Caesar: Life of a Colossus – By Adrian Goldsworthy

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Richard SpallOhio Wesleyan University

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Robert Dietle(Modern Western Europe)Western Kentucky University

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Framingham State College

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Betty Dessants(United States Since 1865)

Shippensburg University

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

Nigel Kennell & Stefanie Kennell(Ancient World)

Memorial University of Newfoundland

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

Paulette L. Pepin(Medieval Europe)

University of New Haven

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Richard Spall(Historiography)

Ohio Wesleyan University

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Texas Christian University

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Scarlett Rebman Kara ReiterJanna Dagley Colin MagruderKaleigh Felisberto Eric Francis

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WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE

© 2009 Phi Alpha Theta

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE-EAST

A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the Stateof Israel. By Gudrun Krämer. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.Pp. viii, 357. $35.00.)

The author of this survey begins with brief references to biblical times and thenfocuses on the period 1750–1948, the founding of the State of Israel. Thoughignoring vast amounts of historical evidence, Gudrun Krämer bases her versionof Palestine’s painful history on carefully selected facts, making her framing andintent clear. Although the author cites the continued presence in Palestine of smallJewish communities, she omits others. Proof of her framing can be seen in themultiple assertions that Palestine, though sparsely populated for much of itshistory, was never devoid of an Arab majority and that their Islamic culture wasnot stagnant.

Extensive archeological findings throughout Israel, attesting to a Jewishpresence, are mostly acknowledged but summarily dismissed as postdating “Arabroots dating back over a millennium.” Thus, Masada, “whether it actually hap-pened or not,” is simply identified as having been turned into “a symbol of Jewishnational history” (13). Qumran, for example, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls con-cerning the Essenes, is not mentioned. This find was significant because it revealedmore about the Essenes than any other Jewish group of the Second Temple period,which predates Islam by almost a thousand years (536 BCE–70 CE).

Previous historians, Krämer states, criticized Ottoman rulers for their poorstatistics and their neglect of Palestine (132). However, “Critical historians nolonger look primarily for external actors . . . [but] pay greater attention to local orregional actors. . . .” Thus, Krämer tells readers, “the temporal horizon is broad-ened, and the boundaries of political change and economic revival are shifted.”Her conclusion is one example of her ignoring historical facts: “The year 1882—beginning of Zionist immigration—loses its status as the date of Palestine’s entryinto modernity” (40).

The book’s theme laments the fact that Palestinian Arabs were disadvantagedas compared to the Jewish settlers, whom Krämer identifies primarily not as“Jews” but as Zionist settlers, perhaps implying an alien origin (269–270). Atsome point, however, she acknowledges that it became difficult to distinguishbetween them (290).

Krämer details the Jews’ incredible effort, specifically during the 1920s and1930s, to develop the land, schools, universities, cultural institutions, libraries,

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industries, and jobs, as well as to build new infrastructures, thereby improvingthe lives of the people (197–198). She also admits that the dynamism of the“Zionist settlers” attracted Arabs from neighboring countries to seek work inPalestine (113). In this regard, she laments the Yishuv’s policy of preferring Jewishover Arab workers.

Regarding Israel’s War of Independence, Krämer’s research would havebeen improved had she read Nadav Safran’s From War to War: The Arab-IsraeliConfrontation. Among the many unmentioned details in Krämer’s book is thepartiality of the British, who, on leaving Palestine, left vast quantities of militaryequipment and strategic bases and flew reconnaissance missions for the Arabsthroughout the war, providing them with critical information. Krämer’s glaringomissions, innuendoes, and subtle historical distortions throughout this bookdiminish its potential value.

University of Haifa Sondra M. Rubenstein

Nelson Mandela: A Biography. By Peter Limb. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,2008. Pp. xvi, 145. $35.00.)

Biographies of South Africa’s iconic first black president, Nelson Mandela[1994–1999], include Fatima Meer’s and Anthony Sampson’s “authorized” onesand several versions of an autobiography. Peter Limb’s volume does not purportto offer a major original study, but as part of the Greenwood Biographies series,provides a brief introduction for general audiences, closer in tone to the earlierbiographies than Tom Lodge’s 2006 demythologizing “critical” work. Tenchapters cover Mandela’s youth, his career as a lawyer and politician, his longimprisonment, the transition from apartheid to majority rule, and his presidency,with a brief epilogue, timeline, and glossary. The bibliography is much moreselective than the rich endnote sources, which include memoirs, interviews, andnewspapers.

Factual errors are rare: the Hertzog Acts to alter the African vote were passedin 1936, not 1935; the African National Congress did not govern “in its ownright” after the 1996 National Party exit, as the Inkatha Freedom Party remainedin the cabinet. Nevertheless, covering so much ground inevitably produces ellipsesand simplifications. For example, asserting that the Dutch introduced slaves fromSoutheast Africa could imply that many came from present-day South Africarather than Madagascar and (mainly late in the slave trade) the Mozambicanhinterland. Pages xii and eighty-nine suggest the apartheid regime banned onlyMandela’s photograph and voice, yet similar restrictions applied to many other

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antiapartheid activists. Mandela’s shock at the National Party’s 1948 victoryseems puzzling without a discussion of what exactly made the previous govern-ment’s policies by comparison “moderate.” Page ninety-one does not make clearthat the Sullivan Principles were for companies remaining in South Africa, notthose which disinvested. Terms such as “Left Hand” or “Right Hand House,”“common roll,” or “banning order” need explanation.

Mandela’s youth and leadership in prison are especially finely detailed, butthe discussion of the apartheid regime’s demise stresses external pressures andMandela’s negotiations from confinement over the internal struggle; there is nomention of the 1980s school boycott, leaving unexplained Mandela’s 1990 callfor a return to school. Limb does not overlook limitations of Mandela’s presi-dency such as his acceptance of funding from the Indonesian dictator Suharto,lack of action on AIDS, or controversial adoption of neoliberal economics, but hefocuses on Mandela as transformer and reconciler, not problems such as contin-ued political intolerance, creeping centralization, corruption, soaring violentcrime, or Mandela’s much-criticized loyalty to old comrades, who were sometimesretained in office when they needed to go.

The author’s emphasis on Mandela’s greatness over his possible blind spots isunderstandable: his long career, especially negotiating in old age a transition tomajoritarian democracy, was remarkable, while his ability to transcend his ownsuffering makes scholarly criticisms seem churlish. The range of this biography, itsconciseness, lively narrative style, and Limb’s deft treatment of complicated topicssuch as the influences shaping Mandela’s ideas; the post-1990 negotiations; or hissubtle, shifting views on communism and African nationalism, make it a usefulintroduction.

Alma College Patrick J. Furlong

The History of the Central Asian Republics. By Peter L. Roudik. (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xix, 212. $45.00.)

In 1991 the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought to the cognizance of a widerpublic the existence of five newly independent countries that, until that date, werepart of the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR) constituting the Union ofSoviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The history of these so-called “-stan” countries,namely Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, is thesubject of this book. Before their integration into the Soviet Union these lands hadbeen already under tsarist Russian rule, the result of a conquest lasting severalcenturies.


For reasons difficult to understand, Peter L. Roudik’s enquiry harks backas far as the sixth millennium BC, and he attempts to sketch the history ofthe peoples that, at one time or another, lived on the territory of the modern“-stan” countries or even beyond them (12). Thus in time and space, he goes asfar back as the Turkic khanate of the sixth century, which flourished in distantMongolia!

The confused and confusing chapter three, “Early History: Islamization andthe Birth of Central Asian Nations,” and chapter four, “The Medieval Statesof Central Asia,” may safely be left unread. Chapters five and six, dealingrespectively with “Russian Colonization” [1865–1917] and the “RevolutionaryEra” [1917–1924] are slightly better.

Roudik’s description of Soviet rule [1925–1991] in chapter seven is reason-ably objective; credit is given where credit is due. Its many and often tragicfailures notwithstanding, the Soviet system successfully brought the populationof the Central Asian republics into the modern age and created a society with a96 percent literacy rate. The liberation of women is yet to come to their southernneighbors. Chapter eight deals with “Post-Soviet Transformation,” while chapternine is a vain attempt to describe “Political and Legal Thought of Central Asia.”

Throughout all these pages, the author does not appear to take cognizanceof basic cultural differences separating the Kirghiz and the Kazakh, touched byIslam only superficially, from the strongly Muslim Turkmen, Uzbek, and Tajik.Also, the Tajik language is closely related to New Persian while Kirghiz, Kazakh,Uzbek, and Turkmen are Turkic languages notwithstanding Roudik’s statementthat Turkmen is “close to the northern Iranian dialect” (6). Elsewhere, he writesthat “the Turkish-speaking people of Central Asia are called Uzbeks” (25). Scantattention is paid to the vexed question of language policies of the newly indepen-dent republics and to the political significance of the choice of alphabets: Cyrillic,Latin, or Arabic. Roudik eschews the crucially important question of the use ofRussian as a tool of communication within the multiethnic population of eachrepublic and as a link with the wider world.

It is clear that the author failed to master the vast amount of informa-tion that could have provided a more comprehensive basis for his presentation.The haphazard quality of the bibliographical essay provides an explanation ifnot an excuse for the weaknesses of this book, which also needed some stylisticediting.

Indiana University Denis Sinor


Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958. By Elizabeth Schmidt. (Athens,Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 310. $26.95.)

This volume is a welcome addition to the sparse literature on one of Africa’spioneering independence movements. France’s overseas territory of Guinea was atthe vanguard of Africa’s decolonization when it split from the métropole in 1958.Rejecting General de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic Constitution, Guinea became thefirst sub-Saharan country to declare its independence from France. Althoughde Gaulle punished Guinea vindictively for its decision, Guinea’s break was justthe first fissure in the collapse of France’s empire in Africa, which the new chartercould not halt. Within two years following Guinea’s historic referendum, most ofFrench Africa had likewise opted for independence, albeit on much better termswith France.

Although other political histories of Guinea use independence as a startingpoint, in this work Elizabeth Schmidt takes a critical step back to analyze howGuinea arrived at its historic “No” vote. More focused than its title indicates,this book traces Guinea’s political development through the RassemblementDémocratique Africain (RDA), a federation of political parties in francophoneAfrica. The author details the Guinean RDA branch’s tumultuous relationshipwith the French Communist Party, the interterritorial RDA secretariat, andconservative political tendencies at the start of the Cold War and the end of thecolonial era. The author’s research is a significant contribution to historians’understanding of this nationalist movement.

Most strikingly, the author turns on their heads previous scholars’ depictionsof the Guinean RDA’s charismatic and controversial leader, Sékou Touré. Schmidtconvincingly argues that Touré has been portrayed too starkly as an unrepentantradical and perennial autocrat. More of a political pragmatist, she suggests, Touréwas open to compromise with France, but militant members of the GuineanRDA, who wielded tremendous power due to the branch’s uniquely democraticand decentralized structure, forced him to take a more radical position. Tradeunionists, students, teachers, and women’s wings mobilized for a “No” vote,demanding immediate independence instead of second-class status in the newCommunauté Francaise. Touré’s falling out with the RDA’s president from Côted’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, is well documented in other works. Refresh-ingly, the author shifts readers’ focus from party elites to grassroots constituentswho challenged party leadership and steered the platform to the Left.

As an expansion of Schmidt’s journal article, the book remains engaging,readable, and brief. The author is much indebted to Hans Morgenthau’s 1964


masterwork on political parties. But Schmidt also draws copiously on archivalmaterial, especially colonial police reports monitoring RDA activities, and per-sonal interviews with party activists, making this an original work. She rightlyshies away from Sékou Touré’s own voluminous musings on the independencestruggle, which the skillful rhetorician based more on party polemics thanhistorical fact.

Yet Schmidt’s thesis begs the question how everything went so wrong inGuinea. After independence under the RDA-Parti Démocratique de Guinée, itspopulist democracy degraded tragically into a single-party dictatorship. Althoughoutside of its scope, the book leaves readers with more questions about Guinea’spolitical development, ones that hopefully the author will address as adroitly in afuture work.

National Endowment for Democracy Christopher Wyrod

Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914–1932. By Peter Sluglett.(New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 318. $24.50.)

During World War I, Great Britain conquered and created Iraq, welding threeformer Ottoman provinces into an imagined kingdom that the British establishedunder an ambiguous mandate from the newborn League of Nations. This is thecritical formative period examined by Peter Sluglett in a study first published in1976 and now updated in a welcome new edition. Sluglett details the strategicerrors and willful self-deception that characterized the British moment in Iraq.Historians tend to forget that in the 1970s the consensual judgment held thatBritain’s role in Baghdad was for the most part a success and that the massacre ofthe Iraqi royal family in a 1958 military coup was viewed as a tragic anomaly.Sluglett’s clinical analysis, based on extensive research in Whitehall archives,suggests otherwise.

Britain’s declared aim was to promote constitutional rule and modernize afeudal economy, in the expectation that a prosperous, secular-minded Iraq wouldserve as a liberalizing beacon for the Middle East. In reality, Sluglett writes,political freedom “functioned only as a form of glorified cronyism, and wasextended only to the privileged few” (216). It thus became all too easy forextremists to play on popular prejudices because most Iraqis were aware that theirgovernment was carried out “for the benefit of a Sunni urban political elite, withina framework created and supported by British authorities” (211). Compound-ing the problem was excessive British reliance on cheaper air power to lower


occupation costs and punish recalcitrant tribes, thereby sowing abiding rage overthe slaying of civilians and the legal immunities shielding military personnel.

Sluglett’s most revealing findings concern oil. Although Britain’s dominantrole in the exploitation of oil was probably the most enduring result of itsinvolvement in the country’s affairs, he writes, “it always seemed rather badmanners to say so, largely, perhaps, because of the vigorous denials of theconnection made by statesmen” (65). A stream of long-classified documentsconfirms the primacy of petroleum in Britain’s successful effort to detach oil-favored Mosul from Syria and join it to Basra and Baghdad. No less urgent wasBritish insistence on ensuring permanent control of a newly formed Iraqi Petro-leum Company (IPC). When Iraqi authorities sought 20 percent equity partici-pation in the IPC, the request was rejected, and the Baghdad government waseventually advanced a £400,000 loan against future royalties, making it peren-nially dependent on a British-controlled oil company (74–75). It is details likethese that give Sluglett’s history fresh value for Americans coping with verysimilar questions, and not just in Iraq. It was surely not his intention, butthis cool and clinical narrative helps explain the widespread cynicism in theMiddle East about the lofty avowals concerning democracy promotion that flowso smoothly from Washington.

World Policy Institute Karl E. Meyer

THE AMERICAS

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction—Fifteenth AnniversaryEdition. By Edward L. Ayers. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007.Pp. xii, 579. $19.95.)

The author set himself an ambitious goal in 1992 when he published a book that,as he notes in this new edition, was “inspired by the sweep and power of C. VannWoodward’s Origins of the New South, 1877–1913,” written in 1951. In fact,Edward L. Ayers writes that he wanted to accomplish what the dean of Southernhistory had not done:

Combine into a single portrait black and white, women and men, mountainsand low-country, town and country, politics and popular culture, businessand religion, literature and legislation. I wanted to tackle some big ques-tions: Why did formal segregation emerge a quarter century after emanci-pation? How could Populism combust in the most politically conservative


part of the country? How did black Southerners survive in a place whereeverything was stacked against them? How did the miracles of blues, jazz,country, and gospel music rise out of the despair of a poor, broken, andseparate time and place? (440)

Now, fifteen years after Ayers’s book was published, Oxford UniversityPress has issued a special anniversary edition enabling readers to examine boththe original and this new presentation of a volume that received considerableattention when it first was published. In fact, when it appeared, a few reviewerspredicted it would displace Woodward as the standard synthesis of New Southhistory. The basic text of the new edition remains as it was in the original, withno updating. Ayers still combines a mix of social, economic, political, andcultural history into an extremely readable narrative. His occasionally impres-sionistic style almost camouflages the statistics he marshals on his behalf. Hediscusses how studying community-level dynamics helps identify forces thatmight not be noticeable if only the larger picture were studied, and yet he neverloses the broader view. His mastery of diverse topics such as the region’sreligion, music, and railroads is as impressive as his discussion of populismand politics. Ayers consults a massive array of primary and secondary sources,and presents the results of details of his quantitative analysis in an appendix andendnotes that add well over one hundred pages to the book. Fortunately, Ayershas added improved maps and a postscript with its own notes titled “Thoughtson the 15th Anniversary Edition.”

However, this new edition ultimately disappoints the reader. Ayers chose tomake no significant editorial additions or changes but rather to treat the book assomething of a classic work in a historiographical canon, which is odd giventhe passage of only fifteen years. Although he alludes to some of his critics in ageneral sense, he does so in a humorous and rather dismissive manner. Nowheredoes he address either the scholarship on the era that has occurred in the yearssince it was written or specific reviews of the work. Disappointingly, as inthe original edition, this new edition fails to include a bibliography of Ayers’ssources, which would have been greatly enhanced with an update. Instead,Ayers’s new edition offers little more than better maps and personal musingsabout the research process, which are interesting but seem oddly inadequate ina book that originally issued a bold challenge encouraging people to rethinkpost-Civil War history.

Minnesota State University, Mankato Charles K. Piehl


Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution. By Benjamin L. Carp. (New York,N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 334. $35.00.)

In this book, the author returns to a problem that many past historians haveconsidered: the importance of cities for the American Revolution and of theRevolution for American cities. Carl Bridenbaugh examined these issues in Citiesin Revolt [1955], using the narrative and impressionistic social-history style ofhis day. Gary B. Nash described The Urban Crucible [1979] with heavy stresson social class. Benjamin L. Carp’s large theme is the density of urban space,which he considers in variant terms as he moves from one city to another.

With greater rigor than Bridenbaugh and at less length than Nash, Carp offersseparate chapters on Boston, New York, Newport, Charleston, and Philadelphia.Each chapter develops a variation on the theme of urban space. Most successfullyCarp explores “The Boston Waterfront as Contested Space.” Better than anywriter the reviewer knows, he evokes here the tangled, ocean-spanning, class-riven, open-ended complexity that distinguished all colonial port cities from anyof their hinterlands. As the reviewer worked through the book, he recommendedthe chapter to a graduate student who has long experience in city planning, andthe student agreed.

Carp’s ideas in this chapter point to a fresh understanding of the wholephenomenon of coastal cities, small in population (by modern standards) thoughthey were. There were no such entities (of course) prior to European contact. Asthey emerged in a huge curve that stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires, theynot only replicated the complexity of their European and West African counter-parts, but also radiated the whole force of the booming Atlantic basin inland.Carp’s Boston waterfront is where the edges of two worlds, respectively ocean andcontinent spanning, collided.

The same point has to hold for Carp’s other cities, but he treats each of themdifferently. For New York, he concentrates on tavern life. In Newport his interestis sacred spaces, the interiors of churches and the Touro Synagogue. In CharlesTown he turns to domestic space and in Philadelphia to the conduct of politics,in and out of doors. Carp reads all of these spaces as zones of both conflictand accommodation, whether among drinkers of different classes, worshipersof different faiths, Carolina masters and slaves, or Pennsylvanians jostling againstboth their province’s heredity proprietary family and one another.

The result is to evoke the many varieties of urban experience in late-colonialAmerica. It is not news that during the long, tense decade of imperial crisis, fromthe Stamp Act riots to the destruction of Boston’s tea consignment, city people


took the lead. Carp demonstrates how their complex urban lives fed into thatprocess.

But after the fine Boston chapter the reviewer did wonder whether the author’sdistinctions are more heuristic than historical. Perhaps the best way to understandwhat he argues is that all his themes came to bear in varying proportions in eachof these places. And given the explosive development of urban America afterindependence, it is difficult to take seriously Carp’s conclusion that in the youngrepublic these cities were “forgotten.” On the contrary, the energy that hadcreated them was set free.

Southern Methodist University Edward Countryman

Old Hickory’s Nephew: The Political and Private Struggles of Andrew JacksonDonelson. By Mark R. Cheathem. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. ix, 371. $45.00.)

There are some people who deserve full-length biographies, and there are otherswho do not. It is unfortunate that such an adroit practitioner of historicalbiography as Mark R. Cheathem has chosen such an unremarkable subject asAndrew Jackson’s nephew for his biographical study Old Hickory’s Nephew.Andrew Jackson Donelson’s only creditable claim to fame, besides his familialconnection, was his participation in the ill-fated 1856 Know-Nothing Party ticketwhen he ran as Millard Fillmore’s vice presidential candidate. Other than this,Donelson’s only other significant relevance was his uncanny ability to avoidpaying off his substantial debts. This is truly a shame because Cheathem has givenDonelson his heart and soul, and Donelson gives very little back.

Donelson was born in 1799, and after only five years, lost his father topneumonia whereupon he was taken into the home of his uncle Andrew Jackson.When his mother remarried, Donelson and his three brothers remained with hisUncle Andrew and Aunt Rachel, who were childless. Seeing potential in Donelson,Jackson sent his namesake to Cumberland College and then West Point, where hisuncle extolled the virtues of martial life with advice such as, “[i]f the superiorattempts either to strike or kick you, put him to instant death the moment youreceive either” (20). With advice such as this, coming from his father figure andhero, it is no wonder that Donelson’s future was a bit spotty. Unfortunately,Cheathem does little with this, offering only that Jackson was training his nephewto conform to the “virtuous [and] honorable” life of a southern gentleman (20).

Leaving it at that, Cheathem moves on to explain that it was at West Point thatDonelson first began the pattern of indebtedness that would plague his life. Upon


graduation, Donelson became Jackson’s aide-de-camp in Florida. From there hefollowed Jackson into the White House serving as an advisor and speechwriter.After the Jacksonian presidency, Donelson served the Tyler administration infacilitating the annexation of Texas and the Polk administration as minister toPrussia. In 1856, his political career ended when he cast his lot with the Know-Nothings. He survived the Civil War as a conflicted Southern unionist, whoowned scores of slaves until the institution was finally abolished. Donelson diedon his Mississippi plantation in 1871.

According to Cheatham, Donelson always fancied himself the natural heir toJackson’s power and legacy. He became driven by a sense of privilege and a falsedestiny that would never be fulfilled and poisoned his life. Hounded by creditorsthroughout his life and often sabotaged by his own uncle in his attempts to ascendin the political world, Donelson became obsessed with money and profoundlyanxious about his relationship with his uncle and his own abilities. Yet Cheathemdoes not emphasize this. Instead, he concludes his biography by stating, “Donel-son came to embody what it meant to be a southern gentleman of his time:virtuous, ambitious, and honorable ” (331). Ambitious though he may have been,the vivid figure of Old Hickory’s nephew so skillfully crafted by Mark Cheathemmaintains many attributes, but virtue and honor are not among them.

Keene State College Matthew H. Crocker

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibi-tion Movement. By Joe L. Coker. (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press,2007. Pp. ix, 344. $50.00.)

Given the American South’s complex past of race, class, religion, gender, andhonor, thoroughly stewed in medieval legends and lost-cause mythology, its storyis one best told sober. When all of these subjects are brought together under onebig tent, as Joe L. Coker does in his examination of Southern evangelicals andtheir effort to refashion moral authority through the prohibition movement, thena clear eye and steady hand is doubly needed. Coker is up to the task.

The newest contributor to the University of Kentucky Press “Religion in theSouth” series, Coker takes his readers through the origins and development ofthe Southern prohibition movement, which started as a weak sister to antebellumNorthern temperance reform, to the eve of World War I, when it became, heargues, the main impetus for national prohibition. By then, Southern evangelicalshad spent over thirty years testing myriad strategies for restricting access to demonspirits in state and local municipalities across the South.


To reach this point, Coker demonstrates the serious drinking problem earlyAmericans had, with per capita consumption, regardless of geographic location,of over four gallons a year. Sectional approaches to solving this problem weredifferent, however, as Southern church leaders generally eschewed political solu-tions, preferring the pulpit’s propensity for moral suasion to control aberrantbehavior. This sensitivity to political or secular temperance was influenced bythe growing abolition movement as much as it was by the doctrine of spirituality,which argued for a strict separation of church and state. After the Civil War,evangelicals gained control of the Southern temperance movement and began tomove away from pure moral suasion to a political activism framed by Christianmorality. Their actions split various denominations and fractured politicalallegiances, as the stalwart Democratic machine, long tepid on temperance, lostmembers to the Prohibition Party.

Coker shows how the politics of prohibition influenced Southern views onrace, honor, and gender. Early efforts at reconciliation between whites and AfricanAmericans were a hallmark of the short-lived “New South” ideology, and bothpeoples saw prohibition as a tool in advancing the cause. Yet rank and file AfricanAmericans refused to follow their own conservative leaders, while white evangeli-cals, fearing increased black political power, reverted to lost-cause mythology andrighteous racism. Southern honor morphed from the manly defense of women,family, and state by dueling, brawling, and hard drinking to one where abstinencefrom violence and drinking best honored the lost cause. While women activistsworked to tie suffrage and prohibition together, Southern evangelicals were busysevering the knot, demanding women retreat from the political wheel and returnto the family hearthstone.

Coker’s study of evangelicals and Southern prohibition will appeal toscholars and students of Southern history. Students of American religioushistory may find Coker’s claim that prohibition, and not evolution, is thestarting point to modern political evangelism in America to be a notion worthyof a closer look.

Alverno College John C. Savagian

Roanoke, Virginia, 1882–1912: Magic City of the New South. By Rand Dotson.(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Pp. xxi, 338. $42.00.)

This author’s account of the early years of Roanoke, Virginia, is local historyat its best. Combining a graceful narrative with keen analysis, he weaves togetherthe economic, social, and political history of the railroad boomtown while never


losing sight of its significance in the larger context of the New South. Among hissources are business records, family papers, and Roanoke’s many newspapers ofthe period. Maps drawn for the book and a superb collection of photographscontribute to readers’ understanding.

Roanoke derived its nickname from the seemingly magical transformation ofthe tobacco depot of Big Lick to an industrial city in the early 1880s. Rand Dotsonstresses the role of local boosters in persuading a Philadelphia investment firm tochoose Big Lick as the site of the headquarters and machine shops of the Norfolkand Western and Shenandoah Valley railroads. The author describes Roanoke as“the prototypical New South city—an extreme version of everything that wassupposed to remedy the South’s torpid post-Civil War economy” (240). AlthoughRoanoke became Virginia’s third largest city by 1900 and its entrepreneursdiversified the economy subsequently, Dotson suggests that the city never fulfilledthe promise of the early years as the American economy has shifted away frommanufacturing.

