The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire - By J. Rüger

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Richard SpallOhio Wesleyan University

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Framingham State College

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Shippensburg University

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Memorial University of Newfoundland

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University of New Haven

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Ohio Wesleyan University

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REVIEW ARTICLE

“RADICAL CURRENTS IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT”

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man1670–1752. By Jonathan I. Israel. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,2006. Pp. xxiv, 983. $55.00.)

In this book, a sequel to his Radical Enlightenment (Oxford University Press,2001), the author continues his impressively documented narrative of the contro-versies and polemics between the radical and moderate wings of the Enlighten-ment, taking the story to the embattled birth of the great Encyclopédie project inthe mid-eighteenth century (a third volume, dealing with the second half of theeighteenth century, is yet to come).

As in the previous volume, Jonathan I. Israel’s main thesis is that the radicalEnlightenment was Spinozist in inspiration. A great number of eighteenth-centuryphilosophes adopted Spinoza’s materialist monism and his critique of revelationand religion. Although Spinoza and Bayle were the chief seventeenth-centuryradicals, Diderot emerged as the central figure in the radical network of themid-eighteenth century. In France, the radical Enlightenment gained ground in themore open intellectual climate after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The radicalswere opposed by the moderates, such as Voltaire and Turgot, who defended the“empiricist” synthesis of Newton and Locke, who often admired Britain, andwhose religious views ranged from “reasonable Christianity” (Locke) to provi-dential deism (Voltaire). A few key figures, such as Montesquieu and Rousseau,are hard to place in the radical-moderate dichotomy. To the “right” of themoderates were the anti-Enlightenment conservatives and, notably in France, theJansenists. The undeniable victory of Newtonian natural science and Voltaire’sAnglomania has led many historians of the Enlightenment to the conviction thatthe dominant current in eighteenth-century thought was Lockean empiricism andantimaterialism.

Israel dismisses this view, arguing instead that it was the radical, monist, andantireligious current that emerged victorious from the fierce intellectual conflictsof the 1740s and 1750s. Ironically, the conservative backlash of those decadescontributed to the triumph of the radicals. The Jansenists stirred up popularreligious sentiments against the “impious” philosophers, while the parti dévotgained ground in church and state. The threat of a wholesale crackdown onintellectual liberty forced the moderates to close ranks with the radicals. Reluc-tantly, Voltaire, Turgot, and their friends supported—and finally saved—the Ency-clopédie. This outcome gave Diderot and his allies a strategic advantage.

5 7 8 T H E H I S T O R I A N

Henceforth, the radicals were in the forefront of French (and to some extent,European) intellectual life (855–862).

More than any previous study of the Enlightenment, Israel organizes his historyaround controversies, in particular the polemics between the radicals and themoderates. It is there, he posits, that historians can trace the evolution of ideas andconcepts, for the intellectual genre of the polemic compels the participants toconsider claims and counterclaims, and to make clear how far they were willingto pursue a certain line of thinking. Moderate advocates of toleration had todecide where to draw the line (usually excluding atheists). Moderates who soughtto overcome the mind–body conundrum of Cartesian dualism had to take care lestthey lapsed into materialist monism. Conversely, radicals who denied the argu-ment from design had to explain how the “random” collisions of material par-ticles could result in a structured universe. Likewise, they had to give a convincingaccount of free will in terms of the evolution of “thinking matter.”

Israel discusses these and other arguments in an impressive number of intel-lectual and political contexts: the crisis of religious authority and the differentvarieties of toleration; secular monarchy versus aristocracy, democratic republi-canism, and popular sovereignty; the polemics about the British “model”; therecovery of Greek materialism; the rise of the history of philosophy; and thenotion of the “progrès de l’esprit humain.” He also considers the problems ofequality, gender, and race, as well as the Enlightenment critiques of colonialism;and the polemics over Islamic philosophy, Chinese history, and Confucianism.Israel ends with the great controversies of the 1730s to the 1750s, occasioned byVoltaire’s Lettres philosophiques; the novel biological views of Tremblay, Buffon,and others; the aggressive materialism of La Mettrie; the secular theory of politicsand society in Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois; and finally the launching of theEncyclopédie.

In all these cases, Israel seeks to demonstrate two things. First, that the radicalpositions were philosophically more consistent than those championed by themoderates. Second, that the radicals were universalistic, egalitarian, and demo-cratically minded, while their moderate opponents countenanced various modesof exclusion along sexual, racial, religious, social, and political lines. Israel con-cludes that the thinkers of the radical Enlightenment were the veritable trailblazersof modernity, freedom, and equality. He defends their positions unreservedly,not only in the eighteenth-century historical context, but also in the intellectualdebates of our time. The postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment, Israelcontends, is philosophically biased and confused, and moreover based on a crudemisreading of the historical record.

5 7 9B O O K R E V I E W S

Israel’s endorsement of the consistency of the radicals’ philosophical monismis largely convincing, as is his reconstruction of the controversies between theradicals and the moderates along the materialism/dualism interface. Time andagain, he demonstrates in great detail that the debates about religion, revelation,biblical criticism, “thinking matter,” and the Newtonians’ inability to provide asatisfactory mechanistic account of gravity were at the heart of the major Enlight-enment controversies. However, Israel’s second claim, that materialist monismprovides the only consistent foundation for an ethical universalism and a defenseof the racial and sexual equality of all human beings, is less convincing (866). Inthis field, two difficulties stand out. First, what to make of materialist thinkerswho are not egalitarians and who do not embrace universalist ethics? Second,what place to assign to Enlightenment authors who defend universalistic egalitar-ian positions but who are not materialists?

Examples of the first difficulty are La Mettrie and Buffon. La Mettrie’sL’homme machine [1747] is one of the most outspoken materialist theorizationsof human nature of its time, but La Mettrie professes a hedonistic egotism that isantiegalitarian and has no use for the common good. On those grounds, Israelrefuses to place him in the radical camp (804). For similar reasons, Israel consis-tently minimizes Hobbes’s contribution to the radical Enlightenment. In this way,the thesis that the radicals were egalitarians becomes immune to refutation. Onthe other hand, when Spinoza explicitly states that women are unfit to become fullcitizens of the democratic republic, Israel contends that Spinoza’s basic principlesnonetheless provide a grounding for the equality of the sexes (557). This is anextremely charitable reading of Spinoza, which contrasts with Israel’s far lesscharitable reading of Locke and other moderates.

Another difficult case is Buffon, whose Histoire naturelle counts as one of themost influential works of the eighteenth century. Israel is undoubtedly right toclassify him as a radical and to qualify Buffon’s profession of Cartesian dualismas a cover-up. The main thrust of the Histoire naturelle is to treat humanity asan integral part of the animal kingdom. Israel does not, however, discuss in anydetail Buffon’s treatment of the varieties of the human species. Buffon positsthat all humans belong to the same species because they can interbreed andproduce fertile offspring. He explains racial differences by environmental factorssuch as climate and dietary regimes. This part of his anthropology is universalistand potentially egalitarian. However, Buffon’s descriptive ethnography isentirely premised on differences between “civilized,” “barbarian,” and “savage”peoples, and he nowhere criticizes the category of the savage, although he wasundoubtedly familiar, as every educated Frenchman would have been, with


Montaigne’s famous saying that “everyone calls barbarian what deviates fromhis own customs.” Buffon even affirms that most inhabitants of the Americasare “degenerates.” Certain elements of Buffon’s anthropology fit the radical bill,but other elements most emphatically do not. Moreover, Buffon is not an iso-lated case. Most of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “scientific racism,” espe-cially in its polygenist incarnations, is impeccably material and deeplyantiegalitarian.

On the other side of the radical-moderate divide, readers encounter thinkerswho profess egalitarian but nonmaterialist views. It is well known that many,perhaps most, authors who advocated the abolition of slavery were believingChristians. The Enlightenment critique of colonialism and European imperialismcan be found in both camps. Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, to which Diderotmade major contributions, combines materialist and egalitarian positions. ButAbraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron’s polemic against Montesquieu and hisradical critique of colonialism and racism [Législation orientale, 1778] is weddedto a Jansenist view of human nature. It seems clear that Raynal belongs to Israel’sradical network, but it seems equally clear that Anquetil Duperron does not (818).Israel portrays Jansenism exclusively as an anti-Enlightenment Weltanschauung,but he completely overlooks the other egalitarian face of Jansenism.

We may conclude that Israel makes a brilliant case for the importance of theradical currents in the Enlightenment. He demonstrates with a wealth of materialthat Locke, Newton, and Voltaire were less dominant than is still assumed inmuch of the historiography of the Enlightenment. His treatment of the socialphilosophy of the radicals is, however, less convincing. Not all materialists wereegalitarians, and not all antimaterialists were antiegalitarians. For all that,Enlightenment Contested is a brilliant tour de force. All future studies of the(radical) Enlightenment will have to start here.

Erasmus University Siep Stuurman

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE-EAST

Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed. By Martin Evans and John Phillips. (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 352. $35.00.)

This new book by historian Martin Evans and journalist John Phillips synthesizessome of the more recent scholarship in French and English on Algerian history, inaddition to incorporating their interviews conducted with Algerians who livedthrough the recent period of civil unrest. The authors’ argument relates violence


in Algeria to three sources of conflict in modern Algerian history: colonial inequal-ity [1830–1962], army-party conflict [1954–1978], and generational conflictbetween older and younger Algerians [1978 to the present].

In the first and second chapters, the authors address Algeria’s origins and theFrench colonial period. Evans and Phillips trace the origins of many of Algeria’scurrent conflicts to France’s systematic denial of civil and economic rights toMuslim Algerians during the colonial period. The authors’ treatment of MuslimAlgerian historians and nationalists will be very useful to scholars familiar onlywith the French historiography. In the third chapter, they provide an adequateaccount of Algeria’s first two decades after independence, in which the dualstructure of the army of liberation and the dominant political party (the NationalLiberation Front or FLN) replaced French administration. For historians familiarwith Alistair Horne’s treatment of the Algerian war for independence, this chapterdemonstrates how the conflict between Algeria’s military and political elites overAlgeria’s wealth replaced the inequality of the colonial system as a new source ofsocietal friction.

Evans and Phillips view the death of former president Houari Boumediène in1978, a man who personified Algeria’s socialist experiment, as the beginning ofAlgeria’s descent into political turmoil during the 1980s. The authors rightly pointout that the poor performance of the FLN elites who succeeded Boumediènedisillusioned young Algerians, who turned not just to Islamist groups, but also toraï music and soccer, as sources of inspiration. In the fifth chapter, the authorsexplore the rise of political Islam in Algeria within the context of the challengesfacing command economies at the beginning of the 1990s. The authors emphasizethat Algerian elites believed that political and economic liberalization could repairthe reputation of the one-party state. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, however, Algerianleaders could not control the forces that these reforms unleashed. One of thepolitical parties to emerge during this period, the Islamic Salvation Front, suc-cessfully competed with the FLN by promising an Islamic government that wouldfulfill the goals of the Algerian revolutionaries of the 1950s. The sixth and seventhchapters deal with some of the worst civil unrest Algeria had seen since the war ofindependence and highlight Algeria’s electoral crisis since much of this violencewas organized and led by military officials and younger, grassroots Islamistleadership during the mid-1990s.

Evans and Phillips devote the final chapter to the decline in violence as Algeriaentered the twenty-first century as a result of two events largely outside of itscontrol: a rise in the global price of petroleum, and a renewed internationalemphasis on combating terrorism following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the


United States. Although President Aldelaziz Bouteflika (elected in 1999) hasbenefited from these trends, Evans and Phillips point out that economic andsecurity gains tend to obscure Algeria’s lack of progress in other key areas, suchas political reform and the resolution of various human rights abuses committedduring the 1990s.

American University of Sharjah Thomas DeGeorges

Iraq in World War I: From Ottoman Rule to British Conquest. By Mohammad GholiMajd. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006. Pp. v, 438. $55.00.)

This is a curious book of missed opportunities. For the most part it comprisesdirect citations of U.S. consular reports, mainly from Baghdad. These are arrangedmore or less chronologically, starting with the 1910 reports of the Americanconsul at Baghdad, Frederick Simpich, in which he describes late Ottoman pro-vincial politics, tribal conflicts, and commercial developments. The author pro-ceeds remorselessly, using the same sources in much the same way until he reachesConsul Heizer’s dispatches of late 1918 reporting on the measures taken by theBritish authorities to secure their hold of Baghdad, and of Mesopotamia moregenerally. He then ends the book abruptly.

The only respite from the direct citation of U.S. consular reports comes whenthe author wants to describe British military campaigns. He then deploys exten-sive direct quotations from Brigadier General Moberly’s official history of theBritish campaign in Mesopotamia. Indeed, in some chapters this seems to be theonly source. Given the use the author makes of these volumes, it must indeed havecome as something of a relief, as he gratefully acknowledges, to discover thatCrown copyright only lasts for fifty years and that he could therefore cite Moberlydirectly. Having been published in the 1920s, these books are not exactly at thecutting edge of historiography, nor indeed are they the most disinterested, com-missioned as they were by the (British) Government of India and the Committeeof Imperial Defence. Of course, there would be no problem about this, nor aboutthe use of the American primary sources, had the author provided a criticalreading of them. However, this would require an analytical and explanatoryframework that is almost wholly lacking. Indeed, one could safely say that theauthorial voice is virtually absent from these pages of direct citation. One is leftinstead with selected extracts from the U.S. archives, from one British secondarysource and from some British military proclamations (no use is made of British


archives). Unfortunately, the author provides no arguments or countercitationsthat would allow the reader to weigh the relative merits of the writings of assortedconsular officials.

The reader is therefore confronted with the opinions, observations, and preju-dices of an array of Americans, some of which may be of interest for what theyappear to tell readers of the lives of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia at the time. Butthese are presented verbatim, are rarely examined critically, and are never held upfor comparison with the accounts of Ottoman officials or of Iraqi witnessesto these events, as references to Ottoman Turkish or Arabic sources are whollyabsent. The author can tell readers, therefore, only a very limited amount about Iraqduring this period, and the book would perhaps be more accurately titled “Iraqduring World War I in the Words of a Handful of American Consular Officials.”

School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London

Charles Tripp

Popular Culture in the Arab World: Arts, Politics, and the Media. By AndrewHammond. (Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007. Pp. viii,347. $24.95.)

This is a unique and welcome study of aspects of Arab contemporary culture bya journalist who has spent over a decade in the Arab world, based primarily inEgypt as a correspondent and then in Saudi Arabia as senior correspondent forReuters. Much of what he presents in this volume is based on his own personalobservations supported by recourse to the historical background, in which hedisplays a remarkable talent for grasping the essentials. The underlying premise ofhis narrative is that the failure of the Arab world’s government to unite the regionpolitically has been mitigated nevertheless by the blossoming of a vibrant popularculture, which has strengthened the sense of a shared Arab identity.

In ten chapters, Andrew Hammond proceeds to outline the basic themes onwhich he chose to focus. These include diverse cultural forms—namely commer-cial cinema, pop music, television, theater, and popular religion. He launches hisstudy with a preliminary chapter delineating contemporary culture and politics inthe Arab world in general, with emphasis on the role of Egypt, where much of itwas formed. He sees in the Arabic language a key to Arab identity, and doesa remarkable job of highlighting the essential aspects of its evolution over thecenturies in support of current trends to standardize its use throughout theArabic-speaking world and beyond into the Islamic dimension. Similarly, his keenobservation of current Islamic trends, which he sees as 1,001 Islams converging,


distinguishing between the true faith and the politicized trends thereof, provesagain his sense of discernment and understanding of what motivates the extrem-ists and jihadists. The role of music receives its fair share in that this is one aspectof Arab culture that has deep roots in its history and evolution, be it classical orpresent-day pop. The belly dance is also deep rooted but presently has fallen onbad days. Television has come to play a major role in reaching out to the Arabmasses. Hammond mentions specifically al-Jazeerah and al-‘Arabîyah as theprimary instruments in communicating more often on the political travails of theArabs and their struggles to assert their rightful demands for international recog-nition and solutions. Hammond stresses the trials and tribulations of the Arabicpress, again with a detailed discussion of its development and dimensions. Heculminates his study with an interesting and cogent observation of the Arabtheater and its struggle for achieving high culture.

Nearly a hundred pages complement the main text with three appendices onreligious figures, Arabic press, and a chronology of cultural and political events,in addition to a glossary, selected bibliography, source materials, and an index.

This work is a must read for scholars and students seeking a combination oftopics not covered by other known works dealing with aspects of modern Arabculture.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Caesar E. Farah

Empires, Wars and Battles: The Middle East from Antiquity to the Rise of the NewWorld. By T. C. F. Hopkins. (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2007.Pp. 256. $24.95.)

The author of this five-chapter book, who has written many adult novels andfantasy books under a different name, is also a dedicated student of militaryhistory and cultural anthropology. In this work, he strives to present a panoramichistory of the Middle East, roughly from 3000 BC to the Turks’ siege of Viennain 1683. In the author’s view, the Middle East became a settled civilization somefive millennia ago, when it domesticated the camel, the ass, and the goat—othercivilizations had only one or two such animals—and made them the source ofmilk, meat, hide, hair, and the means of transport, while spices, dyes, and slavesmade it the crossroads and coveted center of trade. Its ensuing civilization,consisting of legal codes, standardization, the keeping of records, and the writingof mathematics (a profession with mystical properties), was accompanied bya social order in which kinship bonding became the cultural mainstay of clansand tribes, superseding individual personalities except for those in leadership


positions. Subsequently, geography, climate, oscillations of hot and coldweather, raging diseases, and so on, helped reshape the Middle East’s turbulenthistory.

T. C. F. Hopkins describes the numerous invasions, migrations, and wars thatdetermined the fate of the Middle East either in one or two lines or at length,as in the case of the battles of Ramses II [r. 1292–1225 BC] against the Hittitesand Genghis Khan’s [1165–1227] campaign along with their lasting effects. In theMiddle East, a tug of war between the East and West left durable cultural-politicalimprints, beginning chiefly with Alexander the Great’s [d. 323 BC] eastwardmarch from Macedonia to India and the drive of Sula [86 BC] and Pompei[64 BC] that brought the states established by Alexander’s generals under Romanrule. The rise of Christianity not only separated the Roman Empire and the faith,and set Rome and Byzantium against each other, but it also prepared the rise ofIslam and its enduring confrontation with Europe.

Hopkins’s chapter devoted to the relations between Byzantium and Islamprovides intriguing insights into a Middle East divided by faith but united byhistory, a common philosophy of life and similar views of the relation betweenstate and faith. The issue is indeed intriguing, for faith pushed Byzantium to workthe West to fend off the Muslim military threat, yet its basic culture and instinctkept it in the East, as clearly indicated by contemporary Greece’s outward Westernoutlook and inward Eastern (Orthodox) self. Hopkins could have added thatOttoman Islam and the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium had much incommon, as far as state was concerned, and coexisted peacefully until the era ofnationalism. Other missed opportunities to elaborate on the effects of the seminalfacts Hopkins mentions are seen elsewhere, too.

True, the struggle between Persia and Byzantium weakened both and allowedIslam, only twenty years after its rise, to defeat the Sassanids in 642, turn theminto Muslims, and then besiege (unsuccessfully) Constantinople. But after theAbbasid revolution of 750, the Muslims adopted Sassanian absolutist politicalinstitutions and philosophy as “Islamic.” They thus created a permanent riftbetween the Meccan-Medinian religious scholars who believed in an absoluteexclusive faith and the vast Muslim masses in Asia and Africa, relatively newconverts to Islam who embraced a worldly, balanced view of the faith. Thisdifference still survives as the distinction between fundamentalist and moderate(“worldly” is a better term) Islam.

Hopkins, to his credit, pinpoints the crucial fact that the invasions of theCrusaders, from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries—he lists seven ofthem—and of the Mongols in the thirteenth century had lasting effects. Backed by


the Popes, the Crusades were “that most catastrophic series of follies,” whichimplanted a permanent mistrust toward Christian Europe; the Mongols (Tartars),bent on conquest and booty, destroyed the civilization of the Middle East andenslaved much of its land (134).

Paradoxically, however, the Mongols prepared the rise of the Ottoman state byforcing the Turkish tribes to take refuge in western Anatolia and establish theretheir own state, which they expanded by conquest further westward, continuouslymaintaining six hundred years of relations with Europe. Most important, yet stillunstudied, is the fact that the Ottomans became heirs to the Byzantine, Mongol,and Islamic traditions of statecraft, political religion, and nationality and meshedthem into their own pragmatic ruling system.

Hopkins should have pointed out that the Mongol rulers, particularly the heirsof Genghis Khan, the founders of the Golden Horde in Russia, and the Ilkhanidsin Persia and Iraq, became converts to Islam and made the ideas of secular law,kinship, and statehood part of their political culture. The culture, in turn, wasrefined and harmonized with the faith by the Seljuks and especially by theOttomans, who applied it to their multiethnic, multireligious societies. The heir tothe Ottomans, Turkey, rejecting that legacy, is today struggling to superimposeFrench secularism onto its own historical traditions of state and religion in orderto build a national, secular democratic state. It has so far remained relatively freeof the strife prevailing in the rest of the Middle East precisely because of itshistorical background.

Hopkins, as if addressing present turmoils, points out that the reaction to theCrusaders and Mongols gave rise to an extremely militarist religious resistance ledby the “most warlike imams [who] attracted the greatest support because they fedmilitary and civic resistance to invasion. [Consequently] the emphasis on studyand the expansion of thought and knowledge as a cornerstone of Islam took abackseat to a resurgence of clan based nationalism” (173). When the same kindof intellectual intransigence fed by religious fervor that stifled innovative thoughtamong the Europeans, the Eastern Orthodox church, unlike Rome, did not seeitself as a political participant, but as the preserver of the spiritual. So, too, did theOttoman Sheihulislamate in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, until thestate engaged its service to muzzle the demands of a changing society. Unfortu-nately, the last two chapters of the book, which are dedicated to the OttomanTurks, fail to live up to the intellectual level of the previous chapters. Although thebook is packed with events, names, hard-to-remember dates, and occasional smallerrors, it presents in a nutshell, to both the uninitiated and those specializing ingiven periods, a readable, informative, and deeply tantalizing historical view of


the Middle East. This book is recommended highly for the general reader and forteachers of the area.

University of Wisconsin, Madison Kemal H. Karpat

Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia since 1945. By Rob Johnson. (London, England:Reaktion Books, 2007. Pp. viii, 240. $25.00.)

This study is a thorough and updated account of the trials and tribulationsencompassing the newly liberated Central Asian states. Indeed, it is replete withdates, names, and events that render it difficult for the reader to assimilate the datain a comprehensive manner. Much of the author’s sources derive from the elec-tronic media, which contributes to the book’s currency. In ten chapters, the authorseeks to define the course of events in terms of its regional issues and contempo-rary history, the fate of these central republics before and after 1991, stressinglargely the political-cum-religious proclivities thereof. He considers the role ofIslam and the rise of Islamism; the Tajik Civil War and the Renaissance Party; theAfghan Civil War; and the role of the Taliban in spreading its narrow conceptionof Islam. He examines support for Islamists in neighboring states, the IslamicMovement of Uzbekistan-Turkestan and regional insurgency, the Chechen andCaucasus wars and their impact on Russia in the bloody struggle for self-assertionaccompanied by terrorism on both sides. He even fires attention to China and theXinjiang province whose Turkic Uighur peoples resist the influx of Han settlersand their domination of its economy as they look to their western fellow Islamistneighbors for support. The author analyzes a range of issues including terrorism,counterinsurgency, and energy security. The last chapter is dedicated to the role ofhydrocarbons and the great powers who seek access to this plentiful resourcethrough a variety of pipelines proposed to reach outlets on the Black Sea and theMediterranean, as well as across land, for the gas to be pumped to Europeanmarkets.

In the chapter on trajectories, Rob Johnson attempts to make a comparisonwith the role of neighboring states like Pakistan, Turkey, and the Arab states. Theoverall trend can be summarized by the observation that the inheritors ofleadership of these states following the demise of the Soviet Union tended to rulein a dictatorial manner, ignoring human rights. This often elicited a response fromIslamist groups that called for a Wahhabi version of Islam that was abetted openlyand subtlely by the Saudi government and the tendency—since Enver Pasha of thenew Turkey—to recreate a true Islamic caliphate that harkens back to the earliestmodel of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors. Not enough is


said about the economic stagnation that followed independence. The authorexamines the policies of Central Asian governments, including their attitudes todemocratic reform, human rights, and economic development and how they arerelated to civil violence.

Nevertheless this book is essential reading for policy planners and researchers,as well as those who seek to combat terrorism and secure much-needed oilresources and accessibility to western markets. Useful aids include a map of thecentral Asian region, a bibliography for each chapter with much emphasis on dataderived from the Internet, and an index.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cites Caesar E. Farah

Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript onAbu Ghraib. By Bruce Lincoln. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007.Pp. xvii, 176. $30.00.)

There is a long tradition of comparison between the modern west and ancientcivilizations, but the resemblances have usually been sought in Athens, Sparta, orRome. Rarely have scholars made the provocative equation suggested by the titleof Bruce Lincoln’s new book, linking an imperial United States with the Persia ofDarius and Xerxes.

Lincoln reserves explicit modern polemic for the postscript and devotes most ofhis discussion to an ancient empire still unfamiliar to a nonspecialist audience.He offers an eloquent, fascinating meditation on Persian justifications of kingship,conquest, and atrocity in theological terms. Little space is given to politicalnarrative or the Greeks, and readers will find much that is new and refreshing inthe use of ancient Iranian evidence for Persian ideology.

In the first chapter, the author introduces Darius I, the usurper who seized thethrone from the family of Cyrus in 522 BC, redesignating the royal house as“Achaemenian” after an obscure ancestor and commissioning a series of propa-gandistic texts to celebrate and legitimize his rule. In the five chapters that follow,Lincoln traces the evolution of religious thought in the written proclamations ofDarius and his successors over the next two centuries. Although he refuses to givea verdict on the problematic question of whether the Achaemenian kings werestrict Zoroastrians, Lincoln uses comparative material from the later Avestanscriptures to illuminate religious concepts in the royal inscriptions.

Key topics are the attribution of royal power to the favor of the “Wise Lord”Ahura Mazda and the significance of the creation narratives that open twenty-threeof the inscriptions, similar in tone and vocabulary to Avestan accounts of the


world’s formation. Ancient Iranians believed that the Wise Lord constructed aperfect universe, only to see it battered by the onslaught of the Evil Spirit in a cosmicbattle between right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Lincoln argues persuasivelythat the Achaemenian kings privileged creation narratives in their propaganda outof a desire to present themselves as restorers of the Wise Lord’s creation, repairingthe damage done to the universe by evil. The language of salvation and restorationwas used in one case to describe a favorite royal building project, envisioned as aminiature replica of divine creation (75). On other occasions, though, the workof restoration was more sinister, involving the identification and destruction ofthe Evil Spirit’s agents on earth through purges and show trials. Lincoln’s studyclimaxes in an infamous Greek account of torture at the Persian court, contextu-alized through Avestan texts and inscriptions of Artaxerxes II (87–94).

The modern postscript, unfortunately, falls short of the title’s promise.Although it notes references to dualistic conflict and divine approval in PresidentGeorge W. Bush’s rhetoric and suggests some similarity between rationalizationsof torture, ancient and modern, the brevity of analysis contrasts with the thoroughtreatment of ancient evidence. The flaws of the epilogue, though, should notovershadow Lincoln’s valuable contribution to historians’ understanding ofPersia, and this should become a must-read book for students of the ancientworld.

