African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam ? By Andrew Burton

BOOK REVIEWS

EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University;Delaware, OH 43015. TELEPHONE: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643.

E-MAIL ADDRESS: [email protected] ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor

EDITOR

Richard SpallOhio Wesleyan University

REGIONAL SUB-EDITORS

William H. Alexander(Modern Western Europe)Norfolk State University

Richard B. Allen(Africa, Middle East, and South Asia)

Framingham State College

Douglas R. Bisson(Early Modern Europe)Belmont University

Betty Dessants(United States Since 1865)

Shippensburg University

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

Nigel Kennell & Stefanie Kennell(Ancient World)

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Jose C. Moya(Latin America)Columbia University

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

Sally Hadden(United States)Florida State University

Peter Worthing(East Asia and the Pacific)

Texas Christian University

STUDENT EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

SENIOR ASSISTANTS

Paul Krog Amanda Stacy Jillian SnyderSusan Flanagan

Alex Branstool Ryan Colopy Zak GomesRyan Jarvis David Johnstone Sean KennedyJennifer Kirsop Mark Lovering Colin MagruderBenjamin Malecki Matthew McGuire Kara Reiter

Douglas Sampson

WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE & VALERIE HAMILL

mailto:[email protected]

http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The Persian Empire. By Lindsay Allen. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press,2005. Pp. 208. $39.95.)

The author is a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University, withrelevant experience in Persian antiquities at the British Museum, London, and theMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her book was first published inEngland as an illustrated companion volume to an exhibition of Persian artifactsat the British Museum and was later released in the American market as a historyof the Persian Empire, which the publishers tout as the “definitive work” on thesubject. Although Americans are admittedly not known for their love or knowl-edge of history, surely even we can tell the difference between a picture book anda history book.

Lindsay Allen has produced a coffee-table book with a trendy sociologicalmulticultural spin to history and lots of full-page color pictures. Even as acoffee-table book, the work is disappointing because of the dated, often uninter-esting photographs and a lack of clear direction. The book contains little aboutthe state of archaeological research on Persia since the Iranian Revolution of1978, which would have been interesting to know.

The author mixes archaeology, sociology, and history together in a way that issure to confuse the general reader and frustrate the scholar. Even her recountingof the standard facts regarding the history of the empire, something found in anybasic textbook, is difficult to follow. The history of the empire is never examinedin enough depth or with enough clarity to enable the general reader to understandwho the Persians were or how they ruled their subjects and accommodated orresisted the forces that eventually destroyed them. The author begins her historywith Cyrus II, the founder of the empire and its first king, without ever explainingto the reader who Cyrus I was. She ends her history with Artaxerxes V, whom shedesignates as the last Persian king. He was a rebel from Afghanistan named Bessuswho, for a very brief period before he was executed, led a resistance movementagainst Alexander the Great. Bessus proclaimed himself king of Persia when therewas no Persia left to rule, and he was never recognized as king even by his ownfollowers, who turned him over to Alexander. Why the author chose to includehim as anything more than a footnote is a mystery. The work contains distractinggrammatical mistakes throughout its pages, and factual errors (such as Alexanderthe Great conquering the ancient Persian capital of Pasargadae seventy yearsbefore he was even born), which are simply unacceptable.

3 0 6 T H E H I S T O R I A N

The disappointing reality is that this book is not able to tell us anything moreabout Persian history than A. T. Olmstead did fifty years ago when he wrote whatis still considered the definitive work. Olmstead drew his information from thefindings of the University of Chicago archaeologists who worked in Iran betweenthe two world wars, and some of the material in this book seems to be drawn fromthose same sources.

Eckerd College John Prevas

African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam. ByAndrew Burton. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 301.$26.95.)

The Dar es Salaam of the reviewer’s experience, a scant decade after the merger ofTanganyika and Zanzibar, was very different from the more mature city of themid-1990s, when the author was doing his research. Then it was a city in themidst of the euphoria of a newly independent state, as well as the wrath ofthe United States for trying to follow a noncapitalist path to development. All thedata of the mid-1970s showed Dar es Salaam to be growing at the rate of 10percent a year, while the country was growing at between 3 and 4 percent. Othercities and towns in Tanzania were growing at slower rates but still well beyond“natural” increase. Scholars and government officials worried about depopulationof rural areas and a disproportionate allocation of scarce development funds tourban areas. There were conversations about repatriating some rural migrants.There were also discussions of the appropriate approach to developing and“regularizing” the rapidly growing periurban slum areas. Both the city and thecountry were in a state of ferment, aimed toward a new kind of postcolonialfuture, but the vision was not clear about details.

Although the city can be said to have been founded in 1862 by the sultan ofZanzibar, it does not really begin to take on urban form until it becomes thecapital of German East Africa in 1891. The British occupied Dar es Salaam, aswell as the rest of the former German territories, after World War I. This is thebeginning of Dar’s position as a major East African city. Andrew Burton’sexamination of this history helps us to see the resilience of attitudes towardurbanization that have their roots in colonial racism and beliefs that “urbanAfrican” was an oxymoron. The urban poor are treated no better after fortyyears of independence than they were under the British. There are simply moreof them.

3 0 7B O O K R E V I E W S

But, as Burton notes, much of the problem rests in lack of adequate political,material, and human infrastructures in Dar. This seems to be as true todayas it was in the colonial period when the basic problems were beingconstructed. It is depressing, but nevertheless so, that urban policies andurban planning do not seem to have advanced much beyond the constructsproduced by the colonial period, which Burton ably documents. Migrants areseen as strangers in town, and this leads to a consideration of “what to do withthem.”

Anyone seeking to understand the colonial roots of urban and national prob-lems in, at the least, Anglophonic Africa, should read this book. Unfortunatelymuch that is written here can be seen replicated in the actions of many contem-porary postcolonial regimes. Reading Burton’s work with an eye on the contem-porary world brings to mind Santayana’s clichéd and often misquoted commentabout understanding history.

Burton’s other significant accomplishment has been in gaining access to avariety of colonial documents that seem to have “gone missing” since his research.For that alone the book is worth having.

University of Louisville Edwin S. Segal

An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of anIsland Empire. By Gwyn Campbell. (New York, N. Y.: Cambridge University Press,2005. Pp. xvii, 413. $90.00.)

This is a much-anticipated work. For the past two decades, this author has beena leading historian of Madagascar and of its place in the “southern complex” ofthe western Indian Ocean. Many will be familiar with his numerous publicationson various aspects of Malagasy history that stand as a testament to his scholar-ship, most notably perhaps those dealing with the island’s import and export slavetrades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These are listed fully in theexcellent bibliography.

Meticulously researched and cogently argued, the author breaks new ground inoffering detailed treatment of the economic history of Madagascar in the nine-teenth century. Gwyn Campbell draws on a wide range of sources, scattered inarchives in France, Britain, the United States, Germany, South Africa, Mauritius,and Madagascar, that are uniquely rich in detail and have thus allowed the authorto produce invaluable precolonial data on, for example, trade, production anddemography.


The author opens with a well-articulated discussion of the book’s most sig-nificant contributions: 1) that the “rise” of the highland Merina polity in thenineteenth century was the result of policies of imperial expansion and eco-nomic modernization; 2) that Madagascar was not, in contradistinction to theposition advocated by the hitherto dominant nationalist school, a unified statewith a common language, culture, and political system; 3) that it was the adop-tion of autarkic policies in the 1820s, “designed to forge an industrial revolu-tion and to affect rapidly the conquest, colonization, and commercialexploitation of the island,” that ultimately undermined its economy and con-tributed decisively to the “fall” of the Merina empire; and that 4) rather thanreflecting “French military prowess or capitalist aggression,” French colonialconquest at the end of the century was enabled by internal factors, the mostimportant of which was the “implosion” of the Merina imperial state andeconomy (14, 12). Campbell thus offers an entirely new perspective onnineteenth-century Malagasy history.

Campbell then goes on to examine the “traditional economy” from themiddle of the eighteenth century to 1820, in which slave labor demand from theplantation economies of the Mascarene Islands (Reunion and Mauritius) wereof great importance. Of particular significance was the demand for provisions,such as rice, from the latter; the East African coast and as far south as the Cape,which stimulated the development of a plantation economy, gave an impetusto long-distance trade and to the growth of the Merina market system bythe 1820s. The consequent increase in domestic and foreign commerce contrib-uted to the consolidation of Merina power and to its expansion into the east ofthe island.

This is followed by chapters that present a detailed examination of the adop-tion of autarkic policies by the Merina state in the 1820s that rejected Britishfree-trade policies and were aimed at “fostering national economic growth and thepromotion of imperial Merina power” (78). Based on the extensive use of fanom-poana, forced corvée labor, autarky allowed the Merina to embark on a unique“experiment” in industrialization in which prominent state involvement pro-moted large-scale and machine-based production. Although there were a numberof successes, by the 1850s the high cost of transportation and resistance tofanompoana resulted in high rates of desertion and banditry, undermining theseefforts, weakening the economy, and contributing decisively to the fall of theMerina state. Despite these setbacks, in the context of rapidly growing regionaland international commerce, Campbell argues that the Malagasy economy wasable to recover in the 1860s and 1870s as a result of its active participation in


networks of trade that connected it through Indian, Swahili, British, and otherEuropean merchants to East Africa (including Mozambique), Natal in SouthAfrica, and Mauritius. These developments, however, undermined the state’sautarkic policies and, along with the resistance offered by groups in the indepen-dently ruled parts of the island (such as the Sakalava, who had armed themselveswith imported weaponry), mass desertion by fanompoana, and banditry, funda-mentally weakened the Merina economy.

It is against this background of imperial economic and political decline thatCampbell wants us to interpret the French colonial takeover of Madagascar in the1890s. Weakened economically and politically and having alienated much of itspopulace, the Merina court was thus unable to oppose the invading French forcein 1894. In thus highlighting the role of internal factors in shaping its history, andin locating Madagascar within a broader regional Indian Ocean context, Camp-bell makes a pioneering contribution to Malagasy historiography. This book willbe required reading for all of those interested in it.

New York University Pedro Machado

The Rise of Islam. By Matthew S. Gordon. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.Pp. xxxv, 180. $45.00.)

Add this book to the list of good introductions to the origins of Islam forupper-level high school social science or first-year college humanities courses.What sets this text apart from many others is its focus on the socioeconomic,political, and cultural milieu in which a new religious movement was born and hasthrived; its discussion of the origins of Islamic law, spirituality and theology,mysticism, philosophy, and culture; and an appendix of individual page-lengthbiographies of important figures. Also included is a helpful glossary of terms, a“photo essay,” selections from primary sources, and an annotated bibliography.The first chapter, a historical overview, is particularly useful in sketching the broadoutline of events and persons who are discussed more extensively in the chaptersthat follow and are reinforced in the biographies and source documents. In fact,the crisp biographies of early Islam’s significant individuals, as well as the care-fully selected primary source documents, are two of the strengths of the text.

Matthew S. Gordon’s discussion of the sociocultural origins and authority ofthe Qur’an is very good. He also highlights an area of Islamic studies often ignoredin general introduction, the role of urbanization in the development of Islamiccivilization worldwide. He identifies three broad categories of cities: “those thathad existed long before the Arab-Islamic conquests,” such as Alexandria, Jerusa-


lem, Damascus, Aleppo, Balkh, Marw, and Samarkand; the “new city-buildingunder the Umayyads and Abbasids,” e.g., Qayrawan, al-Fustat, Basra, and Kufa;and palatine cities, those “established as seats of government,” Baghdad, Samarra,Cairo, and Fez (51–52). One appreciates Gordon’s extensive history of Baghdaditself—its commerce (including the institution of slavery); the role of the caliphand courtly society (which affected medieval Europe); the role of the Khurasanimilitary; and the establishment of the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom),although considering this is one of the high points of Islamic civilization, thespecific medical, literary, artistic, and scientific accomplishments of the lattermerited more attention.

The usefulness of this text as a general introduction is also its weakness, as itis only able to highlight broad themes. The text itself, separate from the historicaloverview and appendices, is a mere eighty pages; the discussions of particularissues (e.g., Islamic law and proto-Sufism) were cursory, and the choice of theseven pictures seemed rather eclectic.

Nevertheless, this is a very useful and informative general introduction.

Indiana University Purdue University, Fort Wayne L. Michael Spath

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. By Gilles Kepel. (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 327. $23.95.)

Eurocentric is not usually a compliment in the world of Middle Eastern Studies,and yet it is the moderate Eurocentric approach of the author that makes thisbook so useful for those seeking to understand the nature of U.S./Islamic relationsin the post-9/11 world. Since the Madrid bombings, and particularly since theLondon bombings of 7/7, which were apparently perpetrated by homegrownBritish Muslim extremists, the discussion of Islamic movements with Europe as abackdrop is sadly all the more relevant.

The book has two key virtues. First, it frames the history of 11 September asa result of a parallel development of the so-called neoconservative movement inthe U.S. establishment and the Islamic extremism of al-Qaeda. The vantagepoint from which Europeans and moderate Muslims now regard these compet-ing extremist trends provides a much more useful and stable approach to theissue than much U.S. writing, which adopts a neoconservative perspective andpurports to describe the monstrous culture of Islamic extremism from the sideof the angels, thus dehistoricizing and distorting the picture. Retracing the twonarratives of development as a war for Muslim minds in which the outcome isnot a foregone conclusion begins to do justice to the complexity and dynamics


of the dangerous political movement. By tracing the “clash of civilizations”mentality, which motivates the extremists on both sides, Gilles Kepel (in anelegant translation by Pascale Ghazaleh) gives his English language readers avantage point free of polemics and politics. Neoconservatives and Islamicextremists alike purveyed a world view of clashing civilizations and demandedthat those in the middle choose sides. In Kepel’s framing, one sees the two polarextremes through which terror recruits like the London bombers felt forced tochoose.

A fluid and insightful first chapter skillfully narrates and links the events ofthe 1990s up to 11 September. Without lapsing into academic jargon, Kepeldescribes how political capital from the First Gulf War was invested in the OsloPeace process, but how both Islamist and Likudnik extremists, disenchanted withmainstream-negotiated peace, consolidated their own uncompromising discoursesand institutions in the shadows and waited for opportunities to derail the process.In doing this, Kepel provides a convincing argument about how the Palestinian/Israeli conflict was and continues to be central to the power politics of Iraq andAfghanistan.

This excellent introduction then branches off to analyze the two sides in thewar for Muslim minds—the Islamists of al-Qaeda and the neoconservative radi-cals of the Bush administration. Surprisingly, Kepel’s account of consolidation ofthe neoconservatives’ positions is more solidly grounded and convincing than hisinterpretation of al-Qaeda. By focusing on the texts of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri,al-Qaeda’s strategist and second in command, to the exclusion of Osama binLaden’s changing role and image, Kepel makes the phenomenon of Islamicextremism sound more coherent, centralized, and focused than most expertssuspect the loose cell-based movement to be. Suggesting that Bin Laden andZawahiri intentionally dressed in soap opera-like costumes or intended to recreatethe Prophet Muhammad’s hijra, or migration from Mecca to Medina, soundscontrived and is based on little more than the author’s speculation, whereas histracing of the neoconservative lineage back to nuclear theorists of the 1950s is oneof the best such accounts available.

The book’s second virtue is its informative chapters on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, andEurope’s integration of large Muslim immigrant populations. Readers who knowthat Islam is diverse, complex, and far bigger than extremism will find thediscussions of Saudi Wahhabism, Iraqi sectarianism, and the legacies of Europeancolonialism most helpful in sorting out its different currents and trends. In each ofthese latter chapters, the discussion of national history and emerging Islamicideology are seamlessly and readably integrated. All this makes The War for


Muslim Minds the best primer available for the general reader on the history andimplications of the 11 September attacks and the War on Terror.

University of Arizona Leila Hudson

We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa,1947–1999. By Gary Kynoch. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi,200. $22.95.)

The author examines one of the major urban gangs among black South Africans:the Marashea (or Russian) gang. He convincingly argues that the gang’s history isinseparable from the history of South Africa in the last half of the twentiethcentury. The economy underwent massive industrialization in that time, and withit came a number of social and cultural changes. (The apartheid laws enacted after1948 were partly an attempt to control the pace of these changes and make themmore uniformly beneficial for the minority white population.) A steadily increas-ing number of Africans left the rural areas to take jobs in the expanding industrialsector, including both gold mines and secondary industries, and to reside inburgeoning towns and periurban areas. New migrants relied on social connectionsthat linked them with their rural lives, and forged new urban and ethnic identitiesthat redefined larger social groups. The Marashea gang had developed initiallyaround migrants from Basutoland (now the country of Lesotho). The gang beganas an urban enclave for rural-based migrants, but quickly Lesotho also became arural retreat for urban gang members, folding various elements—including beliefsin the supernatural—of the older rural culture into newer urban practices. Thegang also enforced a social code for its members, defining proper gender andfamilial relations, interactions with other social groups, and the political activitiesof members.

The gang’s ability to survive over the years emerged from the symbioticrelationships it forged with two central institutions of South African life: thepolice and the gold mines. By maintaining social order, the gang often coexistedwith the police and the justice system, sometimes making them complicit withcriminal acts through bribes and intimidation. The gang rooted itself from the1950s onward in the social context of the mines, creating some semblance ofhome life for the migrant miners by running lucrative criminal businesses (such asillegal liquor sales and prostitution) that catered to them. The gang also occa-sionally clashed with police and mine authorities, but the author states, “TheMarashea was not a revolutionary movement. Its purpose was . . . to survive andadvance its members’ economic interests . . . [and] to neutralize the police and


protect their own spheres of influence from encroachment” (138). Kynoch sug-gests that the gang’s survival into the twenty-first century is challenged by numer-ous political, social, and economic changes (including the devastation caused byAIDS), but he largely focuses on the period up to 1990.

Gary Kynoch analyzes the gang’s own internal logic rather than trying to slotit into a story of resistance to our collaboration with the white-controlled state.He constructs a multilayered understanding of the connections between the gangand broader South African society by drawing on a wealth of sources, includingarchival documents and extensive interviews with former gang members. Kynochhighlights the meaning of belonging to the gang for many rural migrants, and thisis the strength of his analysis.

Amherst College Sean Redding

Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892. By RobinLaw. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 308. $49.95.)

This definitive history of the “port” of Ouidah is a painstaking reconstructionnot just of the town’s social history but also of the political and economichistories that are intertwined with it. Rather than being a flashy display of asingle technique or approach, this volume demonstrates the ability of a matureAfricanist to utilize the great variety of sources and methodologies developedover the past decades by scholars of Atlantic and African history. The result isan urban history—principally but not exclusively concerned with the place ofthe town in the slave trade—that locates Ouidah firmly in its local context whiletranscending historical approaches that treat African history as exceptional ordeviant.

Robin Law began serious research on Ouidah in the 1980s, intellectuallyarriving from projects covering the large inland states of Oyo and Dahomey andthe Atlantic towns of Lagos and Badagry. What followed were numerousarticles regarding the complex political and economic intrigues of the cosmo-politan town, the mechanisms of the slave trade, and social organization in thetown both before and during Dahomian rule. This book builds on this foun-dation in eight chapters. The first details the socioeconomy of Ouidah as thechief “port” (despite its location several kilometers inland) of the independentHueda state, its foundation, and the evolution of its interaction with the Atlan-tic world. The second recounts the Dahomian conquest of the town and thegradual resolution of the Hueda-Dahomey struggle for control of the region.Chapter three explores the reformulation of Ouidah as a provincial capital and


commercial entrepôt. In it, Law describes the ongoing layering of new commu-nities onto old and, additionally, the functioning of the Dahomian administra-tion and its officers. Chapter four describes the commercial foundation of boththe administration and the cosmopolitan merchant elite: the commerce in slaves.It does so both in economic terms and, intriguingly, through the experience ofboth traders and victims. The fifth chapter continues the narrative after thegradual legal abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the decline of European mer-cantile investment, and the consequent rise of a community of Brazilian émigrés,several of whom receive detailed biographical treatment. Yet during the earlynineteenth-century period it covers, socioeconomic organization and function inOuidah displayed more continuities than discontinuities. This was partlybecause abolition was not effectively enforced until midcentury and partlybecause of local factors. Chapter six picks up the story following more effectiveabolition measures in 1839 and 1849 and follows the subsequent decline ofOuidah from its position of regional preeminence as local merchants attemptedto cope, partly by switching to the “legitimate” trade in oil. The subsequentchapter describes the continued decline of the community, segments of whichbecame increasingly disaffected from the rule of Dahomian monarch King Glelejust as European interference recommenced. This culminated, as described inchapter eight, with French conquest and annexation of the town despite itsinhabitants’ attempts to balance Dahomey, France, Portugal, and Britain againsteach other.

Throughout the study, Law skillfully mobilizes archival sources—including thewritten journals of slavers and slaves—alongside various sorts of oral histories.Although he admits to being limited by a dearth of archaeological data, the authoris able to make significant contributions to a wide variety of topics. Ouidah: TheSocial History of a West African Slaving ‘Port,’ 1727–1892 is an urban history ofa cosmopolitan, African, and Atlantic town. The town’s governance, its rolesin the slave trade, and its religious practices are detailed from several localviewpoints.

The author engages in debating such topics as African worldviews and per-spectives on the slave trade, the economic work of Karl Polyani, and the con-struction and operation of gender roles. By treating Dahomian rule objectively,Law helps to normalize French colonialism as merely an additional chapter in therich history of a town frequently subjugated to foreign powers, but also interact-ing with the world in a variety of other ways. Throughout the book, history istreated as a living process, as the author relates the contemporary contests overhistory within the community and, in the conclusion, the way these help to shape


identity. This incredibly rich volume is a fine contribution to the history both ofAfrica and of the Atlantic.

San Francisco State University Trevor Getz

THE AMERICAS

Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 1779–1820. By Robert J. Allison. (Amherstand Boston, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 253. $34.95.)

Ignored by academic historians for almost seventy years, Stephen Decatur was thesubject of two different but outstanding biographies in 2005. The first, SpencerTucker’s excellent Stephen Decatur: A Life Most Bold and Daring, told Decatur’sstory in the context of the birth and early development of the U.S. Navy. Thesecond, Robert Allison’s fine volume under review here, reveals even more aboutDecatur’s personality, a tour de force considering the paucity of Decatur papers.In tracking down a variety of sources generated by those who interacted withAmerica’s most dramatic early naval hero during his all-too-short life, Allisonreveals much about the man that has eluded his earlier biographers.

Allison builds his story around the very familiar framework of Decatur’s life.Young Stephen came from good maritime stock but did not go to sea as early oroften as many of his contemporaries. Although not a stellar student in his youth,he poured himself into understanding the technical and personal details of thefledgling navy he joined in 1798, then engaged in the Quasi-War with France.Decatur did not have much opportunity to distinguish himself during the Quasi-War, but that would change during the Barbary War. His burning of the Phila-delphia and subsequent destruction of enemy gunboats in Tripoli’s harbor madehim a public hero in the United States and earned him the respect of his Europeanpeers. He also consistently defended the honor of the maturing United States andhis navy, doing much to establish the service’s reputation in the process. Duringthe lean Jeffersonian budget years, Decatur proved his administrative prowess ona number of onshore projects. Although his War of 1812 record included onedefeat, the fact that it came against overwhelming odds and in the wake of earliervictories preserved his public reputation. If anything, that war further demon-strated his devotion to the idea of an American republic. He closed out his combatcareer in 1815 by cowing the North African states and ending the tribute system.Between 1815 and his untimely death in 1820, Decatur worked hard as an earlymember of the Board of Naval Commissioners to put the navy on a solidadministrative footing.


As Decatur rose in prominence and stature, Allison makes an interestingconnection between Decatur and the development of professionalism within thenavy. Decatur was acutely aware that Americans inherently mistrusted any stand-ing military force, and saw the professionalism of the navy as the service’s best betfor long-term survival. Allison’s argument is well supported by his narrative andmakes sense. It would, however, have been interesting had he explicitly exploredthe genesis of this impulse early in Decatur’s career. Given Allison’s consistenttheme of the importance of honor and respect due to the U.S. Navy in Decatur’slife, the connection to professionalism is there to be made. In fact, one might arguethat it is already implicitly there. Still, this is a relatively small criticism and shouldin no way detract from the remarkable quality of this biography. Stephen Decaturmay have been ignored by two generations of historians, but that oversight hasbeen impressively corrected.

University of South Dakota Kurt Hackemer

How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. By Stuart Banner.(Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 344.$29.95.)

The author of this book, a law professor at the University of California, LosAngeles, has written a handy legal history of relations between Native Americansand Euro-Americans that explains how nearly all the land in the United States wastransferred from American Indians to white settlers between the early seventeenthand the early twentieth centuries. Although many works deal with the process inwhich Native Americans relinquished control of their territory, this book focuseson the “law that in principle governed how the Indians were to lose their land”(5). The law in question is entirely English and American, as Stuart Bannercompletely neglects the French and Spanish efforts between Mexico and Canada.Despite this shortcoming, the author clearly demonstrates the manner in whichlaw was used to justify the dispossession of Native Americans within the territoryultimately controlled by the United States.

Employing an impressive array of the latest Native American scholarship, aswell as published primary documents, Banner argues—in opposition to what heclaims is a “near-consensus among historians and lawyers”—that by the end ofthe seventeenth century the English normally acknowledged that Indian land hadto be obtained by contract, not by force (12). He then demonstrates how increas-ing English power in North America coerced the Indians into selling their lands,while at the same time the supposed legal means by which the property was


obtained allowed the settlers to believe that they were actually acting honorablytoward the obviously declining Indians. Whereas, for most of the colonial period,Indian land was purchased by a wide variety of individuals and groups, from 1763onward, Indian land sales were transformed from contracts into treaties, fromtransactions between private parties into transactions between sovereigns. Bannerexplains how this change set in motion the process by which American settlerscame to think of the Indians’ rights to land as being something less than fullownership. As a result, the newly independent United States gradually adopted thenotion that the Indians were in fact not the owners of the land but had only a rightof occupancy, a view expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh[1823], a case that the author characterizes as being “one of the cornerstones ofAmerican law” (11). From there, it was but a short legal step first to remove theIndians, then place them on reservations, and then dispossess them once morethrough the allotment process.

The valuable work clearly explains the sometimes obtuse legal framework theEnglish and Americans used to dispossess the Indians of the United States of mostof their lands, a subject that has confused many scholars of Native Americanhistory, as well as Native Americans themselves, for a very long time.

University of North Texas F. Todd Smith

The CIA & Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy. By David M.Barrett. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Pp. x, 542. $39.95.)

The ability of scholars to record and analyze the history of the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) has been hampered for decades by the government’s refusal to releasethe necessary archival material. David M. Barrett, in the first history of theinteraction between Congress and the CIA during the early Cold War, has workedaround this impediment by masterfully piecing together the fragmentary records hefound in Congressional papers and other sources to document the tensions betweensecrecy and openness that have dominated the country’s intelligence history.

