The Historian articles from January 1993

The Historian archives from January 1993

Interview with Peter Calvocoressi. (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Born in 1912 in Karachi, a port city of British India now part of Pakistan, Calvocoressi became a King's scholar at Eton, earned a first in history at Balliol College, oxford, and was called to the bar in 1935. He assessed intelligence from...

John Ruskin and the Victorian eye.
January 1, 1993... The phoenix art museum will present The Art of Seeing: John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye from 6 March through 23 May 1993. This exhibit on the greatest nineteenth-century British critic of art and culture includes over 150 paintings and...

Antivivisection and the charge of zoophil-psychosis in the early twentieth century.
January 1, 1993... In 1909, at a time of great controversy over the practice of vivisection, American neurologist Charles Loomis Dana proclaimed heightened concern for animals to be a form of mental illness, which he called "zoophilpsychosis." Advocates of animal...

The local dynamics of national dissent: the Ecuadorian Pronunciamientos of 1826.
January 1, 1993... The story of the formation of the Republic of Ecuador from the southern departments of Gran Colombia from 1819 to 1830 is one of the most intriguing in Latin American history Encompassing present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador,...

German policy toward the Sharif of Mecca, 1914-1916.
January 1, 1993... The defeat of Turkey and Germany in World War I resulted in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The victorious British and French protected their strategic interests in the Middle East by establishing a series of successor states and...

Freemasons and the American Revolution.
January 1, 1993... A half-century ago, some historians connected Freemasonry with American independence because a few leaders of the Revolutionary generation - most notably Benjamin Franklin and George Washington - were Freemasons. Bernard Fay, a French historian...

Is ancient history relevant today? (Editorial)
January 1, 1993... In his interview with The Historian, Peter Calvocoressi, a distinguished writer of contemporary history, acknowledges his debt to the classical education in Greek and Latin language, literature, and culture that he received at Eton in the late...

The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... What is fraternalism? Paul Brooker, using Emile Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society as a conceptual model, applies its central idea of "mechanical solidarity" to compare Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. In analyzing each...

Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.
January 1, 1993... Writing a full-scale political biography of either Hitler or Stalin would be a daunting task. To combine the two, and avoid excessive psychologizing and superficial generalizations about the evils of totalitarianism, is even more difficult....

The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945.
January 1, 1993... Yet another volume on the Third Reich? The authors, British historian Michael Burleigh and German political scientist Wolfgang Wippermann, quickly respond to the query in their introduction: "Our object... has been to counteract attempts to...

The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... I. C. Butnaru's study consists of five parts: three brief sections on the origins and development of the "Jewish problem" in Romania prior to World War I, on interwar anti-Semitism, and on Jews in Romania since World War II; an appendix giving...

The Devil Soldier: The Story of Frederick Townsend Ward, the Most Honored and Controversial American in Chinese History.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The T'ai P'ing Rbellion from 1850 to 1865 was the greatest test of the internal integrity of China's last dynasty, the Ch'ing (1644-1911). Presenting itself as a legitimate alternative to the Manchu government at Peking, the quasi-Christian and...

The Norman Achievement.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The Norman Conquest of England has been a favorite subject of historians and students alike. Less well known yet equally fascinating is the Norman conquest of Sicily. This British publication, only recently made available in the United States,...

Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750.
January 1, 1993... Traditionally trained to depict cultures in all their detailed richness and diversity, Orientalist ethnographic historians have avoided theory like the plague. Today, not only has Orientalism become a victim of radical deconstructionists,...

Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy.
January 1, 1993... The early modern naval historian, examining conflicting claims about corruption, ill-preparation, or cowardice, often must rely on accusations from competing ship officers or land-based commissioners heavily implicated in faction-based politics...

Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich.
January 1, 1993... In this worthwhile volume John Carver Edwards seeks to describe and explain the actions of Americans who served Nazi Germany during World War II by making radio broadcasts for Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels' "U.S.A. Zone." Drawing on a...

The English Police: A Political and Social History.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Using such varied sources as local police archives, Parliamentary and Home Office papers, and autobiographies, Clive Emsley sets out to challenge the traditional view that Robert Peel's creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 was recognized...

China: A New History.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... China: A New History, by John King Fairbank, truly the supreme figure in Chinese studies for almost half a century is the valedictory view of the full sweep of the Chinese past. Fairbank does not break new ground or present startling new...

Kings and Lords in Conquest England.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Robin Fleming describes her book's purpose in a concise, if arid, statement: "(It) is an attempt to combine systematically the (Domesday) survey's prosopographical, manorial and geographical evidence, and to discuss the implications of this...

