued to push for equal rights, Reconstructionfailed, Burton insists, because whites in the North and the South ultimately couldnot set free their racial beliefs (320). Industrialism, moreover, brought dramaticchanges to many late-nineteenth-century Americans, whose ideological aspira-tions shifted from millennial perfectionism to economic materialism. The end ofthe century marked a sad denouement in race relations and millennial expecta-tions. Corporate America’s embrace of materialism and corruption replaced Lin-coln’s vision of political freedom; even African Americans, the most ardent


supporters of a new millennial order, became wrapped up in the material focus ofa consumer society.

Burton deftly covers a wide range of issues in this expansive work. The author’sbibliographic references are deep and wide-ranging—readers will wish for foot-notes because of the rich array of sources consulted by the author. An attempt tocover the tremendous social, political, economic, and religious developments of anentire century is ambitious, and some areas could bear further scrutiny. AfricanAmericans and women sometimes receive uneven treatment. Burton provides richanalysis of African American attitudes toward freedom during and after the CivilWar. The reader wishes for even more detail and nuance during the antebellumyears. Still, Burton’s discussion of Native Americans, late-nineteenth-centuryindustrial workers, and a myriad of other groups and events bears witness to thewide, sophisticated scope of this book, which is sure to make an impact on layreaders and professional historians alike.

Baylor University Kimberly R. Kellison

The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. ByDonald T. Critchlow. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 359.$27.95.)

This author’s new book is a history of American conservatism since the rise of theNew Right. Donald T. Critchlow performs a valuable service in bringing togethervarious aspects of the recent history of American conservatism that typically havebeen dealt with separately. The period of conservative intellectual ferment afterWorld War II, the emergence of the New Right in the early and middle 1960s,Barry Goldwater’s related presidential campaign of 1964, the travails of the NewRight during the later 1960s and 1970s, the period of New Right triumph in the1980s, and the uncertain course of conservatism since then are all addressed inturn. Critchlow’s narrative relies not only on the growing secondary literature onthese various topics but also his own archival research. At his best, Critchlowenables readers to see how these various parts of a larger story fit together. Hisdiscussion of how the New Right began to prosper in the 1970s and his accountof the emergence of influential conservative think tanks such as the AmericanEnterprise Institute (AEI) also deserve praise for filling in some of the importantgaps in the tale of how New Right conservatives moved from the margin to themainstream.

The Conservative Ascendancy is, however, disappointing in other respects.Critchlow does little to explain the kind of moderate conservatism against which


the New Right first rebelled during the later years of the Eisenhower presidency.Instead, Critchlow contends that the New Right arose simply in opposition toNew Deal liberalism and “me-too” Republicans. This failure to take moderateconservatism seriously as a distinct, coherent political category blurs Critchlow’sanalysis throughout his book. So, too, does his tendency to see Great Societyliberalism as essentially the same as New Deal-era liberalism, despite the verysignificant differences between those two reform agendas. He also tends to over-state the importance of leading individuals such as Goldwater and Ronald Reaganin explaining the rise of the New Right.

Critchlow’s account also suffers from his strained efforts to argue that NewRight conservatism continued to advance after the 1980s and achieved dominanceduring the George W. Bush administration. This seems unconvincing, in partbecause the top priorities of Goldwater/Reagan-style conservatism were essen-tially libertarian in nature, in the economic realm especially. The New Right’ssocial agenda was mostly stillborn during the Goldwater/Reagan era, in partbecause that agenda conflicted with the libertarian orientation of so many leadingNew Rightists. Critchlow acknowledges at times that conservative priorities haveshifted somewhat since the 1980s, but does not explicate clearly and persuasivelywhat that reveals about the New Right’s current state.

Thus, Critchlow’s book, although useful in helping to understand the history ofAmerican conservatism since World War II, seems unlikely to become the defini-tive account of that subject.

Ohio State University David Stebenne

Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on theTennessee Frontier. By Cynthia Cumfer. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 324. $59.95.)

This is an ambitious book on multiple levels. To include American Indians,African Americans, and European Americans in one study of a late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century borderland is difficult enough. To examine relationsinside as well as between all three groups adds significantly to the task. And thento make the mental worlds of all groups its primary subject raises the challengeeven higher. The movement of settlers and slaves into the trans-Appalachian West,which began in the 1760s, affected how all communities thought about theirrelations with each other as well as about their own social organizations. In turn,even the slightest alteration in ideology and imagination influenced how eachgroup approached the other into the first decade of the nineteenth century.


Cynthia Cumfer displays this complicated process as it unfolded in the present-day state of Tennessee. This is an artificial selection of territory that excludes somegroups and relationships from her analysis, as she does acknowledge, but theauthor nonetheless captures intellectual change among peoples seldom studied forthis purpose.

Diplomatic relations between the Cherokees and white Tennesseeans areclosely examined in part one, where Cumfer’s ability to compare and connectchanges in thought across group lines offers new insight. Although specialists inAmerican Indian history are already aware that state and tribal governments’relationships with the national government were stressfully intertwined at thevery beginnings of the United States, Cumfer explicitly demonstrates how theChickamaugan Cherokees’ reformulation of diplomatic kinship actuallyinterfaced with Tennesseean Americans’ own redefinition of their political ties tothe new nation. She also highlights some important overlap between Cherokeeand Federalist visions of reciprocity, but unfortunately tends to isolate and exag-gerate the Cherokees’ particular influence on the formation of U.S. Indianpolicy.

In part two, the author shifts readers’ attention to what happened inside thethree groups on the Tennessee frontier. Cherokee views about invaders’ impacton identity reached a divergence, with Upper Town villages attempting to retainancestral land through accommodation and Chickamauga villages seeking inde-pendence through warfare and trade. As slaves and free blacks moved intoTennessee, they replaced paternalism with a patronage system by forging churchties with whites, performing military service, and selling goods and services infrontier markets. European Americans, meanwhile, refashioned their social andfamily networks into a new concept of happiness. Contractual marriage, volun-tary association, and political participation leaned toward greater social equalityamong whites, but not without heightening their sense of superiority over Ameri-can Indians and African Americans.

Cumfer combs through an impressive volume and variety of documents tobring readers closer to the “imaginative worlds” of Indians, settlers, and slaves inearly Tennessee (19). She also addresses important historiographical debatespertaining to American Indian policy and frontier society. Plenty of material inSeparate Peoples, One Land will seem abstract and speculative to many readers,but the example set by its steadfast attention to popular thought across culturallines makes this an invaluable book.

Vanderbilt University Daniel H. Usner Jr.


The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival after Yorktown. By ThomasFleming. (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins Press, 2007. Pp. 352. $27.95.)

In this penetrating account of the struggle by the rebellious American colonists,their European allies, and their British opponents, respectively, to “win thepeace” in the wake of Lord Cornwallis’s shocking defeat at Yorktown inOctober 1781, historian and novelist Thomas Fleming lends credence to W. L.George’s assertion that “[w]ars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hateour allies.” Indeed, Fleming’s recapitulation of military, diplomatic, and finan-cial affairs on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that wars also teach Americansto hate themselves.

Fleming’s narrative opens with the British surrender at Yorktown and GeorgeWashington’s dour but well-grounded insistence that the war could still be lost.The presence of twenty-six thousand enemy troops and armed loyalists on Ameri-can soil constituted a continuing military threat. Exacerbating that situation wasthe imminent departure of the French warships and foot soldiers that made theYorktown victory possible. To make matters worse, the nation’s coffers wereempty, leaving Washington meager provisions and no pay for his dwindling,long-suffering army—forces that he needed not only for defense but also forpossible forays against British strongholds in New York, Charleston, Savannah, oreven Canada.

Washington also feared that France, America’s chief ally in the war, had its ownagenda, one that might delay a peace settlement or cast it in unfavorable terms forthe fledgling nation. Spain’s demands further complicated that process. Fleming’sdetailed account of the backstabbing and ineptitude that characterized the newnation’s diplomatic corps covers familiar ground; even so, his depiction of thefeud between Arthur Lee and Silas Deane that divided an already impotentContinental Congress fosters incredulity and not a little angst. His narrative raisesAmbassador Franklin to new heights while vilifying Peace Commissioner JohnAdams for his insufferable pettiness. On the larger stage, Fleming deftly shifts toand fro between Paris, where Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, comte de Ver-gennes, negotiated brilliantly on behalf of young King Louis XVI, and London,where a burgeoning cast of politicos swirled in contrary orbits around theirintractable monarch, George III.

Fleming recounts the Newburgh conspiracy and various mutinies amongdisgruntled Continental troops, implicating Superintendent of Finance RobertMorris and Alexander Hamilton in a concerted effort to pressure penniless Con-gress. Meanwhile, hostilities between British and American troops continued in


various locations even after the guns of Yorktown were silenced, and AdmiralRodney’s unexpected victory over de Grasse’s French fleet in the West Indiesbreathed new life into George III’s hopes for an unbroken empire or, at least, anhonorable peace. Were readers not already aware of the outcome of these variousintrigues, the suspense Fleming evokes would make for an all-night read.

In works such as Liberty!: The American Revolution and Washington’s SecretWar: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, Fleming demonstrated his ability tocast familiar events in a new light. This latest contribution to the scholarship ofthe nation’s founding, The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival AfterYorktown, goes a step further, enlarging the historical stage to link seeminglyisolated developments and redefining familiar scenes by providing a richer con-text . . . one that often leads to more intricate analyses. It is a work that deservesto be read by serious historians, though the level of detail regarding diplomaticaffairs and the extensive roster of dramatis personae may dissuade the casualreader and biology major.

Coastal Carolina University John J. Navin

The Road to Disunion: Volume II, Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. By WilliamW. Freehling. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 605.$35.00.)

This book completes the author’s massive two-volume opus on the South’s pathto the Civil War, begun fifteen years earlier with The Road to Disunion: VolumeI, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. No more prodigious and penetrating work hasbeen published on the subject in many decades. Though William W. Freehlingknows that the reasons for the North’s willingness to fight the slave power to thedeath have never been easy to understand, he finds even more mysterious “whySoutherners risked a potentially suicidal rebellion against Northerners who dis-claimed any intention of forcing abolition on the Southern states” (xii). These twovolumes are the fruits of his lifelong study of how Southerners’ hatred of Northerncritics eventually overcame “their dread of disunion, their divisions from eachother, and their distrust of the fire-eaters” (6).

Freehling’s explanation of how this happened is both complex and colorful. Hepaints a South that differed from east to west as well as from north to south. It wasinternally divided by race, class, and slaveholding, as well as by its inhabitants’stands on such issues as the proslavery argument, Caribbean expansion, reopen-ing the slave trade, and attempts to reenslave freedmen. These differences were


overcome, however, by Southern ire at Northern invasions, not just John Brown’sviolence, but invasions by antislavery religion, Yankee free-labor entrepreneurs,and antislavery political patronage.

The largest portion of the book describes in minute detail the fateful processof what Freehling sees as the five separate secession crises of 1860–1861. If thesecessionists were held at bay before 1854 by the ability of the Southern minorityto dominate the national majority, this section reveals how the secessionist minor-ity of that minority were able to drive the country to war. They were aided in theirefforts by lucky contingencies, not least the happenstance of Georgians celebratingthe completion of a railroad to Charleston at just the right moment for theirpurposes. Throughout the two volumes of his magnum opus, Freehling drawsattention to coincidence, contingency, and individual impulse in the making ofevents, reminding his readers both that men are free agents and that they are neverin full control of their future. Not everyone will agree with Freehling’s highlyoriginal and intriguing argument, but even the most seasoned scholars of this erawill learn from it and will be forced to rethink many of their settled convictionsabout how the war came.

The whole story is told with an unashamed emphasis on mainstream politicalhistory. It employs an energetic and often colloquial style (referring often to“Cuffees” and “rednecks”) that paints word pictures of “striking individuals andfetching places” (vii). Freehling has toned down somewhat his first volume’s “zestfor nicknames, imaginary conversations, and plays on words,” but some will stillprefer the slower-paced, graceful style of his first prize-winning book, Prelude toCivil War, to either of these volumes (xv).

University of Alabama Lawrence Frederick Kohl

Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of theDemocratic Party. By Paul Frymer. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2008. Pp. xii, 194. $24.95.)

Although the phrase “institutional racism” has been in most scholars’ vocabular-ies for many years, Paul Frymer emphasizes that Americans still too readily seeracism as individual pathology rather than a manifestation of American institu-tions. With Black and Blue Frymer seeks to change that mindset. For him,“institutions shaped the split between white and black workers” and played “alarger role in the racism of the labor movement than is commonly acknowledged”(ix). Frymer analyzes the way many institutions struggled with the issue of race,


with the courts and legal system receiving the most attention, followed by theNational Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Equal Employment OpportunityCommission (EEOC), and various unions. All of these institutions, he argues, havehad a complicated relationship with the issue of race, at times exacerbating theracial divide and at other times struggling to surmount race-based problems.

From the beginning of the New Deal era, Frymer argues, racial problems weresewn into the Democratic Party and the liberal state it created. The Wagner Act of1935, which created the NLRB, ignored the interests of civil rights groups andinstead ensured the rights of white workers in segregated blue-collar unions.Minority workers, who were trying to break into discriminatory industries, thusfound the labor relations board unsuited to their needs and had to look elsewherefor support. Within the government they found that support from the FairEmployment Practices Committee (FEPC) and the EEOC. Outside the govern-ment, black workers found their champion in the NAACP. Although the govern-ment agencies often had little power, the NAACP’s legal campaign producedsubstantial results, particularly in the 1960s and afterwards. In a number of courtcases, the civil rights organization persuaded judges to use the power of the purseto force unions to the wall. Labor unions could either stop discriminating or facefines that would bankrupt them. Some of the unions were, in Frymer’s words,“bled to death,” but most grudgingly opened their doors so that by the early1980s many labor unions had minority memberships that approximated thegeneral population (93). The NAACP’s legal strategy helped black workers securejobs, but Frymer shows this was no unadulterated victory. In winning these courtcases, the NAACP simultaneously financially eviscerated many unions. Blackworkers were finally able to join labor organizations but only as they lost theirclout.

The story Frymer tells in this slender volume is a provocative and essentialone. It is, however, not without flaws. For a book examining the intersection ofrace and American institutions, it virtually ignores the Republican Party and theLeft, key players in recent historical accounts of the period. Frymer could also tellhis readers more about the people who held the judicial and other institutionalpositions central to his account. Who these people were, who appointed them,and the nature of their politics are matters largely unexplored. Institutions matterbut, as Frymer knows, the people who administered those institutions matteredtoo. In the end, though, these are minor reservations about a fine and thoughtfulbook.

DePaul University James Wolfinger


After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion inthe Delta, 1875–1915. By John M. Giggie. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008. Pp. vii, 315. $21.95.)

In this engaging and innovative history of African American culture in whathistorians call the “nadir” period between Reconstruction and the Great Migra-tion, the author seeks to persuade readers that African Americans responded tothis particularly oppressive era in such creative ways that they literally trans-formed their religious lives. John M. Giggie suggests that they therefore exercisedmore agency in shaping their culture and broader lives than historians typicallyrecognize, and that historians must adjust their understanding of this oppressiveperiod of the nation’s history.

Readers may recognize in Giggie’s work echoes of slavery histories from ageneration ago that stressed slaves’ abilities to shape their culture in slave quar-ters, away from the watchful gaze of owners. But if these histories stressed theability of African Americans to preserve their African cultural heritage, Giggiestresses the African American efforts during this later moment to chart newground, to shape their religious imagination in light of the modernizing innova-tions of the railroads, commercialism, and growing materialism. Giggie focuses onthe Delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas in his study, though his findingsthere might project more broadly to other areas of the agrarian South.

Giggie sees African Americans using those very same cultural, economic,technological, and legal developments that historians have used to measure theregression in African American freedom and agency during this period in waysthat allowed them to carve out space that they could control themselves. Railroadsillustrate Giggie’s point most vividly. Whites clearly used train travel to draw linesbetween the races and thereby place African Americans in a subservient position.It was no accident that the U.S. Supreme Court used a case involving train travel,Plessy v. Ferguson, to pronounce that the U.S. Constitution countenanced segre-gation. But Giggie sees African Americans taking an instrument of oppression andusing it in their religious imagery and imagination to transform trains into vehiclesof salvation. Thus, African American preachers told of riding trains to heaven.More importantly, religious bodies established themselves near train stops andeven held revivals at train stations. African Americans used trains to further socialand institutional networks of mutual aid and support like churches, as well asmale fraternal orders.

Trains also played critical roles in spreading commercial culture throughoutAmerica, including the Delta region, and, to a lesser extent than for more affluent


whites, even for poor African Americans. Black churches used commercial devel-opment, and the “middle class” material culture that it spread, to help build andsustain a distinct cultural space for African Americans. They prescribed ways forAfrican Americans to enter the material market that would assert their dignityand, just possibly, render them more acceptable to the broader society (thoughwhite society did not respond accordingly).

Giggie’s work is thoughtful, well documented, and tightly argued. He makes astrong case for seeing within the nadir period of African American history spacesof autonomous action and pathways for future progress toward greater equalityin American society. This book will be especially appealing to scholars andadvanced students who will most readily appreciate its subtle arguments andintricacies.

Saint Vincent College Timothy Kelly

Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. By Michael D.Gordin. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 209. $24.95.)

This author has written a stimulating book that brims with insights and is basedon an impressive amount of research. Dust jacket blurbs by prominent scholarshail it as a “remarkable, thought-provoking book,” “bold and provocative,” and“powerful.” It is all these things. Unfortunately, it is also poorly structured, attimes repetitive, and contains some howlers that should have been caught alongthe way. Still, it is a welcome addition to the literature on the final days of WorldWar II in the Pacific.

Michael D. Gordin’s most prominent argument is unassailable: no Americancivilian or military official could possibly have known what effect atomic bombswould have (assuming they exploded, which was not certain) with regard tohastening Japan’s surrender. Others have pointed this out in passing, but no onehas explored the ramifications of what appears to be an obvious conclusion asthoroughly as has Gordin. Many historians, who know what actually did happen,have written as though Harry S. Truman and those around him knew beforehandwhat would happen. Such an ahistorical approach has given rise to a number ofinterpretations that cannot withstand analysis. One is what Gordin refers to as the“two bomb myth”: that “the United States knew in advance that two bombswould be sufficient to induce surrender and so decided to use two and only two”(47). Another is that Truman, knowing that the Japanese were so close to capitu-lation that a Soviet declaration of war against them would be sufficient, engaged


in a “race” to use the bombs before this happened. There are others. Gordin’sdemolition of these myths alone makes his book a significant contribution.

Five Days in August is less successful in other areas. Gordin spends an inor-dinate amount of time discussing which individuals regarded the bombs as“special weapons” and which considered them “ordinary weapons,” albeit morepowerful than conventional high explosives or incendiaries. Similarly, his inclu-sion of a history of Tinian (the island from which the atomic raids were launched)smacks more of padding than of furthering readers’ understanding of the largerissues.

Some parts of the book are just plain wrong. Gordin repeats the old chestnutthat when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the policy of “Uncondi-tional Surrender” at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, he “surprisedChurchill and much of his own staff and military” (23). That is false. Roosevelthad indicated his agreement with a State Department recommendation to insiston unconditional surrender months earlier; he had told the Joint Chiefs of Staffbefore he left for Casablanca that he intended to press it with Churchill, andChurchill himself had sought and received approval of the doctrine from theBritish War Cabinet days before Roosevelt’s announcement. Unaccountably,Gordin includes in his footnotes reference to an article (published more than fiftyyears ago) that refutes FDR’s later claim that the idea “popped into his mind”while he was at the conference.

These reservations aside, Gordin has written a challenging book that ranges farbeyond the five days mentioned in his title.

The Pennsylvania State University Robert James Maddox

Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974. By Kristian Gustafson.(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2007. Pp. 317. $29.95.)

This is a profoundly provocative book that examines U.S. covert operations inChile. For its revisionism, it will likely be dismissed as naive, foolish, or ideologi-cally motivated. Based on careful analysis of recently declassified records (someredacted) and interviews with key figures (some anonymous), Kristian Gustafsoncontends that the evidence linking American antipathy to Salvador Allende’s riseto power beginning in 1958 with all that transpired in Chile is thin. That fouradministrations sought to prevent communist inroads in the hemisphere is unde-niable, but hostile intent does not make the U.S. government the agent of whatoccurred. He insists that where State Department, CIA, or U.S. corporations did


act in Chile, the impact of their deeds was far less than conventional wisdominsinuates. The State Department and CIA did endeavor to manipulate theChilean press, fund opposition groups, encourage strikes, and create anti-Allendepropaganda, but that does not constitute proof that the Nixon administrationarranged the 1973 coup, ordered Allende’s assassination, or groomed AugostoPinochet for dictatorship. The CIA, Gustafson concludes, for years proved totallyunable to control events, had no contacts with Pinochet, and even failed to predictthe coup.

Gustafson lays out a narrative that ends in tragedy, although he finds no realvillains, just amazingly flawed humans, immense bureaucratic inefficiency, defi-cient operational controls, and intractable problems. He does not apologize forU.S. deeds because “the actions carried out by the CIA did not infringe on U.S.laws” (243). For Gustafson, covert operations are legitimate tools of statecraft.Thus, ethics are not his paradigm of analysis; Realpolitik is. The documentsrecently released, he asserts, refute the orthodox assumption that U.S. governmentmachinations derailed the political career of Allende and, failing that, orchestratedthe coup that toppled him in 1973 and led to the dismal years of the Pinochetdictatorship.

Gustafson too casually dismisses the impact of U.S. operations in Guatemalaand the Dominican Republic by designating these countries as insignificantplayers in the hemisphere. And, for all his attention to three U.S. ambassadors inChile and their difficult relations with State Department officials, presidents, andthe CIA, the reasons for their appointment or removal during crucial moments arenever fully explained. Finally, there is the difficulty of taking Henry Kissinger’swords at face value. Given recent revelations of inconsistencies between declas-sified documents and his memoirs (and Kissinger’s defense of this obfuscation),readers should think carefully about unhesitatingly accepting his explanations ofevents.

This is a fascinating monograph that questions long-held assumptions aboutthe State Department’s and CIA’s ability to influence the course of events. Cer-tainly, as the author points out, the American public’s long-held assumption thatthe CIA has the resources and power to determine any outcome it desires and somust be the agent of what occurred in Chile is insulting and condescending toChileans, many of whom have long contended, even as they bemoaned thePinochet dictatorship, that they did not need U.S. collusion to turn their nationaway from Allende’s path to socialism.

University of Texas at Arlington Joyce S. Goldberg


Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876. By Nicholas Guyatt.(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 341. $24.99.)

The author’s study of providential thinking will prove instructive even for schol-ars long familiar with the myth of American exceptionalism. Nicholas Guyattdivides his book into two sections: one considering how colonists looked to andbeyond England in defining the importance of their own errand into the wilder-ness, and a second examining the challenge of Native Americans and AfricanAmerican slaves to providential nationalism.

Examining a variety of sources, Guyatt focuses on three different forms ofprovidentialism: judicial (the argument that God rewards or punishes nationsaccording to the virtue of their leaders and citizens); historical (the claim that Goddesignates some nations to play special roles); and apocalyptic (the notion thathistory can literally play out the events outlined in Revelation). He argues thatPuritans brought to the New World a certainty that God had called England to bea holy nation. But the English Revolution played havoc with that belief, as theRestoration negated Oliver Cromwell’s conviction that the apocalyptic Puritankingdom was about to dawn. In response, colonists concluded that America hadsupplanted England as the instrument of God’s will and justified their War ofIndependence on this reading of historical providence.

Keeping the providential dream alive after the Revolution meant defining rolesfor racial outsiders. Most European Americans dismissed Native Americans andAfrican Americans as inferiors who should at best be resettled far from whitesociety. But Northern abolitionists invoked judicial providentialism to argue thatunless African American slaves were freed and welcomed into a biracial, egalitar-ian America, God would punish the nation for failing to live up to its calling as abeacon of freedom.