Beginning with its origins in the Truman administration, the CIA provokedCongressional fears of an “incipient Gestapo” that would trample American civilliberties (11). However, an accompanying concern about a nuclear Pearl Harborusually tempered Congressional criticism and caused the body to defer to theexecutive branch on intelligence matters. Only a few members of an even smallernumber of Congressional committees had legislative power over the CIA, and theykept floor debate and written records to a minimum. Congress also endorsedcovert action, even though Truman-era DCIs Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Walter


Bedell Smith showed little enthusiasm for such operations. Congressional supportfor more aggressive policies increased throughout the 1950s, a situation thatBarrett believes emboldened the CIA. Yet Barrett also shows that Congress tookits oversight responsibilities seriously and often challenged the CIA when analarming intelligence failure, such as the Soviet acquisition of the bomb, theKorean War, the Hungarian uprising, or the U-2 downing occurred. Eisenhowerdid all he could to discourage Congressional probes of agency activities, becauseof the jeopardy he thought they posed to national security, but his own DCI, AllenDulles, often leaked information to influential members of the House and Senate.Attempts by individual members of Congress to curb the agency’s power madelittle progress, but Barrett’s account of sporadic efforts to create a joint intelli-gence committee, a recommendation again heard after the events of September2001, illustrates the timeliness as well as the scholarly merit of his study.

This work is not without its faults. It plunges into the midst of the postwardebate on the CIA’s creation without providing an adequate introduction to waror prewar intelligence issues. The bulk of the book centers on the Eisenhoweradministration; Kennedy is covered in less than forty pages and then only inrelation to the Bay of Pigs. There is too much detail, and there are too manyheadings; a leaner and more consistently analytical work would have made theauthor’s points stand out more sharply. Nonetheless, Barrett has made a signifi-cant contribution to the history of the Cold War; to the cause of scholarly accessto vital material; and to the current debate on intelligence, executive power, anddemocratic values.

Old Dominion University Lorraine M. Lees

One Christmas in Washington: The Secret Meeting between Roosevelt and Churchillthat Changed the World. By David Bercuson and Holger Herwig. (Woodstock andNew York, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2005. Pp. 320. $29.95.)

On the evening of 22 December 1941, just two weeks after the Japanese attack onPearl Harbor, Winston Churchill arrived in Washington to create with PresidentRoosevelt the Grand Alliance that would win the war against the Axis powers.The fact that Churchill, with his own country in deadly peril and sustained inlarge part by his indomitable example, would leave England and brave the wintryNorth Atlantic and German submarines to meet in person with Roosevelt waseloquent testimony that he considered the alliance absolutely indispensable. Code-named ARCADIA, their meeting is one of the least well-known and most impor-tant summit conferences of the war.


The Americans welcomed the alliance in principle, but they were not yet readyto make the sort of massive commitment to all-out mobilization that Churchillneeded. And they suspected, correctly, that the prime minister intended the Britishto be the senior partner. Roosevelt, who was often reluctant to commit himselffully to one side of an issue or the other, was very definite on the alliance, however.The United States would be providing most of the men, money, and matériel, andWashington would call the shots. Churchill’s Christmas visit provided two weeksof drama and disagreement, but both leaders knew they had to come to terms, andeventually they did. Together, they and their staffs hammered out a grand strategy,created the Combined Chiefs of Staff to implement it, reached agreement on ajoint statement of war aims, and persuaded American war planners that a totalcommitment to production was essential.

Behind the sparring over command and supply, there was a deeper, moreimportant conflict of which neither Churchill nor Roosevelt spoke. Churchill didnot want to face the fact that Britain was no longer the world’s greatest power,and Roosevelt was reluctant to take up the dominant role in world affairs that theBritish had so long carried. Yet whether they liked it or not, both men realized intheir hearts that ARCADIA, perhaps more than any other single moment, markedthe passing of leadership from the old world to the new.

David Bercuson and Holger Herwig are both distinguished scholars. As Cana-dians, they bring a slightly detached perspective to this story and can see clearlyboth Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s strengths and weaknesses. More importantly,they write with verve and color, providing delightful and penetrating little por-traits of each of the major figures in the story, and stating the essential issuesclearly and forcefully. This is a story whose broad outlines at least are well knownto scholars in the field but that has been overshadowed for general audiences bymore dramatic events before and after the Washington meeting. Yet, as Bercusonand Herwig argue, without the hard-won agreements reached that winter, theAllies could not have fought the war effectively.

University of South Carolina Kendrick A. Clements

Martha Washington: An American Life. By Patricia Brady. (New York, N.Y.: Viking,2005. Pp. 276. $24.95.)

This volume narrates the important life events of Martha Dandridge CustisWashington, and sets them in the broader context of American life. The resultingstory is not altogether new. “Patsy” grew up in a family only modestly positionedamong Virginia’s plantation elite. Nevertheless, her marriage to Daniel Parke


Custis made her one of the colony’s most wealthy wives and, upon his unexpecteddeath, most attractive widows. If she enhanced her social and financial standingthrough marriage, so too did her second husband, George Washington. Thoughfinancial and political opportunities might have been factors leading George towed Martha, Brady insists the Virginia military officer and future president wassmitten by the attractive widow and developed a deep commitment to her. Thatrelationship seems Brady’s primary focus.

Loss and devotion are recurrent themes in this thin volume. Martha Washing-ton outlived all of her siblings, both of her husbands, and all of her children.Despite this—perhaps because of it, we are left to surmise—she was a devoted andcaring wife, mother, and friend. Brady describes Martha as generous to all, kindto slaves (even though she had no qualms about their bondage), loving to herchildren and grandchildren (some of whom she and George raised), and abso-lutely committed to her second husband. “Her deep devotion to her children andother family members,” the author contends, “paled before the burning intensityof her love for George Washington” (105).

The Martha Washington that emerges from this book personifies the republi-can ideal, an individual subordinating personal comforts, ambitions, and interestsfor the sake of her husband and the new nation. Her gift to the country, we read,was the support she provided to the single most important figure in RevolutionaryAmerica during eight years of war and another eight years of a tumultuouspresidency. She followed George for most of the War of Independence, sufferinghardships from a transient lifestyle when they were together and loneliness whenseparated. She provided critical emotional and physical support that helpedsustain the Continental commander through victory and defeat. Brady declareswith no sense of hyperbole, “Martha was truly the secret weapon of the AmericanRevolution” (145). Then, as the wife of President Washington, Patsy served ashostess, household manager, keeper of the gate, and sounding board to herhusband, all while enduring the “tedium” of public scrutiny, pressures of socialdemands, and the “torment” of a second term that witnessed her husband’sphysical decline. If George Washington was the “indispensable man,” the authoravers, “Martha Washington was the indispensable woman to him” (144).

Apparently directed at a wide audience, the book is more descriptive thananalytical. Brady chooses not to engage directly in scholarly debates, except for abrief denial that her subject had a half sister of mixed race. Instead she constructsa narrative built around Martha’s incomplete correspondence, using secondarysources to fill voids and to provide a broader context. Where gaps exist, theauthor generalizes about common practices or simply speculates, sometimes cre-


ating an unwarranted degree of certitude and an uncomfortable sense that the lackof evidence has become the evidence. Martha Washington: An American Life, likeits dust jacket illustration, offers an idealized portrait that likely will not satisfyhistorians’ desire for a more complex interpretation of the subject.

University of North Carolina, Pembroke Mark Thompson

The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe. Edited byJames W. Cook. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. x, 258. $19.95.)

The title of this marvelous record of the career of the nineteenth century’s mostfamous human is pure humbug. Judiciously edited and consistently compelling, itis nothing like the “heterogeneous heap of ‘curiosities,’ valuable and worthlesswell mixed up together” that one critic found in Barnum’s American Museum(215). Not only is it not colossal, but there is something like it in the universe, ifvirtual reality counts. For sheer colossalness, nothing beats the Lost Museum(http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu), a website that recreates and contextualizesthe American Museum, America’s first true man-made tourist attraction. (Fulldisclosure: this reviewer and James W. Cook were Lost Museum consultants.) TheLost Museum houses 326 archival documents and hundreds of visual objects; theBarnum Reader has a few dozen pieces by and about Barnum and a smallcollection of lithographs.

But Cook’s fresh and insightful commentary on Barnum’s centrality to thedevelopment of the “culture industry” will make the book a winner for teachersand students seeking the relevance of historical documents. Cook notes howBarnum developed and, in some cases, invented such phenomena as celebritymarketing campaigns, the cultivation of national audiences, and even the concep-tion of a global entertainment market, along with such techniques as matineeshows, three-ring spectacles, and the deliberate courting of negative publicity. Bycontrast, the Lost Museum frames its exhibits in relation to slavery and abolition,temperance, working-class politics, and the draft during the Civil War. If one hadto choose between the two, then, the Lost Museum might work best for a courseon nineteenth-century U.S. history and culture, and the Barnum Reader for acourse with a broader sweep: the history of popular culture or an introduction toAmerican Studies.

Meanwhile, there are some great finds here. Among them are TeddyRoosevelt’s comparison of Cubism to Barnum’s Fejee mermaid hoax, Walt Whit-man’s refusal to succumb to the Jenny Lind hysteria, and Frederick Douglass’s cride couer against the Barnum-inspired “colored baby show”—“a farce played at


http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu

the expense of the colored people” (207). The Holy Grail is Cook’s recovery ofBarnum’s serialized pseudo-autobiography, Adventures of an Adventurer [1841],key installments of which had been presumed lost. It is the most sustained pieceof writing from the showman’s early, rough-and-tumble career; a good firm pokein the eye to contemporary sensibilities; and a telling indication of the twinnedJacksonian fantasies of upward mobility for whites and brute status for blacks.

Cook leaves out the canonical autobiographies: The Life of P. T. Barnum[1855] and Struggles and Triumphs [1869; frequently updated thereafter]. Thismay have been the marketing decision of the press, an attempt to avoid competingwith its own recent edition of The Life of P. T. Barnum. Still, selections from theautobiographies would have been useful in showing how Barnum squared hisgrowing public stature with the rhythms of American political culture. So: colossalit ain’t, but it is a wonderful composite portrait of a man The Times of Londoncalled “an almost classical figure . . . and a typical representative of the age oftransparent puffing through which modern democracies are passing” (238).

Emory University Benjamin Reiss

A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadiansfrom Their American Homeland. By John Mack Faragher. (New York, N.Y.: W. W.Norton & Company, 2005. Pp. xi, 562. $17.95.)

This book, which is an excellent new narrative of the Acadian people, is amust-read for anyone interested in early American or Canadian history. The titleis somewhat misleading because of its emphasis on the Grand Dérangement(Great Disturbance), the brutal deportation of the Acadians by British authoritiesand New England colonists between 1755 and 1763. In actuality the bookprovides a comprehensive history of the Acadian people from their arrival in theNew World to their expulsion and beyond that era. Faragher’s impeccableresearch, clear and compelling story telling, and thought-provoking interpreta-tions make his study a fitting memorial to the French settlers in Nova Scotia whomanaged to survive despite becoming victims of ethnic cleansing 250 years ago.

The Acadian adventure began in the early seventeenth century with the settle-ment of the first French colonists in what is today Nova Scotia, known to theFrench as Acadie. The familiar stories of the founding of Port Royal (nowAnnapolis Royal) in 1605 and the subsequent travails of the fledgling colony aretold here with a fresh twist. Putting recent, rich scholarship on first nations togood use, Faragher emphasizes the “intercultural conversation” between Frenchand Mikmaq (6). He writes, “Intermarrying with the native Mikmaq people of the


region, the Acadians forged an ethnic accord that was exceptional in the colonialsettlement of early North America” (xviii).

The development of Acadian community and culture was also conditioned bythe settlers’ location on the shifting border between two competing empires,French and English. Acadians were subject to nominal British control from 1654to 1670, and New England troops again seized the colony in 1710. Britishsovereignty was confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

In this “world of ambiguities,” “where by necessity people had to learn to playboth sides,” Acadians insisted upon their neutrality (79). This policy enabled themto prosper through the 1740s, but it was never more than grudgingly accepted bythe belligerent colonial powers. In 1755, with the Seven Years’ War looming,authorities from Nova Scotia and Massachusetts decided to expel the 18,500Acadians to diverse British colonies “in a deliberate attempt to destroy them as apeople” (328).

The “great and noble Scheme” or “His Majesty’s final resolution to the Frenchinhabitants of this His Province of Nova Scotia” was conceived and executed bybigoted policy makers and their too obedient followers (333, 344). The productof deep-seated religious and racial hatreds, it was, in Faragher’s view, “the firstepisode of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in North American history” (473). Heestimates that some ten thousand Acadians lost their lives as a direct result of theGreat Disturbance.

The last quarter of the book deals with the aftermath of deportation—guerillawarfare, the tortuous routes of exile, and the rebuilding of Acadian communitiesin Canada and Louisiana. A concluding chapter carries the story forward to thepresent day, contrasting the 2003 British acknowledgment of responsibility withthe persistent silence of the United States, despite the “thoroughly Yankee” natureof the operation (333).

Faragher acknowledges that in the nineteenth century, similar campaignswould be directed against Amerindians such as the Cherokees, but he claims that“before 1755, nothing like it had been seen in North America” (xix). Yet thePequot War of 1637 witnessed the systematic destruction of an entire Pequotvillage in Mystic, Connecticut (an event that occasioned the first official day ofthanksgiving in Massachusetts Bay). After the massacre, as many Pequots as thecolonists could get their hands on were enslaved and shipped off to the WestIndies, and the Massachusetts legislature formally declared the tribe extinct thefollowing year. Wasn’t this too an example of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing?There are two small mistakes that should be corrected in subsequent editions: theword banlieue (suburbs) is misspelled throughout, and there is one erroneous


characterization of Massachusetts’ puritan ministers as “priests” (286). Thesequibbles in no way detract from the importance of Faragher’s eloquent andimpressive study.

Institut français, Assumption College Leslie Choquette

Presidential Leadership: From Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman. By Robert H.Ferrell. (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. vii, 168. $29.95.)

This book is a collection of essays, originally published elsewhere, that takes aninsider’s approach to understanding the presidential legacies of Woodrow Wilson,Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry S. Truman. In each case, theauthor’s assessment differs somewhat from that of other historians, giving thevolume a distinctly revisionist tone.

The book’s second chapter deals with the wartime presidency of Wilson. Basedon information from the diary of Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s most trustedadviser, Robert H. Ferrell paints Wilson as a less-than-competent war president. Atheoretically oriented, trained academic, Wilson was underprepared for practicaladministrative tasks, a “misfit in office.” The third chapter deals with Harding,whose reputation and legacy were, according to Ferrell, unfairly affected by thetreatment of a few journalists and historians. Ferrell’s source for his assessment ofHarding and Coolidge is the “massive memoir” of White House physician Joel T.Boone, made available in 1995. The portrait Boone (and Ferrell) paint of Hardingis one of “a quiet, hardworking, abstemious president,” not a besotted politico(2–3). Chapter four deals with “Silent Cal” Coolidge, who may not have been thesurefooted, quiet, and confident leader he appeared to be. Indeed, according toFerrell, his quiet exterior may have been a cover for a president who valued publicservice above all, but “whose nerves were stretched taut,” and who “was highlyemotional, [and] capable of poor judgements” (3).

Chapter five, “The United States in World Affairs: 1919–1945,” is a replicationof a conversation the author had with fellow historian John A. Garraty. It is anattempt to put some perspective on the problems facing the United States afterWorld War I and the failure of leadership to resolve those problems. Though theinclusion of this chapter seems a bit odd, it fits with the overall theme ofpresidential leadership. According to Ferrell, “Americans, it is now clear, had theirchance to change the world. That they did not do so was perhaps . . . a failure ofleadership” (viii). The final chapter of the book is devoted to Truman, for whomFerrell reserves his highest praise. A leading authority on Truman, Ferrell suggeststhat Truman was much more intelligent and a much better politician than many


have given him credit for being. Although no chapters are devoted to them, Ferrellalso provides some insights into Herbert Hoover (in chapter four) and Franklin D.Roosevelt (chapters five and six).

An obvious strength of the book is the convenience of having the essays of thiswell-known historian collected in one volume, but this is also a weakness. Theonly connecting thread between the chapters is the idea that there is more to thepresidencies of these men than is typically believed. Another weakness is the factthat, although Ferrell is a prolific author, his writing is dense, and in places, quitedifficult to follow. This said, the book will be a valuable addition to the collectionof any presidential scholar and a useful supplementary text in a graduate seminaron the presidency.

East Carolina University Jody C. Baumgartner

America in White, Black and Gray: A History of the Stormy 1960s. By Klaus Fischer.(New York, N.Y.: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Pp. 446.$29.95.)

This is a rare work that weaves scholarly, historical analysis with personalperspective and storytelling of the turbulent 1960s. Klaus Fischer brings a differ-ent insight to the topic because of his perspective as a 1959 teenaged émigré fromGermany as well as his viewpoint as a cultural historian and scholar with a vestedinterest in his new country.

The introduction to this book provides a synopsis of Fischer’s personal expe-riences prior to coming to America as well as an outline of what American cultureand life were before and after this important decade in our history. It also providesa historical context of the decade characterized by profound disagreement,protest, violence, and cultural change. Fischer believes that, “. . . the differencebetween previous protest movements and those of the 1960s was not necessarilythe scope of the protests nor their intensity but the broad involvement of so manyyoung people and the threat the protests posed to the possibility of maintainingany common culture in the United States” (18). Fischer does not take the romanticview of many liberals who have looked at the 1960s as a time of significant changethat resulted in a better society, because there are still racism, sexism, poverty, andother tribulations in our society today.

Throughout the book, Fischer argues that the 1960s were characterized bycultural contradictions (he calls them faultlines) in American society; the impactof the baby boom generation; significant economic and demographic changes;the emergence of a teenage subculture; the failure of society in educating and


socializing its young; and racial and ethnic conflicts, both at home and abroadwith the war in Vietnam.

Fischer provides a very balanced view of all three presidencies of the 1960s,pointing out their strengths and weaknesses and how they were manifested. Hediscusses at length how the personalities and policies of these presidents led to theformation of protests for change in the areas of civil, ethnic, and gender rights. Heargues that the reason that the nation has survived the events of the 1960s isbecause the people could draw on two hundred years of democratic experience inorder to resolve these conflicts. He believes, however, that American democracyhas been weakened because it has not been able to provide long-term solutions tothese problems.

The strength of this book is that Fischer does not focus on one or two areas(politics, economics, religion, etc.) to explain the events of the decade. Rather heuses his training and background as a cultural historian to paint a “big picture”that synthesizes the many different forces at work during the decade. He alsoexamines how perceptions of government, schools, other public institutions, theeconomy, and the media have changed as a result of the events of the 1960s. Thebook concludes with an excellent discussion of how the events of the 1960s arehaving a profound effect on our lives three decades later and it provides the readerwith ample resources for further study.

West Lafayette Schools Gerald White

The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veteran in American Society. By MichaelD. Gambone. (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M Press, 2005. Pp. x, 271. $26.95.)

In this work, the author sets out to answer two basic questions: what were thepostwar experiences of the sixteen million veterans returning from World War II;and what impact did the veterans have on the nation? Drawing upon an impres-sive array of primary and secondary sources, Michael D. Gambone examines theveterans’ homecoming and initial readjustments; the often remarkable efforts ofthe Veterans’ Administration to attend to their physical and psychologicalwounds; the veterans’ reentry into civilian life, especially in education, employ-ment, and public service; the stories of women and minority veterans; the returnto service for some veterans during the Korean War; and the impact of World WarII and the veterans on Hollywood films. The result is a wide-ranging and clearlywritten book that provides a welcome and useful study of the return of theveterans to American life.


Gambone is especially good on the initial postwar experiences of the veterans.He reminds us how strongly “home” figured in the war aims and dreams of theveterans, and yet how the return home was marked by anxieties among veteransand civilians alike about how they would fit in, and by the difficulties manyveterans experienced in readjusting. He relates the important job that the Veter-ans’ Administration did in the early years under the often forgotten but strongleadership of General Omar Bradley, and ably retells the story of the G.I. Bill andits impact on both the veterans and on American society. Examining the readjust-ment of women, African Americans, Latinos, and Japanese Americans providessome important insights, such as how wartime experiences and postwar frustra-tions, often involving the Veterans’ Administration, led minority-group veteransto civil rights activism. And although the chapter on films strays from the veteransinto popular culture more broadly, Gambone’s analysis of two landmarkmovies—The Best Years of Our Lives [1946] and Saving Private Ryan [1998]—isilluminating.

Some parts of the book are less successful. Gambone is better at recounting thepostwar experiences of the veterans than in demonstrating the veterans’ impact onthe nation, an area where the analysis is sketchier and generally does not take usmuch beyond existing understandings. At times Gambone embraces too easily theview that “World War II changed everything,” even when his own evidencesuggests that wartime changes were often limited in extent or duration (10). Thechapter on the Korean War does little to advance his analysis of the World War IIveterans. And in properly giving context for his examination of the postwarexperiences of the veterans, Gambone sometimes provides too much of the former,too little of the latter—a problem in a book with fewer than two hundred pagesof text.

Yet despite some unevenness, The Greatest Generation Comes Home is a solid,often illuminating account of the subject, and the best overall study of theveterans’ return.

University of Maryland Baltimore County John W. Jeffries

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. By Doris Kearns Goodwin.(New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Pp. xix, 916. $35.00.)

Given the vast scholarly and popular literature that treats Abraham Lincolnand his times, one would think that there would be little left to discover aboutthe man. And it is true that the main point of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book—that Lincoln fearlessly harnessed the energies and political capital of his chief


rivals in the Republican Party in a united effort to preserve the Union—iswell known among historians of the period. Yet the book has many virtuesand can be—and should be—read for profit by historians and the reading publicalike.

The author’s framing conceit is to tell the story of Lincoln’s political career bycomparing and contrasting it with those of his principal rivals for the 1860Republican nomination for president, William H. Seward of New York, SalmonP. Chase of Ohio, and Edward Bates of Missouri. By recounting the politicalorigins and personalities of these men, Goodwin tells us a good deal about thesocial and economic climate of antebellum America, as well as provides thecontext for the political battles and military conflict of the Civil War. It is amarvelous feat of compression, and Goodwin succeeds in engaging the readerwhile covering a great deal of historical ground. By the time Lincoln is elected andhas composed his cabinet—the latter a fascinating exercise in politicalmanipulation—the reader can readily understand how Lincoln’s shrewdness,self-confidence, patience, and strength of will enabled him to guide and control hisfractious and powerful colleagues.

Lincoln’s strategy was to include in his administration the chief representativeof every faction that made up the Republican Party—former Whigs, abolitionists,border-state moderates, former Democrats, and those, like himself, who resistedthe extension of slavery into the territories. It was a strategy that a lesser manwould have eschewed and one that could easily have backfired. Lincoln reasonedrightly that, “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet . . . I hadno right to deprive the country of their services.” How the experiment played outforms the second half of the book.

Goodwin is a popular historian and a well-known commentator on currentevents whose interest lies in the political process. For Goodwin, Lincoln was apolitical genius for whom discourse, debate, and compromise were not dirtywords but a way to make policy. It is Lincoln’s adroit management of men, theincremental steps he took to guide public opinion, and his ability to always keephis goals in mind despite others’ attempts to belittle, harass, or goad him, thatcaptivate the author and, by extension, her readers.

This is a book of great narrative power. It is beautifully written, extensivelyresearched, and full of the life and color of the period. Goodwin does justice to ourcontinuing fascination with Lincoln the man while providing a convincing por-trait of Lincoln the politician.

University of Virginia, Papers of James Madison David B. Mattern


The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850. By PeterGuardino. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 405. $23.95.)

Two of the most challenging issues in late colonial and early independence historyin Mexico are how the dramatic transition from Spanish corporatist monarchy torepublican liberalism affected popular political culture and the extent to whichthis radical change in dominant hegemony involved plebian or subaltern masses asopposed to the better-documented elites who had guided that transformation.Peter Guardino insightfully surveys these debates, addressing them by contrastingthe urban setting of the city of Oaxaca (Antequera in the colonial period) andthe rural indigenous setting of the Villa Alta district in the north central part of thestate of Oaxaca. In often subtle and always moderate terms, he concludes that theattempt of the Bourbon reforms to reorganize the political structure had littleimpact because the imperial reformers did not consider the common people asagents of change. At independence, however, the transformation of the politicalculture was more profound and did affect the poor and illiterate, though theyalways interpreted its meaning in their own terms and in pursuit of their owngoals. He also finds, surprisingly perhaps, that there is a clearer picture of theresponses of the rural peasants than the urban proletariat, because the rural folk,being primarily indigenous, had long-standing collective institutions in the form ofcorporate villages to represent their views in litigation and appeals to higherauthority, whereas the urban poor lacked corporate organizations that could voicetheir concerns.

Such a project requires a sophisticated approach and extensive archivalsources. Indeed, Guardino chose Villa Alta as his rural example because, amongother things, its population was 99.5 percent indigenous, the district had moreautonomous municipalities after independence than most regions of Mexico, itwas a major producer of cotton cloth in the colonial era and therefore was infrequent communication with the city, and the district retained a good archivalcollection. No claim is made that Villa Alta, or Oaxaca state as a whole, weretypical of Mexico in general. What sets Guardino’s book apart, as he says himself,is its comparative and entirely empirical methodology, as well as the fact that itgives equal (or even slightly greater) attention to the rural peasants than to theurban proletariat. Guardino is able to comment upon or modify the most recenttheoretical views of the subject of the transformation of political hegemonies atindependence and the extent to which indigenous people comprehended andresponded to the new political philosophies of republican democracy and ethnicequality. In addition, he offers solid new approaches to the old problem of


explaining the postindependence political instability of Mexico. He argues thatideology and the absence of pluralism amid the heated disputes of the first decadesof the republic, especially in the highly contentious elections, were the main causesof political instability, and he rejects the hypothesis of Francois-Xavier Guerra andothers that it was owing to the incompatibility of corporate traditions withmodern republican democracy.

At all times Guardino’s conclusions are precise, careful, and judicious. Althoughreaders may sometimes lose their way amid the rich detail, and although some ofGuardino’s arguments will be debated, the book is a major contribution bothfactually and theoretically. To wrap up the work, Guardino draws a final conclusionof sweeping significance: not only did the peasants accept and accommodatethemselves to the new order that elites had imported, but “the establishment of newhegemonic political cultures depends ultimately on the actions of subaltern peopleand groups” (290). Certainly appropriate for the examples he has used of Oaxacaand Villa Alta, this argument should stimulate considerable future investigation totest it for other localities of a country as regionally varied as Mexico.

University of Manitoba Timothy E. Anna

Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. By Philip F. Gura. (New York, N.Y.: Hilland Wang, 2005. Pp. xv, 304. $15.00.)

The study of Jonathan Edwards’s thought has become a small industry. Yale’songoing publication of his works has now reached twenty-three volumes, includ-ing definitive editions of his major treatises and welcome print collections ofalmost unreadable manuscript material. A steady stream of scholarly books andarticles continues to explore the intricacies of his thought and the extent of hisinfluence. Philip Gura’s “consideration” of Edwards’s life and thought, the secondcritical biography to appear in the past two years, argues that this thriving interestis not misplaced. Edwards’s robust defense of Calvinism turned the intellectualtools of the Enlightenment not to arid polemics among religious and philosophicalopponents, but to the articulation of a practical religion of the affections. Thetheologian’s own experience of grace as the transforming apprehension of a “newsimple idea” of divine virtue “set in motion a series of [intellectual] waves thatwould wash against Hawthorne’s and Stowe’s doorsteps . . . and still washesagainst our own” (236).

