Jerusalem: City of Longing - By Simon Goldhill: Book Reviews

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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

Douglas R. Bisson(Early Modern Europe)Belmont University

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

Framingham State College

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

Betty Dessants(United States Since 1865)

Shippensburg University

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

Paulette L. Pepin(Medieval Europe)

University of New Haven

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

Richard Spall(Historiography)

Ohio Wesleyan University

Sally Hadden(United States)Florida State University

Peter Worthing(East Asia and the Pacific)

Texas Christian University

STUDENT EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Kaleigh Felisberto Kara ReiterAbraham Gustavson Eric FrancisNeill McGrann

Kristina Fitch Celia Baker Drew HowardMax Simon Amadea Weber Jeffrey O’BryonLily Strumwasser Greg Stull Chris Heckman

Word Processing: Laurie George

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. By Noah Feldman. (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2008. Pp. 189. $22.95.)

In this short book, the author presents a sweeping historical overview of thebalance of powers within Muslim states, focusing on the political role of Muslimscholars in various constitutional arrangements. He argues that, as interpreters ofIslam’s sacred law and as paragons of justice, these scholars have played in thedistant past, and can once again play in the future, a crucial role in counterbal-ancing the power of rulers. Motivating this historical investigation of the rela-tionship between rulers and scholars is Noah Feldman’s desire to contribute tocurrent foreign policy discussions on the future role of Islam.

Three parts make up the book. Part one, “What Went Right,” dwells on thepolitical power of scholars over the course of Islam’s first millennium. Thesescholars, the ’ulama, were powerful for several reasons. They were the officialcustodians of the shari’a, the divine law, in states whose very legitimacy derivedfrom a commitment to enforce this law. Appointed as official judges by caliphs,they settled property disputes, criminal cases, and other legal matters, but follow-ing their own understanding of Islamic law rather than any governmental legalcode. By exercising their prerogative to support or not to support rulers, theyacted as arbiters of a state’s religious legitimacy, and they constrained its executivepower. “This constitutional arrangement,” elaborates Feldman, “made the lawsupreme. It established, we might even say, the rule of law” (35).

Part two, “Decline and Fall,” focuses on the rise of autocratic rule in theOttoman empire. Its central contention is that codification of the law in the latenineteenth century undermined “the traditional or the classical Islamic constitu-tion,” that is, the balance of powers between scholars and rulers (157). In earliertimes, scholars had controlled the shari’a in part because it was an unwritten andchanging law whose interpretation required their special skills. Codification madescholars dispensable. It enabled the ruler to control the law, supported byWestern-trained judges whose role it was to serve the state. As a result, “the statebecame a totalizing sovereign entity such as never existed before in Islamichistory” (79).

Part three, “The Rise of the New Islamic State,” deals with the rising power ofIslamist parties in our day and age. These parties promise the Muslim electorateto reenact Islamic law as the constitution of the state. But the law that theycontemplate differs significantly from the classical model. It is a “shari’a without

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the scholars,” a kind of “democratized shari’a” whereby an elected legislaturegains the power to pass new Islamic laws and to abrogate old laws that it deemsrepugnant (120, 117).

In the first two parts, Feldman largely relies on secondary literature andwell-known primary sources. The third part makes a more important contributionto scholarship, based as it is on original research of the websites of Islamist partiesand in particular that of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The first part of the book needs special attention because with it Feldman setsout to establish a positive historical model. He posits that premodern Muslimstates had what the reviewer would call, to expose Feldman’s constitutional logic,“a scholarly branch of government.” In Feldman’s view, that branch worked withfair success to check the power of the executive branch from the rise of Islam untilthe late nineteenth century. The main problem is that, in granting scholars such anessential role in government, Feldman relies not on any official constitution nor onany governmental document, but on the grandiose pronouncements of the ’ulamaseeking to establish in political treatises what power they wished to wield, in anideal state. In practice, the ’ulama rarely felt that caliphs followed their vision ofthe rule of law (the reign of ‘Umar the Pious, from 717 to 720, is the exceptionthat proves the rule). And what did they do when they were dissatisfied with theexecutive power? Typically they kept quiet, by Feldman’s own admission (34). Inrare cases, individual scholars would refuse to serve a corrupt state or even warna godless ruler about the punishments waiting for him in hell. But such brave orfoolhardy actions by individuals did not turn scholars, collectively, into a branchof government; as a group, they simply lacked an effective, constitutional right tochallenge the power of the executive. Moreover, they did not conceive of thebalance of powers in modern terms, with categories that derive from the politicalphilosophy of the French Enlightenment.

If Feldman overemphasizes the power of scholars in the premodern period, heunderemphasizes it in the modern period. The written codes that emerged in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries normally granted scholars jurisdiction overfamily law. Feldman sees this as an “insult” that made scholars appear “irrelevantto the broader political order” (107). But marriage laws and inheritance laws haveprofound political implications; they delimit, for example, what power womencan have in Muslim states.

These criticisms are purely historical. But Feldman’s key contribution is toforeign policy debates on what institutional role Islam should play in Muslimstates. Looking warily at the prevalence of autocratic regimes and at the popu-larity of Islamist parties, Feldman contributes with this book to the development

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of a constructive model for the ideal Islamic democracy of the twenty-first century.He envisions Muslim scholars as critical actors in this future state, because of theirrelatively moderate, learned approach to religion and because of their commit-ment to the rule of law.

Vanderbilt University Leor Halevi

Jerusalem: City of Longing. By Simon Goldhill. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 356. $27.95.)

In The Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch recounts how his mentor Henri Pirenneled the two medievalists to the new city hall in Stockholm instead of a museum.It was because, Pirenne explained, historians as historians must be involvedwith life in the present-day. Still, Pirenne’s rationale can easily lead historians tocheap efforts to achieve relevance or, worse, to presentism in their analyses ofthe past. In Jerusalem, Simon Goldhill falls into neither of these pitfalls even ashe endeavors to introduce the history of a city where past and present bound-aries are always difficult to bring into focus. Instead, Goldhill serves up a nar-rative rich in contingency and chance, which he himself further seasons liberallywith irony.

Untangling the history of Jerusalem via its present-day landmarks, topography,and, not least of all, politics, could never be called an easy task. As Goldhilladmits, it is an exploration of the “weird archaeology of human imagination,hope, and disaster” (vii). With such an agenda, the book straddles the boundariesbetween travel guide and serious monograph.

The opening vignette sets the stage for many of his themes, especially theways in which past and present do not merely overlap in Jerusalem, but actuallykeep reinventing each other. Goldhill takes readers into a Crusader building thathas been home to a Palestinian family for centuries; their rooftop is classified aswaqf, Islamic religious property, and physically surrounding this home is thebulk of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Such conjunctions keep paradingacross the text: Anglicanism arrived at the height of European imperialism, butthe bishops of St. George’s have been Arabs for the last quarter century; or takethe stories around David’s Tomb, which purportedly sits under a former Fran-ciscan monastery on a height that now holds a memorial to the Holocaust. ToGoldhill’s credit, the litany of such layers deepens the city’s story withoutbecoming repetitive.

Perhaps most instructive, though, is Goldhill’s presentation of Jerusalem’sarchaeological tale, because the history of discoveries over the last century and a


half has caused some of the greatest shifts in how different groups memorialize thecity. This is understandable when each group knows their sacred texts thoroughlyand how to discount those of competing sects; the stones themselves must finishthe argument. For that reason, the battle over Hezekiah’s tunnel and the relatedshafts under the city is far more than academic. And for that exact same reason,scholars on all sides are anguished by the digs that are stymied since the status quofears (more than it can anticipate) what archaeologists may find.

Eventually, Goldhill’s Jerusalem circles back on itself. He discusses how theal-Aqsa Mosque transformed over the centuries, thanks to its users, conquerors,and even natural catastrophes. But the mosque has the advantage of history’spatina. When the new Knesset building comes under the lens, the fights over itsaesthetic (doubtless mirroring the same conflicts of previous centuries) just appeartawdry. Goldhill does not point out the rhythm, but surely he wants readers tofind it.

Longwood University Steven Isaac

A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. By M. Sükrü Hanioglu. (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 241. $29.95.)

This brief volume covers the years from 1798 to the imperial collapse in 1918.Moving both chronologically and thematically, the author masterfully highlightslong-term trends and processes in late Ottoman history rather than focusing onsingle isolated events. This successful political history also contains helpful sec-tions on the legal system, material culture, society, and economy.

An aim of M. Sükrü Hanioglu is to rescue late Ottoman history from theclutches of a teleological Turkish nationalist historiography, which views theemergence of the Republic as an inevitable and predictable result of a multina-tional empire in decline. That approach, for Hanioglu, distorts key historicalprocesses by removing them from their proper context to support the agendas ofnationalist histories in Turkey and the rest of the post-Ottoman world.

Hanioglu discerns several fundamental overlapping and sometimes contradic-tory dynamics in the history of the late Ottoman Empire. For him, a principaltheme of late Ottoman history is the central government’s continued struggle,from Selim III down to the rule of Committee of Union and Progress, to assertits control over the periphery. Highlighting practical reasons, he argues that thestate wanted to assert direct control in order to rule and tax more efficiently andin turn finance the creation of a modern military to keep its territories safe. Thesecond major task was how to respond to challenges brought on by modernity,


such as reconciling religion with scientific progress, incorporating new techno-logical advancements into the bureaucratic administration, and, perhaps moreimportantly, convincing non-Turks and non-Muslims to have faith in a suprana-tional identity of Ottomanism in the age of nationalism. Thirdly, though onlypartially successful in most cases, the Ottoman leadership played the great powersagainst each other to mitigate European demands over domestic issues, especiallythose relating to non-Muslims, capitulations, and its territorial integrity. Threat-ened European intervention necessarily related Ottoman domestic policy toforeign policy to the point that relations with the Great Powers provided the initialimpetus for reforms. Despite continuous demands for Ottoman reform, the Euro-pean powers clearly were not interested in seeing an efficient and centralizedOttoman state.

Hanioglu’s text moves well beyond what readers might call the core lands—Anatolia and the Balkans. He refers frequently to distant provinces andterritories—North Africa all the way to Tunisia, Eritrea and Ethiopia, the ArabianPeninsula, and the Gulf—without neglecting the core lands. This approach givesa much better sense of the diversity of languages, ethnicities, and local customsand practices that challenged Ottoman administrators continuously.

This is a clearly written and persuasive work. The text is peppered withwell-placed, interesting quotations from original documents and historical actors;they reflect everything from the racist attitudes of British diplomats to Selim III’sfrustration over his religious scholars’ inability to provide a theological responseto Wahhabi opposition to the Ottoman authority in Arabia. Hanioglu is alsosuccessful in showing Ottoman history as an integral and important part of worldhistory. Having just used this work in a course on the Ottoman Empire, thereviewer can report its resounding success. Many students found the book “highlyreadable, informative, and incisive.”

University of Richmond Yücel Yanıkdag

The French Betrayal of Rwanda. By Daniela Kroslak. (Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 330. $24.95.)

In this author’s composite assessment of Rwanda’s tragic history, readers confrontmountains of evidence that establish, emphatically and unambiguously, France’sculpability in the sordid events that left some eight hundred thousand, mostlyTutsi, citizens dead in 1994. France is presented as having failed in its responsi-bilities at genocide prevention and is indicted for deliberately concealing andignoring actionable intelligence from the NGO community, its own officials and


troops, and Secret Service sources at its disposal that could have preempted thetragedy or stopped it as it unfolded in the early days of the killings.

The book is on very familiar ground in its opening pages, but the authorquickly proceeds to establishing the case against the French. A Tutsi populationthat had suffered extreme marginalization in professional and other opportuni-ties since independence and had been driven into refugee status in neighboringcountries had launched a struggle in 1990 to reclaim its heritage in Rwandawith Ugandan support. France, Daniela Kroslak claims, continued to label theensuing confrontation between Hutu and Tutsi a civil war even when it was clearthat the genocidal activity that followed deserved more than the insistent Frenchdemands for a cease-fire. France’s myopia was a function of its loyalty to theHutu-led administration, an intimacy rooted in close familial ties betweenleaders, a long history of military training and support of Hutu forces, indiffer-ence to the motivations of those she trained, contempt for what was perceivedas an Anglophone challenge of France’s hegemony, and an unwillingness to aidUnited Nations forces that could have arrested the slide. France made twointerventions to Rwanda—Amaryllis and Turquoise—but failed to utilize thoseopportunities to prevent further devastation and to stop Hutu extremists,well known to France as experts in propaganda, who were bent on furtherslaughter of the opposition. In earlier dress-rehearsal killings, failed power-sharing arrangements, and robust militia preparations, the Hutu had suppliedample warning of their intentions. Yet this had been ignored by a United Nationsthat was slow to stir; a United States still traumatized by its Somalia debacle;and a France where freedom from parliamentary restraints did not dictate impar-tiality in the presidency, nor lead to the forswearing of ties to Africa’s mostrepressive leaders. Kroslak advances significant evidence to show that Franceknew of the impending carnage; had trained some of the perpetrators; may wellhave been in limited combat roles; yet routinely ignored reported massacres,passing them off as Africa’s endemic ethnic competition. For France, the realenemy was the Rwanda Patriotic Front. With ethnicity a minor consideration(after all, France backed the Tutsi in Burundi), France championed the powerelite that protected its interests, recognizing the Interim Government and sup-plying it safe passage (with weapons) to Zaire, even as targeted Tutsi factionswere abandoned to their deaths.

Though a trifle repetitive in parts, Kroslak demonstrates extraordinary famil-iarity with the primary sources in this excellent study.

DePauw University Mac Dixon-Fyle


Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East. By Karl E. Meyer and ShareenBlair Brysac. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 2008. Pp. 481. $27.95.)

Some may enjoy reading this book, but afterward they will have learned littleabout the Middle East or those British and U.S. leaders whose decisions affectedthat region much more than this collection of people. All were in the pay of theBritish and U.S. governments, a context noted only in passing, much less what washappening in the Middle East itself.

The title presents some problems. “Kingmakers” suggests that these British andAmerican individuals made kings, when most of them merely backed would-be oralready established leaders in the region who collaborated with British and U.S.private and public interests in the area. King Faisal of Iraq and Emir Abdullah ofJordan were supported and advised by T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, butthese two Hashemite leaders owed their thrones to their descent from the ProphetMuhammad, their fathers’ use of them against the Turks in World War I, and theirpostwar thrones having been backed by the arms and subsidies of the Britishgovernment. The legendary “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Queen of the Desert” hadparts, but the leading British role was that played by Winston Churchill, theSecretary of State for the Colonies, convener of the Cairo Conference, and theleader who convinced the cabinet of the David Lloyd George Coalition andthe House of Commons that this was the best way to cut back on the hundreds ofmillions of pounds the British occupation cost.

As for how the Middle East was “invented,” Karl E. Meyer and Shareen BlairBrysac used this reviewer’s book, London and the Invention of the Middle East:Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,1995). They cited some bits about A. T. Mahan having coined the term “MiddleEast” at the beginning of the twentieth century, which did not catch on. Appar-ently the coauthors did not digest the indispensable role that British money,power, and war had in that region before and after World War I. The term “NearEast” would be used more than “Middle East” until World War II. The coauthorsnever specify what countries they include in the “Middle East,” a region whosedimensions have changed from the Persian Gulf area to include the Levant, Egypt,and Sudan before World War II; Arabic-speaking North Africa after World War II;Central Asia since the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War;and Afghanistan and Pakistan since the War Against Terrorism.

The coauthors survey the personalities and careers of thirteen British (LordCromer in Egypt; Dame Flora and Lord Lugard in Africa; Mark Sykes, T. E.Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell in World War I; A. T. Wilson in Mesopotamia; H. St.


John Philby in Saudi Arabia; Glubb Pasha in Jordan; and General Ironside, SirPercy Cox, Sir Percy Sykes, and Sir Percy Lorraine in Iran) and three Americans(Kermit Roosevelt, Miles Copeland, and Paul Wolfowitz). Meyer and Brysac haveturned up some familiar and some peculiar material about these figures, but noneare portrayed in their British, Anglo-American, or U.S. governmental contexts,much less in the complex local and regional contexts of the Middle East itself.

Arizona State University Roger Adelson

War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: The Patterns and Meanings of State-level Conflictin the Nineteenth Century. By Richard Reid. (London, England: The British Insti-tute in Eastern Africa, 2007. Pp. xvi, 256. $59.95.)

In recent years, the study of warfare in Africa was subordinated to urgent interestsin understanding the violence that graphically illustrated global humanitarianemergencies. Richard Reid returns the scholarly focus to violence at the state levelas it contributed to the power of just, unjust, and perhaps exceptional states ineastern Africa. With a comparative analysis of the descriptions of military mightin the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands and interlacustrine East Africa, Reid exploresstate-level conflict in local terms. From the beginning, he finds warfare as evidenceof state agency in the military, in the practice of diplomacy, and in conflictavoidance and conflict resolution.

The text is organized into three sections, the first being a review of the sparsehistoriography and an analysis of warfare as it shaped African community iden-tities. The second section centers on military organization and practice. The thirdincludes discussions regarding the less immediate consequences of violence, suchas the economic impact, demographic responses, and transformations in socio-economic institutions. Reid begins with eighteenth-century conflicts and continuesthrough the nineteenth century, but self-consciously avoids the colonial period asdefined by European occupation. Prior to colonialism, he argues, the systematicuse of physical force “continually served to define societies, shape communities,mould identity, build (and destroy) states, effect economic and social and politicalchange” (2).

Paradoxically, this book may be most valuable in its ability to inform studiesof the imagery and rhetoric employed in the construction of the colonial and thelater history of representations of force and violence as paternal instruction inAfrica. The text succeeds in recounting the documented narratives, especiallythose created by or for British observers, and through them explores perceptionsof the value and consequence of state violence and contrasting definitions of


criminality and hopes for justifiable retribution. The voices presented are at timesindividual, as in the case of Tewodros and the use of myth in his letters to QueenVictoria, and at other times communal, as in the ruga ruga highwaymen under-stood as resistance to growing Arab power (28, 144).

In this study, Reid seeks to offer a revised model for the study of Africanwarfare, and a corrective against the remnants of neocolonial scholarship. Herejects both the caricature of tribal warfare and the imagined precolonial Africanutopia. Africans are aptly referred to as pivotal in shaping the knowledge embed-ded in colonial documents. Oral traditions are categorically problematizedbecause “manipulations of the past by the chroniclers, for a variety of reasons, areevident” (15). European sources are said to “speak volumes” regarding VictorianEngland. Documents produced during the reign of iconic leaders such as Mutesaand Yohannes are cast in light of the spirit of the time. On the other hand, Britishsources are treated generically—as equivalent products of the long-term Europeanenterprise for collecting knowledge. Given Reid’s self-imposed limitation to docu-mentary sources, a closer reading of the dialogic nature of those documents iswarranted.

Chapman University Carolyn E. Vieira-Martinez

THE AMERICAS

Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century.Edited by Richmond F. Brown. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.Pp. xiv, 314. $24.95.)

Largely ignored by colonial historians, the eighteenth-century Gulf South shines inthis rich new collection of essays by a dozen experts and new scholars. Borrowinga metaphor from contributor Amy Turner Bushnell, editor Richmond F. Brownargues that historians have long treated the colonial southeast like Sleeping Beauty,“a woman who awoke only when kissed by a European man” (x). Only whenadventurers like Ponce de Leon passed through did the region come to life enoughto merit scholarly attention, and once they were gone she returned to slumber.

These essays, by contrast, explore “what happened while Sleeping Beauty wassleeping” (x). In his opening historiographical essay, Daniel Usner argues that,although on the fringes of European settlements, the eighteenth-century GulfSouth was neither marginal nor a “borderland,” in the parlance of the Boltonschool of thought. Rather, it was central to major social and political develop-ments of the colonial and early national eras. Some essays support Usner’s bold


claim better than others, but all answer his call to de-center New England andVirginia in Early American History by offering vivid snapshots of times, places,and peoples left out of most colonial histories.

The two essays that serve as bookends for this collection reveal that the colonialEuropean powers were constantly struggling to maintain control of the diverse anddynamic Gulf region. Bushnell’s examination of a shipwreck off the Florida Coastin 1696 details the limits of Spanish control and influence, while AndrewMcMichael looks at the West Florida Revolution of 1810 and argues that centuriesof Spanish rule were rendered meaningless as soon as residents realized their landvalues and governing bodies were unstable. McMichael explicitly argues what allthe authors combined prove masterfully: the Gulf South was too diverse andcomplicated to understand solely in terms of colonial powers and political loyalties.Groups comprised of a motley mix of peoples were constantly negotiating andrenegotiating their own political, social, and economic existences.

Essays by Greg O’Brien and Karl Davis examine Native strategies for negoti-ating trade and communication with the British and Spanish in and aroundMobile. O’Brien probes Choctaw and Chickasaw masculinity and authority byreexamining a single congress with the British in the winter of 1771–1772, whileDavis assesses the mutual advantages of town building for both the Creeks and theSpanish. Armando C. Alonzo also explores mutually advantageous relationshipsbetween colonizers and the colonized farther west in the Spanish settlement ofNuevo Santander. Together these essays reveal the dynamic tactics diverse groupsof residents used both to adapt to changes in colonial rule and to keep furtherEuro-American expansion in check.

Jane G. Landers, David Wheat, and Virginia Meacham Gould argue that freeand enslaved blacks also played a vital role in these processes. Landers’s study ofBlack Seminoles in Florida places black residents at the center of Seminole com-munities and governance, while Wheat’s biographical essay on NicholasMongoula examines black life in Mobile. Gould’s essay follows four generationsof upwardly mobile Afro-Creole women who “resculpted the social and economiclandscape of nineteenth century New Orleans” (166).

The ugly side of the transformation of the Gulf South receives little attention inthis collection. One exception, Shannon Lee Dawdy’s study of defamation suits inFrench colonial Louisiana, shows that constructing a new society out of a diversepopulation of natives and newcomers was wrought with problems. And althoughseveral essays address slavery, H. Sophie Burton’s study of the introduction ofcash crops into Natchitoches, Louisiana, is the only one that details the tremen-dous social and economic impact of slavery on the Gulf region.


This collection aims its criticisms at early national history, but it contains alesson for Southern historians as well. Southernists are beginning to consider theimplications of the global South, but most approach it as a recent phenomenon.What the essays in this volume demonstrate is that the region has for centuriesbeen intimately involved in global economic, political, and cultural exchanges.

Agnes Scott College Tammy L. Ingram

For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. ByRonald P. Formisano. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.Pp. 328. $35.00.)

Historians acknowledge this author’s Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, andEthnicity in the 1960s and 1970s [1991] as a path-breaking profile of a movementcombining reformist, egalitarian, and antielite tendencies with reactionary over-tones. Exploring the roots of such activism, Ronald P. Formisano initially under-took a history of American populist movements from the mid-nineteenth centuryto the present, but found he could not do so without consideration of the periodbetween 1776 and the Civil War.

Unlike Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion: An American History [rev.ed., 1998], For the People emphasizes social movements rather than rhetoric.Using secondary literature, Formisano equates populism with grassroots mobili-zation against established elites in the interests of local autonomy. Invoked in thename of “the people,” attempts at popular control before 1860 often meshed withproducer values and “masculine citizenship” (3, 70). Like its successors, heconcludes, early forms of American populism represented “amalgams of contra-dictory tendencies”—both “reactionary and progressive” (2, 3).

Drawing on pamphlets, speeches, newspaper accounts, court records, andother sources, Formisano presents a rich and nuanced narrative. He finds thatlate-eighteenth-century Regulators, land rioters, and Anti-Federalists in NorthCarolina, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere saw the people—white,male, small-property holders—as the source of political legitimacy but agreed thatelites could rule through representative institutions unless they bent the rule oflaw. Yet Formisano demonstrates that the consequences of largely symbolic con-frontations such as Shays’s Rebellion [1786–1787] and the Whiskey Rebellion[1794] included the Constitutional compromise of dual sovereignty between thestates and the federal government and a watered-down radicalism “used by eliteand middling democrats to defend a vision of localism compatible with stateauthority” (57).


The contradictions of grassroots politics permeated the 1820s when “men withvery similar economic interests” invoked populist rhetoric on both sides of thebanking crisis and labor radicals embraced masters, employers, and proprietors aspart of “the people” (77). During President Andrew Jackson’s Bank War of the1830s, both factions defended popular will against the inequalities threateningrepublican government. Further complexity surfaced in Rhode Island’s Dorr Warof the 1840s, when mechanics, artisans, and shopkeepers joined a reform move-ment that sought to overturn the state’s limited voting franchise. Eastern NewYork State’s rent strikes against a feudal leasing system, in turn, contained amarginal element of vigilantism but ultimately strengthened demands for distri-bution of public lands in the West.

Formisano points to the conspiratorially minded anti-Masonic movement ofthe 1820s—which associated itself with temperance, civic virtue, equal justicebefore the law, and women’s activism—as another manifestation of populism’sambivalent history. In a similar fashion, the Know-Nothings of the 1850s com-bined nativist antipathy to immigrants and Irish Catholics with anticorruptionand other reforms. In the end, nineteenth-century populism combined notions ofpopular rule, autonomy, and white male citizenship with the virtues of “republi-can motherhood” (211). Nevertheless, Americans would remain divided overwhether the people or their elected agents had the power of self-rule enshrined inthe Declaration of Independence.

Portland State University David A. Horowitz

Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics.By Lewis L. Gould. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Pp. vii,256. $29.95.)

The election of 1912 occupies a central and unique place in the more than twohundred years of American elections. As the centennial of this watershed contestapproaches, it is fitting that scholars revisit that critical year. It was indeed asignificant “turning point” in American political history, or as this particular workwould have it: “[T]he birth of modern American politics.”

