Reviews in American History articles from March 1993

Reviews in American History archives from March 1993

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentiet h Century.
March 1, 1993... In 1946, Merle Curti's The Roots of American Loyalty offered a narrative history of American patriotism, tracing a "pattern of emotions and ideas" from the eighteenth century up to World War II. Curti sought to promote a "more intelligent and...

Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero.
March 1, 1993... As American and Japanese veterans of the battle of Iwo Jima met on the island in 1985 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the battle, a Marine remembered the Stars and Stripes appearing on Mount Suribachi as the battle raged. It was, he...

The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.
March 1, 1993... Scholarly books about New England witchcraft almost automatically earn a wide readership -- both academic and popular -- but reaping the benefits of such an appealing opportunity requires their authors to navigate a dense secondary literature by...

The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the En lightenment.
March 1, 1993... Our fascination with New England Puritans is never-ending. Poised on the brink of modernity, this small but determined band of religious seekers has been placed on the historical cusp between two worlds -- the world we have lost (with its gentle...

The Foundations of American Citizenship: Liberalism, the Constitution and Civi c Virtue.
March 1, 1993... Discussions of the political thought of the Founders once concentrated exclusively on the Federalists. The Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution were generally dismissed as "men of little faith," consigned to the margins of the American...

Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789.
March 1, 1993... The centennial of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis comes at a curious time. The history of the American West, a field that Turner's paradigm shaped for much of the last century, is hot. Among some self-styled "new western historians,"...

Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebe llum St. Louis.
March 1, 1993... As American settlers streamed ever further westward during the first half of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, Missouri, became a commercial boomtown and the leading city of the Mississippi valley. Its population nearly quintupled during the...

The Union as It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787-186 1.
March 1, 1993... When faced with the disaster of the Civil War, Americans prefer to conclude that the Union was secure except for slavery, the tragic flaw--or alternatively, that fools had inherited and ruined a nearly perfect machine. This is not altogether...

Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900.
March 1, 1993... The Civil War lasted four years; the debate over its meaning and significance continues. During the last century and in the first part of this one the discussion oscillated between those who saw the war, often in moral terms, as the working out...

John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice.
March 1, 1993... The historical reputations of jurists is apt to wax and wane as succeeding generations see the past with different eyes.|1~ Few judges better exemplify this phenomenon than John Marshall Harlan, who served on the Supreme Court between 1877 and...

Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America.
March 1, 1993... Recent publications suggest that scholars in many fields have decided that medical history is too important to be left to medical historians. Colleagues have been drawn in from sociology, from political science, and, above all, from "regular"...

Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930.
March 1, 1993... During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women donated their money, collections, and time to promote the creation and appreciation of art in America. They established female-centered networks for the production and marketing of art,...

William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black Ci ty in America.
March 1, 1993... The city of Philadelphia is known as the "City of Brotherly Love," but for black people in the nineteenth century this was not the case. Between 1832 and 1849 the tranquility of Philadelphia was shattered by "five major and numerous smaller...

In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, V irginia.
March 1, 1993... Until the mid-1960s, slavery, emancipation, and black life in the rural South dominated scholarship on the African American experience. A small coterie of black scholars and their white allies combated the prevailing stereotype that blacks had...

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film.
March 1, 1993... Miriam Hansen describes a shot in Intolerance where an aging woman, neglected at a ball, looks into a mirror that reflects back not her image but a darkened abstraction. Central to cinema studies are the questions of what Miss Jenkins sees in the...

Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice.
March 1, 1993... At the close of the 1869 theatrical season in Boston, William Dean Howells reflected upon the entertainment sensation of the year, an English troupe he described as "very pretty, very blond, and very unscrupulously clever." Both fascinated and...

Pretty Bubbles in the Air: America in 1919.
March 1, 1993... William D. Miller begins this evocative study by recalling the "marvelous" aircraft and automobiles he saw as a small boy in Jacksonville, Florida, just after World War I, and the summer trips he took with his family to a camp house where, living...

Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century.
March 1, 1993... The fractious condition of contemporary American Catholicism is perhaps a sign of health, not merely dissent, but this state of affairs certainly provides a vivid contrast to the more culturally cohesive Church (with the triumphant capital "C")...

Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. (book reviews)
March 1, 1993... "This book," states a prefatory precis, "represents a fundamental reinterpretation of constitutional change . . . and of the role of . . . organized labor, which is shown to be a creator of liberalism, rather than a spoiler of socialism."...

John Dewey and American Democracy.
March 1, 1993... Of all the major figures in modern American intellectual history John Dewey must be the most intimidating to a biographer. There is, for a start, a peculiar disparity between Dewey's philosophical outlook toward life and his philosophy itself....

Modernist Culture in America.
March 1, 1993... Given the high authority of modernist art, it is remarkable to realize how recently modernism has been designated a distinctive cultural phenomenon. A good deal of the substance, if not the name, of modernism was occasionally recognized in...

The Culture of the Cold War.
March 1, 1993... These excellent studies add to the historical commentary on a peculiarity of American life: the absence of a sustained socialist or social democratic contestant within mainline politics. Each of the two authors locates within specific national...

Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China.
March 1, 1993... Shortly after Owen Lattimore's death on May 31, 1989, readers of The New York Times op ed page were treated to an ugly echo of McCarthyism in a series of testy exchanges between Times journalist Anthony Lewis and William F. Buckley, Jr. Those who...

Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990.
March 1, 1993... This is the third and final volume of Stephen Ambrose's massive and widely admired biography of Richard M. Nixon. It takes up the President's story in the weeks following his re-election in November 1972 and stays with it until the dedication of...

The Rise and Fall of the American Left.
March 1, 1993... John Diggins is one of the few American intellectual historians who commands an audience outside academia. This is tribute to a writing style thankfully free of postmodernist pretensions and an unfadish passion for the time-honored problems of...

The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democrati c Politics.
March 1, 1993... Future generations of media historians may come to know 1955 to 1985 as the era of the mass audience. The sheer size of television audiences since the mid-1950s has fostered a shared national history in the form of riveting video images -- Joseph...

A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991.
March 1, 1993... A Culture of Rights originated in a series of workshops organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center to commemorate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. Taken together, its seven essays constitute a searching examination of the theoretical and...

The Transformation of War.
March 1, 1993... Martin van Creveld, who teaches at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is arguably the most provocative military historian writing in the English language today. The depth and breadth of his learning are encyclopedic; each of his books is a...

The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s.
March 1, 1993... The home of Disneyland and Universal Studios, Hearst Castle and the San Diego Chargers, California has nurtured a variety of fantasies and dreams. For a century and a half, hope and denial concocted an intoxicating brew, luring millions of...

Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past.
March 1, 1993... This excellent set of essays honors Howard R. Lamar, who is retiring after more than four decades of teaching the history of the American West at Yale University. Of the fifty-seven Ph.D. students he has directed or is directing, twelve...

White Over Black.
March 1, 1993... We write our books and articles and if we are lucky our colleagues pay attention. We wait a year or two for reviews. After a while we show up in footnotes. A couple of lines, maybe even a paragraph, in the latest textbook registers the influence...