Christopher Newport University John Hyland

THE AMERICAS

Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. By Brooke Allen. (Chicago, Ill.: IvanR. Dee, 2006. Pp. xvi, 235. $24.95.)

This author is out to refute the common claim made by the religious Right thatthe United States was founded by Christians to be a Christian nation. Althoughshe acknowledges that many of the elite Founders were Christians, Brooke Allencharacterizes Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and (at times)Hamilton as deists and freethinkers, indeed “the very prototypes” of the “EastCoast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today’s religious[R]ight” (xvi). Allen also claims that the Founders drafted and ratified a “GodlessConstitution” and that the experiment that it began was a “purely secularproject” (xiv). Fearful of repeating the religious wars that followed the ProtestantReformation and aware that the sheer number and diversity of religious sects inAmerica made it impracticable to establish a single denomination, the Founders,


according to Allen, hoped “to keep religion, Christian and otherwise, entirely outof the legal framework of the United States” (xi–xii).

To Allen’s credit, the six chapters in which she analyzes the religious beliefs ofthe most influential of the Founders are informed by substantial research in theirwritings and provide numerous quotations that allow readers to judge for them-selves the veracity of her interpretation. Allen is on strong ground in rejecting theclaim that these elite Founders were orthodox Christians.

Still, Founding specialists will find this book puerile and unoriginal, anothermissive in the culture wars, not a balanced or nuanced interpretation of thereligious beliefs of the Founders or the relationship of church and state in the earlyrepublic. No serious scholar holds that Franklin and Jefferson were orthodoxChristians. Furthermore, Allen does not deal with any of the major issues thatsurround interpretations of the First Amendment. She concludes the Founderswere “separationists” based on the views of Madison and Jefferson and doesnot even consider the writings of other Founders and the practices thatprovide substantial evidence for the deep historical roots of “nonpreferential aid”to all religious groups. She also does not consider the conservatives’ claimthat the establishment clause was meant to prevent the national government frominterfering with state establishments. Because the whole Bill of Rights wasoriginally intended to limit the powers of the national government, this inter-pretation suggests, the establishment clause was meant only to prevent thenational government from establishing a national religion and cannot—withoutcontradiction—be incorporated against the states.

Most broadly, Allen treats the claim that the United States was founded byChristians based on Christian principles as little more than a self-serving distor-tion propagated by the Right. This protean claim is not, however, so easily refuted,in no small part because of the diffuse—if not partial—truths that it contains.Several of the British colonies in North America were formed as “peaceableKingdoms.” Laws in these colonies attempted to criminalize sin. For every deistamong the Founders, there was a God-fearing Christian. And much of the printedliterature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in America wasreligious.

None of this means that Allen is wrong to point back to the skepticism of someof the elite Founders. It does mean, however, that the day has long since passedwhen a polemic such as Moral Minority can be considered either a revelation ora refutation.

California State University, Chico Alan Gibson


Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War. By BurrusM. Carnahan. (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. ix,202. $40.00.)

Abraham Lincoln viewed his Emancipation Proclamation as the one act of hispresidency for which he would be remembered. Lincoln’s fame, of course, hasextended far beyond that document, but his decision to free the slaves certainlyhas been examined in its moral, military, and constitutional contexts. But what ofits foundation and context as a legal measure based upon the international law ofwar? Burrus M. Carnahan argues this has been an overlooked issue, and yet itgoes to the very core of Lincoln’s decisions and actions regarding the Proclama-tion and has had ramifications on U.S. and international policy ever since.

Carnahan, a professorial lecturer at George Washington University Law School,begins with a fascinating examination of the national and international precedentsfor the freeing of slaves by a government in time of war as an act of war. Explainingthe European legal sources on which nations relied for such questions, examiningthe antebellum decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, and explicating the first andsecond Confiscation Acts issued by the U.S. Congress in 1861 and 1862, Carnahanshows that there was in fact a well-known and settled legal foundation for Lincoln’saction. And Lincoln, as a lawyer in private life, would have weighed the issuesraised by freeing the slaves as his constitutional war power and “viewed them inlight of his practical knowledge of American law” (2).

But why did Lincoln wait so long to issue his Proclamation? Why not free theslaves as soon as Fort Sumter was fired upon? And, most importantly, why didLincoln free only the slaves in the rebel territories? For years, Lincoln scholarshave succinctly said, “Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation really didn’t freeanybody.” And although this is technically correct, Carnahan shows it to be aspecious statement. Lincoln, of course, waited for the act to be seen as an obviousmilitary necessity. This would avoid offending his Northern constituents andinternational governments and protect the act—especially military officers whoacted under the Proclamation—against possible legal challenges. But Lincoln wasnot merely concerned with the temporal aspects of the Proclamation. Carnahanshows that by declaring that the U.S. recognized the slaves in the Confederacy asfree, Lincoln “dealt with them as an oppressed people, rather than as property,and appealed for their support as humans” (141). This has had a wide-rangingimpact on the international law of war ever since.

Carnahan’s arguments are clear, sophisticated, and indicative of his thoroughunderstanding of the issues involved. He has taken the creation, context, and


impact of the Proclamation to new depths of analysis, utilizing primary andsecondary sources, while simultaneously creating an interesting and highly read-able book. It is a work that demands its readers to reconsider their previousnotions of how and why Lincoln issued the Proclamation, and establishes itself asa major contribution to the study of Lincoln and Civil War historiography.

Independent Historian Jason Emerson

J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Riseof the Domestic Security State, 1939–1945. By Douglas M. Charles. (Columbus,Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 197. $39.95.)

In February 1941, amid the “great debate” about possible U.S. intervention in theSecond World War, President Franklin Roosevelt learned of an anti-interventionistpamphlet that accused him of subverting American democracy. The document,published by the anti-interventionist America First Committee, charged that theLend-Lease bill before Congress was actually a “war-dictatorship bill” that wouldgive the president “absolute power.” Roosevelt passed a copy of the circular to hispress secretary, Steve Early, along with a request, “[F]ind out from someone—perhaps FBI—who is paying for this” (68).

As Douglas M. Charles shows in this timely book, FBI director J. Edgar Hooverwas more than willing to oblige his boss. Charles documents the FBI’s surveillanceof anti-interventionists from the start of the war in Europe in 1939 to the earlyyears of American involvement. He argues convincingly that the “obsequious”director pursued these investigations not because of genuine concerns aboutnational security, but because he wished to curry favor with the president byserving his political and policy interests. Often, the FBI had little interest ingathering evidence for possible prosecutions; instead, it sought to discover dam-aging personal information about Roosevelt’s critics in order to discredit them.

In pursuit of these alleged subversives, Hoover’s agents examined their mail,interviewed their neighbors, listened to their phone calls, broke into their homes,and leaked damning stories about them to the media and public opinion leaders.The targets included the aviators Charles Lindbergh and Laura Ingalls, historianHarry Elmer Barnes, Senators David Walsh and Burton Wheeler, and Represen-tative Hamilton Fish, among others. Although some of these isolationists admiredthe Nazis, the agents seldom found that the German government was fundingtheir anti-interventionist propaganda. Usually, the answer to Roosevelt’s query


about funding was unsurprising: right-wing press barons were paying for thegroups. But the lack of foreign links did not stop the FBI from spying on thedissidents.

Charles argues that the Bureau’s role as an “institution of the national securitystate” actually dates to the era of the Great Debate (174). It was in this period, hesays, that the FBI “extensively and systematically monitored administration criticswhile seeking to undermine them” (176). He concludes that the history of thissurveillance is particularly relevant in twenty-first-century America, as the Bushadministration increases governmental secrecy and expands domestic snooping.

The author could develop more of the story of the later years of the war.Despite the impression created by the subtitle, the book has little coverage ofevents past 1943. Nonetheless, Charles recovers the history of a significant periodin the development of the national security state. Like Katherine Sibley’s Red Spiesin America, this book prompts historians of U.S. intelligence to locate the seedsof Cold War-era programs and mindsets in the burgeoning security state of theSecond World War.

University of California, Davis Kathryn S. Olmsted

Stealing Lincoln’s Body. By Thomas J. Craughwell. (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 250. $24.95.)

Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, such as David Donald’s excellent account orCarl Sandburg’s classic, end with Lincoln’s last labored breath or his body’s finaltrip to Springfield, Illinois. The arrival of Lincoln’s corpse in his hometown inearly May 1865, however, is really only the beginning of this bizarre and fast-paced story. Eleven years later, associates in a counterfeiting ring plotted theabduction of Lincoln’s corpse. The attempt and the consequences are thoroughlyexplored here.

To make sense of this forgotten episode, Thomas J. Craughwell ties togetherinformation about counterfeiting, the development of the Irish communities inChicago, the formation and early years of the Secret Service, the history of theLincoln Memorial in Oak Ridge Cemetery, and even the labor troubles of thePullman Car Company. The author examines closely the reaction of RobertLincoln, the older surviving son, to these traumatic events and his relationship tohis mother. Craughwell uses an 1890 account of the crime, but supplements itwith descriptions of the criminals from Illinois prison records and the SecretService’s daily reports. All these disparate threads are woven to produce a well-written narrative that is difficult to put down.


At the insistence of Mary Lincoln, Springfield’s town fathers reluctantly aban-doned their initial plan to entomb Lincoln near the city center. Instead thememorial for the fallen president was constructed in Oak Ridge Cemetery, twomiles north of downtown. In 1876 counterfeiters in Chicago planned to abductthe body and hold it until the state released one of their colleagues, a skilledengraver, from the state penitentiary in Joliet. The ghoulish plan was ultimatelycompromised by an informer of the Secret Service, whose original task was toeliminate the flood of bogus greenbacks from circulation. To protect the presidentfrom further attempts, the caretakers of the Lincoln tomb took steps that werealmost as bizarre as the criminals’ intentions. Between 1876 and 1901, thememorial underwent major repairs and outright reconstruction. The redesignof the memorial’s interior, especially for the thousands of tourists, was practical,but, as Craughwell persuasively notes, in the case of “the reburial of AbrahamLincoln . . . the motivation was fear” (210).

Readers might wonder about the significance of this story and whether theLincoln bicentennial has evoked more than people truly wish to know. Neverthe-less, all those interested in the sixteenth president will enjoy this neglected aspectof his life (or death) and will see how particular aspects of post-Civil WarAmerica—urban growth, criminal activity, the legal system, and economicgrowth—are intertwined in history. They should not, like Lincoln’s body, be takenfor granted.

Cornell College M. Philip Lucas

The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960. By Gary A.Donaldson. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Pp. ix, 199. $22.95.)

The author of this study has previously written histories about the presidentialelections of 1948 and 1964, but in turning his attention to the election of 1960he faced a distinctive problem: the shadow of Theodore H. White. White’s TheMaking of the President 1960 established the popular genre of insider campaignnarratives and remains the most famous of all campaign books. Prospectivereaders of The First Modern Campaign will want to know what is different andnew about this new account of the 1960 election.

Gary A. Donaldson tackles his Theodore White problem in a preface andmakes an important claim: for all of its virtues, White’s version of the 1960election was marred by his romanticized portrait of John F. Kennedy. The FirstModern Campaign promises to be a more evenhanded treatment of the candi-dates, and it delivers on this promise. Donaldson might also have noted a second


advantage of his book as compared to that by White: he has done extensivearchival research and brings his revealing findings to bear at numerous points inhis narrative. His book is also much shorter than White’s and thus is a handierread for general readers or students seeking to learn about the 1960 election.

The title of the book refers to the historical importance of the 1960 election asa harbinger of future contests, especially in the extensive use of television and thecentrality of candidate image. Although these are valid themes, they are hardlyoriginal. The strength of the book does not lie in its analysis, but in its fast-pacedyet thorough account of the Kennedy–Nixon combat. Donaldson does an equallygood job sketching the political background for the 1960 election and describingthe pivotal events of the campaign. Particularly helpful are the opening twochapters on the Eisenhower years, one on the Republicans and one on theDemocrats. Other standout chapters cover the famous debates and the meaning ofthe election results. Because the 1960 race was such a cliffhanger, small eventstook on large significance. Donaldson helpfully recalls a number of possibleturning points: Nixon’s knee injury and ill-health, the mauling of Lyndon andLady Byrd Johnson by a conservative crowd in Dallas that may have swung Texastoward Kennedy, and the Kennedy campaign’s intercession to have Martin LutherKing Jr. released from a Georgia jail and its subsequent harvest of AfricanAmerican votes.

Although readers should turn to Donaldson’s book for a fresh and accessibletake on the 1960 election, they should be forewarned that its editing is extremelypoor. There are far too many factual errors, inconsistencies, and misspelled wordshere for the work of a professional historian. For example, Donaldson writes thatin the suburbs Kennedy’s “youth played well among young baby boomers” (154).But the oldest baby boomers, using conventional dating, were fourteen in 1960!

University at Albany, SUNY Bruce Miroff

The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asian-Pacific War in U.S.–EastAsian Relations. Edited by Marc Gallicchio. (Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. 337. $84.95.)

The editor of this anthology has done the academic community a real favor bymaking available, in a cohesive volume, revised versions of a set of stimulatingessays first published in Japanese under the title Pearl Harbor as Memory (Kyoto,Japan: Minerva shobo, 2004). The book’s focus on American memories of WorldWar II in Asia and the Pacific, its blend of little-known empirical research andsophisticated synthetic arguments, and each essay’s clarity and abundant foot-


notes make it immediately useful for teaching and research alike. The nine pieceswritten by American, Japanese, and Chinese historians consider the role of warmemories in American public discourse, policy making, museums, and foreignrelations with respect to Japan and China. They are remarkable even in theirintellectual rigor and documentation and speak to each other in ways that theshort introduction and conclusion cannot quite do justice.

Although the subtitle draws attention to the book’s international and espe-cially trans-Pacific orientation, the collection is strongest in its exploration ofdomestic American struggles over memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Emily S.Rosenberg’s essay on the uses of Pearl Harbor in American public culture in the1990s, Harvo Iguchi’s analysis of the immediate postwar critique of the atomicbombs among political elites, Waldo Heinrichs’s substantive account of specialinterest politics in the Enola Gay debacle, and the important examinations ofAsian American and African American minority politics within a transwar per-spective by Xiaohua Ma, Marc Gallicchio, and Daqing Yang, respectively, docu-ment in fascinating detail the diversity and contestation of American warmemories. These essays can offer a corrective to the overwhelming centrality ofthe European war theater in American public memory. Unfortunately,neither the authors nor the editor address this point from a comparativeperspective.

The role of the United States as a global superpower informed the dominantmemory cultures in the Asia-Pacific region in crucial ways. Ma’s and Yang’simportant essays on the triangular relations between the United States, Japan, andChina in creating national as well as international memory cultures begin toexcavate the complex dynamics involved. Frank Ninkovich and Takuya Sasakizoom in on the fascinating pas de deux of U.S.–Japanese memory politics. Nink-ovich focuses on the dominance of an American “historical understanding” of thewar’s meaning in the modern world, which dovetailed nicely with the objectivesof the ruling elite in Japan, while Sasaki highlights divergent nationalist memoriesof the same wartime events in Cold War America and Japan. Yujin Yaguchi’santhropological study of Japanese visitors to the Arizona memorial in Honoluluilluminates tensions between national and international memory on a more per-sonal level.

The crucial point, however, concerns the long and uncanny memory equilib-rium among the Pacific powers in which power-political considerations preventeda sustained national and international confrontation with Japanese war crimesuntil the 1980s. To understand today’s history wars as well as the various war andpeace museums, historians need to engage with the reasons for and uses of the


long postwar silences on all sides. Such inquiry should, eventually, go beyond theiconic symbolism of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nanjing.

Boston College Franziska Seraphim

Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation. By Lorri Glover. (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 250. $50.00.)

In this book the author provides a thorough and fascinating examination of elite,Southern, male child-rearing practices in the early decades of the Americanrepublic. Lorri Glover conceived her analysis as a corrective to Southern histori-ography’s obsession with the culture of honor. According to Glover, this obsessionhas provided a rather simplistic understanding of antebellum Southern manhood.Yes, elite white Southerners ascribed to the ethic of honor, but they also aspired tobe paragons of republican virtue, community leaders, devoted family members,masters of all those below them, courtly gentlemen, and—of course—financiallysuccessful. To get at the collection of values that shaped the lives of elite Southernmen, Glover examines the child-rearing and maturation process of elite Southernsons in the first decades of the young republic as revealed in the letters and diariesof the Southern gentry. The result is an engaging and informative account thatshould help reshape the study of antebellum Southern manhood.

According to Glover, the South’s elite fathers and mothers set high standardsfor their sons. On the one hand, they wanted their sons to be independent,decisive, and downright arrogant in their displays of personal will. On the other,they also expected sons to adopt English standards of gentlemanly refinement,place family reputation above personal desires, and take up the mantle of lead-ership in the new republic. Raising sons to such exacting—and somewhatcontradictory—standards proved difficult. Boys’ willfulness proved especially dif-ficult to control. Ultimately, parents relied on the power of their purse stringsas well as heavy dosages of guilt and shame to encourage sons to marry for status,establish suitable gentlemanly careers, and uphold family reputations. Mostimportantly, they instilled in their sons the understanding that they must be“unrelenting” in their displays of manly behavior (181–182).

According to Glover, elite Southern parents largely succeeded in their efforts.The generation of Southern sons that came of age in the first decades of the newrepublic was so successful that it set the standard for manly autonomy andauthority for subsequent generations. In closing, Glover suggests that Southernerspaid a high price for setting such high standards: the generation that came of age


in the 1840s and 1850s was so committed to masculine ethics of duty andauthority that the men found it nearly impossible to back down from what theyperceived to be personal attacks from Northern reformers and politicians. HereGlover helps readers to understand one of the enduring paradoxes of Southernhistory in the early national period—how the early nationalism of the South’sRevolutionary heroes gave way to such ardent sectionalists in the next generation.Ultimately, Glover suggests, it had everything to do with the way that the found-ing fathers and mothers raised their sons. Whatever nationalist sentiment South-ern sons possessed narrowed once Northern reformers and politicians started tocriticize Southern character and Southern institutions, namely slavery. WhiteSouthern men—raised as they were to exhibit personal autonomy, willfulness, andmastery—could not countenance such criticism.

As the first systematic study of Southern manhood for the early nationalperiod, Southern Sons is an impressive work. Weaknesses are few. Readers mightwonder how it was that such a disparate class of elites drawn from across theSouth happened on the same child-rearing practices at the same time. In somerespects, Glover’s analysis almost seems a bit too neat, especially given thevolatility of the era of the new republic. This criticism aside, Southern Sons is animpressive work, certain to influence—and perhaps even reshape—Southernsocial and cultural history for years to come, as well as the history of Americanmasculinities.

Grand Valley State University Steve Tripp

A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia,1880–1952. By Laura Gotkowitz. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.Pp. xiv, 398. $23.95.)

The author has written a penetrating and critical revision of the origins andimportance of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution. Most historians have concentratedon that uprising as provoked by class-based urban conflict and miners’ strikes thatquickly overthrew the military regime and installed a civilian government centeredon the leftist MNR party. Bolivian defeat in the Chaco War and the unrest thatfollowed in the 1940s presumably provided the seedbed for this explosion. LauraGotkowitz focuses instead on the longer history of rural mobilization, politicalprotest, and resistance among Bolivia’s indigenous people in their struggles torestore their communal lands as far back as the 1874 revolt against GeneralMelgarejo. Gotkowitz analyzes the persistent and multivariegated strategies of


resistance that Indian caciques, alcaldes, and activists fomented against genera-tions of oppression in the central altiplano department of Cochabamba. Theauthor also demonstrates how the Quechua and Aymara peoples used the lan-guage of rights, citizenship, and justice from populist laws to carve out their ownvision of a state that would be “of the Indian and for the Indian” (252).

Exploitation of the indigenous had deep roots in Bolivian history and grewespecially oppressive in the early twentieth century, following an 1899 Indianrebellion and fears of a “race war.” The drive toward liberal modernization inBolivia was ironically accompanied by the continuation of colonial practices suchas forced labor, onerous taxes, and restricted suffrage against Indians. Theircommunities fought back in everyday work stoppages, petitions, and protests toboth local and national officials. Indian leaders proved adept at reinterpretingBolivian law, particularly the 1945 decrees that came out of the IndigenousCongress that year, which proved a watershed in legitimizing Indian grievancesand identity. They also co-opted state-created Indian schools as centers of com-munal defiance. Shock over defeat in the 1932–1935 Chaco War and continuedIndian agitation provided a brief opening in which a series of populist militaryleaders culminating in General Villarroel pushed for change to codify Indianrights, or at least give lip service to their historical claims. Villarroel’s bloody 1946fall set the stage for more violence, as Indians struggled to maintain their limitedgains against landlord reaction.

Gotkowitz masterfully traces the depth and links of indigenous politicizationthrough the use of Bolivian communal, departmental, and national archives thatbring both Indian and state voices into the narrative. Perhaps her work could havebeen strengthened through more insight into the particular cultural dynamics ofIndian communities that informed these protests. Her section on women marketvendors is a wonderful example of this. But overall this is an excellent work,expertly researched and written, that offers new insights into the rural roots ofresistance that contributed to and expanded the 1952 Revolution. This work alsoopens up a greater understanding of Andean rural–urban connections, Indianidentity politics, Latin American state formation, and labor movements through-out the region. It is an inspiring testament to the ability of committed socialmovements to effect change against the long odds of centuries-old racism andoppression.

Marquette University Michael E. Donoghue


Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America. Edited by WarrenHofstra. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Pp. xiii, 191.$27.95.)

Growing out of a 2004 conference at Shenandoah University, this collection ofessays on the American theater of the Seven Years’ War [1754–1763] seeks togo beyond the traditional perspective of the political and military events of“the largest and most consequential military conflict of the eighteenth century”(2). Rather, the intent of the six essays and Fred Anderson’s well-written, conciseintroduction is to focus on the meaning and impact of the cultural encounters andconflicts of the various participants of the war: the British, French, Indians,Canadians, and Anglo-American colonists. These disparate groups, editor WarrenHofstra states in his preface, acted not only out of self-interest, but “more deeplyfrom all-encompassing complexes of attitude, ideas, and assumptions functioningbelow the horizon of reason,” that is to say, influenced by culture (ix).

Paul Mapp looks at British culture and the changing nature of the British empirein the years prior to the outbreak of the worldwide struggle. British authoritiessought a tighter control over their colonies in America and were willing to devotemen and money to defend them against the French. Victory in the war confrontedBritain with new colonies and new peoples to govern, which were decidedly“non-British.” Why did they pursue this new kind of empire? Mapp holds thatBritons were “hostile to French culture, religion, and influence” and that fears ofgrowing French territorial and commercial threats led “significant parts of theBritish public in the mid-1750s” to oppose their Gallic enemy (35). Mapp is carefulto remind readers, however, that “economic and strategic considerations” alsoaffected British imperial policy as well as cultural influences (42).

Jonathan Dull’s chapter on France in this era is perhaps the best overview ofthe French role in the war to be found. He describes a “culture of war” thatengulfed the French court, one that was jealous of Britain’s growing power. Inaddition, Catholicism and the absolutist monarchical model of government madethe chasm between the rivals unbridgeable, and led to war. Dull describes anempire entangled in European politics to the point that not defending New Francefrom British incursions was out of the question; indeed, France was “forced” intowar by its alliance and fears of burgeoning British strength (71).

Timothy J. Shannon’s essay on Iroquois “patterns and values” affecting theirrole in the conflict is a fine study of cultural influences on the Native Americangroup (80). “Cultural practices,” Shannon observes, “informed how they madewar.” It was all about asserting manhood, gaining trophies and plunder, proving


their courage, and obtaining captives to replace the dead from their communi-ties, rather than European goals of territorial and commercial gains. The Iro-quois fought—or did not—on their own terms, to maintain their culturalautonomy, and weathered the storm of war by refusing to commit completely toeither the French or British. He concludes by showing that Iroquois life wassignificantly changed and stressed by their “increasing material dependence onthe British crown” for daily wants and warlike stores, such as firearms, alcohol,metalware, and fabrics (96).

Also taking up the vein of Indian participation in the Seven Years’ War isEric Hinderaker, who provides a superb chapter in which he describes the nativepeoples of the Ohio Valley, who were a mixed group in conflict with Americansettlers and the Iroquois, all the while wary of British and French forces as well.These Indians sought to distance themselves from the other powers and asserttheir own autonomy. Hinderaker shows that although the Ohio Indians were“central players” in the war, they were also a “collection of independent com-munities” largely unprepared for the conflict, and dependent on colonial allies(113).

The numerous reasons Americans had to become British patriots is WoodyHolton’s subject in an innovative piece throughout which he argues that the waractually worked to slow “the growth of anti-imperial sentiment” in the colonies,at least for some (128). Gratitude, imperial pride, fear of renewed Indian attacks,recognition of Britain’s military might, and concern over possible slave revoltswere, Holton contends, contributing factors to keeping colonial ties to the metro-pole. Holton admits, however, that British success of arms emboldened them todemand taxes from Americans, which led to protests and opposition by thecolonies—“an indirect way that the Seven Years’ War led to the American Revo-lution” (138). Although the essay is provocative, Holton’s insertion of socialconflict in America and a rising class consciousness into the story is clumsy, seemsonly loosely related to his main point, and appears awkward.

Finally, Catherine Desbarats and Allan Greer provide a lengthy analysis of thewar in Canadian history and memory. Although this is an interesting subject,particularly with regard to how the cultural differences of Anglo-Canadians andQuebecois have influenced their collective memories of this eighteenth-centurystruggle, the essay does not for the most part engage with cultures in conflictduring the war itself. In fact, the chapter is in essence a rather tedious historio-graphical review of how Canadians have written about the war since the nine-teenth century, and as such, is unfortunately a poor fit with the rest of thecontributions to the volume.


In sum, the purpose of this volume (as Hofstra concludes) is to cast the war as“cultures in conflict,” rather than a “conflict of culture” (xi). It was, however,both. Although it is a laudable goal for the writers and editor of this book toattempt to go beyond a traditional narrative of the war’s events and its partici-pants, most of these well-written essays, excellent in their own right, do not reallyengage in a cultural analysis as promised. Mapp’s analysis includes just as muchconvincing evidence (if not more) that traditional factors such as trade andeighteenth-century geopolitics were behind Britain’s new imperial posture, besidesculture. Although Dull states in his last paragraph that “cultural differences areimportant in understanding war,” his essay is almost entirely devoid of culturalexploration, and is instead a conventional overview of French politics and Euro-pean diplomacy that spilled over into North America in a war against the British(74). Hinderaker’s work also touches only briefly on cultural themes as well.Readers will find that Shannon and Holton come closest to the goal of usingculture’s “interpretive power” to provide new ways of looking at this monumentalstruggle.

U.S. Army Center of Military History,Ft. McNair, D.C.

John R. Maass

A Good Day’s Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. By Dwight W. Hoover.(Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. Pp. viii, 211. $26.00.)

This author’s ancestors first settled in Iowa Territory in the mid-nineteenthcentury, and by the 1920s his father operated the one hundred acre farm on whichDwight W. Hoover was raised. His grandfather and his uncles also farmed in thelocality, and they were able to offer the advice and practical assistance that onewould expect from a close extended family. Hoover’s father had purchased hisfarm when prices and land values were buoyed by wartime demand. However, thesavage deflationary slump of 1920–1921 increased real debt, and for the remain-der of the decade the financial rewards of farming were far below pre-1920expectations. The Great Depression of the 1930s made things even worse.

Hoover devotes the core of this volume to a careful description of farmactivities in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter. He explains with admirableclarity the tools used for soil preparation, for planting, and for harvesting. Hepoints out how difficult and physically demanding many farm operations couldbe. One of the great benefits of this book is that scholars of this period who haveno farm experience can now understand, rather than imagine, how farm imple-ments were used and how the family farm was managed.