Perhaps the most telltale feature of that year’s election was the distinctivefour-pronged nature of the canvass. Normal political circumstances witnessed twoparty, head to head encounters. Former president Theodore Roosevelt’s formalentry into the campaign arena in 1912 was marked by his famous and colorfulbattle cry “my hat is in the ring.” The headwear metaphor is here expanded tofour hats belonging to each of the respective party standard bearers. These


candidates included not only the Bull Moose Roosevelt, who launched his ownProgressive Party in his quest for the White House, but also his erstwhile Repub-lican Party friend, handpicked successor, and ultimate rival, William HowardTaft, the incumbent president and Republican Party nominee in 1912. The othertwo hats represented the respective tops of Woodrow Wilson, Democratic Partynominee, and Eugene Debs, Socialist Party leader.

Although this election has long commanded the attention of historians, it hasnever received the full research and publication treatment it so richly warrants. Itis true that some books have celebrated the importance of the election andprovided entertaining narrations of the dramatic story line. Still, after nearly onehundred years, the in-depth archive-based probe of the contest remains untold.Enter Lewis L. Gould, a distinguished and prolific scholar of American politicalhistory who also just happens to be a respected specialist in the periods of theGilded Age and Progressive Era. Gould would appear to be well suited for the taskof providing a satisfactory exposition of the people’s verdict in 1912.

The work does mark a step forward over earlier published renditions in termsof affording readers a research-based analysis of the landmark election. Four Hatsin the Ring takes readers from the prologue’s quiet New Year’s Eve of 1912through seven chapters to that election night in November when the will of theAmerican people became indelibly recorded in our political annals. The book endswith an epilogue. “It’s all here,” proclaim the editors on the dust jacket.

Certainly the work makes use of select manuscript collections and representsan advance over what has been published thus far. Unfortunately, it is not all here.True, select manuscript collections, some of which have been available fordecades, have been consulted. Other collections have not. Coverage of the partyconventions remains superficial and incomplete. Important political actors arefrequently given short shrift, dismissed, or make no appearance. On the otherhand, Gould’s sympathetic treatment of Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party issuccinct and informative.

There are errors and omissions. “Appendix C” contains a serious recordingerror granting Taft’s Electoral College votes to Wilson. “Progressives” are notsatisfactorily defined.

The main thrust of this Progressive Era election is unconvincingly presented interms of waning or retro economic issues from the Gilded Age such as the trustsand the tariff.

Thankfully there are notes, a bibliographic essay, and an index, following 187pages of content that includes a number of photos and cartoons. This work has itsstrengths but falls well short of the political analysis for which we have waited so


long. Despite the downside, it is better than what historians had. Four Hats in theRing is recommended with caveats attached until a more thorough expositioncomes along.

Metropolitan State College of Denver Thomas McInerney

Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship. By CatherineO’Donnell Kaplan. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for theOmohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2008. Pp. xiii, 239.$59.95.)

In this tightly constructed and well-written book, the author describes the devel-opment of early republican conversation circles, literary networks, and periodi-cals. She traces the careers of three distinct types of cultural entrepreneurs: NewYork’s Elihu Hubbard Smith, physician, editor of a scientific journal, and centralmember of a debating society, the Friendly Club; Joseph Dennie, first the editor ofa New Hampshire newspaper, then of the period’s leading literary-political maga-zine, the Port Folio, in Philadelphia; and a group of Boston lawyers and ministerswho edited the Monthly Anthology and were instrumental in the founding of theAthenaeum, a private library and flagship in the institutionalization of secularhigh culture. Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan’s comparative account casts a widernet than Bryan Waterman’s recent Republic of Intellect [2007], a more detailedaccount of the cultural and scientific work of the Friendly Club members.

American citizens as much as members of the international republic of letters,these men believed that close friendships and emotional attachments created themutual trust required for unrestricted intellectual inquiry. Smith developed atransatlantic exchange network to attract the broadest possible number of con-tributors. The success of the Port Folio similarly required wide support, andDennie cultivated contributors and subscribers throughout the nation. Theanthologists, however, turned inward and exclusively relied on the financial andintellectual support of Boston’s elites.

Smith, Dennie, and the anthologists also developed different attitudes towardpolitics. The Federalists and Republicans in the cohort around Smith set asidetheir partisanship to concentrate on furthering each other’s scientific and literarypursuits, following Smith’s belief that open inquiry and the development ofaffective bonds, rather than electoral politics, would improve the American repub-lic. In contrast, Dennie’s partisan engagement gained him a bigger audience andimproved the fortunes of his magazines. He presented himself as a “Federalist manof feeling,” performing his combative partisanship for a readership that delighted


in his wit and learning without faulting him for not presenting a coherent chal-lenge to the Republican ascendancy (9). Unlike William Dowling in LiteraryFederalism in the Age of Jefferson [1999], Kaplan sees no Federalist retreat frompolitics: “Dennie and his readers and contributors . . . were participating, not in abackward-looking politics of elite nostalgia, but instead in an interactive, dynamicattempt to shape opinion” (135). The anthologists, in turn, aimed to escape thepressures exerted by both commerce and partisan politics, thus negating the veryprerequisites for their magazine’s existence in the belief that this was the best wayto serve the nation.

Kaplan carefully traces the tensions that developed between the increasinglydominant conception of the politically empowered and active white male citizenand the life of the man of letters, whose claims to civic influence rested on literaryproduction, not on political service. To make the case that their work constituteda valid expression of citizenship, her subjects obscured the participation of womenin their activities, even though women contributed to the Port Folio and otherjournals, and created distinct male-only spaces (for example, by denying womenentry into the Athenaeum).

In this utterly convincing account, Kaplan pays close attention to the specificlocal settings of literary production and publication. Her close reading of printedand manuscript sources subtly teases meaning out of often opaque material. Sheis also prudent to note that the immediate influence of these men of letters onAmerican culture and politics was limited. Kaplan is reluctant, however, to statemore explicitly how her work’s thorough attention to the intersection of sensi-bility, partisan politics, and literature might reconfigure readers’ understanding ofthese distinct fields of study, though readers interested in any of these subjects willbenefit greatly from reading her work.

Charles Warren Center Albrecht Koschnik

A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica. By Thomas M. Allen. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North CarolinaPress, 2008. Pp. xiii, 275. $22.95.)

This book stands at the intersection between literature exploring the developmentof nationalism and studies in sociology and social history that examine thecomplexity of modern temporal consciousness. Thomas M. Allen embraces theconnection between temporality and national identity made by political theoristslike Benedict Anderson, but he challenges the notion “that time, as experienced inthe modern world, is essentially homogenous, and thus constitutes a homogenizing


force in the formation of modern national states” (4). Allen instead argues thatmultiple, overlapping temporalities shaped how intellectuals from Thomas Jeffer-son to Ralph Waldo Emerson defined American national identity.

Following an opening section that analyzes the importance of time in earlyimaginative constructions of the nation, Allen structures the remainder of hisbook as two pairs of chapters. In two of these, the author surveys the contours ofmechanical time and deep geological time, while the other two chapters examinethe ways in which intellectuals deployed these temporal modes in creating theirvisions for the nation.

The chapter on Emerson with which Allen concludes the volume is instructiveas a case study of how temporality was an essential component of narrativeconstructions of national identity. Allen argues that Emerson was deeply influ-enced by the relatively new ideas of geologists, whose work expanded the age of theearth from thousands to millions of years. This new chronology allowed Emersonto argue that, with the past too deep fully to comprehend and the future extendingbeyond the bounds of human civilization, only a commitment to the social worldof the present had real meaning. More important than Emerson’s particular visionfor the nation, though, is what it demonstrates about how particular temporalitiesmake particular social worlds possible. Thus, understanding the multiplicity oftemporalities at play in nineteenth-century America is central to understanding thecompeting national identities that emerged from them.

Allen draws on a diverse set of sources ranging from paintings, to materialculture, to literature in order to argue for the centrality of time, along with space,in the imaginative constructions of the American nation. His use of materialculture analysis in his chapter on mechanical time is particularly useful and allowshim to begin answering questions about the relevancy of the ideas he discusses tothose outside of the intelligentsia. At times, though, Allen’s heavy focus on thework of intellectuals leaves the reader wondering what role the texts he describeshad in a broader construction of American nationalism. This sense of parochialismalso extends to the fact that, apart from Jefferson, Allen draws almost entirely fromNorthern sources, predominantly from the Northeast. Although arguments existfor leaving the South out of the volume, doing so begs the question of how usefulit is to say that the intellectuals discussed developed competing visions for a trulynational identity. Moreover, that Allen does not explore what role the heteroge-neous temporalities he describes played in the refashioning of national identityfollowing the Civil War leaves open an important venue for further exploration.

University of South Carolina Ehren K. Foley


Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism. By Eliza-beth D. Blum. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Pp. xiii, 194.$34.95.)

On the thirtieth anniversary of the crisis at Love Canal, the author of this studypresents a timely reexamination of the controversial event that made “hazardouswaste” a household word in North America. In this study, Elizabeth D. Blumchallenges and redefines the traditional narrative, providing an in-depth andillustrative portrait of this important episode in American history.

Blum begins her examination by contextualizing the Love Canal residents’activism, fueled by the discovery that their working-class neighborhood andelementary school in Niagara Falls, New York, were built upon an old toxic wastedump previously owned by Hooker (now Occidental) Chemical Company. Afterlearning about the toxic soup brewing beneath their homes, working-class women(including Lois Gibbs) turned to the media to publicize their story to pressureskeptical and reluctant government officials to relocate the residents. Unlike manyprevious studies, Blum widens the lens to include the predominantly AfricanAmerican apartment dwellers who were marginalized by race, class, and theirstatus as renters within a contested landscape defined by the interests of the LoveCanal Homeowners Association. Blum also incorporates the efforts of the well-educated, middle-class Ecumenical Task Force, which coupled a history of activ-ism with an ecological language grounded in the biblical concept of stewardship,and a broader understanding that Love Canal was “not only a local problem, buta global problem” (110). Upon this contested terrain, Blum reveals the tensionsthat shaped the residents’ goals while defining the scope of their activism.

Converging at the intersection of race, class, and gender, Blum tackles manyunresolved questions about the controversy, while providing an excellent surveyof the rhetoric and methods of a diverse group of affected residents. She addressesone of the most critical questions circling around this story: Why were women soprominently involved in this crisis? Here Blum demonstrates an unexpected flu-idity in the gendered rhetoric employed by the activists, revealing how the womenof Love Canal relied upon a deliberate maternalist language to engage the media,ultimately recognizing that they “needed constant media coverage to gain theattention of politicians and the public” (97).

Building on her gendered assessment of the saga, Blum explores how theintersections of race and class not only shaped the residents’ objectives, but also the“official” response from the government. Placing this story within the broaderhistorical context of twentieth-century reform movements, such as civil rights and


feminism, she illuminates how “environmental activism serves as a lens throughwhich historians can examine the extent to which different segments of thepopulation absorbed the ideas, goals, and attitudes of other social movements” (2).

Incorporating a rich collection of interviews with the affected residents, news-paper accounts, and legal records into a series of historical “snapshots” that shedlight on the activists’ struggles and tactics, Blum’s approach is unique and refresh-ing. Her analysis of a multifaceted story is sophisticated and nuanced. In the end,Blum weaves an elegant tapestry as she skillfully portrays a watershed moment inAmerican environmental history.

D’Youville College Terrianne K. Schulte

Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of ScottishCulture. By Elaine Breslaw. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press,2008. Pp. ix, 348. $55.00.)

This new biography on Dr. Alexander Hamilton is a very well-crafted book on“the other Alexander Hamilton” and a highly useful work that paints a portraitfor historians about life in mid-eighteenth-century British North America. Thebook is professionally done and provides readers with a much more complicatedman than previous historiography has shown.

Hamilton has been author Elaine Breslaw’s subject for some time, and she haspublished several articles on various aspects of his life that are fleshed out here aspart of the biography. She does an excellent job in setting the context for Hamil-ton’s life in early-eighteenth-century Scotland and especially for the influence ofHamilton’s father, both on the boy and on contemporary Scottish thought con-cerning religion, political economy, and culture. Breslaw also does a highly com-mendable job in illustrating other influences on young Hamilton, especially thebroad and sophisticated formal education he received as a minister’s son and amember of the Scottish gentry. Moreover, she explains why Hamilton decided tomigrate to the colonies, especially the influence his older brother, who was alreadysettled in Maryland, had in this decision. She also informs the readers about hisfinancial difficulties early in his residence there and the life he carved out ofprovincial society through his practice as a doctor, his marriage to the well-placedPeggy Delany, and his establishment of Annapolis’s Tuesday Club.

Breslaw’s work, however, is much more than a good narrative of Hamilton’slife. For those who know Hamilton strictly as the snobbish and ethnocentriccultural observer traveling north from Maryland in the 1740s, Breslaw demon-strates that the man was infinitely more complex than that. In fact, her biography


is a window through which to view eighteenth-century Scotland as the ScottishEnlightenment impacted that society. Hamilton’s life is also an example of theScottish Enlightenment’s effect on Scottish immigrants to the colonies and,perhaps most importantly, the influence that these Scottish immigrants had onBritish North America. Readers come to understand, for example, that Scotland’seconomy was so weak that even educated individuals such as Hamilton had tomigrate at times. Readers also find out how different British American culture wasfrom that in Europe when they realize how often Hamilton had to sue to havemoney paid to him for medical practice he delivered. Breslaw further employsHamilton as an example of European gentry transplanted to North America,including very strong political ideas about religious toleration, quasi-capitalisticeconomic thought, and political rights centered on a parliamentary representationthat had already taken a strong hold in Great Britain.

In short, this is a highly readable, well-researched, and well-written biographyof a man who was important to the development of Maryland and colonialAmerican society, yet has heretofore been very little known outside of his travelwritings.

Henry Ford Community College Hal Friedman

The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. By Stephen Budiansky. (New York, N.Y.:Viking, 2008. Pp. 332. $27.95.)

This moving book is all true with nothing new. The author examines his titlephrase in fascinating detail, but his theme beats a dead horse. It can be found inseveral other recent books: the brutality of Southern racism as ex-Confederatesredeemed their states through a combination of individual violence, terroristgroups like the Ku Klux Klan and White League, superior organization and legalacumen, and political strategy. The colorful old heroes and villains dominate.Among the former are Adelbert Ames, Mississippi’s carpetbagger governor; PrinceRivers, a black South Carolina aristocrat; Major Lewis Merrill, U. S. Cavalry; andLouisiana’s Albert T. Morgan with his African American wife. The villains includeEdgefield County’s Benjamin R. Tillman and a host of murderous whites in SouthCarolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Stephen Budiansky rightly calls his work “popular history” (10). Although hereproduces abundant primary sources and relies on some of the best recentscholarship, Budiansky offers no original interpretation or thesis. Readers ofbooks by Richard N. Current, Eric Foner, Willie Lee Rose, Kenneth M. Stampp,and dozens of other authorities will find nothing surprising here. Missing from


this book is a nuanced treatment of the best postrevisionist scholars, such asRichard Abbott and Lawrence Powell. Some carpetbaggers took whatever theycould grab. Not all scalawags were racial egalitarians. Some black officials wereincompetent (not surprising for those recently emancipated) or corrupt, like somany white politicians in the Gilded Age.

There are few Americans who would deny the author’s argument. None canchallenge his evidence, aside from the members of white supremacist organiza-tions and the lunatic fringe of the Sunbelt, an irony duly acknowledged by theauthor in his closing pages. A more important unasked question is why whiteSoutherners, utterly defeated on the battlefield and in the political arena and theonly Americans to lose a war until Vietnam, were able to reclaim their states andregion in a dozen years or less after Appomattox. Even for jaded Reconstructionscholars it remains a depressing story, epitomized by the disappearance in Budi-ansky’s conclusion of Hamburg, South Carolina.

A great book could be written on this question, but not by the currentgeneration of liberal academics, or able popularizers like Budiansky. For Northernauthors it would mean taking a hard look at one’s ancestors, and asking why, aftersacrificing so much blood and wealth, the victorious Union turned away andallowed whites in the conquered region to handle a racial problem that was hardlyunique to the South? Given what soon happened in slave states that did notsecede, like Maryland and Kentucky, or the later race riots, such as those inSpringfield, Illinois, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, whites in the Deep South were only theleading edge of a response to the American dilemma that began during Recon-struction and continued well into the twentieth century. Judging by the recentpresidential campaign, we have not yet reached an epiphany or even begun thediscussion.

University of Massachusetts–Boston Michael B. Chesson

Women and Slavery, Volume 2: The Modern Atlantic. Edited by Gwyn Campbell,Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008.Pp. xxvi, 329. $30.00.)

In one of the final essays in this anthology, titled “Re-Modeling Slavery as ifWomen Mattered,” Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson assert that their goalis “not simply to add women to the mixture in order to achieve mainstreamstatus” but to put the female slave experience at center stage (253). This bookdoes exactly that by bringing together a dozen well-written and deeply researchedarticles about slave (and sometimes freed) women in Jamaica, Louisiana, Brazil,


the American Southeast, North and South Carolina, the French Caribbean, andBarbados, as well as an introductory essay linking the various strands togetherand the concluding article above. The essays reveal the unique role of slave womenin a number of ways, as mothers, caregivers, and objects of owners’ lust. Theyillustrate how women resisted their owners in a variety of ways; one of the themesin several of the essays is how women resisted bondage by elaborating “ritual andbelief systems, adapting and integrating elements both from their homelands andfrom Europe—notably Christianity.” In a provocative essay by Barbara Krau-thamer, female slaves in early South Carolina and Georgia also resisted by runningaway to live with Creek Indians, integrating into Creek society. Apparently blackmen who ventured into the Indian territory were killed.

The quest for freedom is the subject of several essays about Caribbeanbondage. Bernard Moitt explains how in the French colonies it was primarilyfemale slaves who became the major beneficiaries of rachet (redemption) wherebyblacks could purchase their freedom from their owners for a fixed sum. Omittedin these essays, however, is a discussion of a different type of “redemption,” theone in Spanish colonies, including Cuba, where Africans had the legal right ofcoartación, purchasing their own freedom or that of their children by agreeing topay an owner an initial fixed sum and the balance in installments as determinedby prevailing market values. Nonetheless, the volume provides an importantperspective of slavery in the Americas.

Ironically, within these articles many themes are elaborated upon—even thosethat are focused on infant mortality, infanticide, prolonged nursing practiceslengthening intervals between pregnancies, and taboos against the resumption ofintercourse after giving birth—that argue for an integration rather than a sepa-ration of the topic of women and slavery. Kenneth Morgan’s fine analysis of“Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica” tells readers about the onerouswork demands on sugar plantations and the lack of proper nutrition as the causeof heavy infant mortality rather than “agency [a word that should be exiled fromthe vocabulary of historians] of slave women in resisting biological reproductionas a political statement against the system of slavery” (29). Similar are the findingsof Richard Follett in his excellent article about slave women in the sugar parishesof Louisiana. Moreover, the essays concerning slaves and the law could morefruitfully focus on both men and women. In all, however, the anthology raises anumber of important questions and provides scholarship of the highest quality ona subject that has too often been omitted from early studies of slavery.

University of North Carolina at Greensboro Loren Schweninger


From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in theNineteenth Century. By John T. Cumbler. (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 238. $49.95.)

In the abolition movement, New England’s chapter was the most diverse andproduced many leading figures. In this short and legible book, the author seeks tounderstand these radical reformers on their own terms by focusing on two centralfigures: the lesser-known physician Henry Ingersol Bowditch and the writer andactivist Julia Ward Howe. Based on their writings, and following their social andpolitical networks and activities, John T. Cumbler argues that the abolitionistmovement was much larger in scope and influence than previously thought andwas committed to social justice for all people throughout the nineteenth century.

The movement did not fade with the Civil War as some historians contend, norwas its continuity limited to the suffragist movement. Antebellum religious zealfor perfectionism was only one dimension of the abolitionists’ beliefs; the othermanifested itself in the language of natural rights that permeated their writings.Rather than disappearing from the historical stage, abolitionists led the way inexpanding on Locke’s ideas of natural rights and advocated for an activist statethat would ensure “decent housing, health care, safe and well paying job, prisonreform, and equal rights at home and abroad” (1).

Cumbler describes the building of this abolitionist community through friend-ship, family, and professional links, abolitionists’ heroic role in rescuing capturedslaves, and their disagreements on racial and gender equality after the war. Heunderscores Howe’s activism, but points to Bowditch as the best example of thetrue spirit of the movement.

After thirty-two years of struggle, Bowditch succeeded in convincing the Mas-sachusetts Medical Society, over which he presided, to consider women doctorsfor membership. He demanded government action in providing a clean environ-ment to ensure citizens’ health. Consequently, Bowditch combined his profes-sional and political goals, for which he fought all his life.

In the strong conclusion of the book, the author depicts the Progressives, manyof whom were children of abolitionists (e.g., Jane Addams, Florence Kelley), asstraying from the abolitionist ideals of equality and social justice. The failure ofReconstruction and the influence of social Darwinism legalized hierarchy insociety and relieved the middle class from any responsibility for the rising inequal-ity in industrial America. The Progressives’ fight was not for equality but merelyfor ensuring merit-based access to that hierarchy. Though the abolitionists viewedthe state as promoter and protector of natural rights, the Progressives were


interested in checking government corruption. However, the Progressives inher-ited from the abolitionists the quest for social justice (for immigrants, workers,women, and children), and abolitionist influence is evident in the founding of theNAACP. If readers follow Cumbler’s thesis to its logical conclusion, the Progres-sive movement was an aberration to American reformers’ pursuit of equality.

The weakness of this otherwise fine book is that although Bowditch is at itscenter, it is neither his biography nor a collective biography of the New Englandmovement. However, it contributes to readers’ understanding of the abolitionistmovement and the ways in which a reform movement is formed, transformed, andable to retain influence.

Hamline University Nurith Zmora

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust.(New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. xviii, 346. $27.95.)

Historians and enthusiasts have long repeated the figure of 620,000 deaths for theAmerican Civil War, but rarely have they probed what those deaths actually meantto the men and families who survived the war. In this book, the author not onlycorrects these prior omissions, but does so with verve, creativity, and elegance.This is, quite simply, one of the best books ever written on the Civil War. Inexploring death in its myriad facets, Drew Gilpin Faust reminds readers that eachone of the dead had a family, had comrades, and had an actual body that neededto be buried someplace.

Faust’s guiding metaphor is that death was “work,” that Americans had tolearn to die, to kill, and to mourn in a new world of dislocation and anonymity.Americans of the period became obsessed with the notion of a “good death,”meaning one that would ensure spiritual salvation for the dying, and thereby ameasure of comfort to the living. Survivors would later turn to new ideas aboutthe afterlife (specifically a more familial vision of heaven) and spiritualism to copewith loss on a previously unimaginable scale. At the same time, soldiers oftenstruggled with their new obligations to kill and needed to be reassured that whatthey were doing was in some way socially acceptable and not a sin.

Although readers might expect a book about death to deal solely with theemotional and spiritual ramifications, Faust also details the tremendous logisticalchallenges that so many dead entailed. She describes how Northerners and Con-federates struggled with the sheer mass of bodies and devised new modes ofembalming and transport to bring men home. Confederate women suffered fromshortages of appropriate mourning clothes, while women in the North found new


mourning fashions in the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Both sides worried aboutthe problem of finding, naming, and ultimately reburying unknown soldiers, andshockingly nearly half of the dead were never identified. Faust elegantly shows theways that the individual dead were transformed after the war into the “Civil WarDead,” a political force to be reckoned with throughout the Gilded Age.

Death touched nearly every American during the Civil War era, and by remind-ing readers of this Faust brings home the horrors of the war anew. Whetherdescribing mothers who spent years searching for sons or surviving soldiersforever haunted, she brings a sensitivity to her writing, a reminder that each deathis a tragedy, and that collectively these deaths helped to shape American cultureand the American psyche for generations.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County Anne Sarah Rubin

Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives. By Michael W.Flamm and David Steigerwald. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,2008. Pp. vi, 211. $19.95.)

There are several ways to teach history. Two of the most proven are through theuse of original documents and the comparison of various historical viewpoints.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers has produced a series of classroom textsdesigned to combine these two teaching tools. The result is a series of usefulbooks that look at a specific historical topic, an event, or a time period. This isone such book. It includes two insightful essays. The first, by David Steigerwald,looks at the debate (and often the conflict) between the liberals and the radicalsduring the decade. The second essay, by Michael W. Flamm, analyzes the liberal-conservative debate in the 1960s with a keen eye toward today’s liberal-conservative distinctions and divisions. Each essay is followed by a series ofdocuments that illustrates some of the most important events explained in theessay. At least for this offering, the format works. This is, in fact, an excellent toolfor the undergraduate classroom.

Steigerwald’s essay is entitled “The Liberal-Radical Debates of the 1960s.”Steigerwald’s earlier monograph on the 1960s was one of the most insightful (andperhaps overlooked) of the glut of books on that volatile decade to hit the shelvesin the 1990s. Here, Steigerwald blames the failed promises of liberalism for thecollapse of the 1960s liberal coalition; he views that decade’s radicalism asnothing less than a full-throated assault on every realm of liberal authority. He isalso good at analyzing the relationship between the New Left and the Establish-ment Liberals and their eventual split over the war in Vietnam. These analyses


may not be particularly new in the history of the 1960s, but Steigerwald explainsthe points clearly and directly.

