Reviews in American History articles from September 1993

Reviews in American History archives from September 1993

Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial America.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xx + 376 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. Many scholars of American Indian history watched with trepidation as 1992 approached. Although the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher...

The Spanish Frontier in North America.
September 1, 1993... New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. xx + 579 pp. Illustrations, maps, abbreviations, notes, select bibliography, and index. $35.00. The history of Spanish activities in North America during the sixteenth through eighteenth...

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
September 1, 1993... Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. vii + 412 pp. Tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $17.95. This volume of collected essays grew out of papers presented at a 1988 conference entitled "The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who...

Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century.
September 1, 1993... Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991. xiv + 363 pp. Maps, tables, appendixes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Oddly enough, just as what might...

Perry of London: A Family on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615-1753.
September 1, 1993... Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. xi + 191 pp. Tables, figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Jacob Price knows the ins and outs of the Chesapeake tobacco trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth...

The Refinement of America: People, Houses, Cities.
September 1, 1993... New York: Knopf, 1992. xix + 504 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $40.00. Often when historians stand before the high style objects of the colonial past they assume the role of awestruck visitors. Collectors and curators have...

Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. viii + 57 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Almost twenty years ago, the historian Thomas Dubin published a compact, tightly argued article on the first female mill...

Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture.
September 1, 1993... New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. xxi + 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.50 (cloth); $13.00 (paper). Both Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters and Lawrence Foster's Women, Family, and Utopia deal with...

Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History.
September 1, 1993... Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xii + 231 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $22.50. Few figures in the American past travel so easily and so frequently between the realms of myth and history as does...

Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas.
September 1, 1993... New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. xvi + 607 pp Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.50. Second Manassas and Chancellorsville marked important milestones in Robert E. Lee's rise to preeminence among Confederate...

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.
September 1, 1993... New York: Norton, 1992. 462 pp. Photographs, appendixes, bibliography, notes, and index. $24.95. In City of Eros, Timothy Gilfoyle skillfully represents mid-nineteenth-century New York City as the "carnal show case of the Western world."...

The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City.
September 1, 1993... Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1992. xvii + 356 pp. Appendixes, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Aside from the fact that they both focus on New York City, the two books under review, at first glance, seem to...

Practicing Law in Frontier California.
September 1, 1993... University of Nebraska Press, 1991. xvii + 192 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $37.50. Until recently, historians could find few studies that examined the development of legal systems in the West. John R. Wunder's...

The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture.
September 1, 1993... Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. viii + 187 pp. Appendix, notes,bibliography, index. $39.95. Historians have long drawn attention to the role of American courts in the history of and plight of the labor movement in...

America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.
September 1, 1993... Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xv + 424 pp. Appendixes, tables, figures, notes, illustrations, bibliography, and index. $25.00. Claude S. Fischer's America Calling is a significant addition to the fairly thin literature...

American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics.
September 1, 1993... New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. x + 547 pp. Notes and index. $65.00. From the Revolution to the 1960s American Catholics complained that the rest of the country undervalued or just plain abused them. The non-Catholic population...

Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations, bibliographic note, and index. $25.00. In 1924, a Yiddish daily observed at the end of the High Holidays that "The old [rejoiced] over the Torah, the middle-aged--over...

Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.
September 1, 1993... Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. x + 538 pp. Selected bibliography, notes, and indexes. $27.95. The outpouring of work in American social history and its increasing division into a variety of subfields since the mid-1960s has...

Center Stage: Helen Gahagan Douglas, A Life.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xxi + 369 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $24.95. "Radiant, confident, loyal and loving" was how actor Melvyn Douglas described Helen Gahagan Douglas, his wife of almost fifty years. "She paid a...

Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade.
September 1, 1993... Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiii + 219 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. With most of the valuable and revealing sources on political issues during the Eisenhower years having been...

Academia's Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945-1970.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xii + 532 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. Histories of higher learning in the United States have tended to fall into three kinds of categories: institutional studies, large syntheses, or...

Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1979.
September 1, 1993... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xi + 340 pp. Notes and index. $34.50. The central role of the federal government in the fives of the American people is a defining characteristic of the post-world War II years. The books under...

The Origins of SDI, 1944-1983.
September 1, 1993... Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. xx + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Perception and paradox drove the Cold War. Even now they cloud the past, confuse the history. During the Cold War, what things...

Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist.
September 1, 1993... Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. xii + 401 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibl note, and index. $39.95. The histories of these two engineers' biographies--like the lives of their subjects--overlapped and intertwined....

John von Neumann.
September 1, 1993... New York; Pantheon, 1992. x + 405 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00. John von Neumann and Richard Feynman worked together at Los Alamos. In 1943, when the American atomic bomb effort was reaching its desperate fever...

The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America.
September 1, 1993... Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1992. xi + 241 pp. Bibliography, notes, and index. $35.00. The coinciding demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War provide perhaps the final "defining moment" of the twentieth century,...

The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications.
September 1, 1993... New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xv + 294 pp. Selected bibliography, notes, and index. $44.95 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). In the fall of 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Michael J. Hogan asked a group of diplomatic...

Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics.
September 1, 1993... New York: Norton, 1991. xii + 339 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $22.95. In the beginning there was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it was good. But its political fallout was bad. The liberal Democrats who had crafted the...

Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond: an appraisal.
September 1, 1993... As graduate students in the late 1920s, Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond probably read Charles A. and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization (1927)-almost everyone, it seems, did. But for those two, acquaintance did not bring...

John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life Between Empires.
September 1, 1993... New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ix + 192 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Oddly enough, just as what might be called the "communitarian" interpretation of early New England is extending its...

Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Onedia Community, and the Mormons.
September 1, 1993... Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991. xx + 353 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $37.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Both Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters and Lawrence Foster's Women, Family, and...

Lee and Jackson: Confederate Chieftains.
September 1, 1993... New York: Paragon, 1992. xii + 498 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Few figures in the American past travel so easily and so frequently between the realms of myth and history as does Confederate General Robert E....

Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave.
September 1, 1993... The Souls of the Brave. New York: Knopf, 1992. xvi + 405 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00. Second Manassas and Chancellorsville marked important milestones in Robert E. Lee's rise to preeminence...

In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York.
September 1, 1993... Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1992. xvii + 356 pp. Appendixes, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Aside from the fact that they both focus on New York City, the two books under review, at first glance, seem to...

Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic.
September 1, 1993... New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xviii + 390 pp. Index. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Historians have long drawn attention to the role of American courts in the history of and plight of the labor movement in antebellum...

America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan.
September 1, 1993... Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. xix + 216 pp. Note on sources and index. $11.95 (paper). The outpouring of work in American social history and its increasing division into a variety of subfields since the mid-1960s has...

Government and Environmental Politics: Essays on Historical Developments Since World War Two.
September 1, 1993... Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1992. xi + 325 pp. Notes and index. $38.50. The central role of the federal government in the fives of the American people is a defining characteristic of the post-world War II years. The...

Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment.
September 1, 1993... Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xiii + 533 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. The central role of the federal government in the fives of the American people is a defining characteristic of...

Alexanderson: Pioneer in American Electrical Engineering.
September 1, 1993... Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. xv + 318 pp. Illustrations, figures, epilogue, appendix, bibliographic note, notes, and index. $45.00. The histories of these two engineers' biographies--like the lives of their...

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
September 1, 1993... New York; Pantheon, 1992. x + 531 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographies, and index. $27.50. John von Neumann and Richard Feynman worked together at Los Alamos. In 1943, when the American atomic bomb effort was reaching its desperate...

The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism.
September 1, 1993... New York: Twayne, 1992. xxv + 226 pp. Bibliography, notes, and index. $24.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). The coinciding demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War provide perhaps the final "defining moment" of the twentieth...

Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, Essays from the Charles DeBenedetti Memorial Conference.
September 1, 1993... Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). The coinciding demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War provide perhaps the final "defining moment" of the twentieth...