Particularly interesting is Hoover’s treatment of the dramatic technologicaladvance that took place on many farms during the 1930s: the replacement ofthe horse by the tractor. Hoover’s father made the transition steadily rather thandramatically, and as economically as possible. Hoover painfully records the dif-ficulties of trying to adapt machinery purchased for horse-drawn operations tothe demands of the tractor. There is no evidence that any of the family read thehighly technical papers produced by the Department of Agriculture that tried toshow farmers when it was beneficial to mechanize. Like many in their situation,the Hoovers relied on their relatives and friends for advice. They also picked upinformation at agricultural fairs, and Hoover was a participant in 4-H andFuture Farmers of America (FFA) programs.

It is remarkable how little impact the New Deal had on the Hoover family. AsRepublicans they were not drawn to Roosevelt and apparently did not gather inthe family kitchen to listen to his “fireside chats.” Nor is there any mention of thefinancial benefits from the farm programs that, among other things, funded thepurchase of power machinery by many operators.

Life on the Iowa farm was not easy. Outside lavatories, no electricity until1937, rising early in the winter to milk cows, and even picking maggots from therear end of sheep are among the hardships the author describes. But although herealized that he was not suited to life on the farm, Dwight W. Hoover retainsaffection for his upbringing. This book, however, is not a wistful reminiscing. It isa lucid and highly effective history of farm life that will be of immense value bothto lay readers and to professional historians.

University of Leicester Peter Fearon

Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America. By AllenM. Hornblum. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.Pp. xiv, 207. $24.95.)

Mixing first-hand testimony provided by former prison inmate Edward Anthonywith historical contextualization and analysis, the author of this book provides adisturbing but valuable account of the use of prisoners for medical experiments atHolmesburg Prison in Philadelphia from the 1950s through the 1970s. Anthonywas one of thousands of people who, in the desperate circumstances created bytheir incarceration in one of the nation’s most corrupt and brutalizing jails,allowed researchers to use their bodies to test the effects of a wide range ofproducts, from Johnson & Johnson bubble bath to mind-altering drugs under


consideration for use by the United States Army. In many cases, test subjectsendured prolonged, excruciating pain and lasting damage to their health. Prison-ers earned anything from ten to several hundred dollars for their trouble. Mean-while, the doctors, universities, and corporations seeking to assess the safety oftheir inventions made millions.

Most of the prisoners who participated in the experiments were AfricanAmerican, and the parallels to past forms of oppression and exploitation ofblack bodies are inescapable. Like Southern plantation owners during theslavery and Jim Crow eras, researchers and their corporate sponsors viewedAfrican Americans more as economic resources than as human beings. As AllenM. Hornblum notes, inmates like Anthony became “throwaway people,” com-modities that were used to enrich others and then discarded after they were nolonger needed (65). In many respects, medical research programs in the nation’sprisons were a revival of the nineteenth-century convict lease system in theSouth, where prisoners were rented out as cheap labor for private employers.“Pfizer, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, SmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson became thecontractors,” Hornblum observes, “just as white planters and mine ownerswere in the South” (199).

Amid graphic descriptions of physical and mental abuse that Anthony justi-fiably labels as torture, an even more unsettling revelation appears in the book’sepilogue, where Hornblum discusses current attempts by scientists and corpo-rations to revive medical research programs in the nation’s jails. Although pro-ponents argue that greater regulation and oversight will ensure that the ethicalviolations of the past will not be repeated, Sentenced to Science should givepause to anyone who thinks using incarcerated populations as test subjects isin the interests of inmates or the society at large. After mentioning legislationintroduced in some states offering prisoners reduced sentences for donating theirkidneys or bone marrow for research, Hornblum asks: “Is the commodificationof body parts and human beings something we really want to foster” (198)? ForAnthony, the presumed benefits of such programs could never outweigh thesuffering they inflict. “A lot of medical people and corporations made seriousmoney from those tests, but all we ended up with was scars, bad memories, anda life of pain,” he observes. “It was wrong the first time they did that stuff tous. I don’t believe they deserve a second shot” (200).

University of Nevada, Reno Greta de Jong


The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age. By MarkHulliung. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. ix, 256. $29.95.)

The social contract has been the dominant ideological principle in America sincethe Revolution, but most studies have only explored the social contract through thelens of the American Revolution or in comparison to the European models ofthe social contract. As historian Mark Hulliung argues in his provocative study, theorigins, interpretation, and utilization of the social contract in America were muchmore varied and contested than has been previously understood.

Hulliung begins his evaluation by examining the Revolution. As heralds of theRevolution, the Patriots have often been portrayed as the usual standard bearersof the social contract. Hulliung contends that the Loyalists debated the meaningof the social contract just as much as the Patriots. Moreover, more than onetheorist could be found in both the Patriots’ and Loyalists’ intellectual cache. JohnLocke was certainly influential, but Hulliung maintains that theorists such asSamuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius were cited with frequency. Both Patriots andLoyalists would pull from all different intellectual theories in order to support orfight against the Revolution.

The Revolution, as Hulliung effectively illustrates, left Americans with rem-nants of several social contracts. Before the Civil War, Southerners used Pufen-dorf’s theory of prisoners to justify slavery while Northerners involved Locke.These rebuttals worked to deflate the arguments of Northern critics, but Lockeand his theory of “natural rights” proved to be too strong, and Southerners wereforced to confront Lockean principles head on. The end of the Civil War markedthe decline of the social contract, but only a few years later one finds “GrotiusPufendorf, and Locke creatively adapted to American conditions” (85). Landreformers such as Henry George and his agrarian cohorts used all three socialcontract theorists to justify notions of public land, community, and naturalrights.

One of the major contributions of Hulliung’s book is an examination of thevarious treatments of the Declaration of Independence in American history.From revolutionaries to resisters, opponents of slavery to slaveholders, and civilrights activists to their opponents, all have invoked the Declaration to supporttheir cause in one way or another while respecting its basic principles. But thepreamble of the Declaration that spoke eloquently of natural law and that wasused by so many would be replaced by the “Second Bill of Rights” in the 1960sthat “made such appeals irrelevant by offering assurances that all claims ofrights, all remedies for justice, could be pursued within the constitutional struc-


ture” (172). This shift, Hulliung maintains, stripped away the social contractfrom American political discourse and only left the complicated language ofrights, which, in his opinion, has left the United States without a “commontongue” (174).

This insightful study contributes to the reader’s understanding of the socialcontract in the varied past of the United States. It will provide historians with avaluable tool to appreciate the intellectual heritage of the United States, and moreimportantly, it subtly reminds readers that ideas have been and will remainimportant.

Saint Louis University Matthew C. Sherman

The FBI: A History. By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. vii, 317. $27.50.)

The year 2008 marks the FBI’s official centennial. As such, two comprehensiveFBI histories were published by American FBI historians Athan Theoharis andRichard Gid Powers. Theoharis presented a brief and critical history while Powersoffered a longer and more sympathetic one. In the present volume, RhodriJeffreys-Jones, a noted historian of the CIA from the University of Edinburgh,offers what he calls “a European’s history of the FBI” (vii). In terms of scope, hisbook is similar to those by Theoharis and Powers, yet he takes a differentanalytical approach. Both Theoharis and Powers, as is traditional, date the FBI’sorigins to 1908. Jeffreys-Jones, on the other hand, takes the FBI’s origins to1870—the year the Justice Department was organized.

In dating the bureau’s origins to 1870, the author argues that one canobserve a coherent evolutionary strand in the FBI’s history in terms of its origi-nal mission. He identifies that mission in the U.S. government battling domesticterrorism—in the form of the Ku Klux Klan—and working to protect the rightsof the newly freed slaves amid Reconstruction. He notes that in this effort, theJustice Department relied significantly upon Secret Service agents borrowedfrom the Treasury Department. This is important, he argues, because the JusticeDepartment thereupon relied on borrowed Secret Service agents, and when theFBI was formed in 1908 its first agents were hired from Secret Service stock;their experience can be traced to the agency’s anti-Klan efforts. The FBI’s sub-sequent history can therefore be viewed in terms of it moving away from itsoriginal civil rights mission.

The first step in this direction came in 1910, after Congress passed the WhiteSlave Traffic Act to target prostitution rings. Moving beyond prostitution, law


enforcers sought to regulate perceived immorality among the public, includinginterracial couples. During the First World War, the FBI assumed an internalsecurity role and, especially with the Red Scare of 1919–1920, African Americansand others were targeted as perceived threats. Irrespectively, during the 1920s, theFBI worked to suppress the resurgent and popular KKK, and it targeted lynchingin the following decade. With the rise of the black civil rights movement of the1950s, the FBI under Director J. Edgar Hoover revisited its efforts to harassand discredit civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then, afterHoover’s death in 1972, the FBI moved to make serious efforts to hireminorities—African Americans, women, and Hispanics. By the 1980s, Jeffreys-Jones argues, the FBI largely regained its prosecutorial mission and then lost it byfalling into ethnic profiling and xenophobia during America’s War on Terrorism.Although Jeffreys-Jones’s history covers much more than can be explained here, itis particularly valuable for its interpretation of the FBI’s origins and historicalevolution in light of race.

Pennsylvania State University, Great Allegheny Douglas M. Charles

America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History. By Morton Keller. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 336. $27.95.)

This study is an ambitious work; it is a sweeping political history of the UnitedStates from the colonial period to the present. According to the author, theAmerican political landscape is characterized by three distinct “polity-regimes”(or long periods as shaped by the pertinent institutions, including political parties,national government, state and local government, bureaucracy, law and thecourts, and more recently the mass media). Morton Keller charts three periods:the “differential-republican” (from colonial times to the 1820s, as carried out bythe gentrified Founding Fathers); “party-democratic” (1830s to 1930s, aslaunched by the nongentry Andrew Jackson); and “populist-bureaucratic” (1930sto the present, as initiated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the midst of socialupheaval, namely economic downturn and world war, and later solidified by theCold War). This outline, the author maintains, is “A New Political History”because it emphasizes long periods of continuity with political cleavages ratherthan short “ages” or “eras” packaged in decade-long increments (e.g., Age ofJackson, Progressive Era).

In an engaging, fast-paced manner, the author narrates how the United Statesadvanced from a colonial network, to a young republic, to a democracy with a


strong two-party system, to the current populist-bureaucratic state in which manycitizens define themselves by issues rather than political parties. Iconoclastically,Keller rejects the more conventional approach that emphasizes the 1860 electionof Abraham Lincoln as a definitive political realignment. Likewise, the 1948“Dixiecrat” backlash against the budding civil rights movement (barely men-tioned) and the 1980 “Reagan Revolution” fail to rate as significant demarcationpoints for Keller. Instead, he proposes a long view of history, one in which thenation has often been closely but not deeply divided. For Keller, the culture warsof the 1990s to the present are simply recurrences of an oft-repeated struggle forpolitical equilibrium between two national parties.

This wide-angle view of history is certainly appealing, but it has the samedesign flaw as the “ages” or “eras” approach: any interpretive paradigm has away of shaping events to its purpose. Throughout this work the author’s biasesare apparent, including belief in American exceptionalism. Also, readers willdiscern in various places a subtle conservative bias. For example, Keller reportsthat more Republicans than Democrats approved civil rights legislation, but hefails to note that many of those nay-saying Democrats were Dixiecrats on theirway to becoming members of the GOP. The Monica Lewinsky scandal culmi-nating with President Clinton’s impeachment is characterized as populist poli-tics, as if operatives of the Republican Party played no major role. There arealso many assertions; for example, that the failure of the Equal Rights Amend-ment represented a backlash against affirmative action. This ignores the mostobvious explanation: a negative reaction against the women’s liberation move-ment. There are also omissions, including the war on drugs, the wealth gap, theincredibly high number of incarcerated citizens in the “populist-bureaucratic”regime, etc.

Palm Beach Atlantic University Roger Chapman

Ike: An American Hero. By Michael Korda. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2007.Pp. xx, 779. $34.95.)

The author’s mission in this, his twentieth book, is plainly expressed in thesubtitle—to make the case for Dwight D. Eisenhower as “an American hero.”Michael Korda believes that Americans are too hard on their leaders, that theyobsessively “dig through their lives for flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses” (4). Asa result, the warrior of Europe was ultimately caricatured as “an old fuddy-duddyin the White House” who cared more about his golf scores than leadership on theimportant issues of his time (4).


Korda makes his plea in a sweeping, well-written 723-page narrative. The bookis structured in four parts, with the middle sections focused on the war. Inaddition, he leaps ahead in chapter two to provide a riveting account of Eisen-hower’s decisions approaching D-Day.

Military enthusiasts will delight in Korda’s descriptions of strategies andbattles. He effectively evokes Eisenhower’s burdens “involving staggering ex-pense, destruction of lives and wealth, and the fates of whole peoples” (549). Theauthor refutes the critics of Eisenhower’s wartime leadership, insisting that Ikewas essentially correct in his basic strategy and critical battlefield decisions. Kordarightly reminds readers that victory over the Germans was by no means assured.Ike made the difference.

Korda devotes only eighty-five pages to Eisenhower’s presidential years. Unfor-tunately, this imbalance reinforces the impression that Ike’s wartime leadershipwas more important than his presidency, at a time when historians are increas-ingly positive about his White House years. However brief, Korda’s assessment isfavorable. In civil rights, the author commends Eisenhower’s role in desegregatingWashington, D.C., and the armed forces. He particularly praises Eisenhower’sdecision to send troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce a federalcourt order for school desegregation. Korda concludes that, in this instance,Ike “acted with more energy—and in a more straightforward way—than eitherPresident Kennedy or President Johnson” (699).

Korda is a first-rate storyteller; to be more precise, a story reteller. The bookprovides no revelations based on exhaustive research in primary sources. Most ofthe stories have been told before. The author’s documentation is minimal, relyingmostly on secondary sources or memoirs. For example, Korda repeatedly citesKay Summersby’s 1975 memoir alleging that she had an ongoing affair with thegeneral during the war. Korda apparently believes that the relationship wasserious, although others have questioned Summersby’s credibility.

Readers should measure Michael Korda’s effort on his own terms. He did notset out to do groundbreaking research, but to retell the compelling story of a greatman. Although the book is derivative, Korda’s interpretations are provocative.Perhaps he hopes to do for Eisenhower what David McCullough did for HarryTruman and John Adams—enhance the general’s reputation with “a single greatbook” (13). In any event, the author predictably concludes that Ike “was, in everysense of the words, an American hero” (723).

Southwestern College in Kansas David A. Nichols


William Jennings Bryan: An Uncertain Trumpet. By Gerald Leinwand. (Lanham, Md.:Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Pp. xx, 181. $33.00.)

“If it hadn’t been for Bill Bryan there wouldn’t be any liberal outfit in thecountry at all now,” former president Harry S. Truman once remarked. “OldBryan kept liberalism alive, kept it going” (2). This pronouncement might sur-prise anyone who associates William Jennings Bryan with his role at the 1925Scopes Trial and little else. But beginning in 1896, Bryan championed ideas thatbecame standards of American political life: the direct election of senators,women’s suffrage, and a graduated federal income tax. He also changed thenature of presidential campaigns in 1896 by crisscrossing twenty-six states,addressing over five million people in formal speeches and at countless whistle-stops, and persuading 95 percent of Midwestern voters, whether supporters oropponents, to turn out on election day. As Woodrow Wilson’s initial secretaryof state, Bryan’s strict moral compass suited a foreign policy promoting democ-racy and national self-determinism, but Latin Americans cringed at its pater-nalism and Europeans ignored its idealism. Before World War I mocked hispacifism, Bryan convinced thirty countries to establish a cooling-off period fornegotiations instead of charging headlong into war, and the devastation of thebattlefield lent credence to his intent. At the time of his death in Dayton, Ten-nessee, Bryan no longer seemed relevant. Critics like H. L. Mencken dismissedhim as “a sort of fundamentalist pope,” flailing at an encroaching modernity,yet his support for traditional religious beliefs has found new voices in today’spolitical discourse (147).

In this brief biography for the American Profile Series, Gerald Leinwandpresents a straightforward and critical narrative of Bryan’s life. The “GreatCommoner” grew up in southern Illinois, became a skilled orator while at IllinoisCollege in Jacksonville, studied law in Chicago, then established himself inLincoln, Nebraska. Once there, he began a successful career on the Chautauquacircuit and pursued his political goals. Through it all, Bryan remained ambitiousand devout, both as a Presbyterian and a Democrat, but his tight grasp on thesevalues, as Leinwand sees it, proved limiting. Bryan’s Manichean thinking, forexample, was inflexible and simplistic; he seemed incapable of addressing thechanges in American culture, and he never rose above the bigotry of his times. Forthese reasons, Bryan faced only “defeat, decline, and frustration” after 1896 (71).No doubt, political failures and lost causes have placed Bryan in historicalpurgatory, neither forgotten nor a hero, and Leinwand does little to change things.He underplays Bryan’s significance or expects more from him. In considering L.


Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the election of 1896, Leinwandaccepts the image of Bryan as the Cowardly Lion, but he misses Baum’s point—the lion had courage as well as a roar.

This book is designed for undergraduate students and a general audience, butit lacks a suitable context to clarify Bryan’s importance. He appears as a rigid,well-meaning crank with a like-minded following, always on the wrong side ofhistory. And that is unfortunate; people should understand Bryan’s importance.

Bemidji State University J. Thomas Murphy

Fellow Travelers: Indians and Europeans Contesting the Early American Trail. ByPhilip Levy. (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 224.$59.95.)

Today’s savvy travelers understand that the locals always know the best way totravel and rightly expect a high price for sharing their wisdom. Apparently thislesson was slow in coming to colonizers who walked blindly into the New World,confident that their methods of travel would carry the day. They saw Indians aslittle more than porters and hired hands. As Philip Levy explains in this fascinatingnew take on Native/European interaction, the relationships that developedbetween New World trekkers and their guides may have been contractual, butthey were rarely compatible. The conflicting notions of superiority, manhood, andrules of travel led early explorers and native people to walk a precarious trailtogether, learning in the most intimate of settings how they saw the world andeach other.

Organized topically, Levy’s work offers a comparative study of how Europeanand native peoples took to the trail in different fashions and teaches readers muchabout when the two groups journeyed together. Along southern trails, Levy tracksthe devastating excursions of conquistador hopefuls like Vasquez de Coronadoand Hernando de Soto. He walks his readers through the lands of the Iroquois andHuron as European colonizers, fur traders, and missionaries sought to explore,exploit, and redeem the land. From a canoe trip with an Ojibwa to an overlandtrek through William Byrd’s Virginia, Levy offers new vistas in which to observecross-cultural interactions in early America.

Diversity in habits, disagreements over gender roles, and differences in thevalues and purpose of animal encounters all provide Levy with a rich panoply oftravel stories to recount. The material he assembles and his ability to provideinstruction do not disappoint. In one of his best comparisons, Levy looks atEuropean and native encounters with rattlesnakes on the trail. While Europeans


killed snakes to secure the trail and stay in control, native travelers saw snakes assignificant beings to be praised and beseeched, as well as carefully avoided. To killsuch a creature, they warned, made the journey more dangerous, not less.

When traveling together, natives and Euro-Americans had to adjust to eachothers’ travel imperatives. This proved difficult, as native peoples experiencedtravel as both a social and a spatial occurrence while Europeans chose to walkwith a linear purpose from point A to B. Both sought to convince the other of themerits of their methods; neither side proved very successful in doing so. Levyshows that for the most part there was little integration on the trail.

For ethnohistorians and graduate students searching for a new middle groundto explore in the history of early America, Fellow Travelers offers a fresh look atthe landscape of the trail. It was here that native peoples, Europeans, and earlyAmericans all shared a mutual purpose in getting from one place to another, butrarely did they share the same sense of direction for how to get there.

Alverno College John C. Savagian

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Antico-lonial Nationalism. By Erez Manela. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,2007. Pp. xvii, 331. $29.95.)

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which ended the First World War, is knownmore for its disappointments than for its successes; neither the victors nor thedefeated were entirely satisfied with the peace, the fragile League of Nationshardly lived up to its promise, and, perhaps most importantly, the resultingtreaties failed to create a lasting peace. In his innovative and elegantly writtenstudy, Erez Manela elucidates another disappointment: the failure of anticolonial-ism. President Wilson’s lofty goals for the peace conference, elaborated in state-ments such as the Fourteen Points, mattered not only to Europeans, but also tocolonial peoples hoping to undo the imperialism of the great powers. Anticolo-nialist leaders soon discovered, however, that in spite of the noble rhetoric, theParis Peace would not truly change the relationship between the colonizer andcolonized. The failure to fulfill the “Wilsonian moment” turned faith in Americanleadership to disaffection and disillusion.

Manela begins with an overview of the rapid and apparently uncontainabledevelopment of Wilson’s principles for peace, particularly the concept of self-determination. Although Wilson often expressed his postwar goals in universallanguage, there were, Manela tells readers, “qualifications on the unfetteredexercise of the right to self-determination” (41). This was especially true in regard


to colonized peoples who, at best, should only expect slow reform. However, asthe White House publicized Wilson’s ideas throughout the world so that thepresident could gain the diplomatic upper hand in Paris, colonized peoplesembraced the transcendent language and ideals.

The heart of Manela’s truly international history deftly tracks this dissemi-nation of Wilsonian concepts in the colonial world, specifically in Egypt, India,Korea, and China. Although the extent to which these ideas may have reachedthe masses is unclear, Manela presents substantial evidence that anticolonialleaders from all four regions, including those studying or working abroad inWestern countries, adapted Wilsonian language to their own contexts “and har-nessed it to claim their rights in international society” (221). Additionally, theyhoped that the American president would use his prestige to bring an end toimperialism. These hopes, of course, went unfulfilled as Great Power politicscarried the day and Wilson made sacrifices to secure the establishment of theLeague of Nations. The failure to further an anticolonial program “fueled aseries of popular protest movements across the Middle East and Asia” (5).Furthermore, in their frustration, colonial nationalists increasingly saw theirefforts as part of a global struggle against imperialism. Wilsonian ideals mayhave survived 1919, but colonial peoples began to search for alternativeleadership—the new Soviet Union stood as one option—to lead the global fightagainst imperialism.

The global scope of Manela’s study precludes a deep investigation of individualanticolonial movements in Egypt, India, Korea, or China, but this is hardly theauthor’s intent. Instead, Manela skillfully follows Wilsonianism as it journeyed tothese countries from 1918 through 1919. In doing so, Manela makes a convincingcase that the disappointment resulting from the “Wilsonian moment” shaped thefuture of anticolonial nationalism.

Azusa Pacific University Brad Hale

Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. By MickiMcElya. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. i, 322. $27.95.)

In 1893 Nancy Green—former slave and black domestic—debuted as “AuntJemima” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in a marketing ploy forthe R. T. Davis Milling Company’s ready-mix pancake formula. Micki McElya’sengaging study examines the creation of the “Aunt Jemima” trademark and placesthis story within the larger context of the evolution of the “mammy” trope inAmerican culture, concentrating on the years surrounding the Great Migration.


Much of McElya’s study follows the approach of David Blight and others whohave investigated the construction of public memory, particularly uses of the CivilWar in American memory. McElya similarly explores southern whites’ attempts todelimit black agency by public exercises intended to recall a mythologized legacyof race relations, such as the attempt to create a memorial statue of “mammy” inthe nation’s capital (approved by Congress soon after the defeat of the Dyerantilynching bill).

A compelling example of this struggle is white upper-class women’s partici-pation in the blackface minstrel tradition through their impersonations of“mammy” on the Chautauqua circuit (which prefigures the actors FreemanGosden and Charles Correll’s hit radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy, which premieredin 1928, not noted by McElya). McElya then moves beyond public memory,exploring the sensationalized Chicago custody battle over a young white girltaken from her black surrogate mother. She also examines how white employerssought to limit demands for better pay by black women working as domesticsby invoking the work ethic (read racial subservience) typified by the mythicalfigure of mammy. McElya includes such gems as the Black Mammy Institute,founded in 1910 to instruct a new generation of young black women in theskills necessary for true “service” to their white employers, making this historyread at times like wickedly unbelievable satire (reminiscent of the faux com-mercials in the film CSA [Confederate States of America] based on real adver-tisements using racist caricatures).

McElya concludes with the chilling observation that historic ephemera pro-duced as part of the marketing schemes trafficking in the faithful slave stereo-type, specifically the “mammy” figure, have become valuable “collector’s”items, thus capitalizing a second time on these recycled commodities. WhatMcElya ignores is perhaps a more complex and ambiguous point, that much ofthe market for “black collectibles” is driven by African American consumers,including Oprah Winfrey. As McElya briefly notes, not all African Americansprotested the reification of the mammy myth. Still, she does not explore theways in which some African Americans, like Green herself, participated in whatHouston Baker Jr. and David Levering Lewis have poignantly called the self-commodification of black expressiveness. As Doris Witt cautions in BlackHunger (to which McElya is clearly indebted), we must interpret the updatedtrademark of Aunt Jemima in ways that also acknowledge its new historicalcontext—one in which the idealization of black free labor central to a postre-construction America has been replaced by the demonization of black femaleappetites for consumption in a postindustrial, depressed economy. Perhaps


McElya will chronicle this development in a future work that she has merelygestured to here.

Cornell College Catherine A. Stewart

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. By James McPherson. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 260. $28.00.)

James McPherson brings his considerable expertise on all things Civil War to bearin this far-ranging collection of sixteen essays. The result is a compact but veryuseful introduction to the current state of several significant topics in Civil Warhistoriography that will be useful to a variety of readers.

The book is organized into five sections: “Slavery and the Coming of the War,”“The Lost Cause Revisited,” “Architects of Victory,” “Home Front and Battle-front,” and “Lincoln.” Each section contains between two and six essays, with“The Lost Cause Revisited” getting the greatest attention. Three of the essays arecompletely new, while the others are revised versions of articles and chapters thatMcPherson has published elsewhere. Portions of seven of the updated chaptersfirst appeared as essays in the New York Review of Books, but those earlier effortshave been combined and substantially reworked with new material, with the endresult being more valuable contributions in terms of understanding the currentstate of Civil War scholarship.

McPherson adeptly moves from military history, to social history,to political history in a way that few of his peers can match, summarizingarguments and raising important questions no matter what the subject.He does so throughout the volume in the context of recent scholarship,discussing significant books in some detail and linking them together asappropriate. His essays on Jesse James and the outlaw’s place in history, theLost Cause and its efforts to shape school curricula in the decades after the war,and the importance of military leadership provided by Boston Brahmins areparticularly interesting, especially in the latter case where McPherson decidesthat his 1997 thesis in For Cause and Comrades might be in need of somerevision.

There are three new essays in this collection. McPherson’s discussion of Lee’smotives for the Gettysburg campaign and Grant’s rise in the West cover well-traveled ground, but his analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s use of executive power inwartime stands out for its originality. The topic is certainly driven by events of ourtime, but McPherson manages to provide essential historical perspective withoutpoliticizing the subject. This is a nuanced essay, one that explores the boundaries


of executive authority both in terms of how far past the norm Lincoln pushed itand the limitations that he simultaneously placed on himself. It providesuseful food for thought and may be the essay most likely to provoke scholarlyresponse.

Identifying a target audience for this collection is not as easy as one mightthink. This reviewer finally concluded that this was a book he wishes he had beenable to read at the beginning of his graduate studies. It certainly helps to knowsomething about the Civil War before starting it, but the real value is in theexposure it provides to a number of critical subjects in Civil War history. As such,nonspecialists and junior scholars will find it very useful, and one might profitablyassign it to undergraduate courses.