Steigerwald’s choice of documents is full of the usual suspects, including “ThePort Huron Statement” and LBJ’s “Johns Hopkins Speech.” But there are someinteresting additions, particularly Paul Potter’s “Name the System.” In this antiwarspeech, Potter, then the president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),made it clear that it was the nation’s liberals who were conducting the awful warin Vietnam and, thus, it was American liberalism that was flawed. Another choice,an excerpt from Rights in Conflict: Chicago’s Seven Brutal Days, is a graphicblow-by-blow account of the clash between police and protest marchers in front ofChicago’s Hilton Hotel during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Flamm spends most of his essay on the debates between 1960s liberals andconservatives by identifying various historical events and then applying conser-vative and liberal analyses to those events. There is some tedium here. Thosetopics were already covered in Steigerwald’s essay, albeit from differentviewpoints—and at times Flamm falls into a sort of laundry list of events. ButFlamm’s real contribution is his focus on crime (law and order in the streets) as thereal issue that brought on the conservative backlash and the eventual birth of themodern conservative movement. He draws this conclusion from his own previouswork on crime and unrest in the 1960s. Flamm follows a direct line from the racialunrest that began with the Watts riot in 1965 to the rise of Ronald Reagan,George Wallace, and finally law and order as the bread and butter issue of themodern conservative movement.

Flamm’s choice of documents includes the “Sharon Statement” (designed tooffset the “Port Huron Statement” in the first set of documents), the “Principlesof the John Birch Society,” Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech, andspeeches by Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. All are useful, even necessary, tothe discussion.

One primary concern is that undergraduates using documents almost alwaysneed context. It would have been better had each document been preceded by ashort paragraph explaining the document, its purpose, even perhaps why thedocument was chosen. Most of the documents are addressed in some form in thetwo essays, but not all. And even some of those that are referenced are not givena full explanation.

Otherwise, this is a useful source. The two essays are useful and clear. And thedocuments are important to the discussion of the period.

Xavier University of Louisiana Gary A. Donaldson


The Great War and America: Civil-Military Relations in World War I. By NancyGentile Ford. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2008. Pp. xii, 191.$49.95.)

In this study, the author claims that “the traditional interaction between thearmed forces of the United States and the larger society significantly transformedduring the Great War,” requiring that one “take into account broader social andcultural issues” and “political, economic, and psychological aspects that affectwar and society” (xi). But Nancy Gentile Ford does little to show the essence ofpre-World War I civil-military relations, making assertions of novelty in the era ofWorld War I harder to prove. She emphasizes, among other things, an “unparal-leled presence of the military in American civil society” in World War I, thelarge-scale draft of young males into military service, the greater power of thefederal government, and much else (xi).

The book gives overviews of the “Preparedness Movement,” the militarydrafting and training of “citizen soldiers,” the mobilization of public opinionthrough propaganda and suppression of dissent, the cultivation of science andtechnology for war, and the use of the Army in managing demobilization and thereturn of temporary soldiers to peacetime pursuits. In nearly all cases, the book,based mostly on secondary literature, is derivative, drawing on important andwell-recognized studies by historians such as John Garry Clifford and MichaelPearlman, yet neglecting some others, such as Michael Neiberg’s study of theorigins of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The latter is an inexplicableomission, as Neiberg sees the emergence of ROTC as manifesting a nonelitistimpulse, which is at odds with what Ford argues and is thus essential to engage.The work’s strongest section draws on Ford’s earlier book, Americans All,about foreign-born soldiers in the U.S. armed forces. There are selected docu-ments at the end, suggesting possible use of the book in college courses, butsome surprising problems and debatable interpretations make this an unlikelyapplication.

This book is cheapened, and its argument subverted, by a shockingly largenumber of common and easily avoidable errors in spelling, grammar, syntax, andusage. Especially in the first half, there are often multiple errors on the samepage—sometimes even in the same sentence. Misspellings such as “throws” for“throes,” the “reigns of government” for “reins,” “Oswalt” Garrison Villard for“Oswald,” “Greenville Clark” for “Grenville,” and “Chevey Chase” for “ChevyChase,” Maryland, undermine confidence in the work as a whole. Sloppy lapsessuch as “induced” for “inducted,” “heir status” for “their status,” “Senate


Chamberlain” for “Senator Chamberlain,” “well-entranced army officers” for“well entrenched,” “exasperating” for “exacerbating,” “ramped” for “rampant,”and “war statues” for “war statutes” compound the problem. Commas aremisused, muddling the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers.Textual idiosyncrasies abound, such as quasi-Germanic capitalization of wordssuch as “Shrapnel,” which at least derives from the name of a real person, and“Howitzer” and “Mortar,” which do not.

This is a narrative drawn from secondary works spoiled by avoidable errors.

Kansas State University Donald J. Mrozek

Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. By Colin Grant. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 530. $27.95.)

Born in 1887 in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey became one of the most prominentAfrican American figures of the twentieth century. In this important new work,independent historian Colin Grant offers rich detail regarding Garvey’s public andprivate lives. As Grant, an employee of the BBC, correctly notes, writing onGarvey tends either to lionize or demonize him. Grant strikes a more measuredtone. He recognizes Garvey’s considerable impact in the United States and aroundthe world without losing sight of his shortcomings.

Grant rightly places Garvey in an international context. Garvey grew up fondof British ceremony yet also painfully aware of the crushing burden of colonial-ism. His sense of racial injustice deepened during two years in Europe, where,Grant notes, “Garvey had come to a broad understanding of himself and . . .decided to hitch himself to the Negro race” (51). Garvey returned to Jamaica,founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and moved to theUnited States in 1916. From there, he reached out to leaders and groups aroundthe world through personal travels or sending emissaries.

The UNIA drew supporters partly by promising payment for members’ funer-als, but its emphasis was firmly on changing circumstances for blacks around theworld in the present. Most blacks, Grant writes, had little understanding of Africaor its history. Many saw Africa and their race as an embarrassment. Garvey,however, highlighted Africans’ many important achievements over the centuriesand instilled a sense of pride through his considerable oratorical skills, elaborateceremonies, and emphasis on economic independence through endeavors such asthe Black Star Line, his attempt to build a shipping company to promote peopleand goods to and from Africa. “The time for cowardice is past,” Garvey forcefully


declared. “The old-time Negro has gone—buried with Uncle Tom” (159). Thetime was right for such a bold assertion, as African Americans had suffered fordecades after the Civil War and, in the wake of World War I, experienced a terribleoutbreak of racial violence throughout the United States.

Garvey’s philosophy and tactics drew fire from whites and black alike. Grant’sdeft chronicling of these feuds makes for some of the most interesting sections ofthe book. African American leaders W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph hadlittle use for Garvey’s pomp and questioned his racial exclusivity. Conversely,government officials, notably J. Edgar Hoover, worried that Garvey was a threat.The federal government eventually ordered Garvey’s deportation on dubious mailfraud charges.

Grant also offers a fascinating look into Garvey’s marriages and other personalrelationships. At times Grant provides too many details, but for the most part heuses these sections to paint a rich portrait of a flawed man. Grant has minednumerous primary and secondary sources to produce what will likely remain thedefinitive biography of Garvey for some time to come; scholars of African Ameri-can history, the United States in the early twentieth century, and the AfricanDiaspora will find this a richly rewarding work.

Virginia Commonwealth University Timothy N. Thurber

Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from CentralAmerica. By Todd Greentree. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International,2008. Pp. xiii, 196. $49.95.)

The conduct of American interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador stands instark contrast to previous campaigns in Vietnam and current operations in Iraq.With options limited by the legacies of the recent debacle in Southeast Asia, butstill motivated by Cold War fears of Communist expansion, American leaders ofthat era struggled to find effective ways to conduct counterinsurgency in LatinAmerica with relatively little direct U.S involvement. Todd Greentree provides athorough and provocative study of their resulting policies and actions, enriched byhis own experience as a Foreign Service Officer in the region. He also analyzes thegrowth and conduct of the insurgencies there and the complex interplay betweendomestic and foreign influences that shaped the uprisings.

Though, by the end of the Reagan Administration, the U.S. could claim somesuccess in both countries, no party in either conflict can escape scathing criticismfrom Greentree. Both insurgencies were fanned by the Carter administration’s


foreign policy that cut aid to governments because of human rights concerns,providing “an object lesson in political incompetence” because it “violated thewing-walker rule of not letting go of one thing until you have a firm grip onsomething else” (65). However, Ronald Reagan and his advisors also struggled tobalance ends, ways, and means effectively in Latin America, culminating in theembarrassment of the Iran-Contra affair. Repressive governments in both coun-tries fueled the insurgencies as well. But mistakes and miscalculations were not themonopoly of only one side, as exemplified by the Sandinistas getting their Revo-lution voted out of power in 1990. The book is also filled with many astuteobservations about irregular warfare, offering insightful discussions about thedifficulties of applying decisive force, the fact that time is not always on the sideof insurgents, the importance of legitimacy, and the tradeoffs between escalationand protraction.

It is incorrect to state that the U.S. military had no counterinsurgency doctrinebefore invading Iraq in 2003. Ironically, it was based on the model of El Salvador,with a small footprint and little involvement by major conventional forces. Unfor-tunately, American leaders and policymakers ignored or assumed away relevantinsights from other previous interventions, placing the occupation force in asituation for which it was unprepared. The author is unfairly critical of the newdoctrine currently being applied in Iraq for not relying more on Central Americanexperience and not understanding the imbalance it is designed to correct. He alsoexpects such operational military guidance to provide more direction for nationalstrategy and policy, though that is outside its purview. However, American poli-cymakers do need to be more aware of the precedents from irregular warfare inNicaragua and El Salvador, and they, like anyone else who wants to learn aboutthose conflicts, would profit greatly from reading this somewhat overpriced butvery useful study.

U.S. Army War College Conrad Crane

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West. By John CraigHammond. (Charlottesville, Va.: The University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. xiv,247. $35.00.)

This publication seizes the issues surrounding the Missouri Compromise in anengaging and forthright manner, dissolving the idea that somehow the sleepinggiant of slavery suddenly awoke. He argues it had never been asleep, but ratherthat the resolve reached in 1820 came after an extended series of political struggles


between federal and state power, which could no longer be ignored. John CraigHammond’s work is admirably focused on the slowly developing story. Becausethe author is unwavering in his clearly supported argument, the reader is never ledastray into peripheral issues. His accomplishment is especially noteworthy in adissertation-born study that has escaped its early trappings. The positive side ofthis birthright is the presence of extensive notes, reflected in 27 percent of thevolume’s pages dedicated to documentation. Giving this a bibliography wouldhave been helpful, but that is a minor caveat.

Thomas Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” was really not an accurate metaphor,but rather, as Hammond depicts it, a raging five alarm fire fed by the nationalgovernment’s use of slavery as an inducement for westward expansion into placeslike Louisiana and Missouri. Likewise, the expansionists manipulated this policytoward their own ends of increasing the areas open to slave labor. Perhaps the“slave power conspiracy” was already afoot. As Hammond insists: “The Missouricompromise would only confirm the outcome of a process long underway . . .”(126). Jefferson’s “wolf” had broken free to bite all within reach. Land-hungryVirginians eagerly leapfrogged Kentucky into Missouri where land was cheap,legal titles clear, and slavery protected. Families from the western areas of Virginialike Bath County with a scarcity of affordable arable land emigrated in search oftracts for their twelve sons and daughters or, in another case, reached a placewhere slaves could be useful to their owners or hired out as a source of incomepaid for their labor.

The author’s argument is developed in a model fashion by precisely marshal-ling the evidence when discussing Missouri, for example, while carefully avoidingthe tendency to blur the lines by sliding over into a closely related but separatediscussion about Louisiana. This not only makes for clarity but it also strengthensthe rationale because it is so clearly presented without regurgitating the samematerial. An indirect testament to the monograph’s sharp focus is the RodneyDangerfield (the comedian whose tagline was, “I don’t get no respect!”) of thestory—Maine. The solitary mention of the Pine Tree State refers in passing to the“expansionists holding Maine’s statehood hostage” (167).

Congratulations to the author and to the editors of the Jeffersonian Americaseries at the University of Virginia Press for breathing life into a subject long sinceconsidered moribund. One hopes that new editions of textbooks will quicklymodify their discussion of the Missouri Compromise to reflect Hammond’sinsights.

Marietta College James H. O’Donnell


Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness. By Joshua David Hawley. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 318. $35.00.)

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that historians in democracies tend to look to largeforces and movements to explain the course of events, yet Americans haveretained a fascination for individuals. Not only has popular culture become onefocused on celebrity, often lavishing attention on those whose only claim to fameis that they are famous, but the focal point of American political culture is on theone institution that is inherently personal: the presidency. Presidential biographiesand autobiographies frequently appear on bestseller lists, win prizes, and serve asthe basis for video “docudramas,” and some presidents obviously draw moreattention than others. Abraham Lincoln, of course, holds the record, being thesubject of far more books than any other president (or any other person of the lastmillennium). But George Washington continues to receive the attention of schol-arly and popular biographers, and David McCullough’s lives of Harry Trumanand John Adams have done much to raise awareness of and sympathy for thesemen. Another president who draws continuing attention is Theodore Roosevelt.Biographies of the Rough Rider continue to pour forth from publishers, mostretelling his life and work in a chronological format with varying degrees of detail.

Joshua David Hawley has made a contribution to this literature with a differentkind of biography, offering a fresh interpretation of Roosevelt. Marshalling theevidence of Roosevelt’s own words—written and spoken—as well as his actionsover the course of a busy life, Hawley presents a compelling portrait of his subjectas an apostle of civic virtue. In contrast to Woodrow Wilson, who wanted apolitics focused on providing abundant opportunities for individual choice (whatwould become the spirit of modern America), Theodore preached a “warriorrepublicanism” in which citizens would strive to “live better, to be more, to aspireto something nobler” (267). The author demonstrates how Roosevelt’s early life,experience in the West, and political career all reflected this commitment to analmost Spartan-like emphasis on civic virtue.

Hawley finds much to admire in his subject’s teaching, as well as much tocriticize, but one cannot read this book without a sense that Roosevelt’s “warriorrepublicanism” was the road not taken. It was overshadowed by the loweredexpectations of Wilsonian “choice.” It was Wilson who ultimately shaped themodern presidency (through his disciple, Theodore’s cousin Franklin), giving thenation a politics of interest groups, autonomous individualism, and no higherpurpose than the self. Perhaps the celebrity culture of today has deep roots inWilsonianism’s focus on the self rather than T.R.’s “righteousness.”


Hawley is an impressive researcher but an uneven writer, at times eloquent andoccasionally ungrammatical. He usually lets Roosevelt speak for himself, althoughoccasionally he tells rather than shows what Teddy was talking about. A certainamount of gloss is inevitable in a one-volume biography of so large a figure, andHawley uses good judgment in deciding when to provide telling detail and whento summarize and interpret for the reader. This is a persuasive book.

Miami University (Ohio) Ryan J. Barilleaux

A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush: Dreams ofPerfectibility. By Joan Hoff. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Pp. 308. $24.99.)

In this remorseless critique of U.S. foreign policy since 1917, the author arguesthat American presidents have “cut ‘deals with the devil’ in order to maintain anexpanding list of global goals,” and “failed to acknowledge the often-dirty dip-lomatic deals they made, because to do so would undermine their own and thecountry’s belief in American virtue and exceptionalism” (2). Seeking not only todefend the physical security of the United States and its allies but to perfect theworld by promoting freedom and democracy (and capitalism) abroad, Americanleaders and their agents have essentially made what Joan Hoff brilliantly terms“Faustian bargains”—colluding with dictators, corrupting or defying democraticprocesses, terrorizing and brutalizing civilian populations, ignoring or violatinghuman rights—including the rights of ethnic minorities—practicing torture andspying on American citizens—often with ironic or even tragic consequences, andall at the cost of America’s soul.

Hoff traces the history of such Faustian bargains and their unwished foroutcomes from Wilson’s failed stab at a new world order in 1917–1919, to the“independent internationalism” of the Republicans in the 1920s, to the imperialpresidency of Franklin Roosevelt in World War II, to Cold War leadership fromTruman to George H. W. Bush, on through the post-Cold War stumblings of BillClinton and George W. Bush. A chance to break from the Faustian delusion ofperfecting the world came when Richard Nixon, whom Hoff has already exam-ined at length (Nixon Reconsidered. New York: Basic Books, 1994), dared tobargain openly with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Butconservatives and moral perfectionists found détente outrageous and broughtdown not only Nixon but also Gerald Ford for pursuing Nixon and Kissinger’spolicies. Cold War ideologues known as “neocons” rallied behind Reagan againstthe “evil empire” and for the contras, but they did not totally dominate foreign


policymaking until the presidency of George W. Bush, when attacks on the TwinTowers of the World Trade Center and Pentagon gave them the pretext they werelooking for to convince the evangelical Bush it was God’s will to launch a“preventive” attack on Saddam Hussein and confront Iran. (Suffice it to say thatHoff’s final chapter and epilogue on “The Legacy of George Bush” will reinforceBush’s many critics’ worst suspicions and fears.)

Hoff bases this well-written narrative on solid research and a clear moralstandpoint. Her insightful analysis of the transformation of the modern Americanpresidency since Franklin Roosevelt, and of the postmodern presidency sinceRonald Reagan, ties in well with the story. Although there have also been somegood outcomes from U.S. policies, which she does not explore, Hoff is absolutelyright that Faustian bargains in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have producedregrettable consequences (“blowback”). The American public and its leaders—notonly historians—should ponder this excellent, disturbing book.

Illinois College Richard T. Fry

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Cam-paign. By Michael K. Honey. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008.Pp. xiii, 623. $17.95.)

The author sets forth an ambitious agenda in this work. His goal is to tell the storyof the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, using that event to connect the largercivil rights movement to the labor struggles of the 1960s. But even here the sagais often lost in the shadow cast by the final days of Dr. Martin Luther King, whowas slain while in Memphis supporting the strikers. When the striking sanitationworkers eventually achieved victory, in the form of a pay raise and more impor-tantly a dues checkoff, it was almost an afterthought. The result is a richly detailedbook that explores both the minutiae of strike negotiations and the big picture ofthe King-led civil rights movement in the late 1960s, but fails to tackle fully thechallenges of creating a narrative of the civil rights struggle in 1968.

Michael K. Honey is personally invested in his story. A civil rights activist in the1960s, he moved to Memphis in 1970 to work for civil rights and economic justicethere. His sympathy for his subjects is manifest throughout the book, detailing theharsh working conditions, discrimination, and racism that black sanitationworkers and indeed all black workers endured in Memphis, a city he characterizesas an “Urban Plantation.” Through the use of both oral histories and archivalwork, including the voluminous FBI files on King and the Southern ChristianLeadership Conference, Honey makes the strike and the movement come to life.


The author clearly believes that the civil rights movement and labor movement,particularly as economic issues became more of a focus through the Poor People’sCampaign, were working toward similar goals. King’s support for workers inMemphis was part of his larger campaign for economic justice. Yet, Honey is atpains in many places to support those connections. Many of the gains of the civilrights movement to 1968—basic civil and political rights—were enjoyed more bymiddle-class than working-class blacks. In trying to establish King as a laborleader, Honey’s argument occasionally founders. The reluctance of many blackleaders to work with white union officials, and vice versa, further weakens thisassociation. This was, after all, the year in which white working-class votersbegan abandoning the Democratic Party for George Wallace and Richard Nixon.

Especially provocative are the portraits of African Americans, especiallyyounger men, embracing Black Power instead of nonviolence. Honey repeatedlydepicts the tensions between the nonviolent SCLC and the increasingly militantBlack Power supporters threatening to “burn the city down,” but never fullyengages this subject, one which was resonating throughout the black communityand the civil rights movement at this time.

The author of this ambitious book offers a narrative of the Memphis SanitationStrike and addresses many of the important issues facing the civil rights movementin 1968. That Honey fails to develop fully all of the myriad issues in play shouldnot detract from the many accomplishments of this powerful and heartfelt work.

Kean University Jonathan Mercantini

Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention. ByFrank Kusch. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xv, 206.$16.00.)

The riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention is the stuff of legend. Whatis often described as a “police riot,” the historic clash between police and pro-testers (to the backdrop of a chorus of “the whole world is watching”), issomething that has stuck in the minds of anyone who watched those events unfoldthen, or who has since seen the violent films. The riot is still, in fact, one of thedefining moments of the various 1960s protest movements. For the past fortyyears, that film has evoked sympathy for the poor protesters, running scared, oftenbloodied, as “Chicago’s Finest” chased them down and whaled away on (whatappear to be) nothing more than kids trying to protest the war in Vietnam.

Frank Kusch tells a different story, or at least the same story from a differentangle. He has interviewed the Chicago police officers who were there, gotten their


side of the story, and made an attempt to balance the cops’ views of the eventswith that ubiquitous image of the poor protesters getting pummeled in front of theConrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue.

That certainly sounds like a winner, but there are immediate and apparentproblems—none of which are really the fault of Kusch or his method. Most of theseinterviews were done in or around 2000, some thirty-plus years after the events.With that time to reconcile, reflect, embellish, and forget, about all readers get isa clouded image of policemen who either felt justified for what they did, or denieddoing it with a repetition of “I’m sure a few went over the line, but the majority ofus just did our jobs.” There also seems to be a common refrain that the policewould never have done that; it would have jeopardized their pensions. Again,Kusch does not deserve criticism; he cannot be held responsible for the faultymemories of these retired policemen. All this reviewer could think of while readingBattleground Chicago was that someone should have done this thirty years ago.

This is not a book of interviews. It is an attempt to tell the story of the 1968riot from the standpoint of the police. And Kusch manages to do that pretty well,despite the obvious problem with the interviews. There are a number of usefulrevelations. First, the cops were, at least in part, reacting to orders from MayorRichard Daley’s office to crush the protests and protect the city and the conven-tion at all costs. Second, the cops never fired their weapons, and they did notmanhandle the protesters once they were arrested—often simply driving them toanother part of the city and releasing them. Third, the media were less thanobjective in their coverage of the events, wanting badly to show police brutality.But then again, there was plenty of that to show. And fourth, the intervieweesreadily admitted that they would often trap groups of protesters, allowing themno route of escape, and then move in from several sides and crush them.

Kusch tries to balance his police interviews with quotes and interviews from theother side—from Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, and others—butthese are mostly from secondary sources and printed recollections, and theproduct does not serve as much of a balance. The result is not that the protestleaders come off in a poor light, only that their side does not get told as well as theside of the police. There is, however, one important point that is revealed from thisside of the story: the protesters had no unity, no common leadership, and nocommon goals. Some seemed to want little more than to enjoy a good party andsleep in Grant Park, while others clearly subscribed to nonviolence and did allthey could to stay away from the carnage. Others, however, had clearly come toChicago to storm the barricades and start a revolution. The cops, by the way, sawno distinction.


Battleground Chicago is an attempt to show the other side of the battle. Ithardly does that, but it adds significantly to the story of one of the single mostviolent events in the violent 1960s.

Xavier University of Louisiana Gary Donaldson

Lincoln & The Court. By Brian McGinty. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2008. Pp. i, 375. $27.95.)

Civil War historians tend to ignore the United States Supreme Court. Legalhistorians, by contrast, tend to focus on technically arcane constitutional matters,avoiding anything that smacks of the prosaic or biographical (God forbid!), suchthat a readily digestible account of the role played by the nation’s highest tribunalduring the Civil War has eluded general readers, until the current offering fromlawyer and independent historian Brian McGinty. He treats the Supreme Courtjustices not as “cogs in an impersonal machine,” but as people, men shaped bytheir times (10). McGinty successfully demonstrates that the “Civil War was, at itsheart, a legal struggle” in which the Supreme Court factored prominently (1). Healso provides a valuable backdrop against which to consider twenty-first-centurywar powers.

The two figures who dominate this history of the Court, not surprisingly, arePresident Abraham Lincoln and the man who swore him in, Chief Justice RogerTaney. (Lincoln was the seventh president sworn in by Taney, yet all the others,like the Chief Justice, had come from the Democratic Party.) McGinty begins byintroducing the eight living justices present at Lincoln’s March 1861 inaugura-tion; Justice Peter Daniel of Virginia had recently passed away. In the next chapter,traveling somewhat annoyingly backwards in time, McGinty lays out Taney’smajority opinion in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857. Thatcase—the first of several run-ins between Taney and Lincoln—altered the wayAmericans viewed the Court and quickly elevated the profile of Abraham Lincoln,who became nationally known for his great Cooper Union speech in response tothe decision.

Through eleven chapters, McGinty alternates between coverage of the keycases before the Civil War Supreme Court—Dred Scott v. Sandford, Ex parteMerryman, Prize Cases, Ex parte Vallandigham—and other aspects of the federaljudicial system, including vacancies at the Supreme Court, personalities on thebench, and the federal circuit additions and congressional reorganization plansthat often delayed Lincoln’s appointments. McGinty pays close attention todetails, the effect of which is as interesting (justices were confirmed almost


immediately, Justice Samuel Miller only thirty minutes after nomination) as it iscolorful (the path and plight of Southern justices during the war). Some of thecases considered, such as Ex parte Milligan in 1866 or Cummings v. Missouri in1867, came after Lincoln’s death but delivered important opinions on his warmeasures. McGinty includes an insightful afterword on the legacy of the CivilWar Court and a useful sixteen-page biographical gallery of justices. Althoughscholars of the period will find little technical legal analysis or new material(more synthesis of secondary works than original research, as the rather scantytwenty-nine pages of notes makes clear), academics and general readers alike willbe pleased with the comprehensive and compelling manner in which the Court’scentrality to the events of the Civil War is conveyed.

Yale University R. Owen Williams

When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity. ByKaren McNally. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. 232. $24.95.)

The author of this book had the interesting idea of tracing the public persona ofFrank Sinatra as a means to explore American male identity in the 1950s. Startingwith the hypothesis that the 1950s was a troubled time for male images, becausethey were so much in flux, Karen McNally positions Sinatra as a central characterin the disruption and challenge to traditional models. Slight of build, with a leanand angular face and body, the singer achieved enormous popularity largelybecause of his romantic voice.

