Reviews in American History articles from December 1994

Reviews in American History archives from December 1994

The American Presidency: An Intellectual History.
December 1, 1994... "I greatly apprehend that my Countrymen will expect too much from me," George Washington wrote shortly after entering the presidency. "I fear, if the issue of public measures should not correspond with their sanguine expectations, they will turn...

Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution.
December 1, 1994... This book explains how the political ideas of America's Founders (Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington) stand relative to long-term tendencies in the Western tradition of political thought. Rather than summarizing the...

The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s.
December 1, 1994... Only in the United States do the losers, deviants, miscreants, and malcontents get to narrate the national experience--not as exiles or emigres such as Trotsky and Solzhenitsyn, but as accredited professionals boring from within their own...

The Founders of America: How the Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Classical Civilizations; How They were Plunged into a Dark Age by Invasion and Conquest; and How They are Reviving.
December 1, 1994... Longtime director of the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian, Francis Jennings was instrumental in making it the nation's premier graduate and postgraduate training ground for a generation of "new" ethnohistorians....

The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871.
December 1, 1994... All three of these well-researched books speak, in different ways, to Richard D. Brown's contention in Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (1976) that relative rates of modernization lay behind the American Civil War....

What They Fought For, 1861-1865.
December 1, 1994... The American Civil War long has been, and continues to be, the most-written-about armed conflict in all history. As a consequence Civil War historians find it increasingly difficult to come up with new subjects or to present something that is...

Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments.
December 1, 1994... Consistent with recent liberal historiography on the Civil War, David A. J. Richards argues that the Reconstruction amendments, in substance if not in form, constituted a new American Constitution. Sensitive to the enduring appeal of the Founding...

Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880-1892.
December 1, 1994... Jeffrey Ostler addresses the issues of what gave rise to populism and why the movement became strong in some rural areas and not in others. He employs a comparative approach that focuses on political developments in Kansas and Nebraska, where...

American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services.
December 1, 1994... Over the last two decades, the discourse about American architecture and interiors has expanded rapidly as scholars have sought to broaden artifactual study from connoisseurship to material life. Thus, the field has moved from the pursuit of...

Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86.
December 1, 1994... Historians habitually borrow tools and methods from other disciplines. Currently the methods of literary criticism are in vogue; in the seventies the tools of quantitative social science found favor. There is nothing wrong with this habit of...

Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States.
December 1, 1994... Homework in industrial America has long been a neglected stepchild. Women's labor history has focused on women who left the home to earn wages in factories, offices, stores, or, in the case of domestic service, other people's homes. Homeworkers...

Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929.
December 1, 1994... Thanks to the popular media, our image of Seattle is one in which yuppies like television's Dr. Frazier Crane leisurely sip cappuccino in one of the city's innumerable cafes. And it made perfect sense that the grieving widower played by Tom Hanks...

From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920.
December 1, 1994... It might seem that invention should be the focal point of the study of the history of technology. After all, invention appears to be the ineffable, irreducible essence of technology, the moment of creation. It also seems to be the most personal...

Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of Hawthorne Experiments.
December 1, 1994... Richard Gillespie's title, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments, is too modest. Gillespie, Curator of the History of Science at the Museum of Victoria, Australia, provides a great deal of information about this series...

Franchising in America: The Development of a Business Method, 1840-1980.
December 1, 1994... Centered on five cases of business franchising, Thomas Dicke's fascinating study opens a long-neglected window on the linkages between "big" and "small" business in America since the mid-nineteenth century. Although franchising has drawn a good...

American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression.
December 1, 1994... John A. Clausen's American Lives is an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of life-course studies by a highly respected social psychologist. This field takes the lifetime--individual, modal, and normative, and all of these taken...

W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919.
December 1, 1994... William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was unquestionably one of the towering intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Born in 1868, the year of Andrew Johnson's impeachment, and dead ninety-five years later in the year of Lyndon Johnson's...

Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928.
December 1, 1994... First established as a secret men's fraternity in Georgia in 1915, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan eventually became one of the largest and most influential grass-roots social movements in American history. Stressing the themes of white...

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.
December 1, 1994... It is the declared purpose of Stefan Kuhl's book "to ground references to Nazi Germany in the recent controversies about scientific racism on a historically secure basis" by "providing detailed evidence about the relationship between American...

Pragmatism and Social Theory.
December 1, 1994... Ever since Socrates was charged with impiety, philosophers have had to cope with being misunderstood. Pragmatism may not be the most bizarrely misunderstood of all philosophies--that honor, over the past two centuries, would probably have to go...

Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism.
December 1, 1994... Alpheus Thomas Mason's Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1956) is an estimable but flawed volume. Although among the better biographies of great Justices, it is not a masterpiece like his superb Stone volume. Mason himself shrugged off suggestions...

British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918-1924.
December 1, 1994... Historians of America's international relations have long recognized that apart from the ordinary, friendly relations that existed between the United States and other countries, with certain nation states the United States had cultivated special...

Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944.
December 1, 1994... Students of U.S. foreign relations have long recognized that relations between countries extend beyond government policies and actions and that the impact of the United States on other societies, especially Third World societies, includes the...

The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan.
December 1, 1994... Robert McMahon long ago established himself as one of the best of his generation of diplomatic historians. He published a superb first book, Colonialism and Cold War, in 1981 and followed it with a series of brilliant articles, some...

George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950.
December 1, 1994... George F. Kennan is the diplomat and historian who helped to create the policy of containment, but lived to regret it. After serving as deputy head of mission in Moscow from 1944 to 1946, Kennan became the first person to head the new State...

America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991.
December 1, 1994... For those neighbors who might have missed the ruckus, diplomatic historians have been shouting at one another for the last couple of decades, heaving ideological skillets and methodological rolling pins, shattering the china, slamming open doors,...

Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.
December 1, 1994... Want to reduce students' nostalgia for the 1960s? Tell them that in 1961, police arrested one Thomas Cocomo for selling condoms. Note that at the time, doctors were still being arrested for the crime of fitting married women with diaphragms....

The venturous conservative reconsidered: social history and political culture in the market revolution. (Marvin Meyer's 'The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief') (In Retrospect)
December 1, 1994... My own battered copy of Marvin Meyers's The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (1957) still bears its original price tag: "950," the sum I paid in lira, back in 1971. Tramping through Europe in the summer between college and graduate...