Canadian Journal of History articles from August 1997

Canadian Journal of History archives from August 1997

East End, West End: science education, culture and class in Mid-Victorian London.
August 1, 1997... In the early nineteenth century, scientific activity in London was located mainly in two areas, Westminster and the City of London. In Westminster, the Royal Society, a growing number of other learned societies, and the new Royal Institution...

Andrew Bonar Law and the fall of the Asquith Coalition: the December 1916 cabinet crisis. (Great Britain)
August 1, 1997... By the close of 1916, after more than two years of bloody conflict -- seventeen months into the lifespan of the curious coalition government led by Herbert Henry Asquith -- Great Britain was still eye-deep in the most terrible war in her...

Trading with the enemy: British business and the law during the First World War.
August 1, 1997... After four months of the Great War, Sir Maurice Hankey, the Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, advised His Majesty's Government that "drastic means must be taken to prevent British subjects succumbing to the temptation of continuing...

Le systeme notarial de la Louisiane au XIXe siecle: profil et fonction des notaires.
August 1, 1997... Partant de l'evolution de la fonction de notaire en Louisiane au 19e siecle, cet article examine comment les autorites de cet etat, confrontees a l'influence de la tradition legale americaine, developperent un systeme de droit civil original...

The Devil's Dream.
August 1, 1997... The signing of a peace accord on December 29, 1996, the terms of which are supposed to be "firm and lasting," formally brought to a close thirty-six years of civil war in Guatemala. Armed combat between guerrilla insurgents and government...

Tierra Madre.
August 1, 1997... The signing of a peace accord on December 29, 1996, the terms of which are supposed to be "firm and lasting," formally brought to a close thirty-six years of civil war in Guatemala. Armed combat between guerrilla insurgents and government...

The Dynasty of Chernigov: 1054-1146.
August 1, 1997... Most studies of early Rus' revolve around Kiev, the main political centre of the Riurikid dynasty and their realm, Kievan Rus'. Martin Dimnik's study offers an alternate perspective. While recognizing Kiev as the seat of the senior member of...

The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098-1180.
August 1, 1997... The theme and content of this book are well reflected by its title: the term "charity" serves as both foundation and bonding material. Divided into two nearly equal parts, it is as much, if not more, a study of religion and social anthropology...

The Cartulary of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in England, part 2.
August 1, 1997... Historian familiar with Michael Gervers's work on the Knights Hospitallers will not be surprised that this edition of charters, like its predecessor, is a model of meticulous research and thoughtful scholarship. Selecting 230 documents from...

Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Gunzburg and the Campaign Against the Friars.
August 1, 1997... In Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism, Geoffrey Dipple asserts: "At the centre of the Reformation campaign against the friars looms the figure of Johann Eberlin von Gunzberg" (p. 37). Dipple undertakes to redress a gap in Reformation...

Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France.
August 1, 1997... Kristen Gager's study of adoption in early modern France is a bold attempt to dispute the legal fiction that adoption was extremely rare in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society. One can only admire Gager's commitment to this exploration...

German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 1, Tradition and Enlightenment, 1600-1780.
August 1, 1997... The first of a projected four-volume survey of modern German Jewish history, the present volume consists of a survey of the early modern period by Mordechai Breuer and, in its last third, an extended treatment of the early decades of the Jewish...

The Landed Estates of the Esterhazy Princes: Hungary During the Reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II.
August 1, 1997... One of the most significant developments in the complex central European political condominium presided over by the Habsburg dynasty during the early modem period was the emergence of a relatively small magnate elite of some two hundred families...

The Wars of the Roses.
August 1, 1997... At least four books entitled The Wars of the Roses have appeared in the last fifteen years. Although historians are aware that the name is not really appropriate, (red and white roses as symbols of York and Lancaster meant more to the Tudors than...

John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce.
August 1, 1997... An ex-slave-trader turned parson, John Newton is best remembered today as the author of the still popular hymn "Amazing Grace." Those with taste a for poetry know him as the evangelical curate of Olney and friend of William Cowper with whom he...

Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire.
August 1, 1997... Professor Whelan is to be congratulated for a marvellous new study of Burke's political/constitutional thought. He makes two basic assumptions: the first is that Burke's philosophy can be detected and thoroughly explicated through an in depth...

The French Counter-Revolutionary Theorist Louis de Bonald: 1754-1840.
August 1, 1997... The Vicomte Louis de Bonald was a major ideologist of the French counter-revolution, a "prophet of the past" who diagnosed and even anticipated many of modernity's social problems. He was also a considerable figure in the parliamentary life of...

Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised.
August 1, 1997... As Harvey Mitchell notes, there is a growing consensus that Tocqueville was "if not the greatest political philosopher of the nineteenth century, certainly one of its leading political thinkers" (p. 258). Indeed, Tocqueville seems to have had...

The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848.
August 1, 1997... The Invisible Code, as the subtitle suggests, is one of honour in restoration and July Monarchy France. William Reddy argues that while the Napoleonic Codes provided the structure of a new male public sphere of open competition, a democratized...

Science, Vine and Wine in Modern France.
August 1, 1997... In France, the myths surrounding wine are both potent and remunerative; none is more powerful than the belief that wine is a natural drink. In this well-researched book, Harry Paul, a professor of French history at the University of Florida,...

French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere.
August 1, 1997... The virtually simultaneous appearance of this volume, Bruce Vandervort's Victor Griffuelhes and French Syndicalism 1895-1922, and a provocative article by Gerald Friedman in French Historical Studies (1997), testifies to a continuing fascination...

Wahlerbewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland, 2 vols.
August 1, 1997... This twin-volume work on German Reichstag elections is large and expensive. But it is well-written and carefully organized, so even quantitatively challenged historians can profit from it. And its comprehensiveness and reliability for specialists...

Wilhelm II, vol. 2, Emperor and Exile, 1900-1941.
August 1, 1997... I reviewed the first volume of this work in the Canadian Journal of History, Vol. XXV, No. 2, August 1990, pp. 281-84. The current volume fully lives up to the expectations it set. We now have a full, thoroughly researched and documented, and...

Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution.
August 1, 1997... This is George Browder's second installment on the Nazi police system, and follows his 1990 work, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of SIPO and SD. In that book, he described the political machinations by which Reich S.S. Leader...

Nazism and the Working Class in Austria: Industrial Unrest and Political Discontent in the National Community.
August 1, 1997... This monograph follows the example set by Martin Broszat, Marlis Steinert, and Ian Kershaw in their studies of public opinion in Nazi Germany, but concentrates on the Australian working class. Timothy Kirk is not quite certain what the term...

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia: 1934-1941.
August 1, 1997... To some degree, the scholarship of the revisionists has been a welcome addition to our understanding of the history of the Soviet Union. Some scholars, however, go overboard in their revision of received wisdom about the Soviet past. Robert...

Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century.
August 1, 1997... Jonathan Clark gave us the long eighteenth century (1688-1832) -- the ancien regime confessional state -- and now we are offered the long nineteenth century, whose range, for the purposes of this volume, extends from the early 1790s to either...

British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars Through the Crimea.
August 1, 1997... The four decades between Waterloo and the Crimean war were a period in which British obsession with military dress and drill reached heights still regarded with nostalgia by antiquarian military historians. The main inspirations were the...

The Two Mr. Gladstones: A Study in Psychology and History.
August 1, 1997... The publication within a few months of each other of new biographies of Gladstone and Disraeli stands as proof of an enduring fascination with these two giants of Victorian politics. The immense volume of Gladstone papers at the British...

Disraeli: A Brief Life.
August 1, 1997... The publication within a few months of each other of new biographies of Gladstone and Disraeli stands as proof of an enduring fascination with these two giants of Victorian politics. The immense volume of Gladstone papers at the British...