An unlikely heartthrob, Sinatra suffered ups and downs in his career, buteventually emerged as a serious Hollywood presence, both on the screen and in thefront office. Although the author does not explore his singing style at any greatlength, she does provide a rich background of Sinatra’s political activities, hisvarious friendships, as well as his recording history, and, of course, his films. Herconclusion, which she expresses in a variety of places, is that Sinatra illuminatedthe “complexities of postwar culture and challenged dominant images of theAmerican male.” Or in a more complex version, she says, “Depicting working-class exclusion, confronting ethnic stereotyping and racial bigotry, and creating amasculine image that expressed a potent sexuality and an emotional vulnerabilityin equal measure, Sinatra presented a fascinating star persona . . .” (184).

There is nothing startling about this conclusion. It is well known that Holly-wood in the 1950s offered up a variety of male stars like Marlon Brando, JamesDean, Montgomery Clift, and many others who scarcely fit prevailing notions of


maleness. And even some of the straightest-appearing movie actors of the era werenot so straight.

What seems problematic to this reviewer are neither McNally’s conclusions noreven her analysis, which is often acute. What does trouble the reader are the long,complex, and confusing plot summaries and character descriptions of the filmsin which Sinatra starred. It is, of course, the author’s choice to do this, but thereviewer fears it adds little to an argument that is already convincing. In the bestof circumstances, plot summary is a risky thing, partly because the reader may nothave the recall of images and scenes from which the author is working. In lessfortunate circumstances, without clarity, organization, and a fluid style, this canbe a serious obstacle. Unfortunately, this is the case here. The reviewer foundhimself puzzling over passages that simply made no sense at all or demanded aconsiderable mental rewrite. Here is an example: “Sinatra’s bitterness is oftendisplayed through nonconformist behavior and an antagonistic relationship withthe press, which articles frequently connect to both his career decline andworking-class background” (23). Of course, one can guess at what this mightmean, but such problems mar an otherwise interesting work.

Ultimately, of course, it is the author’s responsibility to make herself under-stood, to strive even for elegance, or more minimally, clarity. But it is also theresponsibility of the press to edit what it publishes. Clearly this has not been thecase here. There is much of interest here. But it requires hard work.

University of Maryland James Gilbert

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction. By Mark E. Neely Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. 277. $27.95.)

This might be the “little book that could.” The author, a past recipient of thePulitzer Prize, has set out in six thematically connected chapters to change the wayhistorians view the destruction, or lack thereof, of the American Civil War. Histask is a daunting one. Mark E. Neely Jr. readily admits that nearly all Civil Warhistorians view the conflict as “bloody” and “brutal” but, to the author at least,the war should be reexamined for its remarkable restraint.

Neely sets the stage for his thesis, not in 1861, but years earlier during theMexican War by documenting widespread acts of violence committed by Ameri-can soldiers, mostly volunteers, on Mexicans. He also examines the postwarstruggle in Mexico that led to the installation of French Archduke Maximilian asemperor and his infamous “Black Decree,” which led to savage repressions of theMexican population. Neely next focuses on two 1864 raids: Confederate General


Sterling Price’s move into Missouri and Union General Phillip Sheridan’s Shenan-doah Valley campaign. The former is noteworthy due to the onset of murderousguerilla warfare in the borderlands, while the latter has often been described inmuch the same way as William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” Neelyconcludes with chapters on the atrocities of the infamous Sand Creek Massacreand the Northern outcry for reprisals due to the horrors of Andersonville prison.

On the surface, it would seem odd to focus on obvious, well-documentedexamples of warfare’s brutality as a means to highlight the “limits of destruction.”But Neely’s thesis is guided by racism, or more to the point, racial identification.He concludes that race mattered in determining the destructiveness of warfareduring the Middle Period. When battling perceived inferiors, whether Mexicansor Plains Indians, soldiers exhibited a lack of restraint, leading to brutal atrocitiescommitted upon the “enemy.” On the other hand, when white Americans battledeach other, Yankee versus Confederate, different in many ways but each consid-ering the other racially equal, Civil War soldiers showed remarkable restraint.

Neely does not downplay the loss of 620,000 lives, nor does he dismissincidents of brutality during the Civil War, but he does want historians to takeanother look at the statistics and realize that many died due to disease rather thanat the hands of the enemy. Does he convince? Only time (and the historicalprofession) will tell. The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction took thereviewer back a quarter of a century when another book offered a controversialthesis on the brutality of war—Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and theSouthern Heritage by Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson. The reviewer sus-pects many will see Neely’s latest work in much the same way: controversial,debatable, but academically engaging. One thing is certain, though. Countlessnascent historians and veteran scholars alike will be watching this “little bookthat could” change the way historians view the destructiveness of the Civil War.

College of the Ozarks C. David Dalton

A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution. ByDavid A. Nichols. (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Pp. 353. $16.00.)

President Dwight Eisenhower has fared poorly in the mainstream narrative of thecivil rights struggle. Depicted as abdicating leadership in the area of civil rights, hequietly opposed the movement through negligence and inaction. Only when anintransigent Arkansas government forced him to intervene in the Little Rockschool crisis with troops did he reluctantly affirm the Brown v. Board of Educa-tion ruling. David A. Nichols refutes this thesis in his expertly researched and


compelling history, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the CivilRights Revolution. He argues that the president’s actions in Little Rock were infact consistent with a full record of championing civil rights. A man of “extraor-dinary executive and strategic planning skills,” he desegregated Washington,D.C., and its schools and completed the task of integrating the armed forces (13).Aided by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, he appointed antisegregationistnortherners to federal judgeships, most famously Supreme Court Chief JusticeEarl Warren. An executive order creating the Committee on Government Con-tracts legally ended racial discrimination in hiring by federal contractors. Thoughthe Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were limited in scope, Nichols argues thatEisenhower deserves proper credit in securing their passage, laying a foundationfor the omnibus civil rights bills passed in 1964 and 1965.

In reconstructing Eisenhower, however, Nichols trivializes the importance ofrhetorical leadership to presidential governance. Yet, if historians have criticizedEisenhower for being vague on civil rights, it is because he was in fact ambivalent.As Nichols acknowledges, the former general was prone to disassociating himselfpublicly from contentious policy debates and studiously avoided mentioning civilrights in his speeches. The author’s argument that “[t]he preaching tradition inmany Negro churches encouraged blacks to equate passionate expression withpersonal commitment” borders on condescension, implying that African Ameri-cans had difficulty distinguishing style from substance (99). The fact is that whileEisenhower fretted over reassuring white southerners anxious about the pace anddirection of change, the actual burden of reform fell on individuals like EmmettTill, who suffered the deadly wrath of racists fearful of miscegenation, andmovement activists, who faced violent reprisals for their work.

While Eisenhower “disdained symbolic actions that might have elicited moregoodwill in the black community,” he actively courted white southern sentimentthrough appeals to states’ rights and the repeated admonishment that lawscould not change hearts and minds (113). It seems disingenuous to cast presi-dential rhetoric as something of dubious quality when Eisenhower’s own cageyuse of language demonstrated the opposite. Whether “massive resistance” toBrown would still have occurred even if Eisenhower had spoken more forcefullyfor civil rights is beside the point. His aloofness and dissemblance, coupled withhis orientation toward gradualism, effectively invited and condoned the defi-ance. The absence of the White House’s imprimatur was significant not simplybecause of its “demoralizing effect” on African Americans but also because itaffected the practical outcome of their struggle (243). This both contradicted thethrust of Eisenhower’s policies and appointments and helped establish a pattern


of unreliable support by the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson presidencies.Nonetheless, A Matter of Justice contributes to U.S. presidential and legalhistory. Moreover, in recovering a presidency whose role in the fight for civilrights has been sorely undervalued, Nichols makes a convincing case forrethinking the relationship of postwar black freedom struggles to the Eisen-hower White House.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Clarence Lang

Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution. By Mark Puls. (NewYork, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. v, 282. $26.95.)

The author of this book fills a significant void in the historiography of theAmerican Revolution and the early national period with this biography of HenryKnox, the first full treatment of Washington’s Chief of Artillery and Secretary ofWar in fifty years. Though scholars may desire greater depth and sharper analysis,this is a welcome general study that will serve as the standard Knox biography forsome time to come.

Unquestionably, Mark Puls has a fascinating subject, as the Boston-born-and-bred Knox went from bright prospects to bookseller apprentice to sturdy shop-keeper to son-in-law of the Secretary of the province of Massachusetts, whilemaintaining an active opposition to British policy, leading to service in theContinental Army and as one of Washington’s most loyal and trusted officers—allby the age of twenty-six! Knox’s rise and subsequent prominence were the resultof ambition, intelligence, application, and an extremely charming and gregariouspersonality. Though, as evinced by the title, Puls identifies the former qualities asthe keys to Knox’s prominence, his efforts are only partially successful, as readerswill likely continue to agree with contemporary and later observers who attributeKnox’s rise at least as much to his winning personality as to his abilities.

The connection with Washington was crucial to the life and career of Knox andis a central focus of this book. Puls presents an excellent portrait of the deep,warm, and intimate personal relationship between the two men. He is less con-vincing, however, on the professional relationship and may have succumbed to thecommon temptation of the biographer to exaggerate the achievements of hissubject. Certainly, Washington and Knox shared similar views and attitudesconcerning the major military and political issues of the period. Puls is on shakyground, however, in suggesting that many of Washington’s plans and policies werebased on the visionary ideas of Knox. That Washington sought and respectedKnox’s counsel is undoubted. Yet several instances, most notably his placement of


Knox as third, behind Alexander Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, inthe ranking of major generals in the provisional army during the French war scareof 1798, indicate that Washington did not consider Knox indispensable and waseven willing to see their treasured personal relationship severed rather than givepreference to Knox in this critical matter.

Puls might also have included more detailed discussion of Knox’s performancein specific military campaigns and, more particularly, of his work as Secretary ofWar, which is treated in a single chapter of only twenty pages. This is unfortunate,as Knox was at the center of the development of American military policy and ofcritical events, most notably the conflict with the Indians and British in the OhioValley, that were crucial to the success of the Washington administration.

Still, though there remains more to be told, Henry Knox is well served by Puls.Though he misses the opportunity to provide the definitive account of an over-looked figure, Puls provides a welcome addition to the literature of the revolu-tionary period, one that will have considerable appeal to the general audience.

University of Tennessee at Martin Daniel McDonough

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. By Ethan Rarick. (NewYork, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. viii, 288. $26.00.)

This study of the Donner party is a comprehensive description and narrative of theexperiences of the group of emigrants traveling to California led by George Donnerin 1846–1847. The book is suitable for the general reader, but scholars seeking ashort review of the conclusions of recent investigations of the emigrants’ travailwill also find it useful. The Donner party emigrants set out from Springfield,Illinois, in April 1846 and traveled to Independence, Missouri, where they joineda wagon train heading west on May 19, a late date to begin an overland journeyto California. Taking the Oregon Trail, the emigrants decided to follow a shortcutto their destination, the Hastings cut-off, a much-touted but untried route fromFort Bridger, Wyoming, to the California Trail. An Ohio promoter, LansfordHastings, advocated the route in a guidebook widely distributed in the Midwest.As it turned out, the route across Utah’s Wasatch Range and the Great Salt LakeDesert took three weeks longer than the commonly used route to California.

After the party of eighty-seven rejoined that trail at Elko, Nevada, in September1846, a portion of the group determined to push on across the Sierra Nevada, whereblizzards marooned it. The people trapped in the mountains became separated fromeach other, and when food supplies ran out, in desperation they resorted tocannibalism when people in the group died. Two Indians from a rescue party sent


out from Sutter’s Fort on the Sacramento River collapsed in the snow and were shotand eaten. Forty-five of the original party survived; fifteen were eaten. About halfthe surviving forty-eight ate human flesh. The ordeal ended in late April 1847 whenrescue parties brought the last of the emaciated survivors to their destination.

Ethan Rarick devotes his book to a narrative of the story and has not produceda strongly thesis-driven book, but does argue that migrants to the American Westwere engaged in a “headlong dash for safety” once they set off across the GreatPlains (2). He describes the many hardships of overland migration with extendedemphasis on the Donner party’s particular difficulties as it faced the mountains,the desert, and the snow. Rarick uses new evidence to develop the story of thetragedy. He cites recent archaeological studies of the Donner party’s campsites,research on starvation, meteorological data, anthropological evidence, and studiesof social networks to tell their story. The Donner experience, however represen-tative it was as a rush for safety, was anomalous. The author also speculates aboutthe migrants, the promoters of the route, the rescuers, and journalists whomoralized about Donner party cannibalism.

The book has photographs and an index. A difficulty with the book is its maps,which are skimpy and lack adequate geographic detail. Anyone who has followedthe Oregon and California Trails, or crossed the Salt Lake desert or the Sierras,will find this disturbing story compelling.

Mary Baldwin College Kenneth W. Keller

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Edited by Bruce J.Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2008. Pp. ix, 373. $49.95.)

This is a good book with a misleading title. If the 1970s were the seedtime of theReagan Revolution, the revolution was not always “rightward” in outcome. Theeditors themselves stress the paradox that, for all their growing electoral success,conservative politicians failed to accomplish most of their key objectives. Thefederal government and its deficit grew larger, not smaller, during the 1980s.Popular culture grew more, not less, raunchy. Abortion remained legal. At best,conservatives “layered themselves over the accumulated changes of the twentiethcentury,” which is why Reaganism had such a superficial quality (4). Still, some-thing happened in the 1970s to dash the hopes of the liberals. Each of the fourteenessays in the book describes one aspect of what, collectively, amounted to the endof their hegemony—an end Nixon plotted and Reagan accomplished, with thehelp of Carter’s miscues.


The authors describe the decade’s overlapping political and cultural crises. Thedebates over family values, gender roles, affirmative action, and foreign policy willbe familiar to most readers, as will the growth of evangelical denominations andthe rise of a conservative institutional network. The value of these chapters lies intheir clarity, balance, and breadth, making them ideally suited for undergraduates.Specialists, however, will be drawn to the chapters on the less-studied aspects ofthe decade. These include the rehabilitation of business education on collegecampuses, the ideologically crosscutting movement for neighborhood revitaliza-tion, the trend toward self-absorption in popular music, the free-marketers’response to the energy crisis, the attack on public-employee unions, and thecontroversy over IRS efforts to penalize Christian schools enrolling few or noblack students. Joseph Crespino’s essay shows how the last issue turned whitesouthern evangelicals against a federal government that seemed determined torevolutionize every aspect of their way of life. The desire to get that governmentoff their backs linked religious conservatives, libertarians, small businessmen, gunowners, and others who rallied to Reagan’s cause in 1980.

Though Crespino tackles race head-on, other contributors pay it only glancingattention—ditto criminal justice. Yet many writers have argued that rising crime,particularly black crime, was central to the decline of liberalism and the rise of theprison state. The reaction was bipartisan: by 1975 even Ted Kennedy was callingfor stricter sentencing procedures. The 1976 Supreme Court decision that death-penalty laws could be constitutional—a ruling that populist state legislatorsquickly exploited—also belongs in any conservative highlight reel.

What is missing, in short, is a chapter on crime and punishment. What remainsis a polished collection of original work from rising and established scholars,deftly tied together by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer’s introduction andepilogue. Rightward Bound is an outstanding addition to the literature on thepolitics and culture of the 1970s and an absorbing read in the bargain.

University of North Florida David T. Courtwright

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Threat of Nuclear War: Lessons from History. ByLen Scott. (London, England: Continuum, 2008. Pp. xii, 222. $49.95.)

There has been no shortage of scholarly interest in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,often described as the moment when the world came closest to nuclear destruction.In this work, Len Scott utilizes much of this scholarship “to examine the role ofnuclear weapons” in the crisis “and to evaluate the risk of inadvertent nuclear war”(2). Unlike some recent studies of the crisis, Scott does not rely on newly discovered


primary sources or make use of interviews of yet-unheard-from participants.Instead, he has carefully mined the secondary (and memoir) literature for insightsinto three related areas: “the role of nuclear weapons in the conduct of foreignpolicy, in deterring armed conflict and in risking nuclear war” (17). For Scott, theseare the salient issues involved in the Cuban missile crisis, which the Soviets referredto as the “Caribbean crisis” and the Cubans dubbed the “October crisis.” Through-out this brief but engagingly written and extremely well-documented volume, Scotttakes on the received wisdom regarding what future generations of policymakers aswell as scholars might learn from the crisis, concluding in the end that the lessonswere uneven, imbalanced, and not universally applicable. At heart, he focuses ontwo hierarchical levels of decision making: high-level policymakers and subordi-nate actors/organizations.

Methodologically, Scott by design employs counterfactual scenarios as heengages in what might best be characterized as “What If” history. As a result,much of this volume is taken up with subjecting other authors’ conclusions andassertions to various counterfactuals in an effort to determine the true role ofnuclear weapons in the Cuban missile crisis, a method Scott defends as “essentialin examining how close we may have been to nuclear war” (23). Besides, he avers,if policymakers on both sides employed such a tool when framing their ownpositions during the crisis, does it not make sense to do the same when seeking tounderstand those positions?

As far as Scott’s conclusions are concerned, there are many, two of which areof particular import. First, he notes that John F. Kennedy’s and Nikita Khrush-chev’s determination to reach a negotiated settlement rose with the risk of esca-lation. In other words, neither really wanted the crisis to spiral out of control.Second, he notes that there were times when lower-level actions threatened upper-level efforts at restraint and accommodation. Put another way, Scott envisionsscenarios in which, Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s best efforts notwithstanding, anuclear crisis might have occurred. This is a sobering thought indeed, and anindication that the most important things to happen in a crisis might not be thedecisions taken at the highest levels.

Without a doubt Scott has produced a volume worth careful study and con-sideration. The just over one hundred sixty pages of text in this volume are heavilydocumented with valuable references to the extant literature—a literature Scottobviously knows well—and the counterfactual methodology used throughoutprovides a useful model that others might employ with much success.

Kent State University Mary Ann Heiss


Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. By Peter Silver.(New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Pp. xxvi, 352. $29.95.)

Almost any serious history is a study of irony. This sophisticated account ofthe cultural and political effects of Indian wars on the Pennsylvania frontier fromthe 1750s into the 1780s is no exception. The essence of the argument is that theterrors of frontier warfare forged a common “white” identity among previouslydisparate, even mutually antagonistic, European religious and ethnic groups in theregion. One irony is that in fearing and battling Native Americans these frontiersettlers and their sympathizers increasingly accepted a reductionist pan-Indianview of them as “white people.”

The author deftly explores the formative process, the developing content, andthe initial consequences of this emerging identity through clearly organized chap-ters enlivened with evocative prose. The study is thoroughly grounded in primarysources providing an impressive array of examples and illustrations to support theargument. The book, in short, is a pleasure to read.

However, the subtitle is somewhat misleading. In this account, Indian wardirectly transformed Pennsylvania, not “early America.” A “white” identity with aslightly different content, as the author duly notes, emerged earlier in the Southernslave colonies (115). Little is said of the effects of border warfare in New Englandor the South. Yet this geographic limitation is beneficial, as it contributes nuance tothe often simplistic sense of “whiteness” in early America. In Pennsylvania, “talk of‘the white people’ was more often political than racial—just as anti-Indian animuswas often applied more eagerly to other Europeans” (116). Irony abounds.

This variant was shaped by a rhetoric strikingly termed “the anti-Indiansublime” (xx). The description and analysis of this rhetoric as a cultural form isa most impressive feature of the work. The eighteenth century’s “aesthetics of thesublime” spawned “a mode of writing engineered to overwhelm the reader withemotion at the sight of suffering,” particularly of women, children, and otherhelpless innocents (83). This rhetoric was used to comprehend the terrors ofborder warfare, to forge a common identity as a “suffering, victimized commu-nity,” and to mobilize factions for colonial and imperial politics (74). It was usedagainst the French, Quakers, and the British during the Revolution. Ironically,the “rapturous reign of literary Indian-hating” was rarely aimed solely at NativeAmericans (84). Nor was it purely literary. Real warfare created real corpses,allowing actual and pictorial display to enormous effect.

This author provides an important perspective on how an often denigratedbackcountry became the heroic frontier of a nation claiming “sovereignty through


popular conquest” (285). As he concludes, the “crisis of Indian war had tiltedpublic life toward the celebration of a suffering people, creating a new politics thatwas harsh and ruthless, if recognizably democratic” (311). Reinhold Niebuhr,author of The Irony of American History [1952], would be proud.

Austin Peay State University Richard P. Gildrie

The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rulein Colonial Oaxaca. By Yanna Yannakakis. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,2008. Pp. xxi, 290. $22.95.)

Once a little-known periphery of southern Mesoamerica, Oaxaca’s Zapotec-,Chinantec-, and Mixe-speaking Sierra Norte has been the subject of considerablescholarship in recent years. The volume under review is the most recent additionto the literature on the Sierra Norte’s colonial history. Covering the period1660–1810, Yanna Yannakakis provides a thoughtful and well-researched analy-sis of the roles of indios ladinos (bicultural Hispanized Indians) who served ascultural brokers between local indigenous communities and the Spanish state andchurch. Located at the intersection of state power, Indian identity, and localcommunity rule, these intermediaries, most of them caciques or other nobles,variously employed accommodation, resistance, and negotiation as they inter-preted both the colonized and the colonizers to each other. This is a book aboutnoble itinerant merchants, legal agents, interpreters, gobernadores, and religiousleaders, most of them from small Cajonos and Rincón Zapotec communities in thedistrict of Villa Alta. The author skillfully shows how these intermediaries bothdefended and exploited local community autonomy while simultaneously defusingcolonial tensions, sometimes at great personal risk.

Tacking back and forth between the actions of individual intermediaries andissues common to the entire district of one hundred communities, the authorbegins by exploring the period following the 1660 rebellion in neighboringTehuantepec. Readers learn how two caciques from San Juan Yatzona engaged in“symbolic warfare” against an abusive Spanish magistrate, laying themselvesopen to charges of sedition in the process. The well-known Cajonos Rebellion of1700 and its political consequences are treated in detail. The author argues thatthe Spanish reprisals amounted to a “second conquest” of the Sierra Norte; theyushered in a period of strengthened state power that anticipated the BourbonReforms by five decades. In a final chapter, the author examines the late colonialfate of an entire community of intermediaries. The central Mexican Nahuas of


Villa Alta’s Barrio of Analco helped subjugate the region for the Spanish in thesixteenth century, but their ethnic status and privileges eroded considerably in theeighteenth century.

This volume makes two important contributions. Its emphasis on the singularaspects of the Sierra Norte and its contextualization within wider colonial Oaxacamake it a valuable regional history. At the same time, the author’s dialecticalanalysis of the complex mediation processes between indigenous communities andthe colonial state will appeal to ethnohistorians interested in other parts of NewSpain as well. The roles of colonial native intermediaries are well known, butrarely have their activities been laid bare in such rich detail. The author accom-plishes this through the careful study of a number of lawsuits, paying closeattention to the language used by all parties. The volume is particularly effectivein tracing the consequences of the Bourbon Reforms, which led to increased statecontrol over Sierra communities. This book’s engaging style, its accent on indi-vidual agency, and its lucid portrayal of colonial relationships will make itattractive to both students and specialists alike.

Arizona State University John K. Chance

Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. ByErnest Freeberg. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. 392.$29.95.)

This book is an in-depth exploration of the case Debs v. U.S. [1919], including theevents leading up to it, and its aftermath. This is a fine work of history writtenabout a remarkable man: Eugene V. Debs, the long-time presidential candidate ofthe Socialist Party USA at the turn of the twentieth century.

There have been biographies written before now about Debs, of course, butErnest Freeberg goes into fascinating detail about the character of Debs, whostood up and opposed U.S. entry into World War I, even though he was an oldman and knew that it would likely land him a prison sentence. Freeberg brilliantlyexplores the political repression of that time under such laws as the Espionage Actand the Sedition Act, which resulted in about two thousand Americans beingarrested for their political opinions. This repression continued after the war in1919 with the “Red Scare” resulting in more arrests and deportations of Americanradicals.

If Freeberg had only done this all along it would have been a fine book, but hedoes more. He explores how the fight for First Amendment rights by the amnestymovement, the labor unions, and the Socialists fundamentally changed how


historians thought about freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It had legiti-mized those freedoms, so by the time that Debs was released from prison afterserving three years, the American people began thinking that First Amendmentrights meant the right to oppose the government even in time of war. That was amajor advance in freedom.

Rowan University Donald F. Bosky

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938. By ThomasW. Burkman. (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 289.$58.00.)

Japan’s association with the League of Nations is usually limited to its disappoint-ment over the veto of a racial equality clause as the League was forming in 1919and its dramatic departure from the League in 1933 over the Manchurian Inci-dent. Thomas W. Burkman gives a context for these events and, more significantly,fills in the gap between them with valuable information about Japan’s contribu-tions to this internationalist experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. He argues thatLeague membership was not taken lightly in Japan and that there is continuitybetween Japan’s prewar and postwar international behavior. He feels conven-tional accounts “overlook the rich legacy of Japanese positive contributions tointernational stability through international organization” (111). This compli-cates the standard view of Japan’s mounting militarism and isolation during thisperiod. What readers see is a nuanced struggle to pursue international peace andregional power, equal status and special consideration, global mechanisms andnational agendas.

Burkman provides the reader with a solid sense of Japan’s active participationin the League through extensive use of published and unpublished writings ofJapanese, British, and American figures involved; official documents; and news-papers and magazines of the day. His biographical details on some of Japan’skey diplomats (Makino Nobuaki, Nitobe Inazo, Ishii Kikujiro, and MatsuokaYosuke) make the story real and engrossing. Individual personalities and attitudesare effectively interwoven with the inner workings of the League and its subcom-mittees and the concerns of the Japanese government and public. The storyproceeds in a generally chronological fashion starting with foreign policy anddiplomacy during WWI, continuing with the debates surrounding the creation ofthe League of Nations Covenant and Japan’s League activities in the 1920s,


climaxing with the Manchurian Crisis of 1931–1933, and concluding withJapan’s post-1933 efforts at international cooperation.

