Reviews in American History articles from March 1994

Reviews in American History archives from March 1994

The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination.
March 1, 1994... Donald Worster's Wealth of Nature is an eclectic collection of essays written over the last several years. They are revealing and worth reading precisely because they are such a mixed lot. Less tightly woven than Worster's monographs, they allow...

A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II, vol. 5.
March 1, 1994... On June 7, 1892, a group of well-to-do German American Jews founded the American Jewish Historical Society. Its first president, Cyrus Adler, declared that it was the patriotic duty of every ethnic group in America to record its contributions to...

Fatherhood in America: A History.
March 1, 1994... These volumes, though not a matched set, have much in common. Neither charts extensive new ground but both are valuable in providing pioneer surveys of literature in men's studies. Because they are working in a comparatively recent era of gender...

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.
March 1, 1994... This is a book that could not have been written twenty years ago; at a minimum, it would have been immediately dismissed. Its message would have been ignored or summarily rejected because it calls into question assumptions firmly held by many...

Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675-1790.
March 1, 1994... Cynthia Kierner's stated intent in Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675-1790 is to offer "more and less than a collective biography of four generations of colonial Livingstons." Her aim is to "examine the evolution of elite...

Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance.
March 1, 1994... Jay Fliegelman's dazzling essay on the cultural context of the Declaration of Independence, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of performance, is an elaboration of the wonderful discovery that Jefferson intended...

Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution.
March 1, 1994... Had Bill Clinton been around in the 1780s--as governor, say, of North Carolina--this is the type of study he might have curled up with of an evening while he pondered the problems of public finance in a country just emerging from a prolonged,...

In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion.
March 1, 1994... Both for people at the time and for historians since, Shays' Rebellion has offered a prime example of the possibilities--and the perils--of revolutionary thinking. Throughout the fall of 1786 and the winter of 1787, the Shaysites of western...

An American Profession of Arms: The Army Office Corps, 1784-1861.
March 1, 1994... This fine study calls to mind the complaint some years ago of a distinguished historian about young scholars who rush their first books into print, with results that are all too often disappointing. The senior scholar went so far as to suggest,...

Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community.
March 1, 1994... At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday February 11, 1990, antiapartheid activist Nelson Mandela walked out of South Africa's Victor Verster Prison Farm a free man--or, more correctly, a free black man. As a number of American news commentators noted at the time,...

Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War.
March 1, 1994... Southern Stories is a collection of previously published essays and articles by Drew Gilpin Faust that, now drawn together in one volume, provides a revealing glimpse into the mind of southern slaveholders during their great crisis in the...

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.
March 1, 1994... This is a hard book to classify. It is, mostly, about a shadowy slave conspiracy in Adams County, Mississippi, during 1861, and its savage repression. Yet it contains no narrative of these events, simply because, as Winthrop Jordan makes quite...

Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West.
March 1, 1994... Over the last decade Civil War history has enjoyed a surprising and robust revival. Volumes on the war crowd bookstore shelves; Ken Burns and his coterie of scholars have offered a compelling if controversial interpretation of the war on PBS;...

Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio.
March 1, 1994... In the past quarter-century, with the exception of the Civil War itself, few areas of middle-period scholarship have elicited more rigorous analysis than Reconstruction. Beginning with the "revisionist" studies of the 1960s, and continuing with...

Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army.
March 1, 1994... Nelson Appleton Miles served in the United States Army for forty-two years, from September 1861 to August 1903. In that time he rose from first lieutenant, Company E, 22nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a unit Miles organized and equipped with...

A Century of European Migrations: 1830-1930.
March 1, 1994... The mainstay of historical scholarship on immigration to the United States is the case study. Despite the numerous articles and books inspired by the social history that is no longer "new," few syntheses have systematically brought together...

To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Association of New York.
March 1, 1994... These three works on a trio of immigrant groups--Dutch, Jewish, and Chinese Americans--follow the current trend in social history that "small is beautiful" by concentrating on small, discrete communities: Amsterdam, Montana; Petaluma, California;...

Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950.
March 1, 1994... The continuing intractability of America's urban problems has made urban history one of the most exciting branches of the new social history. Both of these books draw on the rich historiographic legacy created by the new urban history and...

Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870.
March 1, 1994... What do our amusements say about our culture? For decades only a handful of historians thought this a worthwhile question, pioneering figures like Constance Rourke, in her Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), or Foster Rhea Dulles, in his America...

The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930.
March 1, 1994... "USE OF THESE MATERIALS MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR INTELLIGENCE"--William Ayers proposes this truth in labeling for standardized tests in To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (1993). Observing that tests are a sorting machine for children into...

Charles Sanders Pierce: A Life.
March 1, 1994... This book has already received attention in part because it is the first comprehensive biography of one of America's greatest philosophers. It is also because its author was long prevented from working further on what began thirty years ago as a...

Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963: Conservative, Liberal and Radical Perspectives.
March 1, 1994... Beyond all the different guises Thorstein Veblen has assumed in the historiography of American social thought lies his reputation as an enigmatic or cryptic writer. Even Veblen's defender, Rick Tilman, in this thorough and deliberate survey of...

Science with Practice: Charles E. Bessey and the Maturing of American Botany.
March 1, 1994... Botany played an important role in the popular culture of nineteenth-century America. Unlike entomology or ornithology, which often required killing specimens, botany was ideally suited to genteel goals of self-improvement, enrichment, physical...

War and Healing: Stanhope Bayne-Jones and the Maturing of American Medicine.
March 1, 1994... The renaissance and redefinition of American social and cultural history during the past few decades sometimes occasioned concern among medical historians that their field would be resorbed into the larger narratives of American culture and...

The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.
March 1, 1994... In my own undergraduate days, when the New Deal remained a center of heated controversy between old-fashioned liberals and conservatives, a favorite topic in U.S. history anthologies and on survey examinations was an old chestnut: Did the New...

The New Deal and American Youth: Ideas and Ideals in a Depression Decade.
March 1, 1994... In Paula Fass's memorable formulation, youth in 1920s America were either "damned" or "beautiful." Damned, according to traditionalists, because modern life had so frayed the fabric of social mores that youth were doomed to unravel with...

To Save a Nation: American "Extremism," the New Deal and the Coming of World War II, 2d ed.
March 1, 1994... In July 1934 the National Socialist publication, Der Volkischer Beobachter, described President Roosevelt as "undoubtedly amongst that group of men who intuitively grasps the psychology of his people and who, at a time of spiritual and material...

The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks.
March 1, 1994... It is clear to historians of the recent era that a watershed of sorts occurred between 1954 and 1968 in the history of the United States, bringing an end to the postwar political consensus, and creating new political arrangements and new...

A William Appleman Williams Reader: Selections from His Major Historical Writings.
March 1, 1994... Henry Berger, a student of William Appleman Williams, has published a testimonial to his mentor and friend. By presenting the essence of Williams's historical interpretations and political beliefs, Berger has performed a service to the historical...

Nathan Irvin Huggins, the art of history, and the irony of the American Dream.
March 1, 1994... "I find in the study of history the special discipline which forces me to consider peoples and ages, not my own.... It is the most humane of disciplines, and in ways the most humbling. For one cannot ignore those historians of the future who will...