Sectional tensions over slavery eventually led to war, seemingly confirming theabolitionist threat that God would not abide the evils of slavery. But even theUnion victory did not persuade Americans to incorporate the freed slaves as socialequals. Rather, they were left to suffer new forms of chauvinism while whiteAmericans turned to the promises of historical providentialism, believing that thewar had forged them into a new people, ready to meet their divine destiny.

Readers will be least familiar with the English dimensions of American provi-dentialism and will find section one of this book particularly informative. Thecontours of section two are more well known, though Guyatt’s discussion ofcolonization schemes for Indians and African Americans is well taken, and hisanalysis of Lincoln’s racism and theological nationalism is illuminating. One


dimension curiously absent is a consideration of postmillennial providentialism.Most antebellum reformers abandoned apocalypticism, believing the millenniumwould dawn not through catastrophe but through Christians’ efforts to createsocieties obedient to God. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison coulddemand social and political perfection because their Bible told them the kingdomof God was possible. America was thus the land of millennial opportunity—apromise of hope that balanced the verdict of doom Garrison predicted for thosewho rejected God’s call.

That omission aside, it is easy to thank Guyatt for providing a sophisticatedoverview of a millennial nation.

DePauw University Valarie H. Ziegler

President McKinley, War and Empire. Vol. 2, President McKinley and America’s “NewEmpire”. By Richard F. Hamilton. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers,2007. Pp. xix, 193. $39.95.)

Josephine Tey in Daughter of Time [1951] popularized the term “Tonypandy,” bywhich her bedridden detective, Alan Grant, identified the persistence of myth andmisinformation in the popular historical memory. Richard F. Hamilton seems tobe on a similar quest. Scanning some widely adopted college history texts, Hamil-ton discovered that the claims of “progressive historians,” particularly CharlesBeard and Julius Platt, continue to inform the explanations of “empire” and“imperialism” dished out to college students. In the American history survey,Tonypandy rules.

Certainly historians, especially those who write textbooks, can be taken to taskfor overgeneralizing and reducing complex causal relations to simple confusions.Hamilton is right to remind them, too, that they can never be too rigorous in theirconstruction of interpretations and use of evidence. Having said that, what thento make of this book? It does point to some serious failings in the early literatureon the American Empire, where “Big Business” became shorthand for an amor-phous body of elite actors who never had the coherence that progressive historiansascribed to them. Those historians often used what now seem crude interpretiveschemes, and their evidence was sometimes thin.

Is this new? Do Americans need to revisit the sins of their forefathers to set thecurrent record straight? Much of the history that Hamilton discusses in this bookwas written between fifty and ninety years ago. How many young historiansteaching and writing today have actually read Frederick Merk, Beard, or Pratt?That is not to say that these historians have no legacy, nor that current historians


do not share some of their biases. Hamilton is certainly correct when he arguesthat the fruits of empire were paltry compared to historians’ claims that theimperial moment marked a major point of departure in American history. Thefabled “China Market” took another century to materialize.

Hamilton’s preoccupation with the Beardian progressives seems to have ledhim into his own misreading of the evidence. For one thing, he concentratesheavily on the economics of empire, less so on global political and securitymatters. Yet the modern steel and coal navy became one of the major instrumentsof empire. The decision to build it in the 1880s and to expand it in the eraafterwards marked a national commitment to a larger role in the world. Navalismand imperialism went hand in hand. For another, Hamilton does not acknowledgethe ways in which Walter LaFeber’s explanation of empire marked a departurefrom the Beardian school. For LaFeber, the “new” in the “New Empire” was acommitment to nonterritorial expansion. Here, the “Open Door” concept andaccess to markets were crucial. Americans sought the fruits of empire without themilitary and administrative burdens Europeans assumed in creating their formalempires. As a result, Hamilton’s evidence that America’s empire added littleterritory or population misses the point.

His argument that political elites engineered the imperial departure is one thatmost historians would accept. They could only wish that he spent more time inPresident McKinley, War and Empire developing that interpretation rather thanrefighting the historiographic battles of a now-distant past.

Bard College Mark Lytle

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography. By Cynthia M. Harris. (Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 2007. Pp. 191. $35.00.)

An American icon is rendered human and accessible in this author’s new volumein Greenwood Press’s synthetic, popular biography series conceived and writtenfor high school students and public libraries. Cynthia M. Harris breaks no newevidentiary or historiographical ground, but ably synthesizes the wide-rangingliterature on Roosevelt to paint a thorough—if at times superficial andunderanalyzed—portrait of the woman who became “the first lady of the world”(143).

Harris has considerable ground to cover: Roosevelt lived a very long, engagedlife. Born in 1884, her life and work spanned major developments of the twentiethcentury—Progressive reform and the civil rights movement; the Great Depression;world wars, both hot and cold—until her death in 1962. She played multiple,


often contradictory roles: devoted wife and mother; reformer and activist; politi-cal operative and diplomat; and professional writer and journalist. Harris, notsurprisingly, adopts a chronological approach and moves methodically throughRoosevelt’s life, with the personal and public alternately addressed in eachchapter. Though a comprehensive, readable story of an extraordinary life, toooften Eleanor Roosevelt descends into details and events unmoored from thewider historical context.

Harris’s tone is sometimes patronizing, and she misses opportunities to deepenthe analysis. For example, Eleanor and Franklin clashed over the construction ofher cottage at Val Kill in the mid-1920s. She wanted some oversight on theproject, but Franklin refused. Given his control of the purse strings and societalexpectations, Eleanor lost this battle. Once more, this perennial challenger to thestatus quo was left angry, depressed, and thwarted: a condition by no meanslimited to Eleanor and worthy of more extended commentary than simply that shewas “showing a bit of pique” (50).

Harris also struggles to understand the fluctuating, tenuous, and unequalnature of the Roosevelts’ political alliance: how to balance Eleanor’s legitimateinfluence on Franklin with his calculated use of her as his “bridge to the under-privileged” to mollify and cement the support of, in particular, women, AfricanAmericans, and the poor without meeting their demands (71). Time and again,Harris tells readers that Eleanor was “[e]xcluded in 1936 from Franklin’s politicallife” (94). Yet she simultaneously asserts Eleanor’s continuing significance, includ-ing the overblown conclusion that Eleanor “saved” Franklin’s 1940 nominationat the Democratic National Convention (111).

Harris is to be applauded, however, for raising the difficult issues, including thealcoholism that killed Roosevelt’s beloved father; the complex and unconven-tional nature of her marriage; her intimate relationships, with men and women,outside her marriage; and her depression, anxiety, and insecurity. Harris dealsforthrightly with the major turning point in Eleanor’s marriage, which became aplatonic, if loving, partnership after her devastating 1918 discovery of Franklin’saffair with Lucy Mercer, their social secretary. More importantly, thereafter, shewas a “changed woman” who would “pursue her own interests . . . and ideals”(37).

And Harris ably analyzes Eleanor’s professional life as a teacher, factory owner,journalist, writer, political commentator, and diplomat. Beyond her unpaid laboras her husband’s “eyes and ears,” Eleanor worked for wages that guaranteed hersome economic freedom; more importantly, perhaps, she worked for fulfillment,both personal and ideological.


With a comprehensive bibliographic essay, Eleanor Roosevelt is a usefulresearch tool for high school students and is also an engaging introduction to thesubject for the general public. Readers looking to be challenged or for newinterpretations of Eleanor Roosevelt and her life and times will need to lookelsewhere.

University of Redlands Kathleen Feeley

Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920.By Kristin L. Hoganson. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,2007. Pp. 402. $65.00.)

Admirers of the author’s first book, Fighting for American Manhood (Yale, 1998),will not be disappointed with this one. In Consumers’ Imperium, Kristin L.Hoganson again puts forward an original and provocative thesis and worksdoggedly to prove it. The thesis is that American culture at the turn of thetwentieth century reflected American imperialism in a myriad of ways, and thatAmerica’s aggressive entry into global politics and overseas trade not only affectedbut also shaped (produced) American domesticity. The author has done animpressive amount of research in contemporary periodicals and institutionalrecords and has mined archival sources in several regions of the country. Aforty-three-page bibliography shows the study’s grounding in relevant primaryand secondary literatures.

Hoganson correctly states that studies of late-nineteenth-century Americanoverseas expansion have generally been uninterested in how imperialism abroadaffected patterns of domestic consumption, leisure, and taste. Most scholars offoreign policy and diplomacy, as well as of military and naval history, assumedthat foreign policy and domestic affairs (the private realm, or women’s history)inhabited separate worlds—that the foreign and the domestic were binary terms.Hoganson builds on recent scholarship by cultural and gender studies scholars tochallenge the idea that imperialism was something that happened overseas, ana-lyzing American homes not as private realms but as “contact zones” where foreigninfluences and cosmopolitan tastes were appropriated and sampled (8). She callsthis the “global production of American domesticity.”

In five topical chapters, Hoganson explores how American expansion overseaswas reflected in patterns of consumption, fashion, and food in homes acrossAmerica. She finds paradox and curiosity everywhere. For example, in a chapteron home decorating she notes Victorian prudery along with Orientalism, and suchinconsistencies as the following: “The Ottoman Empire was the largest foreign


mission site for the United States. Yet, all the while middle-class housewives weresewing cushions for sensuous Oriental niches” (52). In a chapter on fashion, theauthor illustrates how expanding global trade resulted in fashions that reflected“astonishing global linkages” such as the fact that in 1915 the U.S. imported morethan two million dollars worth of ostrich feathers (91). She observes that “[t]heAmerican woman took whatever pleased her from around the world” (95). Somechapters prove more helpful in sustaining the author’s thesis than others. ThoughHoganson exhaustively documents how American food writing evoked differentgeographies and concludes that “[m]iddle-class American kitchens had becomeplaces of global encounter,” the reader wonders whether the late nineteenthcentury was unique in this regard (110). When in history did fashionable peoplenot import novelty or the exotic to their menus, or to give their dress distinction?

Two chapters that shift the focus away from consumption to public celebra-tions of difference are those on travel clubs and Americanization, respectively. Ina fascinating analysis of the travel clubs that proliferated all over the country inthis period, Hoganson argues that middle- and upper-class women cultivated atourist mentality that displayed an interest in faraway places in a context ofunequal cultural and economic power. Americans did not have to go abroad toexpress their fascination with foreign ways, of course, since immigrants werevisibly in their midst. In a chapter on Americanization, Hoganson offers a freshexamination of how settlement houses and international institutes brought foreigndifferences into public view. Celebrations of “immigrant gifts,” incorporatingforeign folkways into public celebrations of the United States, were examples ofwhat she calls “the joyful geography of globalization” where immigrants werepresented as a cultural resource in pageants that overlooked discrimination andintolerance (122).

In Consumers’ Imperium, Hoganson points to the benefits of situating Ameri-can history in a global context. Progressive Era Americans not only became moreaware of the rest of the world, but also they positioned themselves as users andappropriators of foreign cultures. It will be hard for readers to venture into WorldMarket or Pier One Imports without recalling with pleasure this entertainingbook. Whether shopping there amounts to what the author calls an “imperialbuy-in” is less certain (11). What is now established, thanks to Hoganson’simpressive work, is that “spreading the American dream” abroad (to use EmilyRosenberg’s phrase) involved a considerable amount of global dreaming on thehome front.

Auburn University Ruth Crocker


Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, andDemocracy. By Richard D. Kahlenberg. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. i, 524. $29.95.)

After suffering the indignity of being lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeperas the man who blew up the world, no less, before being posthumously awardedthe Medal of Freedom by President Clinton, teacher unionist and educationalreformer Albert Shanker clearly deserves a biographical study. In this work,Shanker’s first full-length biography is brought to readers by Richard D. Kahlen-berg, who argues that Shanker “is the single person most responsible for reshap-ing and preserving public education in the last half of the twentieth century”(384–385).

Shanker is easily the most important figure in the history of teacher unionism.He led the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT) during the 1960s,a pioneer union in public- sector collective bargaining. Later, for more than twentyyears, Shanker also served as president of the American Federation of Teachers(AFT). Although second in size to the much larger National Education Associa-tion (NEA), Shanker’s AFT was no less influential, thanks to its leader’s tirelessreform efforts. By the time he succumbed to cancer in 1997, Shanker had estab-lished a reputation as the most influential educational reformer in the nation.

As Kahlenberg makes clear by way of careful research in the AFT archives andextensive oral interviews, the AFT chief was as controversial as he was influential,a trajectory that began with the Oceans Hill-Brownsville controversy of 1967–1968. The battle pitched Shanker’s mostly white teachers against the mostly blackOceans Hill-Brownsville parents, who, once they took over their schools in acommunity control experiment, dismissed dozens of white teachers in the name ofblack power. Shanker led the New York City teachers on strike to protect thosefired and the colorblind ideal of nondiscrimination. In this case the principles ofunionism were higher than those of community control, and although Shankerproved that his colorblindness worked both ways when he organized mostly blackand Latino para-educators in 1970, he never outlived the stain of racism in someliberal circles, which surely informed his unfavorable view of a liberalism increas-ingly beholden to identity politics.

Although this book is a must-read for those interested in educational or laborhistory, it suffers from hagiographic tendencies. For example, Kahlenberg idealizesthe “tough” Cold War liberalism that Shanker advocated. Although Cold Warliberalism was a political strain admirable in its social democratic elements—in itsconsideration of organized labor as more than a mere “special interest”—its belief


that American might was right is troubling. In an effort to revive such a liberalworldview (which wrongly assumes it ever went away), Kahlenberg apologizes forShanker’s unyielding defense of the Vietnam War, which is labeled an “excess” oftough liberalism, rather than, more properly, its logical conclusion. There areother critiques to be made of Shanker and, by extension, Kahlenberg, includingtheir seemingly unqualified promotion of the educational standards movement,which has been co-opted by the forces of business conservatism. That said,this reviewer highly recommends this very readable book about a compellingAmerican.

Illinois State University Andrew Hartman

Andrew Jackson and the Constitution: The Rise and Fall of Generational Regimes. ByGerald N. Magliocca. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. ix,216. $29.95.)

This brief book by a law professor makes a significant observation. The SupremeCourt often makes its decisions based not so much on law but on who happens tobe sitting on the bench. Presidents and Congresses decide the court’s composition,and these are political, not legal, judgements. Using relevant historical workswhile quoting different cases and congressional debates, Gerald N. Maglioccanarrates the court’s history from 1819 to Reconstruction. He states that everygeneration redefines the court according to the political regime that wields powerin its era. Beginning with the Marshall court, specifically the benchmark case ofMcCulloch v. Maryland, the tribunal justified implied powers in approving asecond national bank. The author believes this decision prompted a rebellion,which carried Andrew Jackson, the bête noir of this piece, to the presidency adecade later. Chief Justice John Marshall’s decisions in Cherokee Nation v. U.S.[1831] and Worcester v. Georgia [1832] were undermined by Georgia’s defianceand Jackson’s inaction. The victims were, of course, the Cherokees, who wereousted from their lands by decade’s end. Upon Marshall’s death in 1835, Jacksonhad Congress expand the court from seven to nine justices by the end of his secondterm in 1837 (68). Despite the hapless efforts of the Whigs, this Jacksonian courtheld sway until the Civil War.

According to Magliocca, like “rodents” in the dinosaur age, the abolitionistswere the seemingly insignificant harbingers of the fall of the Jacksonian legalregime (87). Magliocca’s most significant point is the impact the Cherokeeremoval had on the antislavery movement. Earlier, activists had supported sendingfreed slaves to Africa, yet they soon understood that “each policy assumed that the


best way to resolve racial or cultural conflict was by shipping the minority off toanother region. They were also both coercive policies that did not recognize theautonomy of the affected individuals to stay where they were” (88). Abolitionismand a new antislavery Republican Party provoked a reaction from the Jackso-nians, the Dred Scott decision in 1857. With the advent of Lincoln and a horren-dous Civil War, a Republican establishment now controlled the court duringReconstruction. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase restored implied powers in 1870 byruling in Hepburn v. Griswold that Congress could impose “paper money uponunwilling citizens” (125).

Although well researched and ingenious in its arguments, there remains oneminor error and some important omissions. Clay did not finish third in theelectoral college in 1824, but fourth, which excluded him from the race accordingto the Twelfth Amendment (17). Magliocca correctly states that the Dred Scottcase attacked the core views of the Republican Party, yet this infamous decisionundermined also the popular sovereignty position of Stephen Douglas and thenorthern Democrats. The dust jacket asserts that the author offered “parallels”between Jackson and George W. Bush, yet he never did in the text. The personwho most emulated Jackson during this era was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln usedJackson’s argument against South Carolina nullification in 1832 in his firstinaugural address on March 4, 1861, denying that the union is a creation of thestates but the people. Moreover, just as Jackson ignored Marshall’s Worcesterdecision, in this same inaugural address, Lincoln declared, without mentioningDred Scott by name, that he would not obey decisions from an unelected body likethe U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite such drawbacks, Magliocca connects abolitionism to Indian removalwhile reminding readers that every generation fashions the Constitution accordingto its own vision.

Georgia Southern University James M. Woods

Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the AmericanEnvironmental Movement. By Neil M. Maher. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2007. Pp. x, 316. $35.00.)

If you have ever hiked a trail in a state park, gazed down at a national forest orcontoured agricultural fields on a cross-country flight, or contemplated why mostAmericans embraced the New Deal so enthusiastically in the middle of the 1930s,you have experienced the legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The


book under review here is essentially an intellectual and political biography of theCCC, one of the many “alphabet soup” agencies born during the First New Dealbut arguably the most important in terms of its popularity with the public and itsenduring impact on both the political and physical landscape of the United States.More pointedly, Neil M. Maher argues that the work of the CCC and the politicsnecessary for making that work possible facilitated the shift from the utilitarianconservation ideology of the Progressive Era to the ideology of environmentalismthat emerged after World War II. This shift is visible, Maher argues, in both thelandscape itself—especially state and national parks—and in the way New Dealliberalism came to define American politics for more than thirty years.

Maher therefore presents an ambitious, important, and ultimately convincingargument, helping historians better understand not only the CCC itself and theevolution of environmental thought in the middle of the twentieth century but alsothe success of the New Deal itself. Although many people over the years have triedto take credit for the idea of the CCC, Maher makes clear that the early life andwork of Franklin Roosevelt himself embodied all of the key principles of the CCC.Most importantly, FDR was personally invested in making sure that both theconservation ethos of men like Gifford Pinchot and the commitment to developingspaces for recreation in nature became part of the CCC’s mission. The success ofthat mission is remarkable. Although some biologists and their fellow travelers inthe preservation community eventually criticized the CCC for ignoring the laws ofecology in its work, in general the CCC was the most popular of the New Dealprograms and even helped Roosevelt win political support in places where he hadlost the vote in 1932.

As Maher demonstrates through his prodigious research, the affection Ameri-cans had for the CCC was understandable. Whether it was the effect CCC workcamps had on local economies, the transformation of beaten down, underweightenrollees into strapping men who often gained thirty pounds or more, or the newrecreational opportunities CCC projects opened up, most Americans benefitedfrom the CCC in concrete ways. The CCC both “democratized conservation” andredefined it, planting the seeds for the environmental movement in the hearts andminds of CCC veterans and the beneficiaries of their efforts alike (225).

The book’s only shortcoming is the relative paucity of voices from theseconstituencies. Nature’s New Deal is an important contribution to twentieth-century environmental history. Maher’s effort to reframe the political history ofthe New Deal is also something with which historians will now have to reckon.

Ithaca College Michael B. Smith


Technology in Postwar America: A History. By Carroll Pursell. (New York, N.Y.:Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 320. $35.00.)

This book is written for students, general readers, and other nonspecialists.Carroll Pursell, author of numerous works on the history of technology, heresynthesizes recent scholarship to explain how and why technology changed and“what it has meant to the country” (ix). For Pursell, technology and its meaningsare socially constructed. It is a product of human choices, is always designed tomeet human needs and goals, and should not be given agency. Historians whoshare this view contend that alternatives are always possible and that technologyis neither inherently good nor evil.

The book begins as Americans, relieved by the end of World War II, increasedconsumption of consumer goods and confronted the long shadow of the atombomb. Most Americans of the immediate postwar years were optimistic about thepromise of technology. After two decades of economic growth and global domi-nance, however, the nation stumbled from “technology drunk” to “technologysober.” The negative consequences of pesticide use, suburbs and automobility,unbridled growth, and the costs of energy choices from fossil fuels to nuclearenergy became apparent. By the 1970s, proponents of appropriate technologyquestioned the application of certain technologies and attempted to institution-alize their skepticism in government offices dedicated to what was known asappropriate technology. In 1980 Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to standtall again and rejected the appropriate technology movement. He accelerated thepace of military spending, embraced a new missile shield system, and simulta-neously strove to limit the destructive power of technology through arms controlagreements with the Soviet Union.

Readers will gain valuable insights into technology and values that shapedAmericans’ choices about technology, including housing, autos, aviation, transis-tors, energy, computers, and more. The context of the Cold War and the newrelationship between the Pentagon, defense contractors, and congressmen whowere determined to “bring home the bacon” meant that the taxpayers’ researchand development money was directed to military applications. Americansaccepted the fact that leaders of the military-industrial complex made choices ontheir behalf while they internalized the technologies of consumption. Governmentinvestment helped ensure American dominance and even contributed to a braindrain from less developed areas to highly developed ones. The technology gapbetween the United States and the rest of the world grew apace, even as Americansfeared that it was shrinking. By the late twentieth century, technology promoters


again promised to solve problems, as communications technology facilitatedglobalization, which, in turn, created new problems. Technology in PostwarAmerica is a skillful treatment of the ways in which ideas about technology havebeen contested in the postwar period that will serve as an excellent starting pointfor students and generalists who wish to gain a quick overview of the subject.

University of West Georgia J. L. Anderson

Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932. By Donald A. Ritchie. (Lawrence,Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. x, 274. $29.95.)

A casual reader of American political history may assume that Franklin D.Roosevelt’s nomination and election as president in 1932 was inevitable. After all,Roosevelt had already cultivated widespread, expected Democratic delegatesupport from the South and West, and his unexpected victory in the 1928 NewYork gubernatorial election had impressed Democrats nationally. Furthermore,FDR shared the same surname as his legendary Republican cousin, the latePresident Theodore Roosevelt, making FDR attractive to disaffected, anti-HooverRepublicans and independents.

Donald A. Ritchie, an associate historian for the U.S. Senate, effectively chal-lenges and questions this conventional wisdom. “With hindsight, political analystshave asserted that the Great Depression guaranteed that any Democrat could havewon in 1932, making Franklin Roosevelt’s election a foregone conclusion” (3).Using an impressive range and variety of primary sources, Ritchie also contendsthat Roosevelt’s rhetoric, strategy, and major decisions as a candidate in 1932served as a harbinger of his future leadership style and policy agenda as president.“As president, he confounded his political opponents by adopting a varied andcreative program of relief, recovery, and reform that appealed broadly to theelectorate” (209–210).

Ritchie explains how Roosevelt’s political opponents, especially Al Smith andHerbert Hoover, underestimated Roosevelt. In 1932 the Democratic Party requiredthat a candidate must receive the votes of at least two-thirds of the delegates in orderto be nominated for president. Smith was confident that he could attract enoughdelegates, especially from Catholic machine bosses, to prevent Roosevelt’s nomi-nation and eventually emerge as a victorious compromise candidate. Smith’sstrategy also benefited from the fact that the Democratic national convention washeld in Chicago, a city whose Democratic mayor and machine actively supportedSmith. Roosevelt’s candidacy at the convention was also jeopardized by theproliferation of other Democratic presidential candidates, including Speaker of the


House John N. Garner. Garner’s delegate support extended beyond Texas becauseof his endorsement from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Roosevelt won the presidential nomination on the fourth ballot after Garneraccepted Roosevelt’s offer to be his running mate and Garner and Hearst switchedtheir delegate strength to FDR. Meanwhile, Hoover assumed that Rooseveltwould be the easiest Democrat to defeat in November. Hoover continued tounderestimate FDR’s political skills and popular appeal, such as FDR’s precedent-breaking airplane trip to Chicago to accept the Democratic presidential nomina-tion in person and his active campaigning throughout the nation while Hooverrarely left the White House.