Gura’s relatively slim and accessible biography surveys the main events ofEdwards’s life in ten chapters comprising 238 pages of impeccably researchedtext. He sets America’s evangelical effectively within the context of a New


England that by the eighteenth century had become a thriving transatlanticprovince of a great commercial empire. Gura traces the tensions produced asforebears such as Edwards’s imposing grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, sought toadapt Puritan Calvinist religion to the developing social conditions of the colo-nies. He explores how Edwards himself, working within the revivalist traditiondeveloped by his grandfather and other ministers of the previous generation,adapted that tradition to a new set of circumstances that ultimately brought aboutthe transatlantic revival phenomenon remembered as the Great Awakening. Thetransatlantic exchange of print and ideas gave Edwards access to a powerful set ofintellectual tools as well as an extensive forum for applying those tools to defendthe revivals and the heart religion that they fostered.

Gura focuses more attention on the development of Edwards’s thought and itsinfluence than on the texture of his life and relationships. Among other benefits, thislucid analysis should help to correct misperceptions of Edwards as the harshCalvinistic preacher of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Gura’s Edwardsemerges as a theologian of divine love who fashioned an “interpretation of thehuman condition” out of a heart and mind “transformed by the new, simple idea ofvirtue” (238). Readers will catch glimpses of this figure offering spiritual counsel totroubled souls in Northampton, Massachusetts, or defending his StockbridgeIndian parishioners’ claims against the predations of a western Massachusetts landbaron. Yet this emphasis on the intellectual side of Edwards may leave some readerswanting more insight into the human side of Edwards the husband and father, theperiodically depressed and cranky minister of a contentious Northampton congre-gation, or the sympathetic pastor to a dispirited Housatonic congregation.

The strength of Philip Gura’s biography lies in its perceptive summary ofEdwards’s thought in its overarching unity and complexity. Students and scholarsof American religious life will appreciate Gura’s ability to make Edwards’s the-ology accessible as they encounter a persuasive assessment of the reasons forEdwards’s enduring influence in American life.

Central Michigan University Timothy D. Hall

The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progres-sive Era. By Tom Holm. (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. 244.$21.95.)

As the title suggests, this book is about the inconsistencies that have characterizedgovernment relations with Native Americans. Tom Holm focuses upon the era ofthe “vanishing policy,” the Progressive Era effort to eradicate all traces of indig-


enous identity and culture between the 1870s and 1920s. As the author illustrates,policies such as land allotment and boarding school education, despite theirtotalizing scope and often rigid enforcement, ultimately failed. Holm addresseshow this failure reflects both the resilience of Native “peoplehood” and thecontradictions that characterized reformer ideology.

The bulk of The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs addresses the conflicts thatexisted among reformers. However, Holm understands their “confusion” not asthe product of idiosyncratic characteristics but rather as a logical result of a largercolonial process that occurred worldwide as European nations expanded intoAfrica, Asia, and the Americas five hundred years ago. Providing a theoreticalfoundation for this understanding, he draws from a Canadian report commis-sioned during the early 1980s that broke the relationship between aboriginalpeoples and colonizers into distinct stages: “displacement, restriction, assimila-tion, structural accommodation, and, finally, self-determination” (x). Holmargues that the period of time covered in his book is one of transition between“assimilation” and “structural accommodation,” and that this transitional char-acter largely explains the confusions that he describes.

Central to Holm’s argument is the concept of “peoplehood,” a concept drawnfrom the work of Edward Spicer, George Pierre Castille, Gibert Kushner, and BobThomas that identifies “the resiliency of enclaved groups” with the ability tosustain language, a sense of place, religious ceremonies, and a sense of “SacredHistory” (xiv). In an early chapter, Holm provides examples of how differentNative Americans maintained their sense of peoplehood in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries through such practices as the Sun Dance, the Hope SnakeDance, Sequoyah’s creation of a Cherokee syllabary, and the sustained resistanceto removal among the Cherokee Keetoowah society (23–49).

Yet the primary focus of the book is not upon specific indigenous cultures butrather the turbulent nature of the colonial transition that gave birth to the“vanishing policies.” The assimilation policies of the late nineteenth centuryadvocated by reform-minded groups such as Friends of the Indian and the LakeMohonk Conference took direct aim at indigenous peoplehood. Indian boardingschools attempted to eradicate native languages and impose Christianity, whilelaws such as the Dawes Severalty Act worked finally to erase indigenous relation-ships with their land (1–22). Yet by the turn of the century, the assumptionsbehind these policies began to weaken, particularly as white reformers began torecognize the value of Indian arts.

Holm illustrates the ideological instability of this era with an intellectual historyof such “New Indians” as Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Laura Cornelius,


and Arthur C. Parker. Each had become highly educated within elite institutions ofthe United States, had taken up the cause of pan-Indian causes, and had, to varyingdegrees, endorsed policies of assimilation for Native Americans. Yet their attitudestoward pan-Indian identity varied widely, from the hard-line assimilation positionadvocated by Carlos Montezuma to Laura Cornelius’s celebration of Indian artsand advocacy of utopian independent Indian communities (50–84).

Holm points out that arguments over assimilation not only existed betweenwhites and Indians, but also within groups, such as the debates among the “NewIndians,” or the battles that erupted between the new reformers of the twentiethcentury who advocated a preservation of Indian arts, and Carlisle Indian Schoolfounder Richard Henry Pratt, a rigid assimilationist. In addition, inconsistenciescharacterized the very nature of the vanishing policies themselves. For example,reformers professed that assimilation would free Native Americans from the yokeof government control. In fact, the policy of assimilation expanded the Bureau ofIndian Affairs tremendously, leading to ever greater levels of bureaucracy andcontrol than had existed before that time (154).

Holm’s book provides an excellent overview of the Indian policies of theProgressive Era. By framing them within the context of colonial transition, heprovides a valuable contribution to scholarship and interprets Native American–white relations within a larger story of European expansion and conquest. Thebroad scope of this book places it within the tradition of the groundbreakingwork on federal Indian policy by Frederick Hoxie and pan-Indian identity byHazel Hertzberg. The author might have provided more support for his claims tothe resilience of indigenous peoplehood had he referenced some of the excellentwork produced by scholars such as Margaret Archulet, Brenda Child, or TsianinaLomawaima about student life at Indian boarding schools, or if he had addressedthe theoretical concept of “survivance” advanced by Gerald Vizenor. However, asa clearly written book by someone with extensive teaching experience, it could beassigned to intermediate or advanced survey courses in Native American history.

Shippensburg University John Bloom

Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Educa-tion. By John P. Jackson Jr. (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005.Pp. xii, 291. $45.00.)

This new book examines the relationship between “science,” conservative racialthought, and public policy in twentieth-century America. Conservative scientists,including psychologist Henry E. Garrett, psychoanalyst Ernst van den Haag, and


physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, provided post-World War II segrega-tionists with “rhetorical tools” that they and like-minded partisans employedwhen trying to topple Brown v. Board of Education [1954] and other civilrights-era litigation and legislation (5).

These scientists challenged the influential environmentalism and cultural ana-lytical model of anthropologist Franz Boas and his disciples. Reactionary scien-tists and their financial supporters, most notably archsegregationist CarletonPutnam, argued that innate and immutable genetic and behavioral differencesseparated the races in nature and should do so in society as well. Prosegregationscientists identified a conspiracy by left-leaning equalitarians. Boasians allegedlyheld nefarious control over funding for scientific research and publication; theyalso had an equally deleterious hold on federal policy regarding social and racerelations. John P. Jackson Jr. argues convincingly that the segregationist scientistsand their friends were white supremacists whose Negrophobia and conspiracytheories were laced with anti-Semitism. Some had ties to neo-Nazis worldwide.

Jackson arranges his book into eight chapters. After introducing the debatebetween conservative and liberal racial scientists, he unveils the ideas of Boas’smost vocal early critics—Madison Grant and Earnest Sevier Cox. These writers,Jackson explains, influenced the post-World War II underground movement, the“Northern League,” a Nordicist group that espoused anti-Semitic and antiblackdoctrine. In 1959 members of the “Northern League,” legitimate scientists likeGarrett and anatomist Wesley C. George, and a group of what Jackson terms“idiosyncratic conservatives,” including van den Haag, formed the InternationalSociety for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE). The IAAEEprovided the structural foundation for arguments by conservative scientists in Stellv. Savannah [1963] and Evers v. Jackson [1964]. Jackson completes his well-researched and well-argued book by analyzing how liberal and mainstream sci-entists responded to segregation’s scientific supporters and by probing the legacyof scientific racism today.

Despite its virtues, Science for Segregation suffers from several weaknesses.Jackson seriously undervalues the degree to which twentieth-century conservativescientists depended on nineteenth-century racial “science” that defined “races” bytypes based on anthropometric measurements of skulls and head shapes. Onlybelatedly, for example, does he identify in George’s writings “a retrogressivemove, hearkening back to nineteenth-century craniometry” (122). More serious,although Jackson correctly censures right-wing racist scientists for refusing “torecognize that their science was imbued with their values and ideology,” heignores the “values and ideology” of the Boasian equalitarians (9). In fact, both


sides in the scientific war over “race” “transformed [it] into a political battle forscientific authority” (188).

Though they will stumble over these flaws and others (the book is marred bymany editorial lapses), scholars nonetheless will welcome Jackson’s important andoriginal contribution. In Science for Segregation, Jackson underscores the nexus of“science” and “race,” probes the “demarcation between science and politics,” andquestions the very meaning of “objective” scientific inquiry (204).

University of North Carolina at Charlotte John David Smith

Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early TwentiethCentury. By Lisa Jacobson. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2004.Pp. xiii, 299. $24.00.)

A declension model dominates popular thinking about children. Numerous recentbooks argue that childhood has been commercialized to an unprecedented extent.Unscrupulous marketers have colonized kids’ imaginations; distorted their bodyimages; eroded creative play; and encouraged precocious sexuality, rampant mate-rialism, and unhealthy eating habits. This marvelous history of the commercial-ization of childhood since 1890 shows how serious scholarship can placecontemporary anxieties into fresh perspective.

In Raising Consumers, Lisa Jacobson demonstrates that commercialization andmodern childhood grew up hand in hand. Fearing the allure of penny arcades andpool halls, early twentieth-century middle-class parents sought to sequester theirchildren within the home or in adult-directed organizations like the Boy Scouts orGirl Scouts. Store-bought toys served as an outlet for children’s self-expressionand provided a way for children in smaller families to entertain themselves. At thesame time, parents embraced allowances as a way to teach children to managemoney and to reduce family friction over children’s spending.

A complicity of interest contributed to childhood’s commercialization. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century children’s periodicals carried advertisements for bicycles,breakfast cereals, and other products featuring child consumers. To cultivatechildren’s brand awareness, marketers sponsored contests and distributed gim-micks such as miniature boxes of cereal or soap, while manufacturers suppliedschools with booklets and charts. In the mid-1920s, childrearing experts began todescribe children’s acquisitive impulses as benign rather than as insatiable andencouraged parents to let children purchase inexpensive items. For middle-classkids, consumption offered a way to gain peer approval while asserting indepen-dence from their parents.


The commercialization of childhood accelerated during the Great Depression,as manufacturers promoted fantasy-oriented and licensed character toys drawnfrom comic books, movies, and radio as well as established kids’ radio clubs. Byjoining Little Orphan Annie’s Secret Circle or Post Toasties’ Junior DetectiveCorps, children felt themselves to be part of a larger kid culture.

This book’s strengths include its stress on children’s agency and the process ofnegotiation over parental control and children’s autonomy. Jacobson does amasterful job of showing how children incorporated advertising into their play.Highly attentive to issues related to gender, she explains why advertisers focusedon boy, rather than girl, consumers.

Jacobson has uncovered striking continuities in children’s engagement with themarketplace. Children’s advertising is not a product of the postwar television age;it began at the dawn of the twentieth century and has always been accompaniedby adult worries about the exploitation of children’s gullibility. Meanwhile,children, far from being passive victims of the marketplace, have drawn oncommercial culture for their own purposes.

What has changed in recent years? Not only do children wield more spendingpower than earlier, but the deregulation of children’s advertising during the1980s, the proliferation of junk foods and advertising in schools, and marketingvia the Internet have allowed marketers to penetrate spaces previously off-limits.Jacobson raises a key question in this exceptionally well-researched, well-writtenstudy, which is whether our society has the will to impose any barriers betweenchildren and the market.

University of Houston Steven Mintz

Captain Jack and the Dalton Gang: The Life and Times of a Railroad Detective. ByJohn J. Kinney. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Pp. ix, 270.$17.95.)

John J. Kinney’s interest in the career of his great-grandfather, railroad detectiveJohn Joseph Kinney (“Captain Jack”), was stimulated by family stories aboutan encounter he had with the famous Dalton gang. The result, Captain Jack andthe Dalton Gang, is far more than a family history, however. In addition to hisbiography of Captain Jack, Kinney includes vignettes illustrating social condi-tions in the late nineteenth century and philosophizes about the nature ofhistory itself.

Kinney, who teaches English at the University of Arkansas, avoids glamorizingCaptain Jack’s career. Captain Jack does not fare well even in his fight with the


Daltons when they robbed the train near Adair, Indian Territory, on 14 July 1882.The gang not only eluded capture, but took a large sum of money with them andleft Captain Jack wounded. Despite this failure, the railroad detective had asuccessful career. He was a highly respected and effective agent, though most ofhis activities were less noteworthy. He often escorted prisoners by train to courtand jail, for example.

Kinney often digresses from his account of Captain Jack’s career to detail suchdiverse subjects as jail conditions (what and how much was fed at meals, and howmuch the food cost), the best techniques for hanging condemned prisoners, andthe financing of railroads. These accounts provide an intriguing glimpse intonineteenth-century American society.

Kinney also pauses in his narrative to discuss problems faced by all historians.For example, he ponders the criteria for determining who is worthy of a biogra-phy, and wonders whether historians can accurately reconstruct an individual’slife when only random documents have survived. These concerns lead Kinney toconclude that Captain Jack would be forgotten except for his encounter with theDalton gang. “He was,” Kinney remarks, “a mostly ordinary man who on onenight was compelled by history to occupy a small stage in a brief role whose scriptthereafter threatened forever to define him” (210). But if Captain Jack’s accom-plishments were ordinary, they were superior to those of the Dalton gang whoachieved lasting fame. Indeed, Kinney speculates that there might be “somethingfundamentally wrong with a culture that lavishly memorializes the Daltons butlargely ignores those who fought them” (210).

Kinney’s biography of Captain Jack, then, is not typical family or outlaw/lawman history. The story of a relatively unknown railroad detective, combinedwith intriguing glimpses into late nineteenth-century society and inquiries into theinterpretation and significance of historical events, creates a compelling narrative.Although at times Kinney’s digressions interrupt the flow of his narrative, generalreaders and academicians alike will find Kinney’s Captain Jack and the DaltonGang worth perusing.

Dakota Wesleyan University James D. McLaird

Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880–1939. By S. J. Kleinberg. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xiv,248. $35.00.)

The United States poses particular challenges to historians of social welfare. Thedivision of responsibility between local, state, and federal agencies; the diversity of


ethnic, religious, and racial groups; and the wide range of economic structuresacross a vast geographic expanse all make it difficult to generalize about nationalpolicies. Scholars generally either attempt a national, macro approach (whichtends to leave out the shades of gray) or a local, micro approach (which allows fordepth but raises questions about the “typicality” of the community in question).S. J. Kleinberg aims for something in the middle.

This volume traces the evolution in public policy towards widows and (to alesser extent) orphans in the United States from the Progressive Era to the NewDeal, by focusing on three very different cities. Baltimore had a diverse economy,a large African American population, and a large female work force. Fall River,Massachusetts, was a single-industry city with a large immigrant population anda large female work force. Pittsburgh was home to heavy industry, with very fewjobs open to women or children.

Just as in real estate, in social provision location matters. Local elites shapedpublic welfare and private charity to fit the needs of their city’s industries; thuswomen received very different treatment according to where they lived. The textilemills in Fall River, which relied heavily on the labor of women, “regardedemployment as the solution to widows’ poverty” and thus “attempted to restrictpublic charity in order to force women into the labor market” (13). Pittsburgh,with fewer job opportunities for women, “looked more sympathetically” onwidows and orphans and made more generous provision for them (13). Baltimore,in a southern border state with conservative racial views, wished to keep wageslow and African Americans at work. It made little public provision for blacks, andprivate charities focused on whites as well.

The advent of federal programs during the New Deal erased some of the localvariations, but not all of them. Kleinberg emphasizes continued local influenceover welfare policy, which Social Security and other New Deal programs onlydented. What she calls “local values” continued to permeate federal programs,limiting access for black women among others. In the end, even Social Securityfailed to create a truly national social policy.

Some of this is increasingly familiar terrain. Social welfare scholars in recentdecades have focused much attention on mothers’ pensions, Social Security,orphanages, and the like. Historians are aware of the race and class biases builtinto social welfare; much time has been spent analyzing the gendered nature ofsocial provision. Kleinberg is well versed in that literature and frequently links heraccount to the appropriate scholarship. Her original contribution here is to focuson one group of the so-called “deserving poor”—widows—and examine thevariety of social provisions affecting them over time.


Kleinberg gives less emphasis to the agency of the poor than would many otherscholars. Although widows appear occasionally writing letters on their ownbehalf, they do not appear as active in this regard as do the poor in other recentbooks. Given Kleinberg’s demonstrated understanding of the historiography, thiswould seem to be a purposeful emphasis.

This solid piece of scholarship will be of most use to specialists in the field. Theauthor presumes readers’ familiarity with many basic terms and concepts in socialwelfare (“outdoor relief,” for example).

Florida State University Elna C. Green

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. By Matthew D. Lassiter.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 390. $35.00.)

The author of this study examines grassroots movements in rapidly growingsuburban communities of the postwar South. He argues, through meticulous useof primary sources, that these movements of white, middle-class suburbaniteswere critical in transforming the political culture of the South and the nation as awhole.

Following the Brown v. Board decision [1954], Southern white supremacistsmounted a massive resistance effort against court-mandated school integration byattempting to close public schools. Suburban grassroots movements of racialmoderates fought successfully to keep public schools open. Their victory solidifiedthe presence of suburban neighborhood schools and warmed the hearts ofchamber of commerce leaders who feared corporate flight had massive resistanceprevailed.

But these same moderates faced a major dilemma when it came to court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration. They might argue for keeping publicschools open in their own self-interest, but they did not wish to participate inbusing schemes. Grassroots movements arose in opposition. They representedsuburbanites who worked hard through individual effort, without federal gov-ernment assistance, to gain suburban status. They were entitled to nice (and white)neighborhood schools for their children.

In fact, Lassiter argues that federal government policies such as highwayconstruction and low-interest mortgage loans were key in building these nicesuburbs. Blacks, meanwhile, were kept segregated in the central city throughurban renewal policies. Thus segregation was a major structural problem thatwent beyond cases of individual racism. The solution was busing.


Grassroots rejection of this solution signified liberalism’s demise and the rise ofcenter-right politics. This ascendancy, Lassiter argues, was not a result of Nixo-nian Southern strategies, as previously assumed. Rather, it was the result of abelief in entitlement through hard work intersecting with suburbanization andinner-city black concentration promoted by discriminatory public policies.

As a result, the South moved from the era of Jim Crow into mainstreamnational politics. Southern and national politics converged around entitlementand a bipartisan retreat from Brown. An “intractable landscape of racial apart-heid” emerged in which color and class played key roles.

Lassiter makes a major contribution to the literature by examining the impor-tance of the suburb. He raises a key question concerning the responsibility ofsuburbanites to blacks trapped in the city. The author argues that these suburban-ites retreated from their responsibility when it came to education integration. Thisargument of retreat relies partially on grassroots opposition to court-orderedbusing, a costly method to deal with structural inequalities in the built environmentas a result of government policies. But is this a retreat from Brown? Perhaps it isopposition to busing as a method to achieve integration. Other alternatives, such asaffordable housing in suburbs and cities combined with industrial location and jobplacement incentives, might have been more carefully considered. However, evenwith these alternatives, a retreat may well have occurred. In any case, Lassiter offersfirst-rate, path-breaking scholarship that covers new ground and raises key ques-tions. This book is quite well suited for graduate courses in urban studies.

Ursuline College Timothy K. Kinsella

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. By Mark A. Lause.(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. x, 240. $42.00.)

In 1844 a handful of New York City radicals headed by veteran labor editorGeorge Henry Evans founded the National Reform Association (NRA). Theorganization espoused a wide range of reforms, but its central interest was theagrarian project of redistributing all land into inalienable small farm plots. Withinfive years, it dissolved. As its leaders—former trade unionists, freethinkers, Loco-focos, and communitarians—had risen from the reform ferment of the 1820sand 1830s, so they dispersed into the later ranks of anarchists, socialists,Greenbackers, Populists, and communists.

Historians have generally assessed the National Reform movement as anoffshoot of Jacksonian labor activism, which succeeded, at best, in modestlyboosting the growing demand for homestead legislation. In Young America, Mark


Lause seeks to overturn that verdict and restore the NRA to its place at thathistoric juncture “where the origins of international communism overlap withthose of the Republican Party” (1).

To accomplish this task, Lause pursues two strategies. The first is to assertNRA influence through a minutely detailed chronicle of its activities. The secondis to claim NRA credit for the later Republican triumphs of free land andantislavery. Since National Reformers had championed both ideas, the Republi-cans’ debt to them in Lause’s eyes stands self-evident. The difficulty is thatRepublican antislavery grew from many roots, and nothing in the personnel,numbers, political strategy, or particular arguments of the NRA supports its claimto precedence among them. Indeed, the National Reform Association commit-ment to antislavery was hedged and equivocal. Very much unlike Republicans,National Reformers refused to target slavery as an exceptional wrong, insistingthat Northern “wages slavery” was just as bad and that only land distributioncould cure both (74).

The case for NRA influence over homesteads is stronger. Still, the 1862 law wasnot a true agrarian measure, and agrarians knew it was not. It offered acreage freeto settlers but did nothing to undercut commodity ownership of land, which theNRA aimed to destroy. Agrarians saw the law as a beginning, while to Republi-cans it was the end. Homesteads’ political genesis owed more to the westerndemand for cheap land going back to the 1820s than to the ideas of NRAtheorists. That some National Reformers also later became Republicans cannotdisguise that the two movements operated on conflicting presumptions andpointed in opposing directions.

Lause argues earnestly that his NRA heroes were not dreamers and utopiansbut hardheaded realists, though they never offered a practical plan for limitingland ownership nor explained how their vision of noncoercive, nonmajoritarian“pure democracy” would actually work (60). The author presents their avowedaims of abolishing private property and overthrowing government as somehowboth brave and harmless, revolutionary yet innocuous. Overall, the NRA “rep-resented one of the most successful and influential social movements in Americanhistory” (137). How have we all missed this? Lause blames both the capitalistswho hijacked the Republican Party and suppressed its radicalism, and lateragrarians like Henry George who boosted their own originality by denying theirforebears. This argument, like others in Young America, will likely persuadesympathetic readers and strike skeptics as special pleading.

University of Tennessee Daniel Feller


Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By NancyMacLean. (New York, N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. Pp. xi, 454. $35.00.)

The author of this book provides a well-researched examination of the economicsof inclusion and exclusion in the United States after 1955. After describing theprevailing attitude found in the United States during this time period as “therightness of whiteness,” Nancy MacLean goes on to give a brief history of the civilrights, women’s rights, and Latino rights movements. She demonstrates that thelegislation enacted to provide for legal equality such as the Civil Rights Act andTitle VII did little in and of itself to advance economically any group. It was onlywith access to skilled jobs (economic inclusion) that equality could be achieved.

Access to these jobs was achieved through various alliances—some voluntary,others not—and government mandates. MacLean details the attempts made byprivate agencies and individuals to open the workplace. One of many examplesprovided is the use of class action suits, many underwritten by the NAACP LegalDefense and Education Fund to open the textile industry to African Americans.MacLean contends that the success experienced by African Americans throughdirect action and alliance building led other groups (e.g., women and MexicanAmericans) to look for and form alliances. Mexican Americans started to buildalliances only after they left behind an assimilationist mind-set. “Having watchedthe black struggle, Mexican Americans began to organize for fairness and equaltreatment by embracing ‘minority’ status” (170).

One of the most significant contributions of MacLean’s work is her examina-tion of the backlash engendered by economic inclusion and its continued impacton current attitudes and practices. She begins with a detailed look at why JewishAmericans, many of them neoconservatives, were “convinced that the coalitionbetween Jewish organizations and black civil rights groups was no longer desir-able” (196). MacLean concludes that as soon as affirmative action became definedas “quotas,” many groups, even previous allies, began to push back with cries of“reverse discrimination.” Conservatives were then able to co-opt the “injustice”argument and use it for their own purpose. MacLean builds a well-documentedargument that details how conservatives, through labeling the beneficiaries ofaffirmative action as “undeserving claimants of special ‘privilege’ trying to getsomething for nothing,” turned a conversation based on past injustices to onebased on “color-blindness” (233). MacLean argues that “painting those whosought fair treatment and a chance at upward mobility through work as arrogantelitists even thieves was a perverse, but effective strategy” (237). This strategyproved more successful as the American economy declined in the 1970s.


Part three proves the most thought provoking. MacLean explores the impact ofthe adoption of “diversity management” by corporate America on economicinclusion. According to MacLean, the “talk of ‘diversity’ became a way to focuson the future by submerging the long past history of economic racism andsexism,” and by “uncritically absorbing the corporate language and way ofthinking, advocacy groups lost the power to advance that vision through activ-ism” (319).

Attempts to move forward the agenda of economic inclusion continue.MacLean is optimistic that having experienced setbacks, the movement cannot bevanquished. Inclusion has “seeped into the culture” (345). “Now that the genie isout of the bottle, not only are the nation’s workplaces and alliances altered; so,too, are its dreams” (346).

Kent State University Stephane Elise Booth

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. By E. Jennifer Monaghan. (Amherst,Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. 504. $49.95.)

This is a deceptively complex book about a deceptively simple subject. One of themodernization theorists’ central claims about the British American colonies waswidespread literacy. Such book-learning supposedly enabled and empowered earlyAmericans, breaking down the authority of tradition and hegemony while freeingthe individual to seek economic and political independence. Literacy thus becamethe forerunner to the American Revolution, democratic republicanism, andrugged individualism. E. Jennifer Monaghan’s meticulous research, strong theo-retical organization, and persuasive case studies provide evidence for the mod-ernists’ thesis while complicating the story.

Though Monaghan conclusively demonstrates that the ability to read—drivenby religious needs and motives, “the ordinary road” to literacy—spread from NewEngland through the Middle Colonies into the South, the other side of literacy—the ability to spell and ultimately to write letters and public essays—was secularrather than religious and came much later in time. Indeed, the two parts of literacywere disconnected, taught in and out of very different kinds of books, andreceived and understood differently in different places.

Some of Monaghan’s findings are familiar, in part because she introduced themin article form years ago. The diversity of populations and cultures in early Americais mirrored in the story of literacy. For example, women, slaves, and the poor didnot have the same opportunity for an education as free white men. The readingmethods of the day, privileging knowledge of the alphabet and sounds over


understanding words in context, severely limited the meaning of literacy. Readingbegan early, while writing came later in the student’s education. Children learned bydecoding rather than deeply understanding what they read. Overall, the skills andthe manner of their acquisition at the end of the eighteenth century were not muchdifferent from literacy at the inception of the century; religious instruction stillinfused reading models, and women and slaves were still disfavored.