Deep racial and class divisions characterized Roanoke. Local elites joined withnewcomers to create an upper class. Skilled workers from the North joined ruralmigrants in the white working class while a large number of African Americansalso came in from the countryside. Racial tensions threatened the city’s economicprogress from the beginning. Dotson offers essential background informationabout whites’ frustrations in his discussion of the Roanoke Riot of 1893. Thatghastly incident ended with the lynching of a black prisoner accused of assaultinga white woman despite the efforts of Mayor Henry Trout, who called out themilitia in a vain effort to prevent mob violence. The riot received nationalattention, sullying the boosters’ image of a progressive city.

In fact, Roanoke was more primitive than progressive. Rural people broughtcountry habits, such as keeping cows for milk and butter, to the city. Unpavedstreets, a filthy public market, and open sewers contributed to high rates ofdisease. Saloons and brothels played a major role in the city’s reputation forimmorality. Starved for revenue due to tax breaks for new industries, the munici-pal government was unable to provide such necessities as basic sanitation andsuch amenities as parks and a public library.

In the first decade of the new century, three “core groups of ‘progressivereformers’” endeavored to improve Roanoke. Dotson ably chronicles the struggleto prohibit cattle from wandering across the city and the evangelicals’ fight forprohibition. Middle- and upper-class women crusaded for improved sanitation,pure milk and food, and better schools. Dotson, however, writes that, despite theirdesire for reform, “Roanoke’s progressives were uniformly conservative in their


outlook—they did not advocate social justice . . . and never doubted the absolutesuitability of Roanoke’s economic and racial order” (238).

Rand Dotson’s work enriches readers’ understanding of both Virginia’s urbanhistory and the successes and failures of the New South.

Old Dominion University James R. Sweeney

The 1870 Ghost Dance. By Cora DuBois. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of NebraskaPress, 2007. Pp. xxviii, 375. $19.95.)

Famed Berkeley anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber once described the historyof California as a pitiful record of small events. He was soon to discover that thegenocide perpetuated among California’s indigenous peoples was arguably theworst example of systematic extermination of Indians in the American West if notthe entire United States. Working closely with Kroeber prior to World War II wasCora DuBois, who later became the first woman to receive tenure in anthropologyat Harvard, in 1954.

DuBois’s work on the 1870 Ghost Dance movement among California tribesrepresents a pioneer effort in the budding field of ethnohistory. Less familiar thanthe famed Ghost Dance movement of Wovoka that spread to the northern plainsin 1890 and culminated in the infamous Wounded Knee massacre, the 1870movement, although originating among the Paiute (Numa) of Nevada’s WalkerLake region, took on diverse dimensions as it spread west. Each of the smallCalifornia tribes, whose numbers had been catastrophically reduced, added ele-ments of spiritualism pertinent to their particular situations. More of a religiousrevival movement based in shamanism than a dance, the collection of what hadbecome many “separate movements” died down somewhat in intensity about1877.

Yet the native peoples remembered the teachings, and, thanks to DuBois,their rituals and beliefs were recorded as part of Kroeber’s obsessive attemptsto capture the culture of California’s Indians before, as he believed wouldhappen, those cultures would disappear forever. But as is the case throughout theAmericas, California’s Indians and elements of their culture, belief systems, andworldviews did not die out completely. Today the spiritual energies inspired by theGhost Dance movement of 1870 are still a viable part of individual and communalliving among indigenous peoples in California, and their life ways, to some degree,can only be understood through the context of the religious teachings of this140-year-old revival movement. Readers may thank DuBois for preserving manyof these teachings for the outside world to understand.


Since it was first published in 1939, The 1870 Ghost Dance has long beenunavailable to scholars. Almost seventy years later, it is available once again.It remains a seminal work, provides an essential source for understanding indig-enous ways, and serves as a springboard for decolonization efforts in the state ofCalifornia.

Metropolitan State College of Denver John H. Monnett

The Young American Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party,1828–1861. By Yonatan Eyal. (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press,2007. Pp. xii, 252. $75.00.)

Accounts of the antebellum democracy often reflect a disconnect. The drama ofthe Jackson and Van Buren presidencies—nullification and banking policies—suddenly gave way to Manifest Destiny and antislavery. What is the explanation?Once settled, economic issues were eclipsed by expansionism. This is true,perhaps, but leaves much unsaid.

Part of the answer is Young America, suggests Yonatan Eyal. Not a coherentmajority, they nonetheless helped shape their party (Eyal puts stress on thegeneration gap between them and older Democrats). Using a topical/chronologicalapproach, he describes Jacksonian orthodoxy (a traditional agrarian, antielitistphilosophy), based on strict constructionist fears of federal action. But after thedepression that began in 1837, young Democrats “came to terms with economicexpansion, and saw . . . [a market economy] could prove quite lucrative” (30).Though not against regulation, they demanded such federal action as moderatetariffs and transportation assistance. Pushing “reform” meant not Whiggish“suasion” (for, say, temperance), but advocating free land, regulating monopolies,and limiting the spoils system. And pressure from their constituents justified thesechanges—always a Democratic prerequisite.

Indeed, the last shaped their foreign policy. Young America flexed its nation-alist muscles, even supporting filibusters, not from a simple lust for land, but adeep commitment to self-government and liberty. Excited by the 1848 Europeanrevolutions, Young Americans saw their country as the template for a democraticEurope (Young Italy and Young Hungary), and hopefully the world. Even youngdiplomats treated European pomp with disdain. If free trade goals suggestedexpansion, Oregon, Mexico, and Cuba were also symbols of Jefferson’s “newempire of liberty” and universal democracy (not necessarily under the Americanflag).


Young Americans reached their apogee in the 1840s–1850s; once bridgingSouthern and Van Buren animosities, they elevated Polk and Pierce to the presi-dency. But physical expansionism aggravated sectional suspicions and dividedYoung America. Eyal suggests Stephen Douglas symbolized this. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill sought a Pacific railroad to promote settlement and democraticinstitutions—yet destroyed the party unity required. Concludes Eyal, it “becameboth apotheosis and end for the age of the New Democracy” (222).

Eyal opens each chapter with a useful summary. And he pays presidentsbrief attention, emphasizing other movers and shakers: large contributors, U.S.Senators, diplomats. Eyal’s footnotes reveal his knowledge of such figures asAugust Belmont, Sidney Breese, James Shield, and George Sanders.

Persuasive and revealing, this author confirms many of the reviewer’s ownfindings. Though it has been argued elsewhere, readers might question a genera-tion gap as a leading force behind Young America—overlooking local politicalnetworks. And Eyal’s sweeping summaries sometimes mislead, such as whenhe suggests that republican ideas of limited federal power were opposed by“Federalists and their eventual Whig successors” (21). Economically true, thisimperfectly reflects later party alignments. But these are minor caveats. Eyalpresents a skilled, thorough study of Young America that should be on everyspecialist’s shelf and in advanced classes and seminars on antebellum politics.

Midwestern State University Everett W. Kindig

The Supreme Court: An Essential History. By Peter Charles Hoffer, WilliamjamesHull Hoffer, and N. E. H. Hull. (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007.Pp. ix, 491. $34.05.)

Every American who is neither a lawyer nor a constitutional teacher/scholarshould read this book. Probably (unfortunately) they will not. The expert will notlearn anything new here (although the book could be a useful reference tool). Butlaypeople will learn much from this reliable, convenient, and highly accessiblesingle-volume history of the United States Supreme Court. The authors make clearin the introduction that complex Supreme Court cases cannot be easily explainedand that the Court’s secrecy and often arcane language add layers of incompre-hensibility. They do an excellent job of laying bare the details, trends, tensions,and consequences associated with Supreme Court decisional history.

This is a book on constitutional history, not constitutional law. Hence, it isorganized not around constitutional provisions or categories of law but aroundhistorical periods (the usual format of covering the Court’s year under a specific


chief justice is used here). However, the authors are quite good at referring backto an earlier Court period when necessary to explain a development adequately.They are also quite good at summarizing and contextualizing complex cases.And individual cases that emerge during one period are well integrated into thelonger history of the Court. The lay reader will be more than satisfied withthe result. For the expert, there is a superb bibliographic essay at the end of thebook. The authors are seasoned and talented legal historians. Collectively, theyhave produced several dozen books on legal history and edited this publisher’sown Landmark Law Cases. They are insightful without taking long detours.They are objective without sacrificing the opportunity to explore consequences.And many readers will enjoy the delightful minibiographies of individualjustices.

The book is divided into three parts: the “Heroic Courts” of Jay, Ellsworth,Marshall, Taney, and Chase [1789–1873]; the “Classical Courts” of Waite, Fuller,White, Taft, and Hughes [1874–1941]; and the “Modern Courts” of Stone,Vinson, Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist [1941–2005]. There is also a brief epi-logue on “The Court Today and Tomorrow.” (This reviewer would have omittedthe epilogue; it is barely history and any account is destined to be wrong andrewritten.) Of the three main parts, which run a total of 450 pages, the reviewerenjoyed the middle part the most. The best historians cannot do justice toMarshall and Taney in 108 pages. And most of them are already more familiarwith the 1941–2005 period. But, the reader (especially the lay reader) shouldcarefully consider the “Classical Courts” of 1874–1941 before agreeing to rollback constitutional law’s clock to pre-1937 (the determination of those, includingat least one current Supreme Court Justice, to find the “lost Constitution” andrescue it from “exile”).

Legal scholars know that no one book can do it all. But if the lay reader isdestined to read just one book on Supreme Court history, this book should be it.

Ohio Wesleyan University William C. Louthan

Mamie Doud Eisenhower: The General’s First Lady. By Marilyn Irvin Holt.(Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 2007. Pp. 190. $29.95.)

Mamie Doud Eisenhower had the misfortune to be first lady just before JacquelineKennedy, whose youth and charm captivated the nation—and the world. Formany she also paled in comparison to the irrepressible Eleanor Roosevelt, whohad left the White House only eight years before President Eisenhower took theoath of office in early 1953. It is tempting to compare Mamie to her immediate


predecessor, Bess Truman, who had neither the energy of Eleanor Roosevelt northe elegance of Jacqueline Kennedy. But Bess Truman never enjoyed being firstlady and tried to avoid as many demands as she could. Mamie Eisenhower, bycomparison, flourished in the role.

Biographer Marilyn Irvin Holt explains that Mamie struck most Americansin the 1950s as the perfect first lady. Describing herself as just a “housewife,” sheechoed the era’s embrace of motherhood and family. By labeling herself a house-wife, Mamie meant that her primary role was to support her husband, thepresident, in any and every way that he needed her. This included being a dotingmother and grandmother, as well as hostess for her family—and for the largerAmerican family. And like many women of the day, it was her job to write lettersto family, friends, and social connections. To this list, she added political support-ers. Sometimes her correspondence even served as an unofficial conduit to andfrom the president.

Though her style was not glamorous, Mamie believed that it was important todress well and always in a way that felt comfortable and genuine to her. Havinga first lady who was well dressed, but not a fashion statement, was probablyreassuring to a public that had been through years of upheaval—first with theGreat Depression and then with World War II.

Mamie was well prepared to be first lady. As the wife of a rising armyofficer—and then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe—she had developeda strong sense of duty as a military spouse, an attitude that she took to the WhiteHouse. Being a military wife had also allowed her to travel widely. In the yearsjust after World War II, she met a number of top international leaders who stillhad political influence during the Eisenhower administration.

Holt dismisses the claim, still believed by some, that Mamie had a seriousdrinking problem. Although she could not avoid the cocktail circuit, Holt believesthat rumors of Mamie’s drinking to excess were circulated by women enviousof her position. Holt likewise rejects the claim that the general had an affair withKay Summersby, his driver in England, during World War II.

Holt has written a superb biography of Mamie Eisenhower. The book is wellresearched and gracefully written. It places this first lady very deftly into herlife and times. The book should appeal to general readers, to students of thepresidency, to anyone wanting a better understanding of the role of women inAmerican life, and to those who seek a larger understanding of the first six decadesof the twentieth century.

Chestnut Hill College David R. Contosta


Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America. By Josef Joffe. (New York, N.Y.:W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Pp. 260. $13.95.)

This author’s favorite analogy for America’s travails is Gulliver. The end of theCold War, he writes, released Gulliver from previous restraints. There were goodand bad consequences. The good was that the United States did not shrug itsresponsibilities for world leadership. He reminds readers that Gulliver was a goodgiant, one whose intentions, although sometimes faulty due to overexuberance,had nothing in common with those of his enemies. Josef Joffe also reminds readersthat the Clinton administration’s rhetoric (and its military actions) were far morelike those of the second Bush’s reign than both liberals and conservatives are everlikely to admit. American assertiveness, and the heady end of history rhetoric thataccompanied it, were well in evidence in those years.

Joffe is pretty hard on his European contemporaries for enjoying the freeride and then sprouting crops of anti-Americanism on every possible patch ofintellectual, political, or cultural ground. Ask a Norwegian or Dane to namea brilliant American, he writes, and you will get the answer that there are none.Yet Americans have won more Nobel prizes than citizens of any other country.This reviewer’s favorite, however, is Joffe’s take on critics of McDonald’s, thosewho turn up their noses asking what goes into a “Big Mac.” Joffe counters thatGermans never ask (or want to know) what goes into their favorite sausage.

In the years since the Cold War, while Gulliver has been unbound, it worksboth ways. The smaller powers in the Cold War alliance have felt more free tocriticize and to try, as was inevitable, to balance American power and influence.These efforts were largely unsuccessful, but there has arisen another force, Ter-rorism International (TI), which increasingly has limited Gulliver’s absolutefreedom of action, and which will force the United States back to pursuing classicalliance building. Joffe holds no book for Gulf War II, seeing it, like mostsympathetic critics of American policy and planning, as a tragic mistake, but hiscritique of the war fits into the category of Tory Reasonableness, rather than anymore searching probe of American motives. He finds the war’s causes to be thedesire to expand democracy, with all the other possible motivations dismissed asnot worthy of more than an op-ed column.

Many readers will take strong exception to that assertion, which goes back tohis discussion of the Cold War’s origins as a struggle between two empires: oneof coercion and one, the American, an empire of invitation. Without doubtthe United States had more to offer the world than its Soviet counterpart, whetherin terms of individual freedom, economic advantage, or military security. It is


inadequate as an explanation of the American empire, however, as he himselfrealizes, by pointing out that the United States “invited” dictatorships into its tent,including especially Saudi Arabia—where some would say the road to Baghdadbegan back in 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt secured the first foothold forlater American military bases.

Rutgers University Lloyd Gardner

Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. (ChapelHill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. x, 365. $34.95.)

The cynical and initial response to another book on the Peculiar Institution ismuch the same as the response to a new book on Abraham Lincoln: is it possibleto say anything new? And, surprisingly, more times than not, the answer is yes.Certainly such is the case here. What is intriguing and novel about this book isAnthony E. Kaye’s use of the concept of slave neighborhoods as his focus. Overthe past three decades or so, historians have opened up the slave community tonew insights and perspectives that would have truly made U. B. Phillips blanch.Nevertheless, Kaye has added impressively to the list of scholars who have forceda rethinking about slavery in the Old South.

Focusing on the Natchez District of Mississippi, which was one of the wealthi-est areas of the Cotton Kingdom, Kaye demonstrates that the slaves were ableto carve out space, identity, and a level of autonomy through the networking ofwhat he describes as slave neighborhoods. The idea that slaves were not merelypassive victims of a system in which there was victimization aplenty is not aparticularly new revelation or epiphany. For years now, the theme of manypost-1950s scholarly studies was that in many slave communities the transforma-tion went virtually from Sambo to Horatio Alger. Still, Kaye’s argument thatslaves literally made paths between neighboring plantations that, in turn, broad-ened their horizons and created heretofore unacknowledged opportunities isindeed food for thought. By so doing, the slaves created bonds that ultimatelymorphed into a new, vital, and sustaining social network.

Foremost among these social networks were intimate relationships thatspanned the entire spectrum of emotion and affection, culminating in a uniontantamount to marriage; the slave families relied on their new neighborhoods tomitigate the constant fear of separation from loved ones that could come inan instant. Slaves relied on the neighborhood to sanction, support, and protecttheir union and to provide a form or normality to their turbulent and tenuousworld. “Neighborhoods,” writes Kaye, “encompassed the bonds of kinship, the


practice of Christianity, the geography of sociability, the field of labor anddiscipline, the grounds of solidarity, the terrain of struggle. For slaves, neigh-borhoods served as the locus of all the bonds that shaped the contours of theirsociety” (4).

Perhaps Kaye’s most innovative contribution to the study of slavery is his useof the U.S. Pension Records, a vast and virtually overlooked reservoir of thetestimonies of ex-slaves. These documents provide some fascinating insights intothe minds of the slaves and how they viewed their world and that of the planters.Following in the footsteps of historians who made pioneer use of the slaves’ ownaccounts, Kaye has resurrected a cache of primary documents that are crucial toany full understanding of how the slaves persevered. For this, and for producinga first-rate study, Kaye is to be commended.

Winthrop University Jason H. Silverman

The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic.By Timothy Kenslea. (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 2006. Pp. 269.$29.95.)

This book is a multilayered study that treats courtship and marriage from thelate eighteenth to the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. Through a series ofminiportraits, the author focuses on the Sedgwick family network of Stockbridge,Massachusetts. The first chapter provides background on Theodore Sedgwick andhis wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, who bore ten children. In the remainder of thebook, the author examines the lives and experiences of five of those children: Eliza(b. 1775), Frances (b. 1778), Theodore (b. 1780), Harry (b. 1785), and Robert(b. 1787). The first couple of chapters are overwhelming, owing to the introduc-tion of numerous family names and acquaintances. A family tree or diagramwould have been useful for quick identification purposes.

Timothy Kenslea argues that the experiences of the Sedgwick children reflecta shift from marriage treated as an economic agreement to one in which loveguided couples’ choices as much as economic concerns. Concomitantly, as youngadults made their own choices about their spouses, parental control waned.Although Theodore Sedgwick chose husbands for his elder daughters, theyounger Sedgwick children made their own decisions about their futures. Theauthor has conducted considerable genealogical research, examining the expe-riences not simply of the Sedgwicks but also of their extensive friendshipnetwork. He has looked at marriage and death records, wills, probate courts,


and court documents. He relies heavily on the Sedgwick family papers, especiallythe family correspondence.

Besides investigating the courtships and marriages of Sedgwick familymembers, Kenslea broadens his analysis to include other salient themes, such asthe nascent Unitarian religion and changes in inheritance patterns and women’sproperty rights. This reader was piqued by his findings regarding sociointellectualclubs, including a heterosocial association of intellectuals known as the “Green-wich Club,” and the “friendlies,” an organization founded by women that occa-sionally included men (such as Harry and Robert Sedgwick). Kenslea’s findingsunderscore the importance of such organizations for both meeting members of theopposite sex and/or forming romantic attachments.

The bulk of the study explores the courtships and engagements of the youngerbrothers, Harry and Robert. The author shows the subtleties involved inexchanges between men and women and the important role other siblingsassumed in giving advice. In the final chapters, the author provides a close-up ofthe budding relationship between Harry and his fiancée, Jane Minot, based onlove letters the pair exchanged during a six-month separation. More than devel-oping a bond, Kenslea stresses how the couple attempted to “remake” themselvesin their letters as they prepared for married life (141). The exchanges reveal theirbeliefs in separate spheres of ideology as well as their aspirations for a marriageof friendship with spheres of equal value and importance.

The book ends abruptly. Not until the epilogue do readers learn of Robert’sengagement and marriage. There is no discussion of the actual courtship, engage-ment, or marriage. Perhaps more glaring is the thin attention given to CatherineMaria Sedgwick. Kenslea makes references to the writer throughout much of thebook in relation to her brothers and sisters, and evaluates some of her experiencesin the epilogue. But the discussion is very brief. Examining her courtships andrelationships more closely and into the body of the work might have yieldedfurther insights into her attitudes toward marriage.

The Sedgwicks in Love will be of interest to scholars, not least for its inter-disciplinary approach, and as a case study of a transitional period of Americanhistory. As eighteenth-century attitudes of manhood and womanhood graduallygave way to an emerging cult of domesticity, the author depicts the trials of onefamily as they made decisions about their futures. Kenslea treats the Sedgwicks asactors, emphasizing the degree to which individual family members were agentsinvolved in such changes.

Rockhurst University Janet Rider


FDR’s First Fireside Chat: Public Confidence and the Banking Crisis. By Amos Kiewe.(College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 149. $16.95.)

Among the myriad challenges Franklin Roosevelt faced when he assumed thepresidency in 1933, none was more pressing than the calamity that had besetAmerica’s banks. In the days following the November election, the Great Depres-sion had taken a dangerous turn, and by inauguration day the nation confrontedthe very real possibility of a total financial collapse. On 12 March, after the mostalarming first week in office faced by a president since Abraham Lincoln, FDRtook to the airwaves and explained to an anxious public exactly what he wasgoing to do to put America’s banks back on solid ground and ensure that acommercial breakdown did not happen. What that radio address revealed aboutFranklin Roosevelt’s leadership abilities and rhetorical skills is the subject ofAmos Kiewe’s well-researched and crisply written book, FDR’s First FiresideChat: Public Confidence and the Banking Crisis.

In this telling of the story of the first Fireside Chat, readers learn of thecircumstances surrounding its creation and delivery and its impact on the Ameri-can people and American politics. Kiewe, who chairs the Department of Com-munications and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, begins his work witha full text of the 12 March speech and then charts a course that leads fromRoosevelt’s election through the first week of the New Deal.

Utilizing information unearthed at the Hoover and Roosevelt PresidentialLibraries, Kiewe provides a clear picture of the first Fireside Chat by contextual-izing it in that initial phase of FDR’s first term in office. There is much here thatis of interest. Kiewe points out that the Bank Crisis of 1932–1933 was not onlystructural in nature, but also the result of the political maneuverings of bothHoover and Roosevelt. He reveals how Treasury officials from both administra-tions worked together to end the Bank Crisis, how members of Hoover’s teamagreed to stay on the job, and how central they were to the successful resolutionof the crisis, despite the ill-will that had developed over the winter between theoutgoing and incoming presidents. As the author makes clear, holdovers fromHoover’s Treasury Department played signature roles in shaping the financialactions taken by FDR during that critical first week, including crafting theEmergency Banking Act, putting the Bank Holiday in place, and the drafting ofthe first Fireside Chat.

The Great Depression is a popular intellectual destination, and some readerswho are familiar with that time may find little new in this book regarding the BankCrisis or the political waves generated by that first radio speech. If that is the case,


it is because Kiewe has visited it for a different reason. The author’s goal inproducing this well-crafted book is to highlight how Franklin Roosevelt’s leader-ship and rhetorical skills combined to resolve the crisis and reshape Americanpolitics, and it is here that Kiewe is at his best.

As Kiewe emphasizes, both Hoover and Roosevelt saw the Bank Crisis simi-larly, and the tools that were eventually employed to fix America’s broken finan-cial system were available to both men. But Hoover never put those tools to use,and Roosevelt did. This was due to the fact, as Kiewe rightly indicates, thatdespite the role systemic weaknesses and factional maneuverings played in pro-ducing the crisis, they were minor characters at best. Public perceptions morethan anything else drove the country to the edge of commercial ruin that winter.Roosevelt recognized that; he understood how important it was to restore thepublic’s faith in the system and how to shape his rhetoric to restore that convic-tion. Herbert Hoover was never able to move the Congress or the Americanpeople to do what was necessary to put the nation’s financial house in orderbecause he did not appreciate the importance of the public’s faith, lacked thecapacity to restore it, or both. By concluding that the Bank Crisis was moreconceptual than real, FDR was convinced that a dramatic act would quicklyrestore faith in the system and the facts bore him out. Within days of the speech,confidence returned; Americans put their money back in the nation’s banks, anda financial meltdown was avoided.

The first Fireside Chat brought FDR’s first week in the White House to asuccessful conclusion. It assuaged the public’s fears and rallied them to saveAmerican free enterprise, but more importantly it forged an unprecedentedbond between Franklin Roosevelt and a majority of Americans. By entering theirhomes and speaking directly to them via the radio, Roosevelt made it clear tothe average citizen that he not only understood their situation, but also that hecared about them. That brief talk was evidence for a long-suffering public thatthe lengthy period of inaction was over, and that there was now someone inthe White House ready to get things done. This engaging book reminds readersof how vital the ability to communicate is to successful political leadership. Thefirst Fireside Chat provided the glue that bound the public to the new presidentand enabled him to marshal their collective energy and move the countryforward. With this as his starting point, FDR was able to recruit the nation toconsider a broader range of political issues and as a result to be ready to facethe challenges that lay ahead.

San Diego Mesa College Jim Giardina


Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.By Andrew G. Kirk. (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. xiii,303. $34.95.)

It is easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of this new history of the Whole EarthCatalog (WEC). The author approaches the topic with such joy and commitmentthat, at a certain point, it might appear that he has not produced an analysis ofthe impact of the WEC so much as an addition to the major arguments of thatsingular publication. It is something of a Whole Earth Epilogue.

Andrew G. Kirk argues that the “genuinely holistic and human centeredpragmatism” of the WEC “represented a more viable path toward a sustainableworld . . . than the guardian path of Progressive regulation alone could everprovide” (2). First appearing in 1968, the WEC represented a remarkable con-fluence of ideas promoting a practical and energetic return to nature. Along theway, this history of the WEC touches on appropriate technology, geodesic domes,“access to tools,” the Gaia hypothesis, Jerry Brown, the birth of personal com-puting, and the foundations of environmental consumerism at Ben & Jerry’s,Patagonia, and Apple Computer.

