Reviews in American History articles from March 1 1995

Reviews in American History archives from March 1 1995

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 2, Rediscovering Precious Values: July 1951-November 1955.
March 1, 1995... In the editing of the King Papers Clayborne Carson and his associates at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change have demonstrated exemplary scholarship, industry, and integrity under extraordinary difficulties. The...

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism.
March 1, 1995... In this fast-paced age of e-mail and the fax, most scholars struggle just to keep up with their own fields, and feel constant pressure to follow (if not anticipate) the latest intellectual trends. Puritan specialists share these pressures, but...

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge.
March 1, 1995... The historiography of slavery seems to oscillate between two poles. One tradition, perhaps still best exemplified by Eugene Genovese's magisterial Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), relies on the accretion of evidence scattered across time and place to...

Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution.
March 1, 1995... For fifteen years, Thomas Dublin's first book - Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 - has stood as a model of scholarship in American social and labor history. Dublin has now expanded his...

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 1, The Private Years.
March 1, 1995... In the earliest of the biographies of Margaret Fuller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled that during his days as a student at Harvard College he had "seen Miss Fuller sitting, day after day, under the covert gaze of the undergraduates who had...

Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South.
March 1, 1995... In Gospel of Disunion, Mitchell Snay offers an impressive exposition of the subtle ways in which southern churchmen advanced a sense of southern self-consciousness, handled the delicate, constitutional problem of church-state separation,...

The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875.
March 1, 1995... Right up front, Angela Miller, professor of art history and American studies at Washington University, declares, "I came of age at a time when the concept of nationalism was (and is) highly suspect." Ironically in this era when tribalism has...

Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984.
March 1, 1995... At first glance, these three scholarly books might seem to have little in common except for the fact that they all deal with labor and industry. A closer reading suggests that each of these studies not only addresses some aspect of the history...

From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States.
March 1, 1995... Fourteen-year-old Andy Hall's family lived in unspeakable poverty. His drunken father brutalized his worn-down wife and regularly threatened little Roxy, Andy's crippled sister who found refuge under ragged blankets in a dark corner. The family...

Oltre la Politica: La Crisi Politico-Istituzionale negli Stati Uniti fra Otto e Novecento.
March 1, 1995... In the present climate of cynicism about the ability of governments to do anything but harm, it is refreshing to be reminded of the innovative and meliorative activities of the Wisconsin Progressives ninety years ago. Oltre la Politica is a...

The La Follettes of Wisconsin: Love and Politics in Progressive America.
March 1, 1995... During the almost half-century that the La Follettes held high political office in Wisconsin, friends and enemies alike tended to overestimate the power and influence that they wielded; historians have been tempted to do the same. To suggest...

Intervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution: 1913-1917.
March 1, 1995... Perhaps no topic in American foreign policy has proven more captivating and yet received more criticism than the nation's numerous interventions in other countries' internal affairs. Time and again, the United States has intervened in another...

Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City.
March 1, 1995... Down the Asphalt Path is an important contribution to the social history of urban technology. Exploring the relationship between improved street pavements and faster transit vehicles, it also examines their impact on urban life and how cultural...

Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism.
March 1, 1995... Another account of the transatlantic flight of America's most famous female aviator? New evidence on that Lockheed Electra and its missing pilot? Another biography of a woman whose life-story has already been told by herself and numerous...

New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique.
March 1, 1995... One of the most alluring and enduring American images of our time - what John Szwed has deemed "the first truly nonmechanical metaphor for the 20th century"(1) - is the black jazz musician. Successor to the English Gentleman as a globally...

Seeds of the Sixties.
March 1, 1995... Explanations of the social movements of the 1960s occupy an idealism-materialism continuum. Frequently (and wrongly), scholars of these movements seem to perceive an iron link between idealist explanation and sympathetic interpretation of a...

Race in America: The Struggle for Equality.
March 1, 1995... Writing in 1970, Pierre van den Berghe said of racism that it is "the theory that there is a causal link between physical traits on the one hand, and social behavior, character traits, and intelligence on the other hand." He went on to add that...

Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement.
March 1, 1995... In late August 1963, a few days after a quarter-million Americans gathered in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate support for civil rights legislation, socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington published an article on the future of the...

A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald.
March 1, 1995... Intellectual biographies - or biographies of intellectuals, writers, thinkers - have a problematic status. Because philosophers and theorists tend to adopt a god's eye view in their work, biographers tend to bring them down to earth, revealing...

Vance Packard and American Social Criticism.
March 1, 1995... Vance Packard's amazingly productive and successful career as journalist-cum-social-critic has spanned over five decades. During that time he has published twelve substantial and visible books, each of which treated some controversial and...

Peace Works: The Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War.
March 1, 1995... The four books reviewed here provide clear evidence that research and writing about past peace movements constitute an emerging sub field of history. Although each covers only aspects of the last generation of peace movement activity - two on...

The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam.
March 1, 1995... On November 15, 1969, a half-million people gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand an end to the Vietnam War. This "Mobilization" was, at the time, the largest demonstration in American history.(1) Earlier in the fall, President Richard Nixon...

Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam's Armed Forces.
March 1, 1995... On many levels and in many different ways, the process of coming to terms with the Vietnam War continues to unfold. As Morley Safer writes, each witness to that conflict is "still imprisoned, to one extent or another, by that place and that...

Crime and Punishment in American History.
March 1, 1995... The great challenge of writing legal history is defining the task. Law relates to everything, so the legal historian can wind up writing the history of politics, class conflict, intellectual trends, and so forth - all the things needed to put...

Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture.
March 1, 1995... Why do more Americans than Europeans identify themselves as religious? Given that a central tenet of the Constitution is the separation of church and state, how has religion nevertheless managed to pervade American culture, politics, and...

Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950-1985.
March 1, 1995... In recent years historians have become increasingly more interested in American conservatism. A sure sign of this was a forum on the writing of the history of American conservatism featured in a recent issue of the American Historical Review....

The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.
March 1, 1995... George Marsden is a leading figure among the self-consciously evangelical historians who, during the past two decades, have transformed academic specialists' understanding of American religion in general and twentieth-century fundamentalism in...

The New Radicalism.
March 1, 1995... The New Radicalism is really a brilliant book, a book of such importance that people will be talking about it as long as they are talking about 20th Century history. it is an unconventional book, because it is based not on massing evidence but...