The remaining content of Ritchie’s book persuasively summarizes and analyzesthe long-term consequences of Roosevelt’s electoral success in 1932 for theAmerican presidency and the relationship between the American people and thefederal government. He even notes how Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidentialcampaign combined Hoover’s economic ideas with FDR’s style of rhetoric andleadership. “Although Hoover’s warnings against big government continue toresonate, Roosevelt’s vision of a responsive government has prevailed” (210).

Saint Mary’s College Sean J. Savage

The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000. By AlexRoland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar. (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley &Sons, 2007. Pp. xiii, 539. $35.00.)

The authors of this work not only offer the academic world a long-overduemaritime history textbook, but also they offer the more general reading public aninteresting and thorough history of America’s maritime trade. The book is dividedinto five major sections that closely fall in line with more traditional chronologicalstructures for United States history and thus could easily be utilized as the basis fora maritime history syllabus. The authors’ thesis is twofold. First, they argue thatAmerican maritime shipping was central to the development of the Americaneconomy, and then they suggest that it continues to play an essential role in theglobal marketplace.

The first thesis is hardly a new argument. The second thesis, however, offersthe reader some new insights into the topic. The authors argue that, contrary topopular interpretations of the downfall of American maritime trade after the CivilWar, American maritime shipping remained strong and active well into the twen-tieth century. They justify this thesis by emphasizing American coastal and brown-water trade, the integration of maritime commerce with land-based shipment such


as railroad and trucking, and the American capital ownership of foreign-registeredvessels. As such, they successfully argue that the American economy remainedclosely tied to maritime trade. By arguing that maritime historians should paycloser attention to domestic trade and financing as opposed to their more tradi-tional focus on oceanic commerce and labor, the authors present a new perspectiveinto America’s maritime history.

The authors argue that “America is a brown-water nation, with a blue-waterconsciousness,” while emphasizing that it was this brown-water maritime domes-tic trade that drove the American maritime economy, which was later reinvestedinto a host of business enterprises, such as manufacturing and railroads, thatdrove national economic development. Although this approach to maritimehistory offers a new analytical structure to the field, most of the book is really anoverview of more traditional perspectives of maritime trade that includes thought-ful insights into the American fish trade; the rise and fall of Boston, New York,and other Atlantic ports; steamships and canals; maritime labor unionization; themerchant marine at war; and containerization, just to name a few.

The title, “The Way of the Ship,” is a bit misleading, as most of the bookconsiders the macrohistory of maritime trade while dealing only occasionally withthe work of maritime labor, either in oceanic or brown-water trading. Thesubtitle, “America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned,” is also a bit misleading.First, this book is hardly an all-encompassing maritime history. As the authorspoint out in their introduction, this is a history of American maritime trade, bothforeign and domestic. This is not so much a critique of the book, more just of thetitle. The term “reenvisioned,” however, is more seriously misleading. Althoughthe initial focus on brown-water domestic trade is interesting, it cannot be clas-sified as “reenvisioned” as there are numerous histories on the importance ofcoastal traders. Furthermore, much of the book deals with oceanic foreign tradeon an equal basis with domestic trade. Instead of “reenvisioned,” the book couldbe better described as an excellent synthesis of the existing literature presented inan imaginative and interesting way.

Old Dominion University Brian J. Payne

A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861. By John M. Sacher. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press,2003. Pp. xiv, 331. $41.95.)

Adding to the emerging literature examining the antebellum Gulf South, theauthor strives to place Louisiana’s political scene squarely within the context of


national party politics. Beginning with an acknowledgement that state politicsmattered more than national contests, he goes on to insist that “during the 1820sand 1830s, Louisianians moved from a political system based on personality andethnicity to a distinct party system in which Democrats competed against Whigs”(xii). The author traces the emergence of the two-party system in Louisiana in away that almost uniformly parallels Michael F. Holt’s works on antebellum partypolitics, arguing that Louisiana perfectly fits Holt’s model. John M. Sacher alsovery carefully inserts Louisiana into William J. Cooper’s elucidation of the “poli-tics of slavery,” clearly striving to fit Louisiana into the larger Southern portraitcrafted by other scholars. Yet readers familiar with Bayou State politics will besurprised by many of the author’s conclusions.

In order to support his argument, Sacher relies on an array of antebellumnewspapers, legislative documents, and personal collections. Although the author’sprimary sources will be familiar to most readers, he fails to address certain keypolitical studies of Gulf South states that contradict his own contentions.

Perhaps most surprising to students of Louisiana history will be the author’sassessment of the overwhelming democratic ethos in Louisiana, which contrastswith other published studies on the state. He seems to base his argument on theidea that “between 1824 and 1861, the ideals of white men’s democracy tri-umphed” solely on the democratic reforms instituted in the state’s constitution of1845 (219). Yet it took wealthy Louisiana planters only seven years to roll backthese reforms, which they did in the 1852 state constitution. Although Sacherdiscusses this more restrictive document, it does not influence his argument that“during the antebellum period Louisianians discarded most of the aristocraticideas of the 1812 constitution and embraced the tenets of white men’s democ-racy” (219). Considering the power that wealthy planters regained in 1852, mostastounding of which was the apportionment scheme that counted slaves on aone-to-one ratio with the white population and therefore granted overwhelmingpolitical power to the districts of large slaveholders, it is surprising that Sacherdoes not refine his argument to address this retrenchment.

Furthermore, the author contends that the 1852 constitution, which he labelsdefinitively as a Whig document, “included state aid to businesses and internalimprovement enterprises, more liberal banking laws, and increased expenditureson public education” (168). Yet one of the most disappointing results of the 1852document was its crippling effect on the state’s public education system, whichwas just then emerging as a success.

Attempting to fit Louisiana into the larger antebellum South, Sacher miscon-strues the politics of the state. Though such a formula worked well for J. Mills


Thornton in Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860, themodel simply does not fit Louisiana. Sacher’s contention that democratic reformsin the state resulted from Louisiana “politicians following the lead of the people”contradicts available evidence, ensuring that anyone working on the region will beforced to contend with his conclusions in some manner (3).

Louisiana State University Sarah E. Lipscomb

Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated With Our GreatestPresident. By Edward Steers Jr. (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky,2007. Pp. xvii, 264. $24.50.)

In this book, one of America’s leading assassination experts turns his attention tosome of the major myths surrounding the sixteenth president. It is hardly surpris-ing that an assassination scholar would be drawn to investigate Lincoln mythol-ogy as the assassination itself has generated so many myths. Edward Steers Jr.tackles not only this assassination mythology but also the more general myths thathave arisen about Lincoln.

The author’s approach is appropriate because Lincoln mythology is not con-fined to any one aspect of the president’s life or career and because it continuedafter his death. The legends actually begin before his birth, since even his paternityhas been called into question. His father, Thomas, was not deemed heroic enoughto have sired such a famous son, producing stories that he was rendered sterile bya case of the mumps. This created claims for a number of alleged biologicalfathers, including Abraham Enloe, Patrick Henry, and John C. Calhoun. TheHenry paternity claim is the most absurd as he died in 1799, ten years beforeLincoln was born.

One major factor fueling Lincoln mythology is the desire to enlist him onbehalf of a particular cause. If one wants to believe Lincoln was a baptizedChristian, for example, one can rely on the words of housekeeper Mariah Vance,who told of a minister visiting Springfield and secretly baptizing Lincoln. The onlyproblem with this tale is that, according to the railroad timetables, the ministerwould have had to arrive on a train that did not run, and the two men would havehad to chop ice and then plunge into the frozen Sangamon River. Similarly, activistC. A. Tripp claimed that Lincoln was gay, touching off a major debate, althoughSteers finds the evidence less than convincing.

Sensational documents have also occasionally emerged to fuel Lincoln mythol-ogy. The last thirty years have witnessed the discovery of missing pages from


Booth’s diary and detective records purporting to show that Booth was in leaguewith Northerners to capture or kill Lincoln and that he survived Garrett’s Barn.From time to time, alleged new copies of documents such as the GettysburgAddress have also surfaced. Steers concludes that the diary pages are an outrightforgery, not an uncommon problem in the Lincoln field, while the famous speechwas a careful tracing that fooled even some experts.

Steers writes in an engaging style, and this book is highly recommended. Itreminds readers that sensational headlines appear on the front page of newspaperswhile corrections and retractions are placed where few people will read them,allowing the erroneous report to become ingrained in the public mind. Althoughno single work can prevent Lincoln myths from flourishing, the author also urgesreaders to remember that many sensational Lincoln stories are dubious and it isnot the reader’s obligation to accept these allegations uncritically, but rather forthose who make them to provide proof. He also reminds Lincoln historians to beextremely careful in writing about him lest, by endless repetition, they convertmythology into truth.

Bridgewater State College Thomas R. Turner

D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most ControversialMotion Picture of All Time”. By Melvyn Stokes. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 413. $24.95.)

This author’s study of director D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation [1915] isan ambitious synthesis of existing literature and a revisitation of primary sourcesin an attempt to offer new perspectives on one of America’s most controversialfilms. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the film and the author hastwo objectives—first to explore the production’s genesis and second to assess itsimpact. Lauded as a cinematic milestone, Griffith’s movie became the firstfeature-length American film. Yet its sympathetic dramatization of the Confed-erate cause and the Ku Klux Klan’s rise had nightmarish consequences forAfrican Americans.

Melvyn Stokes, a British Americanist, achieves his first objective most effec-tively. Opening with The Birth of a Nation’s remarkably successful premiere, hesubsequently scrutinizes the men responsible for the film. First came ThomasDixon, a North Carolinian whose novel, The Clansman, alleged that vengefulblacks and carpetbagging Republicans violated the white South’s rights. Dixonlater joined forces with Griffith, also a Southerner, to bring this glorification of the


KKK and lynching to the screen. Stokes then details the filming and distributingprocess and Griffith’s creative attempts to patch together funding as his produc-tion ran over budget. Agreeing that there was little true technical innovation inGriffith’s picture, he argues the director’s real achievement was in reshapingmoviegoing and the film business. Griffith was gambling by charging two dollarsa ticket for a film that ran over two hours. But borrowing tricks from thetheatrical trade, he hired professional publicists to plug the film and sent it on tourwith elaborate road shows. This resulted in a shift of movie audiences’ expecta-tions and a revolution in the industry’s promotional practices.

In the last chapters, Stokes surveys the film’s impact. He explores campaigns toban the film, focusing on protests by the National Association for the Advance-ment of Colored People. Additionally, he discusses how Griffith’s narrative and itsveneration of the Southern cause came to dominate white America’s historicalmemory. This film, Stokes also acknowledges, played a role in the KKK’s resur-gence and loss of black lives. His conclusion makes note of continuing debatesover the film. Overall he contends that The Birth of a Nation was a pioneeringexpression of cinematic art, but he maintains that the film cannot be understoodin isolation from its racist content.

Stokes’s exploration of the film’s impact is less satisfying. His approach privi-leges the filmmaker in the telling of the story and thus unevenly interrogatesthe film’s disturbing racial impact. For example, he primarily attributes theNAACP’s failure to suppress the film to the organization’s own weaknesses. Yethis own account demonstrates that agents of powerful white institutionalizedracism—overwhelmingly resistant white courts and politicians—led to theNAACP’s defeat. Additionally, the rare but uncontextualized use of “colored,”which will give American readers pause, should have been removed. Stokesalleges that “trouble” began with the NAACP’s protests against The Birth ofa Nation (129). For the filmmaker, this might be true. But from the AfricanAmerican perspective, “trouble” began when Griffith brought Dixon’s story tothe screen.

California State University San Marcos Jill Watts

Family Life in 19th-Century America. By James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo.(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. vii, 415. $65.00.)

In the latest volume in their series on family history, the authors demonstrate howthe onset of the Market Revolution coupled with westward expansion and the


burgeoning reformist spirit initiated changes in national identity, ideals of equal-ity, and social mobility. Yet, as James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volocontend, the family provided a source of normalcy in a sometimes unstable societyand “served to transmit cultural ideals, societal standards, and political awarenessthrough succeeding generations” (vii).

This study, intended as a reference, posits that the family’s central purpose wasideological. Similar to John Demos’s study of colonial New England families, ALittle Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony [1970], the Volos offer anuanced examination of family roles, relationships, and material culture in thehousehold. They are careful, however, to show the unique nature of nineteenth-century family life by situating their analysis in the context of the urbanization,industrialization, immigration, and regionalism of the period. These changesrefashioned the home and created complex differences in the family experiencedepending on class, race, and regional identity. Despite such disparities, the Volosidentify some commonalities, namely that family served crucial religious, eco-nomic, educational, societal, and supportive functions.

After an overview of the nation in the era, the authors devote subsequentchapters to members of the household. Families typically prescribed to nineteenth-century gender ideals that lauded a patriarchal structure of the home. Fathersserved as protectors and providers who spent most of their time outside the homeengaged in a variety of activities from paid work to military leadership, all in aneffort to enhance their family’s livelihood and reputation. Mothers performeddomestic labor and maternal care central to the daily functioning of the home. Thegrowth of reform movements and opportunities for wage work, nevertheless,encouraged many women to step outside the confines of the domestic arena. Therole of children changed as nineteenth-century society recognized childhood as aseparate stage of development. Parents continued to expect obedience from theiroffspring, but the rise of the middle-class lifestyle afforded youths with materialluxuries and educational opportunities lacking in previous centuries. The presenceof servants, free and enslaved, as well as extended kin depended on regionallocation and class status. The Volos conclude with a chapter on the convergenceof family life and the frontier experience as the nation embraced the ideals ofManifest Destiny.

The strength of this text lies in its synthesis of family history in the period. Theauthors offer a variety of sources including prescriptive literature, census records,and diaries that educators and students will find useful. Their analytical focus is,at times, lost in their survey of historical developments, such as labor disputes,sectional antagonisms, and manufacturing technology. Connecting their


discussion of such events back to the household would reinforce their argumentconcerning the centrality of family life. Still, readers will find the authors’ meticu-lous synthesis beneficial to understanding the larger picture of family history andwill enjoy the entertaining and insightful anecdotal evidence.

Birmingham-Southern College Victoria E. Ott

Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller. By SteveWeinberg. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Pp. 306. $25.95.)

The author offers an engaging, descriptive account of the parallel, and sometimesintersecting, lives of Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, and John D. Rock-efeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company. In often alternating narrativechapters he traces their childhoods, adolescence, and maturation, culminatingwith Tarbell’s attack on Standard Oil in a series of investigative reports publishedin McClure’s Magazine in the early 1900s. He then concludes with several chap-ters looking at the later lives of Tarbell and Rockefeller. Much of this story is wellknown: Tarbell’s early life in Pennsylvania’s oil country, not far from Cleveland,where Rockefeller first established Standard’s headquarters; the opposition ofTarbell’s father to Standard; and the nature of Tarbell’s attack on Rockefeller andhis company. Less well known, and capably explained by Steve Weinberg, areimportant elements of Tarbell’s development: her college days, her life in Pariswhile conducting research on the French Revolution and Napoleon, and hermultifaceted work for McClure’s.

A faculty member in journalism at the University of Missouri, Weinberg hasprepared a fascinating history that, despite some significant shortcomings, shouldappeal to upper-division undergraduate students. Sprightly written and logicallyorganized, the work reveals much about social and economic changes in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century America. Weinberg, however, ismuch more nuanced and complete in his accounts of Tarbell’s life and work thanhe is in dealing with Rockefeller and the development of Standard Oil. He sideswith Tarbell and tends to present Rockefeller as simply a robber baron. Basing hishistory on research in both primary and secondary sources, Weinberg is appar-ently unfamiliar with many of the most significant works about American businesshistory, including very important studies about the development of big business byAlfred D. Chandler Jr. Taking on the Trust contains no footnotes (some sourcesare acknowledged in the text), and the bibliography ignores major works in anumber of fields. Despite its problems, this study could be used to advantage by


instructors knowledgeable about modern American history and business history.It is a good read.

The Ohio State University Mansel G. Blackford

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. By Joyce Tyldesley. (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books,2008. Pp. xiii, 290. $27.50.)

Cleopatra VII, Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt from 51-30 BCE, remains a mythic figureto both popular and academic historians. Accomplished Egyptologist JoyceTyldesley attempts to shed light on the complicated reign of Cleopatra in order “toput Cleopatra back into her own, predominately Egyptian context” (4). Tyldesleyis clearly aware of the rich historical corpus that undergirds the life and times ofthis Ptolemaic queen. In her retelling of Cleopatra’s story, she draws on estab-lished archaeological and classical sources to advance a new reading of this largelymisunderstood figure. Tyldesley, for example, argues that she provides “more ofthe archaeological and historical detective work that underpins Cleopatra’s storythan is perhaps usual in a biography” (4).

Although the author is clearly sympathetic to Cleopatra, her efforts to reinter-pret the queen’s life for a popular audience fall short due to the uneven organi-zation of her book. Tyldesley begins by arguing that “an almost complete lack ofprimary sources” limits the ability of the historian to write “a conventionalbiography of Cleopatra” (7). In chapters one and two, the author discussesCleopatra’s quick rise to power, followed in chapter three by a tangential discus-sion of Alexandria. She then abruptly segues into Cleopatra’s infamous politicaland sexual relationship with Julius Caesar in chapter four. In chapters five throughseven, the author covers ground familiar to most Egyptologists. Tyldesley eluci-dates Cleopatra’s attempts to reframe her religious identity as a new manifestationof the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, her sexual and strategic partnership withMarc Antony, and the murky political circumstances surrounding the queen’ssuicide. The concluding chapters of the book, which encompass the period afterCleopatra’s death and the fate of her children, are interesting but brief. In the finalchapter, “History Becomes Legend,” she raises a number of intriguing ideas andobservations about the historical inaccuracies surrounding Cleopatra’s historicalimage. For example, Tyldesley notes that medieval Arab historians “were able todevelop a parallel understanding of Egypt’s past, which included a very differentversion of Cleopatra from that recognized in the West” (212). This is an important


intervention and one that requires further elaboration, but Tyldesley does notchoose to explain why a distorted image of Cleopatra continues to exist inEuro-American scholarship and popular culture.

That the author fails to do so is odd. She is obviously familiar with her sourcematerial and is well versed in the various debates surrounding Cleopatra. As alecturer in Egyptology (specializing in Egyptian queens) at Manchester University,a consultant for several television programs, and the critically acclaimed author ofnumerous books in the field, Tyldesley should be able to explain her subject matterin a manner accessible to both academics and a general audience. However, thebiographical information covered in this book is already familiar to Egyptologists.The book’s rambling prose also makes it off-putting to nonspecialists. AlthoughTyldesley includes a helpful “Who Was Who?” chapter, a succinct chronology ofAncient Egyptian dynasties, and suggestions for further reading, her opaquewriting style will intimidate all but the most dedicated reader.

Hofstra University Mario Ruiz

Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China. Edited byJeremy Brown and Paulo G. Pickowicz. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. xii, 462. $45.00.)

The fifteen papers in this volume represent the leading edge of contemporaryscholarship on China’s New Democracy period [1949–1953]. From 1927 to1948, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) administrative experience was limitedto certain rural areas. How did the CCP manage to transform itself into a nationalauthority after it assumed power in 1949? The authors show how complex thistransformation proved to be and how flexible the party was in responding todiverse local and regional problems. They also explore how the intellectual andbusiness establishment responded to the CCP and came to support the newgovernment.

A multitude of competing local and regional interests made the transformationcomplex. Central party agendas fought local agendas; Nationalist loyalists foughtparty cadres; workers fought business owners; rural interests fought urban inter-ests; and minorities fought the Han Chinese. In addition, the CCP had to contendwith its main ally, the Soviet Union, which had its own agenda in Asia, and itsadversary, the United States, which posed a particular threat on the Koreanpeninsula.

In each chapter, the author describes the party’s need to be flexible in holdingthings together. To gain support from multiple interests, the CCP carried out its


New Democracy policy, a strategy hatched a decade earlier in Yan’an. The idea wasto bring everyone, regardless of ideological orientation or class background, intothe CCP-led reconstruction of China. Real socialism could come later. However,with the onset of the Korean War, the CCP abruptly ended this politics ofinclusiveness and tolerance and replaced it with mass struggle campaigns to stir uppatriotism. The tyrannical crackdown also intended to replace autonomous civilorganizations with centrally controlled mass organizations. Accusations, confes-sions, and arrests marked this systematic assault on local and regional power.

The book has four parts, each showing how these tensions played out. In thefirst part, they tell how the CCP took over Shanghai, a city ruled by elites and civilorganizations with questionable loyalties and rife with saboteurs, agents, andcounterrevolutionaries. In the second part, the authors take readers to China’speriphery: Liaoning in the northeast, Guizhou in the southwest, Tibet in the farwest, and Xinjiang in the northwest. Each region posed unique problems requir-ing unique solutions. Party tactics there were sometimes conciliatory, sometimesdespotic, often innovative, and frequently cunning. In part three, the authorsportray writers, artists, scientists, educators, and filmmakers, most of whom stoodready to please the new regime and who “had no idea they were about to get theirteeth kicked in” (208). The essays in part four explore how the regime affectedfamily life. In two articles the authors recount how the changing political windsaffected the lives of two wealthy capitalist families. In another article they showhow preliberation birthing practices evolved with the postliberation state initia-tives to bring scientific knowledge and training to rural midwives.

The book is a superb collection that will inspire future scholars. This earlyperiod is important because it helps historians to understand better the sincerity ofboth the CCP and the intellectual and business establishment. Were these groupssincere, or were they instead calculating opportunists when they first encounteredeach other? It also helps readers to understand why CCP policies changed so oftenand so radically in the years thereafter. The book makes an excellent addition toany syllabus for advanced courses on the history of modern China.

Purdue University Juan Wang

From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition. Edited byDipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori. (New Delhi, India:Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 369. $45.00.)

The editors aim with this volume to explore the meaning and significance ofdecolonization on the Indian subcontinent. The work is intended as a tribute to


the memory of Bernard S. Cohn [1928–2003], anthropologist and historian at theUniversity of Chicago.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in the introduction, the topic is vast. The essays,therefore, take up aspects of the transition. The transition began in some respectsin the 1920s and continued into the 1960s (3). Chakrabarty notes, “Becomingpostcolonial is a process, and not a state of being ever achieved with any degreeof finality” (4).

The editors divide the book into six sections: 1) Questions of Democracy; 2)Minority Imaginings; 3) Caste, Class, and Nation; 4) Law, Capital, and SubjectFormation; 5) Regions; and 6) Wider Perspectives. Several essays (such as those ofUday S. Mehta, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Faisal Devji, Anupama Rao, and Ritu Birla)are intellectual ruminations. Other articles are more obviously empirically con-structed, tracking issues and questions, pointing to areas for further research (IanCopland and coauthors John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan.)

Articles that constitute empirical analysis include two that address topics ingovernance, highlighting elements of continuity in somewhat unexpected ways.With a discussion of the development of election law in Britain and India, DavidGilmartin provides an original analysis of democratic conceptions and electoralpractices in India circa 1920–1980. A. H. Ahmed Kamal’s discussion of theapproach of the government of East Bengal to mid-century peasant rebellionsshould be of interest to students of state responses to rural unrest. Barbara Metcalfand Andrew Sartori explore political visions and careers of two mid-centuryMuslim activists. Sartori’s discussion of Abul Mansur Ahmad, a Bengali politi-cian, provides a good companion piece to the article by Kamal. Gyanesh Kudaisyawrites on the selection of a postcolonial name for the Indian state known today asUttar Pradesh, giving in the process a glimpse of contemporary meanings, politicaland cultural, of both the state and the new nation.