But something, a very important something, had changed. There were far morebooks in far more hands in 1800 than in 1700. Some of the manuals werechild-centered “pretty books.” Children learned to write as they learned to read,literally with a writing implement in their hand. Children thus masteredcomposition—how to write for others—at the same time as they learned to readand spell. Children could even select which books to read for themselves.

Monaghan ties her results to a model of social and cultural elaboration that sheborrows from Jack P. Greene and Timothy H. Breen, a model close in many waysto the modernization thesis. This model features a convergence of religion andincreasing secularization of tastes and commodities. What was elite and restrictedbecame more generally available, particularly the ubiquitous speller. The key datesare 1750, when skills in reading and writing began to come together and reinforceone another; the 1770s, when the impact of the new education made itself felt inthe political realm; and 1800, by which time literacy and personal autonomy hadjoined hands.

University of Georgia Peter Charles Hoffer

The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: A Military Analysis. By Kevin Dougherty and J.Michael Moore. (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pp. ix, 183.$45.00.)

There is a lot to be said for truth in advertising. Because the reviewer believes inthis principle, she routinely warns students at the beginning of the semester thatall expectations they may have about her Civil War courses focusing on militarytactics and battlefield strategy will be summarily disappointed. Clearly, KevinDougherty and J. Michael Moore also believe in the principle of truth in adver-tising. Their book, The Peninsula Campaign of 1862, identifies itself explicitly asa work of military analysis “designed to help today’s military leaders examine ahistorical operation in light of current doctrine and see what may be learned” (ix).And indeed, this is exactly how this reviewer would describe their book, too.

The primary audience for Dougherty and Moore’s book is not historiansteaching at colleges and universities who are interested in the Civil War. For one


thing, it does not deal with any of the multitude of fascinating historical questionsone usually associates with the campaign, such as—just to give one example—whyPresident Abraham Lincoln patiently tolerated General George B. McClellan’sinsolence, despite his failures on the Peninsula and despite his shocking attemptto influence policy via his Harrison’s Landing letter. The primary audience is noteven those who consider themselves military historians. Rather, it is readers whoare in the armed services today and who seek insights from the campaign on thePeninsula to assist them in conducting modern military operations. (No aspect ofthe book reveals this more tellingly than the appendix entitled “Tips for Con-ducting a Staff Ride.”) Because of the way in which the focus of this book is onother questions, it is not among those one would be likely to select in order toprepare lectures on McClellan and developments in the war’s eastern theater inthe spring and summer of 1862.

Still, the reader benefits in not insignificant ways from reading this book. It wasilluminating to read about the Peninsula Campaign from a military-analyticalperspective. It was instructive to encounter head-on the language of that perspec-tive, including terms like “objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, maneuver,unity of command, surprise, and simplicity,” for all of which—and many others—Dougherty and Moore provide careful and precise explanations (14). The bookalso includes a very useful guide to the Peninsula, “Touring the BattlefieldsToday,” complete with descriptions of the important sites and contact informationto assist potential visitors of all sorts with their planning. Perhaps most important,however, Dougherty and Moore’s book reminds historians who cover the CivilWar that they really should know more about military tactics and battlefieldstrategy. It is easy to forget that, although the Civil War was about many things,it was also fundamentally about war: soldiers, officers, weapons, killing, militaryoperations, tactics, strategy. Moreover, what happened on the battlefield, quitesimply, affected everything else the war was about, and for that reason alone itis worth understanding. Fortunately, there are great historians such as GaryGallagher who periodically remind us that this is the case.

Colby College Elizabeth D. Leonard

Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. By Francesca Morgan. (Chapel Hill,N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 293. $21.95.)

Who and what constitute the nation? Can one be patriotic and still disagree withthe policies of the present state? From the 1880s to the 1930s, a handful of majorblack and white women’s voluntary associations took the lead in answering these


questions for the recently reunified United States. Their answers varied, particu-larly along race lines. Yet they shared what Francesca Morgan calls “a self-consciously women-centered nationalism” that gave at least some (educated,propertied, native-born) women significant cultural authority at a time whendirect participation in politics was limited to men (3).

The fact that white women’s patriotic organizations endorsed woman suffrageonly very late or not at all indicates the deferential nature of these groups’ genderpolitics. They rejected the notion, put forward by President Theodore Rooseveltand others, “that women best served their nations by producing more babies andeschewing political activism” (6). But even as they defended their right to exist,groups such as the Woman’s Relief Corps, the Daughters of the American Revo-lution (DAR), and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) restricted theiractivities to the cultural arena. They focused on commemorating and, especially inthe UDC’s case, validating the past rather than engaging the debates of thepresent. And they targeted young people (whose training for citizenship had longbeen women’s preserve) as well as popular audiences, for whom they hoped tomake the stuff of patriotism—flags, monuments, celebratory school textbooks—part of the everyday.

Certainly, these cultural activities had political ramifications. Morgan doesan especially good job of documenting the DAR’s commitment to “state-basednationalism”: the idea that “the American nation was commensurate with theAmerican state and empire, and patriotism therefore entailed supporting them”(11). By this light, the UDC seems a comparatively freethinking group, if onlybecause of its members’ suspicious attitude toward federal power. But in relationto men’s and women’s roles, white women’s women-centered nationalism wasconservative, privileging men’s service in the military as the apotheosis of patrio-tism and thereby tacitly accepting women’s exclusion from full citizenship.

Black women’s women-centered nationalism had much more feminist poten-tial, at least early on. Morgan acknowledges that, unlike the white organizationsshe studies, the National Association of Colored Women and the Universal NegroImprovement Association did not set out to promote patriotism. However,an analysis of these two groups reveals much about black women’s politicalconsciousness—or double-consciousness, because white hostility compelled themto ask repeatedly whether their nation equated to their country or their race. In thelate nineteenth century, women “on both sides of the double-consciousnessdivide” criticized black men’s political leadership and narrated black history inways that highlighted women’s own leadership roles (25). They also opposedAmerican imperialism at the same time that they refuted concerns that women’s


activism outside the home was contributing to “race suicide.” Only after the turnof the century did black club-women begin to conflate citizenship with manhood,as male civil rights leaders had long done.

World War I and its aftermath contributed to the “masculinization” of bothblack and white women’s nationalism. White women embraced the new “securitystate,” although the DAR continued to be much more state-centered than thecomparatively unchanging UDC. Black women, having witnessed the triumph ofJim Crow in national politics, “drew new distinctions between patriotism andunconditional support for the state” (123). Some also embraced a Garveyite blacknationalism that transcended U.S. borders.

Morgan’s recognition that “white women’s nationalism . . . walked hand inhand with Jim Crow” and that Jim Crow was “a truly national phenomenon” isa major contribution to scholarship on this period, as is her comparative study ofseveral important women’s organizations (10). By demonstrating the ways thatwomen, who could not even vote, shaped definitions of the American nation,Morgan’s book also advances the rewriting of U.S. history to incorporate genderanalysis.

Utah State University Jennifer Ritterhouse

Food in Colonial and Federal America. By Sandra L. Oliver. (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 230. $19.95.)

This book is second in a series dealing with “Food in American History” byGreenwood Press. The “Series Forward” promises that all its volumes willconform to a format that begins with a “Chronology” and “Introduction,”proceeds with “Foodstuffs,” “Food Preparation,” and “Eating Habits,” andconcludes with “Concepts of Diet and Nutrition.”

The reviewer sometimes suspects that such templates are dreamed up bynonhistorians (maybe even ex-university administrators). Superficially, it mightseem a good idea to have authors consider the same kinds of materials in the sameway, but such an approach generally encourages much in the way of repetitionand makes it difficult, if not impossible, to settle on themes and sustain them. Inaddition, the volumes are aimed at high school students on up, an audience whichcan easily invite occasional author condescension.

Although veteran food historian and writer Sandra L. Oliver cannot alwaysavoid these difficulties, she is, nonetheless, remarkably agile at working withinsuch constraints. Diaries, journals, travel accounts, and cookbooks, as well asmodern scholarship, are marshaled to provide windows into the period. Native


American foodways, along with those carried by the English, Dutch, and Spanishcolonizers, are the focus of the introductory chapter.

Chapter two is a catalogue of the foods enjoyed by our pioneering ancestors:vegetable and animal, wild and domesticated, imported and homegrown. Chapterthree deals with food preparation, stretching from hearth cooking in the beginningto the adoption of the stove as the nineteenth century got underway. The authorgives much attention to food preservation, and Africans and their foodways enterthe picture at this point. Chapter four, by far the book’s largest, adds German andFrench foodways to a regional roundup of eating habits that begins in the Spanishsouthwest, moves to the Chesapeake, New England, the middle colonies, DutchNew York, the lowland South, and the Spanish southeast before winding up in theupland South and the backcountry. Recipes from the period are often supplied soreaders can see that pumpkin for pies has not always come from cans, that a NewOrleans gumbo recipe called for sassafras leaves instead of okra, and that lardplayed a vital part in everyday cooking—as, for example, in the frying ofdoughnuts.

The last chapter makes the point that concepts of healthy food have changedconsiderably over time. The colonists valued fatty meat, believing that it providednecessary energy for hard labor. White bread was preferred because it was refined,the darker rye was seen as coarse. Yet other influences from the prevailingphysiology have continued to the present, like vinegar with cucumbers, lemon onfish, vinegar and oil on green salads. Heavy drinking appears to have been thenorm, at least among men, especially between 1790 and 1830, which brought onthe backlash temperance movement as the Federal period came to a close.

The work itself is complete with endnotes and a bibliography that should helpstudents pursue topics beyond this synthesis—one that probably would havebenefited from a consultation of non-English sources, especially some in Spanish.The nonanalytical index is especially troublesome in a work of this nature. But anice bonus consists of photographs of buildings, maps, cooking equipment, andthe like.

Bowling Green State University Kenneth F. Kiple

Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City,1880–1960. By Stephen Robertson. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Caro-lina Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 337. $22.50.)

Like rights, wrongs have a history. Even wrongs as universally reviled as sexualattacks on children are not timeless or uniform. As the author adeptly argues for


New York City in Crimes Against Children, these have varied in and changed overtime in definition, public attention, processes, and consequence. Inventivelyemploying district attorney files sampled over eighty years with other socialreformist, medical, legal, and popular sources, he presents a richly multivalent andrevealing history of this violence and law.

New ideas about childhood, sexuality, and the state changed law, StephenRobertson recounts. Not simply or linearly, reformers and professionals madenew law, which the distinctive legal consciousness, demands, and jury “substantialjustice” of ordinary New Yorkers reshaped significantly in practice (31). Thateveryday legal experience influenced, in turn, ideas of childhood. New York’sSociety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC) first forced the issue.Working with district attorney staff, the reformers investigated and framed storiesto reflect and direct legal and community conceptions of wrong.

The 1930s brought new experts who supplanted the NYSPCC and, abetted bymedia-heightened panics, changed the law. Psychological-psychiatric expertsrecast childhood as sexual, redirecting legal concerns. Initially, that happened inconcert with popular demands and downgraded the criminality of some assaultsas it amplified others. The new law did not unseat the popular conception ofchildhood innocence though, which persisted to limit the psychological view’simpact. For example, the new expertise created a regime of indeterminate sen-tencing and remediation for sexual psychopaths, which was repudiated withindecades by popular political action.

Robertson’s resourceful turn to interviews in the files of the district attorneyand testimony enable him to populate his analysis with stories. These vivify theacts of violence, follow them through experts’ translation to prosecutable crimes,and illustrate the dynamics of the legal process through court and consequence.They also situate legal action in the larger social array of response, showing law’suse as “an adjunct to extralegal effort” (96). The perspective they lend forfendsoverstating the role of the legal system, while recognizing the powerful shadowcast by law and its professionalizing personnel over even the informal, extralegalresponses to the violence. Law “initiated debates and negotiations at the level ofpractice,” Robertson concludes, where judges and legislators “exerted little more,if not less, influence on the legal process and meanings . . . than did ordinarycitizens” (235). Despite its increasingly institutional, formal practice, law was notdistancing from social experience, but was carrying on a close relationship.

This book makes a valuable contribution to legal, social, and policy history.There are opportunities for further study, nevertheless. Comparison of the tropesof public discourse before and through panics could get more closely at their


relationship to the substance and practice of law. The popular treatment of theviolence beyond the law deserves further study. And the relation of New York’sdevelopments to those of other places in the United States and beyond warrantsexamination. That said, Robertson has written an original and important historyof a difficult subject.

University of California, Santa Barbara Randolph E. Bergstrom

Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America. By Karenna GoreSchiff. (New York, N.Y.: Miramax Books, 2005. Pp. ix, 528. $25.95.)

The author of this book makes a significant contribution to the literature con-cerning gender and the complexity of the social-change process. The authorreviews the lives of nine lesser known women whose actions have changed the faceof contemporary society by bringing justice into the lives of the poor and disad-vantaged. Reading about these women in conjunction with one another explodesthe myth that leadership comes from those who possess a set of particularpersonal characteristics or come from a certain background.

These nine women represent all levels of social class. They used remarkablydifferent strategies to achieve their goals. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born a slavewhile Frances Perkins was born to a well-to-do family who descended from thePuritan settlers of New England. Mother Jones was combative and unyieldingwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Septima Poinsette Clark rejected confron-tation in favor of compassion and selfless pragmatism.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a skillful writer and powerful advocate who relied onfacts and logic to awaken the public conscience to the horrors of black lynching.After the tragic loss of her husband and four children to yellow fever, Mary HarrisJones (Mother) became the voice and forceful organizer for coal miners andworked against child labor. She encouraged her followers to, “[p]ray for the deadand fight like hell for the living” (65). Alice Hamilton came from a family ofwealth, but she disdained the social milieu and chose instead to focus on educa-tion, charity, and work. She was one of the few Americans qualified to investigatethe effects of new chemicals and helped to develop standards and legislation toprotect workers. Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in the positionof a presidential cabinet secretary, serving as Secretary of Labor under PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. Many labor safeguards—Social Security, a minimum wage,workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance—came about in part because ofthe efforts of Perkins. Her focus was surprising given she came from a family whotaught her that the poor were generally lazy and unions were evil (133).


This colorful diversity continues with Virginia Durr, daughter of an oldAlabama family, who was anything but a stereotypical Southern socialite. She wasa staunch supporter of the Highlander Folk School, an integrated retreat inMiddle Tennessee that held workshops on civil rights activism. Septima PoinsetteClark also promoted civil rights through education. With more than forty years ofteaching experience, she was Highlander’s education director.

Readers of this book will learn that, along with César Chávez, Dolores Huertawas cofounder of the United Farm Workers, providing support for agriculturalworkers who had been left out of earlier union movements. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a pediatrician, used her zeal and pragmatism to foster improvements inpublic health while Gretchen Buchenholz has become one of the most effectiveadvocates for children and the homeless.

Along with the grass roots achievements of these women, the author weaves afascinating history of social issues in the United States.

North Dakota State University H. Elaine Lindgren

Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries. By Howard P. Segal.(Amherst and Boston, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 244.$34.95.)

From the early 1920s to the early 1940s, Henry Ford founded nineteen villageindustries in southeastern Michigan within sixty miles of his company’s head-quarters in Dearborn, but during a restructuring of the Ford Motor Company hisdescendants shuttered most of them by 1950. Today they survive as public orprivate buildings, and a few are part of historic preservation efforts to encouragetourism in the area. Howard Segal argues that these village industries have moresalience to twentieth-century America than simply representing curious relics of abygone era. They manifested Henry Ford’s engagement with the social, economic,and political debates covering, for example, nostalgia for rural and small townliving, labor control, the evils of large cities, and integrating decentralized pro-duction with modern vertically integrated factories. Because Ford spoke out aboutmany issues, his reasons for establishing the village industries as parts manufac-turers for the Highland Park factory and later for the vast River Rouge complexcannot be laid to a single coherent vision.

The discussion of these debates’ contexts comprises as much as half of thethirteen chapters of the book. Arguably, the debate over decentralization providedthe overriding framework for the period between World War I and World War II.Thus the building of plants in villages around Detroit could be viewed as rural


nostalgia, an effort to avoid union organizers in big-city factories, exploitation ofthe dispersal benefits of electric power, and avoidance of the negative aspects ofurban-industrial concentrations. In contrast to many social commentators whoembrace decentralization, Ford cannot be pegged so easily. He designed the villageindustries to be tightly integrated with factory production at Highland Park andRiver Rouge.

Segal’s sweeping discussion clarifies Ford’s efforts, but the cost-effectiveness ofthese industries could not be determined, and the company does not seem to havehad clear accounting either. When it finally closed most of the factories, the firmdid so because they were inefficient; yet, that is not fully convincing. Many of thevillage industries produced a large share of some individual parts, albeit lightweight, small items, which Ford assembly plants consumed. This suggests thatthese factory sites may have operated in a similar manner as independent smallfirms that supplied the auto plants; at times Ford had as many as six thousandsuppliers. Thus Segal’s emphasis on the small scale of these village industries issomewhat misplaced. About half of them reached an employment level above onehundred, one reached over four hundred, and the largest had 1,500 at its peak.

This carefully written, thoroughly documented book combines extensive archi-val sources with broad coverage of the secondary literature. It goes beyond thespecifics of the village industries to provide a window on the social, economic, andpolitical debates of the interwar period as they related to technology, or as Segalrefers to it, the “machine age.” Historians, sociologists, geographers, economists,and political scientists who want an overview of that period from the perspectiveof technology, which Segal has covered in other fine works on the subject, willgain insights from this book.

Brown University David Meyer

The Life and Times of Mexico. By Earl Shorris. (New York: W. W. Norton andCompany, 2004. Pp. 780. $16.95.)

This is a big book full of material on every epoch of Mexican history. The authorargues that both Mexico’s past and its present have been shaped by a “debilitatingconflict between the two sides of the Mexican soul” that originated with theSpanish conquest (708). His earlier research on pre-Columbian Mexico is evidentin his insistence on that period’s lasting importance: Mexico remains, he believes,in many respects “a great indigenous American civilization” (xvi). In this, ofcourse, it is markedly different from the United States, and the author’s goal is toexplain those differences to a broad American audience.


Earl Shorris examines Mexico through the prism that the Aztecs used to viewa human being. He explores first the “head,” which he equates with history andphilosophy; then the heart, which was for the Aztecs the seat of the soul and islinked here to art, literature, family, character, and imagination; and finally theliver, which the Aztecs understood to contain the spirit or breath, a category thatfor Shorris includes economics, education, politics, corruption, and race. Thoughcontrived, the scheme meets the challenge of organizing a huge amount ofinformation.

Shorris does not so much develop his argument as amass data to illuminate it,interweaving history and present experience throughout the study. He coversMesoamerican religion; the environmental results of the conquest; the castesystem; national imagery; business in Monterrey; the Mexican Revolution; thephilosophy and politics of José Vasconcelos; novelist Juan Rulfo; corridos, mari-achis, and danzones; the “dirty war” against leftists in the 1970s; assembly plantsand the border; corruption; the recent democratic opening; Mexican Americans;the failings of the legal system; education; and constraints on development. Thelist could be far longer. Shorris asserts that another crucial turning point—to addto the impact of the conquest—came when the church forced poet and nun JuanaInés de la Cruz to recant her secular ideas, thus closing “the door to rationalism”(379). He finds a third major explanatory factor in the overweening power of theUnited States.

Shorris’s life-long love affair with Mexico bears fruit in many stories ofpersonal adventures, which comprise the book’s best feature. One example is theaccount of his meeting with the Curandero (healer) of Pancho Villa. This manintroduced Shorris to Villa’s miraculous spirit, which turned out to be “a chickenon a string” that hid beneath the healer’s chair (220). Shorris also tells of timespent with the leaders of the National Action Party in 1950s Chihuahua, with aMazatec Indian girl in Mexico City, and with a crew shooting a telenovela (soapopera). His scholarly abilities are also considerable; in fact, his knowledge seemsnearly encyclopedic.

The most evident strength of Shorris’s work is his writing. A mechanic on theborder, he tells us in one lovely turn, lay on his back “with his tools on his chestand looked up into the greasy darkness of the transforming age of the machine”(681). But it may be that his eye for pithy or conclusive phrases creates problems.This book has a remark to rile (or amuse) any reader. Shorris reports that theSpanish conquest “determined the essential elements of the character of everyMexican” (350). He judges neither Diego Rivera nor Frida Kahlo to be a Mexicanpainter and, sounding jealous, charges Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante


Marcos with being too European. There are also comments that may offend onethnic, gender, and class fronts, as when he describes a girl with “the Asianelegance of some Nahua women when they are young,” or when he writescondescendingly of Mexico’s “unreflective class.”

The book also suffers from factual errors and strange interpretations. Shorris’sbelief that there were not conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s over politics andeconomics is nonsense; he is inconsistent on the dates of the Mexican Miracle andincorrect that the overthrow of Francisco Madero started the Mexican Revolu-tion. He also overstates the impact of the U.S. in Mexico—“U.S. money andpower had determined the history of Mexico since it took half the country in1848” (685). This book is a great read that contains much to think about, but itshould be approached with caution.

University of Texas, El Paso Samuel Brunk

Montezuma: Warlord of the Aztecs. By Peter Trouras. (Washington, D.C.: PotomacBooks, 2005. Pp. xviii, 114. $12.95.)

This brief biography of the final Aztec emperor, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, is partof a series called “Military Profiles.” The reviewer began to read the book with thehope that a military historian would be able to illuminate aspects of Aztec warfareand military organization. With the exception of Ross Hassig, Aztec specialistshave given far too little attention to this poorly understood topic. Unfortunately,the level of scholarship in this book is so low that one quickly abandons hope ofany such insights. We learn little of the tactics, strategies, or techniques of Aztecwarfare, and the account of the confrontation between Motecuhzoma and Cortésis flawed by a major error. The longest quotation in the book is not from a primarysource but from the romanticized nineteenth-century chronicle of William H.Prescott.

Motecuhzoma (fortunately, the Anglicized “Montezuma” is used only in thetitle) was a successful general in the wars of expansion of the Aztec or TripleAlliance Empire [1486–1502] and was later elected emperor [1502–1520]. TheTriple Alliance was the best-documented Mesoamerican empire, owing to thesurvival of Aztec dynastic historical traditions after the Spanish conquest. Notsurprisingly, these accounts tend to focus strongly on kings and their exploits.Tsouras relies almost exclusively on such official dynastic sources (in Englishtranslation), and this limits his perspective on the military dynamics of Aztecimperialism.


If Tsouras had consulted Spanish administrative records (few of which aretranslated into English), or the scholarly literature on these sources, he would havelearned that the Triple Alliance Empire underwent two cycles of expansion. Ineach cycle, one or two kings extended the reach of the empire through wide-ranging conquests, to be followed by a king who consolidated the gains andestablished provincial control. As the consolidating king at the end of the secondcycle, Motecuhzoma’s military exploits were quite modest in comparison withthose of his predecessor, Ahuitzotl [reigned 1486–1502]. Motecuhzoma, however,was the conquering general for many of Ahuitzotl’s victories. Tsouras does a goodjob on several themes, including Motecuhzoma’s move toward a more totalitarianform of rule and the conflicting accounts of his death.

When we come to the fateful encounter with Cortés, however, Tsouras’s storybreaks down. He relies on an old chestnut—that Motecuhzoma believed Cortés tobe the god Quetzalcoatl returning to rule Mexico—to explain the king’s apparenthesitation to confront the Spaniards. Scholars have debunked this legend,however, showing it to be a postconquest invention by native elites and Spanishpriests. Motecuhzoma did indeed try to halt the Spaniards, but was unsuccessfulfor a variety of reasons not analyzed in this book, including the imbalance inmilitary technology and tactics. He apparently concluded that his armies werepowerless to stop Cortés and believed that active military confrontation wouldhave disastrous consequences for the Aztec people. This revisionist account isdescribed in several prominent books and in articles in the leading history jour-nals, all of which are ignored by Tsouras.

Arizona State University Michael E. Smith

A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary A. Livermore. By Wendy Hamand Venet.(Amherst, Mass., and London: University of Massachusetts Press, 200. Pp. xi, 319.$24.95.)

Mary A. Livermore is one of those prominent nineteenth-century women whofaded into obscurity. Wendy Hamand Venet has made a significant contributionby rescuing this forgotten woman in this well-written biography. Observing“when Livermore died in 1905, the Boston Transcript called her ‘America’sforemost woman’,” Venet contends “a century after her death, few personsrecognize her name or remember her accomplishments” (1). Noting Livermorehas not received the attention given her contemporaries—Clara Barton, SusanB. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe—Venetemphasizes the significance of this often overlooked reformer. Venet effectively


traces Livermore’s involvement in major aspects of the nineteenth-centurywomen’s movement, including the U.S. Sanitary Commission; suffrage; temper-ance; the women’s club movement; and legal, vocational, and educationalrights. A prolific writer, Livermore was also the first editor of the Woman’sJournal. Livermore became one of the great woman orators of the nineteenthcentury.

Venet contends Livermore’s life represents a remarkable journey. Born inBoston in 1820, Mary Ashton Rice spent more than two years as a teacher for aslave-owning Virginia family. Although her father rigorously imposed Calvinistbeliefs, she later embraced the religion of her supportive, Universalist ministerhusband, Daniel Livermore, and became a liberal Christian. Happily married forfifty-four years, Livermore was the mother of three daughters. Living in Chicagoduring the Civil War, Livermore became a major figure in the U.S. SanitaryCommission. Venet asserts, “By the time the war ended, Livermore had earned anational reputation for her relief work and had met with the leading figures of herera, including President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant” (6). A major themein the biography is Venet’s contention that the Civil War was a transformingexperience in Livermore’s life.

After the Civil War, Livermore became involved in the reform movements ofher era. Venet observes, “Once she embraced woman’s rights, she never lookedback” (6). Livermore was active in founding both the Illinois Woman SuffrageAssociation and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. When the suf-frage movement split in 1869, Livermore sided with the more conservative Bostonsuffragists rather than the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Anthonyand Stanton. According to Venet, Livermore’s decision was in all likelihood theresult of private discussions with Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. When theAmerican Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was formed in November 1869,Livermore was one of the founders. “During the convention’s final evening, LucyStone told the delegates that Mary Livermore’s Chicago-based Agitator wouldmove its operations to Boston and would be published under the title Woman’sJournal” (166). Prior to the convention, Anthony told a friend that the Bostongroup would never “ ‘throw Susan Anthony overboard’ in favor of Mary Liver-more and her newspaper” (167). Venet maintains Anthony blamed Livermorepersonally and that the rift between the two never entirely healed. In contrast,Livermore was a close friend of Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe and servedbriefly as president of the AWSA.

Venet’s research supports her thesis that Livermore was widely recognized asan author, activist, and civil educator and one of the most respected women in the


United States by the 1890s. Venet’s favorable and detailed biography of Mary A.Livermore is a valuable addition to Civil War and women’s history collections.

Spring Hill College Patricia Greenwood Harrison

Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. By Daniel Vickers withVince Walsh. (New Haven, Con. and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii,336. $35.00.)