This book is a welcome addition to scholarship on “Taisho Democracy.”Historians have used this term to refer to a period of possibility from the 1910sto the early 1930s. The path to military aggression in the 1930s was but one ofmany. Burkman sheds new light on the important role diplomacy and interna-tional activity played in Japan’s quest for national security and prestige. Fear ofbeing left out of the new world order overshadowed the “serious misgivings” mostJapanese had about the League of Nations during this period (xii). The Japaneseopted to embrace internationalism, but as Burkman also shows, they never gaveup on their regionalism and did not see the two as necessarily mutually exclusive.Japan’s strongest advocates for League participation and an international spiritalso became the most vocal defenders of Japan’s actions in Manchuria. There areother works available on some of the personalities Burkman highlights, but hisdetails on their involvement with the League, their interactions with each other,and their defense of Japan are enlightening.

Burkman’s writing is dense, but accessible. He does assume some knowledge ofearly-twentieth-century Japanese history and occasionally uses Japanese termswithout translating them or mentions events without explaining them. A glossaryof terms, a Peace Conference timeline (meetings, issues discussed, drafts), and theLeague Covenant would make useful appendices. This book would be most usefulin a graduate-level or upper-level undergraduate course on diplomatic history, butanyone with an interest in early-twentieth-century Japanese or world historywould gain new insight.

Gettysburg College Dina Lowy

Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural Enter-prises. By Calvin Chen. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center,Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 224. $39.95.)

Township and village enterprises (TVEs) have been an important part of the storyof rapid economic growth in China over the past three decades. In this book, theauthor follows the case study approach, examining the experiences of two largeand successful TVEs in Zhejiang province: “Phoenix,” which began in Wenzhouprefecture, and “Jupiter,” which arose in Jinhua prefecture. (The two names,Calvin Chen hints, are not the real names of the firms [1].) Based on multiple visitsto the two TVEs, a fair number of secondary sources, and over a hundredinterviews with managers, staff, and workers, Chen argues that the two TVEs in


question owe their success primarily to the vision and approach of enterpriseleaders. These entrepreneurs, Chen says, were successful because they “fused acollectively oriented, trust-based, and reciprocal social ethos with an individuallyoriented, profit-driven, industrial production regimen” (16). In the early stage ofthe companies’ existence, management relied on personalistic ties—local kin andnative-place networks—to raise funds and mobilize personnel, but eventuallyleaders were forced to hire outsiders with specialized skills and turn to moreimpersonal approaches to management. This change posed a challenge to thesolidarity of the enterprises, though management eventually learned ways torecover some of the warmth and cohesion that was lost as the enterprises hadexpanded.

The places that Chen examines are not particularly representative of Chinaas a whole. Wenzhou particularly has long been known to have been an outlierbecause of the early rise and predominance of privately owned enterprises. Ithas a strong local tradition, going back to the 1950s, of bucking policies of thecentral party and state apparatuses. Well into the mid-1990s, a much higherproportion of enterprises there were privately owned and managed than in mostother localities. Moreover, the two enterprises that Chen analyzes are muchlarger than typical TVEs. From another standpoint, however, the two businessesmay be seen as more broadly representative in that by the end of the 1990sa large percentage of TVEs in China that used to be collectively or publiclyowned were privatized, as the two enterprises in question had been for sometime.

One of the author’s key arguments is that the success of Jupiter and Phoenixwas not primarily the result of action by local government. These two TVEs standas counterexamples to Jean Oi’s contention that the Chinese state was the chiefinstigator of the economic transformation of the rural economy and that TVEs(and their success) were the result of “local state corporatism.” It is worth noting,however, that Jupiter obtained the vast majority of its startup capital from a loanby a government-owned bank (60).

Library collections that seek to provide coverage of contemporary China needto have some works that deal with township and village enterprises. AlthoughJean Oi’s Rural China Takes Off is broader in scope and more central in im-portance, Chen’s book is clear and jargon-free, and it is easily accessible forundergraduates. It is a more in-depth look at a specific TVE than is availableelsewhere.

Randolph College Bradley Geisert


Memories of Life in Lhasa under Chinese Rule. By Tubten Khétsun. Translated, withan introduction, by Matthew Akester. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia UniversityPress. 2008. Pp. xx, 318. $32.50.)

Numerous books about the changes in Tibet before and after the Chinese invasionhave been published, but this is the most powerful of the dozens this reviewer hasread. The book will have great appeal to both general readers and academicaudiences. Classes that might use this book are those that consider the CulturalRevolution in China and history classes dealing with memories of traumaticevents or colonial occupation. The narrative of life as a Tibetan under theCommunist Chinese is gripping reading and could thus be used in anything froma freshman survey (as an introductory text) to an advanced graduate seminar (asa case study of the interaction of memory, nationalism, and political campaigns).

The author’s organization is a straightforward chronology that is easy tofollow, and his voice is very human, easily eliciting sympathy. At the same time,Tubten Khétsun is quite evenhanded and dispassionate in relating a gruesome andharrowing account of living under Chinese rule for some forty years, much of thistime in brutal prison conditions. He is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that,at first, working under the Chinese was not so bad, and even as late as 1956,conditions were so good that few Tibetans thought to leave. He also is brave tostate that high Tibetan officials were against the Tibetan uprising of 1959 becausethey had so much to lose. Avoiding both ungrounded hyperbole and stridentcomplaints about the Chinese, this book exhibits an all-too-rare balanced view ofearly Tibetan cooperation with the Chinese colonial occupation.

One of the great strengths of the book is the detail with which Khétsunremembered and recorded critical events, names, and dates. This gives realgrounding to claims against the Chinese that are usually just stated in broad terms,without this convincing level of anecdote. The usual political tract will say “amillion Tibetans died during the Great Leap Forward (Chinese Communist Cam-paign),” but Khétsun does not focus on this abstract big picture. Instead, hedescribes how he and others he knew survived (or died from) the famines: howthey ate moldy grain supplies, how they dug up roots for firewood, how they didany work they could to make a few cents. His account also reveals the level ofenvironmental destruction in Central Tibet under Chinese colonial efforts toextract natural resources: deforestation, desertification, ill-conceived wetlandsdestruction, and loss of biodiversity. His ability to recollect these experiences withsuch vivid clarity, which will make the book of interest to specialists, is also partof what will make the book so attractive to general readers. This reviewer strongly


recommends this book and hopes that it is quickly issued in paperback as well sothat it can be used more widely for classroom teaching.

Columbia University Gray Tuttle

The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. By MeirShahar. (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 281. $54.00.)

This expert and readable distillation of several aspects of Chinese martial artshistory sums up, definitively in English for the present, the verifiable facts andintriguing legends about the Shaolin Temple in North China, a perennial (thoughso far unsuccessful) Buddhist applicant for UNESCO World Heritage Site status—somewhat reminiscent of its contested reputation in late imperial (Ming-Qing)China as the birthplace of kung fu, one gathers from this book. Meir Shaharconcludes that as the stories about the temple, its fighting monks, and theirdisciplines entered the late imperial years, China’s “martial arts” generally, includ-ing the Taiji quan (T’ai-chi ch’üan) exercises familiar today as slow-motioncalisthenics beloved by the elderly, were becoming more than just “martial”: theyevolved into holistic modes of physical well-being, spiritual transcendence,combat, and even magic. With poses and gymnastics named after zodiacal animalsand cosmological elements, these disciplines became something less than martial,too. For what real warriors, in the era of firearms and long-range combat, wouldfollow the Shaolin monks’ preference, by Qing times, for barehanded fighting—except the Boxers [1898–1900]?

Shahar’s history winds down before getting to the nineteenth century andsectarianism, though he describes the commercialization and tourism surroundingShaolin today. The temple fell into desuetude in the early Qing, but in some Mingdecades it was surrounded by knock-off “Shaolin” kung fu schools that sound alltoo modern.

Shaolin, Taiji, and Buddhism have been analyzed in the secondary literature,and so have their legends. In Tang times, Shaolin monks honored the violentIndian guardian god Vajrapani, but later they attributed their skills to the mis-sionary Bodhidharma, traditionally credited with bringing Chan (Zen) from Indiato China. Shahar cites and separates the scholarly studies and legends scrupu-lously, spicing his account with translations from primary sources ranging fromancient steles on the temple grounds to portraits of Shaolin fighting techniques inMing-Qing popular Chinese novels. But how could Buddhist monks becomefamous for fighting? This work offers original, though preliminary, explorations


of that philosophical/religious question, which also calls for comparisons toJapanese samurai devoted to Zen and so forth.

Historically, Shahar shows how Shaolin monks, perhaps by force of circum-stance, fought for the Tang dynasty and for their own property, not necessarilywith special training in those days, but with the result of imperial protection. Inthe Ming period, they were famed for fighting with the staff, but by the Qing theyfollowed the general Chinese trend toward barehanded training, in accordancewith late Ming syncretisms: the union of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism(whose breathing and ascetic exercises contributed much to martial arts practices),and also of combat, health, and spirituality. Shahar locates the Shaolin traditionwithin yet another triad: myth, technique, and community. The Shaolin commu-nity, based in a Henan temple, acquired the romantic reputation of itinerantmonks beyond imperial and societal control.

The book’s scholarship is impeccable. Chinese characters for terms, people,and books appear in the back-matter. Both the graduate student and the kung fuaficionado can learn from this work.

St. John’s University, New York Jeffrey C. Kinkley

China during the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929–1937. By Tomoko Shiroyama. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.Pp. 350. $45.00.)

Since the forced opening of China in 1842, the commercial contacts betweenChina and the outside world became increasingly frequent. By the end of thenineteenth century, the Chinese economy had already been integrated into theworld markets. Not surprisingly, China slipped into depression like many othercountries in the early 1930s. The impact of the Great Depression, an importanttopic neglected in the existing literature on modern Chinese history, is the mainfocus of this work. By explaining the scope and scale of the crisis and then tracingthe new state policies in coping with it, Tomoko Shiroyama argues that the GreatDepression was a watershed in the making of modern China because it created anew state-market relationship that featured transitions from “laissez-faire” tocommitted intervention.

Acknowledging the experience of interior China might be different, Shiroyamachooses to focus on the Lower Yangzi Delta centered on Shanghai, possiblybecause Shanghai was the financial hub and its financial market was most affectedduring the global depression. But Shiroyama’s main concern is not limited to


banks and stock markets in Shanghai; she also connects China’s agrarian andindustrial sectors to the financial crisis and examines urban textile companies—both cotton mills and silk filatures—and their rural hinterlands before, during,and after the crisis. The interactions between different sectors are well explored todemonstrate how the devastating effects of the depression and the rehabilitatingeffects of the new monetary policy spread from one sector to another.

Among some other factors such as economic imperialism, China’s adoptionof a silver standard in a world dominated by the gold standard was claimed asthe main factor that made the Chinese economy—including its rural markets,urban factories, and financial institutions—so vulnerable in front of the externalshocks. Therefore, another notable feature of the book is a well-explainedChinese silver standard and its connection with the changing international mon-etary system.

But the most controversial part of this book lies in neither China’s awkwardposition in the global monetary system nor its political and economic reaction tothe crisis. It is the very positive view of the Nationalist government that distin-guishes this study from most of the earlier researches on the Nanjing Decade[1927–1937]. The author suggests that the Nationalist government respondedpromptly and efficiently to the crisis of the early 1930s. Assisted by the British andAmerican governments, the Nationalists implanted a currency reform that suc-cessfully stabilized the financial market in late 1935. Although the new economicpolicies had their limitations, Shiroyama argues that it was the very success incurrency reform that refrained the Nationalist government from excessive bud-getary expansion, and thus limited its performance in the recovery of the indus-trial and rural sectors. This positive evolution of the Republican-era economyreflects a new revisionist trend intrigued by China’s recent economic success,which attempts to search for China’s economic strength in pre-1949 China.

Georgia Southern University Juanjuan Peng

EUROPE

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. By Hugh Brogan. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 2008. Pp. x, 724. $20.00.)

Beginning with de Tocqueville’s aristocratic forebearers under the ancien régimeand ending with his heart wrenchingly slow death, this author offers a captivatingand balanced interpretation of one of the nineteenth century’s most remarkablepersonalities. Although known for his heralding of democracy, de Tocqueville


was, Hugh Brogan thoroughly illustrates, “first and foremost . . . a noble” (4).Liberty and democracy were central to de Tocqueville’s political philosophy,Brogan reiterates, but his definitions of them varied from other liberal definitions.As Brogan skillfully demonstrates, de Tocqueville never completely shed hisaristocratic beliefs during his writing and political career. His vision of democracyin France, for example, was illustrative of de Tocqueville being a “democrat whodistrusted the people” (386). For de Tocqueville, “democratic” France should notbe characterized by mass suffrage, but by a decentralized society that was guided(i.e., controlled) by “notables” like him. As Brogan emphasizes, de Tocquevilleloathed political centralization whether it was conducted by the Jacobins, Napo-leon, Louis-Philippe, or Napoleon III: centralization was the fundamental corro-sive of liberty.

De Tocqueville fought a lifelong struggle to accommodate the changing politi-cal realities of nineteenth-century Europe to his nostalgia for the noblesse life intowhich he had been born. To demonstrate this, Brogan effectively analyzes deTocqueville’s key works—Democracy in America, On the Penitentiary System,and the Ancient Regime—and personal papers of de Tocqueville and his associates(he exhausts what is extant of de Tocqueville’s letters and is well versed in them).Readers will appreciate Brogan’s balanced treatment of de Tocqueville’s keypassions (travel, writing, and politics) and his comprehensive portrayal of deTocqueville’s personal life: notably the close friendships that came easily for deTocqueville, his marital relations with Marie Motley, and his battles againstnumerous maladies throughout adulthood. Brogan also does well to organize hisbiography by important events—e.g., “Writing America”—rather than a strictlychronological order. Although this tactic complicates the chronology and is rep-etitious at times, it makes the important events more clear.

Readers studying American history may desire a few more details from deTocqueville’s travels in North America, but Brogan’s ability to illustrate howevents in Europe and de Tocqueville’s mentalité contoured his investigation andinterpretation of America during his travels compensates for that. For this reasonalone this work should be read by those interested in the antebellum period ofAmerican history and by scholars who utilize his tract. For general readers andundergraduates, however, Brogan’s biography may be confusing at times: he didnot translate several short passages of French in his text and he could have offeredmore general information about the complex revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Hesuperbly details de Tocqueville’s perception of and involvement in them, but doesnot always provide adequate background material for more novice readers.Further, the reader does not get much of a sense of de Tocqueville’s financial


activities: What were the pecuniary gains from his writing and positions? How didhe and his family sustain themselves and protect their assets during that tumul-tuous period? Lastly, although Brogan does comment on the legacy of de Toc-queville’s works, he does so in a scattered manner; a comprehensive discussion ofit at the end of the work would have been a stronger epilogue than the oneprovided. Regardless of these minor criticisms this is a stunning work and acompelling read.

Randolph-Macon College Mathias D. Bergmann

A History of Florence 1200–1575. By John M. Najemy. (Malden, Mass.: BlackwellPublishing, 2006. Pp. xi, 515. $94.95.)

Although Florence is the most studied Italian city of premodern Europe, it has,strangely enough, inspired very few good narratives of its history. The most recentgeneral introduction to Florentine history in English is Gene Brucker’s master-piece, Renaissance Florence [1969, rpt 1983], a fundamental text for severalgenerations and still a vibrant text, even after nearly forty years. The most recentnarrative history in English is Ferdinand Schevill’s History of Florence: From theFounding of the City through the Renaissance [1936, rpt. 1963], now more thanseventy years old. Having been published long before the extraordinary blossom-ing of social history or the advent of such innovative disciplines as women’sstudies, sex/gender studies, confraternity studies, or even “Renaissance studies,”Brucker’s general introduction and Schevill’s narrative history are showing theirage and leaving a lot of eager students craving for more.

Enter John M. Najemy, one of the most accomplished scholars of the last thirtyyears and a much beloved teacher for several generations of students. His Historyof Florence is a formidable survey of Florentine history from the Middle Agesto the end of the Renaissance. It tells a story that, though familiar, is nowgenerously enriched and enlivened by the author’s superb synthesis of his own andhis colleagues’ many years of research in Florentine and Italian archives. Brilliantcontemporary researchers from across the Anglo-American and Europeanacademy share Najemy’s footnotes with the familiar names of Florentine histori-ography from the earliest medieval chroniclers to Renaissance political thinkerssuch as Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. But the narrative is pureNajemy, and it sparkles with clarity, precision, and insight.

Nicely divided into fifteen chapters of about thirty pages each, which couldeasily be used as the unifying thread (and weekly readings) for a university


course, Najemy’s book intermingles political history with social history andreligious history with cultural history to offer the reader a comprehensive under-standing of what was so special about Florence and how the city grew to becomea leading player in modern Western European civilization. The brilliance ofNajemy’s approach is already evident in the very first chapter, in which he dealsnot with the city’s foundation or with the origins of its power, but with adiscussion of “The Elite Families,” an appropriate topic for a culture that placedso much importance on family relationships and connections. To understandFlorentine history, readers must first understand the social ties that bound itscitizens together and formed the polis. But the history of Florence is also ahistory of the class struggles (for lack of a better term) that led to the creationof a dynamic res publica, and so in the second chapter Najemy presents theFlorentine “Popolo,” while in the third he discusses the “Early Conflicts of Eliteand Popolo”—the Machiavelli of the Discourses would have been extremelypleased with Najemy’s analysis. The author then turns to a discussion of Flo-rence’s economy and its merchant empire to 1340 in chapter four and the city’spolitical unrest in the fourteenth century in chapters five through seven. At thispoint, Najemy opens a parenthesis with an excellent social history chapter inwhich he reviews the nature of Florentine households, marriages, and dowries;the question of property; the problems with inheritance; the social role andposition of women; the place and situation of children; the nature of public andprivate charity (hospitals in particular); and even the ever-present concerns withpolicing sodomy (219–249).

After a series of well-focused chapters on Florence and the fifteenth-centuryMedici family, in his final chapter Najemy looks at “The Last Republic and theMedici Duchy.” Here he points out that the advent of the principate was theinevitable result of irreconcilable distrust between the popolo and the ottimati thathad been mounting for generations and had crested in the first decades of thesixteenth century (446). The dynamic differences that had moved the polisforward had now become the insurmountable differences that led each of the twogroups to place more trust in a supreme princely ruler than in each other. And so,ironically, in the end the two groups agreed that a Medicean prince was preferableto a popular republic.

Najemy’s survey of Florentine history will be a fundamental point of referencefor many generations of scholars and will serve as a building block for muchfurther research in premodern European history.

Victoria College, University of Toronto Konrad Eisenbichler


William Wilberforce: A Biography. By Stephen Tomkins. (Grand Rapids, Mich.:William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007. Pp. 238. $78.00.)

The most effective advocates of reform are often confident and persistent pillarsof the established order. This observation comes especially alive in this author’saccessible, if somewhat derivative, condensation of available sources and schol-arship in reference to the great abolitionist leader of Georgian Britain. Althoughpublished conveniently in time for the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolitionof the slave trade by parliament, Stephen Tomkins’s work does not deify Wilber-force, but rather it portrays him as a comprehensible blend of saint and sinnerwith both short-term and long-term national consequences emanating from thismix of personal qualities.

Key to the strength of the author’s narrative is the avoidance of the mid-twentieth-century perspective of narrowly seeing Wilberforce and his fellow Evan-gelical Anglicans as only the forerunners of the allegedly prim and properVictorians. Without denying their influence on later thinkers or advocates and byacknowledging their eighteenth-century origins, Tomkins humanizes the ClaphamSect, especially Wilberforce, in ways that even surpass the efforts of the magiste-rial Bury the Chains [2005] by Adam Hochschild. The road to abolition was fullof unexpected ups and downs, which makes for natural drama. Tomkins clearlyspells out the reasons for this long and winding road without drowning in theminutiae of celebrity gossip and legislative battles.

Most striking, nevertheless, are the sometimes graphic excerpts from primarysources that preface each chapter. Most of these excerpts reiterate the brutality ofslavery and the slave trade and, thus, they keep Wilberforce’s main causes in themind of the reader after pages and pages of the necessary evils of politicalposturing and maneuvering needed to get rid of both. For a man who ironicallychided himself for a lack of focus, Wilberforce did keep pushing the envelopes andthe issues until his goals were reached, as Tomkins shows.

Wilberforce’s dogged attachment to Evangelical principles, however, could leadreaders to see him as a vigorous imperialist, tactical pacifist, reflexive reactionary,and visionary progressive simultaneously. Tomkins tries to resolve some of thoseseeming contradictions by showing Wilberforce as the epitome of a godly pater-nalist who could combat the excesses of the ancien regime, such as chattel slaveryand bull-baiting, while at the same time defending his deeply held faith againstradicals and pornographers by means of the suppression of civil liberties.Tomkins’s Wilberforce pursued whatever worked to serve God, even if it wentagainst tradition, compassion, or common sense.


The author does have a mostly pleasing knack of translating Georgian situationsand events to a wide, popular audience, even if fussy specialists might wince at someof his colloquial and slightly anachronistic phrases such as “Pitt’s Vietnam” and“homeland security measure” (125, 151). Moreover, even if the author’s views onWilberforce are hardly new or surprising, he does put them together in such a cleverway that his book should merit wide attention from students and teachers ofmodern Britain. Accordingly, because of Tomkins’s writing ability and Wilber-force’s centrality to British politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies, the reviewer would recommend this work as a possible reading assign-ment for an upper-level undergraduate survey class on that topic.

Norfolk State University Charles H. Ford

Slave Revolts in Antiquity. By Theresa Urbainczyk. (Berkeley, Calif.: University ofCalifornia Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 117. $19.95.)

A number of colleagues tried to dissuade the author from writing this book. Thereviewer is glad they failed. Her topic is slave revolts in antiquity, but TheresaUrbainczyk has brought much comparative material from the modern world intothe discussion. Classicists are notoriously averse to writing about cross-culturalresemblances, but Urbainczyk is alert to the perils of drawing simplistic parallels.She is also cognizant of the fact that comparing and contrasting slave revolts bothancient and modern is a huge task. She has spent several years working on thetopic, which, by her own admission, deserves “several books” (vii). Just countingthe sheer number of slave revolts listed in her chronology makes the slimness ofthe volume surprising (ix–xii). Any one of these revolts might have produced abook-length study. The goal of this particular volume was to show why ancientslaves rebelled and what impact such rebellions had on ancient societies.

The topics of slavery and class struggle have created a battleground for bothMarxist and non-Marxist scholars. Is every slave revolt a potential revolution orwere the slaves just trying to escape? Did they have a common ideology? Didsimilar conditions always produce slave uprisings? Many ancient slave revoltsremain unrecorded, and those that are written about are highly colored by the factthat they were written by slave owners. The author also suspects that the ancientsources have given more importance to the actions of slaves than have manymodern writers. One of the reasons she suspects the revolts have held little interestfor modern scholars is that the slaves always lost, slavery was not abolished, and,in fact, there was no abolitionist movement in antiquity. Yet the mere threat of a


slave revolt could strike terror into the hearts of their owners. The author suggeststhat historians fail to comprehend the true impact that such rebellions had onsociety at large, not to mention history.

Because of the nature of the sources, the author is forced to deal more heavilywith the Roman Republic since this is where there is the most evidence. A secondproblem is the nature of the evidence itself. The author relies heavily on DiodorusSiculus, a source much maligned by classicists but who had a great sympathy forthe slaves and their point of view. Unlike Bradley, who argued that the Romanslave movements were “nonrevolutionary” in nature (i.e., they had as their goalrevolt and nothing more), the author believes there is primary evidence to refutethis.

In the end, the intentions of these ancient slaves have been lost forever and somodern commentators are free to speculate. But at least there is a discussion hereof the significance of slaves revolts, how they were prepared, and how the slavesmaintained their resistance. Urbainczyk discusses the role of the leader, the ide-ology of the slaves, and finally slave revolts in ancient historiography.

Besides those who dismiss Diodorus, there will be many readers who will notfind what they are looking for in this book. Urbainczyk does not, for example,discuss the military aspects of the revolts. How did a Spartacus collect the properintelligence gathering necessary to hold the entire Roman Republic at bay for twoyears? Have scholars underestimated the strategic thinking of a slave leader whowas trained by the Romans? Was the Spartacus rebellion even a slave revolt at allor, as scholars like Piccinin and Rubinsohn have suggested, a nationalist conflictof Italians against Roman rule? Similarly, were the Spartan helots fighting forindividual liberty or national liberation? These and many more questions willcontinue to be debated, but in the meantime this is a start to many interestingdiscussions. The fact that the Greek is not transliterated will rule out manyreaders, but this is a stimulating book that will force readers to think about slavesand their experience.

Virginia Military Institute Rose Mary Sheldon

Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies of Victorian London. By Michelle Allen.(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 225. $24.95.)

This author’s focus is ambivalence toward the new forms of sanitary citizenship inVictorian London, which led even to disenchantment by end of century. MichelleAllen is one of many contemporary literary scholars interested in what would oncehave been seen as nonliterary texts. Here the reflections on sanitary reform of


bureaucrats, social investigators, essayists, and journalists are explored in con-junction with works of canonical writers: Charles Dickens (Bleak House), GeorgeGissing (The Nether World), and George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara). Begin-ning with the sanitary reform movement of the 1840s, Allen moves on to thegrand sewerage-and-embankment building projects of the 1850s and 1860s.Sewers, opponents argued, were merely delivery systems of deadly sewer gas ormeans for polluting rivers. (And with some good reason: adequate means oftrapping drains had not been developed; nor, until the 1890s, were there reason-ably successful and practical means of sewage purification.) She moves next to thegreat housing crisis of the 1880s, when housing “reform” usually meant theunhousing of casual workers and their displacement from city center to peripheralsuburb (if they were lucky). She ends by showcasing Shaw’s mordant utopianism:the apotheosis of social and sanitary reform is the company town of the mostadvanced armaments company; peace, harmony, and prosperity come through themost morally repugnant form of capitalism.

