Reviews in American History articles from September 1994

Reviews in American History archives from September 1994

Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.
September 1, 1994... Historians of the United States are becoming increasingly comparative (or at least international) in their approaches to American subjects. Especially in social, cultural, and intellectual history, it is now commonplace to refer to analogous...

The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800.
September 1, 1994... It is unlikely that this book will revive arguments about American exceptionalism--not that the book lacks ideas or is uninteresting. Jack Greene has ideas about American exceptionalism, and he has written an interesting book. But he ignores many...

From Gentlemen to Townsmen: The Gentry of Baltimore County, Maryland, 1660-1776.
September 1, 1994... According to an old joke, it takes twelve Virginians to change a light bulb: one to replace the bulb and eleven to talk about how much better the old one was. At times in recent years, it has seemed that something similar might be said of...

The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution.
September 1, 1994... In a little book that covers the years from the start of the Revolution in 1763 to the ratification of the Jay Treaty in 1795, John Crowley develops the view that nearly all American Revolutionary leaders--including James Madison and Thomas...

Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier.
September 1, 1994... National historiographical fashions powerfully shape the histories of states and localities; that of revolutionary Vermont provides only one excellent example. The historians of early Vermont can be very broadly divided into celebrators,...

The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders.
September 1, 1994... Higher education in contemporary America has been embroiled in a number of bitter controversies in the recent past. One of the most acrimonious debates concerns the status of the traditional canon of Western thought and its privileged place in...

American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis.
September 1, 1994... Great men are making a comeback in the historiography of the early republic. In its heyday, the "republican synthesis" shifted the focus away from deeds to discourse, bringing new voices--and agendas---into the Revolutionary chorus. But, in the...

The Presidency of Andrew Jackson.
September 1, 1994... "If Jackson was the 'Symbol for an Age,' Martin Van Buren was the representative man of his age," Donald Cole wrote in his 1984 study of Van Buren and American politics.[1] Cole expands on this judgment in this latest contribution to the American...

Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802.
September 1, 1994... Several years ago, a panel of distinguished scholars convened at Monticello to discuss the turbulent topic of Thomas Jefferson and race. Comments ranged from defensive explanations of the racial attitudes of our third president to the...

To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum North.
September 1, 1994... In this concise, well-written, but highly technical study, economist Lee A. Craig revisits a longstanding issue in American economic and demographic history, the decline of rural fertility in the North during the first half of the nineteenth...

The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism.
September 1, 1994... The Lincoln Persuasion is a book that is difficult to review because, sadly, David Greenstone died in February 1990 before finishing it. For him, this excursion into political theory represented something of a change from his earlier, more...

Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier.
September 1, 1994... Political history, some historians say, is dead. Concerned only with the petty squabbles of rich white men, irrelevant to the real lives of the deprived or less favored, the territory of messy compromise, not lofty ideas, electoral and...

The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity.
September 1, 1994... For a good part of the twentieth century, the Mississippi Delta has often stood for the South. Whenever journalists needed to conjure an image of the South in its most oppressive and racist form, they turned to the Delta. And there were plenty of...

American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought: 1870-1920.
September 1, 1994... It has been fifty years since Richard Hofstadter published his seminal book about the influence of evolutionary theory upon American social thought.[1] Hofstadter wrote a good deal about the socially conservative implications of what many...

John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive.
September 1, 1994... Sinclair Lewis described Carol Kenicott, the college-educated reformer in Main Street, as "ever so correct and modern." Sometime around 1910, Kenicott moved to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, pledging to "rock its foundations." She tried almost...

Una famiglia a stelle e strisce: Grande guerra e cultura d'impresa in America.
September 1, 1994... In the summer of 1890 Frank Arthur Vanderlip, a prominent New York financier, left for a two month trip across Europe to explore the possibilities for U.S. investments. Upon landing in Naples, he walked past hundreds of Italian migrants waiting...

The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars.
September 1, 1994... It is a paradox of our history that the South--a region historically identified with political exclusion--has given birth to some of America's most remarkable democratic movements. These two volumes from the University Press of Kentucky remind us...

Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945.
September 1, 1994... It is never easy to pass judgment upon those living in other times and places who possess fatal flaws in addition to a host of otherwise admirable qualities. Progressive reformers, especially settlement house workers, have posed this dilemma in...

Ralph Bunche: An American Life.
September 1, 1994... As the United States geared up for war in the fall of 1941, Ralph Bunche went to work in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, an assignment that initiated a lifelong career in public service, in both the U.S. government and the United...

Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta.
September 1, 1994... My favorite quotation from Winston Churchill describes his feelings the night he was called on to become prime minister in May 1940. He recalls that "as I went to bed at about 3 A.M. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had...

The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II.
September 1, 1994... On January 11 of this year John Bradley died. A Navy pharmacist mate second class during World War II, he was serving in the central Pacific when, on February 23, 1945, he joined with five Marines to raise the American flag atop Iwo Jima's Mt....

American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951.
September 1, 1994... On this past Memorial Day, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, President Clinton remembered Lewis B. Puller, Jr. Puller was the son of "Chesty"--Lewis Puller, Sr.--veteran of the bloody Peleliu campaign...

American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-68.
September 1, 1994... More than a quarter century ago, amid the fires of the Vietnam War, diplomatic historians conducted an internecine conflict of their own over the origins of the Cold War. Both sides claimed victory and a ceasefire of sorts materialized. A...

Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II.
September 1, 1994... The work under review completes a two-volume study that began with Geiger's To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 (1986). While the American research university was shaped in important ways by European...

Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate.
September 1, 1994... This is a Twentieth Century Fund book. The designation does not suggest sponsorship alone; it also signifies authorship. The Fund "is an operating rather than a grant making foundation, which means that the Fund directly administers its own...

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America.
September 1, 1994... "Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are," mused the nineteenth-century gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Assuming the duty of telling Americans who they are through what they eat, Harvey Levenstein, in his latest chronicle of...

Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice.
September 1, 1994... As Jerry Knudson recently reminded readers of the AHA newsletter, only the most simple-minded historian thinks of newspapers as mere sources of factual information. Journalists are actors and creators as well as reporters. They collect, select,...

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel.
September 1, 1994... This splendid volume in honor of Robert Fogel's distinguished contributions to economic science was produced and published well before Fogel received his much deserved Nobel Prize. His former students and colleagues already knew what the rest of...

Dean G. Acheson's 'Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.'
September 1, 1994... The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War by no means ended scholarly debate over the origins of the U.S.-Soviet conflict that dominated postwar international politics.(1) Historians today are...