University of South Dakota Kurt Hackemer

Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor. ByEdward S. Miller. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 323.$32.00.)

Using recently declassified Treasury Department and Federal Reserve documents,the author of this study brings his experience as a retired chief financial executiveof a major company to analyze the policy of economic warfare against Japan priorto the Pearl Harbor attack. Although diplomatic historians have focused onefforts to embargo key products, especially oil, against the Japanese, EdwardS. Miller contends that President Franklin Roosevelt’s financial freeze was “themost devastating American action against Japan” (1). Roosevelt invoked the 1917Trading with the Enemy Act in an attempt to bankrupt Japan in order to dissuadeit from belligerent actions. However, the freeze was developed neither byRoosevelt nor his cabinet. It was developed by staff aides, including futureSecretary of State Dean Acheson, who were put into positions of power becauseof their financial expertise.

In this work—filled with economic statistics, charts, and graphs—Miller out-lines trade between the United States and Japan, noting the significance of the silktrade and how changes in women’s fashion and the Depression affected that trade.With the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, U.S. government financial expertsbelieved that Japan would be unable to wage a long war because it lacked the hardcurrency to continue “to purchase essential commodities abroad” (48). However,all governmental predictions of impending bankruptcy were wrong. While U.S.leaders gradually restricted exports to Japan, the Japanese duped the Americansby hiding enough reserves of dollars to postpone that bankruptcy well into the


future. In 1940 the Federal Reserve discovered that, through fraud, the Japanesehad accumulated up to $100 million in a New York bank.

Product by product, Miller discusses the role of the Export Control Adminis-tration (ECA) in analyzing the impact of embargos and import controls on theJapanese economy and way of life. In particular, the ECA studied the impact of anoil embargo on Japan and pushed for a total embargo with the idea that it woulddissuade the Japanese from expansion and leave the door open for diplomaticbargaining. Miller details how Roosevelt justified the oil embargo on the fiction ofa U.S. oil shortage.

However, it was the freezing of assets that had the greatest impact. Millerwrites that “the relentless dollar freeze threatened to pauperize Japan” (219). U.S.leaders believed that unless Japan chose war, it would soon cave in to diplomaticpressure, yet no U.S. agency analyzed the effect of the freeze on the Japaneseeconomy until the Office of Strategic Services in 1943. Although Acheson andothers pushed the squeeze on Japan to bring it “to its senses, not its knees,” theJapanese viewed the threat of bankruptcy as a lethal threat and went to war forself-defense and self-preservation (2).

Miller makes a valuable contribution to historians’ understanding of Japan’sdecision for war with the United States. Although at times the reader may beoverburdened with the financial statistics, Miller clearly demonstrates the influ-ence of a committed group of individuals determined to use the financial power ofthe U.S. to thwart Japanese ambition.

Barry University E. Timothy Smith

The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis in theDemocratic Party. By Bruce Miroff. (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press,2007. Pp. ix, 355. $12.95.)

This author’s workman-like account of George McGovern’s improbable 1972presidential campaign, based partly on extensive interviews with campaign insid-ers, is a welcome addition to the expanding literature on post-1960s America.Although he describes the political background of the election and provides abiographical sketch of McGovern, Bruce Miroff concentrates on the campaignfrom the early primaries, when McGovern’s surprising “insurgency” caught fire,through the November vote when things did not go so well. He argues that theMcGovern campaign was a promising episode that the Democratic Party squan-dered through self-inflicted wounds. It was just a “moment,” when an inclusiveliberalism might have brought together old-line regulars with new identity groups


beneath a philosophy that combined pre-Cold War traditions of antimilitarismwith “rights” liberalism. The moment was fleeting indeed.

McGovern’s campaign was rooted in the upheaval of 1968 and combinedEugene McCarthy’s antiwar fervor with Robert Kennedy’s quest to unite the oldDemocrats with the New Politics. McGovern specifically benefited from thepost-1968 transformation of the delegate selection process designed to open upparty ranks to minorities and women. Because McGovern took on staff memberswho either wrote or who, like Rick Stearns, understood the new rules better thananyone, McGovern got a jump-start on the early primaries and built irresistiblemomentum that carried him through bruising fights in later rounds.

McGovern, Miroff argues, was both sincere and ambitious. His opponents,beginning with Hubert Humphrey, who had become merely ambitious, labeledMcGovern as a radical. But McGovern was really a “square.” Rooted in the oldprogressivism of the rural Midwest, McGovern hoped to heal the breach of 1968,that tremendous fissure between the Democratic Party regulars and the NewPolitics progressives. Here is Miroff’s most valuable point: in contrast to the wayhe was painted at the time, McGovern wanted to bring these two wings together,a task for which he was not badly suited. The one non-negotiable issue for himwas Vietnam, which an antimilitarism born of both Christian piety and SouthDakota isolationism led him unequivocally to oppose.

That the McGovern insurgency turned into an electoral fiasco was partly thefault of the campaign itself. Turning an insurgency that included “probably thebest grassroots organization in the history of modern American politics” into aconventional campaign proved difficult (157). Most of the staffers were quiteyoung—under thirty-five—and did not work well with party regulars. And thenthere was the awful blunder of choosing Thomas Eagleton as the vice-presidentialcandidate without a thorough background check. When Eagleton’s history ofmental illness emerged, the campaign pressured him to drop out. McGovern’speople believed with good reason that Eagleton had been disingenuous to say theleast, but by dumping him, McGovern appeared both indecisive and cold-hearted.The campaign never recovered.

McGovern’s hope to restore party unity, meanwhile, crashed against the insur-mountable gulf between the two wings. The party regulars were either hostile orindifferent. Humphrey threw away decades of close friendship with McGovernwith his harsh California campaign, and created the exaggerated charges aboutMcGovern’s radicalism that became regular Republican fodder. AFL-CIO headGeorge Meany hated the McGovernites who, he declared, “look like Jacks, actedlike Jills, and had the odor of Johns about them” (187). It was enough to make a


sane person cozy up to Progressives—except they were every bit as intractable and,as a matter of electoral calculus, more damaging. Feminists demanded uncompro-mising commitments to every demand, including unrestricted abortion; demandsfrom gay liberationists were even more beyond the pale. Brought into the conven-tion under the new rules, more than 80 percent of the delegates were first-timers.They had none of the discipline of a party capable of winning an election. Like“punchy party animals,” the delegates nearly turned the convention into farcewhen a line of speakers nominated Archie Bunker and Martha Mitchell, amongothers, for vice president (86–87). These antics delayed McGovern’s acceptancespeech until 3:00 a.m. Great fun maybe, but it was no way to win an election.

Miroff thus describes a party at war with itself, and this is nothing new. Thevalue of this book is that it closely chronicles the tipping point, that “moment”when the Democrats blew the chance to carve out a different and presumablymore successful history. Miroff pays no attention to Republican efforts to seize theSouth and siphon off traditional Democrats. But that is his point: the Democratshave themselves to blame. In a political season when the Democrats seem deter-mined to ruin their best chance in more than a generation to take power andreshape national politics, Miroff’s description of a party given to suicidal tenden-cies seems not only timely, but wise.

Ohio State University David Steigerwald

Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830–1925. By ErinO’Connor. (Tucson, Ariz.: The University of Arizona Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 288.$49.95.)

Gender ought to be a central category to any analysis of nation-state building,particularly in the case of nineteenth-century Andean republics in which a sub-stantial percentage of the population were “Indians,” the very antithesis of theindependent, liberal, male “citizen.” Under Spanish colonial rule, “Indians” wereconsidered effeminate and slothful, in need of force to work, and weak and dep-endent on the protection of the state to survive. “Indians” belonged in a “republic”of their own, earmarked to pay tribute and entitled to royal protection in specialcourts. How then to build nations with such poor raw material? Erin O’Connorexplores how the nineteenth-century Ecuadorian elites set out to meet the challengeof transforming effeminate Indians into independent, male citizens. The patriarchalideas of the elite, however, had to confront the alternative patriarchal systems of the“Indians” themselves, which varied greatly depending on whether the natives livedin independent peasant communities or in haciendas as serfs.


For all their republican high ideals, the postindependence elites could not easilydo away with the category of the Indian, for Indian tribute was the sole reliableincome of a bankrupt state. In 1857, however, new state revenues allowed theelites to set Indians “free” from the burden of taxation. But it took more thantributes to be an “Indian”: communal property, local rules (caciques), and speciallegal protections still stood in the way. From 1869 to 1875, Garcianismo, aproject of transforming Ecuador into a unified “modern” nation through state-controlled religion, the only glue for a widely fragmented polity, stopped recog-nizing Indian caciques and Indian communal property. Finally, in 1918 the state—now firmly in the hands of coastal agroexport, liberal elites—abolished concertaje(debt peonage) in the hopes of releasing captive highland laborers to work in thecoastal cacao boom. O’Connor persuasively demonstrates that at every turngender stood prominently in the debates: elites sought to turn male Indians intoindependent, virile citizens and female Indians into well-behaved managers of thenuclear household.

Savvily and cunningly, the “Indians” manipulated the system, at times embrac-ing the persona of “miserables,” the corporate legal category of the weak speciallyentitled to protections from the state (or from the local hacienda patrón), at timesdemanding respect to proper patriarchal hierarchies. In two of the more interest-ing chapters of the book, O’Connor demonstrates that Indians had patriarchalsystems of their own, which either jarred or resonated with those of the nationalelites. O’Connor shows that Indian women in peasant communities enjoyedleverage and power: abandoning particularly violent sexual partners, controllingincome as petty traders, owning land and representing households in legal dis-putes, leading local riots, and administering spaces of male sociability (taverns).Indian women within haciendas, however, were not as lucky. Their labor wentunpaid, subsidizing hacienda profits at every turn; they were sexually abused bymanagers and patrones ritually to emasculate Indian male serfs; and their claimsas widows over assigned hacienda land often went unheeded. Paradoxically, it wasin haciendas controlled by elites outside the reach of the state where the patriar-chal ideologies promoted by the nation penetrated most deeply.

As the antithesis of the “citizen,” the “Indian” should be a privileged categoryto interrogate the literature on nation building. O’Connor has taken a first step inthis direction. This is a thought-provoking, well-crafted book that should speak toall those working on gender and nation building.

University of Texas-Austin Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra


Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations During the MexicanWar. By John C. Pinheiro. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007.Pp. x, 228. $49.95.)

All wars strain the relationship between civilian and military leaders, and theMexican War was certainly no exception. In this book, John C. Pinheiro exploresthe rocky relationship that existed between American political and militaryauthorities in the nation’s first foreign war, detailing the partisan and internecinestrife that hampered the war effort from the outbreak of hostilities in south Texasin the spring of 1846 to the occupation of Mexico City eighteen months later.

As Pinheiro notes, a host of factors conspired to thwart the United States in itsprosecution of the war. The country’s traditional aversion to professional armiesand the limited resources of the federal government posed serious obstacles forthe Polk administration, which had not anticipated a prolonged conflict. Partisanjealousies between the Democratic president and Whig political and militaryleaders arose almost immediately, with Polk’s critics disturbed by the sweepingnew opportunities for executive power and patronage that the war had created.Finally, Pinheiro points to the ethos of Jacksonian democracy, which, he argues,fostered a spirit of individualism and contrariness among all concerned, fromWashington elites to the soldiers in the field.

Despite Polk’s “natural paranoia” and penchant for micromanagement,Pinheiro argues that the president contributed in significant ways to the war’ssuccessful outcome for the United States (153). In particular, the author creditsPolk’s unwavering faith in his own judgment and his ability to rise above theintense partisanship of his time. These qualities allowed him to steer a middlecourse, ignoring both his antiwar critics and ultra expansionists who argued formore extravagant (and unrealistic) territorial claims.

In the concluding chapter, Pinheiro attempts to place the Mexican War in thelarger historical context of U.S. civil–military relations. Here he adopts a com-parative approach, examining similar challenges faced by U.S. leaders in subse-quent wars. Surprisingly, he has very little to say regarding the current conflict inIraq, although parallels abound. For example, even opponents of the presidentwere reluctant to criticize the war effort; then as now, politicians were eminentlymindful of the need to support the troops. A series of appended documentshighlight the tensions between the Democratic administration and military leadersduring the years 1846–1848.

Manifest Ambition is part of a Praeger series on U.S. civil–military relationsduring wartime. As such, it is obliged to cover a good deal of familiar ground, as


the story of the scramble for patronage and its impact on the Mexican War hasbeen examined in some detail, most notably by Bruce Winders in Mr. Polk’s Army.What is more, an institutional study of this kind can only go so far in explainingthe acrimony and divisiveness that hampered the American war effort. Pinheiroattributes the incessant back biting and finger pointing among U.S. political andmilitary leaders to a vague feeling of Jacksonian individualism, not a very satis-factory explanation given the growing body of literature on the culture of mas-culinity during this period. Nonetheless, the book offers an evenhanded treatmentof James K. Polk and the problems he faced as the nation’s second commanderin chief.

University of Texas at Arlington Sam W. Haynes

Courage Under Fire: Profiles in Bravery from the Battlefields of the Civil War. ByWiley Sword. (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 318. $29.95.)

The author of this book has compiled a welter of vignettes, often taken from CivilWar letters he has personally collected, to explore wartime courage. Definingcourage in terms akin to Aristotle, self-control while facing danger to one’s lifeand doing what is right despite popular clamor, Wiley Sword offers ample evi-dence that the soldiers and officers of the Civil War displayed abundant physicalbravery in battle. He finds that the degree of moral courage explains success andfailure in leaders: Lincoln’s willingness to remove General William Rosecrans tothe Department of Missouri, which enabled Grant to succeed at Chattanooga,stands in contrast to Jefferson Davis’s belief that his rhetorical support of BraxtonBragg would end the internecine bickering in the Army of Tennessee. Swordasserts throughout the text that the physical bravery and moral courage of CivilWar participants, like other lessons drawn from history, can equip contemporaryhuman beings to face the challenges of daily living.

The strength of the book rests on the wartime letters of common soldiers andboth noncommissioned and regimental-level officers who, acculturated in Ameri-can values, faced the rigors of military duty and the horror of battle. It is also aweakness. Apart from personally possessing most of these letters, Sword offers noevidence that they are representative; rather, he seems content to provide only acrude regional balance between Northern and Southern participants. Civil War-era specialists will recognize the themes in Sword’s letters as typical, based, forexample, on the much larger sampling of James M. McPherson and other schol-ars. A fair summation of Sword’s evidence might read: of the people who chosemilitary service and saw combat as soldiers and officers, many displayed courage,


some after initially indicating doubt about their valor, and others expressed asobering sense of the horror of battle, disabusing them of notions of martialgrandeur. A vast consensus of scholarship already supports the view that manysoldiers and officers showed great courage in the Civil War.

But Sword’s stated intention is to use the courage of Civil War soldiers as aschool for contemporaries. He suggests that, over the course of the Civil War,veteran soldiers and regimental-level officers learned to exercise discretion, some-times in defiance of orders or military doctrine. His story of Lieutenant ColonelFrank Curtiss makes this point. But Grant’s Overland Campaign, John BellHood’s campaign at Franklin and Nashville, and the soldiers’ willingness to carryout these generals’ military imperatives seem to impeach the author’s claim.

Readers of popular history will likely find Sword’s storytelling and analysisinteresting and engaging. He makes bold assertions, especially that the Confed-eracy should have heeded Patrick Cleburne’s advice and armed slaves to fight forthe Confederacy. Academic historians likely will not find Sword’s book especiallyvaluable or informative. It certainly does not break any new ground and, as aquick trip through the endnotes reveals, is remarkably unsoiled by well-tilledscholarly ground.

Adams State College Edward R. Crowther

The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920–30. By Jan Doolittle Wilson. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. x,245. $40.00.)

In this very slender book on a very slender topic, the author uses the Women’sJoint Congressional Committee [WJCC] “as a lens through which to analyzewomen’s political culture in the 1920s” (2). The group’s members, she argues,became adept at maternalist politics, at using their roles “as women and mothersto win passage of gender-specific or child-related legislation” (2). As an umbrellaorganization, the WJCC marshaled women’s organizations at the local, state, andnational levels, involving about twelve million voting women in its activities.Progressive in their politics, these women believed in the power of government tobetter people’s lives. Although the WJCC existed until 1970, its political influencenoticeably declined after 1930 because of attacks from conservatives. Despite this,Jan Doolittle Wilson situates the historical importance of the WJCC in how its“politically active women competed in the struggle to define the state’s relation-ship to industry and human welfare throughout the 1920s” (173).


In the first chapter, the author covers the origins of the WJCC, an outgrowthof the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the formation of the NationalLeague of Women Voters. Three chapters deal with the creation of, debates over,and ultimate demise of the Sheppard-Towner Act, which allotted federal and statefunds for programs to halt maternal and infant mortality. Although congressionalsupporters appealed to “male politicians’ reverence for motherhood,” they alsopromoted a more practical argument (45): saving the lives of women and childrenwould make for a more prosperous country and even for a more prosperousworld.

Another three chapters chart the difficulties the WJCC had in securing passageof the Child Labor Amendment. The ultimate failure of the amendment showsthat its opponents “were much more successful than proponents at persuadingand appealing to average citizens,” especially the laborers and farmers of theworking classes (131). Combined with opposition from the National Associationof Manufacturers, which demonstrated the power of American business interests,by 1926 the WJCC goal to get children out of the factories was doomed. The finalchapter shows how attacks by various right-wing organizations, “more than anyother factor, greatly undermined organized women’s ability to pursue socialreform” after 1920 (148).

Wilson has written a book of sound historical scholarship. The argumentsare clearly articulated and all of the evidence is properly marshaled. Yet muchof this material, especially on Sheppard-Towner, will be familiar to those whohave read the works of Nancy Cott, Molly Ladd-Taylor, and Robyn Muncy.The narrow topic, without a broad reach, limits Wilson’s audience and ulti-mately does not do justice to the importance of the WJCC. Scholars interestedin early twentieth-century women’s political history will find a wealth of infor-mation. But students, especially undergraduates, will likely find the dozens ofnames and organizations coupled with the intricate details of congressional poli-tics too Byzantine to follow.

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Theresa Kaminski

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724. By Liam MatthewBrockey. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 496. $35.00.)

In this new book, the author brings to light the complexities of the Jesuit enter-prise in China by focusing on the activities of the missionaries in the provinces,


which he refers to as the “centers of proselytizing activity,” rather than thosestationed at the court, as most studies on the Jesuits in China have done (19). Heplaces the Jesuit mission in China within the larger political, religious, andintellectual contexts of European expansion and early modern Catholicism in thesixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

This well-written and carefully researched narrative makes use of a wealth ofboth primary and secondary Western-language sources, drawing heavily from thearchives of the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon, and the Archivum RomanumSocietatis Jesu in Rome. Liam Matthew Brockey has done the scholarly commu-nity a great service by bringing attention to this important yet little-knownresource. Housed at the Biblioteca are eighteenth-century handwritten transcrip-tions of documents that were once held in the society’s archives in Macau and arenow lost. These missionary texts are central to a proper exploration of Jesuitintentions and motivations. Although the book contains detailed footnotes, it lacksa separate bibliography of the sources used, and this would be a useful addition.

This book is divided into two main sections. Part one, “Charting the Course,”offers a chronological look at the history of the mission and its development. Itsfive chapters consider the founding of the society and its history in China. But insetting the stage for a larger discussion of the internal workings of the mission,Brockey looks to the Chinese provinces and, in so doing, brings “marginalJesuits” to light, elevating them to a status that traditionally has been reserved forsuch Jesuit luminaries as Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall (19). This sectionpresents the complex picture of missionary strategy that sent priests to both largeurban centers, such as Shanghai, and more remote rural areas, like North Zhili innorthern Shanxi Province.

Part two, entitled “Building the Church,” answers the question of how themission was able to sustain itself in such a foreign cultural context through ananalysis of Jesuit education—particularly Chinese-language instruction—in bothEurope and Asia, and by examining how Jesuit–Chinese interaction affected theformation and maintenance of the church within this Chinese context. Thissection also analyzes the interactions the Jesuits had with the Chinese, othermissionary groups, and secular European groups in their efforts to establish thechurch on Chinese soil.

Enhancing Brockey’s narrative is a well-selected group of illustrations. Ofparticular interest are an early seventeenth-century bird’s-eye view drawing ofMacau clearly showing the Jesuit College of Macau and the Church of São Paulo,and a fine drawing made in 1617 of Nicolas Trigault dressed in Chinese robes bythe great Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (38, 39, 72).


In his focus on Jesuit activity outside the Chinese court circle and his use ofunderutilized missionary documents, Brockey offers a refreshing and immenselyreadable look into the activities of Jesuits little considered, but who were instru-mental in ensuring the church’s presence in China for nearly 150 years.

University of Alabama Catherine Pagani

Ho. By David Halberstam. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007.Pp. ix, 118. $16.95.)

David Halberstam served as a reporter for The New York Times in Vietnam from1962 to 1965, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war. Two booksemerged from that period, The Making of Quagmire and The Best and theBrightest. Despite these accomplishments, Halberstam writes in the preface of thisbrief biography of Ho Chi Minh, the president of Vietnam’s Communist Partyfrom 1945 to 1969, that he had been dissatisfied with the results of Making ofQuagmire because it “did not reveal nearly enough about the connection of thenew American war to the old French colonial war, the fact because of the shadowof the latter, the American war would be unwinnable” (ix). This biography of Hoserves as a corrective, Halberstam claims, because he “started trying to mastermodern Vietnamese history as best [he] could” (ix).

Rowman and Littlefield published this third edition of Halberstam’s biographyin 2007, shortly after Halberstam’s death in a tragic car accident. Much hashappened to our understanding of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s Communist Party, andthe war in the thirty-six years that elapsed between the first publication and this newedition. For one, a host of scholars with Vietnamese-language skills have writtenextensive biographies of Ho and key party officials that flesh out some of theideological differences within the corridors of power in Hanoi (William Duiker,Sophie Quinn-Judge, Pierre Brocheux, and Yevgeny Kobelev, to name just a few). Itis surprising therefore that Halberstam made no attempt at all to read this work oranything written about Ho since 1970. How instructive it would have been had heengaged this new literature and given readers his impression of it.

This lack of engagement makes Halberstam’s biography nothing more than aperiod piece. Readers get an impressionistic view of Ho, but little else. Halberstam’sHo Chi Minh is one-dimensional. Taking the old talking points about Ho—he ismore nationalist than Marxist—Halberstam uses his obvious literary skill to painta picture of Ho that ignores most of the important decisions he made, policies hesupported, and actions he took. Halberstam’s Ho is always confident of victoryagainst the Americans, knows exactly what is needed to win the resistance war, and


is able to hold political intrigue in Hanoi to a bare minimum. Because Ho possessesthe essence of Vietnamese culture, in Halberstam’s mind, there is little the Ameri-cans and their allies in Saigon can do to stop the party’s inevitable victory. Ho andhis followers are simply more authentically Vietnamese than Ngo Dinh Diem or anyother leader of South Vietnam. The problem with this view, of course, is that itignores the historical realities of Ho’s life and of modern Vietnam. This is aninteresting read to catch the flavor of the 1960s, but if readers want to find outabout the historical figure Ho Chi Minh, they should look elsewhere.

Vassar College Robert K. Brigham

Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Asia: From the Taiping Rebellion to the VietnamWar. Edited by Stewart Lone. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xxvi,252. $65.00.)

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” opponents of America’swar in Vietnam used to chant. What they realized is that military conflicts affectnot only the heavily armed troops that governments deliberately commit tocombat against one another, but also the youngsters and other innocent bystand-ers who are inevitably swept into the vortex of war. Stewart Lone realizes this too.He sees war as “one of the most wasteful of human acts” and believes that “[t]heprincipal losers . . . are always civilians” (xv). This is the central premise of thisfascinating collection of essays, which examines the broader impact of Asian warsfrom the 1850s to the 1970s. The result is a book that should prove of interesteven to historians who (like the present reviewer), do not specialize in Asia.

Asia, as Stewart Lone defines it for purposes of this book, excludes those areasin which Indian or Islamic influence was strongest. It consists only of what wasonce described by historians as the Chinese World Order. That is particularlyironic, for one of traditional China’s values was the desire to avoid conflict. Yet,the area covered by Lone’s volume has seen plenty of fighting since 1850.

His book begins with an essay by R. Gary Tiedman on daily life in Chinaduring the Taiping and Nian rebellions of the 1850s and 1860s. This piece isfollowed by one in which Bernardita Reyes Churchill discusses life in the Philip-pines during the period of fighting for independence there [1896–1902]. Lonenext presents an article he wrote on Japan during its wars against China [1894–1895] and Russia [1904–1905] and one by Di Wong on how what went on inChinese teahouses was affected by the wars in which China was involved between1937 and 1949. Then come essays by Simon Partner on the daily life of Japanesecivilians during the war years 1937–1945, and by Shigeru Sato on daily life in


wartime Indonesia during the period 1939–1949. Lone concludes his book witha piece by Andrei Lankov on civilian life in the two Koreas during the “hot war”years, 1950–1953, and one he did on urban life in South Vietnam during theperiod 1965–1975.

The Churchill essay is really just a summary of the Philippine Revolutionagainst Spain, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine Insurrection thatfollowed. All of the other articles in Lone’s book, however, focus on the aspect ofwarfare that fascinates him: what it does to the lives of the ordinary civiliansforced to endure it. With one exception they support his contention that warspretty much make a mess out of things for these innocent bystanders. Ironically,the exception is his own superb essay on urban life during the American phase ofthe Vietnam War. It could well be subtitled “Life Goes On,” for what Lonedemonstrates is how little the massive war GIs were waging out in the bushaffected life in South Vietnamese cities. Despite this strange inconsistency, DailyLives in Wartime Asia is a fascinating collection that generally supports its editor’sthesis concerning how armed conflict impacts the innocent civilians forced to livethrough it.

California Western School of Law,University of California, San Diego

Michal R. Belknap

The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. By Susan Mann. (Berkeley, Calif.: Univer-sity of California Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 342. $21.95.)

In her ingeniously crafted book, the author presents readers with a new history ofChina during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Instead of a stan-dard masculine narrative of male figures and state building in late-imperial China,Susan Mann’s history is centered on the lives of three generations of highlyaccomplished women of the Zhang family in the Changzhou, Jiangnan, region ofChina. Seen through their eyes and recreated from their lived experiences, thishistory connects “imperial government, local, society, the family, and the person”(175).

Through the reconstructed stories of the Zhang women and their relationshipswith their male kinfolks, readers learn that elite women were the bedrocks of thescholar-official society. They assumed multiple roles that shaped the late-Qing eliteculture and society. They were their male kinfolks’ literary and intellectual part-ners, moral guardians, emotional nurturers, social network weavers, financialplanners, household managers, and educators for the children. Without theirtalent, sacrifice, hard work, and willingness to be part of the game, the male


members of the Zhang family would not have been able to take long absencesfrom home in pursuing civil service exams, literary excellence, and official posi-tions. In fact, the very elite society and culture of late-Qing China would not haveexisted in that form without them.

In this women-centered history, for the first time readers are able to see howelite Chinese women lived in, coped with, and interacted with the epochal wars,rebellions, reforms, and revolutions of the nineteenth century. Their politicalpoems and song lyrics not only contributed to the contemporary political culture,but also inspired later female revolutionaries and feminists. The immeasurablecontributions of talented elite women to their families and society force historiansto reexamine the late-Qing elite social, political, and cultural landscape thattraditionally has been portrayed simply as patriarchic. The Zhang women’sresponsibility in and outside of their homes during the absence of main malefigures challenges readers to rethink the inner/outer gender divide and the meaningof domesticity during the nineteenth century in Chinese history. Mann’s meticu-lous reading of the records of the Zhang family and their association with otherssheds many new lights on Chinese elite family, marriage, and social networks.