The authors of this book take maritime history in a new direction with this study.Salem, Massachusetts, home of great seaborne commerce, especially to the SouthSeas, Southeast Asia, and China in the days of the opening Pacific trades of theeighteenth century, is the means for how they examine an aspect of seafaringhistory. The manuscript and printed materials for their research are rich indeed,and not many such ports and communities are so endowed. Daniel Vickers andVince Walsh may oblige other scholars to seek ways of writing about the interfaceof land and sea that is the hallmark of this book. Halifax, Nova Scotia, and NewYork port seem obvious possibilities in the English-speaking world. Serious stu-dents of maritime studies will follow the influence of this book as its meritsbecome increasingly well known.

Nothing exotic drove the boys and men of Salem to go to the sea. Historicaland fictional accounts have tended to speak about psychological compulsions orexceptional circumstances. The work-a-day world had more compelling circum-stances and dynamics. The trades of Salem, coastal and long distance, beckonedas a means of employment, a way of life. Vickers and Walsh look at seafaringfamilies, business relations, sailors’ lives at sea, and wives’ lives ashore. There isnot much romance here, for entertainment is not the purpose of the authors. Theyturn to other considerations seldom examined by historians.

Among other revelations, the reader finds serious evaluations, some employinggraphs, concerning wages, wages for select occupations, real wages on Atlanticand East India voyages, and the like. The authors examine sailors’ careers. Mostmasters became such in the age bracket of thirty to thirty-four, and most sailors inthat of twenty to twenty-four. The authors also look at duration of voyages. Theyexamine maritime life ashore. It is on the last point that this book has particularlyuseful findings. In the early eighteenth century, Salem was essentially a fishingport, with no hinterland as such to draw on for wealth or activity. But in the lateeighteenth century the distant trades supplanted the coastal and inshore traffic.The growth of capital, the techniques of sending forth bigger vessels for distanttrades, the broadening of labor markets (Salem was a magnet for seafarers from


elsewhere), the maturing economy of Salem, and the growing disparity betweenmasters and men (and with this social stratification) all spelled transformation ofSalem into the global economy. Local influence and control was being subvertedby global tendencies in seaborne commerce. Nowadays visitors to Salem areattracted to the Salem National Historic Site, with its custody over the earlywharves, the Federal Custom House, and an array of historic buildings along thewaterfront. The Peabody Essex Museum preserves a nautical collection of remark-able range and interest. The Essex Institute, Historic Salem, Inc., and the Bowd-itch Initiative all display Salem’s remarkable maritime past. Sadly, The AmericanNeptune, a quarterly journal of maritime history and arts published by PeabodyEssex Museum since 1941, is suspended in its publication, and like the seafarersof Salem of the past seems to have been supplanted by more current, globalinterest in art history, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, yes, even ghosts and the occult.

Victoria, BC Barry Gough

Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and PoliticalThought. By Jerry Weinberger. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2005.Pp. xvi, 336. $34.95.)

This is an absurd and egregiously ahistorical book, oozing with ersatz profundity.The earnest and intellectual author takes a long time unpacking his thesis: Fran-klin was a genius full of contradiction, and his writings teem with deceit. To“unmask” Franklin’s moral, religious, and political philosophy, Jerry Weinbergeremploys the Straussian credo that philosophers like Franklin did not write whatthey really meant but instead left clues for their readers to find, à la The Da VinciCode or the film National Treasure. Applying this inapt methodology, Weinbergertediously excavates passages in Franklin’s writings.

Weinberger begins by unearthing paradox in Franklin’s brief embrace of thedeistic principles he set forth in his 1725 pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty andNecessity. In it the nineteen-year-old journeyman printer disparaged the conceptof human free will, denied a distinction between vice and virtue, and rejected thenotion of God’s providence. Instead, people were motivated solely by pleasure andpain aversion. Franklin later recanted this view repeatedly, both explicitly andimplicitly, and spent sixty years of his life trying to teach virtue to a public heviewed as desperately needful of moral guidance. However, the facts that Franklinrepented of writing the Dissertation, considered its claims “horrible Errors,” andburned his copies of it baffle Weinberger. No, there must be some deeper meaning,for Franklin’s recantation is “too slippery” (6).


Brandishing his Straussian shovel, Weinberger digs zealously, burrowing fordozens of pages into Franklin’s allegedly contradictory claims about religion.Franklin noted in part one of his memoirs, written in 1771, that during his stintas a London printer in young adulthood, he was “under no Religious Restraints”and committed numerous sins. However, in part two, written thirteen years laterin France, where he did not have his part-one manuscript, Franklin claimed, “Inever was without some religious Principles.” Weinberger overlooks the simplestexplanation: that Franklin was raised a Christian, but as a hormone-driventeenager in London, an ocean away from his parents, he fell prey to temptation,spurning “Religious Restraints” before mending his ways later. Instead, the authorscrapes and scratches until he finds dark chicanery, labeling Franklin’s Autobiog-raphy “a really big lie.” Weinberger then announces his own discovery, claiming,“[T]his flat contradiction has remained unnoticed by everyone who has written onFranklin’s religion” (49).

The curious deductions continue throughout the book. Weinberger misunder-stands Franklin’s “Witch Trial at Mount Holly” hoax, questions Jesus’ sanity, andasserts that Franklin meant to ridicule biblical miracle tales and thereby “makeothers have a lesser opinion of their own religion” (71). The author also managesto pervert a coy Franklin jest into sophomoric salacity. Sharing witty advice witha new young husband, Franklin replaces Thomas à Kempis’s Latin exhortationabout finding rest “in a quiet corner with a good book” to “in a quiet corner witha girl.” He jokingly adds that another reading might be “with girls,” but that thehusband should reject this plural construction. In context, the implication is clear:go home and take pleasure in your wife’s companionship. Here is Weinberger’ssummation: “So, according to this, how does one imitate Jesus? Get laid” (129).Likewise, buried within Franklin’s well-known insult of Germans as “PalatineBoors,” Weinberger discovers Franklin’s hidden meaning was actually that allcultures “are just well-organized forms of moral delusion” (264).

The book is filled with bewildering analyses. The Franklin whom Weinberger“unmasked” rejected morality, justice, devotion, distinctions between good andevil, and reward and punishment. Instead, these concepts “make no internallogical sense” (202). This version of Franklin emerges as a “radical and nondog-matic skeptic” who was “no model, no paragon, no ‘first’ anything” (290).

Franklin’s extant writings are so rich and voluminous that one can find almostany sort of Franklin one wishes to find, and Weinberger has done so. He hasproduced a ponderous exercise in gravitas for the University Press of Kansas,which replaced the “mask” Weinberger supposedly removed with a garish Hal-loween fright-mask drawing of Franklin on the dust jacket. In a way, it resembles


the tale between its covers: a grotesque but oddly alluring depiction of how farcredulity can be strained and historical interpretation can be distorted.

Marymount University Ralph Frasca

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. By Sean Wilentz. (New York,N.Y. and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Pp. xxiii, 1044. $19.95.)

The question of when and how the United States came to embrace a marketeconomy and interest-group politics has dominated the historiography of the earlyrepublic since at least the 1950s. Whereas it was once held that the Americanunion was born a liberal democracy, historians have long since reinterpreted thefounding as a republican moment rather than a democratic revolution. Thefounders wished to create a virtuous republic where enlightened statesmen stroveto realize the common good. In such a political system, the role of the majoritywas to defer to their betters. Creating a democracy—a system where the majorityruled—took time and political struggle.

Sean Wilentz’s study of this “momentous rupture” is a “chronicle of Americanpolitics from the Revolution to the Civil War with the history of democracy at itscenter” (xvii, xxi). He focuses mostly on national politics and to a lesser degree ondevelopments in the states. The extension of the suffrage, coalition and partyformation (local, state, and national), political mobilization, and presidentialelection campaigns are central issues. The period saw the removal of propertyqualifications to political participation, but the record on political exclusionbecause of gender and race is more complicated. Where they had them, womenand men of color were deprived of voting rights but nevertheless found other waysto become increasingly active in politics. Taken together, the broadening of thewhite male franchise, the increase in voter turnout, and the general growth inpolitical participation makes this the period of the rise of American democracy.

Considering the book’s topic and considerable length, it is surprising thatWilentz neither defines the concept of democracy nor devotes much space to whatit meant to contemporaries. John C. Calhoun’s theory of concurrent majorities isone of few ideas about democracy that is treated explicitly. Yet it is afforded nomore than three paragraphs and its author dismissed as a native of “the people’srepublic of South Carolina” (538).

Although Wilentz is never clear on this issue, he seems to hold that democracycan be equated with majority rule. Presumably this is why the book ends in 1861with the Civil War interpreted as a great showdown over the principle of majorityrule. In the American context especially, Wilentz’s equation is problematic,


however. Not only does federalism allow popular majorities to be formed atdifferent levels, the principles of checks and balances, minority rights, represen-tation, and qualified majorities in Congress are all limitations on the will ofthe majority that are usually regarded as quintessential features of Americandemocracy.

The expert will recognize both Wilentz’s general argument and his cast ofheroes and villains. To such readers the value of the book lies in its detailedexposition of the practice of democracy. The general audience, for which thiswork seems principally intended, will enjoy the author’s lively style and encyclo-pedic knowledge of actors and anecdotes. Perhaps they will also appreciate what,maybe unwittingly, seems to be the author’s central message: The history of theUnited States is best told as a history of the expansion and promotion of democ-racy. Whenever this development is thwarted, there will arise a Jefferson, aJackson, or a Lincoln to set things straight. And thus, the American republic willforever remain the world’s best hope.

University of Uppsala Max M. Edling

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China. By On-cho Ngand Q. Edward Wang. (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2005.Pp. xxiii, 306. $50.00.)

Historians of China have long lacked a comprehensive historiography coveringthe two thousand years of the imperial past. Mirroring the Past happily fills thisvoid. A mirror in the discourse of Chinese historiography is a reflection both onand of history—so that the present may learn from the past in order to bettershape the future. The contents are arranged chronologically, beginning with theZhou and continuing in eight chapters through the Qing dynasty, and coverofficial and privately written histories, commentaries, and reflections.

On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang trace the etymology of the word shi (history)and the development of the historical tradition from the Zhou dynasty onward.They unproblematically accept Confucius’ authorship of the Spring and AutumnAnnals in accordance with Zuo Commentary and many later authors. Beginningwith the Annals, historical writing had several goals. The most basic was to preservethe events of the past for posterity, but the second—more important—purpose wasdidactic. “History was essentially the record . . . of moral forces and principles inthe lives of past personages, whose behavior and agency [determined] . . . the


well-being of state and society” (xi). The intended audience included the educatedelite, government officials, and the emperor himself. As Sima Qian demonstrates inhis celebrated Records (Shiji), history is a moral narrative.

The third purpose of history, which the Han emperors recognized when theyofficially embraced the privately written works of Sima Qian and Ban Gu, was tolegitimize the state. Various government offices kept the vital records and otherdocuments for historical purposes, but the first governmental History Bureauspecifically created to compose the histories of previous states was established byTang Emperor Taizong. More than simply archival, it also functioned as “aneffective moral check against the abuse of royal power” (111). Tang rulers realizedthat enduring lessons and principles could be learned by studying the rise and fallof preceding dynasties. The works of Sima Qian and Ban Gu became models onwhich subsequent imperial histories were structured.

Ng and Wang go on to survey private and official histories in ensuing dynasties.Attention is paid to the great historians of the Song period, notably Ouyang Xiuand Sima Guang, from whose Comprehensive Mirror [1084] comes the title of thisbook. The Comprehensive Mirror was arguably the first modern historiographywith a sense of anachronisms. Legitimizing the conquest dynasties was clearly onthe minds of the compilers of the Liao, Jin, and Song histories, produced duringthe Yuan period. The Ming dynasty saw the flowering of private histories andhistoriography and increasing numbers of local histories or gazetteers. Scholarsduring the Ming-Qing transition like Huang Zhongxi, Gu Yanwu, and WangFuzhi inquired deeply into sources and developed evidential scholarship, whichchecked texts for accuracy and defined anachronisms. The Qing history bureaucompiled the Ming History, delayed because of imperial meddling but completedin 1735, and kept the Veritable Records of the Qing. No one has yet written thehistory of the Qing itself, however.

Mirroring the Past is the first comprehensive historiography of traditionalChina histories to be published in English. This lively and readable book shouldbe in the library of every serious scholar of imperial Chinese history.

Michigan State University Linda Cooke Johnson

Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910. ByCatherine Vance Yeh. (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. x,430. $60.00.)

The author of this study explores the culture of Shanghai as revealed in literarytexts, guidebooks, and popular journalism of the last decades of the Qing dynastic


regime, which ended with China’s republican revolution of 1911–1912. CatherineYeh focuses on the Shanghai courtesan in the context of the city’s foreign settle-ments, the International Settlement and the French Settlement, in place as ofthe 1850s. The disruptions of inland trade caused by mid-century rebellionsalmost overnight vaulted the economic role of Shanghai, causing its foreignsettlements to be more extensive than were foreign enclaves in other port citiesdesignated by treaties for maritime commerce. A steady flow of Chinese migrantsof multiple classes joined the city’s foreign residents to make Shanghai a specialmultiethnic urban space. Yeh interprets Shanghai as the leading site of China’semerging modernity as evinced by the culture of entertainment represented bycourtesans who became the arbiters of the new and the mechanisms of extendingboundaries of social relationships and public behavior.

Critical to Yeh’s depiction of Shanghai’s complex urban character is themixture of sojourners, both Chinese and foreign, who populated the city. Ofparticular significance to Yeh’s argument is that Chinese intellectuals who livedand worked in the foreign settlements produced images in both words andillustrations that rendered late nineteenth-century Shanghai as a “big playground”by the 1890s (270). The Shanghai courtesan was at the heart of the rise ofentertainment culture, the character around whom plots revolved in late-Qingfiction, the public figure in illustrated magazines, the celebrated civic attraction innewspapers, the hostess at dinner parties. The courtesans featured in the “play”sections of guidebooks were part of Shanghai as a virtual theme park.

The courtesans, in effect, garnered “star quality,” setting fashions, sustainingand advancing refined arts such as storytelling, playing traditional Chinesestringed instruments, dining, and promoting a new public sphere (245). TheShanghai courtesan had roots in the courtesan culture of the past, but she alsochanged the nature of that culture. No longer in a private, shadowy pattern, theShanghai courtesan moved into public view and became a savvy businesswoman.She attained a stature that gave her equality with male customers because of herpublic cultural role; and she opened doors to “Shanghai love,” which wentbeyond sex and pioneered the revelation of emotion in public view.

A rich part of this book is the connection between the world of the Shanghaicourtesan and the eighteenth-century Qing novel Honglou meng (Dream of theRed Chamber). Courtesans assumed names (and sometimes the roles) of charac-ters in the novel, which focuses on the scion of a wealthy house (Jia Baoyu) andhis female playmates, and created games drawn from scenes in the novel’s plot.

Yeh’s use of illustrations throughout the book illuminates the courtesan’stransition from private to public space. The author’s written text tells the full


story. The argument wafts through the book but seems overly repetitive, perhapsintentionally so as to hold together the several chapters with titles such as“Shanghai Love: New Rules of the Game” and “Image Makers: The Settlements’Men of Letters and Shanghai Print Entertainment.” The irony of the repeatedargument is that any one chapter can be read on its own because it reflects theoverall lesson: entertainment was Shanghai’s identity well before the bustlingShanghai of the 1920s.

University of Puget Sound Suzanne Wilson Barnett

The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China. ByMadeleine Zelin. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv, 404.$45.00.)

Naysayers of China’s indigenous economic development doubt the ability ofmerchants and entrepreneurs to overcome the lack of a modern banking system,the absence of commercial laws, an overly extractive state, and a Confuciancultural prejudice against business. But overcome them they did, as MadeleineZelin demonstrates in this finely crafted history of the salt firms of Zigong,Sichuan, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zelin’s masterfulwork not only enumerates the many innovative entrepreneurial, technological,and contractual practices of salt merchants, but, in so doing, also challengesEurocentric models of business development.

The rise and fall of the Zigong saltyard was primarily a function of marketexpansion and contraction. Aided by a laissez-faire Qing state and plentifulsalt-related natural resources, the Zigong merchants moved into the devastatedmarkets of Central China following the mid-century Taiping Rebellion. In orderto exploit effectively this opportunity, Zigong entrepreneurs created new businessstrategies and adapted preexisting institutions to transform the production andmarketing of salt. A few examples will suffice. Salt merchants relied almostexclusively on contracts to pool the capital necessary from a large number of smallinvestors for business expansion. Shares in wells, salt furnaces, and brine pipeswere commodified in a strategy of “fragmentation,” creating byzantine businesspartnerships limiting liability. Lineage trusts, long held to be conservative land-investing institutions, became substitutes for incorporation and designed new,more efficient management organizations and expanded into ancillary industriesto form vertically and horizontally integrated firms.

In the late nineteenth century, however, an increasingly embattled Qing state,looking for revenues to service foreign indemnities and invest in new moderniza-


tion schemes, introduced the “Official Transport, Merchant Sales” system thateffectively broke up the integrated firms by forcing salt producers to sell to thestate, thus eliminating the need for sales and marketing divisions and undercuttingprofits.

Harried by rapacious central and local warlord states in the early Republicanera, the older-lineage trust firms gave way to a new generation of politically savvymerchants, coupling clientist business practices with the introduction of mecha-nized technology. This led to the discovery of the rock-salt layer and the “greatbrine glut” of the 1920s. Overproduction and contracted markets, because ofpolitical fragmentation, dwindled salt fortunes. A brief swan song in the earlywartime years preceded the imposition of state capitalism as the Nationalistsmoved into the saltyard. The once independent, innovative, and powerful saltmerchants became hemmed in by external political factors.

This well-edited (and affordable!) work judiciously mines underutilized sourcessuch as rare business records, partnership agreements, and memoirs to producemany interpretive gems, but, more importantly, Zelin’s persuasive argumentsinvalidate the uncritical application of Eurocentric models of business develop-ment, à la Alfred Chandler, by demonstrating that the only significant differencesbetween Chinese and Western business development are external to business itself.This is a necessary read for business historians in general and one for the Chinesehistory five-foot shelf.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lane J. Harris

EUROPE

Churchill and War. By Geoffrey Best. (London and New York, N.Y.: Palgrave/Hambledon and London, 2005. Pp. xiii, 353. $24.95.)

The relationship between war and Winston Churchill has popular interest andhistorical significance. Like King Arthur or Elizabeth I, he has become a cult figurein the mythology of the English-speaking world: the demigod of resolute andrighteous war. This book investigates the reality behind this myth. This excellentwork, written by an English historian for an American audience, is marked bygrace and intelligence. Geoffrey Best does not address every aspect of his topic, butthose he considers are well done. Above all, he follows the first precept ofhistorians: avoid error. Best repeats none of the usual mistakes in accounts ofChurchill and war, as embodied in Robert Rhodes James, Churchill, A Study inFailure, whether because he is up to date with the scholarship—as in naval policy


before 1914—or avoids detailed discussion—as in Churchill and defense between1919–1938. Best is strongest on Churchill’s role in the politics of strategy, and hispersonal attitudes toward, or relationship with, war. The account of Churchill’smilitary experiences up to 1901 is a judicious commentary on My Early Years andis essential reading for any admirer of that elegant work. The discussions ofChurchill’s role in the Gallipoli campaign and in the formulation of Britishstrategy during 1940–1942, his relations with military figures of that period, andhis attitude towards the United States and nuclear weapons, are shrewd.

Best, however, does not adequately analyze matters like Churchill’s attitudetoward technology or his role in defense policy during the interwar years, eventhough Churchill’s fame rests on the notion that he was right about Hitler, thoughthe historiography on that policy is rooted in a debate between him and his critics.Specialists differ on that matter, though this one is sympathetic toward Churchill.In any case, scholars today reject the view that his actions in the 1920s damagedBritish power. They regard his account of the 1930s as unbalanced and self-serving but, after spending the past generation debating the efficacy of Britishpolicies during that era, most view his actions of that time with respect, whileattempts to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain have failed.

Best’s discussion of Churchill as warlord is curiously bloodless, given the manand his times. Churchill, after all, wanted to start the Second World War in 1938.During 1940, he took one of the greatest risks in modern military history, whichturned a struggle in Europe into a world war, and over the next year made toughand controversial decisions, shaping history as few men ever have. Best does notassess basic elements of Churchill’s strategy, such as his decision to speed aid tothe USSR in 1941 and to send little to Singapore. This was the right decision,however much he misconstrued what Japan could and would do, and so increasedthe damage suffered by his beloved empire. Given these limits to its originality andcoverage, this work is of limited value to specialists, but it can be safely andstrongly commended to their students, or to the common reader interested inChurchill, who are legion.

The University of Calgary John Ferris

The Economics of World War I. By Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison. (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 345. $80.00.)

This book gathers together a group of well-informed country specialists to surveythe role of economics in the prosecution, impact, and consequences of the war. Inaddition to the seven major belligerents, it usefully broadens the discussion to


include the Ottoman Empire and the neutral Netherlands. Chapters on eachcountry cover a comprehensive range of economic questions, from initial impactof the war to demographic changes, industrial and agricultural production,national income, war finances, and trade, among other standard categories ofeconomic analysis. Less well covered are labor-related questions like wages,redistribution of wealth, and social conflicts. The division of the book intocountry chapters, with different ways of calculating and presenting the statisticsfor each country, sometimes makes comparison difficult. Nevertheless, thisapproach allows all the authors to address the same questions, while adaptingtheir analyses to the specific problems raised by the war in each country. Theintroduction, in contrast, is directly comparative and focuses on big questions: theeconomic resources available to the two coalitions, mobilization, costs of the war,and the war’s impact on growth and development. Many chapters also makedetailed comparisons between countries.

The individual chapters present well-documented arguments, based on newcompilation and reanalysis of the notoriously uneven statistical data, for each ofthe countries. Together they point to several larger conclusions. First, level ofdevelopment was the determining economic factor. Capacity to mobilizeresources, in contrast, depended on the level of development. Differences amongagrarian, industrial market, and mixed or unevenly developed economies clearlyfavored the Entente both initially and in a long war. Second, the belligerentsadapted remarkably well to protracted conflict, but by 1916–1917 economicstrains began to show. Less developed countries on both sides faced economiccollapse by 1917–1918, but the Entente’s ability to manage Italian debt anddeficits and to replace Russia with the United States ensured victory. Third, thewar disrupted international economic relations and validated nationalist solutionsto economic problems, setting the stage for renewed war. Among the manydetailed contributions is the best brief analysis of the reparations problem cur-rently available.

The authors overstate some of their arguments. For example, some of theeffects attributed to level of development are better explained by military geog-raphy, especially the Entente’s ability to blockade Germany and Austria-Hungarywhile maintaining its own international trade. Moreover, the failure to discusslabor, strikes, and social conflicts in depth misses an opportunity to explore thesocial and political ramifications of wartime economic stresses. Finally, though theauthors correctly emphasize that the belligerents succeeded in financing the warwith varying mixtures of taxation, debt, and monetization of deficits, the ultimatereckoning was still premised on military victory. The actual outcome—Germany’s


defeat without military victory or occupation—made this reckoning illusory andleft a legacy of economic and political instability on both sides. Nevertheless, theauthors have succeeded admirably in offering a wide-ranging, empirically rich,and analytically informative comparison of economies at war between 1914and 1918.

City University of New York Larry Peterson

World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945.Edited by Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and BerndGreiner. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 392. $70.00.)

This book results from a conference in Hamburg in August 2001, the fifth and lastin a series on the “road to total war.” It brings together twenty-one essays, mostby well-established scholars in the history of warfare or of the Second World Warin particular. Whether the Second World War “stands at the end of the story, thegoal [sic] of 150 years of military history” remains to be seen (4). For the futureof the planet and its inhabitants, let us hope it is. It is apparent that not allcontributors agree on the definition of “total war.” However the concept of totalwar is suggestive, never becoming a straitjacket.

Roger Chickering and Stig Förster open with reflections on a theory of totalwar, encompassing the discussions of previous volumes and arguing for an ana-lytical examination of total war with which to inform future narratives. Sixthematic sections follow. The first, on “The Dimensions of War,” includesGerhard Weinberg (the global dimensions), Hew Strachan (the conduct of war),and Stig Förster and Myriam Gessler (genocide). Next are essays by HolgerHerwig (Germany and the battle of the Atlantic), Jürgen Förster (Germany’s warin Europe), and Dennis Showalter (the United States at war, “global yet nottotal”).

The remaining essays are primarily on nonmilitary topics. “Mobilizing Econo-mies” includes essays by Mark Harrison (USSR), Stephen Broadberry and PeterHowlett (Britain), and Hans Mommsen (compulsory labor in Germany). In“Mobilizing Societies” Martin Kutz examines Ludendorff’s and Goebbel’s ideason total war, and Jill Stephenson compares women in Germany and Britain duringthe war. John Barber adds women in the Soviet war effort, and Greiner reports onAmerican mobilization.

The final two sections deal with the war against noncombatants and warcrimes. Hans-Heinrich Nolte takes up the partisan war in Belorussia, which isfollowed by Richard Overy on Allied bombing of German cities, and Robert


Messer on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Birgit Beck discusses theWehrmacht (minimal) prosecution of sexual violence, while Louise Young tracesthe background and sad results of Japan’s ideology toward China. Daniel MarcSegeser offers a long view of the international debate on punishing war crimes.Finally Michael Howard briefly offers some concluding remarks. He observes thatthe notion of total war is relative. “America’s wars may not have been total so faras the American people were concerned, but they were for its enemies” (383).

Though the conference from which these essays derive was five years ago, theauthors have updated them for publication and include references to titles after2001. Indeed, one of the contributions the volume makes is in the generousreferences in most chapters, largely to English and German literature, but occa-sionally to other languages. The theme of total war limits the range of topics to themajor belligerents, but those that are treated provide a valuable source forstudents of the war. Unfortunately, the cost will put this beyond the range of mostscholars and many libraries as well.

State University of New York at New Paltz Loyd E. Lee

The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. By Nicholas B.Dirks. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 2006. Pp. xx, 389. $27.95.)

Because, the author insightfully argues, the British Empire in Asia, and thereforethe modern British nation, emerged from scandalous corruption and abuses of thecolonized by its founders and practitioners, we must study how Britons of that dayand how later historians rhetorically transferred the onus of scandal onto thecolonized. Nicholas Dirks centers his analysis on his thoughtful reading of par-liamentary and public debates of late eighteenth-century Britain, particularly onthe ideological dialogues between former Governor-General Warren Hastings andparliamentarian and political philosopher Edmund Burke. Dirks then demon-strates how this discourse created an “imperial imaginary,” which purportedlycleansed and justified the Empire and identified imperialism with the virtuousBritish nation (239). He further highlights how “imperial historians” (passim)have perpetuated this scandal by assessing the British Empire primarily as part ofa triumphal British national narrative rather than as the history of the colonized.Dirks extends the implications of his argument to all empires, most explicitly towhat he perceives as the budding American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The widely publicized seven-year [1788–1795] impeachment trial of Hastingsin the House of Lords, with the prosecuting team being led by Burke, has already


been explicated by various distinguished historians and literary analysts. Dirksmakes a distinctive contribution by locating this spectacle and its discourseswithin the practices of personal and systematic corruption by East India Companyofficials in India and also within the larger political economy of the British Empireand of empires generally. He thereby reveals new layers of significance, explainingthe trial’s consequence not as an anticlimactic acquittal of Hastings but rather asBritish identification of the morality and necessity of imperial expansion with theirown burgeoning modern nation. Further, by rhetorically shifting the scandal ontoIndian practices like sati (the notorious suicide/murder of Hindu widows) andthugi (an alleged cult of highway murderers), Britons displaced the putative needfor the British Empire onto the Indians. Thus, by “demonizing Hastings” person-ally, Burke “cleansed and exorcized” the inherent scandal of imperialism from theBritish nation, thereby empowering later aggressive annexationists like Governor-General Richard Wellesley to claim British moral superiority and the allegedadvantages of colonial rule for Indians (191).