The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain's South China Policy, 1924-1931.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This is a well-researched book. Based extensively on the British archives in the Public Record Office in London and on a number of private papers, Edmund S. K. Fung has literally reconstructed the making of the British policy toward the...

The Miracle That Was Macedonia.
January 1, 1993... Nicholas G. L. Hammond has written more on the history of ancient Macedonia than any other scholar of his generation. Thus, he would be the logical choice to write a general history of Macedonia. Writing such a work challenges the author to...

Goths and Romans: 332-489.
January 1, 1993... The story of the Goths and Romans is well known. The Visigoths and Ostrogoths were settled along the lower Danube and the northern coast of the Black Sea in relatively peaceful coexistence with the Roman Empire until the Huns arrived on the...

The English Spa: 1560-1815, A Social History.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Phyllis Hembry's treatment of English spas, the first extensive work in 150 years, deals with the medical and social aspects of spas. It extends to transportation, dress, the interaction of economic and social groups who normally would not...

Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill's Ally.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This book is a delight to review. One wants it to go on for pages. Robert Boothby, in many ways, was Winston Churchill writ differently. This should be taken as no diminution of Boothby, only that his personal weaknessess, alcohol, good living,...

Russia's Balkan Entanglements: 1806-1914.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... On one level, this is a book about nineteenth-century foreign affairs. On another, Barbara Jelavich's study goes much further by connecting Russian involvement in the Balkan peninsula with the collapse of the Tsarist regime in 1917. Her...

Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler.
January 1, 1993... During the last 400 years, armed clashes between the states of Europe have been instrumental in shaping the political structure of the Continent and, moreover, the course of international relations. Thus, several eighteenth-century wars began...

Grand Strategies in War and Peace.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This book consists of ten essays, of which the opening and closing ones are by Paul Kennedy, author of the best-selling Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988). These two relate to his key themes therein: that domestic political, social,...

Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Martin Lowry has already distinguished himself as an expert of early Venetian printing by his work on Aldus Manutius, whose press produced some of the foremost classical texts during the latter part of the Renaissance. This tirne he ventures...

The Cambridge History of China, vol. 15, The People's Republic, Part 2: Revolutions Within the Chinese Revolution, 1966-1982.
January 1, 1993... When the Cambridge History of China was first planned in 1966, it was intended to provide a six-volume account of the current state of knowledge covering some 2,200 years. Contributors were told to write for "the history-reading public,"...

The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass Circulation Press.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... In this monograph, Louise McReynolds outlines the development of the commercial newspaper industry in Russia from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 through the 1917 Revolution. Based on research in period newspapers and in the archives of...

Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History.
January 1, 1993... This is a book of trenchant and insightful essays, a kind of mid career assessment of his field of research by Jeffrey P. Mass, the heir to the mantle of his mentor, John W Hall, as the leader of pre-1600 studies of Japanese history. Mass...

The Unification and Division of India.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... When I ask my students to "draw a map of India," virtually all commence with an outline of the peninsular coasts and territorial boundaries of British India and then fill the space with rivers, cities, and regions. Students accept this...

Peasantry and Society in France Since 1789.
January 1, 1993... This book, first published in 1988, is an extremely useful synthesis of recent scholarly work on the place of the peasantry in French society from the revolution to the present. In conventional fashion, Annie Moulin divides the history of the...

Germans Against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich, Essays in Honor of Peter Hoffmann.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This compilation of twenty original essays in honor of Peter Hoffmann discusses the nature of resistance to Nazi Germany. Francis R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes have defined resistance as broadly as possible and include many diverse articles...

The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The dust jacket of Murray G. H. Pittock's book features a sketch of music hall comedian Sir Harry Lauder decked out in a kilt with a sporran and a crooked walking stick: the tourist's conception of the Scot, needing only a golf club and a...

The Conquest of Christian and Muslim Spain: 1031-1157.
January 1, 1993... With hindsight, the waxing of Iberia's north and the waning of its south by the twelfth century pointed to a definitive turn toward Christian Europe and away from Islamic North Africa. Islam's fundamental weakness, pointed out in this highly...

Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This volume reproduces four studies, the majority of which were originally published in German. In this version some technical items have been condensed or excluded, but the essays present a convincing argument except in certain passages where...

The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This book focuses on the process by which "various aspects of life and thought were divorced from religious values or from the direction of the Church" following Henry VIII's break with Rome (11). C. John Sommerville examines the secularization...