Most of this material will be familiar territory to British historians and histo-rians of public health; these themes were well explored by an earlier generationwhose works are unevenly represented here. Those earlier urban historians andhistorians of social reform certainly recognized opposition to sanitation, account-ing for them in terms of start up problems, incompleteness, and costs, as well asconflict with vested interests. In the area of housing, it was clear that efforts toreduce density did mean that some must move further away, yet at the same timeit was widely appreciated that the language of sanitary reform was often usedcynically, as in the conversion of parts of the City of London from residences ofartisans and laborers into a modern financial district.

That early historiography belonged to the larger question of a “revolution ingovernment,” the emergence of public accountability for the urban environment.To revisit these questions in other contexts may well be important. Allen, however,builds on no single foundation of scholarship; hence it is hard to know whatultimately to take away from the book. The readings of Dickens and Gissing donot mesh especially well with the other chapters, nor is there room to develop theopposition/ambivalence as anything like a social movement. Indeed, literary schol-ars may find the book rewarding precisely where historians find it frustrating. Itis about language more than about people, institutions, money, power, custom,law, administration, ideology, or the material problems of living in cities, a focusof much current scholarship in urban environmental history.

University of Notre Dame Christopher Hamlin


Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History. By JurgenBrauer and Hubert van Tuyll. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008.Pp. xix, 432. $29.00.)

The authors of this book set out to analyze military history through the lens ofeconomics. Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll suggest that their approach is stillconsidered novel and therefore perhaps suspect among traditional military histo-rians. After the authors note that they will analyze some less well-known aspectsof different historical periods and conflicts, they go on to remove any doubt abouttheir thematic approach. The volume is incredibly useful both to historians andeconomists and makes a strong case for the continued and perhaps enhancedrelevance of military history in university education (321).

Brauer and van Tuyll analyze case studies across seven periods: 1) castleconstruction during the high middle ages; 2) military contractors in the Renais-sance; 3) the decision to offer battle during the Age of Battle; 4) intelligence in theAge of Revolution; 5) strategic bombing during the Second World War; 6) nucleararms in the Cold War; and 7) the economics of twenty-first-century warfare. Ineach study, the authors apply six economic principles: opportunity costs; expectedmarginal costs and benefits; substitution; diminishing marginal returns; asymmet-ric information and hidden characteristics; and hidden actions and incentivealignments.

Armed with an economics primer in chapter one, readers are able to considerthe different historical periods aided by the authors’ useful and concise synopsesintroducing each section. A particularly interesting and timely analysis is thediscussion in chapter three of military contracts (condotte) drawn up betweenlocal governments and mercenary leaders (condottieri). As unruly as the merce-naries’ reputation is in popular conception, the authors remind readers that theserelationships were simply business transactions based on the needs of each party.Moreover, increasing state stability encouraged government authorities to con-tract with mercenaries on a long-term basis, a practice that eventually culminatedin the contractors’ subsumation into the state’s military apparatus. Just as authori-ties recognized the economic benefits of enduring employment, so did mercenarycompanies appreciate the attraction of economic stability. Eventually extensivecontracting would die out due not only to the asymmetric information of hiddencharacteristics and hidden action, but also because of the greater benefits ofguaranteed state service.

The timeliness of a discussion about the economics of military contractors isalso obvious in chapter eight, “Economics and Military History in the Twenty-first


Century.” Brauer and van Tuyll take the reader into the economic realm of PrivateMilitary Companies (PMCs) and Private Security Companies (PSCs), analyzingtheir attractiveness to modern states and the approach nations will take to employsuch firms. In this chapter, they also consider the economics of terrorist organiza-tions and the costs and benefits of various state responses. Even the publicabhorrence of terrorism might not be enough to induce nations to subsidize aninternational antiterrorism effort. It still comes down to cost and benefits.

Only the somewhat deeper delving into economic theory in the concludingchapter lessens the impact of an otherwise very useful discussion of economics andmilitary history.

Roger Williams University Jeffrey Lee Meriwether

The Enlightenment World. Edited by Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knell-wolf, and Ian McCalman. (London, England: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xxi, 714.$55.95.)

Once one could write books—large books that attracted readers outside of specificscholarly disciplines and often nonacademics—with the words “the Enlighten-ment” in the title. Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay are authors that come to mind.The term then fell on hard times. First, there was increasing acceptance of thenotion that rationality, the core value of enlightened thinkers, was suspect.Adorno and Horkheimer had put the case forward forcefully for the FrankfurtSchool; next followed postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. But at leastthese attacks seemed to presuppose the Enlightenment as their object. The realdevastation came from the pens not of theorists but of historian specialists whopinpointed the limits of the term and considered intellectual developments in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries in relation to concrete institutions, materialcultures, and practices rather than as a ferment of ideas. Both broadening inquiryand focusing it, these historians attended to matters not easily reducible to thechampioning of rationality: passions, sentiments, and sensibility—not to mentionrace, gender, media studies, popular culture, history of science, proto-pornography, and much more. Coffee houses, postal services, and colporteurs hadpushed aside Voltaire. The irony of the hefty compendium The EnlightenmentWorld is that precisely thanks to all this attention to geographical, chronological,and other details, the topic finds itself reinvigorated.

The title might seem to hearken to a time when “Enlightenment” was deemedthe European zeitgeist. What the reader finds, however, is a complex, diverse,


often loose, and sometimes contradictory intermingling of arenas. There are, ofcourse, guiding threads, and the volume opens with John Henry’s fine accountof the rise of the New Philosophy that seems to reestablish the familiar trajectory(as Alexander Pope put it, “God said, Let Newton be, and All was Light!”). Butjust how multifarious a beast the so-called Enlightenment was becomes clearas readers proceed through different countries—Holland, France, Germany,Britain—through considered treatments of familiar topics—skepticism, toleration,and politeness—and on to Italian opera, femininity, millenarianism, law,economy, and cross-cultural encounters. Ian Hunter’s entry on rival Aufklärer atthe University of Halle may at first blush seem eccentric. It is exemplary of whatthis volume does at its best: convincingly and concisely making the case for whatHunter calls “the pluralization of Enlightenments” (576). Other contributors—and the list is impressive—do much the same.

Happily, the editors have vouchsafed clarity and a consistent sense of a projectwithout quashing individual styles. Like the best encyclopedic ventures, this onecarries the mark of many, often idiosyncratic, voices and concerns. It even endsquite appropriately with assessments of the Adorno/Horkheimer thesis and ofpoststructuralist critics such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Lyotard—asubtle touch of revenge that the likes of Voltaire might well have enjoyed. Is TheEnlightenment World for the general reader? Doubtless not. It could serve verywell in the classroom, however, and certainly contains sufficient insight into themultiple realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought and its institu-tions to please many a scholar (most likely dipped into repeatedly rather thanconsumed at one go).

University of California, Irvine James A. Steintrager

The Seer in Ancient Greece. By Michael Attyah Flower. (Berkeley, Calif.: University ofCalifornia Press, 2008. Pp. xviii, 305. $39.95.)

It is perhaps shocking that the figure who provided the most extensive access todivine knowledge for ancient Greeks has never been the subject of a book.Michael Attyah Flower addresses this glaring lacuna with a highly readable studyof roles and perceptions of men and women who filled this vital religious andsocial position. The seer (mantis) was an expert in the art of Greek divination,which Flower traces from its origins in the Near East to the rise of the Hellenisticworld. Understanding Greek history and literature requires familiarity with thisfigure, whose importance surpasses the more famous oracle.


To communicate the central place of the seer, Flower draws from extensiveNear Eastern and Greek sources, marshaled in his Index Locorum (295–305). Histreatment of Greek historians is thorough, but never overshadows other types ofsources and their recursive relationships to each other and to lived Greek expe-rience. Indeed, his overarching goal “to enter imaginatively into the socioreligiousworldview of the Greek” is realized through his careful and balanced treatment ofmaterial from Greek epic, philosophy, tragedy, comedy, epigraphy, and visual arts(11).

Central to the argument are two interrelated methodological stances. First,relying heavily on anthropological work on belief systems, Flower comparativelyexplores Zulu, Tibetan, Shang, and Han divination. A powerful writer andstoryteller, Flower weaves together examples and anecdotes, arguing that the seerreveals the inextricability of a system of knowledge and belief on the one hand froma socially useful exchange system on the other. To put it another way, he rejectspictures of Greek seers as charlatans, duping the people; they were actually bothseen as and functioned as legitimate interpreters of divine knowledge. Second,critiquing positivist and related modernist assumptions, Flower rejects teleologicalpresentations of divination as: 1) a premodern and irrational system; 2) a charac-teristic of primitive early Greeks versus later “rational” ones; and 3) a social processthat diminished with the rise of Athenian democracy. For him, the seers’ interpre-tation of signs was a rational activity that must be understood through the nuancedrelationships seers had with employers who shared their worldview.

Flower hits several hot button issues, and his work should provoke broaddiscussion. The distinction (if any) between magic and religion succinctly engagesimportant discussions (65–71). An argument about human agency and fatalismposits one role of the seer as avoiding fate (moira); this probably will not convincescholars who read the will of the Greek gods as predetermined and immutable(78–91). Readers might wish for treatment of Hellenistic notions of fortuneand/or heimarmene, but these are arguably beyond the book’s scope. Flower’santipositivist stance will strike some as a tad overwrought throughout, even iftreating religious beliefs sensitively and seriously is the sine qua non of hisargument.

In sum, Flower presents a compelling and imaginative reconstruction of ancientGreek divination through the person and perceptions of the seer. This reviewer, forone, will never read Herodotus (or Homer or Plato or Aristophanes or Xenophonor Sophocles or even Plutarch) quite the same way again.

Grove City College Mark W. Graham


Julius Caesar. By Philip Freeman. (New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 2008.Pp. 405. $30.00.)

Julius Caesar is enormously significant as the transitional figure between theRoman imperial system of government and the old republic that it replaced. Itwould not be frivolous even to call him Rome’s first emperor, given his nearabsolute political and military powers, and the significant fact that those powerswere acquired by his heir, his great-nephew Augustus. He has never ceased tofascinate, and the succession of books devoted to him in recent years indicates thatthis fascination is increasing rather than abating.

It might be asked what need there is for yet another volume devoted to thistopic. Julius Caesar does fill a certain niche, as a book written unashamedly for thegeneral reader, but that the most severe of scholars would be comfortable inrecommending. It is a sound diachronic narration of events, both military andpolitical; ever sensitive to the close nexus between the two, Philip Freeman offersa balanced picture of Caesar, whom he admires as a shrewd and crafty operatorcapable of commanding great loyalty: but he still presents him, “warts and all,”as a man driven by ruthless ambition. He usefully throws cold water on somefamiliar but dubious tales; it is, for example, highly unlikely that Caesar was bornby “caesarian” section (which was invariably fatal to the mother). But perhaps themost valuable aspect of the book is the rich tapestry into which the account ofCaesar’s life is woven, since Freeman makes a point of providing completebackgrounds to the events he is describing. This is especially so when the eventsthemselves are sparse. Caesar’s early years, for instance, are particularly obscure.To compensate for this readers are given detailed information on what a Romanof his time and class might have been expected to experience. So readers areprovided with explanations of Roman nomenclature, education, life in theSubura, the manhood ritual, marriage, provincial government, and religion, allessentially sound, although readers must of course bear constantly in mind thatthese are properly relevant only if Caesar’s early years followed standard patterns.

This is emphatically not a book for the specialist, or even for the senior student.It is too sparsely footnoted to facilitate research into the controversial issues (andfew statements can be made about this period that are immune to challenge). Thematerial is dated in some respects; scholars generally no longer speak of the “FirstTriumvirate,” for example, without recording major reservations. Also, incommon with other popular books of this kind, there is a tendency to enliven thenarrative with colorful but dubious anecdotes. As one example, the engaging andentertaining story of Caesar’s stay with pirates who had kidnapped him, and his


remarkable sang-froid during the experience, is related without reservations, butmost serious scholars would consider the details highly suspect: they would, afterall, have originated with Caesar himself. But these are quibbles, and probablyunfair when made about a book that is directed explicitly at general readers andthat meets their needs perfectly.

Anglistisches Seminar der Universität Heidelberg Anthony A. Barret

Life and Death in the Third Reich. By Peter Fritzsche. (Cambridge, Mass.: TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. viii, 368. $27.95.)

One of the enduring questions on the Nazi era centers on the Germans themselves.Were they Hitler’s first victims or Hitler’s willing executioners? Contemporarycommentators and historians have repeatedly posed this question as they try toexplain the 1930–1945 German experience. Using diaries and letters as a docu-mentary base, the author of Life and Death in the Third Reich picks up thisquestion and follows the implications of National Socialist ideology and policyfrom the early days until the death throes of the regime. Early on Peter Fritzscheacknowledges that his argument “is predisposed” to the interpretation that “mostGermans shared an ‘exterminatory’ anti-Semitic consensus with Nazi leaders,”but he insists that his goal is to examine how and the extent to which Germansbecame Nazis. That is, the process— and from there the implications—of theirconversion (5).

From the National Socialist point of view, radical reorganization of societyoffered the only prospect for recovery from Germany’s national crisis and thushope for racial survival. Their Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) requiredthe participation of millions of Germans ordered and led by the party itself. Facingthe relentless NSDAP demands for reorientation of society, Germans individuallydebated “the whole question of becoming—of becoming a National Socialist, acomrade, a race-minded German, of remaining true to the old or joining the new”(8). People recognized early on the demands for the New Order meant that “noone is supposed to be neutral” (32). The forced coordination of almost all aspectsof German public life is one of the conspicuous features of the early days of thenew regime, but Fritzsche demonstrates how “neighbors were quite self-reflectiveabout the process of conversion [to National Socialism]” (35). As more Germanscame around to the Nazi point of view, their “conversion was an ongoing process,riddled with doubt, rather than a single, final destination” (36).

Organized into four chapters with an introduction, this book connects the Nazidetermination to regenerate German life and the genuine popular support of the


regime with the increasingly intense policies of annihilation. Nazi apologistsunabashedly separated “worthy” lives from “unworthy” ones. In order to pre-serve “worthy” lives, “unworthy” lives had to be destroyed. Fritzsche argues thatlife and death were inescapably intertwined and the gigantic scale of annihilationwas known to many Germans who, although uncomfortable with the ugliness ofthe violence, accepted the rationale that these actions were unavoidable.

Though the Goldhagen thesis remains controversial, Fritzsche persua-sively demonstrates how many Germans came—fitfully, reluctantly, anduncomfortably—to view the world and the struggle through the Nazi lens. Hisanalysis gives the reader an important glimpse into Germans’ hearts and minds asthey struggled to conform and into their apparent acceptance of National Socialistlogic: regeneration of national life in Germany required annihilation on anunprecedented scale. Fritzsche’s provocatively nuanced argument offers insightinto the inner world of many ordinary Germans and their participation inNational Socialist policies. This is an important book.

Hanover College Larry Thornton

Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880. By Jennifer Hall-Witt. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2007. Pp. x, 390. $50.00.)

As historians debate when and why the aristocracy lost power, the ever-risingmiddle class becomes increasingly phantasmagoric. Viewing the London opera asa microcosm of elite culture, this author offers new insights into the aristocracy’sevolution and decline with a detailed analysis of opera management, subscriptionand attendance patterns, audience behavior, theater expansion and seating reno-vations, prices relative to subscribers’ incomes, and changes in repertoire. Herresearch vividly illustrates how commercialization, the anti-aristocratic rhetoricof the political reform movement, and the pressure of newly titled families vyingfor social advancement all contributed to the demise of traditional patronageculture.

Most significantly, Jennifer Hall-Witt exposes the way gender operated in themaintenance of aristocratic preeminence. The first half of Fashionable Acts,covering 1780 (and before) to the Reform Act of 1832, investigates the opera’srole as a “theater of the great” where the beau monde watched the performancesin the other boxes more intently than those onstage. Elite women, the predomi-nant subscribers, acted as social doorkeepers as they held court in their operaboxes, with the number of visitors on display therein indicating popularity and


reinforcing patronage networks. Men, in contrast, had their run of the place: theyvisited boxes, wandered about “Fop’s Alley” in the pit, and flirted with perform-ers backstage. The behavior and exclusivity of opera society became symbolic ofthe need for political reform, with propagandists seizing on the figure of thefrivolous, effeminate dandy as the epitome of the ruling elite’s corruption. In thesecond half of the book, Hall-Witt demonstrates how women of the ton helpedrefashion the image of the aristocracy as service elite by cultivating the appearanceof virtue with decorous manners and courtesy. Ultimately, the presence of QueenVictoria drew attention away from the ladies at the top of the seating hierarchy,signifying their loss of power, as presentation at court, not their patronage, nowgave entrée into high society.

In a review of this length, it is impossible to convey the intricacies of theinterrelated trends that Hall-Witt maps out. Essentially, opera managementbecame the province of entrepreneurs instead of men from the artistic communityand aspiring upper-class families. Expansion of seating and ticket sales under-mined the subscription system and made for a wider audience base, whichreflected the growing diversity of the fashionable elite. The perceptual shift ofopera as an event to being a work of art encouraged the fashion for quiet listening,which made it a less useful arena for power brokering. Opera detached frompolitics, as high society eventually would do. After parliament began convening inthe evening, women’s presence at the opera signified their exclusion from thepolitical realm. With its meticulous research; clear, engaging writing and organi-zation; and well-chosen reproductions of contemporary prints, this book shouldappeal to specialists and general readers alike.

University of North Texas Marilyn Morris

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety,1500–1648. By Bridget Heal. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Pp. xvi, 338. $90.00.)

Marian piety, which had flourished in Germany during the Middle Ages, oftenwithered in the face of Marian protest during the Reformation. It is, however,simply wrong to assume that Marian devotion was eradicated. In her carefulstudy, Bridget Heal cautions against this assumption, arguing effectively thatmany factors, including confessional differences, geographical locations, localcustoms, and political tensions, resulted in varying degrees and types of Mariandevotion. She concludes: “If we wish to understand how the inhabitants of early


modern Germany viewed the Mother of God we must . . . recreate the specificmatrices of politics, religion and society within which Marian piety developed”(303).

After an informative introduction, the book is structured into six chapterssoundly explaining how Marian teaching transformed what constituted Marianpiety in Lutheran Germany; how confessional tensions altered Mary’s status; howthe Counter Reformation influenced Marian devotion; why Cologne, a Catholicreform center, was “less uniformly Counter Reformation in tone than . . . Augs-burg or Bavaria”; and what role gender played in response to Mary (207).Although the author examines evidence from all of Germany, she focuses onNuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne, all of which had no direct territorial over-lords and all of which responded differently to Mary. Using these three cities, Healproves conclusively that “Marian devotion was not merely a paradigmatic ‘rite ofdifferentiation,’” as Wolfgang Reinhard suggests, but rather was derived “fromthe conjunction of specific religious, political, cultural and social circumstances”(21). Indeed, “Local variations in religious practice were . . . key in determiningwhat Mary meant to the inhabitants of early modern Germany” (22).

Thoroughly researched and sensitively written, Heal’s work is a model ofsound historical scholarship. When any historian examines a complex subject likeReformation Germany, attempts to generalize from a single example often gen-erate false or misleading conclusions. To her credit, Heal consistently refuses tocommit such a scholarly “sin.” For example, she argues that although Augsburgand Nuremberg were Lutheran, the two “had very different ecologies of Mariandevotional practice. In order to understand this diversity, we need to . . . relatereligion to other aspects of early modern life: social, political and cultural” (11).She then demonstrates how Augsburg’s biconfessional nature and the influence ofreformed Protestantism worked to make Protestants less comfortable with Marianimages and practices than inhabitants of Nuremberg, who retained images andpractices because Lutheran preachers explained their theological significance dif-ferently. For a second example, her examination of Cologne proves that “thestrength of that city’s own religious traditions ensured that the militant Virgin didnot conquer Catholic devotional practice” (306). She correctly maintains: “Thisdiversity of Marian practice indicates that both Protestant and Catholic piety werefluid and adoptable” (306). As a final note, her chapter on gender is a compellingone, reinforcing that Mary’s “multiplicity of meanings ensured that her appealtranscended all gender as well as all social boundaries” (302).

Heal’s work is a must for libraries and for Reformation scholars. Well-writtenand excellently illustrated with examples from art, it could easily appeal to serious


undergraduate students. Most importantly, this work is significant because itdefinitively dispels the mistaken assumption that the Virgin Mary had meaningonly for Catholics in Reformation Germany.

Providence College Raymond L. Sickinger

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire. By JoeJackson. (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2008. Pp. 432. $27.95.)

Englishman Henry Wickham failed at every enterprise that he touched. In 1866,envisioning himself to be a great explorer, like a Columbus, and a discoverer ofgreat riches for the British Empire, he sailed to Nicaragua only to find malariaand empty pockets. Two years later, he traveled to the Amazon where heacquired his “addiction” to the rubber plant and “the buds of a lifelong pat-tern . . . rush headlong into any scheme that might turn him into a planter”(119, 94). As had happened earlier, his scheme collapsed, and he returned homepenniless. In 1871 he ventured to the Amazonas with his wife, mother, sister, andother relatives, and lost everything, including his mother and sister. When in1875 the British government offered to pay him to gather ten thousand rubberseeds for £100, he nearly lost the commission. Although he collected seventythousand and received £700, that money soon evaporated. Unable to stay still,he left for Australia to plant tobacco but overextended his finances and lost hisland. His next stop was the British Honduras where he would look for gold andplant rubber, cocoa, and bananas. Then on to New Guinea for cocoa nuts,sponges, and pearl oysters, but each enterprise ended as had all the others. In1899, his wife left him. When he died at the age of eighty-two, he had no moneyto his name.

So why was this man noteworthy? A nonfiction writer and five-time Pulitzernominee, Joe Jackson has eloquently spun the tale of how Wickham was a part ofas well as a symbol for British imperialism in the Victorian Age. In this fast-pacedbiography, he ties together the much larger issues of the rush for rubber and theimpact of nineteenth-century “biopiracy” (13). The seventy thousand rubberseeds that Wickham secreted out of the Amazon by lying to Brazilian officialshelped Britain to spread the cultivation of superior rubber plants around theworld. A price was to be paid, Jackson points out, for Wickham’s deed. His “theftruined the economy of one of the lushest regions on earth,” as plantations beyondSouth America poured rubber into the market and the rubber boom became a bust(278). As a consequence, Wickham earned the title “father of the rubber industry”


from some and “Executioner of the Amazonas” from others, a “parable of the useand misuse of nature in the quest for power” (268, 191, 13).

Tarleton State University Janet Schmelzer

The Fall of Napoleon: The Allied Invasion of France, 1813–1814. By Michael V.Leggiere. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 686.$35.00.)

The end for Napoleon began in the summer of 1813. The Austrians hoped that theFrench Emperor—and son-in-law of the Austrian Emperor—would accept a nego-tiated peace that would leave France as a western counterweight to Russian powerin the east. But Napoleon rejected the offers of a negotiated settlement, and afterearly success in the summer of 1813, his forces were outmaneuvered, surrounded,and destroyed in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October. Unlike the winterof 1812–1813, when the allied coalition allowed Napoleon, after his disaster inRussia, to return to France to raise a new army, the coalition elected to risk thedangers of a winter campaign and invade France. The invasion, between 23November 1813 and 3 January 1814, involved 327,000 men organized into threearmies.

Michael V. Leggiere narrates with great success an account of the invasion upto the point when Napoleon, in early February, left Paris and took the field tocommand the French armies in a final effort to defeat the coalition and preservehis throne. A second volume to follow will continue the events to his abdication.Leggiere looks at the military operations from “the perspective of a coalitionundertaking, in which politics influenced strategy and military operations affecteddiplomacy.” He calls this “old military history. It is about generals—theirthoughts, plans, hopes, and despair” (xv).

There is much of value in Leggiere’s narrative. He details the factors thatinfluenced policy and strategy on the allied side: Austrian political goals in conflictwith those of Tsar Alexander I, the Prussian desire for revenge, and the advocatesof the new revolutionary warfare challenging those who preferred the oldeighteenth-century views of methodical maneuver. These factors kept the alliesfrom seizing Paris and ending the war in late 1813, a delay for which they “wouldpay dearly” in 1814 (554). One also sees Napoleon’s failures as he directed theFrench response from Paris, never fully understanding the nature of the alliedthreat and never clearly conveying to his subordinates in the field his strategicintentions.


Leggiere employs his sources impressively. He exploits the important primarymaterials in archives and memoirs while his use of the secondary literature isinteresting; he challenges earlier interpretations that he believes to be unfair, andhe uses the words of other historians to complement his own view and in theprocess enrich the text. The book’s only weakness is the maps. The first does notappear until page 120, making it hard to picture the early allied or Frenchmovements, and the maps themselves are hard to read. But this is a minorcriticism. The Fall of Napoleon is an important study of a military campaign thatscholars have long neglected. It illustrates the difficulties of waging successfulcoalition warfare even as Napoleon’s star rapidly dimmed.

University of Mary Washington Porter R. Blakemore

Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. By BernardLightman. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. vii, 545. $45.00.)

The period of Queen Victoria’s reign is known for many things, including anexplosion of new technologies and scientific discoveries. The author of this bookis interested in the men and women who sought to act as mediators between thescientific elite and society as a whole. Victorian Popularizers of Science representsa culmination of fifteen years’ worth of study on Bernard Lightman’s part. Hisgoal is to bring these nonscholarly writers into the overall discussion of scienceand culture during the nineteenth century.