This history rests on an exceptionally broad grounding in the publishedwritings of the time period, bolstered by primary records from within the WECand its spin-offs. Some of Kirk’s best work comes from deep reading of the text,images, and design of the catalog itself. The writing throughout the study is brightand witty, and much like Stewart Brand and many of the other tool enthusiasts—dreamers and doers of the WEC—Kirk writes with a certain contempt forfence-sitting academics. Really, how else could an author write about the coun-terculture, without mirroring some of its criticism for academia’s pretense ofobjectivity?

As an intellectual biography of WEC founder Stewart Brand, this workis excellent; Brand is a paradoxically heroic figure: a visionary pragmatist, athoughtful man of action, a self-critical yet intellectually promiscuous environ-mental entrepreneur with a happy penchant for being in the center of the culturalmoment.

But as an analysis of the impact of the WEC, there are some importantdrawbacks. Although Kirk ably demonstrates that the WEC and its successorsbrought together an incredible roster of writers, it is somewhat difficult to link theideas and thinkers in the WEC with readers, or with further developments on theground, partly because the WEC’s vision of a technologically mediated relation-ship with nature is the environmental road-less-traveled. And this leads to another


problem: Kirk wishes fervently that the counterculture environmentalism embod-ied in the WEC had been more successful. This might make it difficult to gauge theimpact of the WEC on the mainstream environmental movement—if it was aviable option, why was it not more successful? Or was environmental entrepre-neurialism more meaningful than historians focused on policy and politics haveadmitted? It is difficult to unravel when Kirk seems to mix what could with whatshould have happened. Despite this, Counterculture Green is an important andoriginal addition to the history of environmentalism in the United States; itactually does make the reader wish for another, updated version of the WholeEarth Catalog.

University of Wisconsin—La Crosse James Longhurst

Gall: Lakota War Chief. By Robert W. Larson. (Norman, Okla.: University of Okla-homa Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 301. $24.95.)

This author’s study is a problematic attempt at retelling the life of a Lakota leader.Although he claims to write a biography of Gall, more text and topical emphasisis devoted to the life of Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders than to Gall.Granted, the focus on Sitting Bull and men such as John Grass and Red Cloudstems from the relative wealth of information on those leaders and the paucity ofarchival material on Gall. Nonetheless, readers would have been better served hadRobert W. Larson organized and titled the presented historical data differently.Simply put, there is not enough personal material on Gall in this study to justifythe claim that it represents a book-length biography.

Larson also rehashes well-worn historical topics. He devotes much of the bookto an examination of the Lakota struggle against the United States in the yearsfrom 1862 to 1877. That story has been told countless times with more detail andinsightful analysis than is provided in this monograph. In the strongest chapter ofthe book, the author examines the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Larson effectivelyexplains Gall’s limited role in the battle while debunking the myth that he led thewarriors who smashed Reno’s charge.

The book contains distracting editorial problems. For example, Larson statesthat the U.S. Army ordered one of its officers to arrest Sitting Bull on 20 Decem-ber 1890. Yet, Sitting Bull had already been dead for five days (216). In anotherinstance, Larson claims that the Powder River Country acted as a neutral groundbetween the Lakota and the Crow. Consequently large bison herds existed inthat region because the two tribes avoided the area (25). The historical record


indicates otherwise. The Powder River Country contained bison into the 1860sand 1870s because it lay far from the centers of the robe trade along theMissouri and Yellowstone rivers. Moreover, the Lakota never acknowledged theconcept of neutral zones in the Upper Missouri country. As Larson later admits,the Lakota pushed into the supposed neutral Powder River Country when theyneeded to pursue bison (28). Misstatements such as these disrupt the flow ofthe narrative.

The author’s geographical references and chronology are also frequently offthe mark. He mentions white agricultural settlement moving onto the NorthernPlains in the 1860s, but does not specify exactly where. He also asserts thatthis white agricultural settlement impinged on the Lakota and their pursuit ofbison. However, the historical record indicates that agricultural settlement did notdirectly affect Gall’s people until the 1880s. The robe trade, white overland travel,steamboat traffic, and U.S. military operations contributed to the decline ofLakota culture by the 1870s, not white agricultural settlement, which had onlymoved into southeast Dakota Territory by the early 1870s.

Larson upholds nineteenth-century white-male stereotypes of the Lakota andNorthern Plains tribes. He refers to the Lakota as “terrors along the Missouri,”“intransigent,” “angry hordes,” “scrappy,” “fanatical . . . Ghost Dancers,” and“more warlike than most western tribes.” He calls the Arikara “wily.” Heargues that the subjugated fate of the Lakota was inevitable (238). Such termi-nology and conclusions ignore the more sophisticated reasons for Lakota resis-tance and the options available to both whites and the Lakota during thereservation era.

Larson argues that throughout Gall’s life, he purportedly put the needs of hispeople above his own. Larson dismisses the counterarguments put forward bymany historians that Gall behaved in a self-serving manner. Yet Larson fails toconvince the reader that Gall behaved altruistically. If anything, Gall appears tohave been quite self-serving in his actions, ingratiating himself with Agent JamesMcLaughlin at Standing Rock to acquire financial and material benefits—such asa judgeship, a farm along Oak Creek, and junkets to Washington, DC. Larsonneeded to examine the dubious side of Gall’s personality—such an analysis wouldhave enhanced the story. Finally, Larson inadvertently portrays Gall as a periph-eral figure in Lakota history. With the author’s focus on the decisions and actionsof Sitting Bull and James McLaughlin, Gall appears as the pawn of more powerfulmen, rather than an independent man of action.

University of South Dakota Robert Kelley Schneiders


“Gentleman George” Hunt Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identityin Nineteenth-Century America. By Thomas S. Mach. (Kent, Ohio: Kent StateUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 280. $39.95.)

This detailed study of the public career of Democratic political leader GeorgePendleton rescues the author’s subject from long neglect, and in so doing, illumi-nates significant aspects of nineteenth-century politics.

Pendleton may be best remembered for his 1882 law establishing the CivilService, but that accomplishment came near the end of a long career. He chose tobecome a Democrat as a young Cincinnati lawyer and quickly became influentialin local and state politics. Elected to Congress in 1856, he became a prominentPeace Democrat and critic of Lincoln; he was George McClellan’s running matein 1864. Following the war, Pendleton was at the center of the debate overmonetary policy; he advocated short-term reliance on greenbacks but the eventualreturn to a specie-based financial system. When the monetary issue faded, effortsfor civil service reform dominated his one term in the U.S. Senate [1878–1884].

Thomas S. Mach argues that the central concern of Pendleton’s career wasattempting “to unite his divided party around its traditional Jacksonian prin-ciples” (212). Pendleton was very ambitious, and he hoped unifying the partywould bring him its leadership. But ideals were important as well. He genuinelybelieved that Democratic principles, more than Republican ones, “provided ordi-nary Americans with a mechanism to shape government operations and imple-ment sound public policies” (212). Mach admires what he sees as Pendleton’sconsistent support of egalitarian principles. But he also notes Pendleton’s racism,his “single greatest flaw,” which led him to oppose emancipation and informed hissenate work on Indian policy (215).

Along with others in the Gilded Age, Pendleton pressed for civil service reformafter concluding that Andrew Jackson’s spoils system “was failing to promotedemocracy” and was making it easier for the “wealthy few” to dominate politics(176, 174). Mach argues that, as was the case with his earlier abandonment of astrict hard-money policy, Pendleton was not repudiating Jackson’s principles, butwas adapting the larger Jacksonian goal of “equal opportunity” to changing times(60). Ironically, the success of civil service reform “brought neither party unity norpersonal success” (215). Democrats were as divided on this issue as they had beenon every important issue since the 1850s, and Pendleton lost his senate seat.

Mach’s main achievement in this thoroughly researched study is to explainclearly the complexity of issues and influences that animated Pendleton’s poli-tical world. Mach excels at showing the intricacy of day-to-day, year-to-year


considerations and problems politicians faced. Moreover, he is able to stepback from the intricacies and provide broader context for Pendleton’s views andactions. What Mach cannot do (because Pendleton left no letters or other perso-nal papers) is to elucidate Pendleton’s private views enough to provide a goodunderstanding of his perceptions and motivations.

Despite that limitation, Mach’s portrait certainly makes the case forPendleton’s importance. It also enhances readers’ understanding of NorthernDemocrats and their party in an era of crises and change.

Ripon College Russell Blake

A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of theConservative Movement. By J. William Middendorf II. (New York, N.Y.: BasicBooks, 2006. Pp. xiii, 303. $16.95.)

In recent years, the history of American conservatism has experienced a burstof inquiry. In this book, J. William Middendorf II provides a notable addition tothis emerging literature. The author, a former investment banker, was among thefirst to join the Draft Goldwater Movement in 1962 and, following Goldwater’sdefeat, served as the treasurer of the Republican National Committee throughNixon’s election in 1968. He subsequently served as ambassador to The Nether-lands and as the Secretary of the Navy under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Theauthor aims to write both a memoir of the Goldwater Campaign and a commen-tary on the nature and course of modern American conservatism.

In short, Middendorf views Goldwater’s candidacy as the foundation of themodern conservative movement and suggests that the Arizona senator lost dueto a combination of sabotage, subterfuge, and inexperience. The author’s remark-able sense of detail, his anecdotes, and a collection of heretofore unpublishedphotographs paint a vivid portrait of the campaign as well as the political climateof the 1960s. Middendorf capably recounts Goldwater’s initial and, some mightsay, persistent reluctance on the campaign trail, the dirty tricks of the Johnsoncampaign, and the then emergent influence of television on American politics. Hisnarrative of events is captivating especially on the internal workings of theRepublican Party and the roles that future Presidents Nixon and Reagan played ina campaign that, in retrospect, seems like a “glorious disaster.”

At the same time, the author notably and somewhat contradictorily concedesthat Goldwater also failed, in no small part, because “Goldwater the politicianshut the public off from Goldwater the man” (61). This admission speaks directlyto the relative possibilities and limitations of modern American conservatism.


It also provides a means better to understand the origins of and reaction toGoldwater’s infamous declaration, during his nomination acceptance speech, that“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” The phrase, the author recounts, waspenned for Goldwater by political science professor Harry Jaffa and, thoughpurportedly inspired by the radical Thomas Paine, the notorious expression,Middendorf claims, actually “may have sprung from the professor’s brow” (132).However, the author declines to address the motivations of Jaffa, a student ofLeo Strauss, or, for that matter, to comment on the relative incompatibility ofneoconservatism, libertarianism, and traditionalism as contenders for the mantleof American conservatism during the latter half of the twentieth century. Alsonotably absent is any mention of the role of the populist strain of conservatismrepresented by George Wallace in the subsequent electoral success of Nixon andReagan. In this regard, the book is infinitely more successful as a memoir of theGoldwater campaign than a commentary on the relative success of the Americanconservative movement. Nonetheless, Middendorf’s memoir is an important addi-tion to the emerging literature on American conservatism and to the ongoingeffort to understand its varied and diverse strains.

University of Florida John J. Langdale III

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the UnitedStates. By Stephen Mihm. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp.ix, 457. $29.95.)

Although the early history of the U.S. economy, along with the policies anddebates that shaped it, is well known at this point, what is less well understoodis how exchange mediums functioned in the highly speculative culture of entre-preneurship. Much of that activity occurred on the murky borderline of the legaland illegal, where real and fake, respectable and dubious met. Even defining theunderground economy becomes difficult when that economy was such a necessarypart of the nation’s business. Stephen Mihm addresses this issue in this substantialwork. He argues that counterfeiting is the story of the U.S. economy in its earlystages, an argument that tantalizes, engages, and ultimately succeeds.

His seven chapters proceed chronologically. They center on the story of anindividual. Readers see the start of the counterfeiters’ place in the early economythrough the checkered career of Stephen Burroughs. Seneca Paige introducesreaders to the activities of Cogniac Street along the Canadian-Vermont border.Ebenezer Gleason’s tale shows readers how “koniackers” played their part inthe bank war between Andrew Jackson and Second Bank of the United States


president Nicholas Biddle. James Brown’s heroic exploits in the shadowy worldof fake bank notes demonstrate the workings of the currency in the 1830s and1840s, and so on.

From prodigious research in court records, newspapers, and letters, as wellas other sources, Mihm weaves a Dickensian tale of rogues, lawmen, befuddledbankers, and others in the early industrial age, all attempting to negotiate theirway through a bizarre, often contradictory world. Counterfeit money, Mihmcontends, frequently served the public better than the real notes from fraudulent,though legal, institutions. Even the lawmen and publishers of detecting guidesslipped into the shadowy realm of extortion, falsification, and counterfeiting. Theeconomy required a national paper currency, but until the Civil War, the principlesof democracy prevented its issuance.

Mihm’s book is a fascinating read with few flaws. The reviewer wishes for fewerdramatic declarations that the system was on the brink. The author might also notethat the two sides in the Civil War were not just the North and South; they werethe Union and the Confederacy. More substantially, a mistake underlies Mihm’sargument that somehow bankers and, by extension, currency producers wereperforce conducting questionable activities. Banks by their nature cannot backmost, much less the entirety, of their loans and paper issuances with specie. Credit,so necessary for the system to work, was their contribution to the economy.Furthermore, even specie has no value except what people believe it to hold.

These quarrels aside, A Nation of Counterfeiters is a daring and persuasivework, entirely readable, uncovering the hidden springs of the U.S. economy overthe first half of the nation’s existence. Scholars and lay readers will learn a greatdeal from this book, and will certainly enjoy themselves along the way.

Seton Hall University Williamjames Hull Hoffer

A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution. ByDavid A. Nichols. (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Pp. x, 353. $27.00.)

Following in the tradition of Fred Greenstein’s The Hidden Hand Presidency, theauthor of this book asserts that although President Eisenhower often appeared tobe an inarticulate, uncommitted bumbler on racial matters, he in fact exercisedstrong leadership behind the scenes that resulted in significant achievements in thearea of civil rights. To support this claim, David A. Nichols chronicles Eisenhower’sefforts to eliminate segregation in the District of Columbia, to end discriminationin federal contracts, to complete the process of desegregating the military, to ensurea more racially progressive justice system through his judiciary appointments,


to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and toadvance the passage of meaningful civil rights legislation. Nichols contends thatcareful attention to Ike’s impressive actions—rather than his words—reveals “themyth that Eisenhower was . . . ‘no leader at all’ in civil rights” to be a falsehood (1).Moreover, he suggests that Eisenhower’s leadership on civil rights was moreprogressive than that of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.

Eisenhower’s accomplishments on civil rights are reasonably well known tomost experts but not to most laypeople, and for the latter audience Nichols’sbook will be a revelation. In particular, Nichols uses archival materials fromthe Eisenhower Presidential Library (including recently released documents) todemonstrate that Ike was not a bumbling bystander but rather an active leader inthe federal government’s efforts to combat racial discrimination. The author’saccount of President Eisenhower’s efforts to end segregation in the District ofColumbia and his judicial appointments is especially compelling, and even expertsin the field should find it interesting.

Though the book has much to recommend itself, Nichols’s framing of hisproject is problematic. Consider the book’s subtitle; to take seriously its sugges-tion that the civil rights revolution began in the 1950s, one would need toignore—for example—the NAACP’s legal assault on voter discrimination and thedoctrine of “separate but equal” during the 1930s and 1940s, the March onWashington Movement’s fight against employment discrimination in the federalgovernment during the 1940s, and significant civil rights initiatives undertaken bythe Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Nichols’s failure to recognize theseimportant historical efforts extends beyond the title page, as evinced by thefollowing two claims, both of which are untrue: “In the 1950s, it was unprec-edented for Negro leaders to sit down with a president for serious policy discus-sions” (218). “In 1953, civil rights was not yet a pressing national issue. Thepopular war hero could have ignored it” (274). A second problem of framingis that Nichols puts deeds and words in an opposite relationship, demandingthat Eisenhower’s leadership be evaluated almost exclusively by the former. Butpresidential rhetoric is an important kind of leadership in its own right: thoughnot a “substitute for policy and execution,” clearly it is a vital complement (277).

Though Nichols also fails to mention a few significant issues that wouldenable a more comprehensive evaluation of President Eisenhower’s leadershipon civil rights (i.e., the relationship between civil rights and the Cold War), thiswell-written book is an important, engaging study.

Calvin College Garth E. Pauley


Music of the Gilded Age. By John Ogasapian and N. Lee Orr. (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 204. $49.95.)

The authors of this book provide a brief overview of a fascinating topic. As therural, artisan, and religiously oriented culture of the pre-Civil War decades gaveway to industrialization, science, and mass transportation, America’s ethnicmakeup, thought, and daily life were transformed. John Ogasapian and N. LeeOrr (who completed the book after the former’s death) effectively integrate thestory of music into this general historical context.

Drawing on the work of generations of music historians, as well as recentcultural histories (which have tardily brought music into the historiographicalmainstream), Ogasapian and Orr first portray an antebellum musical culturerooted in minstrelsy, sacred choral music, folk and commercial ballads, andconcert saloon performances. Even touring Italian opera stars (as well as “theSwedish nightingale,” Jenny Lind), German orchestral musicians, and Irishstage performers diversified America’s musical palette. The Civil War is mostlyneglected here, even though it sped the growth of industries such as song pub-lishing and piano manufacturing and revealed slave music to most whites for thefirst time.

Befitting its title, Music of the Gilded Age comprehensively describes postwarmusical trends. Some of these trends are familiar to students of the Gilded Ageor American music. Popular songwriters, such as George F. Root and Charles K.Harris, perfected formulas for writing catchy tunes and lyrics that became bigbestsellers. In the wake of the failure of Reconstruction in the South, raciallyderogatory lyrics and iconography were heavily used in genres such as minstrelsy,“coon songs,” and ragtime. African American groups such as the Fisk JubileeSingers popularized spirituals, while black songwriters and performers foughtfor recognition. Meanwhile—at a considerable social distance from commercialsong—classical composers, critics, and performers wrestled with the basic ques-tion of how indebted American “art music” should be to European models. InNew York City, opera was split between the Italian-focused Academy of Musicand the largely Wagnerian Metropolitan Opera, while New Orleans offered aFrench alternative. Composers such as William Henry Fry and Louis MoreauGottschalk fought in vain to get their colleagues to declare their artistic indepen-dence from Europe; only in the twentieth century would composers such asCharles Ives decisively free themselves from the burden of foreign precedents.

To their great credit, Ogasapian and Orr also explore less well-known featuresof this musical landscape, ranging from choral traditions and brass bands to the


genre of the secular cantata (a short musical drama for voices, largely forgottentoday). Some of their analysis of the musical cross-fertilization between philan-thropic elites, the genteel bourgeoisie, and the working classes is highly sophi-sticated, showing familiarity with works by Lawrence Levine, Joseph Horowitz,and other important cultural historians. Unfortunately, the book’s organizationby musical genre disrupts any sense of a general narrative unfolding decade bydecade, and the authors also unwisely choose to cover events after the Gilded Age,from 1900 to 1920. Some awkward writing also hurts. Despite these flaws, thisshort volume provides a clear and wide-ranging survey of a lively era in Americanmusic.

Western Connecticut State University Burton W. Peretti

America 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the ModelT, and the Making of a Modern Nation. By Jim Rasenberger. (New York, N.Y.:Scribner, 2007. Pp. vii, 307. $27.00.)

The author is a journalist, not a historian, and therein lies a difference ofapproach. Jim Rasenberger relies on the newspapers of the times, in particular theNew York newspapers, as well as the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post,and the Los Angeles Times, to provide a frame of reference for the year 1908—“one hell of a ride around the sun” (1). He has also engaged in extensive, but notthorough, reading of secondary sources. The result is a celebratory chronicle ofthe special events that set the year apart, and of America’s emergence as a modernnation.

America 1908 is a well-written and engaging narrative history. It is organizedchronologically, almost as if written for a daily newspaper. The author focuses ona number of scientific and technological triumphs. He tells in detail the stories ofthe Wright brothers’ achievement of controlling a plane in flight, the race of Dr.Frederick Cook and Admiral Robert Peary to the North Pole (one of the last areason Earth to be explored), the around-the-world dash of automobiles from NewYork to Paris, and the dispatching of the Great White Fleet by Theodore Rooseveltto signify the naval power of the United States. Throughout the year, Rasenbergerintersperses events that place the reader in the context of the times—the nomina-tion and election of William Howard Taft as president; the murder of StanfordWhite of McKim, Mead, and White; the racial riot in Springfield, Illinois; theGiants-Cubs World Series (Tinker to Evers to Chance, along with Fred Merkle);and Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T for the masses. He also providesinnumerable details, such as the divorce rate, the number of horses in cities, the


average wages and hours of the working class, and the clothing of the times.It is indeed an interesting read, particularly for the nonhistorian.

America’s arrival in that year as a modern nation is the major theme ofthe book. Absorbed by the progress made scientifically and technologically,Rasenberger begins his book with a bicycle ride through New York City, aprime beneficiary of all the advances, and a symbolic crash between the teenagerider and an automobile driven by the son of J. P. Morgan. According to Rasen-berger, most Americans in 1908 thought like Thomas Edison that “[a]nything,everything, is possible.” The concluding chapter, entitled “The Modern Defini-tion of Life,” though, does little to clarify what that definition is. America 1908is brilliant in description and even thoughtful in analysis of key persons andevents, but the author fails to examine how special 1908 was in comparisonto surrounding years. He also assumes that what the newspapers of the timehad to say about those events corresponded with what most Americans werethinking.

Whether or not Rasenberger’s book leads to a spate of books centered on oneyear will depend on sales. Historians, though, have doubts about monographsthat overemphasize the special qualities of an era or a year.

Youngstown State University William D. Jenkins

Sitting Bull: A Biography. By Edward J. Rielly. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,2007. Pp. vii, 157. $35.00.)

As the relatively high price and short length might suggest, this is a biography thatthe publisher markets to libraries, particularly for use by high school students. Asa recent installment in the Greenwood Biographies series, this is one of only threein the more than seventy titles (including Edward J. Rielly’s 2005 biography ofF. Scott Fitzgerald) to cover a figure who lived and died prior to the twentiethcentury. It is worth noting that, other than Sitting Bull, the only other pre-twentieth-century subjects are also Native American. Not that it comes as asurprise, but if this series is an indication, Indians are apparently as popularlyappealing as Jennifer Lopez and Princess Diana (their biographies were releasedconcurrently with Sacagawea and Tecumseh); and Sitting Bull entered the serieson the same day as Bob Marley.

By the nature of the series, then, Sitting Bull is a biography that should achieveseveral things: get to the point, give a chronological presentation of the subject’slife with very digestible analyses, and be highly readable. This book does each ofthese things, and it is for this reason that libraries (including college ones) should


buy it. It is good for all of us, but particularly for young readers and buddingwriters, to see how a complicated story can be told well (meaning accurately,engagingly, but succinctly) in an actual book, written and edited by professionals.In other words, fellow teachers, send your students to this history, written by anEnglish professor, and then have them see for themselves all of the rich detail thatthe Wikipedia entry on Sitting Bull misses.

For his part, Rielly misses little. Though it is sometimes clear that he explainsthings differently than a trained U.S. historian might, and although he gets a bitteleological at times with his use of the word “inevitable,” he did his homework.Although he does rely very heavily on secondary sources (likely a norm with thisseries), his fine footnotes make it clear that he also looked at a number of primarymaterials, including newspaper articles, memoirs, diaries, various governmentdocuments, and most interestingly, Sitting Bull’s own pictographic autobiogra-phies. The images section of the book includes two of these pictographs, both ofwhich, along with Rielly’s explanations of them, are fascinating. Rielly makes nograndiose arguments here, which is okay. What he shows clearly, however, is adistinctive Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux life and the leader who defended that way ofliving most fervently.

The book would benefit immensely from even one good map, particularly toaccompany Rielly’s description of Little Bighorn; however, it is hard to imagine adescription of that confusing battle that does so much, so well, with as few words.Although this biography may not be the perfect page-turner for all students, formany readers, even those who know the story well, putting down Rielly’s SittingBull is no easy task.

University of North Texas Duke Richey

Hollywood’s Cold War. By Tony Shaw. (Amherst, Mass.: University of MassachusettsPress, 2007. Pp. vii, 342. $29.95.)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars have devoted increasing attentionto the culture of the Cold War in the United States, especially Cold War cinema.This author challenges common notions that Hollywood moviemakers producedanticommunist films merely to placate the House Un-American Activities Com-mittee, rabid McCarthyites, and the patriotic public. Tony Shaw argues that,starting in 1918, agencies in the U.S. government and motion-picture concernscreated a fluid, “state-film network” in the United States that became, in effect, apropaganda apparatus to disseminate an “American” picture of the Cold War todomestic and foreign audiences. Directors, screenwriters, actors, and producers


voluntarily, and in many cases eagerly, cooperated with federal agencies likethe FBI, CIA, State Department, Department of Defense (DOD), and WhiteHouse, to make films that served their own personal convictions, studio desires,and government agency interests.

Shaw rejects the simplistic “top down” or “bottom up” approach to anticom-munist Cold War culture, in which the ideology either emanated from the federalgovernment or represented a populist push from the public, in favor of a moredynamic and symbiotic relationship in the state-film network. The network func-tioned more on a continuum, from U.S. Information Agency- and DOD-producedcinema for export to developing nations to John Wayne’s voluntary solicitationof the White House to make The Green Berets. In many cases, a quid pro quorelationship existed between filmmakers and government agencies, as in thecase of Louis de Rochement, who made films like Walk East on Beacon, whichglorified the FBI. The FBI granted de Rochement exclusive access to secretBureau information; in return, de Rochement made films that supported J. EdgarHoover’s propagandistic desires. In most cases, the government’s fingerprintson the cinema remained largely invisible, or “grey” as Shaw puts it, revealingitself only under close scrutiny, as in the changes made to the films Animal Farmand 1984 from their literary counterparts.

Shaw also analyzes change over time in the state-film network, arguing thatthere was increasing space in the relationship for a counter-ideological cinema toemerge, a space that widened considerably with disillusionment over the VietnamWar and the détente of Gorbachev in the 1980s. Films like On the Beach, Heartsand Minds, Walker, and Red Heat (which depicted U.S. and Soviet police coop-erating to catch drug traffickers) demonstrate that U.S. Cold War cinema wasmore fluid and open than the cinema behind the Iron Curtain.

