Reviews in American History articles from June 1993

Reviews in American History archives from June 1993

The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.
June 1, 1993... This book will offend many historians, and for different reasons it will also offend many kinds of religious believers. It is unabashedly subjective and sometimes wrong-headed, and its sweeping generalizations invite attack. It is also brilliant...

A History of the Jews in America.
June 1, 1993... Howard Sachar's book is without doubt the most readable and comprehensive one-volume chronicle of the American Jewish experience we have had to date. It is more current and fact-filled than Henry Feingold's Zion in America (1974), more...

Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661-1710.
June 1, 1993... Dutch colonization and the continuing Dutch presence has constituted an uncomfortable, somewhat indigestible, lump in early American history. Modern historians have not found a congenial way to deal with the variety of societies along North...

To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution.
June 1, 1993... To those who once traveled what Peter Onuf and I used to call "the road to '87 (and beyond)"--a road that carried this writer from Ketchikan in the Alaskan panhandle to Ankara in the Anatolian plain, with a stop in Kalamazoo--the appearance of...

Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln.
June 1, 1993... American historians keep wanting the Civil War not to have happened, the slavery issue not to have been intractable, keep wanting to deny the centrality of racial problems to our history, to downplay the facts that many whites positively enjoyed...

The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War.
June 1, 1993... The recent emphasis on ethnic studies, immigration, and the concerns of common folk has given rise to new and interesting approaches to labor and immigration history. Yet the two have often not been fused. Some scholars have stressed ethnic...

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
June 1, 1993... Garry Wills has never been an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. In 1964, when he was closely associated with Willmoore Kendall and wrote for William F. Buckley's National Review, he published an essay in which he distinguished the dangerous dreamers...

Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872.
June 1, 1993... Chicago has been something of an anomaly in historical studies. Urban historians have written extensively on the politics, society, and economies of such major cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. They have chronicled the...

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction.
June 1, 1993... The publisher's press release that accompanied the publication of The Promise of the New South throws down the gauntlet: "Edward Ayers has written an even more inclusive history of the period than Woodward." C. Vann Woodward himself admits, in a...

Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865-1900.
June 1, 1993... Historians have generally shown little interest in providing much-needed comparative regional studies of the American West and South. Perhaps the heightened aura of the holy trinity of contemporary historiography -- race, class, and gender --...

Workingmen in San Francisco: 1880-1901.
June 1, 1993... Professors Woirol and Tygiel have provided another glimpse of what life was like in California's floating proletariat during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Woirol's tale is told through the eyes of Frederick C. Mills, tramping...

Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California.
June 1, 1993... Henry Huntington lived to work, to build, and to collect. He was very good at all three. In a career devoted to corporate management and railroad building, he inherited one fortune, made another, and married a third. At his death in 1927, he left...

The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.
June 1, 1993... On August 28, 1934, Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle and forty-six other books, won the Democratic primary for governor of California, defeating the favored gubernatorial candidate of the party regulars, George Creel, by...

Il socialismo indifferente: Immigrati italiani e Socialist party negli Stati Uniti del primo Novecento.
June 1, 1993... The Italian immigrant presence in the United States has been the subject of a massive outpouring of scholarship over the past several decades, and the momentum shows little signs of diminishing. Much recent American literature has been sensitive...

The United States in Central America: 1860-1911, Episodes of Social Imperialis m and Imperial Rivalry in the World System.
June 1, 1993... The end of the Cold War provides a unique opportunity to rethink how the history of American foreign relations is conceptualized, researched, and written. In particular, the time is ripe for a fresh look at the international context of American...

Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America, 1880-1990.
June 1, 1993... The central issue Tony Freyer raises in Regulating Big Business is whether differences, and later similarities, in antitrust policy can explain the quite different, but more recently converging, industrial structures that have characterized...

Enterprise and American Law: 1836-1937.
June 1, 1993... In 1776, Adam Smith derided the idea of public governance of private economic enterprise, noting that regulatory authority "would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to...

Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.
June 1, 1993... That two laudatory biographies of long-term female political activists, Ellen Chesler's of Margaret Sanger and Blanche Wiesen Cook's first volume on Eleanor Roosevelt, should appear at virtually the same time perhaps reflects how beleaguered...

Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963.
June 1, 1993... These two much needed books help to fill major gaps in the study of southern social activism prior to the civil rights movement. Robert F. Martin's biography of white reformer Howard Kester explores the development of his political ideas and...

Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR.
June 1, 1993... An axiom of late-nineteenth-century America held that cleanliness and godliness were of a piece. In the nation's cities, unwashed--and likely, wicked--immigrant hordes threatened both commerce and the health of the better sort. A cartoon in...

From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America.
June 1, 1993... "Speaking for myself, I too believe that humanity will win in the long run," remarked Goethe in 1787. "I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else's humane nurse."(1)...

The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America.
June 1, 1993... During the last two decades scholars have thrashed out such issues relating to the history of aging as whether veneration and/or respect for the aged has declined and, if so, when and why. David Hackett Fischer, W. Andrew Achenbaum, and Carole...

Truman.
June 1, 1993... David McCullough is a widely admired author and television personality. His five earlier books garnered many honors; his appearances on public television brought him to the attention of an even larger number of people. When he spoke on his new...

Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal.
June 1, 1993... W. Averell Harriman, James V. Forrestal, and John J. McCloy belonged to the first generation of cold warriors whose key leaders are sometimes called the "wise men." What did these three wise men have in common, and do they deserve such a...

The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years.
June 1, 1993... For a long time, politicians have had trouble getting respect. "This thankless breed, these politicians who cringe for favors from a screaming mob and do not care what harm they do their friends providing they can please a crowd," Euripides wrote...

Storm Center: The U.S.S. Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655.
June 1, 1993... The record of American involvement in the Persian Gulf during the Cold War era reveals that until recently various administrations employed surrogates to carry out tasks that Washington judged to be germane to the battle of the superpowers. Yet...

Politics in the New South: Republicanism, Race, and Leadership in the Twentieth Century.
June 1, 1993... During the 1970s, the white South at long last accepted defeat in the Civil War. In the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution and the postwar economic boom, the region no longer clung to the traditional "southern way of life." But like Germany and...

Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.
June 1, 1993... This is a book whose title has become a generic term for the contemporary dispute over cultural values in America. Relentlessly presentist in orientation, it nonetheless invokes the history of American culture and religion to make its case. The...

The Search for Order.
June 1, 1993... Which of us has a book in print twenty-five years after publication? The life span of academic opinion is so short, and the churning mass of publication so great, that most of our books get lost in just a few years. "Never try to use a book more...