Reviews in American History articles from December 1993

Reviews in American History archives from December 1993

Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems.
December 1, 1993... Carville Earle will leave a hurried reader mystified. Narrative history this book is not. At once an introduction to the constraints and potential of geographical inquiry, a group of autonomous essays that range across three centuries, and a...

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America.
December 1, 1993... Not since Perry Miller has one individual so dominated the study of early American literature. Indeed, because Sacvan Bercovitch's work so often extends or revises the former's, the comparison has become unavoidable. And justly so, for while...

Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History.
December 1, 1993... As Jack Greene has noted in a recent essay, the field of early American history is being swept by a search for synthesis. Three large volumes by David Fischer, D. W. Meinig, and Bernard Bailyn have presented broad interpretations of North...

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653.
December 1, 1993... Who was Maurice Thomson? Arguably the most significant English colonial merchant of the early seventeenth century, Thomson plays no part in such pioneering accounts of the commercial development of England's Atlantic empire as Wesley Frank...

Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, 3 vols.
December 1, 1993... Without Consent or Contract, by Robert W. Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and their colleagues, has been published by W. W. Norton as four volumes of studies on the economics of slavery written in the two decades since Time on the Cross (1974). It is...

The Fire-Eaters.
December 1, 1993... Apparently convinced by Henry Adams's acerbic judgment that nineteenth-century southerners had no mind, only temperament, historians neglected the study of the mind of the Old South for far too long, leaving the field to brilliant but...

Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War.
December 1, 1993... These two excellent collections of essays are part of the current movement to integrate questions of gender and race more fully into the study of American culture as a whole and into the standard history of major events. The Culture of Sentiment...

Where My Heart is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876.
December 1, 1993... A new generation of historians are rewriting the cultural history of the Civil War. More than two decades have passed since Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962), George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War (1965), and Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten...

New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States.
December 1, 1993... Marjorie Spruill Wheeler has tackled one of the most neglected aspects of women's suffrage: the strategy for the vote among elite white women in the South from the Civil War until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. At the same time, she...

Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-1890.
December 1, 1993... In the century after the Civil War, fourteen new states were created out of America's western territories. Although their exuberant founders shared goals and assumptions about how these new states would function, David Alan Johnson argues that...

Mormon Odyssey: The Story of Ida Hunt Udall, Plural wife.
December 1, 1993... The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, the Mormons) would appear to be, among other things, a family historian's dream come true. Not only does the church actively encourage its millions of members to research their own family...

When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.
December 1, 1993... Returning to survey the aftermath of the disastrous confrontation in Waco, Texas between the national state and the Branch Davidian followers of David Koresh, novelist Larry McMurtry noted perceptively that the whole approach of federal agents to...

Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1840-1920.
December 1, 1993... The communitarian and utopian movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have commanded considerable attention from American historians. Fourierism, Owenism, and Transcendentalism, for example, have received thoughtful book-length...

The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940.
December 1, 1993... The word "modernity" suggests arriving at a certain stage, reaching a certain status, making some technological or intellectual breakthrough that severs connections to the past. World War I often marks the boundary of the modern: William...

To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order.
December 1, 1993... Thomas J. Knock has benefited from the guidance of his mentor, Arthur Link, the dean of Wilsonian scholars, and scores of other scholars who have pursued Wilson's impact upon the U.S. past. In the past decade alone, at least fourteen major works...

After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920-1934.
December 1, 1993... Largely unaffected by the developments in social history in the last generation, Douglas B. Craig's examination of the Democratic party in the 1920s is, he concedes, "clearly at odds with 'new political history'". Numbers, for example, do not...

The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present.
December 1, 1993... In The Dispossessed Jacqueline Jones seeks to demonstrate two deceptively simple truths: that "Poverty abides no line drawn by color or culture" and that "Poverty has a history". With these two generalizations foremost in her mind, she proceeds...

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States.
December 1, 1993... Discussions of the origins of the American welfare state invariably evoke visions of Depression era breadlines and the spirited political pragmatism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Theda Skocpol challenges this image in her provocative study,...

The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America.
December 1, 1993... In the famous opening to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the music-loving narrator locates jazz at the site of cultural erasure. In the acutely perceptible clamor of black music--embodied in a recording of Louis Armstrong--he discerns sound beyond...

Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation.
December 1, 1993... In a provocative article published back in 1971, Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., broached the subject of the influx of Jews into American academic life. This article appeared exactly at the right time. Ten years earlier, some of...

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956.
December 1, 1993... Histories of the computer age usually trace its origins to the massive military data processing requirements that arose during World War II. The same histories also maintain that the electronic digital computer represented the product of a unique...

The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford.
December 1, 1993... The growth of Cold War tensions and the development of big science in the United States were intimately, and often inextricably, related. These two books provide vivid case studies of the connections between Cold War concerns and scientific...

The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite.
December 1, 1993... Dwight D. Eisenhower's political legacy remains ambiguous. There is no other way to account for the continuing shifts in historians' judgments about his two terms as president: years when so much in foreign and domestic policy seemed "put on...

The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989.
December 1, 1993... This is not the best of times for the American military. With the Soviet threat gone, the armed forces, so recently the favorites of the Reagan administration, now find themselves searching for missions and trying to justify their existence to...

Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past.
December 1, 1993... These five volumes demonstrate the tenacious hold of Watergate--over the policies and politics of the Nixon and Ford administrations, over the collective memory of American elites, and over scholars who write about the 1970s. Historians have...

Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory.
December 1, 1993... In 1844, in an essay entitled "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, "We have yet no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable material, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another...

Lifting the veil: the judicial biographies of Alpheus T. Mason.
December 1, 1993... Students of the judicial process have long vacillated between realism and mythology in describing it. On the one hand, the notion that appellate judges make law and help govern, sometimes described as a discovery of the twentieth century, was...