This book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the ColdWar. Shaw makes an excellent case that the Cold War was fought culturally, aswell as diplomatically, economically, and militarily. By mining recently declassifiedgovernment documents, he presents a clear picture of the unique way that U.S.Cold War propaganda functioned and of the differing degrees of intrusive gov-ernment involvement in cinematic productions. Some readers may find frustratingthe lengthy production histories Shaw offers in the book, but this is an extremelyminor issue in what is an important contribution to the field. It will proveindispensable to anyone considering further research and to those teachingcourses on U.S. Cold War cinema.

College of the Redwoods George Potamianos


Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought. By Michael Stephenson.(New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2007. Pp. 421. $27.95.)

The American Revolution was, first and foremost, a war. For several reasons,historians tend to overlook this. Reflecting prevailing academic interests, modernscholarship often focuses on that event’s political, intellectual, or social dimen-sions, while excluding or muting its military aspects. Then there is the mistakensense that the warfare of that distant time was too antiquated—almost genteel,especially compared to the visceral, immediate horror and violence of more recentconflicts—to merit attention. Further, the Revolutionary War is simply not as welldocumented as later conflicts. And, since it occurred fifty years before the adventof photography, no eighteenth-century equivalent of Mathew Brady can helphistorians envision what the soldiers and battlefields looked like.

On the other hand, many popular accounts of the war that created the Ameri-can republic emphasize combat, but inevitably encrust it in patriotic myth. Theyconjure up “Spirit of ‘76” images that consign the struggle to the “the DisneyWorld of history” (xix). With this volume, Michael Stephenson seeks to redressthe neglect of, and false ideas about, the “sharp end” of the War of Independence.

Stephenson, a New York-based writer and former editor of the Military BookClub, has produced a very serviceable depiction of the common soldiery on bothsides of the contest. He effectively describes who fought, how they fought, andwhy they fought. As such, the book functions admirably as military-social history.It reminds readers that wars not only determine a society’s nature, but also that asociety’s nature determines the conduct of wars.

Patriot Battles consists of two sections. The first, and better, of these exa-mines “the nuts and bolts of war” by opening a window on the soldiers’ existence.Whether Continentals, redcoats, patriot or loyalist militia, or German mercenar-ies, theirs was a routine of homesickness, scarce or bad food, fatigue details, picketduty, “hurry up and wait,” and battle—with all its attendant discomfort, tedium,and occasional terror. Successive chapters treat topics such as clothing, equipment,weapons, and medical care. Stephenson is particularly good at illuminating whatmotivated men to fight. For many, it boiled down to economics; soldiering “wasthe best deal on offer in a world that did not offer them any really good deals”(80). Other reasons included ideology, religion, esprit de corps, alcohol, andbrutal compulsion.

In part two Stephenson offers brief sketches, organized chronologically, ofthe war’s major battles. Although he writes colorfully and his bibliographyincludes virtually all the relevant secondary sources, this portion feels episodic,


and ultimately, much less satisfying. However, the numerous maps are helpful.What would have helped more is an overarching discussion of American andBritish strategies as well as the war’s phases, in order to place the battles in somesort of context. Buffs and general readers will certainly enjoy this book, and theycould do much worse. Although military historians and students of the Revolutionwill learn little, specialists toiling in other fields of historical inquiry who arecurious about the war could also profit from this well-written survey.

University School Alan Cate

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Editedby E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis-Salazar. (Boulder, Colo.: The UniversityPress of Colorado, 2007. Pp. xiv, 336. $65.00.)

The editors of this volume present both social theory and archeological examplesof the study of “the intersection of ritual and economic practices in Mesoame-rican societies” (xiii). Based on a symposium at the 2003 annual meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association organized by the editors, the participantsare concerned that the prevailing political economy models used by archeologistsdo not reflect the premodern societies they seek to understand. Specifically theyfocus on the ways that the intertwining of ritual and economy is expressed in thematerial record, and thus in the basic data of archeology.

After a first chapter in which the editors introduce the concept of a Mesoame-rican ritual economy, in nine chapters the contributors examine the concept interms of the acquisition of material goods (five cases, spanning the Classic Mayalowlands to Zacatecas in both pre-Hispanic and colonial societies) and the con-sumption of goods (four cases, from Honduras to central Mexico, using botharcheological and historical data). Following the case studies are two chapters ofobservations, one by a non-Mesoamerican archeologist (Katherine A. Spielmann)and one by an economic anthropologist (John M. Watanabe).

In their introductory chapter, the editors indicate that their selection of caseswas guided by two principles: the first was to have multiple examples since nosingle dataset is complete, and the second was to include societies of differentdegrees of social complexity as well as from across Mesoamerica. In this sensethe volume is successful; in terms of the contribution to developing a theory ofritual economy it is less so. To the reviewer’s mind, the two finest chapters in thevolume are the introduction by the editors and the chapter by Watanabe, althoughspecialists will certainly enjoy others.


In his excellent theoretical review, Watanabe points out the two meaningsof ritual economy used in the book: the economics of ritual and the ritual ofeconomy. He also notes that most of the case studies present the former—manyparts of the flourishing study of craft specialization/production of materialgoods used in ritual. These studies place their subjects within the social theoryof political economy and do not question the relationship between ritual andeconomy; for example, by asking why ritual affects the political economy (302).These case studies, and the editors in the introductory chapter, see the ritualeconomy as a complement to the political economy and reject its associationwith Rappaport’s “ritual mode of production,” Sahlins’s “domestic mode ofproduction,” or Wolf’s “peasant household consumption” (304–305). To thecontrary, Watanabe sees the ritual economy arising from the conflicting goals ofhousehold autonomy and household interdependence in the absence of centralauthority. Thus ritual becomes the means to transcend kinship in nonstratifiedsocieties and can be used by chiefs to increase inequality in the absence ofcoercive force.

In this manner, the authors of the first and last chapters of this book presenttwo very different models for the relationship between ritual, politics, andeconomy in pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerican societies. Clearly, both areworth testing and should guide future research.

Michigan State University Helen Perlstein Pollard

The General and the Jaguar: Pershing’s Hunt for Pancho Villa: A True Story ofRevolution and Revenge. By Eileen Welsome. (Lincoln, Neb.: University ofNebraska Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 403. $21.95.)

Journalist Eileen Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1994 forher series of articles published in The Albuquerque Tribune on the U.S. govern-ment’s Cold War experiment of injecting plutonium into unknowing Americancitizens. Her subsequent book on the subject garnered two PEN awards. In TheGeneral and the Jaguar, the author turns her investigative talents toward anaccount of the attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in March of 1916 by PanchoVilla and the ensuing ten-month manhunt through the Mexican border state ofChihuahua conducted by General John Pershing and his ten-thousand-strongPunitive Expedition.

Journalistic incursions into the traditional turf of historians are neither novelnor necessarily unwelcome. Welsome brings the journalist’s trademark brisk andengaging narrative to The General and the Jaguar. She competently provides


the historical context for the Columbus raid, from the thirty-five-year rule ofPorfirio Diaz that ended with the eruption of the Mexican Revolution in 1910to the major events and figures, and U.S. involvement, of the first six years ofthis conflict, which left one million dead. She organizes her book into three parts:“The Attack,” “The Hunt,” and “Revenge and Revival.” The travails of MaudWright—an Alabama resident of Chihuahua kidnapped by Villa’s forces en routeto Columbus—bind the narrative: a description of her capture begins the account;her return to the town turned state park in 1960 provides closure.

Welsome follows the journalist’s preference for emphasizing the individualand minutiae in historical accounts, and her fleshing out of the background,characteristics, and actions of participants both famous (Villa, Pershing, hisaide—a young Lieutenant George Patton) and obscure (Wright, Colonel HerbertSlocum, and numerous townspeople and soldiers) results in the usual benefitsand pitfalls of popular histories. The town of Columbus itself becomes a majorcharacter; its rise to international notoriety and eventual decline are carefullydeveloped throughout the narrative arc by the author. In fact, the book’s title isarguably misleading; though Welsome faithfully devotes a substantial portion ofthe text to the hunt for Villa, in her heart she seems more interested in how thetown and its residents experienced and weathered the raid and its aftermath.Perhaps her greatest contribution to the historiography of the Columbus raidis exactly this portion of her study, which includes detailed research intothe series of trials held for captured Villistas. Historians should admire heroriginal research involving previously unopened claims files in the U.S. NationalArchives and work in thirteen other archives. Her bibliography and notes arealso expansive.

High praise aside, professional historians—particularly historians of Mexico—have much to criticize. Welsome’s overuse of adjectives and description grates onthe scholarly reader. Consider her description of Porfirio Diaz, “his grizzled headas timeless as the volcanoes that ringed Mexico City . . . he had a mountainousnose, a mustache that rushed from its base like two white rivers . . .” (14).Welsome also does not read Spanish. Two lonely sources in Spanish attest to thebias of an uncritical use of sources that often reveals itself in the text, particularlyin her portrait of Villa. Finally, as in most histories targeting a popular audience,an emphasis on narrative flow sacrifices analytical and critical diversions. Withthese caveats made, historians and a general readership nevertheless stand to gaina great deal from this highly readable book.

University of Alabama Steven B. Bunker


The Age of Strict Construction: A History of the Growth of Federal Power, 1789–1861. By Peter Zavodnyik. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press,2007. Pp. 372. $59.95.)

The author of this book is an attorney who offers an intriguing account of thestrict interpretation of the Constitution in light of the growth of federal powerduring the antebellum period. Although strict “construction” did gain momentumduring the period, Peter Zavodnyik argues that the reach of the federal govern-ment continued to expand. The development of party politics, especially thewidespread patronage used to bolster the second party system, extended the reachof national politics deep within the ruling elites of local communities. The patron-age of partisan papers, postal officials, and customs officers reshaped local poli-tics, crafting a network highly sensitive to the slightest political changes at thenational level. Strict constructionists might have largely won on federal policiessuch as internal improvements, but they failed to restrict federal politics fromdominating local political life.

Zavodnyik’s thesis provides a convincing explanation for how party machinerycaused Southern secessionists so negatively to respond to Abraham Lincoln’selection. The Republicans may not have been on the ballot in most Southernstates, but Lincoln could fill hundreds of printing contracts and federal officeswith supporters of the Republican Party or abolition. Historians have long knownthat secessionists feared the prospects of a Republican president extending hispatronage into the South. But this is among the best studies to substantiate thoseclaims and examine the likelihood that those fears would have been realized.

To his basic thesis, Zavodnyik adds an informative—but overly extended—account of constitutional interpretation from the 1790s to the Civil War. Heis careful not to come down harshly on any side and acknowledges that strictconstruction became the most widely accepted position. Any student of Americanconstitutionalism will find this work useful if only for his extensive documentationof Congressional speeches highlighting the bitter contest over the Constitution’smeaning. The result is a study that challenges many of historians’ preconceivednotions about who advocated strict construction and why.

Sadly, Zavodnyik pays scant attention to national economic policy, which thereviewer believes antebellum strict constructionists could claim as their greatestsuccess. It is one thing to see the advance of national politics into local matters,but it is quite another to feel its impact. Federal power retreated markedly duringthe period, so much so that one could reasonably argue the entire federal gov-ernment was weaker in 1858 than it was in the 1790s. Direct taxes subsided after


1801, tariff rates declined after 1833 (the Tariff of 1842 excepted), and centraldirection over the country’s banking and monetary system was largely nonexistentby the 1850s. Although controlling federal offices was both a means and an endof the national party system, the postal system did not impact the daily lives ofAmericans to the same extent as the Second Bank of the United States.

Arkansas Tech University Carey M. Roberts

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formation in an Imperial World. ByTony Ballantyne. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 229. $21.95.)

This slim and attractively published volume finds its historiographical placeamong theoretically informed monographs on the Sikhs, western India’s agri-cultural community who became followers of Guru Nanak [1469–1539]. Butthis book does much more. Between Colonialism and Diaspora emerges as asignificant volume within transnational Indian history, blending together bothcolonial history and diaspora studies. Highly accessible, the book speaks tothe need for studies that are research driven yet pedagogical—aimed at an audi-ence beyond postcolonial area specialists—for readers learning both aboutSouth Asia and transnational historiography. The effort that Tony Ballantyneputs into mapping out his major arguments, while engaging his interlocuters,will be useful for historians of any field formulating their own transnationalapproach.

Ballantyne’s primary goal is to “explore Sikhism’s encounters with imperialpower, modernity, and the postcolonial world from an analytical position thatrecognizes both Sikhism’s status as a global religion and its profound rootednessin Punjab” (xiv). Ballantyne weaves together discussions of recent historiographyof Sikh history, colonial ethnography of the Punjab, the history of Punjabi militaryservice, community practices of self-commemoration, and at the book’s end,a fascinating and well-informed chapter on the emergence of bhangra, the cos-mopolitan hip-hop musical fusion of Punjabi folk songs and Afro-Caribbeanrhythms—a favorite at British night clubs.

Ballantyne begins with a section subtitled “A Map of the Field,” dividingSikh historiography into five camps. Internalist approaches, encapsulating“received” Sikh history, echo civilizational narratives stressing the developmentof an autonomous Sikh tradition through its sacred texts and practices, whileeffectively silencing external factors influencing community self-understandings.


Second, Khalsacentrism comes as a response to the social construct modelsof recent scholarship, and hopes to reject social science models of the West infavor of an ethnocentric epistemology. Regionalist approaches, the third mode,understand the emergence of Sikh identity within the local environment of thePunjab and other religious and social movements, especially the Arya Samaj.Externalist scholarship, the fourth approach, places its emphasis on the powerof British rule to shape modern Indian identities. Here Ballantyne offers anincisive critique of the work of Richard Fox and Bernard Cohn, arguing thattheir totalizing frameworks neglect precolonial roots. Finally, Ballantyne con-siders diasporic approaches, including those of Verne Dusenbery, Darshan SinghTatle, and Brian Axel, which seek to illuminate the transregional networksof diasporic Sikhs, and the transformative nature of diasporic locales in themaking of homelands. Ballantyne describes his own approach as tracing the“webs of empire,” stressing multidirectional exchanges and self-constitutingpractices on both sides of the colonial divide, and drawing on anthropology,sociology, and history.

Ballantyne places the debates of social transformation under British ruleas one of the central questions of South Asian historiography. He wishes toexamine the mutually constituted worldviews of both British and Sikh, particu-larly focusing on the emergent category of “religion,” which is arguably a con-ceptual import. Here he attempts to redefine the chronology of the field in orderto include what he calls “precolonial” British knowledge prior to the formalannexation of the Punjab in 1849. Ballantyne convincingly argues that theBritish cast the Sikh into the role of Protestant Reformers of Hinduism. TheBritish fetishized Sikh “masculinity,” especially after demonstrations of loyaltyin the 1857–1858 mutiny.

Historians of the Sikhs will debate Ballantyne’s conceptual frameworks ofSikh scholarship. There is much to admire in the book conceptually and theoreti-cally. Yet case studies chosen by the author to present his “webs of empire”approach come up against some limits similar to those in the “externalist”approach he critiques. There is undoubtedly much more to say, for example,about how the historical role of women factors into the story of Sikh communitymaking. This topic could be addressed by placing more focus on the changingideas of the Sikh domestic sphere, with a closer examination of Sikh women’swriting. Ballantyne’s book has certainly expanded the field, and future scholarshipwill build on both its strengths and silences.

University of Texas, San Antonio Anne Hardgrove


The Illustrated Cultural History of India. Edited by A. L. Basham. (New Delhi, India:Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 301. $33.95.)

Although there has been an enormous amount of writing on the culturalhistory of India since 1975—that is, since this collection of superb essays was firstpublished—it is hard to find another anthology that matches the depth and rigorof the contents of this familiar classic. Its republication, more than three decadeslater, attests to the excellence and durability of the scholarship that the editorassembled with care and critical acumen.

What readers have now is an accessible and illustrated paperback that hasoutlived the many assaults of postmodern scholarship: it reiterates that thereexists a palpable, knowable, demystified India. It is a confident reassertion thatIndian history and culture are rich, complex, changing, and in dynamic interactionwith the goings-on of three millennia, and are not entirely the artifacts of theBritish colonial officers’ imagination or their crude and racist errors of perception!Readers see India again as that generous palimpsest, gaining in layers and textureswithout number, as they go through the three sections of the ancient, the Muslim,and the coming of the West. The overlaps and interpenetrations are duly consid-ered in the essays, and the pieces meld together far more seamlessly than thetripartite division suggests. Perhaps what it needs is a fourth section to capture thedrama of the unshackling of India in the last seven decades since independence,the pace of change and vigorous democratic growth, and the dark turns thatreligious nationalisms have taken in recent times.

The editor, the late, indisputably eminent A. L. Basham, who brought ancientIndian society to life in his most well-known work, The Wonder That Was India,selected some of the best-known names in Indology. It is unfortunate that the tableof contents omits their names, so the reader has to go from essay to essay todiscover that historians and philosophers like Romila Thapar, Percival Spear,Sarvapalli Radhakrichnan, S. N. Das Gupta, Hew McLeod, to mention a few,are contributors to this volume. The major religions that originated in India—Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism—and Islam, which came to the sub-continent to find its most populous home, are all considered in very intelligentsummary essays. The discussions of Indian architecture, art, music, literature, andhistory are lucid and learned.

The illustrations, which are a new addition to the book, are however, mostlydisappointing. Black-and-white photographs of monuments and sculpture arepoorly reproduced and look dull, even murky. Yet for those who have never seenthe façade of the Thanjavur Temple or the luminous Ajanta paintings, or even the


Rashtrapati Bhawan, these might supply a remote semblance. The line drawingsare somewhat livelier.

But the essays remain illuminating. The reviewer recommends this bookstrongly as a text for advanced high school, undergraduate, and graduate studentsin a more multicultural United States, U.K., and Australia; the casual reader; theavid tourist; and the many who now are awakened to an interest in India as arising power.

Baruch College Veena Talwan Oldenburg

Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgment. Editedby Robert E. Hegel and Katherine Carlitz. (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washing-ton Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 343. $65.00.)

This anthology paints a portrait of remarkable cultural cohesion in late imperialChinese views of the legal system. As the collected essays demonstrate, sharedtropes, cultural ideals of justice and morality, and concrete knowledge about thelegal system widely circulated not only in legal case records and the legal bureau-cratic order, but also in fiction and religion. From the apex of society, the emperor,down to China’s myriad bureaucrats, moral commentators, and ordinary citizensinvolved in legal action, all relied on long-standing rhetorical strategies (e.g., theuse of rhetorical questions that can be traced to the Analects), powerful socialtropes (including the filial son, the shrew, lewd Buddhist monks, or merchantsaway from home), and morally compelling stories (e.g., poverty as motive forzhawei, or fraud against the state), to invest their legal narratives with compre-hensibility. Conversely, producers and consumers of vernacular stories, along withreligious actors, were remarkably familiar with the concrete workings of the legalarena and drew freely from the judicial arena to shape their fictional narrativesand ritual strategies.

To look at the intertextual relationship between fiction, religion, and law, thisvolume explicitly adopts an interdisciplinary approach. By treating law as litera-ture, several essays bring methods of literary analysis to bear on legal materialsand open up new questions for the study of law in China. By demonstrating theimportance of narrativity and rhetoric in legal case records, these scholars do notdwell on how just or unjust was the system, but instead move the focus to howdifferent historical actors adopted narrative strategies to pursue what were oftendivergent interests. Readers get a sense of how an illiterate litigant could maneuverthe legal arena with powerful accusations against “immoral and lustful” monks,and how sympathetic magistrates during a period of commercialization might


legislate in ways that benefited traveling merchants in cases of insolvency. Readersalso see how state orthodoxy powerfully shaped judicial practice. In capital cases,for example, the Qing code provided criteria for leniency, as long as values ofConfucianism had been upheld in the criminal act.

Conversely, several scholars of literature explore law in literature, and a singlereligion scholar explores judicial themes in indictment rituals of the divine realm.These scholars show how these alternative realms could often provide morecomprehensive and satisfying solutions than the justice being dispensed in actualcourts. Although these are strong essays in their own right, the pieces lookingat law in literature (e.g., part three) do not engage in as interdisciplinaryan approach as those examining the narrative strategies of legal materials (e.g.,parts one and two). Readers expecting interdisciplinary engagement might, forexample, ask how an analysis that takes law into consideration might open up thestudy of literature beyond merely the content analysis of legal themes in literature.The final essay by Jonathan Ocko raises a fascinating insight in this regard,namely, how a study of the complex relationship between law and literature mayopen up the possibility of thinking about how courts were not simply sites ofpracticing and pursuing justice, but also realms of entertainment, and in turn,explain how this may have been why literature authors were so drawn to materialfrom the courts for their narratives. Unfortunately, none of the individual essaysreally explore this point in full. Further investigation of this aspect of the natureof the relationship between law and literature thus might merit yet anotherinterdisciplinary collective enterprise, and hopefully, this group, or another like it,will continue this fruitful study of writing and law.

Columbia University Eugenia Lean

Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700. By John E.Herman. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. Pp. x, 344.$49.50.)

From a fundamentalist Confucian perspective, the indigenous inhabitants ofGuizhou in southwestern China, the colonized subjects of this work, were tragi-cally uncultured (as are the book’s author and much of its readership, the reviewerincluded). A conviction regarding the superiority of the political, social, andcultural institutions of the empire’s ethnic Chinese (“Han”) majority informsthe core of the “Confucian civilizing mission,” a more nuanced reformulation ofthe controversial term Sinicization, namely the conversion of non-Han people,ignorant of these institutions, into Han.


If readers of Western history are surprised to learn of a Confucian missioncivilisatrice, scholars of Chinese borderlands history are studied in the concept.At its own core, Amid the Clouds and Mist revises Sinicizing stereotypes ofthe Ming [1368–1644] colonization of southwestern China to assert that themaintenance of ethnic distinctions, rather than Sinicization, was the dynasticpriority.

John E. Herman’s important project encompasses the narrative of Guizhou’simperial colonization mainly under three dynasties, the Mongol Yuan [1279–1368], the Han Ming, and the Manchu Qing [1644–1911]. Central is the histori-cal agency of the province’s Nasu branch of the Yi people, today one of China’sfifty-six official ethnicities. Herman considers Yi and Han records in revisionistresponse to both English and Chinese “hegemonizing histories” that have notconsidered newly available Yi language sources in Chinese translation (6).Although acknowledging a deep debt to PRC work on processing these primarysources, the author could have augmented his extended analysis of the Englishliterature in the introduction and conclusion through a commensurate emphasison the illuminating PRC secondary scholarship and its state-centered focus, whichare effectively employed in the footnotes.

In chapter one, Herman covers the emergence of the Yi kingdom of Mu’ege,which controlled most of Guizhou by the ninth century. In chapter two, theauthor gives an account of the Mongol’s comparatively brief and indirectrule over Mu’ege, which initiated the imperial incorporation of the southwestunder the “tusi” or “native chieftainship” system. Herman argues that Mongoladministrative practices defined the southwest as an integral part of China,rather than a buffer zone, the first time for Chinese elites. In chapters three tofive, Herman examines the succeeding Ming efforts to adapt Mongol institu-tions to facilitate large-scale Han settlement of Guizhou by 1413. Simulta-neously, Yi elites strove to preserve their territorial authority, most dramaticallyin the She-An Rebellion [1621–1629]. The Manchu conquest, covered inchapter six, undermined the authority of both Yi and Han, although Herman’sassertion that “the southwest frontier” was fully incorporated by 1722 needsqualification (17).

Although comparative analysis is not Herman’s purpose, his book, like mostrecent histories of the Chinese imperial borderlands, can make important contri-butions to other frontier histories, particularly concerning the North AmericanWest, by problematizing their more parochial aspects. Serious comparativeengagement might result, for example, in precise distinctions between colonialismand expansionism that are generally absent but critical to a global range


of borderlands histories. Borderlands scholars could all benefit from such acomparative civilizing mission.

Washington and Lee University David A. Bello

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. By Yasmin Khan. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv, 251. $30.00.)

Reading this compelling account of the partition of India in 1947, the reader ismoved to ask: What could they have been thinking? Most accounts of the end ofBritish rule in India concentrate on the high politics of the negotiations among asuccession of viceroys—ending with Lord Mountbatten—and the leaders of theIndian National Congress and the Muslim League. The British were concerned toleave a legacy of which they could be proud, and hence to avoid an unseemly civilwar in the wake of their departure. Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the futureIndian Prime Minister, and the Muslim League, headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah,the father of Pakistan, were concerned to inherit a state or states that would begovernable and would guarantee civil rights and economic improvement to theircitizenry. The negotiations had reached a stalemate by late 1946. Mountbattenarrived in Delhi in early 1947, rapidly came to the conclusion that partition wasthe only solution, got the leaders to agree to the plan by early June, and thenannounced to everyone’s amazement that the transfer of power would take placein mid-August.

This grand narrative, with Mountbatten as the master of ceremonies, hasremained dominant for far too long. Questions about Mountbatten’s judgmenthave emerged in recent years, but the politics of the partition settlement havegenerally remained at the center of historical focus. Yasmin Khan endeavors hereto change that focus by bringing together a range of voices that reveal the humantoll of those hasty political decisions. The Great Partition, in other words, listensto “the Indian street,” the stories of ordinary men and women, hapless anddisplaced by decisions over which they had no control. Hindus, Muslims, andSikhs fled for their lives to opposite sides of a frontier that was not defined untilafter Independence Day. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the violence,whether it was random or carefully orchestrated by paramilitary organizations,religious militias, or murderous bands. The solidarity of neighborhoods andvillages disintegrated. Khan assembles an impressive array of sources from alllevels of the social and political spectrum to paint a convincing picture of officialincompetence and unseemly haste. The British were more concerned about with-drawal than with maintaining order as they did so. The political leadership, who


should have been better prepared for the possibility of violent mass migration,remained remarkably insouciant, convinced that once power was transferred, allwould be well. No such luck.

Khan’s account is dramatic and detailed, almost too detailed; it would havebenefited from a firmer editorial hand. The Great Partition is also stronger onnarrative than on analysis. Nevertheless, this is a gripping and readable book thatthe reviewer would recommend for any course dealing with the Indian freedommovement, independence, partition, and the bitter legacy of those traumatic times.