Dirks concludes his carefully reasoned argument by asserting that “imperialhistorians” continue to perpetuate “the mythifications” of the sources of theBritish Empire (331). Dirks begins his critique with John R. Seeley, The Expansionof England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, reprint of 1883) andexplicitly continues with some of the leading historians writing today, mostnotably: P. J. Marshal, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1965); William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of theBritish Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2000); and NiallFerguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and theLessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Dirks’s own extensiveresearch and writing as a historian of India provide him with a perspective thatenriches his rereading of the Empire’s origins in scandal and elucidates them forscholars and lay readers alike.

Oberlin College Michael H. Fisher

The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. By Richard J. Evans. (New York, N.Y.: ThePenguin Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 941. $34.95.)

The reviewer had the pleasure of reviewing the highly praised first volume of theauthor’s planned three-volume history of the Third Reich for The Historian [Fall2005] and would encourage readers to consult that review for his comments onEvans’s primary goals for and approach to this project. As in that volume, Evansorganizes his narrative into large, thematic chapters, which sequentially discuss: 1)


the Third Reich as a police state in which terror and repression were essential toolsof control; 2) and 3), the efforts to win the complete support of the German peoplefor a community imbued with Nazi values through the manipulation of the media,culture, education, and religion; 4) the actions taken to bring the Germaneconomy out of the depression, free it from Jewish influence, and gear it for war;5) the attempts to enfold Germany’s social classes into the Volksgemeinschaft; 6)the creation of a “racially healthy” Germany; and 7) the drive toward war. Eachchapter blends narrative, description, and analysis enriched by the author’s fre-quent use of illustrative anecdotes or personal testimony, most often from thediaries of Victor Klemperer and Luise Solmitz, a conservative, pro-Hitler,Hamburg school teacher.

Given a narrative that runs to over 700 dense pages, it would be easy for Evansto eschew argument for description, yet he seeks both. The central thesis of thisvolume shapes the former. “Dominating everything [in the Third Reich] was thedrive to war, a war that Hitler and the Nazis saw from the very beginning asleading to the German racial reordering of Central and Eastern Europe and there-emergence of Germany as the dominant power on the European Continent andbeyond that, the world” (xv). Although Evans is able to link aspects of eachchapter to this thesis—for example, the envisioned war required a “correspond-ingly thoroughgoing attempt to remould the minds, spirits, and bodies of theGerman people to make them capable and worthy of the role of the new master-race that awaited them”—the argument becomes increasingly compelling in chap-ters four, six, and seven (705). For Evans, the drive toward war was Hitler’s doingand not the result of “inherent instabilities in its [Nazism’s] system of rule,or . . . a constant competition for power between its satraps and minions,” asfunctionalists contend (712, 615). To be sure, Evans does recognize, in contrast tothe arguments of Richard Overy, that Hitler’s continued pressure for rapid andextensive rearmament “created tensions and bottlenecks that could only beresolved by bringing the date of military action forward in order to obtain freshsupplies of raw materials and foodstuffs from conquered countries . . .” (370).

Two other large interpretive questions inform the author’s approach to theThird Reich in peacetime. First, to what extent did the Third Reich win thesupport of the German people? Second, was the Third Reich essentially a mod-ernizing or a backward-looking force? In response to the first, Evans acknowl-edges that the Nazis garnered backing from many Germans—especially thesystematically cultivated and indoctrinated younger generation—as a result ofeconomic recovery and national reassertion, but he concludes they failed “in theirambition of sweeping away alternative sources of moral and cultural iden-


tity . . . and replacing it with unqualified enthusiasm for their own world-view”(320). Further, Evans distances himself from those who argue that the Third Reichessentially rested on a consensual foundation; rather he stresses the degree towhich “everything that happened in the Third Reich took place in [a] pervasiveatmosphere of fear and terror . . .” (118).

Although the Third Reich employed the language of tradition when it served apolitical need, it was, according to Evans, a relentlessly modernizing force notonly because a dominant military force requires it, but also because the Nazis hadan “infatuation with modernity,” which expressed itself in every sphere (707).This was true, for example, in racial policy “that was linked, not to a vague visionof Germany’s return to some quiet medieval backwater, but on the contrary to atechnologically advanced war of European domination, predicated on whatcounted at the time as the most modern, scientific criteria of racial fitness andracial supremacy” (606). Even in the area of art, where the Nazis were decidedlyhostile to modernist works, Evans argues, “[T]he idyllic country scenes painted bythe blood-and-soil school of German artists spoke not of a return to a rural worldmired in the hierarchical and hidebound past, but rather a new order where thepeasant would be independent, prosperous, and proud, delivering the food thatwould sustain Germany in the conflicts to come” (708). The reader may not bepersuaded by such claims, but perhaps the more important point is that Evans,widely conversant with all the latest scholarship in German and English, isunafraid to advance his formidable vision of the Third Reich rather than sometepid consensus.

Although this review has identified the organizational approach, primarythemes, and major arguments of The Third Reich in Power, it is impossible to dojustice to its sweep, depth, and complexity. The wealth of material in this work isimpressive and the errors of fact infrequent, although they do occur; for example,Evans inaccurately identifies Niels Bohr as a Norwegian rather than as a Dane(310). Evans has set out to write the definitive history of the Third Reich; on thebasis of the first two volumes, he is well on his way to realizing that ambitious aim.

Denison University Donald G. Schilling

The Night the Old Regime Ended, August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution. ByMichael P. Fitzsimmons. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press,2003. Pp. x, 245. $49.95.)

There is no single pivotal event in the French Revolution, but among severalcontenders, the night of 4 August must rank high. The events of 14 July 1789


ensured the survival of the National Assembly; the violence of 10 August 1792destroyed the monarchy; the arrests of 9 Thermidor Year II ended the terror; andthe coup of 18 Brumaire asphyxiated parliamentary politics. Yet 4 August 1789saw deputies in the National Assembly vote through decrees that dismantled mostof the social and political structures of the ancien regime. This book traces thelegislation’s medium term consequences in an original and thought-provokingway.

Michael Fitzsimmons is one of a handful of anglophone historians who havereoriented our approach to the political history of the Estates-General andNational Assembly during the last two decades. In his previous book, TheRemaking of France: The National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791[1994], he argued that 4 August was the Assembly’s defining moment, creatinga sense of unity and patriotism among deputies that influenced all subsequentlegislation. It formed what he terms a “functional consensus” that guided thesilent majority of the Assembly over the next two years. He returns to that ideaof consensus in more detail here, with an introduction reviewing the politicalhistory of the Assembly, followed by four chapters that trace the impact of theAugust decrees in four key areas: the nobility, the Catholic Church, the coun-tryside, and urban society.

The impact of the decrees on the nobility was immediate, removing their socialand taxational privilege overnight and, through the abolition of provincial privi-lege, destroying much of its power in local government. Most noble deputiesappear to have accepted their losses phlegmatically, seeing them as the cost to payfor maintaining social order and, in a strangely Benthamite way, contributing tothe greatest happiness of the greatest number. Yet Fitzsimmons goes on to tracethe continuation of peasant violence through the winter of 1789–1790 againstseigneurial dues as well as tithes and the way in which the crucial legislation of thespring of 1790 worked to the advantage of the nobility by reversing the previousdecision on mainmorte and ordering redemption of rights at relatively favorableterms. He argues that the principle of redemption was not in itself a source ofmajor discontent, because of widespread respect for property, but that the ratesimposed were, triggering continued protests over the summer of 1791. On churchlegislation, he reviews clerical attitudes prior to August and the impact of theabolition of tithes and land confiscation and closure of the contemplative ordersbefore devoting lengthy attention to the origins and impact of the civil constitu-tion of the clergy. He looks also at the civil constitution’s significance and impact,underlining the chasm that it opened up between the revolution’s supporters andopponents. On the nobility, he outlines the lurching political trajectory from


massive refusal of change in June 1789, to grudging cooperation in July, then fullintegration into Assembly debates at the time of the August decrees. Noblealienation then emerged again over the pace of change during late August andSeptember 1789, creating a coherent right-wing group in the Assembly (seeTimothy Teckett’s Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the FrenchNational Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1996). Thisled to the abolition of noble titles in June 1790, which, as Fitzsimmons rightlypoints out, represents a significant piece of European social modeling. As for theimpact of the August legislation on urban France, the analysis concentrates mainlyon the abolition of the guilds. There was initial confusion over the applicability ofthe legislation to them and a spirited delaying action mounted by the Assembly’scommittee on agriculture and commerce. Nevertheless the Allarde law in earlyMarch 1791 and the Chapelier law three months later put the issue beyond doubtand moved a major element of corporate social culture.

The scope of the book is broad and ambitious and much of Fitzsimmons’sargument is based on extensive command of the secondary material and impres-sive archival research at the departmental and municipal levels. This enriches thesections dealing with feudalism, the guilds, and the civil constitution of the clergyin particular. The clear analysis of the Assembly’s reform of feudalism and theguilds will provide an excellent overview for students and researchers alike, andthe sections on religious change add to our knowledge of the provincial impact ofthe civil constitution of the clergy. Yet the book promises more than it delivers andis at times overgenerous toward the Assembly’s work.

Despite the title, the focus is on the events of 1789–1791 rather than on therevolution as a whole, and it omits the longer-term impact of the decrees, par-ticularly significant for rural society and the fate of the nobility. It also margin-alizes central aspects of the legislation, including the abolition of venality and ofprovincial privilege, which fundamentally transformed the context of publicadministration and French identity. The chapter on urban impact would havebenefited from much more attention to the impact of municipal and departmentalreform, which politicized local life and shifted the social bases of the political elite,and less on the ambiguities and minutia of the guild legislation. It would also havebeen useful to have some analysis of the taxation implications of the abolition offiscal privilege. The attempt to defend the Assembly’s less than generous approachto mainmorte and redemption of feudal rights is provocative but, to this reader,not wholly convincing. And the claim that the crown throughout the eighteenthcentury had tried to alleviate the conditions of the peasantry is difficult to acceptor justify (138). There are times too when the historiographical trawl strays into


stagnant backwaters, and the views of Lord Acton, Morse Stephens, or HenryEldridge Bourne on the August decrees, for example, are of no real interest to thecontemporary historian.

Those reservations apart, this is a challenging and interesting analysis, whichwill be invaluable for students at undergraduate and graduate levels and,hopefully, stimulate further work on the legislative achievement of the NationalAssembly.

University College Dublin Hugh Gough

Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece. By Barbara Goff. (Ber-keley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 400. $60.00.)

The first word in this book’s title alludes to what most scholars see as a great lackin the lives of the women of ancient Greece. “Deprived” of the political rights thatreign supreme in modern values, Greek women were, nonetheless, active and oftenvisible participants in the ritual life of their families and their cities. These rituals,Barbara Goff argues, required the women to become agents in activities that allowfor various meanings. On one level, for example, a woman’s ritual role may haveprovided her with authority and autonomy, which may have been taken asresistance to the “male-dominated and often explicitly misogynist” community(4). Ultimately, however, rituals inculcated in the women who enacted them theattitudes and behaviors approved by the community. Through ritual participationthe women established their proper place in the family (the primary focus ofwomen’s concerns), their affinity to the very political institutions from which theywere excluded, and their relationship to the divine (or the “nonhuman,” as Goffputs it, 4, 26, et al.), to which their nature rendered them particularly susceptible.The apparent paradox of the book’s title (taken from an actual epitaph for apriestess of Dionysus, we finally learn, on pages 215–216) indicates the author’saim of demonstrating the complex and sometimes conflicting meanings inherent inthe Greek understanding of women and their rituals.

Goff begins with a survey of women’s ritual involvement, from state-fundedfestivals to individual dedications. She then turns to the connection between ritualpractices and two important areas: first the various, sometimes contradictory,views of the Greeks concerning female sexuality, and then the political institutionsin which women generally do not participate but which, nonetheless, sometimesprompt ritual responses. The last two chapters take up, briefly, representations ofwomen’s rituals in vase painting, in poetry composed by women, and in Atheniandrama. Some festivals—Arrhephoria, Arkteia, Thesmophoria, Adonia—come up


repeatedly in the book, as their various facets pertain to Goff’s categories ofdiscussion. As is inevitable in studies of Greek ritual, Goff makes use of evidencefrom disparate times and places, but classical Athens is the main focus withanalogs from elsewhere to assist in teasing out meanings.

Goff states that she intends this volume to be useful not only to classicalscholars but also to those interested in women’s ritual practices more generally.Throughout the work she makes references to studies in the fields of ritual andwomen’s studies, which may help the reader to situate her work in these broadcontexts. The general reader will need to muster courage, however; there is noglossary of Greek terms, although those used most frequently are listed in theindex and defined in their first appearance in the text. The reader should bewarned, too, that theory looms large; some may find the amount of “subtending”and “imbricating” rather alarming. The arguments are clear enough, though, andthe reviewer often found Goff’s summaries of other scholars’ more opaque studieshelpful. Her skill in handling ancient texts is evident throughout the study. Notoverly optimistic about the historicity of some sources, she rightly notes that theirimportance lies not so much in their record of actual events as in what they tell usabout the range of possibilities imagined in antiquity.

The gods are strangely absent from most of this discussion; Goff’s assumptionthat the ancient Greeks saw their rituals as primarily social in function is open toquestion. A modern Greek parallel illustrates the problem. In describing the manydedications made by women, Goff compares their activity to women’s attendanceat liturgies honoring saints in the Orthodox Church, which allow them to “con-struct a space for their own gratification rather than that of others” (49). This maybe so, but how many Orthodox women are so oblivious to the sacred aim ofritual? Many of Goff’s own citations suggest that the ancient Greeks were moreconcerned with the favor of the gods than is evident in her discussions. At timesideology seems to overwhelm the evidence.

Still, this book represents a valuable contribution to our understanding ofwomen in antiquity and of Greek ritual. In a survey of this sort, we should notexpect anything to be covered comprehensively, but Goff succeeds in presentingthe salient points of a great many ritual activities and occupations, providing abrief assessment of previous interpretations, and adding her own nuanced read-ings of their meanings. The result is a book of interest to experts as well as to thoseseeking a more general understanding of the place of women in ancient Greeksociety.

Amherst College Rebecca H. Sinos


The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture. Edited by KennethGouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Pp. xxvi, 437.$99.95.)

The sack of Rome in 1527 marked a watershed. For Italians of the sixteenthcentury, it signaled the loss of “Italian liberty” and the domination of the Hab-sburgs. For scholars, it marked the transition from the vibrancy of the HighRenaissance to a period dominated by the Counter-Reformation. Pope ClementVII, whom many blamed for the disaster, suffered the opprobrium of historicaljudgment.

The twenty essays collected in this volume, however, attempt to restore thereputation of Clement’s pontificate. Grouped into two parts under five themes, theessays represent an international and multidisciplinary effort, offering historical,musicological, literary, and art historical approaches. Part one, “History, Politics,and Humanism,” is further subdivided into two thematic clusters. Four essaysdiscuss the “character, politics, and family” of the Medici pope: T. C. PriceZimmermann interprets the accounts of Clement VII by Francesco Guicciardiniand Paolo Giovio; Barbara McClung Hallman argues for the success of Clement’spontificate, namely the advancement of his family interest; Natalie Tomas focuseson Lucrezia Medici-Salviati (Clement’s cousin) and her daughter Maria Salviati-Medici (mother of the later Duke Cosimo); and Patricia J. Osmond analyzes theconspiracy of 1522 against Cardinal Giulio de Medici and its relationship withMachiavellianism. Another four essays focus on the sack of Rome. Cecil Cloughdiscusses the treachery of Francesco Maria Della Rovere, who commanded Clem-ent’s army. Ivana Ait analyzes the historical work of the Netherlander, Corneliusde Fine. Anna Esposito and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro offer an excellent articledocumenting daily life under occupation, mined from the notorial archives. AnneReynolds explores the papal court in exile in Orvieto, and Charles Stinger reflectson the place of Clement in Renaissance history.

The ten essays in part two shift to the arts. Three essays by William Wallace,Caroline Elam, and Richard Sherr study Clement VII as patron of the arts. To theextent there was a “Clementine style,” as André Chastel has argued in his book onthe sack of Rome, it was largely limited to Clement’s friendship with Michelan-gelo and his particular interest in the Florentine projects. When we shift our focusto Rome, as Linda Wolk-Simon, Victor Amand Coelho, and Julia Haig Gaisserargue in the thematic section, “Artists, Musicians, and Literati in ClementineRome,” Clement’s patronage was wanting in comparison to that of his predeces-sors. A final cluster of four essays, under the theme “Antiquity Revived and


Renovatio in Religion and Art,” offers two art historical studies. George Gorsegives a detailed stylistic analysis of Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of AndreaDoria, Clement’s admiral before he defected to Charles V, in which ancientRoman imperial themes underscored the imperial pretensions of Clement’s pon-tificate. Sheryl Reiss focuses her study on the artistic patronage of Adrian VI,Clement’s much maligned predecessor. The last two essays, W. David Myers’sstudy of humanism and confession in northern Europe, and Alexander Nagel’sstudy of experiments in art and reform in early sixteenth-century Italy, interestingas they may be, sway far from the book’s theme.

A succinct and useful introduction by the editors reflects a judicious editorialhand, which has given us this valuable collection on the state of the field.

Pennsylvania State University R. Po-chia Hsia

Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. By L. P. Harvey. (Chicago, Ill.: University of ChicagoPress, 2005. Pp. xiv, 448. $40.00.)

After the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula came to a close in 1492 with thecapture of Granada, Christian Spain began to experience both the religious fervorof the Counter-Reformation and the political fear of the Ottoman Turks. Thequestion now arose of what to do with the defeated Moorish inhabitants. Thepolicy adopted was essentially to assimilate them, forcing them to become Chris-tians and to abandon their separate language, dress, and customs. Its implemen-tation proved to be a major headache for sixteenth-century Spain, involving twogreat revolts in Granada and much religious and constitutional heart-searching inthe autonomous kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, where a powerful feudalnobility was not minded to sacrifice its vassals (“He who owns a Moor, ownsgold,” as the saying went). It is this story that L. P. Harvey recounts so well in hispresent book, stressing its relevance to a twenty-first-century world that is begin-ning to live again through the nightmare of ethnic conflict. Rather than tell it fromthe viewpoint of the victors, he declares his aim of giving a voice to the van-quished, a task for which he is eminently suited given his command of the Arabiclanguage sources.

The sheer resilience of Islamic culture is demonstrated by the surprising quan-tity of books and writings in Arabic or in aljamiado (Spanish written with Arabiccharacters) surviving from this period and coming to light in the walls of oldhouses or other hiding places. Somewhat debased though many of them were—snippets of the Koran rather than the complete text; folk tales rather than the greatpoetic tradition of medieval Al-Andalus—they suggest a living popular culture. In


passages of rare brilliance, Harvey explains how both Arabics and aljamiadoconformed to the spoken language of the people rather than to the classicalwritten forms of either Arabic or Spanish. As a means of expression, this literaturekept alive a sense of separate identity among the Moriscos (as the forced convertscame to be known), not least because of the polemical, anti-Christian nature ofmany of the texts. And yet the very fluidity of the language used makes one awareof a culture that had evolved on its own terms within Iberia. The famous “leadtablets” of the Sacromonte in Granada, discovered between 1588 and 1599 andpurporting to date from the first century of the Christian era, sought to portray therole that Arabic speakers had played and would play again in the spreading ofChristianity, but a Christianity that, as Harvey skillfully demonstrates, was morecompatible with the Muslim view of Christ as a prophet than as the Son of God.

More research is needed into the social life of the Moriscos, of their graduallysouring relationship with the Christian feudal lords who had once protected theirtraditional way of life and whose inefficacy at crucial turning points highlights ashift in the balance of power between themselves and the monarchy. We need toknow more also about the day-to-day relations between Christians and Muslims,points of contact to be found surely less among writers and theologians than in theparish community (we still know so little about the fabric of the local churches orthe recurring cycle of fiestas and holy day observances). But it is one of thecharacteristics of a good book that it makes us aware of the gaps in our knowl-edge, and Harvey’s outstanding study will be of interest both to researchers andto the general student for its sensitive recreation of the last phase of MoorishSpain.

University of East Anglia, Norwich James Casey

Together We Stand: America, Britain, and the Forging of an Alliance. By JamesHolland. (New York, N.Y.: Hyperion. Pp. lxiv, 650. $32.95.)

This is an excellent “story” in the sense of a series of connected events—achronological account of the, ultimately, successful North African campaign in1942–1943—and in that it is eminently readable. The author clearly has agrounding in military history, and he has supplemented his text with voluminousmaps and notes. He combines a worm’s eye view of the war, through the eyes ofsmall, but key, players on the ground (and in the air), with an account of the highstrategy of the campaign, as seen through the eyes of the main generals andadmirals. This two-level approach adds strength and body to the narrative, but at


the same time it can be disconcerting for those who are not interested in such adegree of detail. Still, the author had a story to tell and obviously wanted to getthe “whole” story out.

The Allied campaign in the Maghreb in 1942–1943 was in many ways a sorryspectacle, except toward the end, which was spectacular enough: the Axis forceswere driven out of North Africa and gave up some quarter of a million prisoners.

Inexperienced American troops, including an incompetent general (Freden-hall), and outmoded British equipment (not to speak of a hesitant general on theBritish side: Horrocks), told much of the story in the early and middle phases ofthe campaign. For both of these English-speaking powers, it was a legacy of thelack of preparation of the interwar years. At one point, General Dwight Eisen-hower thought he was about to be sacked by General George Marshall, only tofind out that Marshall had promoted him!

On the western desert side, in Libya and Egypt, and after the initial successagainst the Italians, the polyglot British Eighth Army—composed in part ofCommonwealth troops, including Indians, Gurkhas, and Maoris—went upagainst the newly arrived Afrika Korps of General Erwin Rommel and suffered bycomparison. It was only after the fall of Tobruk and the scare that envelopedCairo that the British took the situation in hand, with General Harold Alexanderassuming the regional command and General Bernard Montgomery taking chargeof the Eighth Army. Later, as the western desert battle moved toward Tunisia anda linkup with the Allied forces there, Alexander became the deputy to the overallcommander of the African campaign, General Eisenhower—and it was mainlythese two men who were the leaders in bringing into being the Anglo-Americanmilitary alliance of World War II—controlling their less consensual subordinates,particularly Generals Montgomery and George Patton. It is interesting that thedyspeptic Montgomery never spoke back to Alexander, who was a model of calmand optimism.

We learn some interesting new angles from this account. Contrary to receivedimpression, the Italians actually did fight in the desert campaign, though not aswell as the Germans. The reaction of the Germans to the Anglo-American inva-sion of North Africa was incredibly swift and massive—aided and abetted byVichy French military authorities at Bizerte. The Royal Air Force experience in theearlier phase of the war was telling in the desert, even though British equipmentwas not always up to that of the Germans; the Spitfire excepted. Finally, it was theinexorable inflow of American tanks and planes that turned the tide.

Together We Stand appears to be a very accurate account of the 1942–1943campaign. There is comparatively little mention of the French—the colonial


power in North Africa where most of the action took place—though admittedlythis is an Anglo-American story. There are a few, though not really significant,typographical errors, which only illustrate the ancient adage that it is not a perfectworld.

Harvard University Charles Cogan

Franco: Soldier, Commander, Dictator. By Geoffrey Jensen. (Washington, D.C.:Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. ix, 135. $19.95.)

General Francisco Franco joined the July 1936 rebellion of army officers who,early in the Spanish Civil War, installed him as Spain’s chief of state. In thepreface, Geoffrey Jensen acknowledges that his brief biography is mostly aboutthe soldier of his subtitle. He takes fifty-six pages to get to 1931, the birth ofSpain’s Second Republic. He then devotes only fifty-nine pages to Franco’s laterexploits, with fewer than twenty pages devoted to the period from 1939 to thedictator’s natural death in 1975. Jensen’s Virginia Military Institute students andothers interested in military matters should benefit from this well-crafted essay,especially Jensen’s second and third chapters, “Blood and Glory in Morocco” and“Rising Star.” Both chapters underline the brutal realities of unconventional,colonial warfare.

The military account of the civil war contains little about Mussolini’s corpotruppo voluntarie or Hitler’s Condor Legion, units essential to Franco’s victory in1939. Jensen summarizes Franco’s deliberate and militarily integrated campaigns.His last sentence very aptly reads, “In the end, his [Franco’s] identity as a soldierdid much to shape the course and character of his dictatorship.” Others, like PaulPreston, see Franco growing from the fighter in Morocco, through a vital politicalphase as the cautious observer of Spanish democratic society from 1931 to 1936,to a third stage, from October 1936 to 1942, when Franco became a quasifascist.

In April 1937, Franco assumed the leadership of the Falange Party. As caudillohe adopted the one man, Führer-Il Duce image, the anticommunist, antiliberal,antifree-market stance of the Axis powers. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Francolooked to a past age of glory, to the time when Spain was the preeminent nationin Western Europe. By Axis standards, Franco was barely fascist because heretained Catholic associates. As a mostly symbolic imperialist, he wished forcolonies, but would not risk going to war allied with the aggressive Axis dictators.

After the United States entered the European war, Spain developed graduallyfrom 1942 to 1953 into an isolated monarchist tradition. Then from 1953to 1959, Franco increasingly accepted alliance with U.S. military power and


world capitalism. From 1959 to his death, the Generalisimo retreated slowly to aretiring, senile stage of life that was more dependent on the Spanish officer classthan it earlier had been.

A reference to one of Franco’s speeches “as late as July 1937” seems puzzlingand unrepresentative (69). The citation from a study by Stanley Payne notes thatFranco appealed to the slogan of the 1789 French Revolution “fraternity, liberty,and equality.” But Payne says this was in Franco’s first proclamation, probably inJuly 1936. Generally Franco opposed the French Republic as a source of subver-sion of traditional Spain.

Jensen has it right in calling the Spanish Civil War chapter “No Mercy.” TheSpanish dictator was more the soldier than either of the propagandists in Berlin orRome. Jensen’s notes, maps and pictures, and the pace of his short book are allexcellent.

Ohio University Robert Whealey

Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–1540. By John Langdon. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xx, 369. $115.00.)

Although there is no shortage of studies on mills during the Middle Ages, thisvolume should be required reading for advanced students in medieval history,economic history, the history of technology, social history, and related fields.Milling was arguably the most important capital-intensive industry during thatera. In addition to grinding grain for bread and malt for beer, mills powered bywater and wind drove trip hammers that pounded special salts into woolentextiles, making them pliable and soft, in a process known as fulling. The sametechnology reduced bark and old linen rags to pulp for tanning leather andmaking paper, respectively. It drove billows that blasted air over beds of charcoal,reducing ores to metal. It pounded out swords and plate armor for warriors andiron shoes for their horses. Wind and water drove grinding stones to sharpen toolsand weapons.