Mann has long been a champion of women-centered history, and in this bookshe shows an inspiring new way of doing history. She skillfully weaves westerncritical theory and analytic framework with the historical narrative tradition ofSima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han Dynasty, to bring the Zhang womento life by using their own words. More importantly, Mann does not simplyintegrate materials about women into standard historical accounts, but enrichesthe understanding of the history of Chinese elite women and the late Qing. Sheshows readers the new possibilities of doing exciting history. History students andhistorians will celebrate the birth of a female grand historian in Chinese history.

Fairfield University Danke Li

The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. By Patty O’Brien.(Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. x, 347. $50.00.)

In Somerset Maugham’s short story Rain, the faith of a missionary slowlycrumbles as he is seduced not only by the languid commonness of the prostituteMiss Thompson, her racial whiteness literalized by her white dress and whiteboots, but by the sultry dampness of Pago Pago, the place itself. This has been arecurrent theme. From Captain Cook to Moby Dick; from Gauguin to SouthPacific; in diaries and letters, travelers’ tales and novels, paintings and films,Pacific women have been portrayed almost exclusively as the exotic subjects of an


erotic imagination. These women, their bodies like the islands on which they live,are always accessible to white explorers, missionaries, colonists, traders, andmodern-day tourists. As Patty O’Brien illustrates in this book with almost ency-clopedic detail, since their earliest connections with Europeans, Pacific womenhave been portrayed as lascivious, hypersexual, sensual, enticing, and alwaysavailable. Accounts of the Pacific are redolent of sex and female sensuality, and itis almost impossible to conjure up the place, however loosely defined and mythi-cally construed, without nubile women’s bodies in the foreground.

O’Brien’s task is to unfold the sexing of the Pacific, from Renaissance rep-resentations of the sixteenth century to the celluloid images of the twentieth.These characterizations of sex and place, beginning as a by-product of earlyimperialism, are especially problematic in the ways that women and their sexu-ality are framed. The diarists and log keepers on whose work O’Brien drawswere largely Englishmen, for she relies substantially on English and Australiangovernment archives with limited use of Western European company records orthe documents of the American and English missionaries who sought to colo-nize souls in the same broad landscape. The research is meticulous, theexamples in the book reflecting the fine combing of log books, diaries, reports,and letters of this extended period. Yet the sources of history, of course, pre-determine the shape of the work, so that little is said of the Spanish, French,and German colonists in these territories and whether, as is possible, theyshared these same stories of license.

The geographic distribution of colonists is confined in O’Brien’s account, andso is her geography of “the Pacific.” Many of her examples—of women swimmingout to boats, of rape and revenge, of transitory and sustainable Pacific/Englishliaisons—are of Polynesian islands. New Zealand invasion and liaison, and ques-tions of race and sex between Maori and British, receive some attention, butclearly much more can be said. Occasionally O’Brien detours also into Melanesia,but rarely to Micronesia and neither further west to the Philippines nor east to thecoast of South America, where sex and race were complicated by Catholicism andHispanic heritage. The sensuality of island women, therefore, is sustained as amyth by virtue of the boundaries of inclusion.

At the same time, curiously, O’Brien includes Indigenous Australia. Aborigi-nal women were often raped and sometimes became the housekeepersand bed partners of white settlers, but they were rarely depicted as sirens of thedesert, and never as muses. Perhaps a less encyclopedic scope might have givenO’Brien the space to tease out the contrasts and contradictions of colonialracism, which was never as straightforward as the myth of the muse: rather,


attitudes toward women in this broad region oscillated from obsession to revul-sion, enacted through a deeply troubling mixture of fear and fascination, loveand lust.

So readers are tantalized by the narrowness and yet extraordinary breadth ofsubject matter of this book—some but not all of the Pacific, yet the Pacific asimagined and recounted over four centuries by sailors, administrators, chaplains,scientists, novelists, poets, painters, and itinerant beachcombers—virtually allmen. The idea of the muse as constructed by men, rendered as a sexual icon ratherthan as a source of protection or inspiration, is therefore also problematic. AsPacific women are portrayed in this book, there is little sense of agency, defiance,or purpose outside of the myth-making accounts of congress.

Yet a few tantalizing examples lead one to reflect on what women were up to,and how well they might have been used. O’Brien describes one young womanwho died en route to being taken to England as a “trophy maid,” rather like theAfrican men enslaved and brought to Victorian England for display. In anotherexample, an island woman was taken to India. It is not clear whether these womenwere enslaved or willing, but the examples open up questions of their agency.Historians know that in some states, senior women enjoyed authority, maintainedrelationships of power and sociality within their own communities, and had littleor nothing to do with European visitors. Further, although women were repre-sented in men’s imaginations as independent subjects of desire, they were alwaysdaughters, wives, and sisters embedded in their own networks. And whetherwomen interacted with white men—merchants, clergy, sailors, and settlers—toprotect their families or out of profit, curiosity and/or desire, or for some otherreason entirely, and how they saw and told stories of the invaders, are entirelydifferent stories waiting to be told.

Monash University Lenore Manderson

Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa. By Rochelle Pinto. (New York, N.Y.:Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 299. $52.95.)

According to the author of this book, elite Catholic Goans in the 1800s sawthemselves as foundering in a lonely outpost of an eclipsed empire (1). Historianssince have tended to agree. Rochelle Pinto seeks to rescue all Goans from theresultant historiographical neglect by exploring their small but active print cul-tures in the 1800s and early 1900s. Drawing on printed materials written byGoans, Pinto argues that Goan print history differs in many ways from that ofBritish India primarily because of internal divisions within Goa.


Pinto contends that Portuguese rule over Goa did not foster a distinct andunified Goan discursive space. So, beyond its bureaucratic framework, Goa wasillusive, punctured by connections to Portugal and British India and atomized bygovernmental (Old vs. New Conquests), caste (Brahmin vs. Chardo), religious(Hindu vs. Catholic), class (Brahmin vs. Sudra), and linguistic (Portuguese vs.English and Marathi vs. Konkani) divisions. Translucent with blurry edges, themeaning of Goa was contested, and Goans seldom imagined a singular, unitaryGoa.

Bracketed by a historiographical and theoretical introduction and conclusion,Pinto’s substantive chapters assay the political uses of printed materials by Goa’selites, the struggle over the language of education, the developments in majorgenres of printed media, and the materials printed in Konkani by and for noneliteGoans. Although Pinto occasionally argues beyond what her sources will support(e.g., in chapter seven the author speculates on the meaning and importance of thenovel, but relies on just two primary sources), much of her material is useful, andshe easily demonstrates the existence and importance of the internal divisions andexternal connections.

Pinto’s observations suggest that these internal divisions inhibited the develop-ment of a powerful Goan nationalism and perhaps later facilitated Goa’s absorp-tion into India, but it is uncertain to what extent Goa’s “oddities” resulted from theweak imperial power, the whelming presence of British India, or the character ofGoan culture (261). So, it would be nice to be able to compare Goan print historywith that of Pondicherry or other roughly analogous polities. If such comparisonsshow that Goa’s internal divisions grew just from Goan soil, then new studies ofprint in British India focusing on the solidity of India itself would be warranted.

Pinto’s book is not for casual reading, and it has shortcomings. For example,this reviewer’s copy of the book had print flaws that marred several pages ofPinto’s extensive bibliography. This problem is symptomatic of a volume that is ina number of ways difficult to read. For example, idiosyncratic punctuation (e.g.,placing a comma only at the end of parenthetic comments) does not aid readabil-ity. Likewise, the author’s tendency to lard her prose with jargon both reducesreadability and limits audience. At times, the volume even seems sloppy, as aglance just at endnotes 20–30 for chapter seven will show (221). Nevertheless,Pinto’s book is good and will be of interest not only to experts on Goa, but alsoto scholars of the literatures of south Asia, the empire of the Portuguese, or theprint history of colonial India.

Radford University Kurt Gingrich


The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture. Edited by Bob TadashiWakabayashi. (New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. xx, 433. $95.00.)

Japanese forces attacked the Chinese capital of Nanking in December 1937. Thisseems to be the one fact that is not in dispute about an event known as the “Rapeof Nanking” or the “Nanking Incident,” or, as the authors of the present volumeprefer, the “Nanking Atrocity.” “Complicating the Picture” is not so accurate asubtitle as “Efforts to Clarify the Picture” would have been, for the authors of thearticles that comprise The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38 seek to address veryspecifically the different positions of others on such issues as what exactlyhappened and why, how many Chinese died and who they were, and even whethermuch of anything happened at all. They deal particularly with the extremes.

On one side are the outright “deniers” who argue that the number of Chinesecivilians who died was less than a hundred, that most of the fatalities were Chinesesoldiers who died according to the rules of war, and that accounts of atrocitiescommitted by Japanese are simply false. At the other extreme are exponents of avast narrative of cruelties—described as a genocidal holocaust—that left more thanthree hundred thousand Chinese dead in Nanking alone. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashimay have chosen the vague and benign subtitle that he did to avoid provokingactivists on both sides of the issue: the neonationalist resurgence in Japan with aviolent right-wing element supporting the former, and the latter represented by theChinese government and by those inspired by the late journalist Iris Chang’spopular book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Allof the articles in the volume are essential reading for anyone interested in thesubject, although many are too specialized for the general reader. Readers find testsof the argument for three hundred thousand deaths via detailed analysis of thepopulation of Nanking proper, for example, complemented by a discussion ofwhether the number is viable if one expands the chronological and geographicparameters. There is also close scrutiny of the biography and the motivation of oneof the chief “deniers”; meticulous tracing of the activities of individuals and of thegenealogy of contemporary accounts by Westerners; and critical appraisals ofthe postwar charges brought against Japanese leaders deemed responsible for theatrocity and the influence of those charges on the historical record.

Wakabayashi closes the volume with a detailed summary of the evidence toconclude that between forty thousand and two hundred thousand Chinese diedwithin the city of Nanking. He finds incontrovertible the evidence that Japanesesoldiers killed civilians of all ages and raped many women before murdering them.He echoes the other authors in the volume, however, in arguing that, although


Japanese behavior indeed amounted to an “atrocity,” it cannot be characterized asa genocide or likened to the Nazis’ Holocaust. Apropos this issue, the most usefularticle in the volume for a teacher is Joshua Fogel’s, “The Nanking Atrocity andthe Role of Chinese Historical Memory.” Fogel not only describes the evolution ofthe Chinese government’s treatment of the atrocity but, in what would likely be afocus of lively classroom debate, essays to explain why young Chinese Americanshave been among the most passionate proponents of the highest possible estimateof Chinese casualties and of the Holocaust analogy.

University of California, Irvine Kathryn Ragsdale

EUROPE

Pál Teleki (1874–1941): The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician. By BalázsAblonczy. (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 2006. Pp. ix, 338. $40.00.)

This scholarly biography of Pál Teleki, originally written and published in itssubstantially longer Hungarian version, which also served as the author’s disser-tation, surpasses all previous attempts to present and analyze the life of thisHungarian politician, scholar, and educator, who was doubtless one of the mostinfluential Hungarian individuals in the interwar years and whose role hasremained a source of controversy ever since. Teleki held various ministerial posts,accomplished numerous important secret missions, and even served as primeminister twice, shortly after the First World War and immediately prior to Hunga-ry’s entry into the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany. He disapprovedof Hungary’s decision and committed suicide in protest. He was also an interna-tionally recognized geographer who made significant contributions to the develop-ment of this discipline in his home country, as well as to the institutionalizationof sociography and political science. Moreover, next to presiding over dozens oforganizations in the course of his life, he was a bewilderingly active organizer ofeducation on various levels who wanted to produce a Hungarian elite of Europeanstandards imbued with a distinct sense of national obligation and Christian spirit.

As Balázs Ablonczy convincingly shows, although Teleki had strong misgivingsconcerning the modern age and could be crudely dismissive of political parties orof great cities, he was open to certain modernizing trends and aimed at reformswith a social conscience, primarily targeted at the Christian part of the middleclass. The combination of these elements in his thinking set him apart amongHungarian conservatives, and so did his singularly rich initiatives and manifoldaccomplishments.


Ablonczy paints a memorable and convincing picture of the four stages of thelife of this religious, illiberal nationalist (two of which are centered on his twoterms as prime minister, covering 1918 to 1921 and 1938 to 1941), who activelyand, in his own view, scientifically supported the cause of Hungarian territorialrevisionism after 1920, but was ready to draw on various arguments and acceptcompromises, and whose anticommunist convictions were coupled with anti-Semitism that manifested itself in an inflexible doctrinaire stance and commitmentto discriminatory legislation. Teleki was also attracted to certain aspects of thenew right-wing dictatorships and to clerical-corporatist authoritarianism, in par-ticular after his decisive and definite illiberal turn in 1918–1919.

Ablonczy’s chronological narrative, with thematic focuses on Teleki’s majorroles as scholar, politician, and educator, presents abundant details (featuring,e.g., the perception of Teleki’s major deeds by the Great Powers and includingsuch curiosities as when, where, and with whom he tented or slept on billiardtables) and is complemented at the end of the book by an argumentativesummary that covers previous historiography as well. He also exposes the dis-turbing dichotomies of Teleki’s life that could at times border on hypocrisy ina complex and persuasive way. One of Ablonczy’s aims is to correct the wide-spread opinion that connects Pál Teleki and István Bethlen, the other toweringfigure of the times, by pointing to their manifold differences and rather weakpersonal links.

In this reviewer’s assessment, the book could have profited from drawing onthe (mainly German) literature on the conservative revolution, which would havemade Teleki appear less unique. Similarly problematical, the author seems to usethe terms elite and middle class almost interchangeably, and writes rather little onthe actual social consequences of Teleki’s policies. These minor reservationsnotwithstanding, the high quality of the bibliography is evident not only in itsthorough examination of the available evidence on Teleki; in its multilayeredinterpretative ambitions; and in its appropriate employment of intellectual (par-ticularly geographical), educational, and psychohistorical perspectives. It alsomanages to combine successfully empathy towards Teleki with critical insightsand analytical depth, and does this in an unusually readable historical prosewell-preserved in this excellent translation. Unfortunately, many minor mistakeswere left in the published text.

Central European University Ferenc Laczó


The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. By Ken Albala.(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 223. $40.00.)

Subtitles cannot tell it all. In Ken Albala’s The Banquet, “late Renaissance” means1520 to 1660; “Europe” means England, Spain, France, and—at the gastronomiccenter—Italy; “dining” means large-scale formal meals for which menus andrecipes are found in cookbooks, including the most famous food encyclopedia ofearly modern times, the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi [Venice, 1570]. Far fromtreating this 140-year period as a unity, Albala looks throughout it for diachronicchange and for transnational influences. His basic corpus consists of about fifteencookbooks in four languages; he also draws on dietary texts and instructionmanuals on service and carving.

The meat of this carefully structured banquet, in chapters two through seven,is a survey of the ingredients used in elite dining, with analysis of gradual shiftsin popularity. This is meticulously done and reveals significant changes in the useof spices and in the emergence of a new practice of using garnishes. The chapteron wine makes use of additional sources including Conrad Gesner’s De remediissecretis (Lyon, 1557) on the medicinal effects of distilled liquors. Some mayparticularly savor chapter eight, “Nations,” in which the author traces the extentto which national cuisines had begun to be recognized in late-Renaissance times.The answer is not much, and least of all in Italy, which lacked political unity atthis period; but it is fascinating to see how the cookbooks begin to attributespecific foreign origins to certain recipes, and to follow Albala as he sensitivelyexplores why they do it and what validity these attributions have. Chapter nine isentitled “Staff and Carving.” Chapter ten, a light survey of moral and medicaltexts that condemned gluttony, will be welcomed by any reader now suffering theeffects of overindulgence.

Albala enjoys words. He writes fluently (although this text shows occasionalsigns of haste). He generally gives his own translations of foreign-language sources,and these are good. Admittedly, in the case of a certain Italian rhyming proverb, hewould have done better to stick with the usual English version (“From four thingsGod preserve us: a painted woman, a conceited valet, salt beef without mustard,and a little late dinner”), which, though unrhymed, is more accurate than hisversion (150). His logophilia is demonstrated in a number of newly inventedgastronomic terms, the best of which are both useful and amusing. Two are soconvincing—cucumbrance, pejorative term for an imitation cucumber; apastasy,refusal to eat pasta—that they got past the copy editor, who failed to demand theirinclusion in the six-page glossary of Albalogisms, which concludes the text.


In the reviewer’s opinions this glossary overeggs the pudding: Albala couldhave used these six pages for a quick reference guide to the little-known authorsand texts that he cites. Apart from this, the reviewer would have welcomedmore on what really happened: historical banquets, their hosts and guests, theirtriumphs and disasters. Is there room for a sequel, perhaps? Meanwhile TheBanquet is a pleasure to read and a solid contribution to gastronomichistory.

79120 Saint-Coutant, France Andrew Dalby

The British Working Class, 1832–1940. By Andrew August. (Harlow, England:Pearson Education Limited, 2007. Pp. v, 296. $33.40.)

This book is the sort of history that the reviewer loved as a student: short chapters,uncomplicated by theory, full of sounds and smells, thick description, and dottedwith evocative quotations from historical actors.

As Andrew August explains, “class” became a vexed category for historians inthe 1990s, competing for primacy with many other identities and statuses. Heagrees that political affiliation or action be “read” from class status—or lamentedif absent—in the way that some Marxist historians may once have thought. Butafter this nod to the postmodern crisis, August proceeds in a way that suggeststhat he has not brought class under the microscope.

Divided into three chronological sections [1832–1870, 1870–1914, and 1914–1940], the book includes a short theoretical introduction and then chaptersarranged around thematic aspects of working-class life. Social history dominates,with much evidence from the early period drawn from the perspective of outsideobservers with one or another reformist agenda to advance. The later sectionsappropriately rely more on autobiography and memoir.

The result is a somewhat overgeneralized précis of working-class experience.We have the crowded back-to-back housing, the workplace reorganization, andthe long hours worked by children. Life is difficult, but members of the householdcombine their wages to get by. The husband may command the largest meals andkeep his wife in submission by violence, but functional families help “the workingclasses” to carve out a sphere of autonomy in an oppressive world. Most work-ingmen like their drink; attempts at “rational recreation” are regarded withdisdain as social control. Men and women live separate lives, with women’s mainconnection being to their children and with men’s to each other—but somehow,most marriages are happy ones.


Over time, workers’ political enfranchisement changes their connection topublic culture. Compulsory education creates smaller families and more—but stillvery limited—opportunities for upward mobility. Commercial leisure activitiesbeckon: football, the seaside, radio, cinema, and the dance hall. World War Idevastates English demography, but raises the standard of living for those onthe home front. The industrial north suffers more than the south in the 1920sand 1930s; but new “homes fit for heroes” show the government’s commitmentto workers, who appreciate the indoor plumbing. The overall narrative is oneof progress under an increasingly benevolent, if nosy, state.

Fully committed to the salience of class, August argues that shared socialexperiences united workers more than they divided them. Chapters relating toculture and identity, sources of difference within the working class, are left to lastin each chronological section. This is not the only factor that makes August’swork seem a bit old-fashioned. August devotes much more space to men’s workthan to that of women and children, and particularly to episodes of workplaceunrest, even though these were not the norm. Workers who took part in Chartismare chronicled, but those who were apolitical or conservative are not (althoughAugust’s discussion of women’s “informal politics” in the classic slum is enlight-ening). Urban workers are examined; domestic servants and rural workers arecompletely—and rather oddly—omitted from the volume. Were the experiences ofScottish or Welsh workers significantly different from those of English workers?Did whiteness or nationalism unite workers as the Empire expanded? Whatpolitical programs and languages did workers find most appealing?

Although many relevant questions remained unanswered, August’s book is soaccessible, and so systematic in its coverage of the chosen material, that it willserve introductory classes well. Like The Road to Wigan Pier or The Classic Slum,it strongly evokes the details of urban workers’ lost world.

New Mexico State University Jamie Bronstein

Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990. ByDolores L. Augustine. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Pp. xxx, 381. $40.00.)

The author of this book has produced a fascinating examination of the rise andfall of engineering, science, and technology in the ill-starred German DemocraticRepublic (GDR). The fault did not lie with the quality of early GDR engineers/scientists, products of pre-1945 Germany’s superb, if perverted, higher educationunder Nazi domination. Dolores L. Augustine examines how those technocraticpioneers enhanced their skills as forced laborers in Stalinist Russia. Many


returned to the GDR (as opposed to West Germany) because they had ties tovenerable firms like Karl Zeiss in Jena. Furthermore, the SED (Socialist UnityParty of Germany) leader, Walter Ulbricht, genuinely appreciated the scientists’skills and supported them generously. The returnees did not disappoint him. Theyproduced a jetliner in 1956 that could easily have placed the GDR at the forefrontof commercial aviation. Other returnees sought to develop civilian nuclear powerfor an energy-deficient GDR.

Despite massive infusions of scarce capital for these projects, the USSR, GDR’s“Big Brother,” gave notice that the Soviets had monopolized those fields. There-after, East Germans paid dearly for Soviet oil imports in exchange for artificiallylow-priced chemical exports and high-end engineering in microelectronics. Theywere also forced to burn lignite, that is, brown coal, causing massive environ-mental pollution.

The 1960s witnessed overlapping, confusing developments in GDR technol-ogy. True, it increased dramatically its number of engineers and technicalexperts, playing to traditional German strengths in chemicals and engineering. Italso elevated the working class and women into those traditionally male-dominated fields, but by 1971 a glut ensued, and an ideologically rigid,unimaginative Erich Honecker took over. Already in 1968 universities weresubordinated to SED control and the technocratic professors disempowered.Worse, high-tech enterprises such as Karl Zeiss Jena and computer-orientedRobotron came to be dominated by Honecker’s Stasi, and their technocratswere likewise disempowered.

From the late 1970s to 1989, the SED effectively strangled GDRtechnology and science. Its industries became uncompetitive worldwide.Salaries and real income declined sharply as did worker morale. Gifted womenengineers and scientists found their careers unrewarding. Enlightened stateefforts at family support became unsupportable. Yet Honecker reigned supremeto 1989, so that no Gorbachev-style glasnost or perestroika ever emerged in theGDR.

Augustine’s three-hundred-page study is fascinating but incomplete, althoughshe exposes intriguing topics for future study. The author refers repeatedly toCoCom (NATO’s Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) andits embargo on high-tech exports to the GDR. This had a profoundly negativeeffect on Robotron, the very firm that Honecker had hoped would lead the GDRout of its deepening impoverishment. But Robotron was stymied by gross under-funding and Stasi meddling, which undermined cross-fertilization amongscientists/technicians. Thus, like abortive initiatives of the 1950s in aviation and


nuclear energy, the GDR’s hopes for world-class developments in computers andmicroelectronics in the 1980s succumbed to bungled decision making by ideo-logues like Honecker and his minions. With the GDR’s disintegration, admirablesocial developments such as feminist career advances in science and technologyunraveled. The “Red Prometheus” died in 1989 largely unmourned and, until theappearance of Augustine’s fine study, largely unrecognized.

University of Alabama at Birmingham James F. Tent

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. By Arthur H. Cash. (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 482. $22.00.)

John Wilkes was one of the most influential and charismatic political activists inBritish history. He has attracted many biographers, none better informed on hisprivate and public life than this author. Arthur H. Cash has read extensively onWilkes, and he has certainly produced the most detailed account of his life andcareer. His book has already won many plaudits, but it does have some weak-nesses that merit comment.

Cash is excellent on Wilkes’s private life and public career. John Wilkes liveda scandalous private life: he had many affairs, and he fathered several illegitimatechildren. His sole marriage was a disaster, although it did produce a beloveddaughter, Polly, who was the light of his life. Wilkes had a wide range of friends,was frequently in debt, and fought several duels. Cash does justice to all theseaspects of Wilkes’s personal life, and he makes it abundantly clear how ugly,cross-eyed, lisping Wilkes could captivate with his animal spirits, courteousmanners, witty conversation, and enormous personal and political courage.Cash’s biography is also full of details about Wilkes’s public career. There is nobetter account of Wilkes the journalist, the campaigner against general warrants,the contender in the Middlesex elections, the supporter of the freedom of thepress, the sympathizer with the cause of the American colonies, the believer inreligious toleration, and the advocate of parliamentary reform. Cash clearlybelieves and justifies his claim that this scandalous libertine was also a genuinefriend to liberty who made heroic efforts to advance the civil liberties of all men.

Cash concentrates almost exclusively on Wilkes, thus exaggerating his contri-bution to the campaign for greater civil liberties and underplaying the role ofmany others. Cash does not do justice to Wilkes’s allies or to his ordinarysupporters among the liverymen of London and the voters of Middlesex. Indeed,he never really analyzes how Wilkes appealed to such support or why that supportwas given. He also ignores the wider context of the popular movement for radical


reform. Christopher Wyvill never merits even a mention, and next to nothing iswritten about the influential publications of men such as James Burgh, JohnCartwright, and Richard Price.

Cash’s work is also marred by quite a number of mistaken claims and errorsthat ought to have been picked up. Historians have long since abandoned the viewthat George III spent twenty years seeking to establish “personal government.”The Great Reform Act of 1832 did not produce equal representation; universalmanhood suffrage was not achieved in Britain in 1884; and British women did notfirst gain the vote in 1928. Edmund Burke was never “de facto” leader of theRockingham Whigs. The responsibilities of the two British Secretaries of Statewere not divided into Foreign and Home Affairs until 1782. The Jacobite clans inthe 1745 rebellion were not all Catholics by any means. Thomas Paine’s famousAmerican pamphlet of 1776 was Common Sense, not Rights of Man, and JohnAlmon published the Parliamentary Register, not the Political Register. There arealso mistakes in the names of several major figures and in the titles of famouspublished works.

University of Edinburgh H. T. Dickinson

France during World War II: From Defeat to Liberation. By Thomas T. Christoffersonand Michael S. Christofferson. (New York, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2006.Pp. 208. $24.00.)

The authors have produced not original research, but an excellent synthesis of thecontroversies and scholarly literature in English and French that surround thedefeat of France in 1940 and the subsequent years of Vichy and occupation. Theirstated goal is to “tell a complex morality tale for an audience of interested layreaders and scholars who might want a succinct account, although not one thatoversimplifies what are difficult issues” (xiv). Their work offers the advantagesand some of the flaws of a synthesis, but is well worth a place in the library of anycollege or university and on the bookshelf of anyone interested in twentieth-century French history.

Their thesis has two parts: France was in no way exceptional in its responseto occupation and defeat, but rather, no worse or no better than other occupiedWestern-European countries; and France’s defeat in 1940 and the trials of occu-pation were principally the fault of the French institutions (the National Assem-bly, the Catholic Church, the educational system, and above all the army) andof the men who led those institutions. They argue that the ordinary Frenchperson spent most of the war simply trying to survive, but that among the


ordinary rank and file were both those who fought the occupiers, by hidingJewish children or finding other ways to resist the Nazi occupiers and theirVichy allies, and those who actively sought to cooperate with the Nazis. Eachchapter addresses the principal political issues of the topic. In chapter one, theauthors deal with the defeat and conclude essentially that Marc Bloch(L’Etrange Defaite, written in 1940 and published in 1944) was correct inblaming the high command of the army for France’s collapse. In chapter two,they examine the foundation, philosophy, and personnel of Vichy France andemphasize the vast gap between what the National Revolution promised andwhat it delivered to the French people. Chapter three explores collaborationand concludes that, by the end of 1941, most French, at least privately, wereopposed to German occupation, and that the leaders of Vichy profoundly mis-understood both the sentiments of their own population and the intentions ofthe Germans. In chapter four, the authors address the complex issues of exclu-sion, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and xenophobia that created Vichy’suneasy cooperation with Nazi racial policy. In chapter five, they stress thecomplex nature of the motives, activities, and results of resistance and noteespecially the key role of the German policies of forced labor in arousing resis-tance. In chapter six, the authors discuss the liberation, with an emphasis onthe struggles of de Gaulle versus Roosevelt and Churchill, and introduce somegeneral ideas about the relationship of wartime events to the subsequent politi-cal and economic revival of France.