University of Texas at Austin Gail Minault

A Military History of Modern China: From the Manchu Conquest to Tian’anmenSquare. By Peter Worthing. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007.Pp. viii, 226. $49.95.)

This book joins a number of recent studies in reflecting a growing scholarlyinterest in warfare in Chinese history. The author explains his work as a study of“the causes, conduct, and consequences of war and the role of the military in thehistorical development of the modern Chinese nation,” but his emphasis is appar-ently on the former rather than the latter (vii). Almost all of the internal andexternal military conflicts China has experienced in the past two hundred years,with only few exceptions, such as the Sino-Soviet border conflict (the Chinese-Eastern Railway Incident) in 1929, are described in chronological order.

Relying primarily on secondary sources, the book is a succinct and highlyreadable account of the history of wars and military institutions in China from thelate imperial period to the present day. The extent of its coverage distinguishesitself from other similar surveys. Although the focus is clearly on developmentssince the Opium Wars, Peter Worthing begins his narrative with a brief overviewof the past three thousand years and devotes a full chapter to the establishment ofthe Manchu rule in the mid-seventeenth century. In the section on the republicanera, armed struggles in the early years of the Nationalist government betweenChiang Kai-shek and regional militarists receive comparable treatment to that ofthe more well-known warlord wars of the previous decade. Toward the end of thebook, Worthing’s discussion of military tensions across the Taiwan Strait in the1990s gives an appropriate update to his earlier account of the Strait Crises inthe 1950s. At several points Worthing turns his attention to the evolution andimpact of Mao’s concept of “People’s War,” providing a useful perspective for anunderstanding of the PRC’s military past and present.


On the whole, however, this book reads too much like a conventional historyof modern China. Though it is legitimate to consider the political and diplomaticcontexts of some of the military conflicts covered here, much in the book can alsobe found in general Chinese history texts. There seems to be insufficient specificinformation on military matters. The details of China’s acquisition of foreignmilitary technology and arms purchases from the West since the late 1800s, forexample, receive only marginal treatment. Worthing also sheds little light onhow the military has influenced the overall culture and society of modern China.It has been widely noted by scholars that warlords, secret societies, Guomindangtroops, and Communist guerillas have significantly militarized Chinese civilianlife in the last century. Was this indeed the case? As a study of the militaryexperience in modern China, issues such as this deserve at least some attentionfrom the author.

With no introduction or conclusion, Worthing’s work is probably designedas a text for undergraduate courses and therefore ready for frequent updatingrevisions. As such, college teachers should find it very useful, even though it addslimited original research to the field.

St. Michael’s College Ke-wen Wang

EUROPE

Daily Life During the French Revolution. By James M. Anderson. (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 268. $49.95.)

In this book, the author tackles the issue of how the French Revolution changedthe daily lives of French men and women. The first chapter describes the geo-graphic, social, and political situation of France on the eve of the Revolution,before providing a rapid overview of political events from 1789 to 1802. Sub-sequent chapters are organized thematically and cover a variety of topics, fromtravel and entertainment, to food and medicine, and to military life. Eachchapter covers the periods before, during, and after the Revolution, with theexception of the chapter “Life at Versailles,” which is limited to the periodbefore 1789. The book is a synthetic overview, based primarily on secondarysources, although the author uses some primary sources to good effect, parti-cularly the accounts of English travelers to France such as Arthur Young. Thebibliography, though far from extensive, includes key works by recent authorson the French Revolution. Useful additions include maps, a chronology of theRevolution, and a glossary.


James M. Anderson highlights well-known transformations that occurredduring the Revolution, such as changes to family legislation and to policiesconcerning the Catholic Church. Other chapters provide information concern-ing topics that have received less scholarly attention, such as the experienceof travel. Each chapter provides a brief, but solid, introduction to the topic athand, and Anderson has a good eye for the telling detail meant to spark theimagination of readers. Particularly effective in this sense is the descriptionof Paris found in the chapter on urban life, which brings to life the varietyof smells and sights one might have encountered on arrival in this bustlingmetropolis in 1789.

This descriptive work does not present an argument concerning the impactof the Revolution on the French. After finishing the book, readers have a sense ofhow fashion, churchgoing, theater performances, and charity changed, but theauthor does not provide any way to make sense of these changes, documentingthem rather than explaining them. There are three problems with this approach.First, the structure of the book tends to downplay the extent of change that Frenchsociety was experiencing even before 1789, painting a false picture of a staticsociety completely transformed by the Revolution. Second, although it may betempting to attribute all changes in daily life to the Revolution, it would have beenmore useful to take a more analytical approach, sorting out which changes weredue to the Revolution and which simply coincided with this event. Finally, despitethe upheavals caused by the Revolution, many aspects of daily life remained thesame long after Napoleon came to power.

Anderson’s work is unlikely to interest specialists of the Revolution, who mightmore profitably turn to Peter McPhee’s Living the French Revolution, 1789–1799(Palgrave, 2006) or the still useful work by Jean-Paul Bertaud La vie quotidienneen France au temps de la Révolution [1789–1795] (Hachette, 1983). This intro-ductory survey may, however, spark interest in the Revolution among thosepreviously unfamiliar with its history.

Arizona State University Victoria E. Thompson

The Roman Triumph. By Mary Beard. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2007. Pp. 434. $29.95.)

The first Roman triumph—of more than three hundred known—was reportedlycelebrated by Romulus, son of Mars and Rome’s founder; the ritual persisted, orat least was invoked, as late as the sixth-century CE in Constantinople. Withmeticulous scholarship, lively interest in the reception of classical tradition, and a


subversive self-image, Mary Beard does not aim to uncover the historical “reality”of this definitive institution of Roman culture and history. Rather, she seeks toreveal the Romans’ own “critical thinking on the dangerous ambivalence ofsuccess and military glory,” and to expose how historians know what they knowabout the triumph, even if (often precisely if) that clarification undercuts scholarlyopinion (4). This, Beard’s most recent book on iconic topics, offers much toexperts, students of Roman history, and nonspecialists alike.

Beard elucidates Roman triumphs by highlighting in almost every chapter atriumph or related ritual, including Pompey’s lavish triumph in 61 BCE thatincluded a bust of him made of pearls; Cicero’s desperately desired but neverrealized triumph; Ovid’s mock-up of marching as a captive in Cupid’s triumph(Amores 1.2); and Domitian’s macabre “triumphal” banquet in 89 CE. Sheknows the ancient authors well, from the obvious Livy, Plutarch, and Josephusto arcane or atypical writers such as Eutropius and Silius Italicus. She exploresepigraphic evidence, particularly the Fasti Triumphales. As with other specifictopics, Beard does not “solve” the many vexing questions about this roster oftriumphing generals that was once exhibited in the Roman Forum. But heranalysis of the inscription and its divergences from the literary record advanceher thesis, that historians have few unequivocal facts about the Roman triumphdespite (because of!) its prominence. Roman culture, at times qualified as“ritual” or “triumphal,” captivates Beard more than do the economic and soci-etal ramifications of Rome’s celebrated importation of spoils, or the conse-quences for Rome’s built environment and provinces (57). She effectively usesthe triumph’s surprisingly few representations on Roman relief, painting, minorarts, and coins to check literary evidence: she thus debunks, for example, the“standard claim” that a slave stood behind the general in the triumphal chariotto remind this “god for a day” that he was but a man (87). The forty-threeillustrations and plans include stunning reimaginations, such as The Triumphof Marius by Tiepolo, as well as antiquarians’ prints and even a New Yorkercartoon.

Some readers may despair of Beard’s refusal to tackle the obdurate scholarlyproblems she lays bare, and some may grow irritated with her dismissiveness ofprevious research, which she often cites in a simplified manner. But Beard succeedsin having her audience “engage with the complicated, multifarious, personal, andpartisan agendas that underlie any mass celebration” as she interrogates andilluminates the distinctive Roman triumph (333).

Duke University Mary T. Boatwright


Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland (1800–1850). By James M.Brophy. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 365.$99.00.)

It was “sheer happenstance,” as this author is quick to point out in his fascinatingstudy, that revolution and carnival arrived jointly in the Rhineland in 1848 (215).Yet this happenstance illustrates vividly the nexus between popular culture, theemergence of a popular public sphere, and the political participation at the coreof this study.

Focusing mainly on the newly Prussian Rhineland, James M. Brophy’s bookemanates from a deceptively simple question, namely how, in the early nine-teenth century, broader publics, the common classes, came to be part of the civicrealm of participatory politics. Jürgen Habermas’s work, concentrating oneconomically independent elites and print culture, does not answer this vexingquestion. Brophy, with his focus on popular culture, does, thereby providingimportant and challenging correctives to Habermas, such as a more positiveevaluation of consumerism that “did not corrupt the public sphere but, rather,constituted it” (304). Brophy convincingly shows that and how popular cultureas well as its variegated and seemingly inconspicuous practices created formsof political communication that made ordinary Rhinelanders into parts of thepolitical nation. By 1848, at the end of a period of political repression, they hadjoined it, even if their political education had taken unexpected and—before thisbook—understudied forms.

The study, deeply embedded in the many appropriate strands of scholarshipand painstaking archival research, is divided into six substantive and mesmerizingchapters. Among the most straightforward chapters is the first. Here, Brophyshows who “read” (more people than commonly assumed); what they read, forexample folk calendars that presupposed an engaged, informed, and interestedaudience; and how the literature changed, becoming more political and partisanover time. Also fascinating is his study of public spaces not only as loci ofcommoners’ politicized activities—such as the planting of liberty trees, charivaris,peddling of politicized wares, or the acclamation of person and ideas, in reactionto the political and socioeconomic changes around them—but also as a place ofinteraction and communication.

The author rounds out the book with absorbing chapters on the roles ofsinging, carnival, tumult, and religion. For Catholic Rhinelanders, their religiontook center stage, and under pressure from the state, emerged as a demonstrativepractice and civic right. Each of the chapters could easily stand alone, even if some


make the author’s argument more strongly than others. That said, Brophy has theadmirable quality not to overplay his archival hand and freely acknowledges thedifferences between conclusive and suggestive evidence. His book is stronger andmore persuasive for it.

An eminently readable treat for most German and many European historians,the study might, despite its clear organization, be pitched slightly too high for ageneral audience or an undergraduate population. Presumably, the latter were notBrophy’s intended audiences; it will, however, not prevent the reviewer fromfoisting parts of the book on her classes.

Illinois State University Katrin Paehler

The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. By Roger Chick-ering. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 628. $99.00.)

The author of this study begins with an intriguing set of questions: Does total warrequire “total history”? And is it possible to write such history?

As an answer, Roger Chickering offers a rich and varied portrait of a city fullyengaged in the war effort and negotiating its consequences. Though urban historiesof war tend to focus on capital cities, Freiburg, a midsize town of roughly eighty-fivethousand residents, offers a unique contrast. In addition to small-scale manufac-ture, Freiburg’s economy depended on university students as well as tourists andpensioners drawn to the Black Forest climate and landscape. Mass mobilizationand the proximity of the front caused a steep decline in the service economy (e.g.,hotels, restaurants, and theaters), which recovered only slightly with influxes ofsoldiers on leave, “battlefield tourists,” and visitors at clinics for injured soldiers.

Like other cities, Freiburg faced severe shortages and inflation. But with thecountryside so near, tensions between town and country became intense and localrather than abstract as farmers charged high prices at market and city dwellersraided fields. The deprivations of war changed sensory perceptions and the urbanenvironment: food lost its taste, clothes their color, and the town became quiet asyoung men left and historic church bells were requisitioned for scrap metal. Theabsence of reliable news, increasingly complex regimes of regulation, and resent-ments that war burdens were not equally shared destabilized community bondsand even perceptions of reality. This created an atmosphere in which socialfragmentation and accusations of insufficient patriotism flourished. Yet despite theintensifying fissures between groups, the author notes a slender persistence ofcommunity and national solidarity until the failed offensives of 1918 when“exhaustion” replaced solidarity as the dominant sentiment.


As Chickering admits in the introduction, an urban “microhistory” representsa step back from the ambition of “total history” (2). Nevertheless, the lens of thecity allows him to cover a stunning range of perspectives (municipal authorities,labor, religious organizations, and women’s groups) and issues (from calls forproper cemetery decorum to the closing of theaters to promote public “serious-ness”). To aspire to the “total history of total war,” however, a tighter connectionto the battlefield seems necessary. The front remains just offstage. In a societysuddenly dominated by women, youth, and the aged, men of military age usuallyappear as absences and invalids. Chickering draws his closest direct connection tothe battlefield in a very compelling reading of obituary notices and at thosemoments when the boundary between front and home front disappeared duringaerial bombings that claimed thirty-one lives.

By showing readers the impossibility of writing “a total history of total war”despite such a remarkably researched and broadly encompassing study, Chicker-ing proves his point about the vast scope and depth of this war. The story endswithout a concluding chapter explaining the meaning of total war for the city ofFreiburg, but this lack of closure was a feeling perhaps shared by those who hadlived, worked, and sacrificed there during the war.

California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo Molly Loberg

The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688–1691. By John Childs. (New York, N.Y.:Hambledon Continuum Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 440. $49.95.)

William III crushed Irish resistance by October 1691, defeating the deposed JamesII, his Jacobite army, his Roman Catholic adherents, and his few French allies.William was aided by the Protestant “Irish” (mostly Scots and English) and byhis English and continental soldiery. John Childs chronicles—in overwhelmingdetail—the success of Williamite forces as they methodically advanced fromnortheast to southwest, won the iconic Battle of the Boyne on 11 July 1690, andcaptured Limerick, the last Jacobite bastion.

There is much to commend in Childs’s work. An excellent chapter on “Prac-tical Matters” is a primer on late-seventeenth-century warfare in Ireland coveringbasic strategy, tactics, weaponry, personnel, and supply. It describes the difficultterrain, nasty weather, lack of provisions, inadequate materiel, rampant disease,indifferent personnel, and assorted hardships encountered by both professionalarmies. Irish conflicts were also civil wars, confounded by the “irregulars” andmilitias that were both asset and liability for their respective sides.


Childs’s chapter on the Battle of the Boyne is well crafted, with clarifyingdetails, a thoughtful comparison of the opposing armies and their royal com-manders, and a balanced conclusion. He has a fine appreciation of the interna-tional political situation. James and William each needed a quick victory: theformer as a springboard to his supporters in Scotland; the latter to return to hiscontinental struggle against France, which, in turn, wanted a drawn-out war todivide William’s strength.

Childs notes that accounts of the war came almost entirely from William’ssympathizers. Most sources were propagandistic; Jacobitism had lost andWilliam’s cause was justified. Relying “upon partisan sources to reconstruct thehistory of a civil war” is a problem, he admits (83). For example, Williamitesconsistently inflicted huge losses on the Jacobites and Irish at little cost to them-selves. Childs frequently remarks that these casualty figures are hard to believebecause, in reporting “enemy” casualties, Williamites “did not bother to distin-guish” between criminals, civilians, irregulars, and soldiers (28). If so, why passthem on?

There is interesting information here on Irish history and on Williamite mili-tary operations. There is a strong narrative line nearly swamped by an astoundingmass and level of detail. Childs, a military expert of this era, refers to this as a“detailed chronicle” (xxiii). Perhaps a chronicle’s pattern (one thing after another)relieved him of the need to construct a narrative that rises above the details ofinnumerable skirmishes, cattle raids, and officers’ names, and of rain, bogs, mud,hardship, disease, casualties, petty politics, and so on. Conversely, this literarydevice does immerse the reader—almost literally—in the experience of a partici-pant in “small war,” in its dreary, repetitive, and mind-numbing minutiae.

Childs has a lively writing style with occasional flashes of humor and ahigh-spirited gleeful delight in the trivial. The general reader and the militaryhistorian can dip into this book with profit.

California State University, Sacramento Frank Garosi

Contested Island: Ireland, 1460–1630. By S. J. Connolly. (Oxford, England: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 426. $75.00.)

Perhaps the most revealing sentence in this 403-page book comes on page 123.Discussing the endemic conflict of early modern Ireland the author observes, “Whatwas happening was event rather than process; but events, even if only in hind-sight, can be seen to have had their own momentum” (123). “Process” smacksof teleology; “events” are contingent, and tracking “momentum” hopefully gives


shape and coherence to a narrative structure that otherwise might collapse intoa jumble of antiquarian datum, and late medieval and early modern Ireland wasnothing if not messy.

S. J. Connolly is keenly aware of the theoretical and methodological issuesconfronting historians today, and in his introduction offers a brief, sprightlydefense of (what he would probably not call) “conventional” history againstpostmodern critique. He takes those critiques seriously, however, worrying aloudthat “a single, structured account of three and a half centuries of history, even thehistory of a small island” may seem nothing more “than the last bellowings of adinosaur in its swamp” (2–3). As a historian of exacting standards, who has upuntil now worked on the period between the restoration [1660] and the Famine[1845], he is, moreover, wading into a new and treacherous swamp. ContestedIsland, then, draws on printed primary sources and on a rich, if disputatious,secondary literature. Connolly unobtrusively picks his way through the contestedhistoriography, entering a footnoted caveat here and offering a sensible quali-fication there. In a moment of rare abandon, it is true, he describes Alan Ford’sProtestant Reformation in Ireland as “superb,” but discipline is quickly restored.

This book—the first of two, which will bring the story up to the 1790s—openswith a vivid depiction of the Battle of Knockdoe in 1504. In that bloody clashbetween two Anglo-Irish magnates, native Irish allies fought on both sides, andthat is one point of the vignette. Long before this time, the descendants of theoriginal Anglo-Norman conquerors had integrated themselves into the Gaelicpolitical system, or gone native, just as the Irish had accommodated themselvesto new realities of political power. In Connolly’s account pragmatic calculationalmost always trumps ethnic, or later, religious difference.

Another point that Knockdoe illustrates is the military capacity and politicaldominance of the eighth earl of Kildare, lord deputy of Ireland, mightiest ofover-mighty subjects, and walking epitome of Anglo-Irish relations in the lateMiddle Ages. If 1534 and “the fall of the House of Kildare” is often taken as the“beginning” of early modern Irish history, 1520 and the appointment of anEnglish lord deputy, then the earl of Surrey, is just as logical a starting place.Surrey and his successors were instructed to bring Ireland under control but werenot provided with the resources to do so. With his customary craftsmanshipConnolly narrates and analyzes the complicated politics and escalating violencethat inevitably followed. Little wonder he perceives event rather than process inthat morass, although starting with Surrey, process there surely was.

University of Notre Dame Jim Smyth


The English Physician. By Nicholas Culpeper. Edited, with an introduction, byMichael A. Flannery. (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Pp.113. $35.00.)

The seventeenth-century herbals, remedy collections, and pharmacopeia transla-tions of Nicholas Culpeper were widely known in England and regularly reprintedthrough the nineteenth century. Michael A. Flannery has edited and introducedthe first American edition (published by Nicholas Boone in Boston, 1708), whichpopularized Culpeper in the American colonies. In the introduction, Flannerycompares the American edition and the English Culpeper works, discussing itswide appeal and influence on medical practice in the colonies. The EnglishPhysician was not actually written by Culpeper, although it carried his name,“contained something of the flavor of Culpeper’s commentary,” and paraphrasedor copied recipes from Culpeper’s works (15). Rather, it was an almost-verbatimreprint of Thomas Howkins’s Physical Receipts, or, the New English Physician[London, 1690]. Most significantly, Flannery considers what the American editionrevealed about its publisher’s intentions. Boone saw a ready market among thereligious Nonconformists of Boston, understanding that the name Culpepercarried connotations of self-help, distrust of authority, and empirical investiga-tion. Less convincing is Flannery’s connection of Culpeper’s translation of medicalLatin into English and John Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century heretical translation ofthe Latin Vulgate Bible into English, both of which were “unthinkable” (100).With the Renaissance and Reformation, Culpeper’s medical egalitarianism wasindeed very “thinkable”; he was only one of many mid-seventeenth-centuryauthors who wrote medical books in the vernacular.

The reprint of The English Physician is a pleasure to read. Flannery has glossedthe reprint with and provided an appendix of definitions for archaic medicalterminology and obscure ingredients, which is helpful. The text is easy to follow;each section and remedy is clearly indicated, while the modern typescript allowsnonspecialist readers to follow the text easily. In a useful bibliographic essay,Flannery discusses the main primary and secondary literature surroundingCulpeper, publishing, and early American medicine. The overall accessibility ofthe book, however, is hampered slightly by the absence of any discussion aboutcontemporary medical ideas. Although Flannery wants to convey a time “whenmedicine was more sorcery than science,” it is important to recognize that seem-ingly superstitious therapies and beliefs had an underlying logic within the earlymodern worldview (24). It also would be helpful if Flannery gave more explana-tion for the more obscure ailments. For example, although he notes that green


sickness is now known as anemia, Flannery makes no mention of the early modernunderstanding of the disease, such as it being a disease of virgins (81).

Nonetheless, this book will have wide appeal. For nonscholars and under-graduate students, this is an easy-to-read book of the weird and wonderful.Historians of medicine and books will also find this edition of interest, particu-larly in thinking about the transfer of knowledge from the Old World to the NewWorld. Given that there are few surviving copies of this book, and those held onlyin research libraries, Flannery has done a great service in making The EnglishPhysician widely available.

University of Saskatchewan Lisa Smith

The Demonology of William of Auvergne: By Fire and Sword. By Thomas B. de Mayo.(Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Pp. vi, 249. $109.95.)

In 1228, Pope Gregory IX appointed the cathedral canon and master of theology,William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris [1228–1249]. According to the author ofthis study, William’s attitude toward the intractable problems of Louis IX’s Francemade him an important figure in the development of R. I. Moore’s “persecutingsociety.” Indeed, William advocated use of “fire and sword” against all whodeviated from the rigid orthodoxy defined by his scholastic philosophy. Thomas B.de Mayo suggests William’s fear of a demonic conspiracy against Christian societyinspired his harsh attitude.

Relying on De universo and De legibus, de Mayo analyzes the challenge ofGreek and Arabic science to William’s Christian worldview. Although he acceptedthis science’s mechanistic universe, William considered its teaching concerningspirits a dangerous source of error. In keeping with its late antique and earlymedieval origins, to which de Mayo devotes considerable attention, this scienceattributed powers over the natural world to potentially benevolent spirits. Williamknew this doctrine had already inspired some educated clerics in Paris to practice“necromancy,” a form of astral magic. He also feared it might revive pagan beliefsamong an imperfectly christianized laity and offer support to heretical Cathars byattributing god-like power to demons.

William responded by purging science of theories he considered hostile toChristianity, while incorporating the rest into his own theological system. Heaccepted the view that spirits were incorporeal, and insisted that they were theBible’s fallen angels—proud, evil, yet powerless to act independently of divineProvidence. William conceded to demons only the power to deceive humanity


with illusions created through superior knowledge of nature. Moreover, heinsisted that demonic illusions ultimately served the edification of the Christianpeople, according to God’s will.

De Mayo stresses the importance of William’s eagerness to explain somemarvelous events as the effect of “natural magic’s” manipulation of occult virtueswithin objects. Yet William made this limited concession to science in works thatprovided intellectual support for persecution in late medieval and early modernEurope. Practitioners of “natural magic” could easily fall under suspicion ofcontacting demons to work their illusions. De Mayo considers William’s misogy-nist castigation of women for making, and urging others to make, offerings todemons who assumed the form of benevolent or hostile female spirits an impor-tant justification for later persecution of witches.

De Mayo explains William’s scholastic theology clearly for both general readerand specialist, while offering valuable insights into his perception of a troubledsociety. William’s ideal of a hierarchical Christian society conflicted with the rapidpolitical, religious, and social transformation of early-thirteenth-century France.Even more disturbing to William was the conflict between the church’s doctrineof a uniform, absolutely true Christian faith and the divergent religious trends ofhis age. De Mayo’s analysis of William’s scholastic theology and its historicalcontext deserves serious attention.

Pace University Mary Alberi

Mystifying the Monarch: Studies in Discourse, Power, and History. Edited, with anintroduction, by Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere. (Amsterdam, The Nether-lands: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Pp. 296. $45.00.)

This book consists of some thirteen essays by an international group of scholars(Belgian, French, Dutch, English, and American) in which “the relationshipbetween discourse, power, and history is . . . confronted with one of the oldestand most traditional subjects of historiography: the monarchy” (10). Theseessays, all of them concerned with the monarchy in Western Europe, range in theirchronological focus from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. And the citationof just a few of their titles should serve to illustrate how disparate in nature theyare. So disparate, indeed, that the editors are forced to labor mightily (thoughwithout notable success) in an effort to impose some measure of cohesion on thewhole. Thus the collection begins with Alain Bourreau’s “How Christian Wasthe Sacralization of Monarchy in Western Europe (Twelfth-Fifteenth Centuries)?”and ends with Maarten Van Ginderachter’s “Public Transcripts of Royalism:


Pauper Letters to the Belgian Royal Family (1880–1940).” And, along the way,readers encounter such other contributions as Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin’s “ ‘Et leprince respondit par sa bouche,’ Monarchal Speech Habits in Late MedievalEurope”; Kevin Sharpe’s “Sacralization and Demystification: The Publicization ofMonarchy in Early Modern England”; and Henk te Velde’s “Cannadine, TwentyYears on: Monarchy and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and theNetherlands.”

Disparate in nature they may be, but they are full of intriguing claims andinsights—such as the degree to which the institution of the speech from the thronein Belgium differed in nature from that in Britain or The Netherlands, or thenotion that “Louis XV lost control of his character in the 1740s, and [that] neitherhe nor his successors managed to reclaim it” (141). Taken together, moreover,they do succeed in conveying a central finding to the effect that “anything but astraightforward historical tale can be told of advancing demystification of themonarchy” across time (20).