Clement Attlee.
August 1, 1997... When told that Clement Attlee was a modest man, Winston Churchill is said to have remarked that Attlee had much to be modest about. Jerry H. Brookshire would not agree. In this political biography, Brookshire proposes the thesis that Attlee...

The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, The Colonial Era.
August 1, 1997... As are all the contributions to the Cambridge history series, the three volumes in the Cambridge Economic History of the United States are intended to be guides to the existing state of knowledge. Volume I, The Colonial Era, succeeds...

Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England.
August 1, 1997... "SPM [single Puritan male], freeman, 28, half-way member of church, seeks virtuous SPF, early 20s, for fruitful marriage, mutual affection, and sober mirth. I enjoy Bible-reading, psalm-singing, country dancing, house-raisings, militia...

Washington's Partisan War: 1775-1783.
August 1, 1997... Mark Kwasny fills a niche in understanding the crucial role of the militia in military policy and strategy in the middle states, which he defines as Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, during the War of Independence. The militia was crucial...

Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City.
August 1, 1997... Historians and others have long debated why the United States has been characterized by high levels of homicide and other acts of interpersonal violence. David Courtwright argues in this very useful book that demography is the key to unlocking...

What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence Against Wives.
August 1, 1997... Families are not always safe places for women. Ironically, given long-standing celebrations of women's role as guardians of home and family, some women's experience within the family circle can be perilous and sometimes fatal. Feminists have...

Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy.
August 1, 1997... Sara Hunter Graham's close reading of the achievement of woman suffrage not only sheds new light on the process by which American women were enfranchised, but argues that the suffrage movement, as one of the first examples of pressure group...

Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era.
August 1, 1997... This provocative book is sure to fuel the fires of debate over America's lost war in southeast Asia. Robert Buzzanco has examined the varied responses of U.S. military leaders to their nation's experience in Vietnam from the first direct American...

Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution.
August 1, 1997... John Fitzgerald's study, despite his forceful disclaimers that it is an essentially historical production, is much more than "history" in a disciplinary academic sense. It is in most respects cut in the mould of a Toynbeean opus. It demands more...

Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition.
August 1, 1997... In the past two decades western sinology on brotherhood associations and secret societies in late-imperial China has experienced an important breakthrough with newly available archival material from Beijing and Taipei. Traditionally, these...

Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued: Yamagata Daini's Ryushi shinron of 1759.
August 1, 1997... Yamagata Daini is a Japanese Confucian scholar who was executed in 1767 for lese-majeste. Lionized by imperial loyalists from the 1850s to 1945 for his biting critique of the Tokugawa political system and his supposed advocacy of the restoration...

Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947.
August 1, 1997... In the nearly fifty years since India and Pakistan achieved independence amidst the tragic bloodbath of partition that marked the end of the British Raj in South Asia in August 1947, a vast body of scholarly writing has probed into these historic...

Britain and the Politics of Modernization in the Middle East: 1945-1958.
August 1, 1997... This book is a history of the activities of the Development Division of the British Middle East Organization (B.M.E.O.) from its establishment in 1945 to 1958. Based mainly on the B.M.E.O. files in the Foreign Office and the records of the Middle...

Using Computers in History: A Practical Guide.
August 1, 1997... As a practitioner of computer-based research and as a soon-to-be teacher of a course which includes a large section on using computers in history, I came to this practical guide by M.J. Lewis and Roger Lloyd-Jones with hope and great...

Writing and European Thought: 1600-1830.
August 1, 1997... Nicholas Hudson has written a history of writing, today a surprisingly neglected topic. But indirectly he is taking issue with the position of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong on the orality/literacy question, which has inspired such intense...

Life's Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry, 1860-1940.
August 1, 1997... In his 1983 book, The Eclipse of Darwin, Peter Bowler discussed the Lamarckian climate of much late nineteenth-century thinking on evolution. Departing from a whiggish historiography which portrayed (and by and large still does portray) a rather...