The Restoration Church of England: 1646-1689.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Here is a book about the religion of some seventeenth-century Englishmen and women (although we do not hear much about the latter) that does not focus on Puritanism and begins only after the end of the first English Civil War. For a book that...

Disorder Under Heaven: Collective Violence in the Ming Dynasty.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... James W. Tong's Disorder under Heaven is a rare book that ranges across two fields in two different disciplines. Tong challenges the received wisdom in the study of collective violence and maps a major era of Chinese history. Tong's careful...

Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian.
January 1, 1993... Susan Treggiari's long-awaited book on Roman marriage is a major contribution to scholarship that confirms the author's standing as a leading contemporary historian of Roman society. Its subject, the ideology and practical conventions of...

Tom Mann: 1856-1941, The Challenges of Labour.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The fourth successive defeat of the British Labour party has led to a major reassessment of the links with the trade unions, which seem to appear as more of a liability than a source of strength. The barons of the Trades Union Congress are...

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... In the lands where Calvinistic Christianity attained cultural and religious dominance in the seventeenth century, especially the Netherlands, Scotland, and New England, the biblical notion of "covenant" shaped the way people thought about their...

International Theory: The Three Traditions.
January 1, 1993... This is a strange and wonderful book. It is strange because of the unusual way it has come to print and it is wonderful for the erudition, clarity, and insight of its contents. First, the strangeness. This book is based on lecture notes...

Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990.
January 1, 1993... Bryce Harlow once compared Richard Nixon to a cork: "Push him down and he pops right back up" (583). The enduring resiliency of Nixon is one of the central themes of Ruin and Recovery, the concluding segment of Stephen E. Ambrose's three-volume...

The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Modern America presents a great paradox. On the one hand, convention maintains citizens control government. On the other hand, many basic policies have been articulated, promoted, and implemented by several men of extraordinary influence. Kai...

Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism.
January 1, 1993... Roger A. Bruns, deputy executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives, has produced an immensely readable account of the life of Billy Sunday, one of the most influential American...

America in the Modern World: The Transcendence of United States Hegemony.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Stephen Burman's America in the Modern World is a complex yet readable and useful book. Burman develops several layers and then successfully integrates them - classical theories of imperialism, U.S. imperialism, the politics and economics of...

Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh are long-time collaborators on various works on Maryland and the Chesapeake region during the early colonial period. With Robert Cole's World, they have outdone themselves. The work is...

Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Ellen Chesler's meticulously documented first book is a readable biography set in the broadest social, political, and intellectual context. For Margaret Sanger, the personal was indeed the political. Born in 1878 to an improvident Irish radical...

Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960.
January 1, 1993... In Moving the Mountain, Flora Davis offers a passionate account of feminism in the last three decades. Davis draws on a wealth of material, including interviews with key figures in the women's movement and the growing secondary historical...

Playing Cowboys: Low Culture and High Art in the Western.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... During the past century, many scholars have explored the history of the American West and its impact on American culture, literature, and the performing arts. The understanding of western history has been reshaped by each generation of...

George Scarborough: The Life and Death of a Lawman on the Closing Frontier.
January 1, 1993... Among the legion of renowned western lawmen, George Scarborough is not exactly a household name, but he probably should be. Best known for a single event - the 1896 killing of gunman John Selman - Scarborough's moment of glory ironically...

Night Boat to New England: 1815-1900.
January 1, 1993... Reading Night Boat to New England, 1815-1900 is something akin to taking a steamship across a choppy Long Island Sound: the journey is not always pleasant, but the conveyance accomplishes its purpose. Edwin L. Dunbaugh has done a prodigious...

A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... As in five previous works on the frontier of the Midwest, Allan W. Eckert's straightforward narrative will delight his legion of devoted followers as he captures the heroic and mythic qualities of a Shawnee soldier who, in fact, appeared larger...

The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The only significant criticism that can be made of John A. English's most recent work is that the title is in reverse order. The book is, essentially and profoundly, a study of failure in high command. That it uses the litmus test of...

Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... This book is an introduction to the rich, complicated subject of mining landscapes and how to understand them better. Richard V. Francaviglia combines the techniques of the historian, archaeologist, architect, geographer, and preservationist...

The First Day at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership.
January 1, 1993... This collection of essays - based on papers delivered at the 1990 Civil War conference at the Mont Alto campus of Pennsylvania State University - provides case studies of leadership in the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac...

Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... By systematically deconstructing the Hawthorne experiments - from their inception to their effects on industrial relations and the social sciences - Richard Gillespie successfully shows the complex processes at work in the production and...