In this respect, the reviewer would judge the contributions made by the essaysfocused on modern Europe to be the most valuable. Even when they criticize ormodify the cases Bagehot made in his classic work on the English constitution andDavid Cannadine in his article on the British monarchy and the “invention oftradition,” these essays witness powerfully to the enduring power of those works,with Henk te Velde characterizing Cannadine’s essay as “the single most influen-tial article on the history of monarchy since at least the 1960s” (193). And KevinSharpe, in what is perhaps the best of them all, lucidly conveys what is significantin the effort of critics and theorists over the past two decades to draw attention“to the relationships among languages and signs and power and authority from avariety of perspectives” (99). In unhappy contrast, the stream of argumentationin the essays focused on the medieval period is all too often clogged by aportentous species of “critical discourse analysis” and obstructed by a clumsypatter of references to “narrativization,” “hegemonic discourse,” “intersubjectivediscursive conventions and repertoires,” and the like.

Williams College Francis Oakley

Flanders: A Cultural History. By André de Vries. (Oxford, England: Oxford UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 296. $25.00.)

Part of the series “Landscapes of the Imagination,” this book is aimed at a popularaudience, presenting a vast array of interesting facts, stories, and images drawnfrom the history, culture, and landscape of Flanders. After an introduction


explaining the complexity of the term Flanders and the Flemish, both of whichhave meant different things at different times through history, the author beginswith three chapters that give a broad overview of the geography, history, politics,language, religion, and popular culture of the entire territory. He covers thevast array of invasions and wars fought in the area since Roman times, with aparticular examination of the linguistic and religious conflicts that have markedthe area. He also describes some of the more widespread religious, folkloric, andcultural traditions, as well as food and drink, from beer and waffles to fries andsausages. These are followed by ten chapters covering one of the major citiesor provinces within Belgium, as well as a chapter each on Dutch and FrenchFlanders. Each includes references to history, popular culture, literature, architec-ture, monuments, art, interesting crimes or scandals, and short biographicalsketches of famous individuals who lived there.

There are numerous extracts from poetry, as well as literary descriptions fromwell-known writers, both foreign and Flemish. The author covers the well-knownFlemish schools of painting, but also gives plenty of attention to less well-knownelements from the rich history and culture of the region.

The book is well written, entertaining, easy to read, and contains an impressiverange of interesting facts, anecdotes, and information about the composite partsof Flanders. Its strength is the range of material, and the ability of the author torelate the political, cultural, and artistic elements to one another, to create a well-presented, rounded vision of the historical landscape of Flanders. There is notmuch, however, by way of analysis, interpretation, debate, or engagement with thehistoriography of the region, nor does it contain footnotes or other scholarlyapparatus beyond a list of further reading. It is much more wide ranging than atourist guide, but those looking for cutting edge analytical cultural history will bedisappointed. It will certainly be of interest, though, to its intended audienceamong the general travelling public, perhaps more so for those already familiarwith the region or intending to visit.

University of Sheffield Timothy Baycroft

Where Fate Beckons: The Life of Jean-François de la Pérouse. By John Dunmore.(Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska Press, 2007. Pp. 292. $45.00.)

In this biography of Jean François de la Pérouse, the author presents a detailedstudy of French exploration in the Pacific in the late eighteenth century. Born in1741 into the minor French nobility in Albi, la Pérouse’s naval career began atfourteen and coincided with the climax of a century-long Anglo-French struggle


for control of the high seas, and with it, dominion over the as yet largelyuncharted Pacific Ocean. In over thirty years on the seas, la Pérouse saw actionin both the Seven Years War and the American Revolution and served in theWest Indies, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. His career both climaxed with thecommand of a major scientific expedition beginning in 1785, and concluded,tragically, with his disappearance off Vanikoro Island in 1788. This expedition,enthusiastically sponsored by Louis XVI and staffed with scientists and savantsof all kinds, occupies one third of the book. John Dunmore draws on laPérouse’s journals and correspondence to chart his progress from France toHawaii, Alaska, the Sea of Japan, and Botany Bay, where he was last seen byEuropeans on 10 March 1788 before he embarked on the homeward leg ofhis expedition.

It was an ambitious expedition, and Dunmore recounts it in meticulous detail.Although la Pérouse was a somewhat peripheral figure in the naval campaigns thatpreceded this voyage, his career still offers interesting insights into the politicsof the eighteenth-century navy. Dunmore explores the role well-placed patronsplayed in his promotion and the social tensions that bedeviled the French navy asan exclusively aristocratic officer corps resisted claims for recognition from thenon-noble officers of the merchant marine who joined the king’s navy in wartime.It also, interestingly, demonstrates the difficulties many aristocratic officersexperienced in reconciling the pursuit of glory on the high seas with the moremundane, but also more urgent, imperatives of securing a share of colonialcommerce for France in a period of intense imperial rivalry. A pragmatist aboveall else, la Pérouse was able to accommodate both of these agendas effectivelyenough, but it is a telling reflection on the state of the French navy that most ofhis colleagues could not.

As a history of exploration and indeed, of naval warfare, this is very informa-tive, but Dunmore appears less assured when his subject moves out of this milieu;the discussion of la Pérouse’s engagement with the world of Enlightenment ideas,for example, seem overly tentative. As with Dunmore’s earlier biography of laPérouse’s illustrious contemporary Louis de Bougainville, this book is carefullyresearched and lucidly written, although its sparse and poorly edited endnotesdo neither of these qualities justice. Nevertheless, this is a very thorough study ofan important figure in the history of Pacific exploration, although ultimately, aseven Dunmore concludes, the mystery of la Pérouse’s disappearance probablyovershadows his achievements.

Trinity College Dublin Joseph Clarke


Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700.By Susan Dwyer Amussen. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,2007. Pp. xiv, 302. $59.95.)

Slavery and the Caribbean were at the core of England’s seventeenth-centuryempire. The author of this study contends that just as England shaped theinstitutions of its colonies, it was itself transformed by its Caribbean possessions.In this book Susan Dwyer Amussen explores the creation of European andAfro-West Indian transatlantic societies. Although scholars have focused increas-ing attention on the European experience in the tropical Atlantic, they have spentless time considering African and Creole contributions in shaping transatlanticidentities.

Amussen notes that “the traffic between the West Indies and England wastwo-way,” with migrants having a profound impact on the societies they entered(7). Central to her analysis of transatlantic movements is the Barbadian slave,Betty, and her son, Thomas Helyar, who was sent by John Helyar to brotherWilliam Helyar of Somerset, England. Reconstructing Betty’s forgotten story isAmussen’s chief objective. Although the Helyar family’s story has been well toldby J. H. Bennet and Richard Dunn, Amussen draws dissimilar conclusionsby focusing on the transformation of people and cultures on both sides of theAtlantic. Although Bennet and Dunn construct engaging business historiesdrawing in part or totally on the Helyar records, Amussen aims to reconstruct thelives of largely forgotten—and probably more characteristic—people like Bettyand Thomas. Their lives offer a glimpse into seventeenth-century societies inEngland and the Caribbean that were “transformed” by crossing the Atlantic.Such people—as well as their social superiors—were transformed themselves,while changing the communities they migrated to; “people, black and white,enslaved and free, were at the heart of the colonial enterprise” (6).

Amussen addresses the impact of large-scale slave societies and the emergenceof black majorities in the Caribbean on England and English ideas about race.Although the European construction of plantation societies is well documented,Amussen provides a valuable assessment of social transformations. As sheobserves, the seventeenth-century English West Indies were “not a stable society”(57). Although slavery occurred out of economic necessity, the construction ofslave laws reflected emerging English racial attitudes. Through the Caribbean,Europe’s exposure to Afro-West Indian slaves transformed English attitudes aboutAfricans and about themselves. Amussen skillfully documents English racialperceptions through her analysis of seventeenth-century portraits set in Europe


but featuring Caribbean domestics as adornments for English aristocrats. ThusEuropean portraiture reminds readers that Afro-West Indians also transformedEngland.

Amussen successfully reconstructs the seventeenth-century English Atlanticexperience from a novel perspective as she documents transatlantic social influ-ences. Her study is largely revisionist in nature, often using familiar sources butarriving at different conclusions. Overall, she provides a more balanced image oftransatlantic societies by focusing on both Afro-West Indian slaves residing inEngland or European planters living on either side of the Atlantic. She clearlydemonstrates that both exchanges were transformative.

Hannibal-LaGrange College Mark S. Quintanilla

Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. By AleksandrFursenko and Timothy Naftali. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company,2006. Pp. 670. $35.00.)

At his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy declared that he would not shrinkfrom the burdens of leadership in the “hour of maximum danger.” Given whathappened over the next few years in U.S.–Soviet relations, he said more than hecould have known. Kennedy’s Soviet counterpart, Nikita S. Khrushchev, declareda year later that he wanted to “create a meniscus” by which the Soviets would tryto force the United States into recognizing the Soviets as an equal in their ColdWar rivalry. The stage was set for some of the most tense and dramatic momentsin this decades-long conflict.

Khrushchev’s ten years as leader of the Soviet Union at the height of the ColdWar is the subject of historians Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko’s col-laborative, thorough, balanced, and often gripping account of the period from1955 to 1964 when Khrushchev, the successor to Josef Stalin, led the SovietUnion. That Naftali is from the United States and Fursenko is a native Russiangives their effort a uniqueness, and the Soviet side of the Cold War is evidentthroughout the study. The authors’ primary thesis is that Khrushchev—acutelyresenting whathe perceived, from his Marxist–Leninist worldview, as the imperialist arroganceof the United States—was determined to challenge the United States, even to thepoint of nuclear brinkmanship, to equalize the balance of power between the twosuperpowers and to gain the Soviet Union respect from its adversary. At variousplaces around the world, from Berlin to the Middle East, and of course mostdangerously in Cuba in the fall of 1962, Khrushchev sought to neutralize


the superior military and economic power of the United States. First with U.S.President Dwight Eisenhower and later with Kennedy, Khrushchev paradoxicallyalternated between this confrontational approach and periods in which he soughtpeaceful coexistence with the West. After the nuclear scare over Cuba, the fol-lowing year he agreed to the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the United States. Thatachievement notwithstanding, Khrushchev’s erratic and unpredictable behavior inforeign policy is one of the chief reasons his colleagues in the Soviet leadershipeventually removed him from power in October of 1964.

Another thing that sets this study apart from the many previous works on theCold War is that Fursenko and Naftali make effective use of material from Sovietarchives, specifically the meetings of the Presidium of the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party. They emphasize Khrushchev’s emotional style of gover-nance and some of his more idiosyncratic tendencies, such as his focus on growingmore Soviet corn, an obsession that took him to the Coon Rapids, Iowa, farm ofRoswell Garst, a highlight of his 1959 visit to the United States. Fursenko andNaftali include many anecdotes in their study. One that stands out is their vividtreatment of Khrushchev’s comical insistence (in retrospect) on being flown on aless than completely safe Soviet jet that he nonetheless deemed equal to the taskof flying the leader of the socialist peoples of the world. They are wise to remindreaders that even a subject as deadly serious as the Cold War can have itshumorous sidelights.

One weakness of this otherwise distinguished study is the relative lack ofbiographical background on Khrushchev’s younger years. Formative experiencessuch as his youthful turn to Marxist–Leninism and his years spent fighting theNazi invaders of the Soviet Union surely must have shaped his views on foreignpolicy. Readers seeking this context should refer to Philip Taubman’s PulitzerPrize-winning 2003 biography on Khrushchev. That aside, Fursenko and Naftali,one historian from each side of this great twentieth-century divide, have suc-ceeded admirably in writing an impartial and thoughtful chapter in the ongoingscholarly endeavor to understand the Cold War nearly two decades since itsapparent end.

Aquinas College Jason K. Duncan

Caesar: Life of a Colossus. By Adrian Goldsworthy. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-versity Press, 2006. Pp. 583. $18.00.)

The author of this book is an accomplished Roman military historian. Caesar:Life of a Colossus is his seventh book in a dozen years. It is very well written and


accessible. Though this biography does not uncover any great new insights intoJulius Caesar, nonetheless the author performs a valuable service through a vividpresentation of Caesar’s life and deft contextualization of the last generations ofthe Republic. Caesar’s military career is particularly well handled.

Adrian Goldsworthy pays special attention to the fluidity of events. He pausesat each advance in Caesar’s career or military victory to emphasize that the resultwas not inevitable and to trace how differently matters might have transpired (519praesertim). This is his principal approach.

The study has a tripartite structure. In part one Goldsworthy covers JuliusCaesar’s career to his first consulship in 59 BC; part two surveys his years inGaul as proconsul, 58–50 BC; and part three addresses the civil war with thePompeians and his years as dictator until his assassination, 49–44 BC. Through-out the work, Goldsworthy seeks to contextualize Julius Caesar in his time. Hesucceeds more fully in parts two and three. Large sections of part one read like atextbook on the late Republic, surveying the institutions, great men, and principalevents. Although this is necessary, broadly speaking, the references to Caesarhimself often seem isolated and incidental amidst the grand narrative of the earlyfirst century BC.

Part two is really the core of the book. Goldsworthy addresses the narrativeof the annual campaigns of Caesar in Gaul in individual chapters and with greatliveliness. There is more analysis, especially of his military setbacks, and someinstructive insights into militaria. Note, for example, Goldsworthy’s useful cor-rectives on the social background of centurions and on the form of armor usedin the late Republic (194–196). Comparisons of Julius Caesar with other greatgenerals throughout history, such as Napoleon, highlight the proconsul’s greatachievements.

In part three, Caesar’s role in the narrative is well constructed. Though theinsights into the fall of the Republic are conventional, there are passages thattranscend this through their evocative power. Goldsworthy sets the scene beauti-fully for Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon (374–379). In addition, he evokes thespirit of the age with great perspicacity in the epilogue (512–516).

Goldsworthy addresses primary source criticism perfunctorily and with relativeinfrequency. He tends to believe Caesar’s Commentarii readily. This is problem-atic, as he relies more on primary than secondary sources in the notes. Analyticalinterpretation consequently suffers somewhat.

Caesar’s audience is primarily the educated general public and the scholarlyworld only secondarily. The book deserves inclusion in all university libraries,since it might serve as a foundational text for an undergraduate seminar on Julius


Caesar, though its length may deter the faint of heart. General readers looking foran accessible biography of Caesar should consider acquiring this book.

James Madison University Stephen Chappell

Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066. By Emma Griffin. (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 283. $55.00.)

Political debate about hunting in Britain reached its height between 1997 and2004 when parliament spent over seven hundred hours on the issue before passingthe Hunting with Dogs Act. As Emma Griffin argues in this well-researched andconvincing survey, hunting has survived for centuries by adapting to political,social, and economic changes. With a judicious use of a wide range of sources,Griffin demonstrates how hunting has been at the center of political and socialconflict in Britain. To the dismay of nobles and commoners alike, after 1066the Norman kings implemented a new system of royal forests to facilitate theirhunting and declared the deer in the new forests royal property. When the nobilityregained their hunting rights in the thirteenth century, as thousands of acres weredisafforested, they proceeded to confine hunting to the wealthy few with the firstof the Game Laws.

Throughout her account, Griffin emphasizes the flexibility of hunting inadjusting to new conditions. As the deer population plummeted after the peas-ants’ rebellious slaughter during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, hunters turnedto smaller animals, including partridges, pheasants, and foxes, with two signifi-cant results. In the case of flying game, the improvement in guns in the eigh-teenth century resulted in the large-scale decimation of game birds and thesubsequent push to create game farms. In Griffin’s judgment, by the end ofthe nineteenth century, without wild game birds against which shooters couldpit their skills, shooting birds could no longer be called a sport. More signifi-cantly, during the eighteenth century, hunters adopted the fox as respectableprey because it provided a thrilling chase and foxhunting soon developed ahigh-status following with the associated clubs, rituals, etiquette, and clothing.When threatened by the railway and later the automobile, foxhunting capitalizedon the new technologies to increase its geographical and social reach.Car followers proliferated along with the new hunt supporters’ clubs duringthe decades after 1945.

In the final third of the book, the author covers this latter period, whenopposition to hunting gained sufficient strength to challenge the practice ofthe sport. Opposition stretched back to the Elizabethan Puritans, but even


antihunting reformers in the nineteenth century failed to restrict the sport.As Griffin shows, however, with the passage of the Protection of Animals Act of1835, which prohibited the baiting or fighting of any animal, the suppressionof working-class blood sports set a precedent for parliamentary limitation ofleisure activities. Even amidst the pressures hunting faced over the centuries,Griffin suggests that twentieth-century public opinion became hunting’s mosteffective adversary as the public responded to the contention that the act ofkilling had a detrimental moral impact on hunters. Although the parliamen-tary debate and legislation that culminated in 2004 may have destroyedfoxhunting’s respectability among most of the public, Griffin strangely impliesthat the sport is dead. As it has throughout its history, however, hunting hasadapted and remains the significant, albeit transformed, rural pastime thatGriffin so skillfully chronicles in this study.

Cleveland State University Matthew McIntire

The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. By Deborah E.Harkness. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 349. $32.50.)

The story of the Scientific Revolution in England used to be a straightforwardone: Francis Bacon was the prophet whose visionary works led to the “InvisibleCollege” and the Royal Society, whence emerged Newton, Hooke, Boyle, and allthe heroes of modern science. In The Jewel House, Deborah E. Harkness furthercomplicates this once simple story by providing a rich and fascinating overview ofthe wide range of Londoners who were energetically investigating nature in theElizabethan era.

Most of the vernacular practitioners whose activities Harkness recountshere—merchants, midwives, artisans, entrepreneurs, and surgeons—have neverappeared in traditional histories of the Scientific Revolution. As she shows,however, their methods and goals included all of the major features commonlyassociated with modern science: empirical investigation, mathematical analysis,ingenious instruments, replicable experiments, and the desire to enhance humanlife by mastering nature. Using techniques borrowed from ethnography andinformation recovered from a wide variety of printed works, manuscripts, docu-ments, and records, Harkness retraces lost social networks and describes thepractices and discourse of their members. She elegantly solves the challenge posedby the abundance of the evidence that she finds by centering her six main chapterson detailed case studies that illustrate the range of activities and techniques that


Elizabethan Londoners pursued in their investigations of nature. Sometimes inher discussion of their activities vague phrases such as “urban sensibility” seem tosubstitute for more precise analysis. In the end, however, a vivid, intimate, richlydetailed portrait emerges from these pages of a vibrant subculture in ElizabethanLondon whose members clearly were precursors of what we would call a scientificapproach to nature.

Why did these individuals and their activities fade from history? According toHarkness, two factors help explain this. One is the authority that accrued to theprinted book. Published authors—even of relatively derivative and even inaccu-rate works, such as Harkness demonstrates regarding the herbalist John Gerard—nevertheless gained authority and eventually assumed a prominent place in thehistory of science, displacing individuals who shared their findings in letters ormanuscripts or through face-to-face contact. Social class played a role too. Thegentlemen of the Royal Society ultimately found Francis Bacon’s hierarchical,bureaucratic vision of scientific research directed by gentlemen philosophers moreappealing than the messy, democratic, contested, hands-on approach morecommon in Elizabethan London, and the history of the Scientific Revolutionbecame a saga of lone geniuses.

How important were the activities of these Londoners in the developmentof the new approaches to investigating nature that we sum up in the term “theScientific Revolution?” A counterfactual hypothesis to test Harkness’s thesis thatthey were crucial might be: “If these individuals had never existed, would Newtonstill have been Newton?” When future scholars try to determine this, however,they will need to take into account the evidence that Harkness has presentedin this book, which has already greatly expanded our knowledge of who wasstudying nature in late sixteenth-century England and how they were studying it.

Elmira College Robert Shephard

Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. By David Hendy. (New York, N.Y.: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 518. $45.00.)

For over forty years, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Radio Fourhas occupied a unique position, offering listeners its “rich mix” of journalism,drama, comedy, and quiz shows. In this book, the author argues that Radio Four’shistory has been an “evolutionary journey” for the station as it has traveled “froman age of Paternalism to an age of Pluralism” since its founding in 1967 (299). Byusing his own “rich mix” of impressive research, which includes BBC files previ-ously unavailable to researchers, and extensive interviews with Radio Four


personnel, David Hendy skillfully reveals how the station successfully adaptedover the decades to a changing Britain.

Hendy constructs his compelling chronological and thematic narrative aroundthe sometimes competing ideals of responsibility that have confronted Radio Foursince its inception, as it battled television and commercial radio for listeners. TheBBC’s founding ethos not only was liberal and educational, as its broadcastingfocused on “the improvement of taste and knowledge and manners,” but alsopopular, as it aspired to reach the widest audience possible (2). Hendy examineshow Radio Four fulfilled its improving mission by developing important newsprograms like Today and The World Tonight, and by crafting ambitious docu-mentaries, such as the social history series The Long March of Everyman whoseadvisors included Asa Briggs and Raymond Williams. Radio Four also soughtpopularity by addressing the interests and concerns of its listeners with long-running programs such as Woman’s Hour and The Archers, comedy and quizshows such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and The News Show, as well asconsumer affairs broadcasts. Programs from the Radio Drama and Light Enter-tainment departments bridged the gap between the ideals by providing seriousculture and entertainment, even as critics found many of these programs unin-spiring and unoriginal.

Throughout his story, Hendy deftly navigates the reader through the oftencomplex development of these programs, as Radio Four was buffeted by institu-tional, political, and audience pressures. From its advent, the government andBBC governors seemed regularly to seek administrative change and budget cutsfrom the station, and managers and producers pursued their own, often compet-ing, visions. The most vociferous criticism of Radio Four came from listeners whowere quick to denounce any perceived breach of the station’s mission. Criticismranged from disapproval of the form and style of programs, to condemnation ofthe station’s attempts to accommodate new tastes, to accusations of bias from thepolitical Right and Left. In 1992 listener protest prompted the BBC to reverse itsplan to introduce a twenty-four-hour news network on Radio Four’s long wavefrequency and limit the station to FM transmission only. More recently, themorning news program Today was at the center of controversy over the Blairgovernment’s use of intelligence in its justification for invading Iraq. Hendy offersmany more examples, which not only provide keen insight into a stream ofBritain’s cultural life, but also compellingly illustrate how “Radio Four hassucceeded in remaining part of the national consciousness” (391).

Cleveland State University Matthew McIntire


The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914: Social PoliciesCompared. By E. P. Hennock (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,2007. Pp. xvii, 381. $35.99.)

The author of this book compares the emergence of the English and Germanwelfare systems. He focuses on the period between 1850 and the beginning ofthe First World War. Within the two welfare systems, public relief of the poor;industrial injury; provisions for sickness, invalidity, and old age; as well asunemployment are discussed. In the introduction, E. P. Hennock clarifies that theinclusion of other important themes such as public health in the analysis wasoriginally planned but for various reasons had to be abandoned. Commendably,the author discusses the various themes in sections addressing both England andGermany (more precisely, Prussia) and not, as it is often done, separately foreach country.

Hennock sees the evolution of welfare systems in Germany and England rootedin the states’ political and economic needs to support the growth of capitalism onthe one hand, and, on the other, to compensate for increased risks associated withadvancing industrialization (2). In addition, Hennock points out that the system-atic provision of welfare for the German state was aimed at the acquisition ofloyalty from the workers. The creation of the English welfare system, in compari-son, was intended to relieve the overstretched poor laws.

By considering similarities and analyzing differences, the author is able toclarify the characteristics of the individual systems, including their causes andconsequences. Accordingly, Hennock describes the German professionalizednational system, which worked in a more bureaucratic manner than the Englishwelfare state, which relied on voluntary insurance, local provisions, and amateur-ism. Founded on decisions taken in the nineteenth century, these different originscontinue to shape the two systems and have had long-term consequences thatare still visible today.

In passing, Hennock also notes the impact that efforts to construct nationstates may have had on the structure of the two welfare systems (332). Perhapsmore could have been made of this: in the second half of the nineteenth century,the German national state was still in the making. In comparison, English nationalstructures were already established. Arguably, the German welfare state wasconstructed to overcome the boundaries and limitations of the federal system. Onecan assume that particularly Bismarck was intent on first, promoting Prussianinfluence within the German Empire and second, on strengthening imperial struc-tures. In England at least, although perhaps not elsewhere within Great Britain,


consolidation was carried by long-grown structures based in the communalities.The German welfare system ultimately proved repeatedly unable to provide anequivalent structure that could have overcome the individual state’s interests.Such broader aspects may have come out in the analysis more clearly if Hennockhad been able to expand his study beyond England and Prussia.

The author relies on secondary literature and printed primary sources, andtherefore little could be expected in original research. Rather, the strength ofhis book lies in his comparative approach. The largest contribution of this book,so Hennock says himself, lies in the highlighting of issues that beg further archivalresearch (5). His style of prose is fluent and he succeeds in presenting his argu-ments not only succinctly but also convincingly.

Social Science Centre Berlin Jeannette Z. Madarász

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. By Judith Herrin. (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xxii, 392. $29.95.)

The author’s new survey of one thousand years of Byzantine history and culture[330–1453 CE] is an innovative, engaging, and accessible treatment of her subject.As she explains in the introduction, that is exactly what she designed it to be afterhaving once been put on the spot by a passing request to explain what Byzantiumactually was (xiii). It is the type of question that usually has historians mumblingthat it is not their period or that it is really much too complicated to explain. Notso for Judith Herrin. In seeking an answer, she avoids the lure of sensationalism(although there is no lack of that in Byzantine history), but at the same time shequite rightly does not attempt to give a chronological narrative of every singleemperor, battle, and tedious theological controversy. Instead, she has structuredthe book as a series of elegantly crafted vignettes. Some of these cover theessentials, such as the Emperor Constantine I and his founding of Constantinoplein 330 and the final fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Others,however, cleverly take a building, a mosaic portrait, and even a humble fork to actas pegs on which to hang insights into what it was that defined Byzantium as acivilization.

Clear and informative though Herrin’s approach is, appearances can be decep-tive. This is much more than just an introduction to Byzantium. Some of thechapters encapsulate approaches that will provide much food for thought for thosewho teach, study, or research the period. Her account of the Byzantine economy, forexample, is obviously indebted to recent work by Angeliki Laiou, Cecile Morrisson,and others, as Herrin makes clear in her book list (345). Yet in boiling down the


topic to its essentials, she demonstrates more effectively than anyone else theprecise relationship between the prestigious Byzantine gold coinage and theempire’s flourishing commerce. She sums up the emperors’ approach to fiscalmatters as “an imperial, rather than a commercial policy” where prestige was ratedmore highly than profit (159). Byzantine education and literary culture are similarlydissected in twelve tightly packed pages (119–130). Herrin reveals not only the deepinfluence that the literature of ancient Greece had on rarefied Byzantine intellectualsbut also the relatively wide diffusion of literacy in Byzantine society. Apologists forByzantium often make the latter claim, but Herrin substantiates it with examples ofhow written records impacted everyday life.