In 1988, Richard Holt deepened significantly our knowledge of milling withthe publication of The Mills of Medieval England, and, even more recently, AdamLucas contributed a comparative study, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medi-eval Milling Technology (Brill, 2006). Despite the fact that John Langdon’s bookbears a title similar to Holt’s study, these authors do not really cover the sameground. Holt focuses on English mills during an age of economic expansion[c. 1000–1300], whereas Langdon deals largely with an era [1300–1540] whenthe economy first stagnated and then slowly expanded at an inconsistent rate. As


for Lucas, he paints on an extremely broad Afro-Eurasian canvas covering atime-span extending from antiquity to c. 1600. All three books are important;however, Langdon, who worked on this study for more than twenty years, hasproduced an opus with considerably more depth than the other two. He chose tolimit himself chronologically not only because of the economic changes that beganto occur after 1300, but also because documentation expands enormously aroundthat date. He decided on a terminal date of 1540 because the secularization ofmonastic properties then had an enormous negative impact on the availability ofdocuments. Langdon is dealing with a huge cache of sources—archaeological andiconographic as well as written—that he analyzes with a computer database thathe devised himself (Appendix 1). He learned computer programming as an engi-neering student, an experience that adds substantially to the depth of his work.Throughout the book, Landon’s scientific and technical competence is obvious,yet his explanations of the technology of milling are clear and jargon-free. Evenmore importantly, ample diagrams accompany them.

On the other hand, this is not strictly a history of technology, for Langdondevotes approximately half of the book to broader economic, social, legal, histo-riographical, and even cultural issues. Langdon divides the book into six chaptersfollowed by a comprehensive summary. In addition, each chapter (except the first)has a short conclusion. There are seven appendices as well as numerous plates,figures, maps, and tables. In the first chapter Langdon sketches the state of themilling industry in 1300. In chapter two he deals with the number of mills andtheir revenues. Chapters three and four are the technological ones that discuss theconstruction and operation of mills and add a very important excursion on thematerials from which mills were constructed and the resources that they con-sumed. In chapter five the author examines milling as an entrepreneurial venture,and in chapter six he looks at the people who worked in the mills and thecustomers of the mills.

For more than a century, some very able scholars have pursued the topic ofmilling. Marc Bloch insisted that lords forced reluctant tenants to use millingfacilities, thereby increasing their wealth during the “first feudal age.” Lynn T.White and Jean Gimple argued that mills gave medieval Europeans a sense that theuniverse is a warehouse of inanimate sources of energy that could be harnessed forthe benefit of man. Eleanor Carus-Wilson traced the “rise of capitalism” to thespread of fulling mills into rural areas at the beginning of the thirteenth century.Langdon however is mostly critical of these and other well-known theories.Throughout the book he stresses the conservative nature of the milling industry inEngland. In terms of technological innovation and investment, the island lagged


behind the continent, and capital investment was stronger at the beginning of thisperiod than at its end (303). Technologies were not implemented because land-lords were being replaced by a growing class of lessees who were primarilyinterested in maintaining their revenue flows, who were risk averse, and whounderstood little about milling as such. An issue that is not adequately exploredis the environmental impact of milling. From the data assembled by Langdon itshould be possible to trace the “environmental footprint” of the milling industryand that footprint, one suspects, would be quite large indeed, including the impacton streams, tidelands, quarries, croplands, pastures, and forests through all ofEngland as well as parts of France and Germany.

University of Arkansas, Little Rock Charles R. Bowlus

Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. By BenjaminLieberman. (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Pp. 396. $27.50.)

Despite its title, the book is about Central and Eastern Europe’s ethnic cleansing.It covers ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the Holocaust in the three main EasternEuropean empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian) as well as East Germany, theCaucasus, and post-1923 Turkey. The presentation features vivid accounts ofsuffering, destruction, and pillage by eyewitnesses. Starting with the 1821 GreekRevolution, a standard chronological order of events is followed whereby post-1800 instances of these practices are reviewed, irrespectively of whether suchinstances would qualify as “modern” or “traditional.” The author includes tra-ditional nineteenth-century pogroms in the Russian and Ottoman empires along-side examples from the Russian empire’s long-standing strategy of populationtransfers in the Caucasus. He then moves on to the early twentieth-century casesof ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Anatolia and finally to the full-blown casesof ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The authorconsiders World War II as a war of ethnic cleansing and offers ample documen-tation for it. In fact, the author fudges the demarcation lines between ethniccleansing and genocide by suggesting a continuum from mere cleansing of peoplesall the way to the Holocaust. The storyline suggests that all Europeans have beeneager to commit atrocities against their neighbors—and Germans and Turks areno more or less guilty than Russians, Poles, or Greeks. In the author’s own words,“a concentration on individual cases—the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide,for example—might make it easier to depict Germans or Turks as evil . . . but abroader, longer examination of ethnic cleansing in this region expands consider-ably on the list of both perpetrator and victim groups” (332).


Nationalism and the emergence of the nation-state are blamed for the fact thatthese acts took place in modernizing states (78). The author draws mostly onhistorical sources with little attention to relevant literature from other fields,thereby circumscribing the book’s relevance for nonspecialists. There are someminor errors in the text; for example, Xanthi is not a Macedonian town (it is inWestern Thrace) and the Greek “Great Idea” is Megali Idea, not simply Megali(74). Given the complete absence of an in-depth discussion of the causes of ethniccleansing as well as the lack of theoretical engagement with the distinctions amongethnic cleansing, genocide, and the Holocaust, the book’s overall contribution liesin its systematic and lively presentation of individual experiences of suffering. Initself, this is a major contribution in publicizing the tragic fates of thousands ofpeoples, for in many cases recognition of this suffering has been belated oraltogether nonexistent. Though readers should make up their own mind whetherthe author’s main thesis detracts or contributes to the moral evaluation of thesepractices, the book is quite suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduatecourses. It offers a reliable narrative and the author’s approach can generatepassionate debate.

University of Cyprus Victor Roudometof

Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France. ByKeith P. Luria. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005.Pp. xxxviii, 387. $69.95.)

In terms of both theory and practice, the author of this book has made anextremely valuable advance in discussions of French confessional coexistenceunder the Edict of Nantes [1598–1685]. In the preface, he lays out his approachwith admirable clarity. Paying due attention to the mediating role of the Frenchmonarchy and its judicial system, Keith P. Luria examines the shifting interplayof religious boundaries separating France’s Reformed and Catholic churches,primarily in the province of Poitou, by deploying a three-stage model ofadiaphora (a term he eschews), negotiation, and segregation. Their relativeproportions changed over time: starting with a mixture of predominantlynegotiation with some adiaphora in the first two decades of the seventeenthcentury, moving through a mid-century phase balancing negotiation and segre-gation, and concluding with an overwhelming emphasis on segregation afterthe 1660s.

Six chapters—on the Edict itself, Catholic missions, cemeteries, confessionalintermarriage, the role of women, and conversion—implement Luria’s framework


admirably. All make full use of available printed and manuscript sources fromPoitou, supplemented by outside evidence. All incorporate evidence from bothhigh-profile aristocrats and ordinary church members. All pay close attention tothe gaps between ecclesiastical (or royal) prescription and local description. Andall of them significantly advance our understanding of how religious boundariesactually worked in seventeenth-century France.

Some unexpected information refreshes an occasionally familiar story; forexample, pages 232–244 recount the much-studied demonic possession of Loud-un’s Ursulines in the 1630s. Luria’s information about the apparent frequency ofjoint Huguenot-Catholic cemeteries and of interconfessional marriages—e.g., atLoudun around 1600—admirably illustrate his stress on “contested boundaries”and especially on situations where “practice did not always correspond todoctrine” (107, 157, 120). In biconfessional families, baptisms and funeralsapparently provided relatively low-stress occasions for crossing confessionalboundaries. Luria also locates situations where both confessions adopted similarrituals, like the formal and public abjurations by new converts (256). Otherrituals, for example interconfessional marriages, were prohibited by bothchurches (and were therefore rare) but nevertheless valid. So were multiple con-versions from one church to another (252). Like Henri IV (although of course atdifferent ages), one extremely prominent Poitou aristocrat moved from Huguenotto Catholic to Huguenot to Catholic; it is not accidental that his family receivesnine different entries in Luria’s index (352).

One can find minor flaws. Luria’s second chapter suffers from a dearth ofexternal sources; the consequences of the first important royal intervention inPoitou, Laubardemont’s 1633 mission to Loudun, are split between two widelyseparated passages; and his comparisons omit Switzerland, which experienced thelongest and most elaborate interconfessional negotiations in Europe (133, 237).But such minor flaws do not mar his success: Luria’s framework and his infor-mation will guide much future scholarly debate about this major aspect ofseventeenth-century France.

Northwestern University William Monter

Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815–1851. By John Merriman. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 254. $55.00.)

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the development of professional urbanpolice forces in Western Europe, a process exemplified by the establishment of theLondon “Bobbies” by Robert Peel in 1829. The author of the book looks at the


details of this process in postrevolutionary France’s provincial cities. By 1815,legislation dictated that every town with a population of five thousand or morewas to have at least one commissaire de police, or CP, with an additional CP foreach ten thousand inhabitants. The CPs, as Merriman shows, were objects ofcontinual frictions between national and local authorities. Appointed by theprefects, the powerful agents of the central government established by Napoleonand maintained by his successors, they were to be paid by the city governments ofthe localities where they worked, and they were theoretically responsible not justto these two often embattled superiors but also to the local procureurs, or publicprosecutors.

John Merriman argues that the CPs, largely recruited from the ranks of armyveterans or bureaucratic clerks (because of the importance of report-writing intheir work), gradually developed a distinctive sense of professional identity duringthis period, marked by increasingly standardized procedures and a career ladderthat enabled the successful to move to better-paying posts in larger cities.Although supporting the regime of the day remained their most critical respon-sibility, the Restoration government set a precedent by purging the ranks ofincompetents, even if they professed the proper ideological sentiments. Merrimanfinds that “most CPs never confronted a riot or large demonstration,” and theyalso rarely had to deal with violent criminals (90). They were nevertheless keptbusy checking on such potential sites of disorder as public markets and tax-collection barriers, workers’ gathering places, and theaters, as well as monitoringtraditional popular rituals such as charivaris. They harassed vagrants, pressuredprostitutes to obey regulations, dealt as best they could with the problems createdby urban poverty, and tried to enforce municipal regulations about sanitation.Hardly a sufficient force to embody Foucault’s notion of panoptical surveillance,the nineteenth-century French CPs nonetheless contributed to the gradual estab-lishment of a more orderly and predictable society.

No one knows the French police archives for this period better than Merriman,who has mined these sources for several earlier monographs. In this case, however,the details of the lives of policemen and those they disciplined sometimes over-whelm the argument. Most of these details come from the Restoration and theearly years of the July Monarchy, an imbalance which creates a certain difficultybecause Merriman argues that the real transition to a genuinely disciplined policebureaucracy responsive to the concerns of the central government occurred underthe Second Republic of 1848–1851 and its authoritarian successor, the SecondEmpire. Was this development simply the culmination of processes begun underearlier regimes, or did it represent a deliberate rejection of the more decentralized


arrangements of the Restoration and the July Monarchy? Would French democ-racy have a different flavor if the police had remained more responsive to localgovernments? In his fascination with anecdotal “police stories,” Merriman leavesthese questions unresolved.

University of Kentucky Jeremy D. Popkin

What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa. By David E. Murphy. (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. 352. $30.00.)

The circumstances surrounding the Nazi invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941remain some of the most debated in Soviet history. What can explain Stalin’sapparent obliviousness to the Nazi threat? Had he been deceived into trustingHitler? What led him stubbornly to dismiss literally dozens of warnings of animpending attack? The author of this book, a retired CIA intelligence chief andauthor of a study of superpower espionage in Cold War Berlin, proposes answersto these questions in this ambitiously titled work, What Stalin Knew.

According to David E. Murphy, much of Stalin’s flirtation with Nazi Germanydates to the late 1930s, when the Munich accords forced him to give up his ideaof a collective security pact with Great Britain and France. Disgusted with thepolitics of appeasement, Stalin decided to pursue a tactical alliance with the Nazisthemselves, believing that such an agreement would not only delay war on theeastern front but drive Germany into a debilitating conflict with France andBritain as well. Quoting from a speech by Stalin to the Politburo on 19 August1939, Murphy casts this bid to spark a Western war as a brilliant plot toundermine the international capitalist system in advance of any coming conflictwith the USSR (24–27).

Within a year of the resulting Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, Poland, Denmark,Norway, and France had fallen under Nazi control. Disappointed with the speedof these victories, Stalin counted on Germany’s standoff with Great Britain toproduce his anticipated war of attrition. Hitler, however, abandoned his plans fora cross-channel invasion shortly thereafter and opted instead to attack the USSRin early 1941. In order to mask the movement of men and matériel to the Sovietfrontier, he mobilized German counterintelligence to float rumors that EasternEurope was to serve as the staging ground for the expected attack on Britain.When these rumors proved insufficient to account for the enormous size of theinvasion force, the Germans disseminated more rumors that referred to the troopbuildup as part of a complex bluff designed to intimidate the Soviets into loweringthe price of oil and grain sold to Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty.


Stalin desperately wanted to avoid war in 1941 and appears to have believed thisdisinformation. According to Murphy, private correspondence between Hitler andStalin reinforced the latter’s mistaken sense of confidence. Particularly importantin these letters was mention of Hitler’s “fears” that several Wehrmacht generalson the eastern front might turn out to be renegades. Hitler, according to Murphy,requested that Stalin make every effort to ignore the unauthorized saber-rattling ofthese officers, even if they were to go so far as to stage a border incident in theirattempt to start a war (185–191, 256–258).

A generally persuasive narrative, What Stalin Knew is probably more of adetailed summary of recent English and Russian language publications than anoriginal account. Indeed, limited by the inaccessibility of crucial archivalrecords, Murphy was forced to rely on a handful of official documentary col-lections published by the KGB’s post-Soviet incarnation, the FSB. He attemptedto correct for this methodological weakness by triangulating the FSB materialagainst other archival documents, but this strategy led him to trust even lessreliable sources. The archival transcript of Stalin’s 19 August 1939 Politburospeech, for example, is generally regarded to be a forgery. Hitler’s letters toStalin are of equally dubious origin, forcing Murphy to draw his account of thiscorrespondence from I. Bunich’s popular novel, Operatsiia ‘Groza’. Similarlydisconcerting is Murphy’s routine conflation of “Soviet” and “Russian,” and hisinsistence that Soviet foreign policy was based on the tenets of Marxism-Leninism—contentions that reveal the book to be framed in outdated Cold Warterms. In sum, this study lacks the archival material to say precisely what Stalinknew and when he knew it. That said, with caution, the book could serve as auseful introduction to Soviet intelligence and Nazi counterintelligence on the eveof the Second World War.

University of Richmond David Brandenberger

The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy.By Michelle O’Malley. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. x,358. $50.00.)

This book is a thorough-going survey of workshop practice and aspects ofaltarpiece painting and frescoes that determined their costs in Renaissance Italy,defined broadly from Duccio’s Rucellai Virgin of 1285 to Sodoma’s Virgin andChild of 1537. Michelle O’Malley’s compilation of published commissions acrossnorthern and central Italy, assembled from notarial contracts, account books,diaries, and letters, will prove of lasting value to art and economic historians.


Many of these contracts are found in earlier collections such as those of the latenineteenth-century Gaetano Milanesi; others, however, are scattered throughscholarly journals and appendices to monographs. With a corpus of 233 commis-sions, she describes the techniques and costs of carved altarpiece woodwork andgold-leaf gilding; the use of blue pigments; workshop procedures, artists as man-agers, the significance of drawings and models for contractual agreements, thedialogue between patrons and painters on selecting subject matter; and patrons’quality controls over finished products. Although cautious at every turn,O’Malley makes unexpected findings: the price of gold leaf (the most expensivesingle ingredient of altarpieces) did not vary over the 253 years of her analysis,despite a steep increase in the price of gold over these centuries, and against earlierevaluations of the status of painters during the Renaissance, the prices theyfetched for their skills and labor fail to show significant monetary gains, eitherabsolutely or relative to other artisans, or at least relative to the woodworkerswho produced the frames.

The central chapters of this book analyze the art “market.” Her findingsraise new questions for research. Although it is not surprising that papal Rome,especially by the late fifteenth century, offered artists the most lucrative com-missions, it is perplexing why commissions from the relatively backwardMarche should rank second, over Florence and Venice. In addition, by thesecond half of the fifteenth century, prices for paintings in Florence suddenly fellbelow those of most places in northern and central Italy, even below whatartists could expect in the poorer provinces of Tuscany. These chapters suggestthat there was no “art market” as such in which laws of supply and demanddetermined prices. Often, the commissioning bodies bid up their prices,O’Malley maintains, to enhance their honor, while artists such as Filippo Lippimight bid down their fees, contributing their labor as a pious cause to theirecclesiastical commissioners. No doubt, O’Malley is correct in seeing the marketfor these unique objects of prestige and piety during the Renaissance as imper-fect; yet her data might have employed more sophisticated methods such asmultivariate analysis to sort out and evaluate the interplay of variables such astime, regional differences, size of work, commissioning bodies, materials, etc., indetermining price. Such analysis might have uncovered trends and surprises thatcannot be visualized by a simple reading of tabulated data. If nothing else, suchan analysis might have shown more convincingly that noneconomic matters—prestige, piety, and the like—had the predominant role in fixing artistic prices inthe Renaissance. More problematic is O’Malley’s inattention to inflationary anddeflationary trends over her long period. Nonetheless, this is a welcome and


significant work, of value not only to art historians but to historians acrossdisciplines.

University of Glasgow Samuel Cohn Jr.

Russian Identities: A Historical Survey. By Nicholas V. Riasanovsky. (New York, N.Y.:Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 278. $49.95.)

The author, a prominent figure among the first generation of Russian historians inthe postwar era, has written extensively on the first half of the nineteenth century(treating such questions as the Slavophiles and Westerners, Nicholas I and OfficialNationality, and the emerging split between the state and educated elites), with abroader study on the image of Peter the Great in Russian culture and thought. Toa significant degree, those studies revolved around the problem of Russian identitythat became increasingly important in the post-Petrine era of “Westernization” ofelites amid a far more traditional population.

This volume seeks to reframe the author’s interest in a larger historical contextand, as the overarching thesis, to make religion central to national identity: “Withthe baptism [in 988], Orthodoxy became a central element in Russian history andculture, whether in the days of the Kievan princes of the quasi-medieval appanageRussia, of the Orthodox tsardom of Muscovy, of the Orthodox empire of theRomanovs, or even, as the enemy, during the communist regime, which trieddesperately but failed to eradicate it” (4–5). The author then surveys Russianhistory from its prehistory to the present day, with about a third devoted to thepre-Petrine era, more than half to the imperial period, and a brief overview of theSoviet era.

While the thesis emphasizes the importance of Orthodoxy, this book is aboutRussian identity and how Orthodoxy figured in the formation of and controver-sies about national identity. It therefore examines the discourse about identity andreligion, drawing heavily on the author’s prior publications, with some attentionto more recent scholarship. The result is a coherent, highly readable synthesis ofthe traditional view of Russian intellectual history, one that is highly accessible tothe general reader. Here one will find a clear exposition of the course of Russianhistory for the medieval and imperial periods (far less so for the Soviet era),emphasizing how articulate Russians (whether officials or intellectuals) tried todefine and defend Russian national identity. While one might wish for a somewhatdifferent book (one that employs new methodologies, explores new sources,challenges old stereotypes, and contrasts elite ideologies with popular culture),that would be quite afield from the author’s objective, which is to provide a


coherent account of “Russian-ness” over many centuries. Given the goals set bythe author, he unquestionably achieves a highly engaging, coherent synthesis ofthe formation and elaboration of “Russian-ness.”

Brandeis University Gregory L. Freeze

Moscow. By Karl Schlögel. Translated by Helen Atkins. (London: Reaktion Books,2005. Pp. 351. $27.00.)

“One way of discovering the nature of a city is to see what books are producedand read there” (131). In Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, Muscovites are more eager forsecondhand books than for new ones, a result, perhaps, of “the general dearth ofpublicly disseminated ideas.” In fact, “[t]he books offered in second-hand book-shops have rarity value not only because of historical circumstances but becausegoing back to the original edition is often the only way of getting hold of the textat all” (132). If this sounds like Soviet-era Moscow, it is, for this is an English-language translation of Schlögel’s impressions of Moscow first published inGerman in 1984.

Schlögel has a keen eye for the remnants of Moscow’s architectural heritage.Amid the grim prefabricated buildings that dominate the city, “the elementalvigour of art nouveau, which is known here as style moderne . . . leaps out atyou” (41). Schlögel also describes buildings that were never built, for exampleIvan Leonidov’s 1934 People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry that mighthave turned Moscow into “a futuristic metropolis of steel, glass, and concrete”(58–59). Overall Moscow’s planners and architects were more concerned withthe city’s panorama than they were with individual buildings or isolated squares.What resulted were the seven monumental wedding-cake structures that dominateits skyline, spread out like points in a star on the city’s periphery. The central focuswas to be the Palace of Soviets, a 420-meter tower topped by a gigantic statue ofLenin (pictured on page 73). Construction began in 1939, but war intervened,ending the project once and for all. Some believed the project’s failure was God’srevenge for Stalin’s decision to tear down the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, itselfa bombastic Moscow emblem since its completion in 1883. A year-round, heatedoutdoor swimming pool went into the foundation of the projected palace, and anondescript Palace of Congresses was ultimately built amid the lovely churches ofthe Kremlin, but Moscow never got its architectural focus, remaining “a circum-ference without a centre” (80).

Schlögel’s Moscow will interest students of architecture and planning, andHelen Atkins has provided a wonderfully readable translation. Those who can


recall late-Soviet Moscow may also enjoy his leisurely strolls about the city.Casual tourists beware, however. The swirls of steam from the swimming pool canno longer be found, for after the collapse of communism, it was quickly removedand the Cathedral rebuilt, facts that are mentioned in an all-too-brief postscript.Like the grand Soviet plan for Moscow’s panorama, this book seems unfinished.Why not add an index and a more detailed look at the city’s extraordinarypost-Soviet transformation? Schlögel does append a lengthy list of Moscow’smajor historical buildings that includes their dates of construction and their chiefarchitects. Regrettably, current street and building names are not provided.

Centre College Michael F. Hamm

War Summits: The Meetings That Shaped World War II and the Postwar World. ByDavid Stone. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. xiv, 304. $29.95.)

This work, written by a British military historian, not only covers the proceedingsof such Big Three meetings as Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, but of such significantencounters as the Moscow conferences of August 1942 and October 1943, theCasablanca meeting of January 1943, and the Quebec conferences of August 1943and September 1944.

The book has some strong features. The prose is clear. The occasional chartsare surprisingly helpful. The uncommon attention given to military events high-lights the coordination of strategic goals and diplomatic policies. The session-by-session, day-by-day accounts of various meetings indicate the priorities given bypolicymakers to such matters as Germany, Poland, the second front, and the waragainst Japan.

Certain of Stone’s observations are quite sensible; in fact, they show realperception. For example, the three-year process of planning was certainly“unprecedented in the history of warfare” (xiv). Stone is on the mark in criticizingany possible cross-channel invasion in 1942 or 1943, any Allied backing of China,and the value of the Joint Declaration on Liberated People, drafted at Yalta. Thesame holds true for the Allied obsession at Yalta concerning Poland, to the neglectof the more dangerous issues of Germany and Berlin. A similar danger lay in theU.S. lack of candor manifested at Potsdam concerning atomic development.

Occasionally one finds an error. Obviously there was no Theodore DelanoRoosevelt (30). When war broke out in 1939, any considerable American publicsupport for Germany was lacking (15). Robert H. Ferrell’s study of FDR’s healthchallenges any claim that the president probably suffered from “early stages ofcancer” (148–149). Few historians have found James F. Byrnes “a most competent


diplomat” (243). One wishes for greater elaboration of the claim that Churchill’sBalkan strategy might have changed the war’s course “to the Allies’ advantage” aswell as affected “the future political status of much of postwar Europe” (90).Similarly, did the unconditional surrender policy really prolong the war by severalmonths?

While twenty-four of the forty-three books cited in the bibliography deal withmilitary matters, the listing neglects many works that offer crucial material onsummit diplomacy. One misses reference to the Foreign Relations series as well asto comprehensive accounts by Christopher Thorne, Warren F. Kimball, EdwardM. Bennett, Mark A. Stoler, Remi Nadeau, Gaddis Smith, Lloyd C. Gardner, andKeith Sainsbury; specialized narratives by Theodore A. Wilson on the 1941Newfoundland summit, Keith Eubank on Teheran, Albert Resis on the Moscow“percentages agreement” of 1944, and Russell D. Buhite and Diane ShaverClemens on Yalta; and the memoirs and/or published diaries of Anthony Eden,Henry Morgenthau, Edward Stettinius, and Averill Harriman. Robert Beisner’sbibliographical guide, American Foreign Relations since 1600 [2003], would havebeen an excellent starting point.

Because of such drawbacks, War Summits can be helpful only to the novicereader, that is, someone who seeks some initial information on wartimediplomacy.

New College of Florida Justus D. Doenecke

The Outbreak of the First World War. By Hew Strachan. (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004. Pp. x, 299. $15.95.)

For more than two decades James Joll’s book, The Origins of the First World War[1984], has remained the only compact, readable, and wide-ranging study of theorigins of the war of 1914–1918. Hew Strachan’s study bids to replace it.Strachan’s three-part work begins with an examination of the European powers’role in the origins focusing on Germany and Austria-Hungary, then proceeds toexplain why Europeans went willingly to war, and concludes with the “big” ideasof a struggle of civilization and culture at stake in 1914.

Strachan displaces primary responsibility for the war from Berlin to Vienna,stresses the importance of the decline of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans, andconcludes that Germany went to war not for world power, but from the humili-ation and fatalism that its striving for world power had incurred. These argu-ments, which are based on the latest research, are welcome and overdue. YetStrachan’s concentration on Germany and Austria-Hungary and the interaction of


their domestic and foreign policy to the relative exclusion of the other GreatPowers indicates his a priori determination of their responsibility for the war.Strachan’s argument would have been more convincing had he devoted less spaceto Germany and Austria-Hungary and far more to the circumstances in France,Great Britain, and Russia.

After emphasizing the role of individual statesmen in the great decisions in thefirst part of his book, Strachan turns in the second to focus on socialists, intel-lectuals, and then the masses to explain to what extent and why they condoned thegovernments’ decisions. His discussion of all three groups is highly informative.Yet relegating the ideas of intellectuals to the realm of forming the people’sresponse to government decisions strikes this reader as rather arbitrary andspecious, because the statesmen of the time, as evinced by their very writings, werecertainly influenced by the popular currents of thought that originated with theintellectuals.

