History Lessons: How Textbooks from around the World Portray American History by DanaLindaman; Kyle WardReview by: Walter Russell MeadForeign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2005), pp. 187-188Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20034238 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 20:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.104.110.128 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 20:09:21 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books ideological connections between Edmund

Burke and Adam Smith, as well as her arguments for the continuities between the younger and older versions of these key figures, is an extraordinary and convincing tour de force.

Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero. BY MICHAEL KORDA. NewYork:

HarperCollins, 2004,176 pp. $19.95. This lively and well-constructed short biography of Ulysses Grant follows the method of Plutarch, describing Grant's life from the standpoints of narrative and character. Narratively, Korda outlines as

well as anyone ever has the odd structure of Grant's life: two towering peaks of heroism rising out of a muddy plain of perplexity and failure. The first peak was his extraordinary rise to greatness and victory in the Civil War, after years of obscurity in the Army and various failed ventures. The second, following a dismal presidency and an aimless post presidency climaxed by financial scandal and ruin, saw Grant race the clock to

write his memoirs (and provide for his wife) as he died slowly and painfully of throat cancer. Korda concisely summarizes

Grant's military gifts, describes his deeply happy marriage with the "walleyed" daughter of a slaveholding Confederate, and documents his apparently congenitally bad judgment about anything having to do with money. This failing blighted both his public and private lives. It con demned him to failure before the war, disgraced his presidency, and bankrupted him afterward. Even so, he was a great man, and Korda's biography is an excel lent introduction to an important

American life.

Washington's Crossing. BY DAVID HACKETT FISCHER. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2004, 576 pp. $35.00 (paper, $16.95).

Brandeis historian Fischer won a large and devoted following with Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in NorthAmerica. His reading of the early setder communities' attitudes toward questions of liberty and government has influenced a generation of writers seeking to understand the differences between "red" and "blue" America today. In Washingtons Crossing, Fischer looks at the darkest months of the American Revolution, when, following devastating defeats in New York and

White Plains, Washington's tatterdemalion army, and the American cause, teetered on the brink of collapse. For Fischer, the story of how Washington rallied colonial opinion and rebuilt the army's spirit explains why the Americans were able to win their independence. Unlike the

Howes (leading British aristocrats who commanded the formidably equipped British naval and land forces), Washing ton had to cajole, persuade, and win over a multicultural mob of colonial politicians, officers, and soldiers. Washington, Fischer argues, was doing more than winning a

war in these months; he was inventing a style of leadership and a form of politics

well suited to American realities.

History Lessons. How Textbooks From Around the WorldPortrayAmerican History. BY DANA LINDAMAN AND

KYLE WARD. New York: New Press, 2004, 400 pp. $26.95.

Lindaman and Ward had a brilliant idea: show Americans what the rest of the world teaches its children about U.S. history by excerpting history textbooks from around

F O R E I G N A F FA I R S January/February 2005 [187]

This content downloaded from 193.104.110.128 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 20:09:21 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

the world. Unfortunately, they weren't able to carry it out. They include what French history texts teach about the French resistance in World War II, for example. Interesting stuff, perhaps, and especially for those who, like Lindaman (as we learn from the jacket notes), focus on the formation of French identity in secondary school textbooks. But this excerpt, like far too many others in this unwieldy and poorly edited morass of a book, tells us exactly nothing about what the French learn about the United States. We can learn here what the British, Italians, Germans, and French are taught about the out break of World War I, or how the British describe the partition of Palestine, and

we can read many other little snippets of information. Overall, the book leans too heavily on a handful of countries, and fails too signally to focus on what others are teaching and learning about the United States to serve any useful purpose.

Western Europe STANLEY HOFFMANN

Fear: The History of a Political Idea. BY COREY ROBIN. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 336 pp. $z8.oo.

This talented young political scientist examines fear as a "political tool, an instrument of elite rule or insurgent ad vance, created and sustained by political leaders or activists who stand to gain something from it, either because fear helps them pursue a specific political goal, or because it reflects or lends support to their moral and political beliefs-or both." He examines the role of fear in the work of thinkers from Hobbes and

Montesquieu to Tocqueville and Arendt, warning us throughout against the limi tations of liberalism in combating it. The last part of the book turns to "fear, Ameri can style"-how "a little bit of coercion" can "produce a great deal of fear." Both dur ing the Cold War and after September 11, zool, elites organized coalitions of fear with the help of collaborators.

In all, this book is a thoughtful, often brilliant, radical polemic against the in sufficiencies and pitfalls of liberalism.

And yet, in his very brief conclusion, it is to "the egalitarian and libertarian principles of Rawls and Dworkin and to the eman cipatory strains of American liberalism

more generally" that Robin appeals, despite doubts about their viability. Let us hope that in his next work he will try to construct a defense against political fear as spirited as this provocative and discouraging dis section of its multiple forms.

The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution ofNaziJewish Policy, September 1939-March1942. BY CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING WITH

CONTRIBUTIONS BY JURGEN

M AT T HA U S. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 616 pp. $39.95.

This enormous volume explores in ex haustive detail the evolution of a policy aimed at expelling German and Eastern European Jews or locking them up in ghettoes into a policy of extermination that quickly became "the wholesale destruction ofJewish life." The signal seems to have been given by Hitler as early as July 1941: "by the end of October 1941 the conception of the Final Solution had taken shape," with "full-scale implementation" beginning, and gas ovens replacing mass shootings, in

March 1942. Browning shows both the

[188] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume84No.1

This content downloaded from 193.104.110.128 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 20:09:21 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions