The Australian Journal of Politics and History articles from March 1999

The Australian Journal of Politics and History archives from March 1999

Contemporary Europe: Histories and Identities Introduction.
March 1, 1999... One of the more dubious benefits of Europe's prolonged division into Eastern and Western blocs after the World War II was ease of geographical identification. Even if both blocs contained their own renegade and peripheral states, questions of...

A Moveable Place With A Moveable Past: Perspectives on Central Europe.
March 1, 1999... This paper discusses whether the region which in the 1990s has been called "the Visegrad Four" is a political and/or cultural whole and if so, in what respects. Using the concepts "centre" and "periphery" the paper argues that parts of...

Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850s-1930s.
March 1, 1999... This paper notes that the emergence of class-based politics preceded the advent of factory manufacture and that artisans or skilled workers continued to dominate the labour movement before 1914. It recognises that industrialisation alone does...

Problems of European Union Citizenship Rights at the Periphery.(peripheral territories)
March 1, 1999... European Union member states have different nationality laws. Those with overseas dependencies control access there to European Parliament (EU) voting rights. Gibraltar and French Polynesia are two dependencies in which the existing situation...

Environmental Movements and the Emergence of Civil Society in Greece.
March 1, 1999... The generally acknowledged weakness of civil society in Greece has obstructed the solution of many urgent environmental problems. Since the 1970s these weaknesses have begun to be overcome by various environmental movements. Community protests...

Nationalism, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Freedom in Eastern Europe.
March 1, 1999... The events of 1989 in Eastern Europe represented an alliance between two dynamics: anti-Soviet and anti-communist. Once the "double rejective" task of the revolution was complete, these dynamics began to diverge as the space created for freedom...

Soviet Work Attitudes and Politics, 1953-91: A Preliminary Historical Sociology.
March 1, 1999... The main question investigated here is the extent to which Russian workers' changing attitudes toward their labour contributed to the systemic political crisis of the Soviet regime during the latter part of the 1980s. The related issue of the...

The Soviet Military Administration and East German Elections, Autumn 1946.
March 1, 1999... Even before the capitulation of Germany in 1945 the Soviet Union had begun to make preparations for a step-by-step communist seizure of power in the territories it controlled. This paper shows that the elections in the Soviet Occupation Zone...

The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and French Intellectuals, 1925-29.(Soviets control French intellectuals' impressions of Soviet Union)
March 1, 1999... The 1920s and 1930s were years of active personal support for the USSR by a number of eminent French intellectuals who assisted in the creation of an image of the USSR in French public opinion. This was largely based on their perceptions of the...

Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Frederick Burkhardt, ed., Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 249. There has been a good deal of filling recently in the Darwinian field. Fortunately scholars now have excellent...

Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 344. There has been a good deal of filling recently in the Darwinian field. Fortunately scholars now have excellent...

Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Stephen J. Gould, Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996, pp. 358. There has been a good deal of filling recently in the Darwinian field. Fortunately scholars now have excellent...

HISTORICAL RECORDS OF AUSTRALIA: Resumed Series III, Despatches and Papers Relating to the History of Tasmania. Volume VII. Tasmania, January-December 1828.(Review)
March 1, 1999... HISTORICAL RECORDS OF AUSTRALIA: Resumed Series III, Despatches and Papers Relating to the History of Tasmania. Volume VII. Tasmania, January-December 1828 Peter Chapman, General Editor. Australian Government Press publication in...

EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD AND THE COLONIAL DREAM: A Reconsideration.(Review)
March 1, 1999... EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD AND THE COLONIAL DREAM: A Reconsideration. By various authors, Wellington: GP Publications in association with The Friends of the Turnbull Library, 1997, illustrated, pp. 220. No price given. Edward Gibbon...

EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD: Abductor and Mystagogue.(Review)
March 1, 1999... EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD: Abductor and Mystagogue By Ged Martin. Edinburgh: Ann Barry, 1997, 56pp. Edward Gibbon Wakefield is a name with which we are all at least familiar. Something to do with the planned settlement of Adelaide and...

THE MAYNE INHERITANCE.(Review)
March 1, 1999... THE MAYNE INHERITANCE By Rosamond Siemon. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, pp. xiii + 214. $15.95. This is not the usual sort of History book that might be reviewed in a learned journal -- but such an assertion raises a...

THE COST OF WAR: Australians Return.(Review)
March 1, 1999... THE COST OF WAR: Australians Return By Stephen Garton. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996, illustrated, pp. xii + 298. $44.95. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Oswald Bates served in the trenches of France...

KEEN AS MUSTARD: Britain's Horrific Chemical Warfare Experiments in Australia.(Review)
March 1, 1999... KEEN AS MUSTARD: Britain's Horrific Chemical Warfare Experiments in Australia By Bridget Goodwin. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, pp. xviii + 361. Illustrated. $29.95. In the late 1990s, a number of voices -- including...

GREEN BANS, RED UNION: Environmentalism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation.(Review)
March 1, 1999... GREEN BANS, RED UNION: Environmentalism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation By Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann. Sydney: New South Wales Press, 1998, pp. xiv + 352. Illustrated. No price given. In 1997,...

A NATURAL HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Tim M. Berra. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998, pp. ix + 304. $45. Berra freely admits he has had a lifelong love affair with Australia and her biota. Although based in the United States, and now a professor emeritus of...

The Packaging of Australia: Politics and Culture Wars.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Gregory Melleuish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998, pp. 143. $19.95. Melleuish hopes a "vibrant" civil society will eventually develop in Australia, but concedes there is "no human right to a better future, nor any...

Under Blue Skies: The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability in Western Australia.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by Errol Cocks, Charlie Fox, Mark Brogan and Michael Lee. Perth: Centre for Disability Research and Development, Faculty of Health and Human Services, Edith Cowan University, 1996, pp xi + 334. Illustrated. This collection of essays...

Gregory the Great and His World.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By R. A. Markus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xxiii + 241. $36.95. In recent years a number of monographs have appeared dealing with one of the greatest of the medieval popes, Gregory I (590-604), but all of them are...

The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Caroline Litzenberger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xvii + 218. Illustrated. Maps, figures and tables. $90.00. Since the mid-1970s when Christopher Haigh first challenged the interpretations of A. G. Dickens, the...

The Impact of the English Reformation: 1500-1640.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by Peter Marshall, editor, London: Arnold Readers in History, 1997, pp. xi + 344. Since the mid-1970s when Christopher Haigh first challenged the interpretations of A. G. Dickens, the English Reformation has become a veritable...

Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620-1643.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Tom Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xv + 350. Since the mid-1970s when Christopher Haigh first challenged the interpretations of A. G. Dickens, the English Reformation has become a veritable historiographical...

Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and Its Interpretation.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by Adrian Wilson. Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1993 pp. ix + 342. No price given. Social history in the late 1980s had reached a point of crisis in an intellectual climate which had been convinced that...

Richard Newton and English Caricature in the 1790s.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By David Alexander. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. x + 178. Illustrated. $53.95 Some fifty years ago, Mary Dorothy George compiled the indispensable Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires... in the British Museum...

The New Police in Nineteenth Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By David Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, pp. xi + 180. Selected documents and bibliographic essay. No price given. The last fifteen years have produced a significant amount of scholarly work on the origins and...

Victorian Science in Context.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by Bernard Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, illustrated, pp. viii + 489. No price given. These twenty essays on nineteenth-century science in Britain offer most interesting and sometimes entertaining reading. In...

Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture and the Demonstration of Enlightenment.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Geoffrey V. Sutton. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995, pp. xiii + 391. No price given. Dr Sutton's aim is to explain the growth of the new science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The period he examines in detail extends...

Revolutionaries at Work: The Constituent Assembly, 1789-1791.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Edna Hindie Lemay and Alison Patrick. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1996, one graph, two maps, pp. vii + 144. No price given. In the aftermath of our recent Constitutional Convention, this book's glimpses of an earlier gathering are...

THE CAMBRIDGE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF GERMANY.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Martin Kitchen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, illustrated, pp. 352. No price given. While the richly illustrated appearance of this book at first glance could easily lead to its dismissal as a lightweight "coffee table"...

BRITISH POLICY AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 1918-1919.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Douglas Newton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. x + 481. No price given. Douglas Newton's book that details the significance of British policy on the Wehnar Republic from 1918-1919, is a cogent analysis into the political forces that...

THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Andrei Sinyavsky. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. x + 98. This book contains the text of the Harriman Lectures, delivered by the veteran Soviet dissident and intelligent, Andrei Sinyavsky. Sinyavsky's trial (along with Yuli...