Woodrow Wilson.
January 1, 1993... This biography of the twenty-eighth president is the work of a former president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation who also served as a member of the editorial staff for publication of the Wilson papers at Princeton. Documents in that collection...

Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Francis Parkman was perhaps the most prolific and influential U.S. historical writer in the late nineteenth century. His works on colonial American history, marked by a graceful literary style, observations based on his own pioneering field and...

The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The American communist movement is one of the more fascinating movements, social or otherwise, in U.S. history. The fascination is in part because of the numerically disproportionate attention U.S. communism has received. While American...

Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Steinemetz is not simply the story of a man but an examination of Charles Steinmetz and the myths to which he gave rise as a means to understanding both the man and the times in which he lived (1865-1923). Beginning with Steinmetz's origins in...

Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... For about a generation, historians have been re-examining the social and economic character of antebellum America. Yet until recently, there has been little attempt to link these studies of American society to the familiar story of the...

Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... When Gabriel Kolko published The Triumph of Conservatism in 1963, he challenged conventional views of the Progressive Era with the argument that Progressivism was not progressive at all. The years commonly seen as a period of political reform...

Christianity Comes to the Americas.
January 1, 1993... Stafford Poole described an invasion of "strong, resourceful, militant, brutal and aggressive people with a messianic sense of their own destiny" who forcibly impressed their religion and customs upon the people they conquered (28). These...

Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Anyone adhering to the commonly held definition of Appalachia may be disappointed by many of this book's articles. Eastern Backcountry would be a more appropriate title. Robert D. Mitchell chides students of Appalachia for being too parochial,...

Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Religious life in colonial Massachusetts, including popular religion, has been the object of intense scholarly investigation. Yet little work has been done on the sectarian alternatives that reshaped the spiritual life of the Bay Colony Carla...

Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... In this slim volume Amanda Porterfield sets herself the task of exploring further the significance of women's religious experience in seventeenth-century New England first outlined by such scholars as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Lonna...

Colombia and the United States: Hegemony and Interdependence.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Stephen J. Randall emphasizes the role of culture in the U.S.-Colombian relationship frequently in this book, one volume in the America and the Americas series. Colombia has been most successful in maintaining a separate identity in high...

Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... In Dubious Victory, Robert D. Sawrey provides one of the leading studies on the politics of Reconstruction in a Northern state, with special emphasis on the Republican response to Reconstruction. Unlike Felice Bonadio, who suggested that the...

The United States in Central America: 1860-1911, Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Thomas D. Schoonover has both a methodological and a substantive agenda in The United States in Central America. Methodologically, he seeks to change how U.S. diplomatic history is written. Substantively, he tries to bring North America's...

America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... The topic of this book is a twofold success story: first, it recounts the implementation of U.S. German and European policies and John McCloy's contribution to this process; second, it relates the early history of the Federal Republic of...

Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... John Seelye has written an outstanding book that stands alone as a major achievement in addition to serving as a sequel to his earlier, much-praised Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature. In a richly textured...

From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era.
January 1, 1993... Psychosomatic illnesses encompass ailments in which physical symptoms are the result of the unconscious mind, although the ailments are defined by their sufferers, as well as their physicians, as organic illness requiring medical explanation...

Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Comparative slavery as a distinct field in history is barely a quarter century old. Twenty-three years ago, this reviewer took Eugene Genovese's course at Yale on the infant topic. Today's mail brought the National Geographic (September 1992)...

The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860-1880.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Victorian culture has often been viewed as hierarchical and repressive. In Victorian Homefront, Louise L. Stevenson persuasively argues that Victorian culture was shaped as much by those who lived in the Civil War and Reconstruction period -...

Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Edwin R. Sweeney has written a fairly straightforward, conventional history of Indian-white relations that does double duty as Indian biography. With the close of the war with Mexico, the United States acquired the homelands of a people known...

Edward Everett: The Intellectual in the Turmoil of Politics.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1993... Edward Everett is known to most students of U.S. history as the Gettysburg orator whose speech was overshadowed by Lincoln's address. Paul A. Varg reminds readers that Everett also enjoyed a long career in antebellum Massachusetts Whig politics...

The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy.
January 1, 1993... In this volume John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, turns his attention to that most extraordinary figure, Christopher Columbus, a man whose four voyages of exploration and discovery changed world civilization forever. He...

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
January 1, 1993... In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills is primarily concerned with words. "The power of words," he writes, "has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration" than in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (20). Lincoln's goal was to win the Civil War...