Strachan concludes with the greater ideals and values perceived to be at stake in1914 beyond great power status. He omits Austria-Hungary and Russia from hisdiscussion, although intellectuals and statesmen in both powers held ideals thatoften differed from those current in England, France, and Germany. Finally, whilegiving a nod to the significance of imperialism, Strachan does not capture itspervasive role in shaping the world view of the statesmen and societies whodetermined on and then went willingly to war in the era of the “New Imperialism.”Strachan’s new book consequently provides an excellent, detailed, and nuancedexamination of what he chooses to discuss, but the study suffers from the absenceof due attention to the important subjects that he neglects to examine. This readerawaits a definitive study of the crucial subject of the origins of the First World War.

University of Georgia John H. Morrow Jr.

Condorcet and Modernity. By David Williams. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2004. Pp. 306. $75.00.)

As it is widely believed that the European Enlightenment is fairly well-tilledground as far as research and writing go, it tends to cause a measure of surprisewhenever anyone remarks that our knowledge of this subject actually remainssurprisingly patchy. Yet this is undoubtedly the case. Many Enlightenment writersremain very little known or studied, or else, until recently, conspicuouslyconfined—particularly in the English-speaking world—to a peculiarly stereotypedand marginal status that ill reflects the real character of their contributions.Among these is de Condorcet, whom the author characterizes as “a political


thinker of outstanding originality and relevance.” Hence this extensivelyresearched account of his career and thought fills an obvious gap in the literature.

Although Condorcet was of aristocratic background, there can be no questionthat he was an egalitarian even before 1789, and increasingly radical in his views.Although he voted for the 1791 Constitution, establishing constitutional monar-chy in France, and was a gradualist who was anxious to avoid violence and drasticchange, he had already become a radical republican (partly under the influence ofThomas Paine), as well as a fervent defender of the rights of women and anadvocate of the abolition of slavery. He also worked for a general reform ofeducation and the creation of a government system of general instruction for allsections of society. What began as a lively political career full of hope for thefuture quickly darkened. If his plea for “rational moderation” antagonized boththe Girondins and the Montagnards within France, proroyalist philosophical andscientific circles outside the country were no less emphatic in their repudiation ofhis philosophical egalitarianism. The royal academies of both Berlin and SaintPetersburg struck him off their lists of honorary members. Condemned, forcedinto hiding, and eventually arrested by the Jacobins, Condorcet died in his cell inMarch 1794.

A great virtue of David Williams’s account of Condorcet is that he bringsclearly into focus both his free-trade economic theories and his political thought(including his relationship with Thomas Jefferson and other American foundingfathers). These aspects have in the past often been dealt with in isolation. Thereviewer’s chief criticisms of Williams’s approach are that he fails to enter suffi-ciently into a discussion of Condorcet as a theorist of “enlightenment,” and thathe is relatively uninformative about Condorcet’s philosophical reading andinvolvements, as well as the real character of his fierce hatred of priests, which theauthor admits as early as 1774 resembled more that of Paul Henri d’Holbach thanthat of Voltaire. Why exactly are the (Spinoza-like) ideas that the political right ofman is something natural that carries over into society and the political sphere andthe concept of the general will so central to Condorcet’s outlook? Indeed oneshould question whether the author really proves his contention that “it is theauthority of Locke’s name that predominates in Condorcet’s thinking on the roleand nature of enlightenment within a broad spectrum of political and socialcontexts.” In particular, it seems to this reviewer, references to Diderot, Mably,d’Holbach, Rousseau, and even his friend Turgot, as well as, further back,Hobbes, Bayle, and Spinoza, are all far from adequate.

Institute for Advanced Study Jonathan Israel


The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche toPostmodernism. By Richard Wolin. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2004. Pp. xi, 375. $29.95.)

This author’s excellent study provides the reader with an informed survey of someof the more important intellectual trends of the twentieth century, employing thewritings of a selection of Europe’s avant-garde authors. One of the most disqui-eting of those trends is that which sought the renunciation of what are generallyreferred to as Enlightenment values: “the predominance of science, reason,democracy, socialism, individualism, and the like” (3–4). The rejection of thosevalues by “Counter-Enlightenment ideologues” constitutes the central concern ofRichard Wolin’s exposition. He tends to speak of them as “protofascists” andsupplies a roster of nineteenth-century notables, including Joseph de Maistre,Arthur de Gobineau, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as representative (154–155, 185,296). The names of some twentieth-century luminaries—such as Oswald Spengler,Werner Sombart, Carl Gustav Jung, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, perhaps MaxWeber, and Werner Jaeger—follow.

Although much of this is familiar, what is not so familiar is Wolin’s studiedrecognition that whatever fascism emerged from that protofascism, it shared an“essential ideological kindredness” not only with Lenin’s Bolshevism but withmodern French political and cultural Leftism as well (158, 307–308).

It had become clear to Wolin that at “certain pivotal ideational junctures, lesextremes se touchent” (144, 308).

What is not immediately evident is at what point in time one might findevidences of that “essential ideological kindredness” between the Left and theRight that is now so evident in the “Leftism” of postmodernists. In fact, and inretrospect, it is not at all clear that the revolutionary Marxists of the twentiethcentury ever were committed to the “bourgeois values” of “science, reason,democracy, socialism and individualism.” It is not evident that “dialecticalscience” or “dialectical reason,” as understood by Lenin or Stalin or Mao,was ever anything like the science and reason of the Enlightenment. No lessmight be said of the Marxist-Leninist notions of democracy, socialism, andindividualism.

In general it can be argued that Lenin’s concept of “dialectical science” sharesaffinities not only with that of postmodernists but a “kindredness” with theneo-Hegelian conception of science common among Italian Fascists. Not a few ofMussolini’s theoreticians saw more than superficial similarities between Fascistand Marxist-Leninist doctrine. More recently scholars have noted the muted, but


nonetheless real, nationalist and anti-Semitic elements to be found among old andnew Marxist-Leninists.

Conversely, “the central feature of Nazi ideology, the doctrine of race, [had] noparallel in the case of Italian Fascism” (183). Though Stalinism and Fascismemphasized the centrality of the state, Hitler’s Nazis marginalized its role. Stalin-ism, Fascism, and National Socialism all rejected determinism and opted for variousforms of voluntarism. On the edges of all this one finds contemporary postmod-ernists making appeal to Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche—in Wolin’s judgment, a“fascist” and a “protofascist.” In effect, what had seemed so transparent to scholarsin the twentieth century—with their clear distinctions between Left and Right—now seems obscure. It appears we have only begun to understand fully the evolutionof European revolutionary thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Granted that, there is no better place to start than with Wolin’s masterful work.

University of California, Berkeley A. James Gregor

Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance. By RebeccaZorach. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 314. $45.00.)

The art of the French Renaissance has long been a neglected area of study. Thiscertainly owes much to the difficulty of understanding both the art itself, which isfrequently obscure and even bizarre, and its relationship to the broader culture.Rebecca Zorach’s ambitious (and beautifully produced) study attempts to over-come those difficulties, applying a wide range of hermeneutic strategies usuallyassociated with current literary theory to sixteenth-century French visual culture.At the same time, she maintains a focus on the political context and implicationsof French Renaissance art. The result, like its subject, is challenging and some-times diffuse, but fascinating and valuable.

As the title suggests, Zorach divides the book into four sections, organizedmore or less chronologically around four increasingly inorganic fluids. The firstsection is really about the seminal Galerie François I at Fontainebleau, created inthe 1530s by Il Rosso and his collaborators, which, she argues, responded to thefailure of military expansionism with images of sacrifice that would bring peaceand plenty. The second considers various images of breasts and lactation assimultaneously erotic and allegorical of natural plenty. The third examinesengravings based more or less loosely on the decor of Fontainebleau and their roleboth in creating a “mass market” for previously elite arts and in highlighting thetransgressive possibilities of French mannerism. The last chapter ranges widelythrough the reign of Henri III, considering coinage and plate, but also costume


and court entertainments, all of which fed, and fed on, increasing insecuritiesabout the stability of form, gender, and the state itself. A brief epilogue suggeststhat these insecurities led to an aesthetic and political impasse that prepared theway for seventeenth-century classicism (and, presumably, “absolutism”).

Historians will be most interested in Zorach’s comments about how the delib-erately obscure mannerism of the School of Fontainebleau strengthened royalauthority, giving kings a presumptive monopoly on interpreting their own com-missions, and associating the monarchy with an ideology of France’s overflowingnatural abundance. Though quite a few studies have investigated the literary andceremonial propaganda produced by the French Renaissance monarchy, Zorach’scombination of art-historical and literary-theoretical perspectives is new andinteresting. This approach leads her to privilege the causal force of internalcultural and aesthetic logics; although few historians will be willing to go as far,this may help us understand the florescence and comprehensive collapse of Frenchsociety in the later sixteenth century.

Readers with a low tolerance for deconstruction, queer and feminist theory,psychoanalysis, and the like will find this book tough going. Conversely, thosesympathetic to such approaches will often find it exhilarating. Even so, a slightlygreater methodological discipline would have done Zorach’s work no harm. Butubi uber, ibi tuber, as the ancients said: where there is abundance, there is alwayssome excessive growth. Zorach argues that the fruitfulness of French Renaissanceart was a function of its overflowing, even transgressive nature, and the same isdoubtlessly true of her own study.

Duquesne University Jotham Parsons

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture 1800–2000. By GiovanniFederico. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 416. $45.00.)

This ambitious book, written from the perspective of an economic historian, setsout to provide an evaluation of the reasons for the unprecedented increase inworld food production that has taken place since 1800. Extensively researched, itprovides an impressive synthesis of the causal factors that have accounted foragriculture’s performance, stressing the significance of the environment, accumu-lation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, andagricultural policies. Written from the viewpoint of what he acknowledges is thatof the optimist school of economic thought, the author passionately and persua-


sively argues that agriculture has been an outstanding, if rather neglected, successstory.

During the course of the last two centuries, agriculture’s gross production, ata conservative estimate, grew tenfold, an increase that has made it possible notonly to feed the rising world population but also to improve significantly nutri-tional standards. Large areas of the developed world were able to escape theMalthusian specter of malnutrition and starvation that had periodically threat-ened population growth.

Implicit in this approach, to which the author unintentionally ascribes, is thatprevious and present developments should be commended in a rather unquestion-ing and uncritical way. His assertions for this bold proposition about the successof agrarian developments are not as completely convincing as he implies. Theunprecedented increases in output that have transpired, particularly since WorldWar II, are not sustainable and have been achieved, in some instances, with scantregard for the environmental, ecological, and social consequences. The book’sglobal perspective means, almost invariably, that some causes and significant timeperiods are treated in a superficial way. In this respect, the role of scientificinnovation merits more detailed treatment, particularly in terms of the changes inplant breeding and livestock production that have taken place since World War II.In a similar way, a more detailed assessment of the impact of World War II onreshaping patterns of international trade in agricultural commodities is merited.The influence of multinational companies on world food production could havebeen explored in more specific terms.

The text recognizes the imperfect nature of the data sources and the difficultyof extrapolating overarching themes from discrete case studies. It provides exten-sive references, masses of relevant statistical data, and an extensive statisticalappendix, which provides comparative data that will be invaluable for a widerange of disciplines. One minor reservation in this respect is that some of thegraphs, such as those on page 29 and page 162, are difficult to decipher.

Giovanni Federico should be congratulated for his efforts in providing what isclearly an impressive synthesis, constituting a significant contribution to ourunderstanding of the changing role and the revolution that has taken place inagricultural production since 1800. It will appeal to a wide readership, encom-passing not only the academic community but also lay readers who are interestedin how feeding the industrially advanced countries of the world has been success-fully achieved.

De Montfort University John Martin


Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. ByLeonard B. Glick. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 370. $30.00.)

The current debate over the routine nonreligious circumcision of newborn malesin the United States—the only country where this occurs in large numbers—is, fora minority, part of a decades-old ethical discussion. For others, however, it is anuncomfortable, little-understood topic, and many have scarcely acknowledgedthat there is a controversy at all. This is odd, given that so many males in theUnited States are physically marked in a way that in the time of their great-grandparents was largely reserved for Jews (and Moslems, though this was lessrelevant in the United States at that time). Up until the nineteenth century,Christians around the world categorically condemned the practice. In otherwords, as Leonard B. Glick and others have shown conclusively, the routine,nonreligious circumcision of males in the United States has a modern origin.

Glick adds to the ongoing discussion of circumcision in its present “American”form by providing a detailed history of the Jewish ritual and perceptions of thispractice among the goyim (non-Jews). He thus fills a gap left open by DavidGollaher in Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery.The turning point of Glick’s story—and his book—occurs during the nineteenthcentury, when physicians and surgeons developed the impression that venerealdisease was less prevalent among the socially segregated Jewish population. Hetells how the same observations were made by the British in India by comparingHindu and Moslem populations. For this and other reasons, by 1900 a group ofdoctors he terms the “good sanitarians” were convincing the Gentile populationof the United States that circumcision should be adopted as part of “modern”hygiene and medical practice. They represented the American foreskin as anunclean and useless appendage; rates of circumcision in the United States rose tonearly 85 percent by 1980 (the author claims it has now dropped to around60 percent).

Today the arguments promoting circumcision echo those of the nineteenthcentury: decreased rates of very rare cancers, venereal disease (now including HIVinfection), general hygiene, and the like. Glick skillfully presents these argumentsalong with those from within the Jewish community, although he is careful toshow that there are, in fact, two parallel stories: Gentile and Jew. Nevertheless,there are strong arguments against circumcision, largely from an ethical stand-point. In exploring these, the author sets out the absolute ethical paradox of malecircumcision: “In obvious contrast to all other medical decisions, when it comesto circumcision it is parents, not physicians who are expected to determine that a


surgical procedure is in a child’s ‘best interests’” (213). In fact, the ethicalsituation is worse, this paradox being solely concerned with male children. Babygirls in the United States are spared such treatment, and laws are now in place toprotect them. Glick provides readers with a wealth of information to questionhow this different treatment of patients based on gender can be acceptable, and heasks them to agree with him that it is not.

University of Edinburgh Lawrence Dritsas

Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. By Tsuyoshi Hase-gawa. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 382. $29.95.)

This book is a well-researched and provocative analysis of a fascinating yetneglected aspect of World War II: the American public’s conventional assumptionis that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of American atomic bombs.Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, however, argues that Japan considered Soviet as well asAmerican actions in the Pacific before it surrendered. He contends, “The twobombs alone would most likely not have prompted the Japanese to surrender, solong as they still had hope that Moscow would mediate peace” (296–297).

The structure and theme of Racing the Enemy explore American, Soviet, andJapanese interests, perspectives, and decisions in ending the war in the Pacific.American policymakers expected and feared a massive Allied invasion of Japanthat would result in heavy casualties from stubborn Japanese resistance. On 16July 1945, one day before President Harry S. Truman met with Soviet PremierJoseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, an atomic bomb was successfullydetonated in New Mexico. This sudden coincidence prevented any meaningfulagreement and cooperation between Truman and Stalin at Potsdam about how toend the war in the Pacific.

Hasegawa then explains how the scientific and military feasibility of Americanuse of atomic bombs on Japan quickly influenced Truman’s perception that aSoviet declaration of war against Japan was now both unnecessary and undesir-able. He was now confident that he could force Japan to surrender uncondition-ally. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan immediately after theAmerican use of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and continued to plan andimplement invasions against Japanese-held territories in the Pacific, includingKorea, Manchuria, and the Kuril Islands, despite the American use of anotheratomic bomb on Nagasaki.

This book is especially interesting and beneficial when it details and assesses thecombined impact of the American atomic bombs and the Soviet military actions


against Japan on the peace party within the Japanese government and Japanesediplomacy. The peace party became stronger and co-opted Emperor Hirohito as itexplored the possibility of an acceptable, conditional surrender with the SovietUnion and then asked Stalin to mediate a conditional surrender with the UnitedStates. Truman, however, continued to insist on Japan’s unconditional surrender,ordered American conventional bombing of Japan in mid-August, and consideredthe later use of a third atomic bomb. Truman’s persistence contributed to stale-mate within the Japanese government and an attempted military coup d’etatbefore Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on 15 August. Hasegawa’s conclu-sion raises tempting hypothetical questions for further research of this topic, andhe provides intriguing answers to them.

Without the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would have continued tofight until numerous atomic bombs, a successful allied invasion of the homeislands, or continued aerial bombardments, combined with a naval block-ade, rendered them incapable of doing so (298).

Saint Mary’s College Sean J. Savage

Migration in World History. By Patrick Manning. (New York, N.Y., and London:Routledge, 2005. Pp. vi, 193. $24.95.)

This study is not the typical book on world immigration. The author goes backthousands of years and traces movements of homosapiens and whole communi-ties, first in Africa and then in Eurasia. He argues that migrations began not twohundred years ago, nor even ten thousand years ago, but “more than ten timeslonger ago than that” (38). He traces human migrations on the African continent,Eurasia, and the Americas. Long distance commerce became institutionalizedaround 1000 BCE, and he describes the development of money, banking, large-scale shipping and caravans, major marketplaces, and ports.

The author has a very interesting chapter on the slave trade. By the end of theeighteenth century, nearly one hundred thousand slaves were transported fromAfrica across the Atlantic Ocean, and tens of thousands of additional slaves weretransported to other parts of Africa and the Middle East. Up until 1600, Africansremained a minority of the world’s slaves. Most slaves prior to 1600 came fromCentral Asia and Europe, but by 1700, the largest slave populations were in theAmericas and overwhelmingly from Africa. The number of slaves and serfs allover the world peaked at fifty million in about 1850.


The ten to twelve million African slaves in the United States worked mainlyon plantations that produced sugar, tobacco, and cotton. In Cuba, they workedin the sugar industry and in Brazil on coffee plantations. By the end of theeighteenth century, slaves worked in mines, on plantations, and as domesticsand artisans.

Migration, as demographers and social scientists use the term, is discussed inthe last thirty pages of the book. Patrick Manning reports on the mass migrationsfrom Europe to America and the migration of some fifty million Chinese as wellas thirty million Indian and Japanese workers across Asia and the Indian andPacific Oceans. Overall, Manning reports that the period from 1850 to 1930 wasthe most intensive era of migration in human history. Most of the migration wasvoluntary, motivated as it is today by desire for greater economic opportunities,safety, and freedom. Migrants traveled from their home country of Great Britainto Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, South Africa, and the UnitedStates. Although most of the migration was voluntary, it was during this periodthat slaves in the United States were granted their freedom and serfs in much ofEastern Europe were freed. These people, too, became part of the mass worldmigration. English, according to the author, became the language of governmentfor one-fourth of the world’s population. French became the official language inNorth Africa, Southeast Asia, Syria, and Lebanon.

In his concluding chapter, Manning discusses mass murders in different areas ofthe world, the most systematic of which was the Holocaust under Nazi Germany.The mass murders under Stalin and Mao are not mentioned.

The reviewer will conclude on the same note as the beginning of this review. Ifone expects to find the traditional discussion and data on the numbers anddemographic characteristics of emigrants from different parts of the world, theirreason for emigrating, their subsequent adjustments in the new country, this bookwill be a disappointment. For those who do not have such clear cut expectationsor interests in migration, this book offers an interesting exploration of worldwidemigration going back thousands of years.

American University Rita J. Simon

Fighting the Great War: A Global History. By Michael S. Neiberg. (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xx, 395. $27.95.)

The author of this book has written a lucid account of the military aspects ofWorld War I. Based largely on secondary sources, his work takes the readerthrough the conflict’s major campaigns and presents a number of crisp judgments


on the era’s leaders. Though Fighting the Great War stresses the bloody failuresthat dominated the first years of the conflict, it also highlights the growing militarycompetence on both sides of the battle line as the war reached its climax in 1918.The author credits the Allied victory in the war largely to the cooperative rela-tionships of talented politicians like David Lloyd George and George Clemenceauwith highly competent military commanders like France’s Ferdinand Foch.Neiberg also stresses the battlefield expertise of lower ranking leaders such asAustralia’s John Monash and Britain’s Herbert Plumer. While specialists willencounter nothing novel here, general readers will find the book a stimulating andaccessible introduction to the conflict that shaped the course of the twentiethcentury.

The author presents a notably balanced picture of the relationship between thefighting on the Western Front and the war between Austro-German forces and theRussians in the East. For example, Neiberg shows how the German army’s newmilitary formations and tactics that developed in capturing Riga in the fall of 1917paved the way for the Ludendorff offensive in France in the spring of the followingyear. At the same time, he elucidates Germany’s difficulties at this crucial point inthe war in occupying and exploiting the economic resources of the territory wonfrom the Russians. Neiberg also emphasizes the bloody futility of the numerousItalian offensives on the Isonzo River, presenting a devastating picture of LuigiCadorna, who he appropriately labels as “one of the worst senior commanders ofthe twentieth century” (151).

While Neiberg treats the war in Europe in suitably extensive fashion, hisdiscussion of the wider conflict is notably thin. To his credit, he does present astirring account of the Gallipoli campaign. Nonetheless, although his study hasthe ambitious subtitle of A Global History, there is relatively little discussion ofthe warfare in Africa and only the briefest reference to the campaigns in coastalChina and the western Pacific. Neiberg appears unacquainted with importantrecent work like John Morrow’s The Great War: An Imperial History, whichoffers a wealth of material on the non-European aspects of the conflict. Fightingthe Great War relies to a surprising degree on antiquated works such as C. M. R.F. Cruttwell’s A History of the Great War, which appeared in 1934. Finally, onemust note that more careful editing would have eliminated both scattered spellingerrors as well as factual mistakes. It is unlikely, for example, that a ship carryingsupplies to General Charles Townshend’s troops in Mesopotamia held “270,000tons of food” (143).

San Diego State University Neil M. Heyman


Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire. By Edward Shorter. (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 321. $39.95.)

This perverse and challenging study is written in an engaging, anecdotal styledrawn from a wide range of original sources. The main thesis is a polemic andthus begs the question: Is it directed at scholars of sexuality or a lay audienceinterested in an overview of the history of desire?

In his endorsement, Walter Laqueur describes the book as “maddeningly fun toargue with,” and he is right. One does not expect a historical excursus to beginwith a statement about the existence of a universal human characteristic. “Sexualbehavior and sensual pleasure is the product of biologically driven desire ratherthan of fashion and social conditioning,” writes Edward Shorter (3–4). Yet theauthor also claims that these “neural drives” have, since 1870, been set free fromsocial constraints. He asserts, “The narrative of the history of desire thereforebegins late in the nineteenth century, as these various hindrances are lifted and themind is set free to follow the urgings of the brain towards sensuality” (97).

Chapter four opens with a statement that epitomizes the irritations of the styleand structure: overgeneralization and insufficiently convincing evidence. Theauthor argues that “the low priority attached to sexual pleasure by people wholived in distant times is inexplicable unless one considers the hindrances thatexisted in those days” (80). The use of such phrases as “those days,” “distanttimes,” and “the world we have lost” is jarring, and there is a recurring uneasinessas the reader wonders how we can know this. The chapter devotes itself to alimited overview of the hindrances to sexual pleasure—personal cleanliness,privacy, and body parasites (80, 85). The reader is invited to see these as axiomatic“turnoffs” in twenty-first century terms, rather than as conditions that were partof life and, therefore, not necessarily obstacles to pleasure. Shorter inadequatelyacknowledges the social context to develop his notion of a “unilinear continuous”march of sexual history (6, 167).

In chapter six, Shorter draws from nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryliterary and medical sources and argues that urbanization, secularization, and thefragmentation of traditional communities enhanced opportunities for “total bodysex.” Yet he ignores the concomitant emergence of pathologizing categories: themasturbator, the hysterical woman, the perverse homosexual, and the preco-ciously sexual child. Masturbation receives especially scant attention as a topicthat problematizes the claim of linear progression towards erotic enlightenment.

The author, in chapter eight, details the coming of age of “total body sex” asthe hygienic, toned, aesthetically pleasing body invites erotic exploration beyond


Shorter’s “sexual baselines”(18). Yet little is made of erotic explorations that arenonorgasmic. Instead “nipple play” and oral and anal sex dominate, all directedtowards orgasm and most involving penetration. The argument ignores the officialpromotion of heterosexual pleasure (sex therapy and the “erotic housewife”) andlegislation that widened normative erotic boundaries.

Shorter finally concedes “there is really no evidence that we are any morededicated to sensation today than at any other time in history” (237). If, as hesays, total body sex has emerged with the decline of hindrances, why has this notresulted in the dedicated hedonic pursuit and fulfillment of sexual desire? Shorterdoes not offer a conclusion that matches his opening claims; yet, despite this, thebook is a “good read.”

University of New England, Australia Gail Hawkes

Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. By Gerhard L.Weinberg. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 292.$28.00.)

The eight World War II leaders covered in this volume are Adolf Hitler, BenitoMussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chiang Kai-shek, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, Charlesde Gaulle, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each has been the subject of numerousbiographies, but this is the first volume to compare their postwar visions. Aseparate chapter is given to each leader, with a ninth chapter comparing the hopesof the eight with the postwar world that actually did occur.

Not surprisingly, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt have the lengthiestchapters (31, 36, 23, and 34 pages, respectively), while Tojo, Mussolini, Chiang,and de Gaulle have the briefest (16, 14, 15, and 11, respectively). The differencesin chapter length reflect not only the centrality of the individuals and their nationsto the war but also the availability of material on their postwar visions. DeGaulle’s papers remain closed to researchers, for example, while other leaderssuch as Tojo provided only indirect evidence during their lifetimes of their postwarvisions. Such problems are compounded by the existence of conflicting evidenceand historical interpretations for many of these leaders. Consequently the authormust speculate as well as interpret on numerous occasions.

Gerhard Weinberg is eminently qualified to do so. Indeed, he clearly rankstoday as the dean of World War II scholars, with his magisterial A World at Arms(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 2005) the most comprehensiveand incisive history of the war available. It is also one of the longest at more than900 pages of text and 1,200 pages total. Although based on equally exhaustive


research, Visions of Victory is much more limited in scope and length than theauthor’s previous works; but for those very reasons it is much more accessible toboth the general public and university students. (Indeed, Weinberg dedicates thevolume to his numerous former students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.) It will provide readers with an excellent brief overview of the worldeach of these leaders wished to create, and it is highly recommended for generalas well as academic audiences.

Readers will find numerous examples of Weinberg’s well-known wit and senseof irony. “If there were any coral reefs that the Japanese planners overlooked” intheir expansive postwar plans, he quips after listing all that those planners didinclude, “these must have been missing from their maps” (64). That Allied leadersagreed to the removal of all Germans from the areas to be ceded to Poland, hesardonically notes, “must be regarded as the last great triumph” of anti-VersaillesGerman propaganda that had maintained Germans and Poles could and shouldnot live together (152).

Readers will also find numerous insightful and provocative conclusions thatwill challenge them to rethink their view of the war, even when they do not agreewith the author. Perhaps most notable is Weinberg’s conclusion in the finalchapter that the postwar world resembled the vision of Roosevelt more than anyother wartime leader—not only because he led one of the victorious nations, butalso because he was “more attuned” than his allies or enemies to “the currents ofworld history at a time when he saw and wished that colonial empire was apassing phenomenon” (232–233). Every other wartime leader studied saveChiang had as a major wartime goal the creation, expansion, or maintenance ofa colonial empire. All such empires would be destroyed in the war and itsaftermath.

University of Vermont Mark A. Stoler


African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam ? By Andrew Burton

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