The authors promise a “complex morality tale,” and, indeed, much of theliterature on these controversies has taken a tone of moral judgment, of heroesand villains, of good versus evil. What the authors never completely explain ishow and why this complicated period came to be so often abstracted from theprocesses of historical analysis and made into myth, or how the myths weredisplaced. Their sources provide the historiography of how professional historiansin France and the English-speaking countries, especially in the last twenty-fiveyears, have done painstaking and very traditional archival research to figure outwhat really happened. They promise not to oversimplify, and yet any synthetictext must do so on some levels. Nonetheless, they have produced a valuable,affordable paperback work for the layperson or the undergraduate student. Theyconfront and refute some well-known and very inaccurate ideas about France(such as the idea that the French soldiers simply lost their will to fight in 1940),and they introduce new issues to lay readers, especially to Americans who often donot understand the historical importance of Charles de Gaulle or the source of hissuspicion of the American government. Their notes include every major work


published in French and English on these political questions through 2002. Thework is, however, a political history. The reader will not find here any substantialsocial, economic, or intellectual history of the era or its meaning. There is anotherhuge literature on these aspects of France 1940–1945 that awaits another authorfor another synthesis.

Hamilton College Esther S. Kanipe

Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance1789–1799. By Joseph Clarke. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,2007. Pp. x, 306. $99.00.)

The period of the French Revolutionary War was noted for its colorful and oftenoverdramatic eloquence and its addiction to ornate monuments and ceremonies ofvarious kinds. These were combined with the sentimentality and the Romanticismof the periods that preceded and followed the Revolution and the need to dra-matize the political changes that were taking place. Death, which often occurredduring dramatic political events, such as the fall of the Bastille and politicaldemonstrations and counterdemonstrations, provided opportunities for ceremo-nial processions and gatherings, with pompous or tearful funeral eulogies, plasterbusts of the deceased, and popular engravings of various types. These latterexpressions of sorrow and indignation developed into a commercial sideline thatproved quite profitable to engravers, printers, and peddlers throughout France.

In his detailed and well-documented study of the process of commemoration ofthose who lost their lives during the 1790s, Joseph Clarke reminds readers that theprocess of honoring the dead, especially philosophers and writers, with lengthyeulogies and statuary went back to the pre-Revolutionary period, and he providesthe interesting example of organized pilgrimages to the tomb of Jean-JacquesRousseau at Ermenonville. He then shows the evolution of the commemorativeprocess through the various stages of the Revolution, from the honoring of the“Vainqueurs de la Bastille” to Robespierre’s use of funeral ceremonies to build upand eventually defend the more extreme aspects of the revolutionary movement.

The period was heavily scarred by internal and external conflicts, with numer-ous casualties on all sides, and a fully detailed study would be a mountainous task.Clarke provides readers with the broad lines of the problem of honoring the dead,with different social classes, the distinction and indeed the rivalries between Parisand the provinces, and the split between the various political factions. Commemo-rating the dead is a worthy and honorable duty for all citizens, but how does onehonor the dead who have been killed by their fellow citizens? Furthermore,


funerals had been centered on the church, especially on local parish churches, butanticlericalism soon prevailed, causing anger among the more conservative citi-zens and heartbreak among the country people whose traditional forms of mourn-ing were being undermined. The establishment of the Pantheon, which did awaywith the Church of Saint Geneviève, is well explained, with the resulting “pan-theonization” of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Mirabeau, and bitter arguments aboutwho else should join them.

This leads to the final section: the treatment accorded to the more obscurevictims of the Revolution and the spreading wars. Their burials were far lessmarked by ceremonies; indeed, it could be said that most were treated perfunc-torily while the widows and orphans they left behind were reduced to the bleakestlevels of poverty. Joseph Clarke’s study is welcome indeed and opens the way forfurther studies of this major period in human history.

Massey University John Dunmore

Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770. By Emily Cockayne. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 335. $35.00.)

In contrast to the recent emergence of a strong body of scholarship on the historyof pollution and responses to it in the industrializing world of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, relatively little work of this kind exists for earlier periods. Yetas Emily Cockayne demonstrates in this remarkable book, concerns about exces-sive noise, unsafe food, and unhealthy air abounded in the rapidly expandingpopulation centers of early modern England. Building on the author’s Ph.D.dissertation, a cultural history of sound, she explores the full range of sensesthrough which residents and visitors in early modern London, Oxford, Manches-ter, and Bath perceived and sought to modify themselves, their neighbors, andtheir surroundings.

Cockayne draws on a cornucopia of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centurysources, including diaries, pamphlets, lawsuits, maps, and engravings, to under-stand what aspects of their environment contemporaries found noisome and whythey considered them so. The introduction contains a valuable overview of theconcept of nuisance within English jurisprudence, an interesting exploration oftheories of perception, and fascinating capsule biographies of thirteen individualswhose recorded observations constitute the book’s main primary sources. Notingthat people experienced their environments through multiple senses simulta-neously, Cockayne wisely structures her study by the nature of particular nui-sances rather than by the primary sense through which they were perceived.


Bringing to mind the famously pessimistic aphorism from Hobbes’s Leviathan,the titles of each of the book’s eight core chapters are solitary adjectives. “Ugly”explores bodily appearance and behavior; “Dirty” looks at street paving, rubbish,and sewage; while “Gloomy” considers air, light, and urban land use. One of thegreatest strengths of Hubbub is the author’s highly perceptive reading of dozensof visual sources reproduced throughout the book, including numerous engrav-ings by William Hogarth and Marcellus Laroon. Using them in conjunction withcontemporary texts, she shows that each type of source can help to illuminatethe other. Equally impressive is the ease with which she integrates the results ofher prodigious research, from different sources and about different places, into acoherent and elegant narrative.

Less successful is her use of proverbs from contemporary texts to denotesubdivisions within chapters. These are a missed opportunity; in contrast to theillustrations that adorn Hubbub, these sayings serve a merely decorative purpose,and Cockayne neglects to explore their historical context and significance. A moreserious problem is that even though some parts of the book, notably the chapterson clothing and noise, devote considerable attention to the roles that class, age,and gender played in the perception of environmental conditions, other parts ofthe book fail to analyze these issues sufficiently. Although the introduction tellsreaders that “culturally mores influenced perceptions of whether certain condi-tions were tolerable,” the reader is often left to infer how these mores operatedand why they changed over time (7). Despite these shortcomings, Hubbub is awork of impressive erudition and insight. It deserves to be widely read by everyonewith an interest in urban, environmental, or early modern British history.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte Peter Thorsheim

Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution. By Anne Crowther and MargueriteW. Dupree. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 425.$120.00.)

This is a collective biography of those doctors who began their medical studiesat Edinburgh and Glasgow during the years of 1866 to 1874, approximately onethousand from each university. At that time, the two Scottish universities wereimportant institutions for the training of doctors, particularly in Britain, but to acertain extent also internationally. The group is especially interesting in that mostof the students attended university classes with the surgeon Joseph Lister, whointroduced the antiseptic principle into surgery. They thus participated in whatamounted to a surgical revolution. Claiming that “this book tries to define one


medical generation, at a particularly significant period in the history of imperialpower and medical knowledge,” is therefore justified (9). To this end, the authorshave collected an enormous amount of biographical details on each of the studentsin his different life and career phases, from an impressive variety and number ofoften scattered sources, including autobiographies, registers, and so on.

The account starts with the students’ arrival at university and follows themover the various steps of their careers. Throughout the study, the authors combinevivid vignettes from individual biographies with larger concerns that situate theseindividuals into the context of their time. According to the nature of a cohortstudy of this scale, the authors provide numerical information about particularaspects of the group’s careers, even though the difficulty of following up everysingle person necessarily results in gaps. The authors are very much aware of thisproblem and are correspondingly cautious in their interpretation. Equally daunt-ing as the research on the biographical details is the task of putting all of theobtained information into historical context. The authors are to be admired forwhat they have achieved in this regard. The topics they expertly cover range frommedical and surgical training to psychiatry, homeopathy, and colonial medicine.

Two thematic foci emerge in particular clarity. One is the entry of women intomedical training, which receives its own chapter. The other one is the spread ofLister’s system of antisepsis. The authors trace the way this new technology warwas taken up and how it got adjusted to local circumstances. However, structurallimits come with the chosen approach. Readers would wish to get a deeperanalysis of how antisepsis was spread. Instead, the narrative moves on to anothertopic. As a result, an impressive range of themes is addressed and covered invarying depth, which makes the book hard to read as a whole.

On the other hand, the firm basis in concrete and individual biographiesreminds the reader of the limits of any generalization. There are always cases thatelude such efforts, cases that show how the idiosyncrasies and contingencies of theconcrete historical situation make every attempt at finding patterns difficult—auseful lesson in historical humility.

McGill University Thomas Schlich

Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy. By Trevor Dean. (Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 226. $99.00.)

The author’s latest work examines crime and justice in later medieval Italy, “notto argue for a new categorisation of crimes, or to attempt to offer new explana-tions of crime, but to write about crime in a new way, focusing on attitudes,


representations and constructions” (10). In the first part of the book, Trevor Deanassesses five types of sources: trial records, which reveal considerable variations incriminal activities and official responses from one locale to the next; chronicles,whose narratives betray complex and often ambivalent attitudes toward differentcrimes and the officials who punished them; fictional works, which reflect“popular” perceptions toward crime and punishment (and often contain detailsabsent from other sources); statute law, which exposes oft-changing “official”views of crime in society; and consilia, in which established legal experts weighedin on crime and justice. In the second part, he examines what these sources revealabout five particularly important classes of crimes (insult and revenge, sex crimes,crimes involving potions and poisons, crimes of violence, and theft), particularlyin the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Dean provides a nuanced and richly detailed treatment of his subject, repletewith numerous (and most often fascinating) examples drawn from all over Italy.His analysis shows that the size and sociopolitical circumstances of a givencommunity informed both the nature of criminal activity within it and how itresponded to crime. It is equally clear that, where crime and justice are con-cerned, continuity and consensus were moving targets in later medievalItaly.

Legal systems evolved constantly, from the accusation-based procedures of thethirteenth century, to the inquest, which predominated later. Concerns aboutparticular types of crime changed as well: although some crimes (e.g., theft, insult,violence) were perennial problems, official responses to them were often change-able, and there were other offenses (e.g., sorcery) that barely registered in thethirteenth-century sensibility but aroused considerable concern in the fifteenthcentury. By the same token, both “popular” and official attitudes toward crimeand justice were subject to inconsistencies and contradictions; offenders’ socialstatus went a long way in coloring perceptions of their misdeeds, and somethingas simple as the manner in which a condemned man approached the scaffold couldquickly transform a murderous rebel into an object of popular respect (althoughit seldom, if ever, delivered him from execution).

Significantly, Dean utilizes a great range of both published and archival mate-rials, not just from well-researched centers such as Florence and Venice, but frommany different Italian locales, including the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. Inmany respects, this is as much a work about reconceptualizing the narratives ofcrime, and about the interpretation of the sources from which these narratives areconstructed, as it is about crime itself. It makes an important contribution to thescholarship of crime and punishment in medieval Europe. Social historians, legal


historians, and students of medieval Italy will be glad to find a place on theirshelves for this engaging, well-written, and superbly researched book.

University of Louisville Blake R. Beattie

Fleeing Hitler: France 1940. By Hanna Diamond. (Oxford, England: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2007. Pp. x, 255. $29.95.)

Self-evidently, the French “exodus” of 1940 was an extremely confused episode.This may be one reason, although surely not the major reason, why so fewhistorians have attempted to come to grips with it. Hats off, then, to HannaDiamond, who has tried to seize hold of it, attending particularly to a small numberof participants and witnesses, analyzing it and its historiography in an enlighteningway. Unlike Pierre Miquel in his comprehensive popular account, L’Exode 10mai-20 juin 1940 (Paris, France: Plon, 2003), she has not sought to embrace thewhole ragged narrative of the collapse of Western Europe. Unlike the magisterialearly work by Jean Vidalenc, L’Exode de mai-juin 1940 (Paris, France: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1957), a product of privileged official documentary accessand his seasoned professional skill, Diamond’s discussion has the advantage ofdistance, her own externality to the event, and the obvious incitement to explainwhy for these fifty years since Vidalenc’s pioneer volume so little scholarly attentionhas fixed on the calamitous national (even multinational) disaster it was.

It may be that the fall-of-France vignettes Diamond gives readers here do notconstitute the strongest parts of this relatively brief book—for example, surelyPaul Reynaud was not motivated to bring Philippe Pétain into his cabinet in orderto “help raise the army to victory”—the very short account of incidents such asthe “Massilia” affair, or the eventual British seizure and sinking of major Frenchnaval units is scarcely adequate to explain the dramatic fallout from them (38).But once she has cleared the political-military catastrophe out of the way, Dia-mond’s thoughtful examination of the vast human tide of civilian refugees creep-ing across the land—intimately crisscrossed and infiltrated by fragmented militaryunits, spent soldiers, deliquescent officials, good Samaritans, and steadfast publicservants—establishes her work as insightful and important.

Drawing largely on published memoirs, select prefectoral reports, and the seriesof interviews she conducted with ordinary people (chiefly very elderly women, ofcourse), she evokes something of the emotional turmoil, multiple motivations, classdivisions, and immense material disparities characterizing the millions on the movesouth and west when the structure of normal French life seemed suddenly to havevanished once and for all. Especially successful is her account of the variety of


experiences of those (unlike the hundred thousand civilians who succumbed inthe exodus, the soldiers who perished in captivity, the Jews taken and murdered inthe Holocaust) who returned home during thewar. Some made it with the help of theVichy government, or even of the German authorities; some against all authority,simply on their own. All experienced a period, long or short, of exile in their nativecountry, among people, welcoming or hostile, who often seemed as foreign as theinhabitants of another country.

Overall, Diamond judges the exodus to have been “the result of the failure ofgovernment and the authorities to predict and organize for the war” (197).Vidalenc himself had suggested as much (L’Exode, 418). This may seem logical,but is it reasonable? One may wonder whether any administration could conceiv-ably be expected to provide for massive internal migration in the millions conse-quent on the virtual collapse of national defense in a mere matter of days.

More convincingly, she comments on a certain French reluctance, even fiftyyears on, to recall these events (in extreme old age, a reader of her fair-mindedinquiry reflects that she might scarcely credit the difficulties earlier inquirersencountered in the attempt to get at some part of what had happened thatremarkable spring and summer). And she rightly insists on an imperative postwaragenda, common to a variety of mutually contentious political clans, that dis-couraged probing the disaster. With this enormous exodus screened off by thecurtain of the Resistance and Liberation, the nation was variously encouraged tomove on in renewed unity of purpose; perhaps rightly so. Years earlier, fromwartime Algeria, the young Fernand Braudel had given historians in his devas-tated nation their cue: Away with mere events, forward to the longue durée! Andfor some decades this exhortation was regnant, if not unchallenged. But Germans,Americans, Britons, and others—and finally, because time modifies all watch-words, the French themselves—succumbed to the fascinating pursuit of 1940.

Somewhat curiously, Diamond inclines to attribute French neglect of theexodus to “the lack of ‘official’ sources and archives” (217). On the other hand,she points to serious work on it now under way in France. Perhaps a people, longsince recovered and secure, is able to look back in tranquility. And, who knows?Their historians may yet agree with the Resistance myth (v. Daniel Mayer inVidalenc, vii–viii) that, just as the French Army has been credited with putting upthe first serious resistance to the Third Reich’s apparent juggernaut, the harriedpeople of the exodus, by their initial refusal to stay put, gave expression to anessential resistance to the European New Order.

University of Toronto John C. Cairns


Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium. By Jonathan Harris. (London, England:Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. 304. $27.95.)

Appealing to a broad audience and moving away from a traditional political,social, and economic approach of Byzantine history, this study examines thehistory of the empire and its capital, Constantinople, from the perspective of howpolitical power functioned and how it was articulated in 1200, a period of relativeimperial weakness. Focusing on the use of myth, on the role of religious traditions,and on the importance of cultural norms, Jonathan Harris argues that Byzantineemperors maintained their power through the creation and the perpetuation of avariety of spiritual and historical narratives.

Relying on a wide range of sources and synthesizing different approaches topower, Harris contends that these narratives touched on a variety of themes. Forone, Byzantine power was based on the indisputable virtue of the founding fathers,in particular, Constantine. The Byzantines believed that he was a saint and that“Constantine, by founding Constantinople, had irrevocably bestowed supremeauthority in the Christian world on the emperors who ruled there” (39). Con-sciously linking the thirteenth-century city to its past, stories were told promotingthe idea that Constantine was personally responsible for the Christian relics inConstantinople and for the city’s place as a sacred site. Along similar lines, Harrisinforms readers that the emperor Justinian was remembered not for his destructiveactions, but instead for his endowment of buildings that still dot the city.

In this regard, demonstrating that the projection of imperial hegemony wasclosely tied to the emotive significance of particular places such as the city’spalaces and its churches, Harris situates himself within a tradition of scholar-ship that emphasizes the importance of architecture in the study of power. Herehe shows that the city’s built environment—such as the Palace of the Blanch-erne, the Pantokrator church, and the church of the monastery of St. Mamas—acted as representations of political legitimacy and as sources of spiritualmeaning.

Yet Harris’s work extends beyond the role of the emperor and the importanceof the architecture of the city and demonstrates that political power must beunderstood in connection to other stories as well. One of these involved the beliefthat, because the city had been and always would be defended by the Virgin Mary,it was immune from foreign attacks. Icons scattered throughout the city werevisible confirmation of the Virgin’s protection, proclaiming the divine natureof Byzantine military authority and serving as proof of the city’s spiritualimportance.


Even given the success of these types of symbols in maintaining imperial power,in his final chapter, Harris includes a note of caution regarding the sustainabilityof empire as a political model. Commenting on the fall of Constantinople to theOttoman Turks in 1453, Harris’s analysis seems to suggest that the myth ofunchallenged power represents a form of hubris that plagues all empires, includingthose in the contemporary world as well.

Simmons College Stephen Ortega

Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister. By Christopher Hibbert.(Houndsmill, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xi, 401. $16.95.)

Students of nineteenth-century Britain are undoubtedly familiar with BenjaminDisraeli [1804–1880]—the bon vivant, novelist, politician, and progenitor of themodern Conservative Party. In this eminently readable biography, ChristopherHibbert offers them ample coverage of Disraeli’s social calendar, opening awindow onto how this talented raconteur overcame his family background(ethnically Jewish, yet converted to Anglicanism) and lack of a public schooleducation to force his way into the center of this still-exclusive society. Thoseless familiar with the period, however, will find the book’s dearth of contextualiza-tion potentially off-putting.

Disraeli’s political career was noteworthy for its longevity and its developingsense of purpose. As Hibbert notes, “Dizzy” did not consciously set out to changepolitical life when he entered the fray in the 1830s; he only hoped to be recognizedat its center. He nevertheless became a master of the House of Commons. Hisspeeches, sometimes running to three hours, were legendary for their sharp witand dramatic delivery. By crafting the Tory machinery as leader in the 1870s, hehelped force the shift from political groupings acting in concert to parties appeal-ing through platforms to what was termed “the democracy.” But Disraeli wasno democrat; instead, he was someone who hoped to cement those enfranchisedin 1832 and in 1867 to Britain’s traditional elites and to his vision of empire.He clashed ideologically with the Liberals, and his longtime rivalry with theirleader, W. E. Gladstone, fueled interest in the parliamentary game.

Much of the mentioned material is gleaned here only in passing, for Hibbert’sfocus is squarely—although not exclusively—on Disraeli’s debts, dalliances, anddinners. Mining prior biographies and his subject’s copious correspondence withfamily and friends, Hibbert presents the arc of Disraeli’s life from “dandy” toprime minister. It is an interesting and well-told story, but it would arguably bemore compelling if the great issues of the day were presented in similar depth. For


instance, given Hibbert’s recognition of the importance of the empire to the Toryprogram, this reader was surprised that there was but a passing mention toDisraeli’s seminal speech on imperialism, that is, the Crystal Palace speech in1872, during which he differentiated sharply between his vision of colonies in“constant and continuous relations with the Home Government” and the Liber-als’ seemingly more parsimonious attachment to colonial self-government.1 Asplayed out during his premiership in the latter 1870s, Disraeli’s typically oppor-tunistic and muscular approach to imperial threats inspired Gladstone todenounce “Beaconsfieldism,” in pejorative reference to the title recently bestowedupon Dizzy by their admiring monarch, and contributed to the Liberal victory inthe General Election of 1880, just months prior to Disraeli’s death.

Such omissions are numerous and are therefore vexing. Thus, like so many ofthe evenings Disraeli spent at the country homes of friends, this profile of one ofthe most important figures of the Victorian era is a fine, if light, entertainment.

Marquette University Timothy G. McMahon

Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944. By Violetta Hionidou. (Cam-bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 261. $99.00.)

Interdisciplinary research is often praised but seldom practiced. In this work, theauthor shows how the right combination of multiple methods, tools, and disci-plinary perspectives can yield new insights. She provides nothing less than a social,demographic, economic, historical, political, and epidemiological account ofthe Greek famine during this country’s occupation by Axis powers between 1941and 1944.

It is estimated that the Greek famine killed close to 5 percent of the population.This was a famine that affected a relatively “developed” European country at atime when such phenomena were considered to be things of the past. Hence, astudy of the Greek famine does not just entail the reconstruction of a historicalevent, but also sheds light on the paradox of a famine that took place in a settingwhere famines were no longer part of the menu of natural calamities.

Violetta Hionidou skillfully exploits spatial and temporal variation withinGreece to highlight the factors that contributed to the famine. She relies oncreative comparisons, for example, between German-occupied Hios and Italian-occupied Syros, to study the effects of various levels of state intervention. She

1. Quoted in The British Empire, edited by Jane Samson (Oxford, England: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), 184.


reconstructs the historical context and examines several putative factors of thefamine, including the British blockade and the food requisitions by the occupationarmies; she probes the role of local markets, and especially black markets.Hionidou also provides a detailed examination of relief operations—what modernscholars call humanitarian aid. Further, she analyzes population movements andmigration, as well as the causes of mortality (which, she finds, were predominantlythe result of starvation rather than epidemics). All this is done in a way thathighlights the actual human experience of the famine.

In the process, Hionidou debunks several persistent myths. She shows thatpeasant resistance to taxation was not an act of political resistance, but ratherone of economic expediency; that agricultural production did not collapseduring the occupation, but in fact was even raised in some places; that thefamine took place throughout the occupation period, at different times in dif-ferent places, as opposed to just the winter of 1941–1942 as previouslybelieved; that requisitions by occupation authorities were not as pervasive orcentrally organized as thought, and usually took the form of disorganized plun-dering by soldiers.

From a methodological perspective, the author demonstrates the importance ofnot generalizing from the single case of Athens to that of the rest of the country,as experiences did vary widely; the need to evaluate critically written sources, asoral ones often contradict them, thus calling for evidentiary triangulation; and theobligation to challenge official accounts of both the Right and the Left, as well asnewspaper accounts of the time, as they pack in considerable bias.

In short, this rich, yet analytically sharp, book will be essential reading not justfor the students of Greek history and the Second World War, but also for research-ers interested in the intersection of processes of military occupation, civil war, andfamine.

Yale University Stathis N. Kalyvas

Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Companyof St. Ursula (1474–1540). By Querciolo Mazzonis. (Washington, D.C.: CatholicUniversity of America Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 247. $35.95.)

This clearly argued study introduces to readers of English the north Italian “livingsaint” Angela Merici and her foundation in the 1530s of the Company of St.Ursula. In the seventeenth century and after, the Ursulines flourished in Europe asteachers of girls, and in Quebec, one branch pioneered missionary schooling for


Native Americans. This later prominence as a religious order devoted to charitableservice, however, represented a post-Tridentine evolution away from Merici’s owninnovative goals.

Querciolo Mazzonis shows how Merici developed a rule for a new form ofreligious life for women, including those lacking the dowries required by tradi-tional nunneries. Incorporating ideals from late-medieval spirituality, Merici’smodel eschewed conventional monastic vows, enclosure, communal life, andinstitutional hierarchy. In the company, with the guidance of more experiencedwomen (Colonnelle and Matrone) but with scant oversight from male clerics,virgins lived in the secular world and earned their keep as need be, while devotingthemselves to pursuit of individual union with God. Emphasizing interiority anddownplaying external asceticism and good works, the early Ursulines could stillserve their neighbors according to medieval modes by bodily mediation of thesupernatural and “rational” counsels to civic peace. Mazzonis presents Merici asfinding a “radical” middle way for women’s spiritual autonomy, one thatskirted the period’s stereotypes of female incapacity without rejecting Catholicorthodoxy.

For Ursuline beginnings, primary sources (described in chapter one, with usefulamplification closing chapter two) are limited. Drawing selectively on scholarshipin both Italian and English, Mazzonis proceeds by setting three foundationalwritings by Merici into several sorts of contexts. Around a brief narrative of herlife and work, chapter one outlines the central argument. Chapter two describesBrescia’s social and political environment and highlights the diverse, but oftenmodest backgrounds of early Ursuline recruits. Chapters three and four take upaspects of the fluid religious sensibilities of pre-Tridentine Italy with particularattention to gender and emergent ideas of self in order to trace their fit withMerici’s ideas for her company.

For the specialist scholar, the book’s principal contribution lies in differentiatingMerici’s early vision from later homogenizing assessments of the Ursuline story.Other readers, including students with a more general interest in the history ofwomen and religion, will find the summations of scholarly thinking about spiritu-ality, gender, and the self clear and useful. Mazzonis links these broad ideas with theparticularities of Merici’s program, sometimes more satisfactorily, sometimes less.For example, the discussion of alternative meanings of charity succeeds better thanthe treatment of spiritual transcendence, which the author calls, imprecisely,“mysticism.” Furthermore, his claim, with a nod to Gabriella Zarri, that Merici’svirgins modeled a new female role—the lay single woman—seems a bit strained.Nevertheless, Mazzonis’s case for Merici’s originality and for the medievalizing


novelty of the company’s rule, although doomed as the churchly climate changed,will engage feminist interest and will reward the attention of a broad readership.

York University (Toronto) Elizabeth S. Cohen

Medieval Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition: A Tribute toKenneth Pennington. Edited by Wolfgang P. Müller & Mary E. Sommar. (Wash-ington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 404. $79.95.)