Articles of social history in the volume are less unified in theme. Boria Majum-dar studies the changing social background of major cricketers in India to the1980s. Nikhil Rao focuses on cooperative societies and space in the constructionof south Indian identity in late colonial Bombay. Rochona Majumdar’s discussionof representations of women, property, and family in debates around the HinduCode Bill provides insights on gender and economy linkages in contemporaryvisions for national development.

The final essay in the volume looks beyond mid-century transitions to suggestbroad trajectories. David Washbrook joins voices that call for considering theprecolonial in the postcolonial. He also notes that understandings of colonialsociety often spring from research on north India and that paying attention to


south Indian experiences presents new possibilities in interpretation for bothcolonial and postcolonial India.

University of Oslo Pamela Price

Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinationsin Imperial China (1127–1279). By Hilde De Weerdt. (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 495. $49.95.)

Civil service examinations and Confucian thought profoundly influenced laterimperial Chinese history. A literate elite male hoped to pass the examinations,become one of the “stars in the heavens” (an official), and ensure the status andfame of his family. Since most of the examination content was based on Confuciantexts, the rigorous preparation for the examinations steeped the candidates inConfucian thought and specific styles of writing and argumentation. Many haveargued that the examinations promoted literacy, ensured the ideological unity ofthe pool of officials, and, some argue, promoted a conservative neo-Confucianphilosophy that inhibited China’s modernization.

Hilde De Weerdt provides a rich, complex look at the examination system inthe Southern Song. De Weerdt tackles two major themes in Song history: the shiftof neo-Confucianism from heterodoxy to orthodoxy and the shift from stateactivism to elite activism in education and politics. Drawing on classical Chinesetexts, and modern scholarship in Chinese, English, and Japanese, De Weerdtdevelops a multifaceted picture of what she terms the “examination field,” whichincluded political officials, private teachers, examination candidates, and publish-ers (16–17). By exploring collections of model examination essays she delineatesmultiple and competing uses of the examinations and the public and privateschools. De Weerdt establishes the link between these areas of the “examinationfield” and commercial presses, arguing the latter played a key role in promotingcompeting ideologies.

The Southern Song court had adopted a strategy of “great impartiality”retreating from the state activism of the Northern Song. Hence, the court did notpromote a single curricular interpretation of Confucian thought. Consequently,the “examination field” was open, and private education flourished. De Weerdtfocuses on two of the major Southern Song schools of thought: the Yongjia school,known for its broad curriculum and utilitarian approach to problem-solving; andthe Learning of the Way school (often translated as neo-Confucianism), stressinga rigid core curriculum and moral argumentation.


The “contest” between these approaches was fought through teachers’ writingsand commercial publications. Teachers whose students earned degrees were alsobestselling authors of examination preparation manuals, which also promotedtheir ideologies. Ultimately, the Learning of the Way curriculum shaped by Zhu Xiwon the day. De Weerdt suggests that this school gained imperial support in thethirteenth century because of its popular appeal amongst literate elites. The courthoped adopting it as orthodoxy would “work as a catalyst in healing andreinvigorating the Song state” (216). What is less clear is why it was popular. Theanswer may be that the Learning of the Way promoted a clear ideology (allsociopolitical problems are due to a lack of moral development) couched in alimited core of texts (the Four Books) providing a clear means of interpreting themassive amount of classical literature and history that examination candidateswere expected to master.

This densely detailed book merits close reading by those hoping to understandthe examinations, education, and the development of Zhu Xi’s brand of Confu-cian thought in the Song dynasty.

Berea College Robert W. Foster

Santa Anna of Mexico. By Will Fowler. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press,2007. Pp. viii, 501. $45.00.)

In this compelling biography of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the author sets therecord straight about the man who served Mexico six times as president yet isvilified today as a tyrant and traitor to his country. Will Fowler asks why, if SantaAnna was such a monster, was he invited back to power by so many differentfactions over four decades? His answer is surprising—Santa Anna was a liberal, arepublican, an army man, a hero, a revolutionary, a regional strongman, but nevera politician. He presented himself as a mediator who was both antiparty andantipolitics in the decades when the new country of Mexico was wracked byfactional infighting. He was always more willing to lead an army than to lead hiscountry. In all but his last presidency, Santa Anna retired to his haciendas almostimmediately after taking power; he remained in Mexico City only a few monthseach time, allowing another to assume the role of acting president.

Fowler also depicts Santa Anna as a trickster who persuaded the Texans to lethim go without giving up anything of substance and later tricked President Polkinto funding Mexico’s defense in the Mexican-American War. Santa Anna linedhis own pockets at every turn, and bought enough haciendas near Veracruz to


become its greatest landowner, employer, protector, and benefactor. Yet, he spenthis own funds to arm and clothe the military when necessary.

Veracruz, Mexico’s most important port, is the center around which Fowlerspins his story. Its archives are the core from which Fowler’s narrative grows. Heargues that Santa Anna could not have gained like power had he come from anyother place in Mexico. Yellow fever was the scourge of the area; the veracruzanos,Santa Anna, and the armies he raised among them were immune, giving them agreat advantage over invaders. The importance of that port city to the economy ofMexico meant that whatever government served Mexico had to accommodate theregional strongman, Santa Anna. He was a federalist in so far as the ideal offederalism protected his friends and supporters in Veracruz. When necessary, hebecame a centralist for the same reason. He saw the army of Mexico and his ownleadership as a force for peace and order. The people of Mexico and their politicalclass repeatedly called on Santa Anna for those very reasons. Santa Anna regardedhimself as a founder and liberator deserving of honors, parades, celebrations, andfiestas. Yet at his death he was unsung—the scapegoat for all that had gone wrongin Mexico since its independence from Spain.

University of Texas at San Antonio Patricia L. P. Thompson

Imperial Japan’s World War Two, 1931–1945. By Werner Gruhl. (New Brunswick,N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2007. Pp. 254. $39.95.)

The enormity of the losses suffered by the peoples of Asia in the Second WorldWar is little known except to regional specialists. Not surprisingly, people in theWest have looked first to their own losses, but they have not overlooked theimpact of war on the enemy, most notably Japanese casualties of the atomicbomb. Yet the lives lost or forever changed in East and Southeast Asia, especiallyin China, dwarf anything experienced by the Western allies, or even by Germanyand Japan.

Werner Gruhl presents a wide range of statistics, indicating some twenty-sevenmillion deaths from all war-related causes in the East Asia-Pacific sector. Such acalculation inevitably carries a degree of imprecision, but there is no doubt as tothe magnitude of the total, nor the significance of the figure’s breakdown: Ameri-can and other Western losses amounted to about three hundred thousand—or 1percent of the total; Japanese losses stood at about 12 percent; while Asian lossesin the Japanese-inflicted war account for 87 percent—almost twenty-four milliondeaths. Of the latter figure, at least fifteen million were Chinese, four-fifths of themcivilians.


The narrative runs from the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931 through1945 and the subsequent Tokyo war-crimes trials. The focus is on the Japanesearmy’s treatment of war prisoners and the civilian population, and on Japaneseadministration and exploitation of the occupied areas. In presenting this record,the author relies on a wide range of English-language sources, mostly secondaryand some of them dated. Given the centrality of China to his argument, it isunfortunate that he did not engage an assistant for access to some of the vastliterature produced in China and Taiwan in recent years on the Sino-Japanese War.

Even with good source materials at hand, the structure of the book weakenstheir impact. After reflecting on the near lack of historical memory regardingAsian victims, the author then chronicles the Japanese military record throughoutAsia. However, in attempting to cover so much, he often just broaches an impor-tant topic before moving on to the next. There is also too much repetition ofnonspecific statements of the “yet more dead, injured, brutalized, homeless”variety. He would make the case effectively by concentrating more on select topicssuch as the devastation of the Lower Yangtze in 1937, the Nanjing massacre, thedestruction of Manila, and the medical perversions of the Unit 731 project.

The author is not a professional historian, but he has brought great dedicationto his task. His objective in bringing forward the magnitude of suffering in Chinaand other Asian nations is not only germane to a fuller comprehension of the war,but also is vital to understanding the continuing tensions in East Asia between thevictims and a Japan that does not fully admit to the devastation meted out by itin that war.

McMaster University David P. Barrett

Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765–1954. By KamaMaclean. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv, 344. $74.00.)

From this interesting history of a mammoth Hindu pilgrimage festival, threesurprising findings should be underlined. First, Kama Maclean argues convinc-ingly that, though Allahabad has been the scene of religious gatherings for morethan a millennium, these have only been called Kumbhs recently, since she couldfind no source using this label before 1868 (98). This book’s account of why andhow this innovation was effected, without being noticed by the British, who wereotherwise often sticklers for precedent, is compelling.

A second and not unrelated transformation concerns how the festival becameincreasingly “religious,” as Indians sought to protect their autonomy by invokingthe queen’s 1858 proclamation prohibiting interference in religion (113). A


prominent and poignant symbol of this change is the nagas. Maclean cites thework of William Pinch and others, who have described how these “holy men”were often long-distance traders and mercenaries before they were pacified by theBritish. She notes the irony that the British came to characterize these mendicantsas “idle, lazy fellows,” when it was they who had stripped the nagas of theirprevious gainful employment (58).

A third finding concerns the role of party politics at the Kumbh. As Macleannotes, news reports of recent festivals have featured Hindu nationalist groups(212). Yet the history of what Maclean calls “Congress Kumbhs” goes back to thefirst quarter of the twentieth century (213). Peter van der Veer and many othershave noted how the Congress has not been above using appeals to Hinduism tomobilize support, despite its rhetorical commitment to secularism, and Pilgrimageand Power adds yet more evidence to that argument.

This review would be incomplete without commending Pilgramage and Powerfor its style. The writing is admirably clear throughout, enlivened with an eye fortelling detail. The book also occasionally displays the author’s ironic sense ofhumor. Noting that inoculation requirements at the 1966 Kumbh were droppedfor the immersion of the ashes of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Macleanadds: “Clearly, the government did not think that mourners of the departed primeminister had the same capacity to transmit disease as pilgrims” (305, note 151).

Though she draws on a wide range of sources in the work, Maclean apologizesfor not including “Indian representations of the mela” (18). She does incorporatetravelers’ memoirs and newspaper accounts by Indians, especially beginning fromthe late nineteenth century, but even these come from “educated circles” (16). Atone point, Maclean speculates that the festival of ordinary pilgrims might have leftlittle documentary trace as it was “largely a personal experience” (17). But theoverwhelming evidence in the book suggests that once the political aspects of theKumbh Mela have been exhaustively analyzed, there might be nothing left torelegate to the realm of the personal or the religious.

Missouri State University J. E. Llewellyn

The Last Days of the Incas. By Kim MacQuarrie. (New York, N.Y.: Simon andSchuster, 2007. Pp. xv, 522. $30.00.)

The Inca Empire was the largest empire to develop in the precontact Americas.Last in a series of states to develop in the Andes of South America, the Incacontrolled a territory that stretched from modern-day Colombia to Chile. At theirheight, the Inca oversaw a population of at least six million persons. Initial contact


between the Spaniards and the Inca began in 1532 with Francisco Pizarro’ssurprise capture and subsequent execution of the Inca king, Atahualpa. By 1572,the invading Europeans had come to control almost all parts of the former empireand the last direct heir to the Inca crown, Tupac Amaru, had been executed.

The story of the Spanish invasion of Peru and the ensuing collapse of the IncaEmpire has been told many times. The most famous, but now outdated, account ofthese events was written by William H. Prescott (The Conquest of Peru) in 1847.The most widely read recent description of the fall of the Inca is John Hemming’smagnum opus (The Conquest of the Incas) written in 1970. Although Kim Mac-Quarrie’s historiography does not compete with that of Hemming, he does providea detailed, highly accurate and thoroughly engaging narrative of these events.

MacQuarrie begins with the arrival of Pizarro and the tragic events of Cajama-rca. Focusing on the heirs to the Inca crown, and less on the complex series of civilwars that occurred between the Spaniards, the major part of the text concludesforty years later with the death of Tupac Amaru. In the final chapters of the book,MacQuarrie is concerned with the rediscovery of Machu Picchu by the Americanexplorer Hiram Bingham and more recent explorations in the Vilcabamba regionof Peru. MacQuarrie has an engaging writing style and brings a new eye to thedetails that are contained in the sixteenth-century accounts. This is an excellentbook for those who are traveling to Peru or who are interested in learning aboutthe European-American contact period.

University of Illinois at Chicago Brian S. Bauer

Mao Zedong. By Maurice Meisner. (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2007. Pp. 222.$24.95.)

The author has written a relatively short, readable, and balanced biography ofMao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party who transformed Chinain the latter half of the twentieth century. Maurice Meisner details Mao’s early lifeas the son of a rich peasant who made his way to the city in search of education.There he encountered a variety of Western ideas—liberalism, anarchism, social-ism, and Marxism-Leninism—sweeping China’s urban areas in the early decadesof the twentieth century.

Although Meisner describes Mao’s response to these various ideas, he focuseson how Mao was able to mold Marxist ideas to the realities of rural China thathelped make possible the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 under theleadership of the Communist Party. At the same time that Meisner shows thatMao was a liberator and a nationalist, he also details how Mao became a despot


in the late 1950s. For specialists in the field as well as for interested observers ofthe events in China’s twentieth-century history, this book is a stimulating assess-ment of Mao’s life.

The reviewer’s criticism is that Meisner views Mao and his policies primarilywithin a Marxist context. When Mao deviates from that context, Meisner depictsMao as a repressive leader and tyrant. Thus, in the late 1950s, when Mao beganto impose utopian visions onto China such as the Great Leap Forward, this led tothe death of thirty million Chinese peasants. Similarly, when Mao turned againsthis party comrades, whom he felt were conspiring against him, he launched theCultural Revolution [1966–1976] that led not only to widespread violence andbloodshed, but also brought China close to anarchy at the time of Mao’s death inSeptember 1976. Though Meisner gives great attention to the role of Marxism, hemakes only passing mention to the role of Leninism in China’s revolution. Fromthe beginning, the People’s Republic of China was established on Leninist dicta-torial strictures and structures, as well as on Marxism that made it an authori-tarian and, at times, a totalitarian state during Mao’s reign.

Meisner sees Mao’s greatest achievements during the early 1950s when Chinawas reunited after years of disunity and when the party carried out land reform,which divided up the landlords’ land holdings relatively equally. There were alsoimpressive gains in literacy and healthcare and the doubling of life expectancy. Hedescribes these achievements, including the creation of a national market, as com-parable to a bourgeois revolution, which previous Chinese regimes had failed to do.But Meisner does not explain that just a few years later, in 1955, Mao launched thecollectivization of agriculture throughout the whole country that did away with therelatively equal landholdings. At the same time, China’s industries and businesseswere nationalized. Thus, whatever bourgeois revolution may have occurred quicklyfaded away and did not produce a bourgeoisie or a broad middle class.

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms of Meisner’s ideological approach, thisbiography is worth reading and provides an intriguing and fascinating view ofChina’s transformative leader, Mao Zedong.

Boston University Merle Goldman

Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World.Edited by Himanshu Prabha Ray and Edward A. Alpers. (New Delhi, India: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 311. $45.00.)

Is there “such a thing as an ‘Indian Ocean World’” (15)? This series of essays, thecompilation of which was triggered by a 2003 conference entitled “Narratives of


the Sea: Encapsulating the Indian Ocean World,” does not provide a definitive andcomprehensive account of the historical and historiograhical contours and coher-ence of the Indian Ocean world. Its own coherence, however, testifies to theusefulness of the Indian Ocean as a unitary focus of inquiry.

The editors divide the volume into two parts preceded by their useful intro-duction. Part one, entitled “Maritime Communities and Littoral Societies,”begins with three methodology pieces. Michael Pearson sets the stage provoca-tively by noting that data and metadata on Indian Ocean interconnectednessoften sidestep the sea: land-born concerns dominate the emerging “landscape ofthe sea,” ultimately necessitating what Pearson calls “amphibious history.” Hisconception of littoral society, the notion of permeability as the defining char-acteristic of the littoral zone, and the interpenetration of sea and land underliethe argumentation of the rest of the papers of the volume. So does the focus onmaritime communities centered on and dispersed among ports, advanced byanother pioneer of Indian Ocean studies and contributor to this volume,Kenneth McPherson. Also methodologically central is Himanshu Prabha Ray’sapplication of Horden and Purcell’s conceptual repertoire to establish thatIndian Ocean diachronic connectivity resides in material, navigational, architec-tural, and visual sources.

The next five papers focus on specific subregions and polities to emphasize themix of trade, politics, and religion that shaped littoral societies into parts of acommon oceanic world. Thus, Mahesh Gopalan shows how Jesuits capitalized onthe political dynamic between the Coromandel coast’s pearl fishing Parava com-munity and the ruling Nayakas, thereby naturalizing their influence on localsociety. Anthony Reid revises his earlier position on South-Asian historiographicalautonomy to examine how Aceh became “the verandah of Mecca” (113). EdwardA. Alpers exposes the layered impact of Indonesian migrations, Arab trade,coastal Islamization, European insertion into local networks, transfer of slavepopulations, Indian financiering, and Hadhrami religious authority in the creationof the complex littoral society around the Mozambique Channel. Nigel Worden’sstudy demonstrates that the “new social history” of Cape Town is much moremarked by Indian Ocean links than the port’s geographical position and tradi-tional historiographical emphasis on Dutch origins would allow. Finally, ErikGilbert shows how Zanzibar’s links with Oman created “a cosmopolitan com-munity that stretched across the western Indian Ocean to embrace Oman, theHadhramaut, East Africa, and western India” (169).

Entitled “Commercial Transactions and Currency Systems,” part two shiftsthe focus to economic instruments and modes of transaction that unify the


Indian Ocean world. Here the triad of articles on currency systems, patterns ofmonetization, and metallic and nonmetallic currency flows by Najaf Haider,Shailendra Bhandare, and Sanjay Garg makes a remarkable contributionopening a new, numismatic path in mercantile network research. Lakshmi Sub-ramanian’s piece on Asian mercantile networks’ coping mechanisms in thechanging world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Gwyn Camp-bell’s outline of the structures of Indian Ocean slave trade and its role in theconstitution of “Indian Ocean Africa” expose globalizing phenomena of IndianOcean economy.

The concatenation of these papers dealing primarily with the period between1500 and 1800 implicitly raises the issue of periodization, as different parts ofthe Indian Ocean lend themselves to different chronologies; the application ofterms such as “late medieval” and “early modern” requires justification. More-over, the question of the relationship of the broad period covered by thesepapers with that preceding the sixteenth century remains to be fully articulated.Ray’s brief but intriguing treatment of “coastal forts and the increasing aggres-sion on sea” in that earlier era, for example, or Haider’s allusion to Genizadocuments, which in fact do offer remarkable numismatic information for thepre-1200 period, hint at the ways in which the growing knowledge of an earlierIndian Ocean world could inflect the reader’s understanding of later trajectories(66, 188).

Having said that, this volume both exemplifies and will further contribute tothe maturation and growing sophistication of Indian Ocean studies. All fourteenessays (including the introduction by the editors) offer critical literature reviewsand excellent bibliographies, and will thus prove extremely useful to graduatestudents, specialists in all subfields of Indian Ocean studies, and historians ofmaritime worlds more generally.

Emory University Roxani Eleni Margariti

EUROPE

An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culturebefore 1914. Edited with an introduction by Holger Afflerbach and David Steven-son. (New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. xiv, 365. $90.00.)

Led by Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eighteen historians from sixcountries participated in a conference at Emory University in October 2004. Thegoal of the conference was to reappraise how European political culture dealt in


1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Seeking a fresh historical per-spective, the participants investigated the “degree of probability and inevitabilityin the outbreak” of the conflict (xv). The organizers of the conference hoped toprovide a “significant change in historical perspective” by undermining long-heldmyths about the war, such as the existence of universal enthusiasm for warthroughout Europe in August 1914 (2). The papers presented at the conferencedemonstrate a healthy diversity of methods and a wide range of opinions aboutthe inevitability of the conflict. To use a phrase coined by the editors of thevolume, the contributions show a “reality full of ambiguities” (8). The editorsnonetheless conclude, after carefully qualifying their comment, that World War Iwas not inevitable.

As in any conference, the quality of the contributions differs considerably. Ofthe many notable essays in the book, those by Paul W. Schroeder and Samuel R.Williamson Jr. deserve special note. Schroeder’s “Stealing Horses to GreatApplause” is a remarkable synthesis filled with insight from a master historian.Similarly, Williamson’s work demonstrates his great experience and thoroughresearch on the subject of the Habsburg Monarchy and Austria-Hungary. Otheressays, such as those by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht on arts and culture before1914 and by Frederick R. Dickinson on Japan’s view of the war, offer freshinsights into subjects not always associated with the outbreak of the war. On theother side of the coin, the essay by Matthias Schulz raises as many questions as itanswers. His description, for example, of Russia’s general mobilization as “not anaggressive act” and “not by any standard a violation of norms” suggests anincomplete understanding of the complexities and dangers of a general mobiliza-tion (55). Also, Ute Frevert’s explanation of the role of male honor in the Julycrisis seems single-mindedly simplistic.

In the final analysis, the essays remind the reader of the breadth and depth ofthe historical literature and contribute to a more-rounded understanding of thewar. Most of them, however, do not blaze new paths for changes in perspective.In a few cases, the interpretations are based on an incomplete understanding of theevents themselves. Afflerbach’s assertion, for example, about the difficulty ofmeasuring “soldiers’ love of war for war’s sake” may rest more on a misunder-standing of the challenges soldiers faced in 1914 than on an inability to gleanobjective data (168). The volume thus adds fresh insights to historians’ under-standing of World War I, but it does not mark the beginning of a new historicalperspective.

U.S. Military Academy Robert A. Doughty


Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History. By SarahBadcock. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 260.$99.00.)

This author’s book is an important addition to the literature on the revolutionaryyear 1917 in Russia. Sarah Badcock analyzes power relations and social interac-tions at the regional and local levels in Nizhegorod and Kazan provinces. Herstudy offers new insights into the failure of the liberal and so-called “moderate”socialist parties to consolidate the leading position they assumed in the spring andsummer of 1917. She argues that the desires and interests of ordinary peopleconfounded the expectations of the political elite, who failed to persuade the greatmass of Russia’s population to accept the elite’s understanding of the Revolution.

Even though Kazan and Nizhegorod were adjoining provinces in the middleVolga River valley, Badcock has not written a comparative history of the RussianRevolution in both jurisdictions. One of her principal points is that “the differ-ences within uezds of each province were often greater than differences betweenthe two provinces as a whole” (3). Eschewing a narrative approach on thegrounds that it might obscure the diverse local contexts, Badcock presents a seriesof interlocking studies on how ordinary people experienced the Revolution inKazan and Nizhegorod provinces. In successive chapters, she analyzes how revo-lutionary elites attempted to control revolutionary discourse, the role of theSocialist Revolutionary Party, the selection of local leaders, educational cam-paigns designed to bring “cultural enlightenment” to the population, soldiers andtheir wives, struggles over land issues, and disputes over grain supplies. In addi-tion to local newspapers and memoirs, Badcock utilizes an array of archivalsources from both provinces, especially the records of town dumas and localsoviets and communications between local representative bodies and commissarsat the provincial, uezd, and volost levels. She brings out in rich detail the impor-tance of local conditions and considerations in shaping power relationships in1917, particularly in challenging the priorities and power of political elites at theall-Russian and provincial levels.

Of particular significance were local hostility to the grain monopoly andprovisions committees, and the way that moderate socialist political elites reactedto this hostility. Badcock shows that local populations in both grain deficit andgrain surplus localities refused to make the sacrifices that elite policies—mostnotably Russia’s continued participation in World War I—entailed. They alsorejected efforts by the elite to “educate” them to embrace elite viewpoints. Themoderate socialist elites, unable to accept the notion that popular resistance to


their policies reflected rational understanding of local interests, reverted to prer-evolutionary stereotypes of the ignorant and uncultured “dark” people. Yet thevery decentralization and democratization that the Provisional Government andthe Soviets championed made it impossible for them to force obedience onrecalcitrant localities.