Herrin concludes with a summary of what defined Byzantium and why it lastedso long. For her, the key lies in fusion (321). Classical, pagan, Christian, Eastern,and Western elements all contributed to Byzantine culture and to the powerfulself-identity that enabled the empire to bounce back from defeat time and timeagain. It was not always an easy mix. For centuries, Byzantium fought against itsMuslim and Christian neighbors while at the same time absorbing aspects of theirculture and imparting elements of its own. It is that very contradiction that makesthe Byzantines “so different from ourselves and yet so like us” (336).

Royal Holloway, University of London Jonathan Harris

Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early ModernEurope. By Benjamin J. Kaplan. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 415. $29.95.)

With this book, the author makes a significant, original contribution to scholar-ship on religion in early modern Europe and the history of Western religioustoleration. He covers the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, ranginggeographically from Britain to Lithuania and south to the Mediterranean. Hefocuses principally on “how religious diversity was accommodated within theChristian society of early modern Europe” among Catholics and Protestants, withone chapter devoted to Christians’ treatment of Jews and Muslims (10).

Most broadly, Benjamin J. Kaplan makes two important arguments. Bothderive from his approach, which criticizes previous scholarship for concentratingon ideas about tolerance at the expense of concrete practices of toleration. By“toleration” Kaplan means “situations of stable coexistence where conflict wasbeing successfully contained and physical violence avoided” (11). First, by com-paring the different accommodations and arrangements, institutions, and treatiesthat were created in order to address the unwelcome reality of Christian pluralism,


Kaplan concludes that the Reformation era cannot be characterized as one ofendemic religious war and persecution: “Even in profoundly religious communi-ties where antagonisms were sharp, religion was not a primitive, untameableforce” (358). More often than not, mutually hostile Christians found ways ofcoexisting, however grudgingly, and in describing their social practices and insti-tutional arrangements of toleration Kaplan makes his most important contribu-tion. Second, the eighteenth century represented only a minor contrast to thereligious hostilities of the Reformation era. Large-scale religious violence did notend with the Peace of Westphalia [1648], but persisted into the 1710s. Enlightenedideas about toleration began to take hold only from the mid-eighteenth century,and then only among an elite minority; and the various edicts of toleration of the1770s and 1780s were highly restrictive, a far cry from contemporary liberty ofreligion in Western democracies.

It is perhaps inevitable that such a wide-ranging book would contain somefactual errors. Christians and Jews, for example, did not share “a commonscriptural [heritage]” with Muslims, who rejected the Bible; not every Englishparish church was required to own a copy of Foxe’s martyrology, but onlycathedral churches; and it is false that “no Catholic was ever executed for heresy”in England—Observant Franciscan John Forest was burned as a heretic in 1538(9, 117, 123). Conceptually, too, Kaplan’s book has some shortcomings. Claimsby Castellio, Witzel, Duifhuis, Menocchio, and seventeenth-century Dutch Col-legiants and English Latitudinarians about the relative unimportance of disputeddogmas did not transcend doctrinal controversy, but only added another dimen-sion to it. So too, the “black-and-white, us-versus-them mentality” of so manyProtestants and Catholics was not created by them as a dichotomy, but takenstraightforwardly from Jesus’s reported words in scripture (293). “Defining ortho-doxy in negative as well as positive terms” was not a peculiarity of early modernChristian confessionalism, but is a logical necessity of all truth claims, religious orsecular (38). Regardless of its flaws, however, Kaplan impressively demonstratesthe necessity of understanding the emergence of Western religious toleration inearly modern Europe as a social and institutional phenomenon.

University of Notre Dame Brad S. Gregory

Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. By AlanKramer. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 434. $34.00.)

Using a thematic approach to synthesize the study of culture and of military andpolitical decision making in World War I, this author argues that there was a


“conceptual link between cultural destruction and mass killing” in the war (2).Alan Kramer seamlessly weaves together evidence from all fronts in Europe andthe Near East, privileging no front or country over others. Sensitive to nationalvariations in wartime experiences, however, Kramer rejects George Mosse’sconcept of a shared European “myth of the war experience” (210).

Episodes of cultural destructiveness covered in the book range from theburning of Louvain to intellectuals’ support for their national war efforts and theircondemnations of enemy culture. Mass killings include massacres of ethnicminorities on the eastern front and civilians on the western front, the Armeniangenocide, and the tremendous loss of combatant lives. Consistent with the recenttrend in World War I studies, Kramer maintains that Germany and Austria-Hungary bore primary responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. Neverthe-less, he is not an “exceptionalist” in regard to Germany and does not think thatGermany alone allowed militaristic nationalism to determine its policies towardcivilians. The Ottoman Empire, for example, “pushed the dynamic of destructionfurther” than any other state (158). According to Kramer, the strongest tiebetween culture and physical destructiveness was that between the Italian futur-ists, who glorified violence, and the postwar Italian fascist movement, which manyfuturists joined.

Kramer explains the implications of his findings for World War II studies.Contrary to the trend that conflates the two world wars, Kramer thinks thatpolitical decision making and destructive consequences differed considerably inWorld Wars I and II. Moreover, he denies that the Second World War was aninevitable consequence of the First. He offers as evidence the strong pacifistmovement during the interwar period, especially among veterans. AlthoughWorld War I saw an increase in anti-Semitic violence, the German governmentthen and during the 1920s tried to stop or limit anti-Semitism, while the Nazismade anti-Semitic violence one of their main goals. Thus, Kramer disagrees withthe Goldhagen thesis about the roots of German anti-Semitism.

This book makes an important contribution to the study of World War I andcan be used by teachers to refresh their lectures about the war. Kramer writesclearly, has conducted extensive research in German archives, and has read widelyin the secondary literature on World War I. The book is a model of goodorganization, with well-chosen illustrations inserted at appropriate points in thetext, index, endnotes, bibliography, and historiographical note. Despite the grimimplications of his title, Kramer’s message is ultimately optimistic: mass killingand cultural destruction are neither inevitable outcomes of warfare determinedsolely by available technology, nor are they intrinsic to human nature. Both are


products of conscious decision making, whether at the policy level or on theground. Thus, individuals can and often do refrain from engaging in destructiveprocesses.

La Salle University Barbara C. Allen

Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775. By Andrea McKenzie. (London,England: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. xx, 316. $60.00.)

This study is based on the Accounts of the Behaviour, Confession, and DyingWords of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn made by the respective“Ordinaries” (chaplains) of Newgate Prison, published serially from the end ofthe seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Andrea McKenzie’s book promisesthe reader “a story of the rise and fall of the Ordinary’s Account and relatedliterature” (xix).

There are useful chapters on dying speeches and criminal biographies, con-temporary theories of criminality, the rise of the highwaymen, and the ritual ofexecution “to provide a cultural history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gallows and the larger belief system underpinning it” (26). Read throughthe lens of eighteenth-century theology, trials can be understood as moralistdiscourses, indicative of the century’s growing social emphasis on personalresponsibility and the subjectivity of the individual. Consequently, legislatingagainst crime and the meting out of punishment meant that the perception of thelaw shifted from being an instrument of divine wrath and grace to becoming avehicle for voluntary conversion and reformation, and crime itself became alifestyle—or cultural—choice.

McKenzie’s thematic arrangement compiles material that appeared underthe authority of the various Ordinaries. In the face of such copious sources, itis inevitable that little proper attention can be given to comparable criminalliterature. The Accounts were published alongside “Sessions Papers,” recordingOld Bailey trials and a tide of popular ephemera, from rogues’ histories to “lastgoodnights,” which had been sold as ballads, broadsides, chapbooks, and calen-dars since Elizabethan times, and there was a perennial fascination with thelanguage of cant and criminal slang. Contemporary writers (notably DanielDefoe) were alive to the opportunities offered by the emerging genre of crimewriting. It is however when McKenzie strays beyond the Ordinaries’ Accountsinto such material that her argument falters. Although she describes the rise of thecult of the highwayman by briefly outlining its literary origins in the anecdotal


fabliaux of Boccaccio and Chaucer, her consideration of the Accounts appearsconsiderably less sceptical, and with Moll Flanders she overlooks the ambiguitiesof Defoe’s archly poised text.

Literary accounts of crimes, criminals, trials, and executions in the period arecharacterized by a confusion between narrative conventions of realist storytellingand actual (indeed often fatal) criminal and legal realities, and the writing thatemerges from this particularly complex field of cultural production eventuallyhelps to produce nothing less than the modern novel. McKenzie understandablysidesteps this critical debate (she also, it has been said, offers only the briefestsketch of earlier work in her immediate area: excepting Peter Linebaugh, littlerecognition [if any] is given to Paul Baines, J. M. Beattie, Clive Emsley, MichaelHarris, Thomas Laqueur, Frank McLynn, or Cal Winslow). Such a context wouldhave been welcome, and could have positioned the Ordinaries’ Accounts moreemphatically in eighteenth-century literary culture. Though Tyburn’s Martyrs islikely to become the standard guide to the Accounts, it should therefore inspiremore nuanced work that can do justice to the tortuous textual relationship thatexists in the period between the culture of the gallows and the letter of the law.

University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus Nick Groom

Family Life in the Middle Ages. By Linda E. Mitchell. (Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress, 2007. Pp. vii, 240. $65.00.)

This author ambitiously examines Christian (Roman Catholic and Greek Ortho-dox), Muslim, and Jewish medieval family life in Western Europe, the ByzantineEast, and the part of Islamic World that had formerly been under Roman rule.Divided into two parts, this work first defines the family structure in the MiddleAges with chapters on the late Roman family, its transition into the Middle Ages,the Western European family, the Byzantine family, the Muslim family, and theJewish family. The second half of the book is comparative, revolving aroundthemes such as interfamilial relationships, religion and the family, and the con-nection between the physical environment and the family.

In the first half of the book, the author posits that the family model establishedby the Roman Republic/Empire was the template for the family in medievalEurope. The Roman family was an extended family governed by the father/husband who had total power over the property and lives of his family. Over timeand after contact with the Greek and Germanic models, the family model adoptedin the Latin West and the Greek East, though still patriarchal, was no longer anextended family, but a nuclear one. However, the power of the patriarch had been


mitigated, especially over his sons. As the Middle Ages progressed, the RomanCatholic families in Western Europe favored eldest sons for inheritance, and thewomen tended to have greater freedom outside the home than their Greek Ortho-dox or Muslim counterparts. Muslim family structure, because of the practice ofpolygamy, differed from the Roman model the most. Since Jewish families abidedin both Christian and Muslim lands, they followed the local patterns.

Due to the wide breadth of the subject, the author only sketches the basic linesof each family model. She focuses on how medieval Western elites and peasantfamilies really functioned, dismissing prescriptive and artistic sources that oftenpresented an ideal. However, as the author continually acknowledges, the sourcebase for such a strict social history is too small. Unfortunately, she does not adopta consistent approach to address this problem. For example, the author uses theseventeenth-century autobiography of a Jewish female merchant to illustratethe experience of nonelite Jewish families and of Jewish women, but missesopportunities to use later sources for the other groups discussed (88–89).

The largest problem the reviewer found with the book was the choice ofInternet sources cited in the notes and selected bibliography (which seemed toobrief). Even though this author clearly intends to give a broad, synthetic overviewof Jewish, Christian, and Muslim families in the Middle Ages, relying on shortsnippets of primary sources from The Medieval Internet Source Book and entriesfrom “Wikipedia” is problematic at best. (Not all the Internet sources used wereshort extracts, some were full texts.) Although the reviewer disagrees with someof the primary sources cited from the Internet, she does not believe that scholarsshould ignore web sources either. The main problem, and one that has not yetbeen properly addressed by the historical community, is how to use Internetsources properly. Hopefully this book will initiate a conversation on how to dojust that.

Eastern Kentucky University Catherine L. Howey

German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. By A. Dirk Moses. (New York, N.Y.: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 283. $80.00.)

In this compelling and accessible intellectual history of West Germany, the authorexplores how the past comes to bear on the present. As intellectuals in the postwarperiod struggled to make sense of the recent history of National Socialism andgenocide, they were simultaneously generating a new political culture embodiedin the Federal Republic. Engaged in active debates about the meaning of theNazi past—how it originated, what it signaled about German culture and


nationhood—intellectuals adopted radically different positions toward the newstate. Some embraced the Federal Republic despite reservations, understandingallegiance to political institutions as a historical corrective to the fragile legiti-macy of the Weimar Republic; others questioned the legitimacy of a republic thatincluded former Nazis within its ranks.

A. Dirk Moses tackles these questions of postwar memory and politicalculture through a study of one generation of West German intellectuals, whichhe refers to as “forty-fivers,” or “the founders’ generation.” Born between 1922and 1932, members of this generation experienced adolescence or early adult-hood during the Nazi period. For them, the German collapse in 1945 andcompounding evidence of Nazi criminality necessitated a radical revision ofpreviously held attitudes and assumptions. This generation included interna-tionally recognized figures like Jürgen Habermas (a central figure in the book),Günter Grass, and Hannah Arendt, as well as an accomplished body of Germanacademics and public intellectuals. Moses analyzes the contributions made bythese figures to broad public debates, drawing on sources directed toward aneducated audience: articles and interviews printed in national newspapers, uni-versity publications, and magazines; and books that found traction in the publicsphere.

The author challenges the reigning historical narrative of the Federal Republic,which claims that West Germany was “saved” from the conciliatory politics of thefounders’ generation by the unflinching radicalism of student activists in 1968. Ifthe forty-fivers had been prepared to accept the presence of former Nazi membersin universities and government, they would have simply papered over the fascistpast and thus failed to extract it. It was left to sixty-eighters to “purify” theRepublic through unflinching exposure of people and structures implicated inauthoritarianism.

Moses reveals the inadequacy of this narrative through a careful look atdivisions among the forty-fivers. Employing a structural analysis of politicalculture attentive to conscious statements and unconscious emotions, Moses arguesthat postwar intellectuals imagined the new state in two ways. “Redemptiverepublicans” believed that the legitimacy of the new republic required a definitivebreak with a compromised national past; in keeping with this break, they rejectedGerman identification. “Integrationist republicans,” by contrast, stressed agradual process of political reeducation and regeneration; rather than rejectGerman identity, they lived with the necessary ambivalence generated by the Nazipast. Moses traces the evolution and implications of these two stances from theimmediate postwar period through 1968 and reunification.


An original contribution to an emerging body of scholarship on historicalmemory, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past provides the reader with a freshperspective on postwar political culture.

Simmons College Sarah L. Leonard

The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow thatChanged the Course of World War II. By Andrew Nagorski. (New York, N.Y.:Simon and Schuster, 2007. Pp. xiii, 366. $27.00.)

The author goes far to fill a gap in the literature of World War II. His work is acompelling account of the life-and-death struggle for Moscow in the autumn andwinter of 1941–1942. Accounts of this struggle have been eclipsed by those ofStalingrad and Kursk. Andrew Nagorski suggests that the Battle of Moscow wasperhaps even more important than Stalingrad and Kursk because it revealed forthe first time that the seemingly invincible German army could be beaten. Moscowwas certainly one of the most decisive battles of the last century, and, as a contesteventually involving seven million men, the largest battle in history. It was alsoa contest of will between Stalin and Hitler whose outcome foreshadowed theultimate and complete victory of the Soviets in 1945.

The Greatest Battle has much to recommend it. It is crisply written, wellresearched, and draws on recently declassified Soviet and NKVD (People’s Com-missariat of Internal Affairs) archives. Most interesting are the anecdotes relatedto the author by witnesses to some of the main events. Fearing that the Germansmight capture the Soviet capital, one of Lenin’s embalmers tells how Lenin’s bodywas removed early in July 1941 and transported to Tyumen, over one thousandmiles east of Moscow, where it remained until the closing weeks of the war, whenit was returned to its original resting place. Thanks to Stalin’s insistence onits preservation and public display, Lenin’s body had become a symbol of theBolshevik Revolution and the Communist revolutionary world struggle.

Little known is the ordeal of Vyazma, Hitler’s first objective in his bid tocapture Moscow. Nagorski believes hundreds of thousands of Soviets perished inthe fighting there. In its early retreats, the Red Army lost so much territory so fastthat soldiers left most of their dead unburied. Only within the last twenty yearshave Russian volunteers made concerted efforts to find, identify, and bury theremains of their soldiers. Nagorski accompanied one such group of scholarsin 2005.

Early on Nagorski quotes William L. Shirer to the effect that Hitler’s post-ponement of the invasion of Russia doomed his chances of winning Operation


Barbarossa, as Hitler referred to the Russian campaign, and, by implication, theentire war. The reason for the postponement was Hitler’s desire to punish Yugo-slavia for overturning its pro-Axis government. A more nuanced appraisal is thatof Sir John Keegan. Although he notes that the Balkan campaign is held by some“historians as an unwelcome diversion” from Hitler’s life goal to attack the SovietUnion, Keegan also points out that the lateness of the spring thaw in 1941 wouldhave prevented an earlier invasion in any case. Hitler needed firm ground ineastern Poland as a jumping-off point for his tanks and other vehicles. Keeganwrites that “[t]he choice of D-Day for Barbarossa had always depended not on thesequence of contingent events but on the weather and objective military factors.”1

Such questions will continue to remain topics of debate.All in all, The Greatest Battle is a vivid and compelling book and one that will

take hold of scholars and general readers alike.

Bentley College Richard S. Geehr

Guernica and Total War. By Ian Patterson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. 199. $22.95.)

Guernica, elevated in fame by Pablo Picasso’s painting, fits the Harvard Profiles inHistory Series’s focus on iconic events. It also provides author Ian Patterson witha cultural touchstone from which to move to a larger analysis of total war and fearin the human imagination. His thesis is that while humans have the creativecapacity to build and live in civilizations, they also possess the intrinsic need toimagine the destruction of civilization, especially manifest during times of rapidchanges and uncertainties. Modernity in general (loosely defined by the author aspost-1870), but especially the technological and total warfare brought by WorldWar I and the uncertainty of the interwar years, provided much fodder for thehuman imagination, building a sense of imminent and mortal crisis felt by civiliansand captured by artists and policymakers.

Patterson essentially divides his book into two parts. In chapter one, titled“Guernika’s Thermite Rain,” he provides an analysis of the meaning of thebombing before moving to a narrative of the event itself, a summary of eye-witness accounts, and the contested assignment of blame. In the process, theauthor also sets Guernica in the larger context of the Spanish Civil War. Thoughwritten with lively prose and interspersed with a variety of fascinating images,readers—especially those coming to the book as a general introduction due to

1. John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 174.


their piqued interest in Picasso’s painting or the Spanish Civil War—might findthe chapter lacking. To be fair, neither objective is the author’s goal. Concerningthe former, he appears hesitant to revisit the analysis of two recent publicationsby Russell Martin [2002] and Gijs Van Hensbergen [2004]. This is a missedopportunity as the painting, as much as the event itself, brings the iconic asso-ciation to Guernica for those outside of Spain. Concerning the latter, Patterson’ssection on eyewitness accounts hints at the complexity of the Spanish Civil War.As he notes, estimates of the casualties and destruction varied widely accordingto point of view. Getting a handle on a true narrative of the event must havebeen frustrating at the time as it soon diverged into a history of the competingpoints of view. Fleshing out the ideologies behind this transition would havehelped cement Patterson’s contention that the 1930s represented a tortureddecade fueled by competing ideologies predicated on fear and imagination ofcivilization’s destruction.

The second chapter, appropriately titled “Civilization and Its Discontents,”deserves wide readership and both further exploration and application. In thischapter, the author barely mentions Guernica, nor does he need to as it becomesa symbol of destruction fulfilled and future destruction imagined. Here Patter-son underscores and links two critically underexamined themes. First, heexplores the imagination of the destructive possibilities of air power over thefirst half of the twentieth century, with special focus on the interwar years. Hecites a wide variety of authors, including H. G. Wells, Basil Liddell Hart, GiulioDouhet, and J. F. C. Fuller, who addressed air power’s association with theconcept of total war—the willingness to destroy civilian populations whileinstilling heavy doses of fear in those who survived applied uses of destruction.If not policymakers themselves, Patterson certainly makes the case for how thisfuture-war literature impacted policymakers prior to World War II, arguing that“[i]n the mid 1930s, the worlds of fantasy, imperialism, and military realitybegan to coincide” (123).

Second, Patterson examines the concept of fear itself in relation to civilians andtheir constructed concepts of civilization, especially changes to the status quo,perceived challenges to the status quo, and the imagined, millennial fantasies ofan impending apocalypse. The author argues, “The whole political culture in theinterwar years operated within a melodramatic framework, with a polarizationbetween good and evil, civilization and barbarism, Left and Right, and an over-whelming sense of imminent mortal crisis” (137). Fear of destruction from abovebecame a convenient, not to mention thrilling, focal point for the rechannelingof a wide range of preexisting fears, all of which propelled civilians to respond


publically and politically. Paradoxically, Patterson notes, this “tended to intensifythe millenarian rhetoric, and increasingly the sense of the inevitability of war”(137).

Future-war literature thus represented a mythical world of preexistinganxieties, prompting Patterson to ask, “Why do people enjoy imagining theworst?” (137). Patterson’s is an important philosophical question, with appli-cation to today’s post-9/11 America. He attempts to answer it in a mere twopages, linking to Sigmund Freud’s theory that civilization is built on repressionand an inherent sense of unease due to the fact that the very construction ofcivilization comes as a result of humans checking their aggressions. This is acursory summary to what Patterson admits is a complex situation. Important,however, is the fact that he sheds light on civilians and their relationship to thetheme of fear of civilization’s destruction as captured through the popularityof future-war literature, especially during the tense interwar years that oftenimagined death from above. An equally important question for historians wouldbe “[w]hen, as a result of the forces of history, do people imagine the worst?What social, religious, economic, and ideological forces stir the imaginationprocess?”

Uses and conceptions of fear in relation to total war deserve further study, andPatterson’s slim meditation that uses Guernica as an iconic, cultural touchstonecertainly gives the reader much to ponder. It is recommended for those interestedin air power, interwar history of the twentieth century, and modern questions onfear and human conception of civilization. The book would also serve WesternCivilization, world civilization, and twentieth-century European history surveyclasses well.

Winona State University Matthew Lindaman

The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity. By Sarah B.Pomeroy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 264. $24.95.)

This is not really a detective story. The author admits that “the bare bones of thestory are few” (3). In AD 160 Regilla, the wife of the rich and influential Greeksophist Herodes Atticus, died from a beating inflicted by her husband’s freedman.Regilla’s brother prosecuted Herodes as well as the freedman, but Herodes wasacquitted through the intercession of his former pupil, Marcus Aurelius. Thoughthe freedman was found guilty, he escaped punishment and remained Herodes’sclose associate.


Sarah B. Pomeroy focuses on the murder in only one chapter; the rest is aboutRegilla’s life with insights into the lives of aristocratic women in early imperialRoman Greece. Pomeroy invokes the notion of incident analysis, “in which asingle dramatic event such as a murder becomes a means of exploring socialrelations in the past” (7). This approach suggests a dilemma familiar to socialhistorians: was Regilla a typical aristocratic Roman matron or an atypical trans-plant to Greece with her story further complicated by Herodes’s peculiar characterand tastes? Historians know next to nothing about Regilla’s early life or evenabout some typical rites of passage. For example, when Pomeroy imagines Regil-la’s wedding, she acknowledges the lack of information about such ceremonies inthe early Empire, but reasonably supposes that conservative Romans would havepreserved those of the past, for which there is evidence of a sort—from a poem byCatullus. Some may find a related stylistic device in the book disturbing. When thejourney to Greece is described, readers are treated to a vivid scene: “When Regillareached southern Italy and her family estates in Canusium, she found the townwas dry and dusty” (40). The evidence for the subject’s personal observation isactually a description of Apulia in a famous satire of Horace. To be fair, thereafterPomeroy details actual improvements made in the aqueduct system thanks toHerodes’s generosity.

Pomeroy also sketches the unusual relationship between the young Regilla andher imperious husband. Though Regilla could communicate with her husbandin Greek, Herodes cultivated an archaic style that probably bewildered hisfellow Greeks. Evidence from Plutarch suggests that Greek social restrictions onwomen—such as their exclusion from symposia—relaxed under Roman rule; butin this, too, Herodes may have been reactionary, just as he gleefully embraced theold practice of pederasty. Coupled with a violent and arrogant disposition, thesepeculiarities must have made for a stormy relationship.

Beyond textual evidence, Pomeroy makes excellent use of archeological mate-rial. Numerous building projects and monuments recall the couple’s public life.Pomeroy dissects their iconography and analyzes the language of their inscriptionsfor clues to perform an “autopsy of the marriage.” In the end she does concludethat Herodes was responsible for the murder, though much of her argumentremains surmise. For example, in a paroxysm of grief Herodes built grand monu-ments in Regilla’s memory, including the famous Odeion below the Acropolis.Was this a guilty conscience at work? Whether or not Pomeroy has convictedHerodes, this is a fascinating and highly readable book.

Providence College John M. Lawless


Sweeping the Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945.By Nancy Reagin. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii,247. $75.00.)

In this absorbing and informative book, the author analyzes the developmentof an understanding of domesticity that linked alleged qualities of housework, aprivate activity, to Germanness, a public identity. This construction of domesticityportrayed German housework as particular in every way: fastidious, exceptional,and unique. The work of the household was assumed to be the wife’s labor, andindeed, her vocation. The putative traits of the German housewife were cleanli-ness, orderliness, thriftiness, and well-honed domestic skills. This rendition ofdomesticity was intrinsically comparative; it defined the German housewife rela-tive to housewives in other nations, cultures, or “races” in the nineteenth-centurysense of the term, meaning ethnic groups—and found non-German housewivesdeficient.