Kenneth Pennington, the Kelly-Quinn Professor of Ecclesiastical and Legal Historyat the Catholic University of America, is an expert in medieval canon law and inlegal history generally, especially of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries.This volume, edited by two of his former students, is a well-deserved tribute thatserves also as a fine introduction to many of the scholars and topics currentlyimportant in medieval and early modern legal history on both sides of the Atlantic.The dedicatory preface and an introductory essay by Wolfgang P. Müller, “Medi-eval Church Law as a Field of Historical Inquiry,” sets the tone for this Festschrift.The subsequent twenty-six articles, written by friends of Pennington, some ofwhom were his students at Syracuse University, are arranged into four parts: 1)“Western Church Law in an Age without Jurists, ca. 900–1140”; 2) “The Forma-tion of Canonistic Theory: Authors and Texts, ca. 1140–1350”; 3) “CanonisticDoctrine in Practice: Courts and Procedures, ca. 1140–1500”; and 4) “Canonists inConversation with the Wider World.” The year 1140, noted in three of theseheadings, is the traditional date for Gratian’s Decretum, the work marking thetransition between the ius antiquum and the ius novum in medieval canonicaljurisprudence. Section by section the contents of the volume are as follows:

I: Ludger Körntgen, “Kanonisches Recht und Busspraxis: Zu Kontext undFunktion des Paenitentiale Excarpsus Cummeani”; Wilfried Hartmann, “ZuEffektivität und Aktualität von Reginos Sendhandbuch”; Rudolf Schieffer, “ZurEntstehung des Sendgerichts im 9. Jahrhundert”; Gerhard Schmitz, “Ein Kanonistbei der Arbeit: Kleine Rechtstexte aus Codex Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona deAragón Ripoll 77”; Greta Austin, “Vengeance and Law in Eleventh-CenturyWorms: Burchard and the Canon Law of Feuds”; Jörg Müller, “Gedanken zumInstitut der Chorbischöfe.”

II: Anders Winroth, “Neither Slave nor Free: Theology and Law in Gratian’sThoughts on the Definition of Marriage and Unfree Persons”; Titus Lenherr,“Reos sanguinis [non] defendat ecclesia: Gratian, mit einem kurzen Blick erh-ascht?”; Mary E. Sommar, “Twelfth-Century Scholarly Exchanges”; CarlosLarrainzar, “Notas sobre las introducciones In prima parte agitur y Hoc opus


inscribitur”; Robert Somerville, “A Fragment of Compilatio prima at ColumbiaUniversity”; Peter Landau, “Die Phi.-Glossen der Collectio Cassellana”; KeithH. Kendall, “‘Mute Dogs, Unable to Bark’: Innocent III’s Call to CombatHeresy”; Charles Donahue Jr., “Johannes Faventinus on Marriage (With anAppendix Revisiting the Question of the Dating of Alexander III’s MarriageDecretals).”

III: James A. Brundage, “An Advocate’s Dilemma: What Can You Tell theClient? A Problem of Legal Ethics”; Orazio Condorelli, “L’usuraio, il testamento,e l’Aldilà: Tre quaestiones di Marsilio Mantighelli in tema di usura”; LotteKéry, “Ein neues Kapital in der Geschichte der kirchlichen Strafrechts: DieSystematisierungsbemühungen des Bernhard von Pavia (+1213)”; SuzanneLepsius, “Summarischer Syndikatsprozeß: Einflüsse des kanonischen Rechs aufdie städtische und kirchliche Gerichtspraxis des Spätmittelalters”; Mario Ascheri,“Fonti per la storia della giustizia ecclesiastica medievale a Siena”; LudwigSchmugge, “Barbara Zymermanin’s Two Husbands.”

IV: Franck Roumy, “L’origine et la diffusion de l’adage canonique Necessitasnon habet legem (VIIIe–XIIIes)”; Charles de Miramon, “Innocent III, Hugucciode Ferrare et Hubert de Pirovano: Droit canonique, théologie et philosophie àBologne dans les années 1180”; Manlio Bellomo, “Considerazioni sulla pervasiv-ità della religione nella società e negli ambienti di studio universitari in etàtardo-medievale”; Péter Erdö, “Il diritto canonico, fonte della giurisprudenzaoccidentale nell’Ungheria e nella Polonia del medioevo”; Brian Tierney, “Hohfeldon Ockham: A Canonistic Text in the Opus nonaginta dierum”; R. H. Helmholz,“Thomas More and the Canon Law.”

The volume concludes with a list of Pennington’s published works (a visit to hiswebsite offers additional unpublished items), a list of contributors, and an index.It is unfortunate that an “index manuscriptorum” was omitted, the only com-plaint that this reviewer has about this excellent collection of essays in honor ofan excellent scholar, whose influence can be felt on the study of legal history in theUnited States and in Europe.

Columbia University Robert Somerville

Socrates: A Life Examined. By Luis E. Navia. (New York, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,2007. Pp. 291. $26.00.)

It is notoriously difficult to reconstruct the life, character, and beliefs of Socrates.Historians know that he was condemned to death at the age of seventy in 399 BC


by an Athenian jury on charges of corruption and impiety. Almost everythingelse is debatable. There are two main reasons for the “Socratic Problem.” First,unlike most philosophers, Socrates wrote nothing. Second, the primary sourcesfor Socrates seem fundamentally contradictory. Plato’s ironic, paradoxicalgadfly is hard (perhaps impossible) to reconcile with Aristophanes’ stereotypicalsophist; neither seems to fit with Xenophon’s sensible moralist. A further,related difficulty is that none of these writers were composing biography, orhistory. Writers used the Socratic dialogue to explore their own philosophicalpreoccupations.

Luis E. Navia’s latest book is an attempt to analyze the Socratic problem forthe benefit of an undergraduate or general reader. The book includes sevenchapters. The first outlines the problem; the next four assess the main contempo-rary witnesses for Socrates (Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle); thefinal two chapters provide Navia’s analysis of what Socrates really believed.

Navia offers a fairly lucid summary and citation (with quotations in transla-tion) of most of the major ancient sources necessary for any approach to theSocratic problem. There is some repetition from one chapter to the next. Particu-larly useful is the citation of all major references to Socrates in Aristotle in chapterfive. Also helpful is Navia’s insistence that the Cynics may have been close to thebeliefs of the historical Socrates.

Navia’s goal is not just historical reconstruction, but presentation of Socratesas the figure “we” need now: an advocate for reason and meaning in a worlddominated by the “empty gods” of materialism, pleasure, and power (264). Thisis an inspiring message, although the false dichotomy between reason and “spiri-tual poverty” rather begs the question (264).

But Navia damages his own credibility as an advocate for rationality and therigorous use of language. He is misleading in his formulation of important issues.For example, Aristotle implies that for Socrates, knowledge was “the necessaryand sufficient condition for virtue” (143, italics original). But Navia goes on tosay: “Stupid people do stupid things” (143). This is a false summation: the pointis ignorance, not stupidity. Conceptual slips of this kind are all too common.Navia reads Socrates, anachronistically, as a precursor to Descartes and Kant; heclaims that Socratic wisdom involved a journey “into the recesses of one’s con-sciousness” (179). “Consciousness” is not an ancient Greek concept. Navia’swriting is rather careless: readers are told, for example, that Socrates “literally”deflated his interlocutors (106).

Navia is too sanguine about the possibility of using the (supposedly) earlyPlatonic dialogues to reconstruct the historical Socrates. Many scholars over the


past fifteen years have pointed to difficulties with this model. Navia’s bibliographyis outdated and idiosyncratic; he includes very little material from the last fifteenyears. A better undergraduate introduction to the Socratic problem is ThomasBrickhouse and Nicholas Smith’s The Trial and Execution of Socrates: Sourcesand Controversies.

University of Pennsylvania Emily Wilson

Crusader Warfare: Byzantium, Western Europe and the Struggle for the Holy Land1050–1300 AD. By David Nicolle. (London, England: Hambledon Continuum,2007. Pp. xiv, 306. $59.55.)

Crusader Warfare is the first of a two-volume work, focusing on Christianparticipation during the Crusades. In some ways, the title is misleading. DavidNicolle ambitiously construes the Crusades in broad terms, analyzing variousaspects of warfare throughout the Mediterranean world during the elevenththrough fourteenth centuries. He argues against viewing the Crusades as a“clash of civilizations” and instead examines political, economic, and socialfactors that dictated the military engagement in the crusading movement.

Nicolle devotes the first section of this book to discussing the Latin states ofWestern Europe and the Crusader states, a term he acknowledges as problem-atic but continues to employ. The second section focuses on the Byzantine stateand Christian principalities in Africa. The chapters break down to focus onindividual topics: recruitment, strategy, tactics, training, equipment, fortifica-tion, siege warfare, naval warfare, and so on. Nicolle discusses the topics regionby region, moving geographically from Spain, Southern Italy, Northern Italy,the Crusader states, and so on. He moves chronologically from the elevenththrough fourteenth centuries. This structure allows the reader to observe howtechniques developed on the peripheries of the Christian world alter the practiceof warfare at its core.

However, because of its immense scope, Nicolle focuses on synthesizing a vastarray of secondary material rather than investigating original research. The sparsefootnotes, which contain almost exclusively biographical data, make it difficult toassess the evidence supporting Nicolle’s theories. Asserting that the Christians’large numerical advantage of the First Crusade helped account for its success,Nicolle contends that a force of twelve thousand men, including some twelvehundred to thirteen hundred knights, laid siege to Jerusalem in 1099, citingJonathan Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading as evidence(7). Riley-Smith’s data comes from Raymond of Aguilers, but he warns that these


numbers are “no more than guesses.”1 Nicolle leaves his readers with neither thesource of these numbers nor the author’s caveats about their use. Discussing theuse of Byzantine siege engines, Nicolle quotes a summary of a Byzantine militarytreatise2 side-by-side with direct quotes from a translation of another treatise3

(216–217). Unless the reader is already familiar with these texts, he or she has noway to distinguish between secondary and primary sources.

The author pays little heed to historiographical debates. Nicolle either presentsonly the opinion with which he agrees or ignores the debate entirely. For example,Nicolle contends that the twelfth-century Turcoples of the Latin states were likelycomprised primarily of Muslim prisoners, without referencing recent literaturethat debates their origins4 (13). A discussion of the importance of the combinationof joint cavalry–infantry tactics cites only a conference paper for evidence (60).The focus on breadth of material and synthesis of existing research limits the useof this text for specialists in medieval warfare. The lack of historiographicalcontext and the uneven presentation of evidence restricts the use of this text forprofessional historians.

Eastern Illinois University Joshua Birk

London: After a Fashion. By Alistair O’Neill. (London, England: Reaktion Books,2007. Pp. 240. $24.95.)

The author has written a cultural history of British fashion, as it has evolved in thecontext of the city of London. He draws on cultural theorists, such as WalterBenjamin, Georg Simmel, and Guy Debord, proponents of British Cultural Studiesin the 1980s and 1990s, and recent sociologically oriented literature on the historyof fashion by Elizabeth Wilson and others. From Alistair O’Neill’s perspective,contemporary fashion stylists are descendants of Benjamin’s flâneur and Victorianrag pickers. Their ideas coalesce from their experiences of different facets of themetropolis, often marginal and poor, that they put together using principles ofcollage.

1. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia, Pa.:University Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 63.

2. De obsidione toleranda, identified only as “one treatise” by Niccole. Eric McGeer, “ByzantineSiege Warfare in Theory and Practice,” in The Medieval City Under Siege, ed. Ivy A. Corfisand Michael Wolfe (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1995), 126.

3. George T. Dennis, Three Byzantine Military Treatises (Washington, D.C.: Dunbarton Oaks,1985).

4. Yuval Harari, “The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment,” Mediterra-nean Historical Review 12 (1997), 75–116.


O’Neill examines several periods when cultural changes reshaped the charac-teristics and meaning of both fashion and consumption. He begins with a voguefor tattooing among the upper classes at the end of the nineteenth century andthen turns to the role of couture in fashion in the 1920s and the impact of theSurrealist movement in London in the 1930s. The emergence of consumer culturein the second half of the twentieth century is exemplified by the phenomenon ofCarnaby Street, the antecedents of punk, and a fad for chintz in the 1980s. Ratherthan focusing on fashion stylists, whom he barely mentions, he attempts toexplain how artists and entrepreneurs reshaped fashion by reconceptualizing themeaning and importance of certain urban cultures.

Many of the “heroes” of his book are artists, photographers, and musicianswho captured the essence of part of the city in their works or in their dress. Healso credits entrepreneurs whose contributions to fashion change have generallybeen ignored, showing how owners of boutiques capitalized on the expansion ofconsumer culture by popularizing marginal styles, often associated with homo-sexuals. Although scholars associated with cultural studies have focused primarilyon street cultures, O’Neill broadens that concept to include the interiors of shopsas important elements in reshaping cultural tastes.

For the most part, O’Neill provides an interpretation of fashion change asoccurring from the “bottom-up,” rather than as being imposed from the “top-down.” He says: “the products of fashion are resolutely drawn from illogical andunorthodox sources” (180). Instead of analyzing Fashion Week, he focuses onhow certain relatively impoverished districts in London became focal points forartistic innovation and “settings for fashionable identities.”

O’Neill argues that some photographs epitomize an era, and they constitute animportant aspect of his documentation. Other sources include documentary films,works of art, advertisements, maps, and fashion magazines for men and forwomen, as well as more conventional sources such as diaries, memoirs, interviews,and articles in the press.

The book contains close to one hundred photographs that clarify and enrichthe text. Some chapters are more insightful than others, and the volume as a wholewould have benefited from a concluding chapter. Nevertheless, the book is ahighly selective but stimulating and readable analysis of how social changes inparticular areas of a major city, refracted through the lens of creative talent,transformed the character and meaning of fashionable appearance during thetwentieth century.

University of Pennsylvania Diana Crane


Napoleon as a General: Command from the Battlefield to Grand Strategy. ByJonathan Riley. (London, England: Continuum Books, 2007. Pp. 228. $29.95.)

If, as is frequently asserted, more books have been written about the life andcareer of Napoleon Bonaparte than all but a handful of figures in world history,the appearance of a new study invariably raises the question of whether anotherone is necessary. British major general Jonathan Riley, a former Sandhurst instruc-tor, argues that military training and experience enable him to fill a gap in theexisting literature, that of a shortage of expert analyses of Napoleon’s commandabilities and generalship. Academic historians, he asserts, lack this background,and generals, for the most part, do not write history. Although he acknowledgesthe lasting influence of James Marshall-Cornwall’s similarly titled 1967 study(another work by a British general), he finds few others that meet his standard.

Although Napoleon as a General is the sort of medium-length study that caneasily be assigned for classroom use, this reviewer did not find Riley’s claim oforiginality particularly convincing. The book is too short to provide the systematicanalysis found in the work of military theorists like Clausewitz or Jomini, orDavid Chandler’s longer and more comprehensive overview of the NapoleonicWars. Riley’s chapter on “Generalship” reminds the reader of Napoleon’s instinc-tive gift for inspiring loyalty and obedience and his daunting capacity for hardwork. His intuitive ability to fashion military solutions, often in the absence ofdetailed information, was another strength, although his insistence on centralizingdecision making in his own hands became a weakness as the Empire expanded,and he failed to train subordinates in independent command. A chapter on“Napoleon as Strategist” (which focuses primarily on his strategic failures inSpain, Russia, and with the Continental System) also revisits familiar territory.

A separate chapter on logistics may reflect Riley’s military background, but his“case studies” of Napoleonic battles (in Italy in 1796–1797, at Jena-Auerstadt in1806, and Leipzig in 1813) add little to the existing literature. Brief accounts ofsuch campaign tactics as the battalion square, envelopment (manoeuvre sur lesderrières), and exploitation of the central position will be familiar to even casualreaders of military history.

Riley’s conclusion stresses Napoleon’s declining powers (and growing impa-tience with dissenting views) in his later campaigns, even as his opponents learnedto copy and counter his methods. Undergraduates may benefit from remindersthat admiration for Napoleon’s accomplishments led generals as late as the earlytwentieth century to overlook revolutions in transportation, communications, andweaponry that rendered many of his practices obsolete. Today’s asymmetrical


struggles against stateless enemies make Napoleonic models even less applicable.Riley’s closing observation, that Napoleon’s military triumphs conspicuouslyfailed to gain a lasting peace that would have permitted his Empire to survive, mayanger his cultists, but is worth repeating.

Napoleon as a General is a readable addition to existing studies of its subject,but it neither surpasses nor replaces the better ones.

Baylor University David Longfellow

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the FirstWorld War. By Graham Robb. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.Pp. xvii, 455. $27.95.)

To open this book is to accompany the author on a bicycle tour through time andspace to discover France, or, more accurately, to examine the ways in whichFrance discovered itself. Outside of Paris and beyond the main roads, Franceremained a cabinet of curiosities, a patchwork of pays, languages, and localloyalties well into the nineteenth century. To explore this world, Graham Robbmounted the seat of a bicycle and delved into a host of museums, memoirs, andmonographs. The result is an engaging and scholarly account that examines firstthe diversity of France and then the ways in which that diversity disappeared.

Robb’s central question is how France developed a national identity when nosuch identity actually seemed to exist. Even in the nineteenth century, he states,few people in France had ever seen a map of their country that might show themtheir place within the larger body. Their identity was largely local; who they werewas where they were. Robb observes that “France was effectively a land offoreigners,” a land of people who did not know each other or know much abouteach other beyond the boundaries of their pays (23). “There was no obviousreason why these people should have formed a single nation” (26).

The author is not eager to create the modern union. He prefers to honor thecultural diversity and longevity of the “tribes of France.” He uncovers their secretsand explores their “obscure logic of daily life” (91). For example, people whoappeared ignorant or backward to travelers from Paris actually lived in uniqueharmony with the realities of harsh, remote circumstances. The “art of remainingidle” offered a way to cope with tedium and poverty (78). Sloth might be a naturalresponse to “physical and economic necessity” (76). A web of connections carriedrumors, goods, migrants, and animals in well-established patterns among appar-


ently isolated communities. This is part of the answer to Robb’s fundamentalquestions; here is the “ant-like activity” that united France without benefit ofbureaucrats or common language (98).

Robb has a special gift for storytelling. He begins the book with the horrificexperience of an ill-fated geometer in the 1740 expedition of the Cassini mapproject. Bernadette of Lourdes leads to the subject of fairies, virgins, gods, andpriests. The Duchesse de Berry’s efforts at royalist revival in western France in1832 open the issue of the “colonization” of France through government controlsand the reclamation of wastelands. Then there is the nameless, work-worn,twenty-eight-year-old woman of Champagne who exchanged words with ArthurYoung on 12 July 1789 and who may well be the aged figure whose photographnow appears in a local museum of daily life. Robb creates a story of her life.

The author writes with grace, delight, and insight. Maps and photographssupplement the narrative. Readers will find here all of the pleasure and none of thepain of the “fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library”that produced this remarkable book (xvi).

Armstrong Atlantic State University Janet D. Stone

The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History. By Pat Southern. (Oxford,England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 381. $24.95.)

The author of this book characterizes it as an introduction for the general readerlikely to be curious about this “tremendously successful army,” but without accessto the traditional scholarship and needing guidance both to the ancient sourcesand the “plethora” of modern books (ix). Wisely, Pat Southern warns that, giventhe size and longevity of the Roman Empire, the fragments of evidence availabletoday provide only historical snapshots. Extrapolation may fill some gaps, butcannot produce a comprehensive account (2).

From this introduction, the reader expects three things: a narrative sensitive todifferences in Roman political institutions and military practice over time andspace, regular citations of the ancient texts, and an up-to-date bibliography. Innone of these three respects does The Roman Army prove satisfactory. Thenarrative sections are very brief, with no more than five pages allotted to describ-ing Rome’s rise from a village on the Tiber and eleven more to the history of thearmy. Most of the book consists of a page or two each on topics ranging fromweapons, to generals, to camel riders, to music. None of these sections is longenough to fulfill the author’s original promise to examine the diversity of Romanmilitary institutions over time and geography.


If, in Southern’s defense, the evidence rarely supports such nuanced analysis,she still ought to explain the nature of the sources and the consequent limita-tions of the “snapshots” they provide. She talks little about evidence and,worse, ignores the crucial principle that modern histories, however valuable, arenot the same thing as evidence. Instead, by shifting without explanation fromancient sources to modern works, she conceals the crucial distinctions betweenthe two. A book aimed at readers attracted to Roman history by film andtelevision ought to emphasize the thinness of historians’ sources for the Romanarmy and the dangers of treating snapshots as though they were historicaldioramas.

Southern largely ignores the existence of historical controversy. Early Romemay, for example, have absorbed neighboring territory for purely defensivereasons, but the claim requires justification. The historians best known fortheir competing views on the topic—among them Hans Mommsen, TennyFrank, Ernst Badian, and William Harris—do not appear in the exiguousbibliography.

The tyro in the field of Roman history may be convinced by constant repetitionthat the Roman Army was indubitably “great,” but an author whose notion ofhistorical causality is that the Roman army changed “to keep up with the times”will not instill curiosity about the nature of military greatness or anything else (10).

The descriptive sections are readable enough, but the usage error in the openingsentence (“amount of books”) is fair warning to the grammatically squeamishreader.

The reviewer has no quarrel with Southern’s claim that there cannot be toomany books on the Roman Army or with her lament that many excellent workshave become difficult to access, but to choose this book rather than something by,among others, Adrian Goldsworthy, Lawrence Keppie, or Yann Le Bohec—letalone Polybius—would be a poor economy.

United States Military Academy Eugenia C. Kiesling

The East German Leadership and the Division of Germany: Patriotism and Propa-ganda, 1945–1953. By Dirk Spilker. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,2006. Pp. xi, 296. $146.50.)

This author challenges readers to consider how events in East Germany between1945–1953 appeared to the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) leadership;they had reason to hope that the Communist message would prove attractive


given the horrific economic conditions in the immediate postwar years, theperception that America was imperializing Germany, and the assumptionthat bourgeois capitalism was on the verge of collapse. To arrive at his conclusions,Dirk Spilker examines the records of the Central Party Archives, especially theminutes of the Parteivorstand and Central Committee, in addition to the “privatepapers” of Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Otto Grotewohl, and Franz Dahlem.Spilker chooses to examine the leadership as a “collective,” because of the difficultyhe had culling individual voices out of sparse records; only Pieck consistently madeannotations that provided his personal insight (2, 8). Despite the paucity of sources,Spilker confidently maintains that private thoughts and public statements wereclosely aligned. Secondary sources, largely German language, fill gaps in theresearch and attempt to contextualize events.

Spilker finds that the SED leaders were in agreement with Stalin that a dividedcountry was preferable to a united Germany under bourgeois capitalism. TheCommunist promotion of Western-style democracy was rooted in the belief thatthe SED would win major electoral victories because Germans were fed up withthe exploitative nature of capitalism. Although Spilker does not hesitate to referto this assumption as deluded, he avoids a judgmental tone. He points out thatcommitment to Marxist ideology corroborated by reports of the horrific livingconditions in the Western zones convinced the SED leaders that capitalism was onthe verge of collapse. They honestly believed that they held the high ground, whichSpilker illustrates convincingly through numerous statements made in public andprivate meetings.

The least convincing elements of Spilker’s study are his decision to treat theleadership of the SED as a collective and how he allows the linear progression ofevents to dictate the structure of his narrative. He organizes the monographchronologically, emphasizing how SED leaders were filled with hope and enthu-siasm at each step. Only belatedly does Spilker point out that physical isolationfrom the masses in a “requisitioned luxury estate” may also explain why the SEDleaders were surprised to learn that anti-Soviet feelings remained strong in thegeneral population and the party membership. He notes that the leaders werebecoming “ever more dependent on party channels for their information,” butwhen did this dependency begin (126)? This is apparently a minor question, butreaders are left with only limited knowledge of how the daily lives of the SEDleaders shaped their politics, let alone the nature of their relations with Sovietauthorities in the Eastern zone and the USSR. In addition, by allowing thesequence of events to shape the narrative, considerable evidence is uncovered, butits interpretation lacks depth.


Studying the period 1945–1953 through the lens of the SED leadership pro-vides an essential understanding of their official perspective, and that is all thereader will gain from this well-documented monograph.

Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania L. M. Stallbaumer-Beishline

The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940. By Peter Stansky. (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 212. $24.00.)

The author of this book, a distinguished scholar of Modern Britain, here revisitsthe “myth” of the Blitz. It lasted until 10 May 1941, when Germany looked East.Britain had been bombed earlier in 1940, when the Luftwaffe’s targets were airdefenses and aircraft production. Britain’s retaliation by bombing Berlin evidentlyprompted Hitler to order 340 bombers protected by 617 fighter aircraft to assaultLondon. It did not frighten Britons into demanding peace. But, on 7 September1940, a Saturday, Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, was believedimminent.

Planners, who had focused on deaths, made almost no provision for homeless-ness, hunger, and clothing. Such matters were for local poor law officials. PeterStansky focuses on an emblematic event of the 7–9 September weekend, when theSouth Hallsville School filled the first night with Dockside residents, now home-less. On 9 September, a coach arrived to transport them elsewhere. Sirens went off,and the coach drove off empty. A direct hit killed those sheltering in the school andsoon made all Britons aware of government failures of preparation. As similarhorrors followed, for the bombing was almost nightly, the civil services’ pinchpenny ways and limited idea of community obligations to all in this total warbecame causes of seemingly endless miseries. For each bombing death, thirty-fivepeople were made homeless. By the end of 1941, the British state had finally takenresponsibility for bombing victims and their families.

Perhaps the Blitz’s chief effect was the creation of a myth celebrating Britons’endurance and coping. The author, whose eyewitnesses are many, steers a middlecourse between a dyspeptic and eupeptic myth. Authorities expected bombingneuroses leading to mass panic. Proved wrong, they swung to overestimatingLondoners’ buoyancy. Stansky notes that the terror’s effectiveness fell as bombingcontinued. Eight to ten hours of it clarified for Britons that there was only so muchone could do about it. To the extent that the popular slogan, the People’s War,implied an inclusivity of experience and unity of purpose, Stansky disagrees, buthe avers that it brought some unity and prompted an unaccustomed friendless-ness. Nor does he see merit in an antimyth highlighting the looting, pilfering, and


corpse stripping. Court cases revealed that first-time thieves, not gangs, wereresponsible. In the end, the myth of enduring, coping, and ultimately triumphingstill stands.

The reader will not, and likely should not, expect evidence of comparisons withGerman experiences of daily bombing. Allied intelligence knew by the Blitz’s endthat German morale did not collapse nor did German capability to make warmaterièl, but this all falls outside Stansky’s scope. Within the scope are timelyreferences to America’s experience of 9/11 and evidence of shocking incompetenceduring the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina. His conclusion that terror-bombing London was counterproductive “because it strengthened the resolve ofthose who are attacked” seems also to fit New York’s 2001 experience (183).

Earlham College Peter Cline

A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. ByVladislav M. Zubok. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Pp. xvi, 467. $39.95.)

During the Cold War, there was very little objective analysis. United Stateshistoriography often had severe flag-waving faults, while its Soviet counterpartwas more uniformly dogged by adhesion to the prescribed line. Hopes must behigh, therefore, that Vladislav M. Zubok, brought up in the Soviet Union but nowteaching in the United States, will be able, with his understanding of both sides,to achieve an informed balance. He himself makes his aims clear. Using a consid-erable range of sources, including Politburo deliberations, high-level cable corre-spondence, and even some private journals, he sets out to write about the ColdWar not just as a confrontation of great powers accumulating deadly weaponry,but also as the story of people struggling with alien ideas and values. He adoptsa revolutionary-imperial paradigm as a conceptual framework in which Cold WarSoviet leaders strove for security and power.

The distance traveled between the first and the last Cold War Soviet leader isgiven emphasis on the dust cover by the juxtaposition of a stern sepia study ofStalin with an animated technicolor portrait of Gorbachev. For those of us wholived through the years from 1945 to 1991, the contrast was great indeed. “UncleJoe,” as Americans were encouraged to call him, much to his own annoyance, wastired and sick after 1945, and scarcely the dynamic expansionist almost whollyresponsible for the Cold War as he has often been represented. In retrospect, hisanxiety for security appears greater than his lust for even more power. Khrushchevwas more reckless, especially over Cuba. It is impossible to imagine Stalin embark-


ing on such an adventure. Brezhnev was cautious, hoping to negotiate the way topeace and prosperity. Then, after the brief geriatric interlude of Andropov andChernenko, the much younger and more vigorous Gorbachev talked the SovietUnion into history.