Badcock’s book is a welcome addition to the still relatively small number ofstudies that have focused on the Russian Revolution outside St. Petersburg andMoscow. It also effectively challenges students to rethink the interpretations basedon the views of the political elites. It is essential reading for all specialists on theRevolution, though its high price will probably discourage most of them frompurchasing it.

Ursinus College Richard D. King

Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 415. $39.50.)

Occupying the rich scholarly intersection of the fields of Greek religion and genderstudies, the author aims to reclaim “the prominent role of the Greek priestess,”which “has, until recently, been ignored by modern commentators” (2). To do soproperly, according to Joan Breton Connelly, the full range of available evidencemust be exploited and archaeological material in particular must be considered“independently from the prejudices that privileged texts promote” (275).

Connelly uses a selection of illustrative examples spanning the temporal andspatial limits of the ancient Greek Mediterranean, on which basis she narrates thefull range of social, economic, and political possibilities available to “female cultofficials”—a description of the book’s subject matter that is more accurate, butless rhetorically effective, than the “priestess” of the title. What emerges from thefragments of adolescent and adult women’s lives assembled here (over 150 ofwhom can be named and are usefully listed in an index) is that service within a cultconveyed considerable prestige, which could allow the female official to becomeinfluential in a variety of environments outside of the sanctuary, including thehighly visible, public realm of politics. Such an interpretation contrasts stronglywith traditional historiographies, which have tended to recognize agency forGreek women in domestic and religious contexts alone. In individual chapters,Connelly considers the many conspicuous roles of women in Greek cults betweenyouth and old age, what these cult officials did within the sanctuary and duringpublic festivals, and, ultimately, how these actions translated into broader socialand political agency. In the concluding chapter, Connelly discusses the different


status of women within the Christian church. Along the way, she weighs in on anumber of thorny problems that have vexed earlier generations of scholars,including, for example, whether or not women could handle sacrificial meat orattend the theater (211–213).

The prose is crisp throughout the work; the author’s discussions are thoroughand persuasive in the main, although she occasionally generalizes from evidencethat need not be especially representative—a risk run by all synchronic, thematicstudies of Greek religion. And, for all of the many inspired readings of archaeo-logical evidence on display throughout, it is frustrating to see Connelly’s argu-ments so often weighted down by uncertainty about what is actually depicted inany given image. Connelly’s argument is weakest in its treatments of literary textsas they are often indifferent to genre and simply assume that the texts mean whatthey say.

The work is equipped with an outstanding collection of images. It is well editedon the whole, although there are errors in nearly every passage of Greek that isquoted. Most of these are benign, some less so; the Menophila inscription inparticular as presented is a mess, and one may wonder about the wisdom ofprinting so much Greek when the author has so little to say about it (252).

Connelly’s book can be recommended to a wide range of potential audiences,especially those teaching on the subject of Greek religion or gender in antiquity,and their students. Scholars of the classical world more broadly will also takemuch from it.

University of Tennessee Denver Graninger

Churchill and His Generals. By Raymond Callahan. (Lawrence, Kans.: UniversityPress of Kansas, 2007. Pp. x, 310. $34.95.)

Tensions between political and military leaders are almost inevitable in wartime,but Churchill’s appointment as prime minister in 1940 marked the beginning of aperiod of exceptional stress and strain. Churchill believed that his long experienceof warfare gave him a special insight into military affairs and the right to directboth strategy and operations. “Churchill’s minutes, cables and conversations,”writes Raymond Callahan, “were full of criticism of British generalship. Thatcriticism . . . was repeated in his memoirs, a work that still shapes the popularhistory of the war in the English-speaking world” (3). The generals and theirdefenders retorted that Churchill’s military leadership was flawed by ignoranceof military realities, an overaggressive temperament, and dangerously erraticjudgments.


These arguments have been in circulation for half a century, but Callahan is thefirst historian to attempt a comprehensive and scholarly account of the relationsbetween Churchill and his generals. He modestly describes it as a work of synthesis.It is indeed based mainly on printed sources, and the author acknowledges the debthe owes to the groundbreaking work of historians like David French and TimothyHarrison Place on the institutional development of the army. This is, nevertheless,a deeply thoughtful and original work and a landmark in Churchill studies.

Callahan is no partisan for Churchill or the generals. His primary aim is tounderstand the views and actions of all the leading figures and the contexts inwhich they were operating. This is a complex exercise, involving biographical,political, and strategic considerations; narratives of battles and campaigns; andquestions of equipment, training, and doctrine. No short review can do justice toa many-sided analysis, but some conclusions stand out. One is the overwhelmingimportance of the political pressures on Churchill between 1940 and 1942.Almost from the start, he had staked his premiership and the prestige of Britisharms on the outcome of the war in the desert. Hence his restless prodding of thegenerals and his attempts to direct operations from Whitehall. As Callahanexplains, however, he failed to appreciate that the army in North Africa was toopoorly trained and equipped to serve his purpose. First Wavell then Auchinleckwere dismissed for alleged shortcomings of which they were largely, though notwholly, innocent: they too had their limitations. In the end it was not so much thegeneralship of Montgomery as the reorganization and reequipment of the armythat gave Churchill the victory he so badly needed.

After this, Churchill’s relations with the soldiers changed. With ultimatevictory in sight, he was happy to give them a freer rein and spent much of thesecond half of the war championing the interests of the British generals against theAmericans. As Callahan shows, the war in the Far East was a very different storycharacterized by Churchill’s almost continuous neglect. He took no interest in thereconquest of Burma and knew little of the extraordinary achievements of WilliamSlim, the commander of the Fourteenth Army. For this Callahan is inclined tocensure Churchill, but would it have benefited Slim to have the prime ministerpeering over his shoulder? Churchill, furthermore, regarded the Burma campaignas strategically irrelevant to the war against Japan. Was he mistaken? Although itis not a conclusion that Callahan himself draws, his account suggests thatalthough Churchill was often wrong about the nuts and bolts, he was usually rightabout the big picture.

University of Edinburgh Paul Addison


Conspiracy in the French Revolution. Edited by Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser,and Marisa Linton. (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2007. Pp.xi, 222. $74.95.)

This collection of nine essays examines the fear of conspiracy that prevailedthroughout the French Revolution. The authors (six from the U.K. and three fromthe U.S.) represent a solid body of recent scholarly work, mainly since 2000. Theauthors’ short chapters focus tightly on different chronological stages of con-spiracy fears, beginning with prerevolutionary perceptions of the factions at courtand culminating with a chapter on Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. In theessays, the authors include theoretical discussion and historical examples, with thelatter being particularly rich and useful.

The obsession with secret activities directed against the public good offered away for revolutionary thinking to explain the unexplainable. Food shortagesmeant a famine plot; military setbacks meant an Austrian plot; counterrevolu-tionary activities meant a foreign plot. This psychological perception often restedon concrete experience, as in the genuine public fear of royal troops in the Julycrisis of 1789. Barry Shapiro argues that the memory of the July experienceproduced a lasting suspicion of royal conspiracy that influenced the constitutionaldecision for complete separation of executive and legislative powers and foiled theministerial role that Mirabeau hoped to play. In his essay, John Hardman buildson the same July experience to argue for a persistent suspicion of royal conspiracydespite the possibility that the troops may have been intended for defensivepurposes and despite the evidence that the later flight to Varennes may not havebeen an effort to flee the country but rather to occupy a safe location (Montmédy)from which to negotiate a modification of the constitution. Conspiracy fearsoverrode any such interpretation of events. Jill Walshaw examines the conspiracyexplanation as applied to peasants brought to trial on charges of subversivelanguage. Such language could not reflect the genuine attitudes of good Frenchpeasants but instead must indicate the influence of clerical or noble conspirators.With this interpretation, revolutionary leaders refused to acknowledge that thecountryside might harbor the presence of a “critical public opinion” (122).Marisa Linton argues that such denial was not possible within the ranks ofRepublican politicians, where the assassination of Marat provided the concreteact that fed the fear; and Girondins, Hébertists, and Dantonists each in turn facedthe fatal charge of conspiracy.

The introductory essay by Peter Campbell and the concluding essay byThomas Kaiser frame the entire collection well. Campbell looks closely at


eighteenth-century definitions of conspiracy, and Kaiser looks broadly at theironic moments when the revolutionaries themselves justified conspiratorialtactics as necessary for revolutionary progress, whether in the early Society ofThirty or in the later coup of Brumaire. In the case of the Terror and the aftermathof Brumaire, Kaiser suggests that the revolutionaries came to realize that con-spiracy was an inescapable and ongoing consequence of the Revolution itself,precluding the possibility of stability. In that sense, the Revolution might never beover, a fact that justified the continuing revolutionary exercise of power.

Armstrong Atlantic State University Janet D. Stone

Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942. By Robert M. Citino.(Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. xiv, 431. $34.95.)

This book is a winner across the board. It completes the author’s four-volumeoeuvre on modern mobile warfare, and is the best of them in terms of scholarship,conceptualization, and presentation. Foremost among the work’s many positivequalities is its success in laying to rest the long-standing “Blitzkrieg question.”Robert M. Citino’s concept of Bewegungskrieg (mobile war), elegantly definedand convincingly demonstrated, should become the new benchmark for analysis.

Citino’s thesis that Germany’s traditional way of war was systemically over-strained by the invasion of Russia is best argued from the military side. Frederickthe Great’s strategic approach involved decisively defeating an enemy, and thennegotiating a permanent settlement. The nineteenth-century Moltke/Bismarcksynergy reflected a similar paradigm. The problem in World War II was that nonegotiating element at policy levels existed. The Wehrmacht was thereby com-pelled to wage the kind of “forever war” its own history and doctrine consideredunwinnable.

The only chance of victory was at the operational level, and Death of theWehrmacht confirms Citino’s place among the masters of operational history.Citino’s clarity and perception, his understanding of the operational level of war,informs this work from first page to last. Even good treatments of operationalhistory too often become recitals of troop movements in the fashion of a staffdocument. Not this one. Citino’s synergy of the desert war and the Russiancampaign of 1942 is a masterful exercise in cross-fertilization. His specificaccounts of the Crimean and Caucasus operations fill two significant gaps inEnglish-language literature. His overall treatment of the year’s operations inRussia is fully level with the best of David Glantz’s work from the Sovietperspective.


Citino integrates the mid-World War II experience with the German army’sinstitutional and personal history in a way few authors bother to attempt. Mostconceptual work in German military history concentrates on intellectuals, staffofficers like Clausewitz and Schlieffen. Citino establishes the importance of com-manders: Rommel, Hoth, Kleist, and less familiar midlevel figures like PanzerCommander Eberhard von Mackensen. His perspective is especially significantbecause the synergy between German generals and their chiefs of staff, developedbetween 1806 and 1918, did not really exist in World War II. The general staffsystem had not been comprehensively restored in the contexts of expansion andNazification. Wartime staff officers, especially at unit levels, functioned more onthe French or American model, emphasizing operational planning and adminis-trative housekeeping. That in turn significantly enhanced commanders’ positionsand authority, reinforcing the operational emphasis the Third Reich’s policy andstrategy demanded.

Citino establishes El Alamein and Stalingrad as turning points of World War IInot in the context of battle, but by demonstrating that they marked the upperlimits of operational art. They marked the end of a way of war as an art formbased on movement, encirclement, and independent command. The Wehrmachtcame close but fell short. Management, broadly defined, would become the newmode of war making and continuous battle war’s new format, at least through theCold War.

Colorado College Dennis Showalter

Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100B.C.–A.D. 250. By John R. Clarke. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,2007. Pp. xi, 321. $55.00.)

The author of this study takes on a big, intractable, and difficult subject in hislatest book. What makes people laugh does not translate easily, and the subject ofthe humor of ancient civilizations requires sensitivity, tact, and caution fromscholars. John R. Clarke is surely correct to point out that previous generations ofscholars tended to take the Romans too seriously, no matter how provocative orirreverent the graffito or wall carving under scrutiny. The temptation to overana-lyze, to draw on the artillery of classical knowledge in mythology or literature isan academic handicap, given the traditional emphasis of the field of classicalarchaeology on textual sources and the achievements of elites. Images of friskypygmies, disembodied phalluses, and lampooned heroes, once considered mar-ginal in Roman art, are now brought center-stage. One of the delights of this book


is the sheer amount of attention to these works that have not fit into the moreconventional histories of Roman art. Another is the illustrative material—thecolor plates, line drawings, and house plans—that enhances the text. Clearlywritten and carefully explicated, the book is suitable for students and nonspecial-ists, as well as for art historians and classicists.

This book proceeds from the author’s interest in the art of Romans of the lowersocial orders and, in particular, his study of the painted interiors of Pompeianhouses, inns, and shops. In other words, the social lens is focused on matters ofeveryday life rather than on the view from the top. Visual representations ofhumor are the subject of this book, and images most often without captions orverbal cures are tricky to interpret. Clarke’s method (and he is explicit aboutmethod) relies on reconstructing a context for the image that is both site-specificand social in terms of considering the viewers and their responses to it. Archae-ology is crucial in giving a sense of the physical setting of the image and indicatingwho would have seen it. Clarke is nimble in providing multiple readings of imagesthat have defied interpretation from more polite (or repressed) commentators.With this he reanimates the barren ruins with their appropriate social set but risksatomizing the works’ meanings according to the various subjects’ social positions(elite male, working freedwoman, slave, etc.) in line with our notions of identitypolitics.

The subtitle reveals how humor is delineated in the book. If some of the imagesappear fierce or threatening (and, therefore, not so funny to some readers), it isbecause the humor of the double-take and the put-down are the preferred formshere. A quick flip through the book indicates that the sexual or scatological bodyis prominent, and the humor is pointed at targeting flaws or deflating pretensions.Clarke prefaces the volume with a look at theories of humor and its role inmaintaining the social order. It is to his credit that he allows the tensions andcomplexities of the images to emerge in the discussions that follow.

Vassar College Eve D’Ambra

The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances and State Patriotismin the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky.(New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. x, 246. $90.00.)

The Habsburg monarchy, according to the old textbook standard, was a politicalarchaism too brittle to withstand the centrifugal power of ethnic nationalism. Therepressions of 1849 and the empire’s reconstitution as Austria-Hungary in 1867were only able to extend the monarchy by little more than one reign, Franz


Joseph’s [1848–1916]. In 1929 Oscar Jászi upended this account by emphasizingcentripetal effects of the church, the imperial bureaucracy, and the army. Theseessays analyze the monarchy as a cultural institution, the object of memory andsymbolic contestation. If there is a unifying thesis, it is that imperial and ethnicloyalties were not always opposed; rather, the empire survived by fusing particu-laristic loyalties with a cult of the house of Habsburg.

This was, in part, by design. As Ernst Bruckmüller shows, history textbooksremembered and forgot the past selectively, the better to encourage ethnic iden-tification with the imperial dynasty: schoolchildren learned their respectivenational myths, but stories that disrupted narratives of Austrian state formationwere avoided studiously. Thus Italian pupils learned nothing about the Risorgi-mento. Similarly, Laurence Cole’s study of state-sponsored veterans’ associationsin Trentino/Tirol shows how their involvement in rituals and festivities thatcelebrated the imperial house blunted the edge of philo-Italian irredentism.

None of this meant that imperial patriotism was a “top-down” imposition,however. This emerges from six essays that analyze the politics surrounding theimperial cult. Nancy Wingfield and Daniel Unowsky, for example, show howdifferent groups appropriated the memory of Emperor Joseph II “from below.”Czech liberals emphasized his efforts at economic modernization, but ignoredwhat their neighbors recalled as his efforts to promote the empire’s “German-ness.” Jews and Uniate Ruthenians celebrated his edicts of religious toleration, tothe frustration of Polish democrats. Living royalty, too, had to contend with suchcontested appropriation. Hugh Agnew shows how, on his visits to Bohemia, FranzJoseph tried to balance the symbols of Czech and German imperial patriotism. InPrague and, as Sarah Kent shows, in Zagreb, conflict centered on flags: duringFranz Joseph’s visit to Croatia in 1895, students showed their patriotism byburning the Hungarian colors. In Hungary itself, Alice Freifeld shows, EmpressElizabeth (“Sissi”) became the focus of identification with the house ofHabsburg—and not, pointedly, her husband. Contradictory identifications evenplagued individuals, as Alon Rachamimov shows in his study of the Hebrew-language poet Avigdor Hamieri.

The parallels to other European monarchies are striking. In neighboringGermany, too, imperial patriotism functioned most effectively as a metaphor forparticularlistic, local identities. Also common to both countries and Britain, asChristiane Wolf shows in her concluding essay, was the novelty of imperialpageantry, which propounded a symbolic link between state and monarch thatenhanced the prestige of Franz Joseph no less than that of Queen Victoria or theKaiser. The cumulative effect of these essays, however, is to highlight difference: in


no other European society was the legitimacy of monarchy so heavily contingenton so much local, ethnic contestation. The editors are right to stress the limits ofloyalty.

University of Oregon David M. Luebke

Never Will We Forget: Oral Histories of World War II. By Marilyn Mayer Culpepper.(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2008. Pp. xi, 318. $44.95.)

At the outset of this book, the reader understands immediately that the author ishoping to fill in the gaps left by other histories of World War II, most notably whatshe calls the “personal side” of war (ix). After sifting through oral histories of overfour hundred Americans who lived through the war years, the author seeks toprovide a more intimate account of the war and the experiences of those who livedthrough those difficult times. Never Will We Forget is an anecdotal look at thewar, and one that gives a general sense of the myriad facets of the conflict throughreminiscences, rather than a blow-by-blow account of World War II.

At first look, the title of the book brings to mind Studs Terkel’s PulitzerPrize-winning bestseller, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II, butMarilyn Mayer Culpepper utilizes a much different approach with her sources.Where Terkel let his interviewees do most of the talking in his book, Culpepperlooks to integrate oral histories into her own narrative, preferring to provide themajority of the explanation herself instead of offering longer excerpts frominterviews. In doing so, readers will not get the same depth of description andpersonality of Terkel’s book, but Culpepper does cover a wide variety of topics ina relatively short space. Few of the major events of World War II pass withoutintriguing personal accounts, and the author is as interested in experiences on thehome front or in POW camps as she is in the storming of the beaches atNormandy or the battle for Iwo Jima.

It is this diversity of topics that is the strength of Never Will We Forget.Culpepper dedicates entire chapters to interesting subjects such as “Luck, Fate,Providence, and Guardian Angels,” which contains story upon story of unlikelysurvival, and “The Softer Side of War,” which includes anecdotes that remind thereader that even in the midst of tragedy there were many moments of camaraderieand joy. In addition, the book has three chapters on experiences after the cessationof hostilities, often ignored in histories of the war, but crucial to understanding thewartime era. Added to the chapters that the author devotes to fighting in Europeand Asia, readers get a broad overview of the war as told by those who experi-enced it.


Occasionally, Culpepper’s desire to narrate her interviewees’ stories leads herto make dramatic comments (often times punctuated with exclamation points),such as “Ah, sweet revenge!” after relating a fascinating story of a POW dentist’sefforts to extract some payback from his Japanese patients/captors (133). Culpep-per’s material is powerful enough that these additions seem forced and unneces-sary. Still, if readers enjoy learning their history from personal stories andinteresting vignettes, Never Will We Forget provides a nice introduction to theAmerican experience during World War II.

Rhodes College Robert Francis Saxe

Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge. By Dan Diner.Translated by William Templer with Joel Golb. (Madison, Wis.: University ofWisconsin Press, 2008. Pp. 323. $35.00.)

The author of this study offers another in a growing list of postmortem analysesof the late, little lamented, twentieth century. The book is an extended reflectionon the course and nature of twentieth-century European history, interspersed withnarratives of significant events that illustrate the author’s assertions. In the some-what dense introductory chapter, Dan Diner develops a theoretical framework forunderstanding the previous century. According to Diner, twentieth-century historyunfolded as a “complex intermeshing of long-term and short-term contingencies”(6).

These contingencies are symbolized by “double interpretive axes,” with thevertical axis representing universal values and overarching ideologies, intersectedby a horizontal axis representing particular circumstances, especially issues oftraditional geopolitics and nationalism. This interpretive scheme allows Diner toconsider questions of how and why the events of the century occurred. In simpleterms, his analyses question whether such “cataclysms” as the revolutions andwars of the period occurred as responses to traditional circumstances—the kind offactors (like balance of power and national interests) that occasioned earlierconflicts in previous centuries—or represented a new force in world politics, a“universal civil war” of values that featured a struggle between the twin Enlight-enment values of freedom (Britain and the U.S.) and equality (the Soviet Union).In the course of his meditations, Diner proposes to consider these issues in thecontext of “Europe’s edges,” especially eastern Europe (Poland) and the Balkans.For Diner, the interplay of events is best reflected on this geographical periphery.

Diner’s theoretical musings are interspersed with historical narratives, focusingon four major developments between 1917 and 1989—the Russian Revolution,


the rise of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Europe between the wars, theHolocaust, and the Cold War. Though his insights are thought-provoking, hisinterpretive framework breaks down in the course of the narratives. Diner isforced to admit that, with the major exception of the Cold War, most of the eventsof the twentieth century were not the result of a “universal civil war of values” butthe product of traditional political circumstances, especially the influence ofnationalism. Even so, he insists on a structural approach to understanding worldhistory, suggesting that individuals (like Hitler and Stalin) had less influence thansocial, political, and economic conditions. The result is an interesting but flawedbook. Diner’s theoretical constructs, which he spends so much time explaining inthe first chapter, by his own admission do not hold as explanations for events. Hewould have been better served by extending his narrative analyses (including afascinating comparison between Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, which posits aqualitative and intentional difference to the detriment of the German regime) andletting the events of the century speak for themselves.

The dense prose style of the English translation also detracts from the acces-sibility of the work. Established scholars and graduate students of the twentiethcentury might profit from some of the insights of this book, which is not recom-mended for general audiences or undergraduates.

Rockhurst University Richard J. Janet

Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Quest for the Mysterious Great South Land. ByMiriam Estensen. (Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia: Allen & Unwin,2006. Pp. xiv, 274. $24.95.)

In her new book, the author recounts the Pacific expeditions undertaken by theSpanish navigators Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Alvaro de Mendaña [1567–1569], Mendaña and Pedro Fernandez de Quirós [1595–1596], and Quirós andLuis Váez de Torres [1605–1616]. The descriptive summary on the book’s dustjacket states that this work “focuses new light on the Spanish voyages of discoverythat sailed from South America into the unknown southwestern Pacific in the latesixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” while telling “a story of passionatebeliefs, of high hopes and catastrophic failures, of violent confrontations andtentative friendships with indigenous people, of a fierce clash of cultures, andrelentless ambition . . .” Romantic hyperbole aside, the book is simply a historicalnarrative of the three expeditions, written clearly and in detail, that bring intofocus for a popular audience the expeditions in a way that has rarely been donebefore.


In that capacity, the author offers a good introduction to the subject forstudents of the Age of Discovery and maritime exploration, as well as an inter-esting account of the experiences of some of those “men that [went] down to thesea in ships” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But the bookonly whets the appetite. Miriam Estensen offers little by way of historical context,noting only Spain’s controversy with Portugal over the demarcation of the globeinto separate spheres awarded to the rival kingdoms and the possible implicationsof Francis Drake’s famous circumnavigation as a stimulus for Mendaña’s secondvoyage. Neither does the author provide much by way of real analysis or inter-pretation. To be sure, she describes at some length the relations, often hostile,between the Spanish voyagers and the island peoples they encountered, but apartfrom some speculation about the source of the cultural clashes between them, itnever crosses the author’s mind to explore why it was that the Spanish newcomersthought nothing of claiming islands as their own that were already inhabited byrelatively sophisticated peoples, what they actually understood about the culturesdescribed in the surviving accounts of the three voyages, and what evidence can bederived from these written records to give insight from the native perspective onthe reasons for their frequent hostility to the strange white men from across theseas.