This definition of domesticity and its association with Germanness, NancyReagin argues, arose in the imperial era as an invented tradition and an internal-ized norm. Diaries, memoirs, and household books suggest that by the latenineteenth century many urban bourgeois housewives set for themselves (and theirservants) meticulous standards for the well run, frugal, and comfortable home.This household ideal did not, at least initially, guide the practice of all women,Reagin points out, such as farmerwives. Still, this set of norms became the“template” for German household management, propagated in domestic advicebooks, cookbooks, and travel literature (12). The “German household” came tobe deployed internally as a yardstick by which to measure the work of housewivesinside Germany. The dominant construction of domesticity was bourgeois, patri-otic, imperialist, and racist but, Reagin argues, not politically right-wing, anti-Semitic, or hypernationalist before 1914.

The gendered practices of household management became a partisan issueduring and after World War I. Reagin attributes politicization to the intense dearthin wartime Germany and to the increasing influence of housewives’ associationsaffiliated with conservative political parties. Housewives’ groups made domesticresourcefulness into a matter of national survival. They encouraged women to buyGerman, cook German, and think German quality, not mass-produced quantity.They extolled natural and native produce and products. They responded ambiv-alently to the (American) rationalization of the household. They ever more ada-mantly constructed the German household as a labor-intensive, resource-savinghome run by a full-time housewife. Their loud insistence suggests that many


compatriots were not shopping, cooking, or keeping house as prescribed by theirgender and nationality.

After 1933, the National Socialists reinforced the prevalent understandingof the housewife and her role in the “national community.” Not surprisingly, theThird Reich defined German domesticity as Aryan and, above all, not Jewish orPolish. As Reagin demonstrates, the regime hitched the housewife to its autarkiceconomic program to cut back on imported materials and private consumption inorder to finance arms production. Nazi women leaders touted traditions such asfrugality and also pushed housewives to use cheaper foods and synthetic fabrics.Reagin’s last chapter considers German housekeeping as an issue confronted byNazi women sent to help speed the Germanization of occupied Poland.

In addition to periodicals, advice literature, and autobiographies, Reagin drawson the records of housewives’ associations and the Nazi women’s organization. Asrewarding as the book is, this reviewer has several quibbles. Data on householdconsumption of foods and durables, as well as on the proportion of domestic help,would have been useful. Also helpful would have been some attention to discourseon housework in the liberal and left-wing press, in novels by and for women, andin feature films. German women, including wives, were employed at a compara-tively high rate in the interwar era. Their juggling of employment and householdlabor surely left some mark on representations of housework.

Carnegie Mellon University Donna Harsch

Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. By Jules Schelvis. (Oxford, England:Berg Publishers, 2007. Pp. xvi, 278. $99.95.)

The author of this book is uniquely qualified to write about Sobibor. He surviveda brief stay at this death camp, where his wife and other relatives were murderedin 1943. He also served as a witness and joint plaintiff at the fourth West Germancriminal trial of Sobibor SS men in Hagen in the 1980s. He participated in adocumentary on the uprising by the camp’s prisoners in October 1943. Notsurprisingly, his motives for writing this volume are deeply personal. Indeed, thebook goes beyond the traditional historical monograph and must also be consid-ered part memoir and part tribute to the victims.

Established in eastern Poland in the spring of 1942, Sobibor became a killingcenter for Polish, German, Austrian, Slovakian, French, Dutch, and Soviet Jews.Akin to the other death camps, it was testament to the lethal efficiency developedby Himmler’s experts on mass murder. Jules Schelvis states that approximatelyone hundred seventy thousand Jews lost their lives here; other reliable sources cite


a quarter million Jewish victims. Staffed with a small number of German SS menand a larger contingent of Ukrainian guards, Sobibor might have caused evenmore deaths had the rail line leading to the camp not been shut down for repairsin the summer of 1942. The perpetrators relied on carbon monoxide produced byan engine and pumped into specially constructed gas chambers to kill theirvictims. Unlike Auschwitz and Majdanek, Sobibor did not have a forced laborcomponent. The camp’s sole purpose was to plunder and murder the arriving Jewsas quickly as possible. The SS did select several hundred prisoners as slave laborersto do the dirty work, which ranged from cleaning recently arrived trains toburying and cremating thousands of corpses.

Schelvis’s book has many strengths. He exposes the SS men’s frighteningdetermination to fine tune the machinery of death. The Germans in the camp andtheir superiors elsewhere relentlessly searched for ways to make the killing processmore efficient. They constantly improved the level of deception to ensure that thevictims did not learn about their fate until after the doors of the gas chambers hadclosed. Soon after Sobibor began to function they even constructed a narrow railtrack to allow for the speedy transportation of those who could not walk fromthe train to the killing site. The SS was also dissatisfied with the capacity of theoriginal gas chambers and built new, larger ones in mid-1942.

Schelvis further highlights the tremendous psychological strain on the forcedlaborers. The SS routinely killed those who fell sick or became injured on the job.The work prisoners knew that they would be shot once the camp closed, sincethe SS wanted to eliminate all eyewitnesses. Such fear caused some prisoners tostage an uprising in October 1943. The Germans quickly crushed the revolt,killing hundreds of their captives. Only a small number managed to get away, butSchelvis rightly interprets the episode as psychologically significant for the Jews.

Schelvis has produced a well-researched and informative contribution to theHolocaust historiography.

Rhodes College Frank Buscher

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents. By JamesSimpson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.Pp. 346. $27.95.)

The author has written a provocative revisionist study of reading practicesdeveloped in the English Reformation. Not content to critique only the evange-lical reading culture of the sixteenth century, James Simpson also wants to dobattle with the dominant strain of triumphalistic Protestant historiography that


insists that Luther and his followers are the creators of the independent readingindividual—the basis of modern liberal democracy. The reader of this work iscaught up in his grand, if very biased, historical vision, even while following theclose explication of texts by William Tyndale and Thomas More. The author’spartiality for the Catholic More over the evangelical Tyndale is justified, hesuggests, by the lopsidedness with which this story has been told up until now,and perhaps will help to shock readers into recognizing that some of the mostcherished assumptions of Western culture are in fact dangerous fictions.

Simpson provides a thoughtful, close reading of texts by Tyndale and Moreconcerning reading the Bible, one of the central thorny issues of the day. Thequestion was not merely a matter of polite disagreement, but also led to the“burning” mentioned in the title. Simpson discusses the difficulties faced byProtestants in their insistence on the (or really their!) literal sense of Scripture, andtheir concomitant rejection (and then recovery) of allegory. He contrasts theevangelical “dark” and “violent” reading plan with the sophisticated, communalmethods of reading developed by Catholic humanists such as Erasmus and More.

The flaws of the book do not absolutely undermine its premise, but they shouldbe noted. This is not a work of history, but rather one of literary studies—thehistorical evidence for its claims is too thin and the bombast piled on is too thick.One example is the unexamined assertion that Luther and his new theologyignited the Peasant’s War of 1525, after which he cruelly sold out his followers inurging the lords to smite them. This view has been deeply revised by the work ofPeter Blickle and others in recent years, but it is used by Simpson to underscore theviolence inherent in the evangelical message. Likewise, overly simplistic readingsof Luther’s message—especially his views on predestination, works, and Law andGospel—support Simpson’s theories, while a lack of awareness of the differencesbetween the English and continental contexts allows Simpson to “write large”upon the whole Protestant movement the reading strategies developed by Tyndale,Coverdale, and other English evangelicals.

Perhaps the most egregious fault lies in Simpson’s ignoring, beyond a fewasides, the centrality of the spoken word in the Reformation. Much recenthistorical scholarship has focused on preaching, as well as the complexities ofpromoting a literary movement within a largely oral culture. If the buddingevangelical reader had to “hate” the text before he could “love” it (i.e., becondemned by the law before he could be saved by the gospel, which Simpsoncalls “hating” the text, not the more logical self, then “loving” it), does that meanthe illiterate Christian would first hate and then love his preacher? If Simpson’scategories do not, after all, apply to the nonreader, then the force of his arguments


will be severely lessened. Simpson may, in fact, be right about many or even all ofhis claims, but the flaws, especially in his reading of Luther, make at least thisreader too wary to take the leap of faith.

Belmont Abbey College Beth Kreitzer

Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. By Nicholas Werth. (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 223. $24.95.)

On 8 August 2007, a two-week commemoration of the seventieth anniversaryof Stalin’s 1937–1938 Great Terror, and the death of up to twenty-seven millionpeople, concluded with the erection of a twelve-meter wooden cross on ButovoPolygon outside of Moscow. Led by the Russian Orthodox Church, the govern-ment did not participate in or acknowledge the ceremonies. The terror and lossof life began years before this specific horror, however. To many Russians today,especially in Siberia where millions died, there remains an urgency to discover andtell the stories, as those who witnessed or guessed at what was happening neartheir villages are dying out.

The 1937–1938 Great Terror was only one aspect of terror under Stalin. TheFrench scholar Nicholas Werth draws out the overlooked story of the specialsettlers, a program developed in 1930 designed to serve two purposes, that ofsettlement of remote areas of Siberia to serve economic ends and removal ofunwanted elements of Moscow and Leningrad. As envisioned by the OGPU head,Genrikh Yagoda, common criminals, the unemployed, the homeless, and otherswould be cleared out of the Soviet Union’s great cities, along with kulaks, or“rich” peasants, from the new collective farms. It failed so rapidly in 1933 that ofthe planned two million to be sent to create villages in remote Siberian places, only268,000 were sent, and Stalin shut the program down (182).

Using Soviet archival sources and eyewitness accounts, Werth—with the aid ofscholars at the Academy of Sciences, Institute of History in Novosibirsk, and theTomsk Memorial Association—recounts the horrors of Nazino Island in the ObRiver in the summer of 1933. This story would not have been known outside ofthe region if a local Communist Party head had not investigated, and eventuallytold, the story of what is now known as Cannibal Island.

In the spring of 1933, over ten thousand deportees/colonists were dumped onthe shore of Nazino Island—a great distance from the regional capital of Tomsk,and also the nearest railroad—among the local Ostiak people. Although theseurban people were provided only with flour, and nothing else, including buildingsor cooking equipment, Yagoda actually intended for them to colonize and be


self-sufficient within two years. When the predictable horrors, starvation, murder,cannibalism, and eventual rejection by death at the hands of the Ostiaks came tolight, they illustrated the failures of every element of planning.

Werth’s tale of bureaucratic bumbling, gross incompetence, and murder isnot for the faint of heart. In the vein of the monumental The Black Book ofCommunism, which he co-wrote, Cannibal Island lays bare the details of thebrutality of the Stalinist era. It is a must-read for all historians, for both itsmethodology and content.

Wichita State University Helen Hundley

The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. By Hiroaki Kuromiya.(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 295. $30.00.)

The period of Russian history from 1928 through 1939 encompassed the FirstFive-Year Plan, the Great Famine, and the terror of the 1930s, which came inwaves culminating in the Great Terror of 1937–1938. The period was a carnagethat claimed as many as twenty-eight million lives. These people were inhabitantsof the Stalinist Soviet Union who died because of state actions designed to increaseits control.

There are many important works on Stalin’s terror, and this work is one ofthem; however, it is different from many others that deal with the terror as aphenomenon or system to be analyzed. In this valuable work, Hiroaki Kuromiyauncovers the faces, names, and private lives of ordinary people, revealing the pain,anxiety, despair, hope, and courage of those consumed by the state terror machineled by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. A work of history is shaped by the sourcesavailable, and the author has made an exceptional find in the NKVD files ofpersons consumed during the Great Terror in Kiev and other locations in Ukraine.

These files contained the handwritten notes of interrogators, statements ofvictims, denunciations by “witnesses,” indictments, and other records. From thisrarely accessible type of material, the author crafts the stories of individual victimsof the terror, and this in turn reveals the profile of the terror machine as it groundforward, fabricating the “truth” in the indictments that led directly to the execu-tion of untold numbers of innocent people.

The author recognizes and identifies formulas of language and thinking thatwere used by the interrogators as they fulfilled quotas expected in the eliminationof different categories of persons who were a threat as defined by Stalin. Kuromiyaestablishes that as the threat of war loomed in Stalin’s mind, he feared anddeliberately singled out groups for suppression, relocation, or elimination. Among


these were foreigners such as Koreans, Japanese, Germans, and those who asso-ciated with them; the religious, especially priests and active believers; Ukrainianpeasants and Kulaks; former nobles, nationalists, and those who fostered nationalcultures; Polish nationalists and members of nationalist military groups; as wellas Trotsky and those who could have been identified as Trotskyites or had hissurname.

By comparing the written notes, the testimony, and the indictments, Kuromiyareveals the thoughts and deeds of the victims, as well as the lies of interrogatorsand coerced statements of witnesses and victims alike. The author seeks everynuance from his sources with his own interpretation of what they said or whatthey may have implied. At times he conjectures beyond his sources in light of whathe feels other scholarship has already established. This innovative and compellingbook belongs in university libraries and on the shelves of students of the SovietUnion and totalitarian systems.

University of St. Thomas Lee J. Williames

Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician. By John Worthen. (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 496. $40.00.)

This biographer of Robert Schumann draws on a remarkably rich fund of primarysource materials: some twenty thousand letters written and received by him andhis wife, Clara; the diaries and household books (Haushaltbücher); and even,among many other documents, daily accounts of the two years he spent in anasylum at Endenich and the autopsy report following his death there in 1856. Hewas an obsessive writer and list maker. The Haushaltbücher allow for the detailedreconstruction of his financial circumstances on an almost daily basis (they also,if the usual interpretation of a particular marginal mark is indeed correct, providean unusually clear index of his and Clara’s sexual activity); these and the relateddiaries are available in a scholarly (German-language) edition, as is (in bothGerman and English) the correspondence between Robert and Clara; the greatmajority of the letters, however, remains unpublished.

John Worthen—not himself a musicologist—has made full use of much of thismaterial in constructing this biography. More than this, though, Worthen’s prin-cipal concern is to offer an extended corrective to the tradition that has consignedSchumann “to Romantic lunacy” by constructing his life prior to 1854 in accor-dance with the mental decay (Worthen’s preferred cause is tertiary syphilis) thatovertook him in the two years thereafter (389). Reassessment of Schumann’s lifehas been in train for some time now, not least in the studies of John Daverio


[1997] and Erik Jensen [2001], both of whom Worthen nonetheless takes to taskon more than one occasion. His chief target, however, is Peter Ostwald’s 1985book, Robert Schumann: Music and Madness; time and again, the reader turns toan endnote to find Ostwald in the dock and found guilty. There seems somethingof an almost missionary zeal in this pursuit of another author’s (now somewhatoutdated) work, and it is ironic, given his intensely antipsychologizing stance, thatWorthen should at the outset claim that “this is a book about the lives [sic]Schumann led, not about the music he wrote” (xv).

What kind of Schumann emerges from this intensely revisionist reading? Thisreviewer wonders whether Worthen’s insistently unquestioning interpretations ofSchumann’s behavior do not, in the end, protest too much. For example, he seesno contradiction in Schumann’s composing a Frühlingslied on the day of his flightfrom the Dresden uprisings in May 1849: “[T]he spring was lovely, his family wassafe” (303). Why does Worthen want Schumann to be so very ordinary? Thereare moments, too, when his language betrays overconfidence in the biographer’sinsight: “The only answer is either that” (141; emphasis added). The few instancesof musical detail leave readers grateful for Worthen’s decision to “leave analysisof [Schumann’s] music to those qualified to undertake it”; given this and hisrevisionist efforts on the biographical front, it is depressing to find him nonethe-less perpetuating traditional views of the weakness of the late music (xv, 340).This reviewer wonders, finally, which readership this book is intended best toserve. Scholars able to consult the primary sources in the original language hardlyneed Worthen’s painstaking chronological trawl through them, though amateursmay find the scholarly apparatus daunting. The inaudibility almost throughoutSchumann’s music—Worthen’s Schumann is a “musician,” not a composer—risksmaking this seem a life unlived.

University of Cambridge Nicholas Marston

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. Edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W.Karrow Jr. (Chicago, III.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 400. $55.00.)

Congratulations to Chicago’s Field Museum and Newberry Library for theirdecision to commission a wide-ranging introduction to the contemporary study ofhistorical cartography, rather than a narrowly focused catalogue, to accompanythe magnificent exhibition “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,” which ranfrom November 2007 to January 2008. Historians, who may be unfamiliar with


the revisionist enterprise of the late J. B. Harley and David Woodward embodiedin the multivolume History of Cartography (also published by the University ofChicago Press), will find this volume an invaluable guide to recent trends inscholarship.

After an elementary primer on the nature of mapping by James R. Akerman, insubsequent chapters the authors treat maps of the whole world, regional andnational maps, thematic maps that present particular sets of data in visual form,maps of imaginary places such as More’s Utopia and Tolkien’s Middle Earth, andthe history of maps as items of consumption and collection. A particularly elegantand interesting chapter by Susan Schulten traces the development of maps ofthe United States. She shows how maps not only reflected the historical processof westward expansion but also in some cases shaped it. By picturing a nationstretching from sea to sea between British and Spanish colonial territories, JohnMelish’s 1819 map of the United States projected the concept of “ManifestDestiny” long before the phrase was coined. A map of the density of slavepopulations in the antebellum South is shown to have molded Abraham Lincoln’sstrategic thinking during the Civil War.

As the editor of a similar book published the same year (Mapping ColonialConquest: Australia and Southern Africa), this reviewer was encouraged by theoverlap in chapter themes to think we were on the right track, and by thestandards of production to acknowledge the University of Western AustraliaPress for keeping up with current best practice in the digital reproduction ofhistoric maps. Where our book cannot compete is in the superb collectionsavailable to curators at the Field Museum and Newberry Library. Every platein this lavishly illustrated volume rates as a treasure in its own right. The onlydrawback for the authors was the general insistence that whole maps be repro-duced wherever possible so as to fulfill expectations of exhibition visitors that thecatalogue they bought reflected what they had seen. Although the publishers havedone a fantastic job of reproducing maps to a fine level of detail, there is a limitto what can be studied, even with a magnifying glass. With very few exceptionsthis meant that the authors could not zoom in on significant details to supporttheir arguments.

The authors will open historians’ eyes to the possibilities of new kinds ofmap-based studies that would have been impossibly costly in the days beforedigitization, when scholars had to travel physically to widely scattered archives toinspect rare and fragile materials.

University of Western Australia Norman Etherington


A Movable Feast: The Millennia of Food Globalization. By Kenneth F. Kiple.(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 368. $27.00.)

The Cambridge World History of Food is one of those grand and authoritativetomes that for most involves a library visit rather than a purchase. So it is apleasure to see this offspring volume, written by one of the World History’scoeditors, providing readers with a rich taste of the larger volume’s delights, butat a manageable size and price. In A Movable Feast, Kenneth F. Kiple takes hisreaders on a journey through time and space to visit the wide range of plants andanimals that have fed the human race and have themselves become transformed inthe process. It is a journey packed with information in which the author takes anevident delight in the sheer diversity of it all.

Starting with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, Kiple writes of some of the morefamiliar prey—mammoths, reindeer, and bison—but also reflects on the nutri-tional contribution of lampreys, grasshoppers, giant sea turtles, and many otherthings besides. As he moves into the prehistory of farming, readers are takenthrough a wide range of different domesticates, each getting around half a pageof treatment, enough for the general reader to have a sense of both the story andthe manner in which archeologists and geneticists are building it.

Kiple devotes much of the book to the historical consequences of domesticationand trade in foodstuffs. There are sections on the classical empires of Egypt,Greece, and Rome as well as on world religions. Kiple also explores how foodswere moved, prescribed, and prohibited in different cultural milieu. There is afull treatment of the “Columbian Exchange,” which, after the passage to theAmericas, heralded food globalization on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

In the final section of the book, the author moves in another direction to reflecton a series of issues concerning nutrition, health, politics, and commerce in themodern world. The range of issues tackled is immense, from very specific nutri-tional diseases to more general problems of feeding the world. The author rattlesthrough his vast array of topics with an endearing sense of optimism. Kiple veryclearly is of the view that the world nutritional problems are soluble with theinstruments already available, if only good nutrition could be established as auniversal right.

The whole experience of reading the book is rather like being absorbed in ananimated and engaging dinner party conversation. The talk never ceases to beinteresting, though following it is a somewhat hectic journey, with fairly relaxedrules about what is emphasized and what is glossed over. Some might be surprisedthat the book’s section on the campaign against McDonald’s is rather lengthier


than its section on Christianity, for example, but that is all part of the whirlwindnarrative, occasionally settling for a close look, other times speeding off in searchof fresh insights.

Food is a simply massive topic, and there is much to be learnt from reflectingon its history. What Kiple has learnt and wishes to convey is a lesson of optimismand responsibility. Humans have spent thousands of years controlling a vast rangeof plant and animal species. If people continue to do so judiciously, then, to quotehis closing words, “a Post Neolithic Revolution” should “signal the beginning ofthe end of the Third World.” Let the world hope he is right.

University of Cambridge Martin Jones

Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History. By David Nash. (Oxford, England:Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 269. $63.00.)

The early years of the twenty-first century have offered compelling evidence thatreligion is not a premodern anachronism inching its way toward inevitable extinc-tion. The tragic consequences of religiously inspired terrorism have revealed theextent to which religious belief can still influence human actions. David Nash’sBlasphemy in the Christian World offers additional persuasive evidence for reli-gion’s continued relevance by showing how the rediscovery of seemingly archaicblasphemy laws in Europe and the Americas challenges cherished (albeit com-paratively recent) legal traditions of free speech and expression. Despite its title,Nash’s book is a legal, not a theological, study. By tracing the legislation andprosecution of blasphemy from the Middle Ages through modernity, he revealsboth the changing definitions of the term, as well as the ways in which blasphemylaws have been used by interested parties to limit the speech and expression ofothers.

Nash convincingly shows how, as early as the thirteenth century, the syste-matic prosecution of blasphemy was seen as necessary for the protection of thecommunity, a development that reached its apex in the wake of the ProtestantReformation, with Church and State working together in a constructive partner-ship. By the eighteenth century, revolution—political and religious—caused manyto question the utility and justice of the blasphemy laws, while blasphemy itselftransformed as “tavern-room apostasy became enlightenment deism” (117).

Despite its convincing narrative, Nash’s book is not without its flaws. Hisaccount contains only the briefest of sketches of early Christian history. Moreover,this sketch is marred by several questionable propositions. He writes that the earlyecumenical church councils attempted to “enforce religious orthodoxy,” a rather


difficult task considering that orthodoxy in this period was less a fixed standardthan a constantly evolving set of beliefs (42). Definition, at the very least, was asimportant as enforcement. Additionally, despite Nash’s insinuations to the con-trary, the Council of Nicaea [325] concerned itself not so much with confirmingChrist’s divinity, but rather with evaluating the priest Arius’ proposal that Christ’ssubstance differed from that of God the Father. Medievalists will recoil at Nash’suse of the term “Dark Ages” to describe a period more commonly referred totoday as “Late Antiquity,” and his impression that Christianity in this period wasfighting for its very survival against barbaric invaders is blatantly false.

Finally, Nash uncritically follows R. I. Moore’s perspective that WesternEurope became a “persecuting society” in the High Middle Ages, undercutting hisusual care in noting regional diversity. While Nash’s coverage of premodernity isthe weakest part of his book, it does not irrevocably undercut the quality of thewhole. Whig historians would do well to note his crucial observation that over thecourse of history “religious toleration and secularization . . . were episodic andconditional episodes rather than sustained changes” (242). Likewise, all of usliving in what Nash calls a “post-tolerant society” should pay careful attentionthat in our efforts to protect certain freedoms, we do not inadvertently give awayothers (248).

Framingham State College Gregory Halfond

Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century. By David Reynolds.(New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2007. Pp. 435. $35.00.)

Throughout history world leaders have met to discuss military and diplomaticissues, but the author of this new book argues, “Summitry is really a recentinvention—made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of massdestruction, and made into household news by the mass media” (5). He divides hisstudy of six international meetings into three categories: “Personal” summits atMunich in 1938 and Vienna in 1961; “Plenary” summits, which included largenumbers of specialists, at Yalta in 1945 and Camp David in 1978; and “Progres-sive” summits such as Richard Nixon’s meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscowin 1972 and Ronald Reagan’s discussions with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in1985 that were intended as a general step toward more cordial relations.

Each chapter opens with a discussion of the key actors, the issues they faced,and domestic concerns that would influence their diplomacy, followed by adetailed description of the meeting and an assessment of its immediate andlong-term successes and failures. David Reynolds is a master of detail and his use


of telling anecdotes and analysis of the personalities of the participants makeshistory come alive for both the specialist and general reader.

He is most harsh in his assessment of “Personal” summitry. Neville Chamber-lain was motivated not only by the fear that Hitler was ready to launch a massivewar, but also by his feelings of inadequacy resulting from comparisons with hismore successful father and brother. Munich was less a product of the PrimeMinister’s naiveté than an “ego trip” (41). Ill-prepared, overly confident, andheavily medicated, John Kennedy was unable to prevent Nikita Khrushchev fromdominating discussion at Vienna and his dismal performance led the Soviet leaderto test him by placing missiles in Cuba and convinced the president he had to be“tough” on Vietnam. The conference succeeded only in paving the way for futureconflict.

To Reynolds, Yalta was not the “sell out” critics later claimed, but largelyconfirmed earlier political and military decisions. Winston Churchill and FranklinRoosevelt did not abandon Eastern Europe to the Soviets, but were guilty ofbelieving they could build a lasting relationship with Stalin based on personalrapport rather than specific policies. The Moscow summit in 1972 failed due tothe rivalry between Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s addiction tosecrecy and “backdoor” diplomacy.

Somewhat surprisingly, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan emerge as themost successful practitioners of twentieth-century “summitry.” Carter’s attemptto broker a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt was “the most notablebreakthrough in Middle Eastern peacemaking since the state of Israel was born,”and Reagan’s meeting with Gorbachev helped pave the way for the dismantlingof the Soviet Union (341).

The book is both entertaining history and a useful primer for diplomats. Itshows that although summits occasionally produce personal and national success,they also have the potential for disaster. Like all diplomacy, they require carefulpreparation, reasonable expectations, and skillful negotiation.

Carthage College Thomas J. Noer


Documents

Caesar: Life of a Colossus – By Adrian Goldsworthy