Lightman examines several groups of popularizers. The first were priests whosought to keep religion within the discussion of science. Today this might seem anodd set of individuals to write about science, but they had long been promoters ofthe study of nature. Priests were, however, the bane of more scholarly individualslike Thomas Henry Huxley and were largely forced out of the new “professional”scientific societies by midcentury.

Women were another group that Huxley sought to excommunicate from “trulyscientific organizations.” During the nineteenth century, writing was one of thefew acceptable careers for females. Some wrote to educate other women and chil-dren, but after the 1850s many sought to appeal to a wider audience. Lightmandemonstrates that a number of these women had worked with husbands or relativeswho were professionals and thus actually had firsthand related experience.

Lightman then turns to a series of amateurs who sought directly to challengethe professionals for the right to present and write about science. Showmen likeJohn Henry Pepper and illustrator and naturalist John George Wood employedvisuals that captured the imagination of more than one generation. Writers


Arabella Buckley and Grant Allen embraced Darwin and sought to convert thegeneral population to the concept of evolution. Finally Lightman illustrates howRichard Proctor attempted to challenge the journal Nature with his own Knowl-edge and, in so doing, keep a space at the scientific table for the amateur.

Popularizers of science were largely successful because publishers, and notscientists, controlled what books were published. It took scientists time to recog-nize that in order to sell books one had to be both instructive and entertaining.Two professionals who understood this were Huxley and Robert Ball. Theychallenged the popularizers at their own game. Lightman ends his work bylooking at a series of writers at the end of the century and how they reacted to thegrowing importance of science within the daily lives of many Britons.

Victorian Popularizers of Science is a well-researched and documented text.Lightman is a skilled writer so the work, like the individuals discussed, appeals toboth a popular and a scholarly audience in a number of fields including genderstudies. It is important to Lightman that women popularizers of science receivetheir due. As a result, almost half of the individuals he discusses are women.

Mary Baldwin College Edmund D. Potter

The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. By Lorenz M. Lüthi.(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 375. $27.95.)

It was only after the Chinese Revolution was a fait accompli that Stalin threw hissupport behind the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao remained resentfulboth of this hesitation and of the fact that Stalin dealt with the People’s Republicof China (PRC) as with a subordinate power. Nonetheless, Mao regarded theUSSR as the natural leader of the Communist bloc and believed that Chinadesperately needed Soviet support. In 1950, the two countries signed a formalalliance.

The relationship was always tense. Though Mao resented Stalin, he dislikedKhrushchev even more. On the one hand, Mao’s rivals within the CCP pointed tothe failures of Stalin’s radical social and economic programs as justification formoderation in China. On the other hand, Mao feared that, as a result of Khrush-chev’s efforts at de-Stalinization, an alliance with the USSR could underminedomestic support for his own radical programs. He also believed that Khrush-chev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with capitalist powers would prove disas-trous for Communism. In his view, the imperialists needed to be confronted. Thus,in spite of personal animosity for Stalin, Mao identified ideologically with Stalin-ism and, in the late 1950s, grew increasingly skeptical of the value of the alliance.


The Soviets, understanding the alliance’s geo-strategic importance, supportedChinese industrialization with generous financial and technical assistance.However, Soviet leaders never really attempted to understand China. Conse-quently, their foreign policies often failed to consider their Chinese partners’interests and sensibilities and just as frequently offended them.

In addition, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” and the resulting instability inEastern Europe frightened the Chinese. Moreover, the removal of Soviet warheadsfrom Cuba following the missile crisis confirmed Mao’s suspicions that Khrush-chev was ineffectual. Yet another key factor in the dissolution of Sino-Sovietrelations was Khrushchev’s withdrawal of promises to provide the Chinese withan atom bomb. According to Lorenz M. Lüthi, the decision was not surprising.The Chinese had failed to warn the Soviets of their military enterprises along itsboundaries with India and in the Taiwan Straits, thereby violating the terms of thealliance and jeopardizing Soviet diplomatic initiatives globally. No less importantwere Mao’s imprudent pronouncements about China’s ability to win a nuclearwar with the U.S. and tense border disputes between the USSR and China thatwere exacerbated by his provocative behavior. Although the Soviets were notblameless in these and later conflicts, they were guilty less of deceit than of poordiplomacy. Unlike Mao, they genuinely sought to preserve the ill-fated alliance.

Using his extensive research in Chinese and Soviet archives, Lüthi argues thatthe Chinese, rather than the Soviets, set the tone of the relationship and that theirpolicies were a function of internal politics rather than the result of a coherentforeign policy. Most importantly, Mao came to associate the alliance with ideo-logical moderation and ultimately believed that ending it would help him to movehis country in a more revolutionary direction. This persuasive, thorough, andbalanced history of the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations in the late 1950s and1960s should be considered essential reading for scholars interested in the ColdWar.

The College of Wooster Peter C. Pozefsky

The Nazi Party: The Anatomy of a People’s Party, 1919–1933. By Paul Madden andDetlef Mühlberger. (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii, 329. $111.95.)

The predominant view in the early 1930s and after 1945 was that the Nazi Partydrew nearly all of its membership during its kampfzeit (period of struggle) fromthe lower middle class, despite the fact that there was virtually no concreteevidence to support the thesis. Paul Madden and Detlef Mühlberger have con-ducted an exhaustive survey of postwar historical opinion, looked at the social


characteristics of Nazi Party members, and investigated four areas in detail—Posen-West Prussia, a farming area bordering on the reconstituted state of Poland;County Friedberg, a central rural area; Göttingen, a university town; andFrankfurt-am-Main—to determine the exact social class of those who joined theNazi Party.

Madden finds that in the years 1919–1923, the upper ranks of the middleclasses (comprising people like “managers and senior officials,” “military [offic-ers],” professionals, and “persons from the socio-economic elites”) represented aconsiderably higher percentage of party membership in Hitler’s movement whencompared to their strength in Bavarian and German society. Madden asserts that“the importance of this group in the early party . . . can hardly be overstated” (93).

Between the years 1925–1933, a considerable number of workers and membersof the lower middle class joined the Nazi Party (147). More than twice as manyprofessional people were members of the NSDAP as a proportion of their class,and there was a proportionately high number from the socio-elites as well.

After extensive investigations, Madden and Mühlberger come to two conclu-sions. First, that the Nazi Party effectively transcended the class divide of Germanpolitics. Second, that without the American stock market crash and “resultingglobal economic depression,” Hitler would never have received such an endorse-ment from the German people. The two authors’ second conclusion, however,warrants further consideration. They remark upon the success of Hugenberg’sFreedom Law petition (on whether President Hindenburg and all his cabinetshould be tried for treason for agreeing to the Young Plan war reparationsagreement and every international agreement since the war, including the Treatyof Versailles) in persuading people to join the Nazi Party in County Friedberg.

They also reveal that the Nazi Party almost doubled its share of the votebetween the 1928 Reichstag elections and the local 17 November 1929 electionsin Frankfurt-am-Main. Yet they do not consider whether the anticipated successof Hugenberg’s petition on 3 November 1929 could itself have contributed to thestock market crash in America on 23 October 1929. As Germany was the greatestexporter in the world in 1931, with considerable balances in the bank, it is moreurgent than ever to consider whether it was an outside economic crisis that droveGermany into recession and persuaded the German people to seek salvation inHitler or whether Germany itself was largely responsible for the economic depres-sion and the rise of Hitler in a foolish and criminal crusade to rid the country ofpaying war reparations.

London, England Sara Moore


Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur. By Laurence Marley. (Dublin,Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2007. Pp. 314. $55.00.)

The author of this biography begins with the important reminder that MichaelDavitt was not yet forty when the Kilmainham Treaty was signed (11). WhatLaurence Marley has sought to redress are Davitt’s lesser-known later years.Marley immediately acknowledges that historians gave T. W. Moody wide berthto do his biography and, as such, Davitt’s later years have yet to be well covered.Nevertheless, although Marley clearly acknowledges the importance of Moody’sbiography, he does not hesitate to counter Moody’s analysis.

In the first chapters, Marley discusses Davitt’s early years, including his estab-lishment of the Land League and relationship with Charles Parnell. Marley showshow Davitt’s radical support of land nationalization alienated Davitt from Parnelland his supporters who, following the Kilmainham Treaty, increasingly turnedtoward Home Rule. Nevertheless, Marley argues that until the Kitty O’Shea affair,Davitt restrained his criticism of Parnell, fearing it might cause a split in the IrishParty. Once the affair became public, Davitt then used his paper Labour World(launched in 1890) to call publicly for Parnell to step down. Marley places LabourWorld into the greater context of British labor activism and offers importantcomparison with James Kier Hardie’s Labour Leader, which, suggests Marley,was much more sensationalist than Labour World. The journal did not last a year,but Marley argues that it was a paper well ahead of its time and that “its initialattraction was such that demand exceeded output” (110). Labour World high-lighted Davitt’s abilities as a first-rate investigative journalist, an occupation inwhich he would work most of his life.

What Marley implies throughout the first half of the book but begins to makeexplicit as he moves forward into Davitt’s post-land-war years is that Davitt wasmore often than not a square peg in a round hole. Davitt advocated land redis-tribution when his Irish cohorts were often interested in peasant land ownership,and his relationship with the British labor movement and, most notably, JamesKier Hardie, was rocky. As Marley notes, when it comes to politics, Davitt isdifficult to situate. He once reflected, “I am not a Socialist. . . . I am content to bean Irish Nationalist and Land Reformer; but there are many articles in the politicalcreed of Socialism to which I willingly subscribe” (220). What Marley paints forreaders is a man who was at his core a political and social loner.

Marley provides an understanding of Davitt’s middle age. Davitt traveledwidely, seeking to study other cultures and hoping to return with new ideas onhow, in particular, to address Ireland’s land issues and extensive poverty. Marley


has produced a well-researched study that shows a man who, at times, was singlyfocused to the point of narrow-mindedness and so dedicated to Ireland’s causethat he often neglected his family. A dense read that jumps about, this book bringsto life a complicated man who, long after the land war ended, continued to workto improve the lives of the Irish.

Augustana College Margaret Preston

Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain. By Julie Melnyk. (Westport, Conn.:Praeger, 2008. Pp. xvii, 208. $49.95.)

This brief volume is published as part of the Victorian Life and Times series, whichaims to provide “authoritative and dependable” studies of specific aspects of the“social history and material culture” of the Victorian era (x). Julie Melnyk fulfillsthese goals admirably. Her book is clearly written and comprehensive, a usefulguide or primer for anyone interested in the complex topic of Victorian religion.

Melnyk organizes her study into short, easily digested chapters covering differ-ent aspects of religious belief, practice, and experience. This approach sometimesresults in repetition. For example, when describing the Established Church inchapter one, she explains that Dissenters could not use their own burial rites inAnglican graveyards; she repeats the same information in chapter two whileexplaining the dissenting sects; and again in chapter four, when discussing theeffect of religion on daily life. Still, such thoroughness only reinforces how helpfulthe book is as a reference tool. General readers, students, teachers, and even somescholars will benefit from her concise review of the most prominent religions inVictorian Britain (chapters one and two). Readers of Trollope’s novels in particularwill thank her for clarifying all matters clerical—from the difference between acurate and a dean, to the proper way to address a bishop (“the Right Reverend”),to the importance of a glebe to a vicar and a prebend to a canon (chapter three).

Because the most likely readers of this book will be those familiar withVictorian literature and culture, Melnyk makes a point of using extensiveexamples from novels and poetry to illustrate her explanations. She also offers amore systematic survey of religious literature and of religious themes in main-stream imaginative literature (chapter six). Her emphasis on the contributionsfrom female authors leads naturally into her analysis of “the liberatory role”religion played in the lives of many Victorian women (123).

Melnyk’s study is weakest in its examination of the political dimensions ofVictorian religion. Although she explains the crucial links between church andstate and between religious convictions and reform (chapter five), she fails


adequately to convey the centrality of religion to Victorian politics and politicians.Religious differences helped form the basis for party divisions in parliament anddeeply influenced the political philosophies of both Disraeli and Gladstone. Simi-larly, because Melnyk gives so little consideration to religion in Ireland (orScotland or Wales), her study ignores the political implications of the IrishCatholic devotional revolution and ultramontanism during the era. Finally,though Victorian Religion includes a useful glossary of terms, its bibliographyomits some of the most useful and engaging works on the subject. The book, andthe series, would be better served by including “a suggested reading” section thatcould direct readers inspired to learn more about topics such as Evangelicalismtowards works like Owen Chadwick’s brilliant microhistory Victorian Miniatureor Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement.

York College of Pennsylvania Padraic Kennedy

Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. By CharlesH. Parker. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii, 346.$49.95.)

Among historians, the religious plurality of the seventeenth-century Dutch Repub-lic has enjoyed an iconic reputation for its tolerant stance in an ocean of religiousintolerance. Since the nineteenth century, many scholars and the Dutch themselveshave considered toleration to be central to the national character. In his excellentstudy of Dutch Catholicism in an officially Calvinist land, Charles H. Parker addsanother correction to the scholarly understanding of confessional coexistence inthe Republic. In order to organize the multiconfessional Republic and support thepublic Reformed Church, Dutch magistrates excluded Catholics from public life,forced them to worship in private homes, and held imprisoned priests for ransom.Catholics considered this informal religious coexistence to be persecution, nottoleration. Even in this context, the reorganized Catholic Church grew to equalthe Reformed in numbers by the end of the seventeenth century.

Parker sheds light on the history of the Dutch Catholics from 1572 to 1702 byplacing them in the larger context of the Counter Reformation in Europe. Hedraws from archival records and published manuscripts to depict the history ofthe Holland Mission, the effort of the regrouped Church to minister to Catholicsliving in the Republic. Central to their efforts was the establishment of seminariesto train priests especially for the Republic. Parker credits the close relationshipbetween the highly trained priests and the Catholic elite families for the Church’s


survival and growth in a country where they lacked official state support.Although the new seminaries allowed the hierarchy to conform the HollandMission to post-Tridentine Catholicism, it was not a top-down process; withoutthe commitment of the elite families to give their money and sons to the church,it surely would have faltered.

Parker also examines the interplay between the local Dutch traditions and thereforms of international Catholicism. Like Catholics elsewhere in Europe, Dutchmen and women went on pilgrimages, honored the saints, and remembered themartyrs, but they did so in a way that strengthened their faith in a land governedby heretics. Parker concludes by illustrating the way that the Dutch Catholicsreshaped their charitable and financial work following the secularization ofchurch property. The loss of the traditional patronage system was a burden;however, the freedom from traditional financial obligations allowed Catholics toadapt creatively to their minority status.

The Dutch Catholic Church grew without the support of the state organsnormally associated with the confessionalization and Counter Reformation of theseventeenth century. Its members’ sense of persecution strengthened their com-mitment to the international Church, while the new seminary and financialstructure supported the post-Tridentine reforms of the hierarchy and the growthof Baroque piety. Previous histories of Dutch Catholicism have stressed itsnational identity; Parker convincingly argues for its placement within interna-tional Catholicism. Because it places the Dutch Catholics between the localcontext of a Calvinist country and the broader forces of Catholic Europe, thisimpressively researched book will interest scholars of early modern religion, theDutch Republic, and the Counter Reformation.

Bluffton University Troy Osborne

A More Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. By MarkPegg. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii, 253. $25.00.)

Remarkably few comprehensive works exist about the pivotal crusade against the“Albigensians.” This author’s contribution certainly helps to fill that historio-graphical gap. Indeed it is Mark Pegg who has taught readers the importance ofthose quotation marks. In past works he advanced the idea that heresies identifiedby churchmen were largely the products of their own systematizing tendencies,and this work continues that theme. Pegg contends that the crusade itself waslaunched against a chimera—a “Catharism” that had no basis in reality. He


concludes that heresy was not a cohesive set of dogmas and hierarchies, but ratherwas an ecclesiastical misinterpretation of native courtesies and practices inherentin the local culture.

Pegg has an arresting writing style that begins in a somewhat choppy mannerbut becomes a forceful and propulsive narrative once he reaches the crusadeproper. He leads the reader through some background preliminaries, and thenchronologically through the course of the campaign. He is at his strongest whendescribing local customs and social realities. Pegg is very well read in the sources,and he weaves them skillfully throughout his text, though at times one wishes fora block quotation, rather than a snippet surrounded by commentary. This excel-lently produced book also comes with handy maps and thoughtful additions likea list of characters, a glossary, and genealogies, making it useful to students. Oneof the most valuable parts of the book is the introduction, where Pegg, unlikemany historians, makes clear his philosophical presuppositions.

In the introduction, Pegg plainly lays out his bias against essentialism. Heknows from experience how difficult it is to find heresy “on the ground.”However, his contention that heresy is completely fabricated ends up going too far.It impugns the sources too much and requires a wholesale hermeneutic of denialin relation to their “essentializing” tendencies. What is ironic, then, is the book’suse of the terms “genocide” and “holocaust” to describe certain events in thecrusade. Pegg essentializes these terms and imposes them on the thirteenth centuryin order to undergird his points. His narrative is also hampered by a mordant toneregarding the intentions of the Church and of the crusaders, who are constantly“walking like Him” during bouts of pillage and killing. This underestimates thegenuine religious feeling of the crusaders, and the great value they placed on thecrusading indulgence, which was granted, not as a license to mass murder, but asa remission of punishment should a crusader die in battle.

In the end, Pegg’s book is a thoughtful exploration of the conflict, but isburdened by a good idea taken too far. It is unlikely that Dominic and the tavernkeeper of Toulouse stayed up all night debating the intricacies of cortesia. It wasnot a critique of their customs that led the “good women” of Prouille to abjuretheir heresy and become cloistered nuns. Week-long theological debates did notexist merely to decry local fashions. Something was there, not Manichaeanism,not perhaps even “Catharism,” but a dualism so dangerous to medieval culturethat in holding it one lost the title of “Christian,” for in so doing one effectivelydenied the Incarnation.

Jacksonville State University Donald S. Prudlo


Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy. By Michael S. Reidy.(Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 389. $40.00.)

In this new book, the author describes clearly and succinctly the successful Britishcampaign, waged between 1830 and 1855, to develop a scientific understandingof the actions of the oceans’ tides. “Rather than a history of tidal theory,” MichaelS. Reidy says, “this book is a history of British scientific culture during thetransition from industrialization to empire, when understanding the sea becameimportant politically, economically, and strategically” (10).

After discussing early English ideas about the oceans, the author describesseventeenth-century scientific advances, which prepared the way for the earlyVictorian tidal campaign. These include studies by members of the Royal Society,creation of ephemerides of the sun and moon, and Newton’s theory of gravitation,which explained the relationship of those bodies to the tides.

Because Newton’s theory did not deal with the tidal effects of the earth’sgeography, it could not be used to predict tides. During the eighteenth century,scientists tried to deal with this problem. None of them succeeded.

The core of the book is in the next five chapters, which discuss the Britishdrive to develop this essential geographical component of tidal theory. Successcame from the efforts of a huge and diverse network of people who collected,standardized, analyzed, and synthesized tidal data. One of the strengths of thisbook is that it describes the functions of those in subordinate positions as wellas those of the elite scientists. As the project’s scope and cost increased, privatefunding by learned societies and individuals proved to be inadequate. TheBritish Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office ultimately provided the necessarymoney to complete the studies. By the mid-1850s, the office was publishing anddistributing tide tables for the world’s major ports as well as charts, pilotguides, sailing directions, and Notices to Mariners, which regularly updatednavigational information.

In addition to producing practical data for mariners, tidal studies contributedto developing scientific methodology and to defining the roles of persons engagedin scientific endeavors. Among the most prominent of the scientists were JohnLubbock, who studied the complicated tides and currents of the Thames estuary,and William Whewell, who studied tides of the world. Whewell developed isotidalcharts as well as tables to present his findings and wrote two important treatiseson the inductive sciences. Among the calculators were John Foss Dessieu, of theHydrographic Office, whose achievements and trials are detailed in chapter three,and Thomas Gamlen Bunt, of Bristol, who was also a surveyor and inventor of a


self-recording tidal gauge, which showed continuous rather than periodic tidalheights.

In closing, the author points out that in the nineteenth century, Great Britainneeded the scientific knowledge of the sea developed in the early Victorian periodto maintain her position as the world’s greatest sea power and was, therefore,willing to pay for it.

This book makes the story of an important scientific enterprise accessible togeneralists as well as specialists. Its bibliography is excellent, and its illustrationsare clear and useful, if not elegant. Academic libraries should give its acquisitionserious consideration.

California State University, Fullerton Ernest W. Toy

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

July 4, 2007, marked the bicentennial of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s birth. This was anational holiday in Italy, but passed without much notice elsewhere. Why wasGaribaldi once called “the hero of Two Worlds”?

Alfonso Scirocco’s chronicle of Garibaldi, first published in Italian in 2001 andtranslated into French in 2005, emphasizes the revolutionary hero’s worldwidetravels and reputation, following Garibaldi’s own wide-ranging memoirs. Bycontrast, George Trevelyan’s three-volume epic [1907–1911], like the memoirsstill in print, treats only Garibaldi’s momentous influence in the Italian wars ofunification.

Born in Nice (Nizza), Garibaldi was trained to be a sailor like his father, but hejoined Giuseppe Mazzini’s abortive revolution of 1834 against the Piedmontesemonarchy. Garibaldi escaped to France and was sentenced to death in absentia,launching his romantic career of freedom fighting. In exile, he became a privateerfighting for the breakaway Republic of Rio Grande do Sul against the Empire ofBrazil. He next served as an admiral and general in Uruguay’s civil war. Havinggathered in Montevideo as a Legion of Italian expatriates, Garibaldi returned toEurope for the revolutions of 1848–1849. He led the defense of the Republic ofRome against overwhelming French forces, then conducted a masterful retreatwhile enduring the death of his wife, Anita.

* Editor’s Note: Due to an oversight in our editorial offices, in addition to the review byAlexander De Grand in our previous issue, this second review of Professor Scirocco’s biogra-phy of Garibaldi was commissioned. We owe it to Professor Choate to have his exceptionallythorough review published in our pages.


Garibaldi returned from exile in New York to help lead Italy’s Second War ofIndependence, launched in 1859, and in 1860 he led one thousand men in adramatic expedition to overthrow the Bourbon kingdom of southern Italy. Theexpedition sailed from Genoa to join a Sicilian peasant revolt, and throughGaribaldi’s daring leadership conquered the entire island, crossed the Straits ofMessina, routed the royalist army, and captured Naples itself.

Garibaldi’s international reputation was unparalleled. The United Statesoffered him a generalship for the Civil War in 1861, and Garibaldi accepted ontwo conditions: that the North make the conflict a war against slavery, and thathe be made general-in-chief. Garibaldi was refused, but Lincoln did adopt anantislavery position a year later. Garibaldi led two more failed attacks on thePapal States in Rome and fought for France against Prussia in 1870.

Scirocco is careful to peel back layers of accumulated myth to presenta plausible human hero. As the Italian version of the book’s subtitle indicates,the narrative returns repeatedly (and sometimes awkwardly) to Garibaldi’slove affairs, risky military campaigns, and political ideas. Drawing from Saint-Simonian utopianism, Mazzinian republicanism, and Marxist socialism, Garibaldibecame “an idealist without ideologies” (xi). Unlike Che Guevara or othertwentieth-century heroes, Garibaldi separated his charismatic leadership from anyideological absolutes, and refused to wreak massive bloodshed and terror. Afterconquering southern Italy, Garibaldi handed everything over to the King ofPiedmont, without preconditions, to avoid further war.

This is a straightforward, traditional biography, as opposed to Lucy Riall’spostmodernist Garibaldi: The Invention of a Hero [2007]. The translation isserviceable but word for word and often clumsy. (For good prose, see Trevelyan.)Readers will benefit from a chronology and annotated bibliography, but the indexis spotty. Anyone unfamiliar with Garibaldi will find Scirocco’s book a usefulplace to start.

Brigham Young University Mark I. Choate

Gladstone: God and Politics. By Richard Shannon. (London, England: Hambledonand Continuum, 2007. Pp. xxvi, 550. $87.00.)

Those familiar with Richard Shannon’s two-volume biography of W. E. Glad-stone [1982 and 1999] will know of his antipathy toward the man about whomhe has written at such length. Having himself concluded that the density ofhis previous work on Gladstone had blunted his argument and limited his


readership, Shannon now gives readers a single-volume life that aims to mountan effective challenge to the generally favorable (and well-received) biographiesproduced by H. C. G. Matthew and Roy Jenkins. Shannon holds that Matthewand Jenkins, like John Morley before them, fail to come to grips with thepolitical implications of Gladstone’s sense of himself as an instrument of DivineProvidence. Insufficient weight, Shannon contends, has been given to what Glad-stone said about his own conduct and the forces shaping it. Moreover, Glad-stone’s biographers, says Shannon, have not satisfactorily assayed the imperiouscharacter of Gladstone’s premierships or appreciated the gap between his “lib-eralism” and the parliamentary liberalism of his party, a party upon whichGladstone inflicted great harm.