Even as a historical narrative, however, the book has value because it examinesa series of voyages too often overlooked in the literature of the Age of Discovery.For various reasons, most historians of Pacific exploration tend to skip directlyfrom the circumnavigations of Magellan and Drake to the professional expedi-tions of Cook, Bougainville, and Malaspina in the late eighteenth century. Con-sequently, any book—popular or academic—about the “neglected” voyages ofSpain into the Pacific is welcome.

University of West Georgia Ronald S. Love

The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. By Lars Fischer. (NewYork, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xix, 252. $80.00.)

In Imperial Germany, anti-Semitism crossed social and political boundaries andbecame a pervasive cultural code. Self-avowed political anti-Semites and theiropponents often subscribed to the same anti-Semitic stereotypes. “Anti-Semiticand anti-anti-Semitic positions,” Lars Fischer argues, were “. . . largely identicalboth in terms of what they actually identified as ‘Jewish’ and even in theirevaluation of many phenomena they assumed under this label” (13). Socialistsbelieved that the “Jewish Question” would inevitably be solved by a social


revolution. Succumbing to the ideal of a world without Jews, however, made them“share the responsibility for rendering German society susceptible to Nazi anti-Semitism and preparing the ideological seedbed from which the Shoah couldgrow” as the author concludes in his deftly documented study (228).

This bleak assessment is evinced by Fischer’s erudite and detailed study of keysocialist intellectuals, who are placed within the wider cultural currency of anti-Semitic politics and culture in Imperial Germany. His dense interpretation ofcanonical texts, like Karl Marx’s Zur Judenfrage, and his probing investigationof leading Social Democrats, like Franz Mehring, Eduard Bernstein, AugustBebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, aptly illumi-nate the discursive patterns and tropes socialists shared with many of theirpolitical opponents. The antimodern and anticapitalist core of modern anti-Semitism often easily conjoined with the socialist critique of the modern capi-talist society. To be sure, socialists disapproved of anti-Semitic political partiesand several party leaders indeed attacked anti-Semitism. Yet whatever individualsocialists’ opposition to anti-Semitism, Fischer argues, it had less to do with agenuine opposition and more with wider political concerns. Socialist oppositionto anti-Semitism therefore appears as “little more than a barely discernabletrickle” (17).

Many socialist leaders in Germany believed that those who were unwilling toacknowledge the importance of Jews in the capitalist economy were as guilty ofdistortion as those who blamed society’s ills on Jews. Critiquing Jews oftenappeared as only dissecting philo-Semitism, not as attacking Jews themselves,Fischer repeatedly notes. Established stereotypes easily spilled into the assessmentof anti-Semitism and into debates about the collaboration with nonsocialistpapers. This is clearly the case in the sometime strange and deranged attack on theDreyfusards by Wilhelm Liebknecht and the fierce frontal attack by August Bebelon the publisher Maximilian Harden.

Along with Sulamith Volkov, Fischer therefore believes that notwithstandingthe critical opposition to political anti-Semitism, socialists’ employment of cul-tural anti-Semitism contributed greatly to the transmission of anti-Semitism fromImperial Germany to the Weimar period. Socialism helped more often to consoli-date than subvert widely shared assumptions about “the Jews.” Dismayed withthis record, Fischer takes them to task and leaves the reader with Rosa Luxem-berg, who stands out as an exception with her penetrating analysis of anti-Semitism that breaks through the conceptual confusion of the kernel-of-truthapproach employed by many socialists. Fischer’s slightly taxing and confusinglyarranged elaboration provides a perceptive and fresh view on socialists and their


responses to anti-Semitism. It is a very welcome contribution to the vital, stillhaunting, and unresolved legacy within socialism.

University of Texas at Dallas Nils Roemer

Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922–1940.By John Gooch. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix,651. $35.00.)

Some leaders bluff their way through the diplomatic thicket and, through gull-ibility, stupidity, or a desire to believe, other nations accept their exaggeratedestimates. When they do, bad things eventually happen. Leaving aside SaddamHussein and the bizarre American effort at state building in Iraq, Benito Mussoliniwas a perfect example of the statesman as supreme con artist. He projected animage of Italy as a first-rate power that would eventually displace France andBritain from their control of the Mediterranean Sea, when, in fact, he had amilitary force that could defeat Ethiopia and grab Albania but performed badly inSpain, was thrashed by Greece in late 1940, and was soundly defeated by Britainin North Africa in 1940–1941. In his masterful and highly detailed study of Italiandiplomacy and military power under fascism, John Gooch examines year by yearand in great detail the interaction between Il Duce’s foreign policy goals—from1922 to Italy’s entry into the Second World War in 1940—and the response of thearmy, navy, and air force as they sought to accommodate Mussolini’s ever evolv-ing ambitions. Gooch makes it clear that Fascist Italy was bent on war and was,for most of this period, fundamentally opposed to France, Great Britain, andYugoslavia, although Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the chief of the general staff andthe man in charge of coordinating military strategy, was far more comfortablewith France than with Nazi Germany.

Gooch makes it clear that Italy lagged in almost every category when comparedto its designated rivals, England and France. When Fascist Italy reached the late1930s, the British naval rearmament program dwarfed all Italian efforts. In fact,the riskier Italian policy became, the wider the gap between Italian objectives andthe means at hand to achieve them, and this covered all three services: land, sea,and air. Mussolini, who held the three military ministries from 1932–1933 to theend of the regime, seemed on paper to have more control than Adolf Hitler, but,in fact, this was far from the case. The Italian army never modernized; its valuesremained those of the First World War. Gooch shows that Il Duce missed his greatopportunity to break the hold of traditionalism around 1924–1925, but he wasbogged down by the crisis that ensued after the murder of the Socialist deputy


Giacomo Matteotti and failed to back his own War minister Antonino Di Giorgiowhen the latter met resistance from the military hierarchy. Compromise with theold establishment was a hallmark of the regime but it proved to be quite costlywhen dealing with the military leadership. Military inferiority in terms of planningand equipment was disastrous for a regime that was determined to engage inendless warfare.

Mussolini and his Generals is at once a history of Italian foreign policy and itsmilitary strategy. It is the definitive work in English on this subject.

North Carolina State University Alexander De Grand

The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788. ByVivian R. Gruder. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 495.$59.95.)

This study takes its place in a long historiography, in both English and French, onthe subject of the origins of the French Revolution. As its title indicates, the scopeof the work is the two years prior to the summoning of the Estates-General, whichprecipitated the French Revolution of 1789. This narrow focus is evidence of thehighly specialized state of research in the field of Revolutionary France. The maininspiration for the work, as stated in the introductory chapter and referred toseveral times throughout the book, is Jean Egret’s La Pré-Révolution française(1787–1788) [1962]. Vivian R. Gruder builds on Egret’s thesis that the way to theRevolution was paved in the two years prior to 1789 but departs from theinterpretation of Egret and others that what took place during that time wasmerely the nobility’s efforts to preserve its privileges, or an “aristocratic revolt”against the Crown.

The main thrust of Gruder’s book is to show that during those two fatefulyears, the political consciousness of ordinary people in the ancien régime wasawakened. This awakening was brought about by the nobility itself in the Firstand Second Assemblies of Notables summoned by Louis XIV, which met fromFebruary to May 1787 and from November to December 1788, respectively.Whereas the general reader is more likely to be familiar with the Second Assembly,summoned by the Crown to deliberate on matters of voting and representation inthe Estates-General, which was set to open in May 1789, Gruder instead placesgreater emphasis on the First Assembly in part one of the book. She draws thereader’s attention to the fact that in the First Assembly, the Notables were willingto give up their tax exemptions as they put forth their own tax proposals inresponse to those of the Crown. She argues that what the Notables sought was the


protection of property and political participation, not the perpetuation of theirtraditional privilege, and that “under cover of financial objectives . . . their effortsadded up to a program whose effect would be to transform the structure ofgovernment and transfer power in the state” (36, 44). These demands garneredpublic sympathy for the Notables in opposition to the Crown until the SecondAssembly, when the Notables inadvertently shifted the issue from the relationshipbetween the Crown and the nation to the relations of power among the nation’ssocial groups by insisting on voting by order as opposed to voting by head in theupcoming Estates-General (73).

Parts two and three, the bulk of the monograph, are a detailed and well-documented discussion of the various means by which political ideas were trans-mitted in pre-Revolutionary France. Seven out of the ten chapters in these twosections are devoted to various print and manuscript media, their political posi-tions, and their possible readership. One chapter mentions the role of fêtes in themaking of political statements, and one chapter addresses the issue of howpeasants might have been part of the political discourse despite their illiteracy orsemiliteracy and geographical isolation. In effect, these chapters show that thecareful distinction the author makes between the First and the Second Assembliesof Notables matters, that the “political revolution” of the Notables did translateinto “the political schooling” of the French nation. The final chapter on thedeliberations of local judges and community assemblies both clinches the argu-ment of the book that ordinary Frenchmen were becoming politicized and showsits limitations. On the one hand, it illustrates political awakening outside thecapital; on the other hand, the author admits, “among the grass roots we find alocal elite considered notable in the late ancien régime” (326).

Hope College Gloria S. Tseng

The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London. ByBarbara A. Hanawalt. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv,317. $19.95.)

The author of this study demonstrates what a good historical monograph can be.Scrupulously researched, carefully argued, and deftly written, The Wealth ofWives will be of value to a wide range of students. As well as those interested inlate medieval England generally, urban, gender, and economic historians willbenefit from it. This reviewer would particularly recommend it to students curiousabout the rise of capitalism. The book includes a very helpful introduction andconclusion in which Barbara A. Hanawalt clearly articulates and recapitulates her


nuanced thesis. Her commendable endnotes, which provide a rich conversationwith recent researchers, should also be noted.

Hanawalt examines women’s impact on the changing economy and society oflate medieval London, not as laborers and entrepreneurs, but, as she deems them,“conduits of capital” (208). Women transmitted wealth, particularly throughmarriage and remarriage. She argues that “the circulation of wealth, talent, andservice through women contributed to capital formation in late medievalLondon . . .” (4). In rich discussions about inheritance, dower, and dowry,Hanawalt shows that London law “gave women the custodianship and sometimesthe control over large amounts of wealth in terms of real property and cash,” andthat despite obvious cultural misogyny, London law “tried to treat the daughtersand sons of their citizens equally in terms of inheritance and legal protections”(51, 34).

In featuring this line of inquiry, Hanawalt historicizes medieval women. Con-spicuously not seeking out “early feminists” in medieval London, she contextu-alizes their activity within patriarchal structures (vii). Rather than a narrative ofmales constraining women, Hanawalt indicates women’s agency “by looking atthe ways in which women learned either to manipulate male dominance orbecame pliant in accommodating the prevalent social mores” (12). Of course herhistory includes and indicates class considerations.

An insightful thematic correlative to this argument centers on what Hanawaltterms a “constrained” or “self-limiting patriarchy” (12). London men rationalizedthis patriarchal tradition during these years. They chose “to keep capital and realestate liquid . . . rather than emphasizing the establishment of patrilineal, verticaldescent” (209). And they institutionalized this modification by using women, by“passing wealth through women to men of their own social status” (209).Complementarily, laws constrained men’s power by protecting men’s womenfrom other men’s predations. This resulted in a horizontal social structure thatprivileged the value of the conjugal family and increased the importance of theLondon guild system as members worked to circulate their wealth among them-selves by fostering internal remarriages.

In another nuanced discussion, Hanawalt argues against those who describe a“golden-age” of opportunity for women in postplague England. Rather, she seesat best a continuity of opportunities, and probably a decline by the end of thefifteenth century as the rationalizing patriarchy closed whatever benefits may haveaccrued to women as a result of demographic phenomena. In two rewardingchapters (seven and eight) on women’s standard of living and on women asentrepreneurs, she convincingly makes these arguments and concludes by


asserting that by the sixteenth century women played little part in business, trade,or estate markets, and very few women acted as femmes soles in crafts or trade.

Babson College Stephen L. Collins

Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium. By Jonathan Harris. (London, England: Con-tinuum, 2007. Pp. xvii, 289. $27.95.)

It is a difficult and ungrateful task to compress 1,100 years of history into a short,comprehensive account destined for the general reader with little knowledge of theByzantine empire. Jonathan Harris’s take on this is to concentrate on this elusiveempire’s capital and more specifically on its monuments and the myths thatdeveloped around them during their long existence. These myths and legends,according to the author, “were clearly extremely important to the minds not onlyof medieval visitors to Constantinople but also of the Byzantines themselves”whose leaders “assiduously cultivated them” (2). For convenience, as he states, thechronological focus is the year 1200; no further explanation is given as to why thisyear was chosen, nor does this turn out to be particularly significant for the book’soverall outcome (3).

In two hundred pages, Jonathan Harris delivers an eclectic overview of thehistory of the city structured around thematic chapters on the key figures of theurban development of Constantinople; the city’s defenses, palaces, churches, andmonasteries; its sources of wealth; and the social condition of its inhabitants. Herethe text is composed around associations that suggest lectures or a guided visit bya very learned and eloquent guide. When describing the chapel of the Virgin ofPharos, the imperial chapel in which a number of the most important relics in thecity were housed, for example, the author discusses two sections of the True Crossof Christ held there and takes readers from Helena, the mother of Constantine theGreat, who brought the first fragment to the city in the early fourth century, toHeraclius, who restored the True Cross taken by the Persians in 614 fromJerusalem to Ctesiphon back to Jerusalem in 630 and then had another fragmentremoved to Constantinople some years later (65).

In the penultimate chapter, Harris breaks with this narrative’s trait and offersa more detailed, chronological account of the turbulent closing years of thetwelfth century leading up to the trauma of the sack of Constantinople by thearmies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. This is a gripping read and a vastlyenjoyable section that will appeal to all those interested in these events. In the lastchapter, he deals with the period after 1200 and becomes again more detailedwhen describing the fall of Constantinople in May 1453 and the end of the


empire. A very useful epilogue provides information on the latest archaeologicalfinds in the city (for example the spectacular find of a harbor discovered duringworks for a new metro station at Yenikapi) and offers a quick guide as to whereto find most of the important monuments discussed in the book (193–205).

This work does justice to the long and often turbulent history of Constanti-nople. Harris has drawn material from a wide variety of sources (passages ofwhich are found throughout the text) to produce a readable, informed, andinformative account that will appeal to those wishing to learn more about the cityand the empire whose heart it had been.

King’s College London Dionysios Stathakopoulos

Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic. By ColinHeywood. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 313.$99.00.)

Most histories of childhood and youth use a top-down approach to their subjects.Their sources focus on adult conceptions of young people, on educational theoriesand philosophical trends, rather than the experiences of young people themselves.The author’s study of childhood in France between 1760 and 1930 uses an alter-native and refreshing method. He juxtaposes traditional sources for the history ofchildhood with personal diaries, letters, and autobiographies, sources he calls “ego-documents.” Colin Heywood’s study reveals that the modern concept of childhood—one based on the understanding of the child as an innocent creature that neededto be protected, nurtured, and isolated from adult culture—was slow to develop,and that it was experienced differently according to gender and social class.

Historians of childhood have often shied away from autobiographies becausethey are formulated in later years and thus reflect adult conceptions of the child.Relying on the insights of Richard Coe and Philippe Lejeune, Heywood embracessuch documents and asserts that ego-documents relate real, core issues and trendsthat lie at the heart of growing up in the past. When used comparatively, heargues, the documents allow historians to put “flesh on the bare bones of statis-tics, and [give] the idea of the diversity of experience among different sections ofthe population” (34).

Heywood’s study is divided into four parts that examine the representations ofage and life stage, the experiences of growing up, children’s relationships as theyaged, and the gradual movement toward independence in the contexts of school-ing and peer groups. In each of the sections, Heywood summarizes our currentknowledge about trends and dynamics in the development of modern childhood


illustrated with examples from contemporary philosophy, science, medicine, andlaw. Heywood’s analysis of biographical material, however, reveals that the shiftsoccurred in different times according to social class. Heywood’s best examples lieat the end of his study. In the section on education, the analysis of biographiesshows that the idea of a prolonged childhood typified by extended schooling wasfirst embraced by the wealthier classes, and then only for boys, while the familiesof poorer classes and young females slowly embraced the concept by the beginningof the twentieth century.

Heywood’s work combines the best, most current understanding of the socialand cultural history of childhood with a renewed focus on biography and indi-vidual experience. In its emphasis on the literary and the personal, this studyreconsiders the ways in which a history of childhood can be accomplished.Though Heywood’s findings will not change the ways historians have understoodthe emergence of modern childhood in the Western world, they will allow a better,more nuanced explanation of the processes through which the change occurred.The book will serve as an excellent introduction to important aspects of growingup between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, while specialists will findit an interesting model for how to examine broad processes of social and culturalchange at the individual level.

Minnesota State University, Mankato Christopher R. Corley

From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law. By JanineM. Lanza. (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. x, 252. $99.95.)

The author of this study observes that “exploration of gender practices changesthe basic structure of history . . . [including] periodization, class structures, andideas about power in the state and the family . . .” (12). Her meticulouslyresearched and carefully reasoned study of the widows of Parisian master crafts-men, drawing from marriage contracts, guild records, probate inventories, churchrecords, a variety of municipal documents, contemporary literary sources, and awide survey of secondary sources, challenges established assumptions about wid-owhood, guild economy, and law.

Janine M. Lanza explores how contemporaries represented widows and howchurch and state contended with widows’ unsettling lack of male control. Herresearch reveals, however, that the realities of widowhood for wives of mastercraftsmen diverged from these expectations, as they did from the experiences ofwidows socially and economically above and below them. Using practice theory,she traces the interplay between social structures and their members to reveal the


“ways women could avoid being determined by patriarchy while still acknowl-edging its considerable power” (15). Widows, for example, had advantages overmarried and single women as “honorary men” with control of family, workshop,wealth, marriage choices (including their own remarriage), and mastership in theguild. This allowed them to defy society’s desires and expectations by remainingsingle and successfully running the family business. Society’s additional wish thatwidows support their families allowed them to surpass the usual bounds ofpatriarchy in surprising ways, often abetted by the civil law itself.

Lanza’s scholarship finds the standard history of widows too quick to acceptearly modern perceptions of widowhood as the reality for all widows. Masters’widows, in occupying liminal space, defied gender norms even as they redefinedthem for purposes of getting on with life, and yet they did so with the sufferanceand even blessing of the very forces that otherwise restricted females. Guilds thatnormally excluded women nevertheless accommodated widows of masters;although not accorded full participation in guild governance, the same applied tomany male masters. The financial success of widows challenges the “familyeconomy” paradigm where the loss of male labor is judged fatal to the survivingfamily members. Instead, the inherited shop—its inventory, tools, andcustomers—was probably economically more significant than the more easilyreplaced labor of the master. Finally, Lanza illustrates how the law, usuallymisogynist in the letter, was nonetheless complex, offering a “strategic field”where users could shape it to their ends (11). Though legal “reform” under theearly modern state ostensibly extended patriarchal power, the reality was thatwidows maintained their traditional legal rights.

In clear and engaging prose, Lanza probes the accepted gloomy assessment ofOld Regime widowhood; she also contrasts this with the grim prospects facingwidows after 1789. The abolition of guilds and the Napoleonic Code left artisans’widows with fewer protections and rights as they entered an increasingly atomisticeconomy in which men, but not women, had gained citizenship rights. Theperhaps well-intentioned pedestal of domesticity only further marginalizedfemales in the economy.

Ohio State University Ben S. Trotter

Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes. By Ely M. Liebow. (Madison, Wis.: PopularPress/University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 269. $26.95.)

In mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh, a surgeon’s greatness was largely judged byhis speed. Dr. Joe Bell, for example, could perform a double amputation and have


the patient bandaged and on the ward twenty-four and one-half minutes afterentering the hospital gate. But this engaging biography of the famous Scottishdoctor, first published in 1982 and now reprinted, locates his lasting importancein other notable talents. Equally respectful of new scientific findings and patientpsychology, Bell developed a distinctively holistic and technological approach tohis discipline, appreciating early on, for example, the importance of Lister’s newantiseptic spray in the operating room and even speculating on the way theequipment could be used to sterilize surgical instruments. Additionally, Bell’spassion for cleanliness, his insistence on compassionate nursing, and his interest inpreventative medicine signify a particularly modern outlook. These qualitiesunderpinned his rapid rise to prominence as an expert surgeon and his manycareer achievements, including posts as Surgeon of the Royal Infirmary, Examinerto the Royal College of Surgeons, and President of the Royal College of Surgeonsof Edinburgh. Although he did not make any sensational medical discoverieshimself, Bell influenced a new generation of doctors and nurses through hisinspirational lecturing and his popular textbooks.

For Ely M. Liebow, Bell’s real interest lies in one special tutor-student relation-ship. Arthur Conan Doyle enrolled in Bell’s class in Clinical Surgery in 1878 and,Liebow argues, was quickly mesmerized by his lecturer’s diagnostic skill: animpressive mix of “natural curiosity,” “common-sense observation,” and anapplication of rational, deductive logic to the minutest detail (48). As Liebowreminds readers, the resemblance between this technique and the detective methodof Sherlock Holmes is well known. Doyle explicitly acknowledged his debt to Bellin creating his famous detective. His friend and fellow medical student, RobertLouis Stevenson, spotted the parallels. Reporters of the day knew—and pursued—the link. Indeed, Bell himself wrote the introduction to the 1892 edition of A Studyin Scarlet.

However, Liebow’s extensive archival research provides a more roundedpicture of this outstanding doctor, ably contextualized through lively digressionsinto social history. Inter alia, the narrative includes sideways glances at thedevelopment of the Royal Infirmary, the habits of Victorian university students,the ghastly living conditions of the Edinburgh poor, the struggle of women to beadmitted to medical degrees, and the recreational life of an upper-middle-classdoctor and Elder of the Free Church. The author persuasively highlights pointsthat reinforce the Bell–Holmes relationship, such as the surgeon’s forensic work ina number of high profile murder cases, his love of the word “elementary,” and hisfavored gesture, that of pressing his long fingers together (103). Literary studentswill certainly welcome the adept concluding overview of the controversies


surrounding the Bell–Holmes identification. But overall, it is the general readerand avid Sherlockian who will most appreciate this “work of love,” with itsbreezy style, its delight in fascinating anecdotes, and its “Holmesian” relish for thetiny, telling detail (ix).

Brunel University Maureen Moran

Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914. By Jeff Lipkes. (Leuven,Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2007. Pp. 815. $55.95.)

In the first days of the Great War, the Prussian army invading Belgium executedover six thousand civilians, burned entire villages, and culminated this campaignagainst noncombatants by destroying much of the city of Leuven. The authorprovides a graphic, detailed account of events that, until recently, were oftendismissed as atrocity propaganda. His vivid descriptions from the victims’ per-spective illustrates his position that the German terror of 1914 was a deliberate,top-down policy intended to break a conquered people, and in that sense was a“rehearsal” for the greater crimes of World War II.

Doctrinally the Prussian army had been committed even before the Franco-German War to the principle that any irregular resistance must be ruthlesslysuppressed because it enhanced war’s suffering and increased its duration withoutaltering the outcome. In that context it was kind to be cruel: a few condignexamples made early would save lives in the long run.

Those principles were applied by a completely inexperienced army, in thecontext of a war whose duration was expected to be too short to rectify mistakes.From freshly mobilized reservists to colonels and generals shaking off the rust ofyears in garrison, tension levels were correspondingly high. That the Germansnever formally charged any civilians with partisan activity does not exclude thepossibility of retreating soldiers firing a few parting rounds. As Jeff Lipkes dem-onstrates, the inexperienced Germans’ fire discipline was in any case execrable.High-velocity rifle bullets from any source can penetrate walls and ricochet almostat random; not every shout of “sniper!” camouflaged malevolent intentions.