There is much more to the book than the personalities and policies of theleaders and their advisers; for example, there is an excellent chapter on the Soviethome front. There are some omissions too. Zubok somewhat disarms criticismsby acknowledging two of them: a systematic review of Soviet economic andfinancial history and a deeper study of Soviet military thinking and the military-industrial complex. However, there is another, greater omission. Above all theCold War was a global conflict, leaving no continent untouched, and a variationof the “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” should be applied to the Soviet Union’smajor adversary, too. Yet, there is hardly a word about Latin America beyondCuba. The reason given during the Cold War for U.S. intervention in Chile,Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, to name just a few, was the Communistthreat. How real was this? Zubok’s near silence suggests that it was nonexistent,but it is to be doubted that this is what he really thinks.

University of Aberdeen Paul Dukes

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World.Edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker. (Berkeley,Calif.: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. x, 263. $24.95.)

The editors of this collection seek to situate the scholarship on the African slavevoyage within a global context as well as to draw on the richness of that scholarshipto engage the historiography on maritime forced migration beyond the Atlantic.The concept of the middle passage, they argue, is a useful “structuring link betweenexpropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another” (2).

Although the magnitude of the transatlantic slave trade “is in a class of itsown,” there were other middle passages in the historical development of globalcapitalism over the last three centuries (8). There was the African slave trade in theIndian Ocean in which slaves were transported from the port of Kilwa on theMozambique coast and the inland sea of Lake Nyassa into transoceanic circuits ofArabic and Portuguese slave trades. At the other end of the Indian Ocean, Lacunslave pirates seized Tagalogs, Visayans, and Malays and put them to work as shipgalley slaves in the Malay Archipelago.


Another middle passage was the transportation of bonded soldiers and convictsalong oceanic imperial circuits linking coastal Europe with coastal South Africa,South Asia, and Australia. There was the transoceanic forced migration ofChinese coolie laborers to Spanish Cuba and Peru, and the migration of Chineserailroad laborers across the Pacific Ocean to work in the western United States,although the latter were hardly forced in the same way as coolies, convicts, andslaves. By its own estimate, the book’s middle passages involved at least fourmillion African slaves, Chinese coolies, European bonded laborers, Asianindentured servants, and transported convicts (9). There are five useful maps offorced migration routes at the collection’s end, although the sea paths of Chinesecoolies are not mapped, and a map of the African slave voyage would have fit thevolume’s comparative aspirations.

Some of the volume’s conceptual links are effectively established. The role ofcapture in African enslavement was mirrored in the seizure of captives by Lacunslave pirates, Chinese “crimps” deceiving Chinese peasants into specious contractlabor, and Mozambique women seized by Arab slave traders. Perhaps the mosteffective conceptual link concerns the appalling living conditions reminiscent ofthe slave ship: cramped quarters, bad food, lack of fresh water, disease, physicaland mental abuse, and so on. Mortality rates ranged from the low for Indianconvicts to the very high among transported convicts to Australia. (For theAfrican slave voyage, it ranged from one in ten to one in three depending onconditions aboard ship, length of voyage, captain’s management, etc.) Anothereffective link was resistance to such oppressive conditions. Between 1850 and1872, there were forty-three mutinies aboard Chinese coolie ships, while poorconditions, cultural transgressions over diet, and weakened shipboard manage-ment encouraged Indian convict mutinies in the Indian Ocean (176). Clare Ander-son’s latter contribution on these Indian convict mutinies makes the usefulcomparative point that these mutinies were “a tiny proportion” of the recentlyestimated 10 percent of Atlantic slave ship revolts; she might have noted thatunlike convicts, enslaved Africans were faced with freedom’s lifetime denial (129).

Other conceptual links are not quite as strong. Slave-trading ships like the Arabdhow and Lacun prahus are not structurally compared to the snow, brigantine, andschooner of the Atlantic trade. Several contributors touch on the importantquestion of cultural change among coerced migrants, but their range of response—from “psychic dislocations” to “cultural inheritance” to “collective identity”—arestated rather than persuasively argued and comparatively connected.

This collection succeeds in its goal of making the reader think through the globaldimensions of coerced labor past and present. One small question is whether the


noninclusion of a contribution on the over 500,000 Indian indentured servants tothe Caribbean between 1838 and 1917 did not represent a major oversight giventhe role that particular oceanic forced labor played in the shift from colonial Africanslave labor to bonded Asian indentured labor in the postemancipation decades?The larger question concerns the contradictory link between forced labor and thehistorical development of global capitalism. How does James Warren’s otherwisefascinating piece on Lacun slave pirates in the Sula zone fit into the historicaldevelopment of global capitalism? Evelyn Hu-DeHart claims that the Chinesecoolie trade was the prime example of nineteenth-century global capitalism, yet shepoints to free labor relations (surely capitalism!) as contributing to the ending of thecoolie trade (179). The editors argue the importance of exploitation as a “link,” yetthe seven index entries to the word exploitation are all descriptive rather thananalytical, although the only conceptual treatment of surplus value in the Chinesecoolie trade is not in the index (180). Finally, although historians agree on the roleof the African slave voyage in the development of global capitalism, this reviewerremains unpersuaded that these four million forced migrants (and their so-calledtwenty-seven million contemporaries) are part of the same historical process.Perhaps they are transoceanic extensions of older precapitalist forms of appropria-tion and exploitation that still demand abolition.

Howard University J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

Christmas: A Candid History. By Bruce David Forbes. (Berkeley, Calif.: University ofCalifornia Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 179. $19.95.)

“I love Christmas. And Christmas drives me crazy” (ix). His ambivalence appar-ent at the outset of this charming little volume, author Bruce David Forbes set outto craft an honest, condensed account of “how the Christmas celebration gotto be the way it is” (x). The result is satisfying. Colloquial, straightforward,and colorful, Forbes depicts Christmas as a curious historical hybrid, a view hedevelops chronologically.

Discrete chapters chart Christmas’s origins in ancient pagan, pre-Christian,midwinter festivals; Christmas’s late official placement on the Church’s liturgicalcalendar; variations and continuities in Christmas celebrations illustrated by theChristmas tree; gift-giving practices linked to St. Nicholas, but upstaged by SantaClaus in the nineteenth century; and the hypercommercialization of the pastcentury. Forbes stresses the ebb and flow of Christmas enthusiasm, its supportersand detractors, noting Puritan attacks on the holiday in England and the colonies.Common people were vital throughout, Forbes maintains, since efforts to


innovate—whether by church fiat, by reformers, or by creators like CharlesDickens, Clement Clarke Moore, or Haddon Sundblom—yielded traditions onlyif people were willing to embrace them.

Forbes makes the details delicious. He renders potentially deadly topics,whether hermeneutics (nativity narratives) or ancient sources (PhilocalianCalendar), in a lively fashion. Readers learn of St. Nicholas’s legendaryaccomplishments, including his resuscitation of three murdered boys, aremarkable feat necessitating their reconstitution from cured meat (71)! Inanother delightful tidbit, Forbes illustrates one of many groups dedicated toChristmas reform, the Society for the Prevention of Useless Gifts [1912],bearing the apt acronym SPUG (117). Readers expect a brief work dedicated toChristmas to be a fun read; Forbes does not disappoint, but there is also foodfor thought.

Arguing that Christmas has ever been a blend of beliefs, practices, and pur-poses, Forbes likens it to a snowball that collected and discarded items pell-mellas it rolled along. Thus: “Christmas never was the pure spiritual holiday weimagine” (32). And many of those who revel in its enjoyment, like the Japanese,care not a wit for its religious message. Those who feel betrayed by its seemingimpurities and pine for a pure, unadulterated Christmas, warns Forbes, seek anonexistent golden age.

Some readers may not appreciate Forbes’s final chapter, “Wrestling withChristmas,” but it raises core questions and offers sound, measured advice forthose who do. Here greater attention to contemporary Christmas practices aroundthe globe would supply needed context and contrast. There remains a disturbingside to the obscene commercial overkill of the “Christmas Machine” that theauthor’s thoughtful suggestions cannot dispel (149). Individuals and families mayunplug the machine, but Christmas cannot help but reflect the angels and thedemons of its host culture.

Forbes presents a brisk synthesis conversant with authoritative sources inreligion, history, and popular culture. It will especially appeal to a general audience,but cultural and social historians will find it to be a useful reference. Handsomelyillustrated with twelve prints, including a color plate inset of Sundblom’s iconicSanta Claus, the book includes an informative annotated bibliography.

Concordia College-Moorhead Richard M. Chapman


Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions. By Alan Gibson. (Lawrence,Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. xi, 314. $29.95.)

In this lucid and often trenchant analysis of some of the most persistentquestions surrounding the nation’s founding, the author offers a study that isbeneficial to specialists in the early Republic and general readers alike.The former is treated to a clear, taut review of historiography along with sug-gestions for future research, while the latter is presented a jargon-free surveythat explains the important debates and how and why they have changed overtime.

This volume is a study of four critical questions that confronted the foundersof the Republic and continue to be the subjects of ongoing historiographicaldebate. The first question has a long history, dating back to the Progressive Eraof the early twentieth century: the economic interpretation of the Constitution.After reviewing the debate initiated by Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpre-tation of the Constitution of the United States [1913], Alan Gibson examines itsmore recent manifestations, including those of rational and social choice theo-rists. The second big question he explores is: how democratic was the politicalsystem created by the Constitution of 1787? He observes that scholars havestaked out positions that turn on their respective understandings of democracyand questions if agreement is possible on a single standard for the term. Thethird question asks whether historians should study the founding by focusing onhistorical context and the competing interests of the day or by concentrating onthe political principles that the founders considered and their applicability toperennial questions confronting the country. The last question engages thedebate over whether the intellectual foundations of the founding are located inliberalism, republicanism, or some synthesis of the two. Gibson sides withscholars who find a richer and more accurate analysis to be rooted in a syn-thetic view of the question.

Gibson writes out of a conviction that it is important to take these debatesseriously because they say a great deal about the contemporary state of Americandemocracy as well as illuminate the founding era. Far from an antiquarianapproach that celebrates the founding era and the “great men” that establishedthe Republic, Gibson offers a serious examination of historical context, politicalideas, and change over time. He contends that by understanding the big debatesthat have surfaced and persisted over the Constitution’s meaning, the reader cangain an appreciation for the human and historical quality of the foundationalagreements and disagreements that define the Republic. He does not expect his


work to resolve disagreements, but instead to clarify them and offer ways to movebeyond impasses.

Some specialists might find this book at times to be a bit pedantic. It often readslike an undergraduate lecture with the material arranged as lists: four questionsfor this, three reasons for that, four lessons learned, and so forth. But that stylisticirritant aside, this is a book that does what its title announces: provides under-standing of the founding.

Purdue University Frank Lambert

Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony inEngland and America. By Tal Golan. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2007. Pp. 325. $22.95.)

If progress may be measured as the journey from certainty to doubt, then, as theauthor suggests in his judicious and enlightening study of modern expert testi-mony, we have come a long way. The medieval trial by ordeal, with its appeal tothe heavens, was premised on the notion that God would answer all questionsdistinctly and truthfully. When that faith was put by, the law was left with physicaland testimonial evidence. The development of the sciences has vastly complicatedthe question of evidence, both introducing new forms of it and subjecting tradi-tional forms to novel scrutiny. But the sciences themselves are subject to scrutinyin court, where hired experts controvert each other and juries of laymen or panelsof judges must decide among them. The modern courtroom is thus a whetstone onwhich we grind our knowledge of the world and of one another, a tribunal wherenot only our deeds but our sciences are weighed and tested.

Expert testimony is now a routine feature of all courts, but it is particularly thecase in the Anglo-American adversarial system, where, as Tal Golan points out,“scientific expertise was sold in an unregulated fashion on an open legal market”(151). When Lord David Gilbert declared in his seminal Law of Evidence [1754]that “there can be no Demonstration of a Fact without the best Evidence that thenature of the thing is capable of,” that market was established. By the end of theeighteenth century, civil engineers, surveyors, geologists, and agronomists hadbecome part of civil litigation proceedings. They were joined in the nineteenthcentury by chemists, biologists, microscopists, radiologists, and physicians, whobranched out into criminal justice as well. The contradictions of adversarialtestimony were deeply frustrating, but, as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote in1863, the trial of truth still rested on two great pillars, “the general uniformity of


nature and the general trustworthiness of the senses.” Stephen had perhaps notread his Plato, but by the twentieth century, physics and psychology had over-turned those pillars as well.

Golan narrates his story largely through a close reading of major trials from theclassic case of Folkes v. Chadd in 1782, which concerned responsibility for thesilting of an English harbor, to the 1922 murder trial of James Alphonso Frye,which gave rise to the rule governing the admissibility of scientific evidence thatstill prevails in American jurisprudence. It is, Golan concludes, a tale of “goodfaith . . . turned to disenchantment and finally to institutionalized mistrust” (263).Initially, litigants hired expert help to present their evidence; later, nascent sciencesor pseudosciences, seeking public legitimation, sought to obtrude themselves onthe legal process. Yet the actual story is more complicated; as Golan notes of themost contentious relationship of all, that between medicine and law, the twoprofessions were “deeply connected social institutions, carrying ongoing negotia-tions through which legal doctrines affect[ed] medicine no less than scientificdiscoveries and medical applications affect[ed] the law” (177).

There is a long chain that connects the rise of adversarial law, empirical science,and the development of modern, two-party democracy, of which the jury remainsthe ultimate symbol, the practical arbiter, and the perdurable element. A distrustof scientific knowledge, perhaps the legacy of rejected medieval priest craft, runsthrough it, but so does a fascination with and a growing dependency on itsexpertise. If the scientific paradigm is dominant in our society, the courtroom isstill the forum where, for better and sometimes worse, science is put in its place.

Drexel University Robert Zaller

At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Edited byCatherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006. Pp. v, 338. $75.00.)

In this anthology, the various meanings of home—being home, being “athome,” domesticity, the home as imaginary, and inclusive and exclusionaryforces that move populations within “home” geographies—are explored. Thisvolume rides the wave of scholarship challenging the metropole/colonydichotomy, terms that coconstitute each other. The authors focus on empire’suneven influences on “everyday practices” as Britons thought “imperially” indaily life. Naturalized through religion, education, consumption, and culture,empire influenced social reform and the welfare state at home. This volume


examines empire’s hidden histories sustaining the divide between national andimperial histories.

Catherine Hall analyzes Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of Englandas exemplary of the split between domestic history and the history of empire.Macaulay envisioned Britain as a progressive nation of an imperially chosenpeople, underscored by Macaulay’s unhappy experiences in India.

Laura Tabili focuses on internal “others,” emigrants excluded by Britain’snationalism. Numbers had no clear relation to xenophobia filtered throughimperial racialized discourses. Fewer Irish did not abate anti-Irish hostility, anda trickle of Asians and Africans were enough to trigger hostilities. ChristineKinealy examines whether Ireland was a colony, or assimilated, or a specialcase—participating in the imperial parliament yet subordinate through changingIrish views toward the Union and Irish emigrants’ imperial service abroad.

Jane Rendall explores writings by women who visited India through intersec-tions of imperial expansion, commerce, and missionaries (102). Women inserteddomestic life into concepts of nationhood and empire, deploying the notion ofwoman’s moral mission. In Susan Thorne’s study of mutual inflection of religionand politics, missionaries, whether complicit with or critical of imperial treatmentof native populations, became major voices representing colonized people to theBritish. Clare Midgley shows that women supported all sides of imperial issues asfeminism blended with social Darwinism.

Philippa Levine explores real and imagined colonial sexualities that obsessedcolonizers’ contradictory views of colonized people as sexually conservative andlicentious. Levine links pathologized colonial sexualities with sexual myths aboutthe working-class, metaphoric colonials for many Victorians.

Joanna de Groot argues that consumption transformed British life at home,offering imperial goods that were then naturalized as British products. De Grootsurveys advertising, consumption patterns, and interactions between manu-facturing and consumption. Cora Kaplan analyzes novels’ buried or disguisedimperial allusions that unleashed utopian and dystopian imperial imaginaries.Literature’s “fantasmatic register” suggests alternative histories for socialrealities.

White settler colonies became models for British politics on women’s suffrage,famine relief, and poor relief. Antoinette Burton’s focus on Antipodean influenceson the metropole exemplifies the “reverse flow” theme of this volume. JamesEpstein explores empire’s unpredictable, complex impact on class identities athome: feelings of resentment at “home” did not always interfere with allegianceto nation and empire.


Keith McClelland and Sonya O. Rose address debates over citizenship from1867 to 1928 and how subjecthood embraced colonials and Britons in an imperialbelonging. Imperial events affected racial attitudes and immigration policieswithout any linear “progress” toward wider rights.

Authors analyze the complex intersections of gender, class, race, and nationwhen British domestic policies are interpreted through imperial histories andstress the importance of deep vertical studies of short periods to synchronizeBritish, colonial, and global histories to challenge disciplinary divisions.

Arizona State University Julie F. Codell

Battlefield: Decisive Conflicts in History. Edited by Richard Holmes. (Oxford,England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 429. $18.95.)

The editor of this volume readily concedes that this book largely repackagesentries from The Oxford Companion to Military History (2001), which he alsoedited. Richard Holmes claims he revised this material in light of recentscholarship and injected greater diversity by paying more attention to conflictsin Asia and Africa. To avoid having this work characterized as “another dic-tionary of battles,” Holmes arranged his entries chronologically rather thanalphabetically (vii). He tried placing events in context by beginning eachchapter with brief introductory essays and linking various battles with concisecommentary.

Despite these efforts to make old wine seem like new, Battlefield: DecisiveConflicts in History offers little to justify its existence. There is no escaping thefact that this book is an exercise in getting extra mileage out of previouslypublished material. Its very title reflects marketing considerations rather thanscholarly judgment. Holmes admits that he is “suspicious of attempts to isolate alimited number of decisive battles and write only about them” (vii). Consequently,he covers a plethora of battles, disposing of most with such brief descriptions thatthey merge into a numbing mountain of trivia.

Although Cranfield University employs Holmes as Professor of Military andSecurity Studies, he is mainly a popularizer who is most comfortable covering theBritish Army. Consequently, the book suffers from pronounced Anglophilia andpays too much attention to an organization whose persisting rigidity and ama-teurism made it a follower more often than a leader in advancing the art of war.Holmes also flounders badly when he deals with non-British history, and he littersthose parts of his text with insupportable interpretations and factual errors. In theentry on Pearl Harbor, Holmes relates that Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the


commander of the Japanese carrier strike force, thought that all he had accom-plished was “to waken a sleeping giant, and to fill her with a terrible resolve”(284). Nagumo never said such a thing, nor did any other Japanese admiral at thetime. A scriptwriter for the 1970 film Tora, Tora, Tora placed those words in themouth of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Among Holmes’s other lapses into fantasyis the assertion that the United States sought war with Great Britain in 1812because it feared invasion from Canada. His section on the American War ofIndependence is rife with errors, the chief of which is his statement that GeneralGeorge Washington, that exemplar of military subordination to the civil power,feuded with the Continental Congress.

The most troubling thing about Battlefield is its old-fashioned character.Military history has come a long way in the past thirty years. It is no longer justa matter of memorizing battles, generals, and casualty statistics. Political, insti-tutional, cultural, and social forces shape the armies that clash in large encountersand small, and these same factors can have as much to do in shaping the outcomeof armed conflicts as the number of soldiers killed in a certain place on a certainday. Although there is a need for reference works that make the basic facts easilyaccessible, Battlefield does not come close to supplanting worthier predecessors inthis field.

Temple University Gregory J. W. Urwin

The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. By Jan Rüger.(New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 337. $95.00.)

Reading this book, the reviewer is certain of three points. First, the author is anexcellent and talented historian. Second, despite recent debates, military historyis alive and well. Third, the nature of military history has evolved past limitedtechnical arguments regarding the operations of battle and into considerations ofmilitarism and warfare in the context of the actual societies that support them. Itis no accident that Jay Winter, who has done much to open whole new areas ofunderstanding, particularly about the Great War, is the General Editor for Studiesin Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, the series in which this volumeis published. Cambridge University Press deserves high praise for sponsoring thisscholarship.

The Great Naval Game is a great read, a rare quality in research monographs.However, as Jan Rüger deftly illustrates, his study of naval reviews in EdwardianBritain and Wilhelmine Germany is a foray into theatre. From the latter nine-teenth century, both Britain and Germany indulged in ever more elaborate


ceremonial displays of naval power. These fleet reviews showcased the actualwarships of each nation, but accomplished much more than that. Reviews becameoccasions for the governments to promote self-image and to celebrate the majestyof monarchy. Public attendance at naval reviews (or laying keels, or ship launch-ings) provided a participatory role for regular citizens otherwise divorced from thegrandeur of high politics and state power. Within the general scope of spectacle,Rüger also finds intriguing evidence of dissidence and independence, as Britonsand Germans sometimes used great public spectaculars to express protest orpolitical comment.

Rüger entertains his readers with a wide range of evidence from high-policyformulation, to secret police reports on public opinion, to analysis of the dramaticspace of naval spectacle, to discussions of the evolution of naval military tech-nology. Moreover, he follows the story through the rise of mass markets and newmedia, showing how once tightly controlled official dramas took on independentlife thanks to the technologies and the sociology of the infant Information Age.Anyone conversant with the media role of the World Wide Web today willunderstand Rüger’s contention that burgeoning media actually limited the controlexercised by British and German elites, even concerning official messages of theirown devising. Lastly, Rüger elevates his theme to the transnational level. In a briefcomment in his introduction, he notes that although historians have long seen theMediterranean “Ocean” itself as a subject for transnational history, that visionhas not transferred to the North Sea. Yet the North Sea has clearly served both asthe metaphorical space for Anglo-German rivalry in the twentieth century and asthe literal location of contact. What Fernand Braudel once accomplished in TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World now portends for the North Sea andnorthern Europe. It is a brilliant and surely fruitful proposal.

Sam Houston State University Kenneth E. Hendrickson

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. By Karel van der Toorn.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 401. $35.00.)

Although the Hebrew Bible has influenced nearly every spot on earth, its currentdistribution package, namely, a bound book of pages, belies its original nature andgenesis. In an outstanding work that exemplifies the best of modern scholarship,Karel van der Toorn sets out to uncover the cultural and professional milieu thatcreated the Hebrew Bible during the first millennium BCE.

Van der Toorn’s thesis is threefold: literacy was once mostly limited to aprofessional scribal class; the essence of writing has changed over the millennia;


and the original nature of the Hebrew Bible can be understood only in the contextof the scribal culture that created it. In the first part of this book, the authorexplains and expands that thesis. In the second part, he uses it to investigate theBible and how it was canonized.

The author draws on limited and unclear evidence from the Bible itself andfrom more extensive and certain evidence from what we (think we) know aboutMesopotamia and Egypt to assemble a picture of antiquity in which writing andwritten documents functioned materially differently than they do today. Literacywas limited, so bookstores and public libraries did not exist; authority trumpedauthorship; scribes wrote for other scribes, not for a reading public; writingtechnologies precluded inexpensive documents; and so forth. A thorough analysisof these and related matters, and their implications, takes the reader throughchapter five.

In chapters six and seven, the author uses the prior material to investigate thebooks of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah as a “model for understanding the involve-ment of the scribes in the production of the legal and narrative texts of the Bible”(173). In chapters eight and nine, about the concept of revelation and aboutcanonization, respectively, van der Toorn continues to expand the realm to whichhe applies his thesis. The analyses in these four chapters are interesting in theirown right and tend to support van der Toorn’s conclusions, although the readerat times wonders if the discussions are driven entirely by the evidence or in partby van der Toorn’s desired outcome.

Although the author assembles a coherent picture, his reasoning is ultimatelypartly circular. The paucity of information about the Hebrew Bible leads van derToorn to other cultures, most notably writing from roughly the second quarter ofthe first millennium BCE to neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian times. Van der Toornrelies on his (unwritten and unsupported) assumption that the writing culture of theBible resembled those other cultures in order to argue that they were similar.

But overlapping evidence that van der Toorn does not consider points in adifferent direction, and this reviewer concludes, in chapters three and four of Inthe Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (NYU Press, 2004),that the role of writing in Hebrew culture was unique in the ancient world. (Thereviewer suspects that precisely for that reason the Hebrew Bible is widely readtoday while neo-Babylonian and neo-Assyrian documents remain the purview ofthe academy.)

Vexingly then, readers are left with two largely incompatible conclusions, eachinternally consistent and coherent, but unlikely both to be entirely correct. Puzzlessuch as these create exciting times for scholarship, and van der Toorn contributes


significantly. Scribal Culture is essential reading for future scholars and interestedlay readers alike.

Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion Joel M. Hoffman

Et Tu Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder. By Greg Woolf. (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 199. $19.95.)

President Lincoln famously knew that calling a tail a leg would not make a cowhave five legs. And the subtitle on the cover of this work does not make the book“A Short History of Political Murder.” Seeing that subtitle, the reviewer mistak-enly imagined a selection, more or less equally weighted, of assassinations over thepast two thousand or so years. This is not so. Although the author touches brieflyon some recent killings in chapter two, this book is mostly about tyrannicide inancient Rome. And there is a different, more accurate, subtitle on the title page.

The text itself is admirable. It has about enough on Caesar’s murder as mostreaders are apt to want even though it is not definitive. Even Vincent Bugliosi’sseemingly definitive tome on JFK and Oswald, at 1,612 pages, may need revision,because of new discoveries such as the material recently found in a Dallas districtattorney’s safe.

Four chapters grace these pages. In chapter one, the author provides somedetails about Roman government in Caesar’s time along with background, events,and the immediate aftermath of his demise. Prefiguring much of the other threechapters are analyses of the literature about Caesar’s assassination. Much writingthat was contemporary has been lost, but some that is missing in the originalcomes to us through the filters of later authors such as Plutarch and Seutonius,who wrote during the apogee of the Empire. Using their accounts and contem-porary ones that survive, Greg Woolf has constructed a history of Caesar’s murderand its interpretations. From conflicts about details, Woolf moves through proxi-mate causes to competing motives and justifications. He takes readers closer tomodern relevance by referring to the “dispute over what constitutes an appropri-ate explanation for a cataclysm of this kind” (48). The question for potentialmodern Brutuses is: What might be acceptable reasons for political murder? Ofcourse, those, persuasive or not, will vary according to cultures, politics, religions,ideologies, and pathologies. Thus, there will never be one correct reason.

In chapter two, the author devotes a few pages to modern assassinations, tohow the people of liberal democracies see them and other forms of violence, andto how violence more generally relates to notions about advanced civil societies.


In the last two-thirds of the chapter, Woolf returns to ancient times and the issuesof acceptable versus unacceptable motivations, situations, and attention toconsequences.

In chapter three, the author reviews assassination during several hundred yearsof Rome after Caesar. “Aftershocks,” the last chapter, will appeal to many readersinterested in how Caesar’s murder and the deaths of Romans such as Catoinfluenced and have been reflected in literature, especially that of the past fourhundred or so years.

In all four chapters, Woolf does a good job of raising issues and providingcontextual answers. This erudite book is good for understanding Caesar, hisassassins, Roman politics, ideas relevant to assassination, and the echoes throughthe centuries of this famous murder.

The index is so poorly done it makes this reviewer wonder why the HarvardUniversity Press would not be more careful of its reputation.

Montana State University-Billings Norton H. Moses


The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire - By J. Rüger

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