NO CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Bruce Russett. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1997. pp. 111. No price given. No Clear and Present Danger is a re-publication of an influential World War II revisionist study, prepared at the height of the Vietnam anti-war movement, which...

REVOLUTION AMERICAN STYLE: The Nineteen-Sixties and Beyond.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Paul N. Goldstene. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp, 1997, pp. xiii + 136, US$12.95. The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It is less a commentary on America of the 1960s, than a somewhat quirky and highly personalised...

RICHARD NIXON: A Psychobiography.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Vamik D. Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz and Andrew W. Dod. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. pp. 167. US$32/19.95 [pounds sterling]. There have been many biographical attempts on the life of Richard Nixon but this particular work...

COMING FULL CIRCLE: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Eric Jones, Lionel Frost and Colin White Boulder: Westview Press, 1993, six maps, pp. xvi + 188. No price given. This study aims to present a history of the "process by which... certain societies have taken a leadership role in...

FRENCH WORLDS, PACIFIC WORLDS: French Nuclear Testing in Australia's Backyard.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by Stephen Alomes and Michael Provis. Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations, 1998. This book is about various aspects and interpretations of the French presence in the Pacific, from early colonisation to the last...

NATIONS AND STATES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Nicholas Tarling. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp. x + 136. One map. $24.95pb. Nations and States in Southeast Asia is a stimulating, though basically lightweight contribution to the growing body of...

ASIAN FREEDOMS: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Edited by David Kelly and Anthony Reid. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 230. $32.95pb. If you survey Asia at the end of the twentieth century you will have no difficulty in finding evidence that freedom...

MALAYSIA'S POLITICAL ECONOMY: Politics, Patronage and Profits.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Edmund Terence Gomez and Jomo K. S., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xix + 207. Two maps. pb. $29.95. Insider trading to raise election campaign funds, businessmen at the head of conglomerates serving as proxies for...

HISTORY OF LAOS.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Martin Stuart-Fox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. pp. 253 + xv. Four maps. $24.95 pb. The bookshelf on Laos is small, and it is unusual to see three additions to it coming out within a twelve-month period. It is also...

STALKING THE ELEPHANT KINGS: In Search of Laos.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Christopher Kremmer. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Illustrated. One map. pp. 215 + xi, $16.75 pb. The bookshelf on Laos is small, and it is unusual to see three additions to it coming out within a twelve-month period. It is also...

THE POLITICS OF RITUAL AND REMEMBRANCE: Laos Since 1975.(Review)
March 1, 1999... By Grant Evans, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1998. Illustrated. pp. 216 + vii. No price given. The bookshelf on Laos is small, and it is unusual to see three additions to it coming out within a twelve-month period. It is also notable that...

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN INDIA: Issues and Themes.(Review)
March 1, 1999... SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN INDIA: Issues and Themes By K. L. Sharma. New Dehli: Sage Publications, 1997, pp. 218, Rs 295. Almost all textbooks on sociology have a large section on the "caste system". The Indian caste system is considered...

CREATING SOCIALIST WOMEN IN JAPAN: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900-1937.(Review)
March 1, 1999... CREATING SOCIALIST WOMEN IN JAPAN: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900-1937 By Vera Mackie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, illustrated, pp. 252. $59.95. Until the publication of Creating Socialist Women little was known...

THE ENVIRONMENT IN WORLD POLITICS: Exploring the Limits.(Review)
March 1, 1999... THE ENVIRONMENT IN WORLD POLITICS: Exploring the Limits Ian Bellany. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. x + 232. No price given. This book arose out of a series of lectures, offered to students of Politics and International...

GREEN OR GONE: Health, Ecology, Plagues, Greed and Our Future.(Review)
March 1, 1999... GREEN OR GONE: Health, Ecology, Plagues, Greed and Our Future By David Shearman with Gary Sauer. Thompson. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1997, pp. xiii + 280. No price given. This book makes a passionate plea for...

NATIONS AT WAR: A Scientific Study of International Conflict.(Review)
March 1, 1999... NATIONS AT WAR: A Scientific Study of International Conflict By Daniel S. Geller and J. David Singer. Cambridge Studies in International Relations: 58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. xi + 242. Price: $29.95. Why do...

WAR MACHINE: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age.(Review)
March 1, 1999... WAR MACHINE: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age By Daniel Pick. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 292. No price given. Once in a while a piece of scholarship is produced which draws together a wide variety of...