Events on the ground were all too likely to follow the pattern Lipkes soeloquently describes—exacerbated by a variant of the ricochet effect. A companyofficer who reported that he was possibly taking fire from civilians—itself not easyin 1914 conditions—was likely to be asked why he had not begun taking hostages.His superiors in turn were likely to remind subordinates sharply of their duty insuch cases.


Implementation was arguably shaped as well by the Prussian army’s institu-tional culture of hardness, an exaggerated masculinity that inhibited questions orprotests because no one (generals included) wished to look like a mama’s boy—especially to himself. The brutal behavior that so shocked its victims, the numberof executions relative to the flimsiness of the evidence were proof of “the rightstuff.” And when soldiers ran amok, as seems to have been the case at Tamines onAugust 22, who in the chain of command was willing to admit it?

This explanation is not complete, nor is it exculpatory. It fits the pattern ofevents, however, more closely than models tracing German behavior to policiesapplied in Africa of which the mass of the army was ignorant; to anti-Catholicsentiment in Protestant regiments or general hostility towards religion; or tounsupported front-line rumors of franc-tireurs, much less to wider negative fea-tures of German culture. The atrocities of August are a firm and undeniable partof the history—and the account—of the German army.

Colorado College D. E. Showalter

Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective. Edited by GrahamMacPhee and Prem Poddar. (New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. vi, 211.$60.00.)

The problem that this collection of essays confronts is the contemporary one ofthe meaning of “Englishness” in the context of past imperial experience, in whichEnglishness was largely subsumed in “Britishness.” The discussion is complicatedby the fact that, although devolution is now a threat to the idea of Britain itself,the latter has simultaneously been shored up by the increasingly influential blackand Asian population who identify themselves with Britain rather than England.The introduction by the editors serves as a guide to the book’s main arguments,offering as its central theme a short but incisive outline of Hannah Arendt’stheorizing about imperialism that has become of increasing interest to postcolo-nial theorists in recent years, especially those with backgrounds in English depart-ments. Of the nine essays that follow, five authors look at various aspects of theimperial experience and four are concerned with postempire themes. In the firstpart, Enda Duffy wittily dissects Ireland’s tendency to subvert the British attemptsat colonial othering, and the legacy of contempt and hatred for the English thatimperialism has left behind. Vivian Bickford-Smith discusses the evolution ofEnglishness in an Afrikaner context and Prem Poddar sees the early traces ofBritish Overseas Subject status in post-Mutiny India. Geoffrey Nash writes aboutthose British travellers and commentators on the Middle East before 1914 that did


not have an assured sense of British superiority. In one of the most thought-provoking pieces, Graham MacPhee then charges Joseph Conrad with drainingterrorism of its political aspect in The Secret Agent and of thus “occluding the roleof imperialism” (115). In the second part, Sheila Ghose analyzes Hanif Kureishi’sfiction to illuminate some of the difficulties inherent in liberal discourse whenconfronting the Muslim presence; Bridget Byrne comments on the view of variedkinds of Englishness expressed by a number of contemporary London women;Colin Wright very imaginatively compares and contrasts Enoch Powell’s infamous“rivers of blood” speech with Robin Cook’s celebration of multiculturalism; andMatthew Hart probes the meanings expressed by the garden created in New Yorkto commemorate the British who died on 9/11.

The essays are all penetrating in analysis: but, as with many postcolonialwritings, there is an ever-present danger of theoretical overload effacing readabil-ity at times. Globalization is often discussed as though it succeeded imperialism,though it could be argued that empire itself was the residue of a long globalizingexperience and that the tension between the two is a marked feature of Britishhistory. Also, insofar as Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism gives a framework forthese essays, some of its key concepts need a closer look. To take one example:Arendt presents an undifferentiated bourgeoisie, though much work on the socialand economic history of Britain in recent years has argued for a divide between anindustrial/Northern and service/Southern middle class. What has been called the“Southern Metaphor” is discussed here as relevant to present imaginings ofEnglishness, but its Northern counterpart is absent, weakening the analysis atsome crucial moments.

Sheffield Hallam University Peter Cain

Garibaldi: Citizen of the World. By Alfonso Scirocco. Translated by Allan Cameron.(Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 442. $35.00.)

Certain historical figures grab the imagination of their generation. Whatever theydo seems larger than life. Giuseppe Garibaldi was one such person. He burst onthe scene just as modern communications were making news available ever morerapidly. His exploits in South America during the 1830s and 1840s and then backin Italy in 1849 and again in 1859 and 1860 made him the “hero of two worlds.”Alfonso Scirocco’s solid, but somewhat traditional, biography of Garibaldi traceshis career from ship captain to general in the new Italian state. Scirocco rightlyviews Garibaldi primarily as a man of action, not an ideologue. During the early1830s, he was drawn to the cause of Giuseppe Mazzini, the great republican


nationalist. His involvement in Mazzini’s Young Italy movement and in theabortive uprising in Genoa in 1834 drove the young Garibaldi into exile in SouthAmerica where he supported the independence movement of the republic of RioGrande do Sul. There he met his wife, Anita, who fought by his side until herdeath in 1849. During the 1840s, Garibaldi fought for Uruguay in its war withArgentina. His South American experience showed him to be a daring andresourceful tactician.

The outbreak of revolution in Italy in 1848 drew Garibaldi back to hishomeland. He fought for the Milanese and Sicilians before becoming the militarychief of the Roman Republic in 1849. When the French retook Rome and handedcontrol back to Pope Pius IX, Garibaldi returned to exile in the United States andthen on the trade routes of the Pacific Ocean. By the mid-1850s, however, he wasback home in Nice, which was still part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.About this time, he seems to have become convinced that the best chance forItalian unification would be under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, the Kingof Piedmont-Sardinia. When the war between Piedmont, backed by France, andthe Austrian Empire broke out in 1859, Garibaldi served as a general in thePiedmontese army.

Discontented with the outcome of the war, which left Rome under the rule ofthe papacy, Garibaldi resigned his commission. Garibaldi took command of asmall group of volunteers that set off on 6 May to take Sicily. Scirocco is unclearabout the overall strategy, but it seems that the politicians behind Garibaldi hopedto use southern Italy as a negotiating position for a new, more democratic,constitutional alternative to Count Cavour’s simple annexation of the entirepeninsula to the Piedmontese state. At no point, however, did Garibaldi waver inhis loyalty to the king. Garibaldi managed with considerable tactical skill to defeatthe armies of the Bourbon rulers of Sicily and Naples. By October, he was inpossession of the entire South, which he handed over to Victor Emmanuel forannexation to the northern kingdom. Despite Garibaldi’s successes on the battle-field, the real victor was Count Cavour, who outmaneuvered Garibaldi, theDemocrats, and the European Great Powers to achieve his version of a unitedItaly.

Garibaldi became a national hero, but it was a bitter and short-lived triumph.He was rapidly marginalized in the new Italian state and was blocked in hisattempts to seize Rome in 1862 and 1867. But in a larger sense Garibaldi’s victorywas a costly one. The South and the new Italian state might well have been betteroff if the Bourbons had repelled Garibaldi’s invasion. Rather than a humiliatingannexation of one of the oldest states in Europe, some negotiated federation of


Naples and northern Italy might have been possible. The bitterness and alienationcaused by the virtual conquest of the South might have been avoided. The neglectof broader issues is a serious defect in what is a useful and competent biography.

North Carolina State University Alexander De Grand

Hitler’s Central European Empire, 1938–1945. By Jean W. Sedlar. (Bangor, Maine:Booklocker.com, 2007. Pp. xv, 472. $19.95.)

This is the sort of book that earns the author little glamour but does valuableservice. In her acknowledgments, Jean W. Sedlar thanks a friend for pointing outthe need for such a book, and, as the cover description says, it “offers the firstcomprehensive overview of World War II in a part of Europe that usually receiveslittle attention in the histories of the war—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, theBaltic States, and Finland.” Sedlar is quite right about the need for such a book.General histories of World War II focus perforce on the conduct of the war by thegreat powers, and secondary powers or occupied territories well behind the frontreceive cursory attention. This book (and its companion volume, The Axis Empirein Southeastern Europe) seeks to fill that gap, and the author provides a crisp,cogent narrative of the grim process by which Nazi Germany eventually occupiedall of those nations save for Finland, exploited them for its war economy,rewarded collaborators and crushed resistance, murdered millions of their Jews,and forced them to share in the devastation of its defeat.

Given the absence of competing accounts (shortly to be remedied by the U.S.publication of Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire), readers might wonder whySedlar had to self-publish her book. Its strengths are by no means below the levelof narrative histories published by commercial and academic presses, and itsprinting by Booklocker.com rivals the work of prestigious publishers. The answersmay be found in her approach to her topic and her organization of the narrative.A review of Mazower’s book commented that the complex multiple topicsincluded in a history of the Nazi empire presented organizational challenges “thatmust make an author reach for the aspirin” (Laurence Rees in the Sunday Times,June 8, 2008). Sedlar has cut that organizational Gordian knot with ruthlessefficiency, but, on first inspection of her book, the reader’s heart is likely to sink.Sedlar writes that she eschewed a country-by-country approach and instead optedfor a continuous chronological narrative that “reflects the reality that the entireregion was linked during the war by the simple fact of belonging directly orindirectly to Hitler’s empire” (10). In practice, Sedlar’s design means that thereader gets a “nothing-but-the-facts” narrative divided into chronological


chapters that include no section headings. There is no practical approach to thebook (despite a helpful and well-organized index) except to read it from beginningto end.

But readers who do that will be rewarded with a wealth of informationcontained in a narrative that does justice to the drama of the story. This book isessentially a textbook: it is not based on archival research or primary sources, butrather synthesizes a wide range of classic and recent scholarship in English.Sedlar’s goal is not to advance a striking new thesis but rather to introduce aneglected part of the history of World War II to interested readers. That goal maysound modest, but it required very hard work, and nonspecialists will be gratefulfor Sedlar’s concise and thorough overview.

Illinois College Robert C. Kunath

Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850. By Sujit Sivasundaram. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,2005. Pp. xi, 244. $80.00.)

The author of this study generously acknowledges that his is neither the firsthistory of missions in the South Pacific nor the first to pay attention to missionaryrhetoric. What is distinctive about Nature and the Godly Empire is its focus on therhetoric of science among missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS).Sujit Sivasundaram argues that science and religion were fused into a coherentview of the world among missionaries, one in which Christian rhetoric, modernscientific ideas, and imperialism all fit into a providential march of history towardthe global triumph of both Christianity and civilization. By science Sivasundarammeans for the most part the theological contemplation of nature and the economicexploitation of natural resources. The most fascinating part of the book—ofinterest to historians of religion, science, and imperialism alike—is his taxonomyof nature metaphors employed in the service of Christianization and economicdevelopment.

This work would be even more useful if Sivasundaram had paid more attentionto the distinction between metaphors of nature taken from the Christian traditionand newer figures of speech drawn from more recent scientific knowledge. Chris-tian rhetoric is steeped in nature analogies. It is not surprising to find evangelicalrhetoricians invoking analogies between the spirit Christ and a seed. Were tradi-tional analogies changed as a result of modern science?

Sivasundaram lumps all of the LMS missionaries together under the term“evangelical.” Many of their metaphors, though, were found in the Bible and


predate modern evangelicalism. Furthermore, the term evangelical cannot carrythe full weight put upon it here, for there were significant differences among theCongregationalist missionaries of the LMS, some of whom were more liberal thanothers, and between Congregationalist missionaries and those of other denomi-nations, especially Anglicans such as Samuel Marsden.

Marsden in particular raises the issue of the conflict in missionary circlesbetween the tasks of Christianization and civilization. Sivasundaram acknowl-edges the existence of that conflict, but never really focuses on its implications forhis own argument, which ultimately stresses the unity of Christianity and civili-zation, especially in matters of housing and clothing. From reading Nature and theGodly Empire one would never know how deeply controversial the question ofclothing was in the LMS, or that the very first LMS missionary to South Africa, Dr.Van der Kemp, caused an unresolved crisis in mission circles by “going native.”

The overwhelming majority of missionaries in the South Pacific introducedwhat they thought of as Western styles of housing, clothing, and food, even whilemodifying them under local conditions, but not all of them did. Missionaries of alldenominations faced the problem of how to deal with colleagues who “wentnative,” rejecting Western lifestyles. One of the most durable of the many mis-leading popular beliefs about missionaries is the assumption that they behavedeverywhere in the same manner and always confused Christianity with the intro-duction of Western styles of living. Nature and the Godly Empire does little tocorrect that impression.

University of Iowa Jeffrey Cox

Nazis and the Cinema. By Susan Tegel. (London, England: Hambledon Continuum,2007. Pp. x, 324. $36.95.)

In this comprehensive and informative survey of cinema under the Third Reich,the author tells an often surprising story. When the Nazis took power, the Germanfilm industry was the second largest in the world. Hitler, convinced of the politicalefficacy of propaganda, gave his brilliant Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels a“free hand” (4). Goebbels’s favorite medium was film, and he quickly establishedcontrol over the industry. Paradoxically, the vast majority of films produced werenot overt propaganda. Goebbels believed the most effective propaganda came “inthe guise of entertainment” (133). He also understood the morale-boosting func-tion of “pure entertainment,” which the film industry, “coordinated” rather thannationalized, saw in terms of the bottom line (111).


The first propaganda films were in the Kampfzeit genre, depicting young men(usually SA storm troopers) struggling nobly for the cause. Hitler’s slaughter ofthe SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives aborted this type of film. Morefamous, enduring idealizations of Nazism are Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries,which provided the positive “stock images of the Third Reich” until World WarII (75). Susan Tegel refutes Riefenstahl’s postwar rationalization that her filmsmerely recorded events rather than functioned as propaganda (76, 98). Curiously,Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will would be the only Nazi film with Hitler in the“leading role” (75).

In the second half of her book, Tegel’s focus shifts to Nazi film and the “JewishQuestion.” Until World War II, Jews were mostly absent from the screen, despitethe Nazi regime’s intensifying anti-Semitism. Where they did appear, as in twocomedic farces, they personified stereotypical vices, but they were more roguesthan villains. This situation changed in the wake of the Propaganda Ministry’slate-1938 directive that each film company produce an anti-Semitic film. Jud Suss,a sex and crime melodrama, was the most commercially successful of the threemajor anti-Semitic films to appear (146). Its main message—that Jews werearch-corrupters who had to be expelled from society—faithfully reflected currentgovernment policy. Tegel finds nothing distinctively Nazi or German in the film’santi-Semitism (142). However, the Propaganda Ministry’s The Wandering Jew, asa purported historical overview, offered a racist interpretation of Jews as rootlessparasites that was characteristically Nazi. Often described as the most evil filmever made, Hitler and Goebbels were extremely pleased with it, despite its com-mercial failure (154).

With the outbreak of World War II, Goebbels demanded more patriotic,military films. He also took a much greater interest in high-quality newsreelproduction. As the war worsened, escapist fare predominated. By 1942, with theFinal Solution decided upon, Jews had completely disappeared from the screen,even though the regime had recast World War II as a crusade against “Jewish-Bolshevism” (196). Tegel’s explanation is two-fold: the Final Solution meant “theneed for Jewish characters [in film] had disappeared”; and the film industry shiedaway from depressing, commercially suspect subject matter (208). The one genrein which the regime did return to focus on the Jews was in two “Potemkinvillage”-type documentaries made by the SS (214). These were designed to denyHolocaust rumors and “demonstrate” how well the Jews lived in their concen-tration camps—surely the moral nadir in film history. Tegel completes her story bydiscussing the films of the Western Allies as they liberated German concentrationcamps, made in part to justify the costs of their war efforts and for use in


prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Tegel thus characterizes them as belonging toa “propaganda offensive” (227).

Tegel’s book is solidly researched, well documented, and clearly written. Nazicinema is placed within multiple contexts: film history in general and German filmspecifically, Nazism’s ideological outlook and (shifting) political needs, theregime’s institutional structures, and the roles of key individuals (especially Goeb-bels). The films are extensively described, as are the histories of their productionand those involved in producing and acting in them. Tegel is well versed in therelevant historiography, and she pays meticulous attention to detail. Where pos-sible, she discusses the gap between propaganda film and historical reality. Sheresists the temptation to inflate the importance of her subject, concluding that filmwas “slightly less useful to the [Nazi] state than has hitherto been believed” (x).Tegel might have discussed more systematically the tension between the filmindustry’s focus on the bottom line versus the regime’s political objectives. Andher description of the Allies’ concentration camp films as a propaganda offensivestretches the definition of propaganda past breaking point. Nevertheless, her bookis a major contribution to film history and the history of Nazi Germany.

Arcadia University Geoff Haywood

Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1939 to the Present. By Javier Tusell.(Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. 494. $89.95.)

The history of Spain from 1939 to the present begins with what this author callsa crucial break in historical continuity and passes through yet another breakpoint, in the early 1980s, when the new democracy consolidates. Explaining thetransition from a dictatorship modeled after a “medieval warrior society” to apostmodern democracy at the end of the century is one of the most fascinatingtopics in twentieth-century European history (1). Although the tragedy of thefailed Republic and Civil War dominated historical scholarship for many decades,the triumphal narrative of successful democratization raised a new set of questionsabout what went right instead of wrong in Spanish history. Since the late 1970s,these questions have been largely the preserve of social scientists, but in recentyears historians like Javier Tusell, one of the most prolific historians of modernSpain before his recent death, have turned their attention to the transformationsof the latter half of the century.

What makes the transformation even more remarkable is the nature of theearly Franco regime that took shape after the Civil War, which both explicitlyturned its back on liberal modernity and sought to eradicate any vestiges of that


defeated Spain, including its defenders. Though he rejects the term “genocide” todefine the repression, because there is no single category like “Jews” or “kulaks,”Tusell rightly emphasizes the distinct harshness of the internal repression and theresulting social fragmentation that maintained the victor/vanquished dichotomyfor decades.

At the same time, as the author notes, the regime was also unique in itsevolution from one form of dictatorship to another, while retaining Franco at thehead. Thus, over the course of the four decades, the regime evolved from “pseudo-fascist” during World War II to National Catholic after the war and eventually toa “modernizing secular dictatorship” in the 1960s, in which “consensus” hadreplaced repression as the primary stabilizing strategy (12). This evolution wasmade possible by the flexibility of the regime’s ideology; the personalistic natureof the dictatorship, which resisted institutionalization; and the unintended con-sequences of economic policies that opened up Spain to the world capitalistmarket. Tusell emphasizes the unintended consequences of these changes, inparticular of the economic “miracle” that completed Spain’s transformation froman agrarian and rural economy to an industrialized and urban economy within adecade or so. Instead of crediting the regime with this transformation, Tusellargues that the regime’s early autarchic policies actually delayed the economictake-off.

This social and economic transformation was then key to setting the contextfor the democratic transition, in conjunction with the political skill of individualslike King Juan Carlos, who Tusell ranks highest in terms of impact, followed byAdolfo Suarez, the first prime minister, and Santiago Carrillo, the leader of theCommunist Party. Tusell’s narrative balances the impact of individuals withinsightful biographical sketches of important figures and the role of broaderstructural factors such as the economic transformation and changing cultural andsocial values. Thus, the author emphasizes that the Church’s transition precededand made easier the political transition a decade later. Although Tusell does notintroduce any surprising new explanations for the successful transition and con-solidation of democracy, he includes a balanced discussion of all the contributingfactors rather than trying to support a particular transition model that privilegesone factor, like elite actors, over others.

The breadth of his knowledge—reflected both in the details of the narrative,including apt quotes and anecdotes, and in his comparative references to othernational case studies—makes this book a rich resource for contemporary histo-rians of Spain. At the same time, this reviewer would have liked a clearerexplanatory framework that summarized the reasons for Spain’s extraordinary


transformations, especially for the reader less familiar with the existing debatesabout the period. The implicit framework driving the narrative relies on a kind ofteleological vision of liberal modernity, in which Franco’s “outmoded Baroqueideals” give way to a recovery of liberal ideals and an “opening up to the westernworld” (160). By declaring that Spain, by the end of the dictatorship, “had inmany senses become a European country,” Tusell reproduces a simplistic versionof “Europe” and “modernity” that undercuts his book’s explanatory power(197).

University of California, San Diego Pamela Radcliff

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. By Eric D. Weitz. (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 425. $29.95.)

At the 1934 Nuremburg Party Rally, Rudolf Hess famously barked that “Hitler isGermany; Germany is Hitler.” From the time that these words were spewed fromHess’s sweaty lips until the 1980s, historians did little to alter Hess’s statement.The psychohistorians of the 1970s believed that the history of the Third Reichcould be discerned from Hitler’s mother’s cancer, the plot of Lohengrin, and evenquantitative analysis of the Führer’s genitalia. Interestingly, when it comes to theWeimar Republic, the focus tends to invert. History from the right becomeshistory from the left; Hitler’s racist horrors make way for Berlin’s intellectualpromise; “Hitler is Germany; Germany is Hitler” becomes “Berlin is Weimar;Weimar is Berlin.”

Apologies to Eric D. Weitz for this outlandish comparison to Herr Hess. Thisis not fair. Weitz has penned an outstanding book. He gives the message of “Berlinis Weimar; Weimar is Berlin” its most stimulating, colorful, and elegant voicing.Weitz’s Weimar is visually stunning. With inviting, even friendly, prose he guidesthe reader through the sights and sounds of Berlin. Starting from Potsdamer Platzand radiating outward to the suburban lakes, he lingers at the base of modernarchitectural wonders (particularly those of the architect Erich Mendelsohn) andcaptures the energy of that metropolis. Reflecting Mendelsohn buildings, Weitz’sstructure is clean yet rounded; functional yet playful; revolutionary yet organic.Taking his cue from Bauhaus design, Weitz keeps the footnotes to a minimum andstrips his text of historiographic in-fighting. His bibliographic essay is a model ofconcision. And thankfully, Weitz does not look to the Bauhaus for his sense ofhumor! Weitz’s wit often zings; see, for example, his comparison of Kurt Weill’sflabby post-Brecht years to that of the wayward, Lennon-less McCartney, refresh-ingly funny and sadly true (289).


Hitler plays a part in Weitz’s work (one ignores the Führer at one’s peril), butWeitz very self-consciously prevents the lance corporal from dominating the scene.The Weimar Republic had its flaws: the notorious Article 48, a polarized popu-lace, and conservative naysayers, to name a few. But even with such blemishes,the Republic was not inherently doomed to fail. Weitz argues that Weimar hadgenuine “promise”; ultimately, however, this promise turned to “tragedy” as theRepublic strained under the pressure of a failed peace, postwar psychosis, hyper-inflation, and depression and then was “deliberately destroyed by Germany’santidemocratic, antisocialist, anti-Semitic right wing” (364).

Neither Weimar’s genesis nor its demise was predetermined. Weitz’s Weimar isthoroughly modern and by no means an extension of some Bismarckian mistake.Even though many of the movements in Weimar started before the war, “war andrevolution” transformed everything, often beyond recognition. Although Weitzdoes not engage in historiographical sparring, his stance on the Sonderweg debateis clear. He opens not with “In the Beginning there was Bismarck,” but rather aportrait of German troops returning from the Great War. Weimar’s “promise”was not foiled by a failure of 1848–1849, the passage of an Indemnity Bill, or afeudalized bourgeoisie.

Weitz predicates Weimar’s “promise” on artistic and intellectual innovations.His discussions of leading artists and intellectuals (i.e., Weill, Brecht, Gropius,Mendelsohn, etc.) are excellent on their own terms. One wonders, however, ifthese figures truly represent Weimar Germany. The pitfall of such extensivecoverage of the liberal movements of Berlin and its “outposts” is the temptationto make them normative (361). As a result, Weitz does not seem to know what todo with those who opposed Weimar’s alleged “promise.” Weitz relegates thisopposition to the periphery. He squeezes the conservative, Protestant, and Catho-lic leaders; the Conservative Party establishment; and the growing radical rightwing into a final chapter that ultimately feels tacked on.