Shannon frequently summons a sentiment expressed by Gladstone in a letterhe wrote Lord Aberdeen in 1856 (a sentiment given a similar formulationin Gladstone’s “General Retrospect” of 1897). Gladstone asserted that the“strength” needed “for the purposes of Government . . . must rest upon thedoings & practical intentions of the [Prime] Minister, and by a correspondingconviction wrought by them in the public mind” (99). Gladstone came tobelieve that he had been endowed by Providence with a special “insight into thefacts of particular eras, and their relations one to another, which generates inthe mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public opinion andfor directing it to a particular end” (87–88). Acknowledging that Gladstone’sprodigious administrative and parliamentary abilities, coupled with his capacityfor moving mass audiences, made him Britain’s pivotal political figure duringthe second half of the nineteenth century, Shannon nonetheless insists that Glad-stone’s taste for a heroic brand of politics and readiness to see himself as anagent of divine purpose made him an essentially destructive political force. Inthe 1880s, Shannon tells readers, Gladstone scuttled practical measures (landpurchase and a local government scheme) that might well have answered thepolitical problem presented by Ireland and instead embraced a Home Rulepolicy that neither parliamentary nor public opinion could countenance(Shannon finds the remarkable Irish Land Act of 1881 “largely irrelevant”[330]). Some of Shannon’s answers to the “what if” questions he raises seemdubious to this reviewer. Such questions aside, the Gladstone he presentsis overweening, willful, self-deluding, tactless, and egotistical. Gladstone-watchers, Shannon avidly points out, commonly considered him a “lunatic,” a“madman,” and a “fanatic.”

Much can justly be said against Gladstone, the man and the political leader,and Shannon’s arraignment is comprehensive and formidable. Readers wanting to


know what can be said for Gladstone should look elsewhere (to Matthew, Jenkins,and Eugenio Biagini, for example).

Kenyon College Bruce Kinzer

Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. By CarolynSteedman. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 263.$91.00.)

A series of mysteries animates this author’s new book about a remarkable rela-tionship between master and maidservant. When thirty-eight-year-old PhoebeBeatson became pregnant out of wedlock, why did her master, Reverend JohnMurgatroyd of Slaithwaite, not follow contemporary practice and evict her? Whatmoved him to baptize the child, born in September 1802, and provide for bothmother and daughter until and after his death in 1806? What was the nature oftheir relationship?

In her search for answers, Carolyn Steedman charges through a thicket ofcomplicated issues, providing dozens of lessons in historical interpretation. Sheconstructs the book as a series of intersecting essays on the social, economic, andcultural relations of late-eighteenth-century West Yorkshire, exploring topicsranging from the “culturally noisy” eighteenth-century provincial domesticservant to the organization of worsted wool manufacturing, from West RidingAnglicanism to Murgatroyd’s intellectual universe. Each essay could stand on itsown, which is a plus because the book is so dense with information and provoca-tive argument that many readers may choose to read selectively. However, persis-tence pays off, for it is in the intersections of these seemingly unrelated topicswhere Steedman’s analysis is most intriguing. The sources are sparse, but Steed-man painstakingly extracts clues and interprets them with finesse. The mostcomplete portrait emerges of Murgatroyd, whose extensive diaries [1781–1806]and commonplace books reveal him to be a well-read individual with a modern,emotive understanding of love. Phoebe Beatson’s character and motivations areless clear, and Steedman must read the “absences and silences” as deftly as shedoes the actual sources, drawing on her deep knowledge of literature to fill in thegaps. In the final chapter, Steedman places Phoebe’s life within the fictionalpossibilities provided by Emily Brontë’s Nellie Dean: “Characters in books, andplot structures and literary devices have historical existence, and can be made todo the work of historical analysis” (196).

Through unexpected juxtapositions, Steedman challenges an ambitiousnumber of canonical interpretations, making this book well worth reading for


specialists of the time period. E. P. Thompson’s “well-worn” explanation of themaking of the English working class is complicated by Steedman’s analysis of classconsciousness among domestic servants. Explanations for the emergence ofmodern love, which too often stay “within the conceptual confines of agape anderos,” are enriched by her analysis of West Yorkshire material culture and ruralindustrial capitalism (190). She reveals the region’s Protestant culture to be quiteheterodox, influenced by Renaissance humanism almost as much as evangelicaltheology and practice.

Ultimately, Steedman argues, the secret to the maid and master’s emotionalbond lies in emerging forms of religious faith and their manifestation in social andemotional relations. Murgatroyd’s interest in Beatson and her baby reflected arelatively modern conception of an Anglican God, who served no longer merely asa source of constitutional-philosophical thinking, but also as a wellspring of socialknowledge and an arbiter of human relations. To outsiders, Murgatroyd’s godsmight have been crazy, but to him they made perfect sense.

Augsburg College Jacqueline R. deVries

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling. By Lewis Erenberg.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 274. $28.00.)

The title of this book comes from a 1938 radio broadcast announcing boxer JoeLouis’s New York rematch against Max Schmeling. Seventy years on, the genera-tion is no longer ours, and Lewis Erenberg’s book reminds readers why a 124-second boxing match (which Louis won) became “international political theater”(2). The match, and the relationship between the two boxers, has attracted muchattention in recent years, notably in David Margolick’s Beyond Glory: MaxSchmeling vs. Joe Louis, and a World on the Brink (Knopf, 2005) and PatrickMyler’s Ring of Hate: The Brown Bomber and Hitler’s Hero (Mainstream, 2006).As their titles suggest, all three read sport as “mirroring” wider issues, but Erenberg,as befits a professional historian, situates his account in a wider range of contexts.At times, this is at the cost of some uneasy maneuvering between academic and fightargots, between talk of gendering and talk of “fistic redemption” (101, 170).

Erenberg says his aim is to give “each boxer comparable weight,” and hisaccount of Schmeling is certainly the most thorough and sympathetic to date (4).He begins his story in the early 1920s when boxing really took off in Germany,largely due to the popularity of American fight films; Schmeling took up the sport


after seeing the film of Jack Dempsey’s 1921 defeat of George S. Carpentier. At thestart of the 1930s, boxing represented transatlantic cosmopolitanism, but by theend of the decade the sport had entered the discourse of a resurgent nationalism.Drawing on a vast array of German and American newspapers, as well as therecent work of other historians, Erenberg uses Schmeling’s career to chart thiscultural and political shift.

His reading is alert and nuanced, marred only by a rather unskeptical approachto Schmeling’s account of events, as presented in several postwar autobiographies.It is unsurprising that in 1977 Schmeling would say that while “outwardly”conforming to Nazi “dictates,” he was “privately” unhappy (74). Readers learnabout Schmeling’s Jewish manager, his Jewish friends, and the Jews he helped toescape, but Erenberg never questions the boxer’s repeated assertion of the “sanc-tity of sport” nor asks why, unlike many of his Weimar café society friends,Schmeling didn’t leave Germany (but instead went hunting on Göring’s estate)(75). Erenberg describes a “consummate professional” whose actions were “rein-terpreted” by others (95). Only in the epilogue does he pass judgment: “Like somany others, he was a decent, but at times weak man caught up in horrific eventsbeyond his control” (228).

The link between sport and politics is one that clearly bothers Erenberg. Hetalks of the Louis-Schmeling fights as “politicizing” sport, but of course sport waspolitical long before Hitler or Roosevelt took an interest in it (106). Moreconvincing is the book’s central argument: that the story of the events leading upto, and beyond, the Louis-Schmeling fight reveals a great deal about the way inwhich versions of German and American nationalism developed before and afterthe Second World War. At the very moment that Germany’s national self-imagecontracted to a narrow “racial definition,” the United States, Erenberg argues,embraced a “new self-definition” as “an ethnically and racially tolerant nation”(62, 178). The final chapters—in which, by closely analyzing Louis’s role inwartime propaganda and Schmeling’s career at Coca Cola, the author explores thelimits of these definitions—are the best in the book. The story of the two men’sfinal “reversal of fortune” is as revealing as that of their “greatest fight” (222).

University College London Kasia Boddy

Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. By Lisa Appignanesi. (New York,N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 2008. Pp. ix, 540. $29.95.)

The author of this work presents an entertaining examination of mental illnesswith a particular focus on the interplay between cultural perspectives and medical


diagnosis and how the relationship between these two points of view affectswomen.

Lisa Appignanesi begins with the lives of English writers and siblings Charlesand Mary Lamb, which sets up the first shift in understanding and treatingmental illness from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Byfollowing the case of Mary Lamb and using it as a template, Appignanesi illus-trates the adoption of mental illness as a positive characteristic for some as ameans of escape from the expected roles of women in the nineteenth century. Shethen follows the development of alienism or psychiatry as a profession throughFrance, Germany, and eventually the United States up through the twentiethcentury.

Appignanesi discusses in chronological order the diagnoses in vogue foreach century. As the discipline of psychiatry developed, diagnoses of mentalillness became a means to enforce women’s adherence to certain social norms.In this regard, the mental state of women acts as both bridge and barometerfor the cultural negotiation between the medical society’s definition of variousforms of mental illness and the lay person’s understanding of the same termi-nology. Although she briefly mentions the use of former female patients asaides in nineteenth-century asylums and hospitals, Appignanesi fails to capital-ize on the more innovative approach of assessing the increased presence ofwomen in the medical community itself rather than as just patients or subjectsof the doctors. At times, it is easy to lose sight of her theoretical argu-ment and simply follow the interesting anecdotes of the various people andplaces.

The abundant biographical information coupled with the traditional back-ground for a history of psychiatric medicine makes this work ideal for a classroomsetting as it is a fascinating read for students and leaves ample room for aninstructor to supplement the book’s information with lectures and discussions ondifferent theories of literary and medical history as well as feminism. The overalllength may be daunting to students, but the chapter organization makes it easy toassign selected readings when focusing on a particular mental illness or timeperiod.

Appignanesi has thoroughly researched both secondary and primary resourcesin writing Mad, Bad, and Sad, and she provides an adequate bibliography. Thelack of footnotes and the cumbersome practice of matching endnotes to the bodyof the text by phrases rather than reference numbers makes it difficult for thosewishing to do more research on their own to use this work as a starting point. Thenarrative, however, of the evolution of psychiatry in conjunction with women’s


roles does encourage exploration of the history of medicine and how societyaccepts certain diagnoses.

Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Laura M. Zucconi

Unlikely Allies: America, Britain and the Beginning of the Special Relationship. ByDuncan Campbell. (London, England: Continuum International Publishing Group,2008. Pp. vii, 295. $29.95.)

Although this is a splendidly informative book, many readers may find that itsmain argument possesses limited explanatory appeal. Spanning the long nine-teenth century [1780s–1914] and occasionally the period beyond, it sets out torevise an established claim that Anglo-American relations, despite a fractiousbeginning featuring the revolt of 1776–1783 and the War of 1812, led inevitablyto a rapprochement culminating in the United States joining Great Britain againstGermany and its allies in World War I. Disputing this claim that the cards werestacked in favor of an evolving friendship, Duncan Campbell stresses that manyfactors conspired to ferment acrimony, misunderstanding, and rivalry betweentwo expansive imperial powers. Rapprochement was anything but likely and verydifficult to achieve.

To buttress this argument, the author considers a wide variety of political,diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural factors that shaped the relationship.These are developed from an impressively thorough and extensive bibliography ofsecondary sources. Given the lengthy time period and numerous factors consid-ered, there is inevitably a terse and selective discussion of many aspects of therelationship. For example, the trade nettle as Britain adopted free trade and theU.S. protection is briefly discussed. But selected incidents and individuals set outas anecdotes are extremely accessible and readable such as the “Pig War” of 1859on the San Juan Islands when British and American forces nearly came to blows.The reception in Britain of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the popularity of SirArthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in the U.S. are two examples. Indeed,perhaps the most interesting part of the book is devoted to cultural exchanges andthe reception on the other side of the pond of the work of Charles Dickens,Charles Dilke, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and HenryJames, to mention a few of the influential authors who contributed to transatlanticintercourse.

There were elements of animosity and of conciliation evident in the variousencounters throughout the period. The tipping point at which the mutual likesbecame more prominent than dislikes occurred, the author suggests, between the


end of the United States Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. Whether therapprochement was problematic or inevitable may be of limited interest or utilityto potential readers. But the book’s well-crafted background material should be.For example, the fate of Canada as annexationist proclivities of its neighbor ebbedand flowed, Britain’s other world wide preoccupations as it entered into relationswith the U.S., summations of the policies and preferences of the respective politi-cal elites including prime ministers and presidents, the incidents and their outcomethat entered into acrimony such as naval encounters during the civil war, and theissue of slavery on which both countries were divided. The extensive bibliographyand the rich background to the specifics of the developing Anglo-Americanrelations are the strengths of this book.

University of British Columbia Robert Kubicek

Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World. By Marc Dierikx. (West-port, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2008. Pp. xi, 202. $49.95.)

Air travel, once a rarity, has now become a regular part of contemporary life. Suchwas not always the case, as the author makes abundantly clear in his superb studyof air travel. In the early 1900s, a handful of daring pilots made flight anirresistible attraction for the general public. Nations quickly recognized the valueof air flight. States relied on airpower as an important component in the worldwars. Imperial polities even used airpower to control their restive colonial popu-lations and to join various parts of their far-flung territories.

Nations also saw the need to control air travel as part of their sovereignty. Theearliest commercial airlines carried the national flags and stood as a sign of anation’s power. Governments also protected their domestic markets by limitinglanding rights of foreign airlines through bilateral agreements. National airlines inEurope and North America at first survived through generous government sub-sidies and later benefited from tight regulation that limited domestic competition.Charter airlines operating outside scheduled, international flights challenged thebilateral system through lower fares. Eventually national carriers took control ofthese airlines and reinforced protectionism and internal regulation of the airlineindustry. Change did come to the industry both domestically and internationally.Pressure for cheaper tickets persisted and led to significant deregulation beginningwith the U.S. in 1978. In 2007 the Open Skies Agreement between the U.S. andEurope created a single market that ignored national borders, a model embracedthroughout the globe.


As the skies became more affordable and national restrictions diminished, thenumber of passengers soared and brought new demands on the industry. At firstnothing more than a hut in an open field, airports acquired luxury designs duringthe 1920s and 1930s to appeal to their affluent passengers. By the 1950s, stylishnew airports appeared throughout the world from Buenos Aires to New York andChicago. As tourist and economy class tickets as well as new jumbo jets placed airflight within the reach of ordinary citizens, airports also expanded dramaticallyand, in the process, introduced tax-free shopping outlets. Airports also becamemoney generators for their communities through large-scale employment andhigher real estate values.

The new competitive environment also forced airlines to become far moretechnologically savvy in every aspect of their operation from maintenance toelectronic ticketing. In the new global market, airlines also lost their nationalidentity, an association that no longer had any value. Inexpensive carriers such asthe Irish Ryanair, unrestricted by borders, incorporated outsourcing, minimalonboard services, less costly airports in secondary cities, and online discounttickets to keep fares low and draw more passengers.

Marc Dierikx’s global perspective gives the book immense value to specialistsand many others. He uses air travel to place diverse topics such as the Berlin AirLift of 1948 and the relief of Biafran rebels in Nigeria in 1967 in a globalperspective as well as opening up new ways of understanding the relationshipbetween air travel and local events. World historians, in particular, would do wellto read this book.

University of Utah Edward J. Davies

A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. By RobertFriedel. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007. Pp. x, 588. $39.95.)

The author of this book has admirably synthesized the history of technology in theWestern world over the past millennium. Any such ambitious attempt inevitablydepends on the secondary scholarship of many individuals, and Robert Friedel’swork is no exception. If anything, what is surprising is that he has managed toinclude and explain so much in a text of approximately 540 pages. The revieweris reminded by comparison that Joseph Needham’s original plan for Science andCivilization in China (Cambridge University Press, 1954) was to write a singlevolume of some seven hundred pages. Needham’s plan, however, quicklyexpanded to seven volumes, and currently stands at twenty-four volumes and isstill counting despite his death in 1995. Both scholars have sought to explain what


accounts for the particularly rich development of technology in the cultural milieuof their respective geographic regions and time periods.

In this sense, then, Friedel’s study is a significant accomplishment. In a singlevolume with twenty-four largely chronological, substantive chapters, Friedelpresents readers with a vast range of materials from the history of medievalplows and Gothic cathedrals to nineteenth-century canals and railroads totwentieth-century mass-produced automobiles and computerized communicationnetworks. In between he serves up brief histories of metalworking, textiles, andsteam engines, as well as the darker wartime experiences with military technolo-gies, to name but just a few of the dozens on dozens of technologies treated ina series of brief descriptions ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages eachin length.

Although at times it is possible to get lost in the thicket of artifacts, what keepsthe volume from degenerating into a mere series of descriptive vignettes is Friedel’sinterpretive framework, the title idea of “a culture of improvement.” By this hemeans the notion, held increasingly firmly over the time period in question, thatpeople have the capacity “to improve how they do [the] things” that sustain them,and often do so through the “small contributions of ordinary, anonymousworkers and tinkerers” (3). At the same time, he does not mean to equatetechnological change with some grand idea of “progress,” but rather to “directour attention to the immediate technical motivations for innovation” (3).

To explain why some improvements move beyond the merely “ephemeral”to become “sustained” within society, Friedel introduces a second analyticalconcept, that of “capture.” As the very sociopolitical means of capture or sus-taining technological change—for example, guilds, professional engineering soci-eties and schools, and corporate and governmental R&D efforts—become evermore powerful and deeply embedded in society, so too will the technologicalimprovements that they promulgate. In a concluding analytical chapter, curiouslytitled “Improvement’s End,” Friedel introduces some recent and contemporaryexamples of questioning technology’s contributions to society—e.g., the 1971decision in the U.S. to halt progress on its SST (Supersonic Transport) and morerecent discussions to slow or ban the use of genetically modified foodstuffs or howfar it is appropriate to develop and go forward with human genetic technologies.These seem to be less examples of an end to the idea of improvement and morea case of society consciously working through what constitutes “improvement”in a given place at a given time. Presumably Friedel understands this, as he alsosuggests that “technological possibilities are everywhere” in the twenty-firstcentury, but he hopes people will make “enlighten[ed]” decisions regarding “the


future’s possibilities and dangers,” drawing on “a clearer understanding of thehistory and values that have shaped technology” (540, 543).

Friedel’s text provides just such a historical framework, and would thus beuseful both for the general reader interested in the development of moderntechnology-based society and for students of Western technological history.Because it has an interpretive framework, A Culture of Improvement could wellserve as an appropriate course text, although instructors would probably want todevelop further many of the topics covered with additional lecture material orancillary readings, perhaps especially of a non-Western comparative sort.

Lehigh University Stephen H. Cutcliffe

Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias toal Qaeda. By Mark Juergensmeyer. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,2008. Pp. ix, 370. $27.50.)

This book, a revision of a 1993 work, offers a comprehensive, systematic, andinsightful analysis, enriched by interviews with leaders of many of the religiousmovements prominent today. This reviewer agrees with Robert Bellah’s statementthat “This is an indispensable book in helping us understand the new worlddisorder that seems to be overtaking us.” This book is more theoretically pen-etrating and empirically grounded than journalistic essays on the subject and moreaccessible than many of the more specialized or abstruse academic studies.

The work is organized both geographically and thematically. It proceeds geo-graphically from the Middle East (seen as the “Front Line of Religious Rebellion”)through Asia to Europe and the United States. Gaps can, of course, be identified(the reviewer’s own area of specialty, Indonesia, for example, is not covered insufficient depth), but coverage is quite broad and in selected instances deepenough to make concrete the key dynamics. Major themes are the religiouschallenge to the secular state; global jihad as a transnational network; violence,democracy, and human rights; and a conclusion, “Religious Rebellion and GlobalWar.”

Mark Juergensmeyer’s argument moves through violence and confrontationbetween religious and secular frameworks toward hope for conciliation. He notesReinhold Niebuhr’s hope that reason would not destroy religion “before its workis done,” anticipating the rise of secularism. Instead, there has been a rise ofreligion warring with reason, and this war could escalate into a globally unifiedreligious bloc. Islam, for example, could create “an arc of anti-American powerdominating global politics,” an arc fueled by nuclear power, youthful energy, and


electronic communication. However, in conclusion he sets aside this grim visionfor a more hopeful one. After all, both secular states and religious movements areresponses to modernity. “Religious values have buttressed some of the ideals ofthe secular state. The revival of tolerant forms of religion may therefore be a partof the cure for the excesses of its rebellious and intolerant extremes.”

Perhaps one can add to this hopeful prognosis a comment based not only onthe analysis of values but also of symbols, images, and politics. Barack Obama isan example of a synthesizing symbol, combining a certain global heritage with anidentity encompassing some diversity in race and religious outlook, resulting thusfar in appreciative responses from many nations that suggest possibilities fortranscending or at least negotiating clash between West and “rest,” rationality andreligion, suffering and hope.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Peacock

On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine. By Nicholas Rasmussen. (New York,N.Y.: New York University Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 352. $30.00.)

Viewed as a miracle cure for depression by 1940, amphetamine was soon woveninto the fabric of American society. Amphetamine drugs touched the lives ofmillions of people as prescriptions for depression, stimulants in World War IIbattles, performance enhancers for athletes, diet medicine, and popular pills fordoctors to prescribe to distressed patients. With use came abuse, whether by adeveloping counterculture of “Beats” and jazz musicians, warriors in Vietnam, ormillions of others looking for an intensity, a sense of control, or an elevation ofmood in a competitive, anxious United States. Tightly regulated after mountingevidence indicted them as the major drug problem in the nation, amphetaminesenjoyed a revival with Ritalin for sufferers of Attention Deficit Disorder, pleasuredrugs methamphetamine and ecstasy, and another generation of diet pills.

In this fascinating, accessible, and thoroughly researched account, NicholasRasmussen portrays a range of institutions as largely responsible for the impact ofthis drug. These included an underregulated pharmaceutical industry that consis-tently searched for products to market, worked with a growing psychiatric pro-fession to refine the definitions of mental illness and determine other drug uses,and approached practicing doctors with easily prescribed pills they could providepatients with general complaints of tiredness, pain, and lack of confidence. Anincreasing number of studies in the 1950s and 1960s questioned the benefits andappreciated more of the risks of amphetamines. A concerned society witnessedcrazed speed freaks engaging in violence, and even leaders of the counterculture


like Frank Zappa spreading the word that speed kills. Still the drug lobbyprotected amphetamines from activist congressmen, until the FDA assumedgreater authority and regulated them heavily in the early 1970s. Rasmussenremains skeptical of these institutions, along with parents and other interests inthe case of the greatly expanded use (and abuse) of amphetamines like Ritalin. Hissuspicions continue with the evolution of a number of problematic amphetamine-related diet pills and enduring excessive marketing by a highly profitable Ameri-can drug industry and general medical overprescription.

Rasmussen has made a significant contribution by mining many heretoforeunused archival sources and large ranges of the scientific and medical literatureand presenting the most thorough analysis and easily understood history ofamphetamines and their society to date. References to social construction andother theoretical models are occasionally found in the notes, but the author ismuch more interested in exploring the dynamics and practical ramifications of thespeed story. One problem with his analysis is that, with his critical interpretationof drug overuse, he does not fully represent the behavioral treatment alternativesto Ritalin, as well as the tough decisions parents face in considering the drug. Also,because of his excellent treatment of German, British, and American militaryexperiences with amphetamines, the reader might wish for a more extensive globalcomparison of the alternatives to amphetamines and approaches to medicine ingeneral than the limited one he provides. These relatively minor considerationsaside, this book is an excellent analysis of a “miracle drug” and its complexsociety.

SUNY College at Buffalo Kenneth S. Mernitz

On Deep History and the Brain. By Daniel Lord Smail. (Berkeley, Calif.: University ofCalifornia Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 271. $21.95.)

Despite its slender size and informal style, this book offers a revolutionaryproposal for the practice of history. It begins with a leisurely critique of oldhistorical tropes and deformations: “sacred history,” “Great Men” theories,restriction of the subject matter of history to documents, avoidance of “prehis-tory,” obliviousness to anthropology, lack of attention to archeology or paleon-tology, and so on. None of this will be particularly new to a reader of “BigHistory.” This opening is followed by a thoughtful, though hardly revelatory,dissection of the significance of both biological and cultural evolution for thestudy of history.


But in chapter four, entitled “The New Neurohistory,” the book becomesradically more interesting. Daniel Lord Smail proposes that if history is to reachback before the advent of written records, and if it is to take account of bothbiological and cultural evolution as well as the burgeoning neurobiology of ourtime, then its evidential foundations must be reformulated. Thus we have thefollowing key simile: the historian as an omniscient observer of patterns amongthe chemical messengers that determine our moods, “like a technician in a record-ing studio facing an array of dancing meters” (157). Smail envisions a neurohis-tory that would integrate such patterns with the names that cultures assign to the“common chords” registered by such meters: disgust, sadness, or joy. With thisneurobiological foundation for history, history’s connections with the subjectmatters of evolutionary biology, ethology, and kindred topics are supposed bySmail to become natural. This key move, Smail proposes, will free us from theconstriction and stultification that arises from limiting history to written recordsthat are intentionally constructed.

Indeed, although he does not say as much, Smail’s neurohistory would reinte-grate both history and the social sciences wholesale, placing them on morebiological foundations. But if this sounds like E. O. Wilson’s notorious humansociobiology, it is not. Despite his rejection of the conventional apparatus of historyand his emphasis on the salience of biology, Smail fortunately does not proceed onto the glib analyses of “evolutionary psychology” and other “biologized” defor-mities of some big histories. Smail has a subtle and versatile understanding of thecommingling of evolutionary and neurological mechanisms. His discussion of theuse of unpredictable cruelty to produce stress, and thus maintain subordination, isthe start of a creative formulation of a neurobiology of the power relations thatdominate conventional history. And that is just one of his asides.

There are limits to what Smail accomplishes. Though he offers a sustainedseries of brilliant insights concerning psychotropic intoxication, they do notconstitute a worked-out paradigm for writing history. His favored term for hisproposed enterprise, “neurohistory,” has awkwardly already been appropriatedfor the history of neurology. In any case, Smail’s proposals go far beyond historyin any conventional sense. Though he does not give a concrete program for thedevelopment of his neurohistory, the book is bracing nonetheless, for the chal-lenge posed to conventional history is one of the most important of our time.Social scientists would be well advised to pay attention too.

University of California, Irvine Michael R. Rose


Jerusalem: City of Longing - By Simon Goldhill: Book Reviews

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