Reviews in American History articles from June 1994

Reviews in American History archives from June 1994

After thirty years: making sense of the assassination. (assasination of Pres. John F. Kennedy)
June 1, 1994... In the context of other books about the JFK assassination, Deep Politics, by Peter Dale Scott, is an unremarkable work. The field brims with books that conjure up fantastic conspiracies through innuendo, presumption, and pseudo-scholarship while...

Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America.
June 1, 1994... Historians of early America have long been fascinated with the transatlantic migrations that brought hundreds of thousands of settlers onto colonial soil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The "peopling of British North America," to use...

Portia: The World of Abigail Adams.
June 1, 1994... "I am not, never was, and never shall be a great man," John Adams admitted in 1790 (Ferling, p. 446). Two hundred years later the "greatness" of John Adams remains problematic. "What explains the elevation of such a personality to the highest...

The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830.
June 1, 1994... Few topics in American history have attracted so much attention over the last fifteen years as artisans and artisanal life in the early stages of the industrial revolution. After Alan Dawley's 1976 work on shoemakers, Class and Community: The...

The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England.
June 1, 1994... Each fall I am asked by my university to give generously to the United Way. Voluntary contributions from the faculty and staff help fund a host of charitable associations, all members of this large umbrella organization. I am invited to designate...

The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800.
June 1, 1994... The historiography of the early Republic has long begged for a book of magisterial stature. The Federalist decade has inspired countless monographs, but these have tended to be monochromatic in their focus on particular themes like the origins of...

The Shaker Experience in America.
June 1, 1994... Shakerism holds a unique place as the most successful celibate Protestant sect in American history. Over the course of more than two centuries, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing--popularly known as the Shakers--has...

Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900.
June 1, 1994... Elihu Thomson was an amazing man. During his five decades as an electrical engineer and businessman, he won some 696 patents, thus making him the third most prolific inventor in American history. Nor was this all. As W. Bernard Carlson reminds...

A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public.
June 1, 1994... Since the heyday of an insurgent "new" social history, now over two decades ago, intellectual historians have scrambled to keep the history of ideas relevant to the history of social change. Attesting to their success are the new cultural...

Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880.
June 1, 1994... This volume consists of ten essays, of which Kaestle is the sole author of three and coauthor of the remainder. In the first two chapters (part 1), Kaestle surveys the historiography of literacy and reading, a field that resembles a gigantic...

Boats Against the Current: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860.
June 1, 1994... "If our goal is to capture a sense of connectedness between post-revolutionary encounters with modernity and those of later times," Lewis Perry writes, "we could not tell a traditional story, and we would have to experiment with language and form...

American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917.
June 1, 1994... In one of the often piquant asides addressed to his readers, Robert M. Crunden complains off-handedly that "too much literary history has text speaking to text in a contextual vacuum". This unobtrusive homily is, in fact, the premise for...

The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950.
June 1, 1994... Victorians developed two lines of response to challenges to Christianity and traditional authority by the new critical spirit and naturalism of their era. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer set out one line, which had important antecedents in...

Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914.
June 1, 1994... Immigration, which used to be almost exclusively the concern of the so-called receiving countries of the New World and the Antipodes, is now topic "A" or nearly so almost everywhere. When the obtuse Helmut Kohl claimed a few years ago that...

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West.
June 1, 1994... Several years ago western historians began a fresh debate about the meaning of western history. Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) gave the first indications that popular assumptions...

The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal.
June 1, 1994... Given the prominence of the social, economic, and political issues currently being debated by the so-called "New Western historians," a re-immersion into questions concerning the meaning of the frontier might, at first glance, appear to be quaint...

Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940.
June 1, 1994... Urban historians are finally starting to give western cities their due. Several recent volumes about the urban West have focused on the unique and not so unique characteristics of cities in that region. Mansel G. Blackford's The Lost Dream:...

FDR and Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945.
June 1, 1994... Virtually a half-century beyond the end of World War II, histories of Franklin Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy have come almost full circle. First there were the Roosevelt cheerleaders and apologists. Close on their heels came the conservative...

Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia.
June 1, 1994... A song kept running through my mind while I read Douglas Brinkley's fine study of the postcreation years of Dean Acheson. Actually, it was less than a song, really only a few lines since they are all I remembered of the tune, but they echoed like...

The Struggle Against the Bomb. One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953, vol. 1.
June 1, 1994... This study originated in the author's concern, first aroused over three decades ago during his college years, as to the consequences of the atomic arms race for the fate of mankind. Among his previous works in the area of peace history is a...

Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam.
June 1, 1994... Beginning with the author's reflections on viewing the 58,152 names incised in the black granite of the Washington, D.C., Vietnam Memorial, Working-Class War by Christian G. Appy seeks the answers to questions for which the names on the wall...

Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History.
June 1, 1994... Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., and Jacqueline Goggin have written, respectively, excellent biographies of black lawyer and author Archibald H. Grimke (1849-1930) and historian Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950). Intellectuals and civil rights activists,...

The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism.
June 1, 1994... It is inviting to write the history of dissenters who come out on the side of the angels. It is something else to write about dissenters who still believe in angels, and in devils too--who in fact ascribe some of the academic world's fundamental...

Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960.
June 1, 1994... As the twentieth century draws to a close, contemporary observers of education in the United States seem to be in agreement about one thing only: the woeful plight of American schools. By contrast, they disagree vociferously about who or what is...

Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children.
June 1, 1994... Recent scholarship provides a rich context for further explorations into the issues raised by Hamilton Cravens in Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children: modern notions of child development and the rise of a scientific...

The Politics Presidents Make.
June 1, 1994... Stephen Skowronek's first book, Building A New American State was triumphantly successful, one of the most cited books in political science published in the 1980s. Skowronek's success was all the more impressive as the bulk of his first book was...

The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.
June 1, 1994... In 1958 sociologist Joseph Fichter reported that students in the upper grades of a midwestern public school listed as the "greatest men living today" President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Elvis Presley (in that order). Catholic school...

Freedom of speech: Zechariah Chafee and free-speech history.
June 1, 1994... In 1920, with free-speech issues very much in the news, Zechariah Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School assembled some recently published articles into a book called Freedom of Speech. More than seven decades later, with free-speech issues still...