By focusing on Berlin’s innovators, Weitz imposes the structure of “Greektragedy” on a history that may not have been so tragic after all (361). When onemoves from one innovator to another only to hear that the innovations were fornaught, one is tempted to conclude that it must have been a tragedy. But as Weitzinforms the reader in his conclusion, the oppositional figures were there all along;the innovations “were bitterly contested every step of the way” (331). However,in Weitz’s tragedy the opponents appear all at once after one giant leap.

The reality is more humdrum than that. The (silent) majority of Germans didnot live in Berlin, did not like Mendelsohn’s architecture, and did not listen toBrecht/Weill’s Three Penny Opera. It is unfortunate that they did not. It is even


more unfortunate that Germans (37 percent of them) voted for Hitler . . . but theydid. Weimar needs to be taken on its own terms, but in a way that does notoverestimate Berlin’s relationship to the whole. Weitz has provided readers withthe point of departure. Now they must leave Potsdamer Platz and the rest of Berlinbehind and explore the rest of Weimar Germany. As we do so, one dares say thatthe exclamation point of tragedy will blunt to the everyday plainness of a comma.

Valparaiso University Kevin Ostoyich

Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. By Patrick Wright. (Oxford, England: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 488. $18.99.)

At first glance, the subtitle of this book puzzled the reviewer. How is a stagerelated to this post-World War II conflict? The first pages of the book, however,cleared up the apparent enigma. The author examines the origins of the mesmer-izing “Iron Curtain” metaphor, and the events connected with it from veryunusual social, cultural, and historical perspectives. In his analysis, the IronCurtain emerges as a metaphorical agency that embodied political rivalry, divi-sions, and warfare well beyond the customary Cold War ones.

Patrick Wright disassembles conventional assumptions that define the IronCurtain as a conflict between the West and the Soviet bloc. Tracing the origins ofthe metaphor, Wright found that it had existed well before Winston Churchilluttered it in 1946. Iron Curtains had been long used as fire prevention devices inEnglish and European theatres. For English-speaking people, the phrase had acertain symbolic power in its meaning of a fence against what was bad or evil. TheIron Curtain received its first political connotation during World War I, when itwas used to delineate a barrier between England and Germany. For politicianswho viewed the world divided along vertical lines, the Iron Curtain was the onlymode of protection and security. In this volume, Wright also explores alternativeviews—that is, the outlooks of those who urged against vertical divisions and whoperceived the world in cosmopolitan dimensions. A prime example was VernonLee, who, according to the author, first gave the phrase “Iron Curtain” its politicalconnotation.

With reference to the USSR, the metaphor already gained prominence after theOctober Revolution. Wright views the Cold War as a prolonged conflict, brokenoff by a short-lived Soviet-Western marriage during World War II. Although thepostwar Iron Curtain “descended” in 1946 or thereabouts, its substance consistedof easily recognizable historical fabric. Whatever Churchill’s recollections were ofthe phrase’s earlier utterances in 1946, he clearly renewed the old metaphor and


reinforced its new connotation—a fire-curtain against the USSR and ultimatelyagainst Communism.

Wright argues that, just as in theaters where the fire-protection device failedto prevent or contain fires, political “iron curtains” fell short in their goals andoften only exacerbated problems. The curtains succeeded only in inflictingcasualties that need not have occurred and in making trouble for civilians onboth sides. That they were easily dismantled even before official decisions weremade to do so indicates their artificial nature. This is perhaps the strongestpoint of Wright’s book. He warns politicians against curtains and walls thatsplit people.

Wright claims that the metaphor and related phenomena involved a gooddeal of theatricality and play-acting. The author tells his story in an anecdotalform and makes good, indeed innovative, use of contemporary periodicals,stories, and even gossip. Expressions such as “it was said” or “some believed”are frequent throughout the narrative. The weakest part of the book is that itsometimes lacks historical analysis and argument. The author sometimes doesnot explain the significance of developments he narrates, leaving this readerunsure about their worth for his general hypothesis. Despite these shortcomings,this book offers a broad and revealing look at the Iron Curtain and the ColdWar.

Auburn University Boris B. Gorshkov

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Plotting the Globe: Stories of Meridians, Parallels, and the International Date Line. ByAvraham Ariel and Nora Ariel Berger. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Pp. xii,236. $49.95.)

A history of neither exploration nor cartography, this book is a unique explora-tion of the abstract great circles that run around the earth and how humans havecreated and given meaning to them. More specifically, the authors are interestedin meridians and the one great circle that is also a parallel of latitude, the Equator(in this respect, the reference to parallels in the subtitle is misleading). The authorsare a former deckhand, who rose to be a ship’s master before becoming anengineer and educator, and his journalist daughter. They do not pretend to behistorians, but seek only to present a collection of stories that combine marinehistory with the history of science, and the ancient world with medieval China andmodern Europe. Their tone is at once didactic and popular.


The book has four unequal parts. The first and longest considers the measure-ment of portions of meridians to determine the size and shape of the earth; thispermits the authors not only to explain the basic geometry of the earth but also toreview the history of geodesy since the late seventeenth century. A further chapteron the remeasurement by the French of the meridian through Paris after 1790, todefine the length of the meter, is the occasion for a broader discussion of units ofmeasurement. The second part deals with definitions of prime meridians, fromHipparchus’s use of the meridian of Rhodes (ca. 130 BC) to the internationalacceptance of the Greenwich meridian in 1884. In the process, the authors give apotted history of time measurement; they also make special note of the often-overlooked attempts by the French to avoid using an English prime meridian. Thethird part focuses on the difficult concept of The International Date Line, themeridian opposite Greenwich’s, and its implementation. Finally, part four con-siders the Equator, the traditions of “crossing the Line,” and who might have beenthe first mariners to do so. In their account of early sea explorations, AvrahamAriel and Nora Ariel Berger reject the nonsensical claims by Gavin Menziesconcerning the Chinese admiral Zheng He but miss the fact that Zheng Heprobably did reach Zanzibar, south of the Line.

Though perhaps motivated by the recent spate of popular histories concerningmaps, initiated by Dava Sobol’s Longitude, this book lacks the coherence andtone of the genre. It suffers from an idiosyncratic and anecdotal approach. On theplus side, the authors do explain well the several concepts involved without anycomplex mathematics. It is thus unclear to whom Plotting the Globe will appeal.Certainly, it is too episodic and partial to be of use in a course on the history ofscience or cartography, or even world history, and its idiosyncracies will perhapsnot appeal to a general readership.

University of Southern Maine Matthew H. Edney

Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska.By Stuart Banner. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. vi, 388.$35.00.)

In this comparative study of native land alienation within the Pacific Basin andaround its Anglo-American rim, the author demonstrates the importance of whenand how cultural contact was made. “Today, . . . Tongans own all the land inTonga, Fijians own much of Fiji, and the Maori own significant parts of NewZealand, but Hawaiians own little of Hawaii, aboriginal Australians own verylittle of Australia, and aboriginal Oregonians own scarcely any of Oregon,” as can


also be said of Alaska, California, and British Columbia (3). The key was theperception of land use.

Australia was terra nullius, land owned by no one. British policy of compen-sating local inhabitants for their land did not apply in a place where people didnot practice agriculture, made no recognizable improvements to the land, andlacked the structural organization necessary to respond politically or militarily tocolonizers. Contemporary observers found Aborigines still in a state of nature.First impressions proved to be incorrect, but land, once taken, could not easily bereturned. The Crown took title to the land and sold it fee simple to colonists. Thecolonial government eventually allocated Aboriginal reserves, but terra nulliusproved irreversible.

New Zealand Maori practiced agriculture and a specific system of heritableproperty rights. Land was not a saleable commodity. In the Treaty of Waitangi[1840] the Maori ceded sovereignty of the land to Britain in exchange for pro-tection. From 1840–1865, the Crown acquired land through purchases and resoldit to colonists. The Crown bought land; the Maori sold the use of land, or of aportion of land. The British were a single unit; the Maori, divided into tribes. TheNative Lands Act of 1865 created a Land Court to decide which Maori ownedwhat part of the land. Private purchasers bought land from Maori who oweddebts in the market system that came with colonization. Initially, the Maori lostvast quantities of land. Ultimately, the Treaty of Waitangi became the basis ofcontemporary Maori activism for legal and social rights.

In the Kingdom of Hawai′i, people practiced agriculture and commerce; theking retained land ownership. In 1848, King Kamehameha III divided the landbetween the king and the high chiefs, and then between the king and the govern-ment. In 1850, the legislature approved the sale of land to foreigners and also theKuleana Act, allowing commoners to gain title to property they used. Land couldbe bought and sold freely, and, in case of foreign annexation, fee simple titleswould be recognized. Overall, the strategy worked, but much native land wasalienated. Hawaiian rights to land and its revenue remain unresolved legal issues.

Polity and land use, terra nullius or agricultural improvement. In addition tothe cases above, Anglo-Americans applied these criteria to evaluate indigenousland rights in Fiji, Tonga, and the North American West Coast. Unless governmentpolicy dictated otherwise, documented land use resulted in enforceable treaties orlegislation that now is used to reclaim indigenous land and cultural rights.Without such documentation, legal recourse is almost impossible.

University of Hawai�i at Hilo Sandra Wagner-Wright


Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. ByRonald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2007. Pp. xxvi, 619. $39.50.)

The authors preface this book by explaining that it was written:

in the belief that . . . contemporary globalization, and its economic andpolitical consequences, have not arisen out of a vacuum, but from a world-wide process of uneven economic development that has been centuries, ifnot millennia, in the making. In turn, this process has been critically shapedby the changing ways in which the various world regions have interactedwith each other, not only through trade, migration, and investment, but alsopolitically and culturally, over time. Understanding this two-way interactionbetween the pattern and evolution of interregional trade . . . and long-termglobal economic and political developments . . . is the main purpose of thisvolume. (xvi)

Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke judge regions to be more reliable unitsthan nations for such long-term global analysis because they are “separated notsolely on [more stable] geographic lines, but more importantly on social, politicaland cultural lines that give each of them a modicum of coherence and unitydistinguishing it from the others” (3). They group these interactions over thesecond millennium in nine successive “eras” separated by major shifts of technol-ogy, ideology, and relative military and political power affecting trade policies.The regional set of the pre-1500 eras contains Western Europe, Eastern Europe,North Africa, Southwest Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and EastAsia. For the post-1500 eras, sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Hemisphere areadded. Each era has a chapter in which its central features alleged to have alteredglobal trade patterns are presented with supportive historical detail, includingrecent revisions of data and judgments in the scholarly literature.

Notwithstanding the ambitious scope of their analytic structure, the authorsmake no claim to have uncovered many sweeping new insights about globaliza-tion and drench most of their judgments with qualifications. The main exceptionis the claim that they have produced the first detailed survey of the evolution ofglobal trade free of Eurocentric bias, and thus an especially valuable source forhistory-challenged economists and economics-challenged historians. The avoid-ance of regional bias does uncover new insights; e.g., it invalidates the formerlywidely accepted Pirenne Thesis that the seventh- and eighth-century Muslimtakeover of the Mediterranean cut off West Europe’s trade with Asia,


deurbanizing the Carolingian economy and bringing on Europe’s “Dark Age.”The new evidence instead shows the Islamic region prospered as it expanded,shared the gains with Europe by open trade policies, and that Pirenne hadoverblackened Europe’s Dark Age economy.

Other biases, however, lessen the book’s reliability. Notwithstanding support-ive demographic, trade, and price data in chapter four, Hobsbawm’s thesis of a“General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century” is flatlydismissed, seemingly victim of the authors’ anti-Marxist animus. Their addictionto the Heckscher-Ohlin model may explain but does not justify excluding BrinleyThomas’s alternative push-pull modeling of nineteenth-century factor migration.Moreover, the H-O model is notoriously ill-equipped to account for the recurrentasset mispricing, overleveraging, debt crises, and credit crunches afflicting finan-cial markets. The defense has been to attribute super-rational error-correctingcapability to these markets and blame adjustment failures on government inter-ference. But the post-1914 “eras” have been short and unusually financiallyturbulent, causing economists to defect in increasing numbers to analyses thatdeny the possibility that laissez-faire capital markets could attain super error-correcting capability. The authors mention little of this in the book; instead theypresent nonfinancial explanations of the post-1914 turbulence. In the last chapter,they offer tentative predictions for the twenty-first century guided by their analysisof the past. This was obviously written before the subprime mortgage crisis andthe mutual agreement of the major central banks, Wall Street, and the City thatbailouts of overleveraged, “too big to fail” financial institutions were essential toprevent the financial crisis from globalizing into a 1930–1932 depression. Unfor-tunately, the authors fail to prepare the reader for such possibilities in the past orfuture.

Washington University in St. Louis David Felix

A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the BibleChanged the Course of Western Civilization. By Jonathan Kirsch. (New York, N.Y.:HarperOne, 2007. Pp. 352. $15.95.)

Preaching in the Last Days has been a characteristic of Christian thinking sincethe earliest days of the church. Los Angeles columnist, attorney, and authorJonathan Kirsch catches the irony of this in his survey of Western history throughthe lens of the use of the book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse. Through suchchapters as “Something Rich and Strange” (chapter one) and “Spooky Knowledge


and Last Things” (chapter two) to “The Godless Apocalypse” (chapter seven),Kirsch offers a rich array of the use and abuse of the text in Western social andcultural history.

By emphasizing the ironic, Kirsch catches a glimpse of that strain of apoca-lyptic thinking, originating in later Jewish (fourth and second centuries BC)cultural and political conflict, that would come to dominate views of history inmuch of Western Latin and Byzantine Civilization. What seems diminishedthrough this sense of irony is the value of the interpretative tradition spawned bythe intricacies of apocalyptic symbolism, and the way in which such interpretationstands as a summary of the later Jewish canonical prophets. Again, though helpfulin drawing attention to religious ambiguity, the use of irony can undermine theChristology implicit in the text, drawing as it does from elsewhere in the NewTestament in deeply symbolic fashion.

By viewing the Apocalypse through an ironic lens, readers end with the feelingthat much of the ecclesiology that finds itself embedded in or arising out of thebook of Revelation is more derivative of political and social controversy thantheological intent. Perhaps this is the case, but it should be recognized for what itis. The irony of the text is that just as it has led, as in modern times, to the likesof Waco cult leader David Koresh or to forms of Zionism that seem oblivious ofsocial justice in the Middle East, the Apocalypse has also been the visionary enginethat has promoted abolitionism and civil rights, the nonviolence of the peaceablekingdom, and has been a solace for those burdened by the weight of history.

Kirsch is a delightful author. Whether reveling readers with stories of themedieval Richard the Lionhearted and his appeal to Christian mystic and apoca-lypticist Joachim of Fiore for insight on the fate of the Third Crusade [1190–1191]or by entertaining readers with stories of the different identities of Gog andMagog and other end-time characters through history, Kirsch is able to deal withthe ironic without losing sight of historical detail—as he did so well in his earlierThe Harlot by the Side of the Road [1998]. Through his use of image and prose,Kirsch makes the journey through A History of the End of the World a lesson anda delight.

But it is a journey that is as sobering as it is captivating. It is a journey thatcompels the reader to read more and to go beyond what Kirsch has provided, orfailed to provide, in terms of the intersections of theology and history. His healthysense for the ironic should be an encouragement to read more; it fails if it becomesan impediment that fosters historical cynicism. Apocalyptic thinking is coursingthrough contemporary Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith communities, andoften engenders direct or indirect violence. This is reason enough to take the


journey on which Kirsch invites readers to go. The book is clearly written for ageneral audience and deserves wide readership.

Boston Theological Institute Rodney L. Petersen

Comrades!: A History of World Communism. By Robert Service. (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 571. $35.00.)

The author of this study describes a world communism that was born of the“bright hopes of Marxism” and tried to become totalitarian but could not due tothe strength of preexisting social and cultural phenomena (7). Nonetheless, itproduced “basically similar” characteristics “wherever it . . . lasted any length oftime” (9). For Robert Service, the root of these similar characteristics is Leninism,which “lasted unreformed under [Lenin’s] successors through to the late 1980s”(8). These similar characteristics included violence against political rivals, religion,culture, and civil society; centralization of state power; an intensely intrusivesecurity state; insularity; and the treatment of people as resources, which together“make it sensible to speak of a communist order” (9). This is a recognizableapproach that will satisfy many, but not those who look for a book that will castcommunist regimes or their achievements in a positive light.

Comrades!, like world communism itself, positions Russia and the SovietUnion as the hub of a great communist wheel, with other movements, parties, andregimes as the spokes. Service approaches the topic as a political one, withrelations between the Soviet party and its subordinates presented as a question ofpower. In this sort of exposé, there is little room for examination of the appeals ofcommunism or the motivations of those who embraced it. The final third of thebook (consisting of two parts entitled “Mutation” and “Endings”) does addressa time when world communism diversified, from the mid-1950s to its end in thelate 1980s.

Service has tackled the difficult task of synthesizing the history of worldcommunism in one volume. He does so concisely, with verve but not muchsympathy. Service writes aggressively and is given to conclusions that will mostoften please the ear of those who are fundamentally hostile to the communistproject. Given the enormity of its topic, the book’s coverage is understandablybroader than it is deep. It rarely offers original interpretations. When Service isoriginal, it is most often with his characterizations of individuals and of episodesrather than of larger processes and interpretation. People who will appreciate thisbook include teachers of courses on world communism—as it does about as wellas one can hope with a topic so enormous, and it is organized to suit a class


schedule—and lay readers, who will find the style engaging and the conclusionsnonthreatening. Scholars will not get much that is new from reading Comrades!,and any reader looking for an examination of why communism might haveappealed to anyone other than the leaders of the movement will be dissatisfied.Service’s bibliography and notes include archival sources, but he relies most of allon secondary sources. This reviewer is no expert on all aspects of the topic thebook addresses, but in areas where he is an expert, there were occasional naggingbut not terribly consequential errors; for example, Aleksandar Rankovic wassacked in 1996, and Edvard Kardelj was not his friend (257).

Boise State University Nick Miller

Hunger: A Modern History. By James Vernon. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. xiii, 369. $29.95.)

This author opens his book on hunger with some dispiriting facts: twenty-fourthousand people die of hunger or hunger-related diseases every day (one every 3.6seconds); eight hundred twenty thousand lack adequate food (one in eight world-wide); and on September 11, 2001, there were twelve dead from hunger for everyvictim in New York (1). But this fascinating study is not so much about the hungryas about how hunger has been understood historically, why questions about thecauses of hunger arose, and how solutions to the problem developed from theVictorian period to World War II. Drawing on a wide range of sources, JamesVernon offers a cultural and material history of hunger that demonstrates itsimportance as a “boundary between the market and the state, the subject and thecitizen, the individual and the collective, the nation and the empire” (273).

The author begins with an account of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus,showing how each wanted to free the market from outdated obstacles like moraleconomy. Vernon sees the Malthusian view of hunger as the best way to teach thepoor the merits of industry as a key disciplinary tool. In the words of one ardentdisciple, hunger taught “decency and civility, obedience and subjection to the mostbrutish” (11). In other words, hunger was not a product of problems with thepolitical or economic system, but a solution to them. By exposing the lazy to themoral discipline of labor, hunger appeared as a good and necessary thing.

Next, Vernon traces the changes in the way hunger was viewed, beginning withthe humanitarian discovery of hunger. From Oliver Twist exposing the inhuman-ity of officials to reporters and photographers establishing the hungry as peoplelacking food, not moral fiber, the depiction of individual suffering helped toexplode Malthusian assumptions and render the hungry as sympathetic figures


deserving action. Indeed, twenty million deaths in colonial India and Irelandbefore 1900 opened the door for a political critique of hunger. No longer were thehungry simply humanitarian victims, they became subjects or citizens “in need ofpolitical emancipation from states that failed to redress their hunger” (79).

Following World War I, hunger marches filled with veterans transformed theface of the hungry from women and children to war veterans, victims of a systemthat failed to ensure their welfare. Officials sought to solve the problem throughscience and nutrition, discovering that rats on a British diet were stunted and“nervous and apt to bite the attendants” and “began to kill and eat the weakerones” (108). Not surprisingly, during both world wars the government recognizedthat well-fed workers in munitions plants were more productive, leading to therise of canteens and food provision for employees.

Vernon provides disheartening evidence that the attitudes towards the hungryremain maddeningly persistent: famine relief must not make the starving depen-dent, Jamie Oliver and others continue to tell the poor how to eat, and the causesof hunger are all too often gendered, with maternal inefficiency seen as aggravat-ing if not causing hunger. Some of the most fascinating material in the bookappears in Vernon’s chapters on the ideal home, domestic economy classes, andmagazines like Good Housekeeping. The commodification of nutrition andgovernment-inspired domestic training (for girls) are all revealing about the con-tinuing tensions between statist solutions and the reliance on the private sector.

In the end, the absence of a tidy progressive history from Malthus to humani-tarian approaches to politics to science is clearly demonstrated in Hunger.Although Vernon has interesting sections on hunger in the Empire, more on theissue of nutrition in the Empire as well as the question of hunger and race inBritain would have been welcome. Nevertheless, Vernon offers an original workthat shows how the politicization of hunger contributed to the welfare state, oneof several reasons that the topic deserves a history of its own.

University of Delaware John Patrick Montaño

Transport Design: A Travel History. By Gregory Votolato. (London, England: Reak-tion Books, Ltd., 2007. Pp. 239. $35.00.)

The author of this book, a professor of design at Buckinghamshire ChilternsUniversity College in England, has written a different kind of transportationwork. What he has created is a thoughtful, careful examination of how design,mostly fashioned during the past two centuries, has affected travelers on land andwater, and more recently in the air. Although Gregory Votolato shows how


patterns of design have evolved, he points out striking linkages between old andnew experiences. As he indicates, George M. Pullman, who perfected and popu-larized the railway sleeping car, helped to define modern concepts of luxury travel.For example, Pullman-like innovations, popular with the public for extendedtrips, would later be incorporated in aircraft designed for long-distance flights.Similarly, reclining chairs, found in a range of historic railroad rolling stock,would eventually be employed by automobile and airplane makers, albeit withimportant modifications that reflected advancements in materials and ergonomics.

In the process of discussing continuity and change in transport design, Votolatocontends that an important difference exists between “transportation” and“travel.” The former involves getting to destinations in the most efficient andeconomical way, and the latter has more to do with the overall quality of theexperience. Both factors have influenced transport design, whether for commonurban trams or elegant ocean-going passenger liners.

Votolato shows imagination in his research. In addition to predictable sources,including travel accounts, trade publications, and scholarly works, he has tappedfilms, television programs, and novels. Votolato complements his narrative with awide range of illustrations, essential for showing change in transportation design.Often the illustrations selected leave no doubt about what Votolato means.

It must be noted that Votolato is a design specialist and not a trained historian.There are a few historical errors; for example, Ulysses S. Grant did not immedi-ately follow Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States and the “limited”passenger train did not earn that distinction because it contained Pullman cars,but rather the moniker meant a limited number of stops en route (31, 41).Although Votolato covers impressively a wide range of transport forms, includingmotor homes and speedboats, he might have commented profitably on the sleeper-bus craze that infected the American bus industry during the late 1920s and early1930s, a transport type that remains in Europe.

Admittedly, a work on transport design could take on encyclopedic qualities,and Votolato has distilled the topic to produce a thoughtful overview study. Noreader will likely ever look at the artifacts of transportation, either past or present,in the same way. This book is to transport design what John R. Stilgo’s Metro-politan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene [1983] is to the impact of thebuilt-railroad environment on the cultural history of the America. TransportDesign: A Travel History deserves a large reading audience.

Clemson University H. Roger Grant


historian volume 72 issue 1 2010 dionysios stathakopoulos -- constantinople- capital of byzantium...

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