The Historian articles from January 1996

The Historian archives from January 1996

Interview with Roger Adelson. (historian)(Interview)
January 1, 1996... Born in 1942 and reared in Kansas, Adelson received his B.A. degree from George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; his B. Litt. degree from Oxford University, Oxford, England; and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University, St....

The unraveling of an Anglo-American utopia in South Carolina.
January 1, 1996... The South has risen again in the historiography of colonial British America as recent treatments of the Anglo-American scene have placed the Southern colonies in the center of the North American colonization process. The early South manifested...

The Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace.
January 1, 1996... People sometimes come up with a grand idea to preserve something worth saving only to find that it has already been destroyed. Such was the case with the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, now a national historic site run by the National Park...

Queen Victoria and the challenge of Roman Catholicism.
January 1, 1996... Biographies of Queen Victoria continue to pour from the presses, but modern scholars have dealt systematically with the role of religion in the queen's life in but two essays. This fact is surprising when we consider how important a role religion...

U.S. foreign policy and the Belgian Congo in the 1950s.
January 1, 1996... The turmoil that engulfed the Belgian Congo when it gained independence in 1960 and the tortuous role subsequently assumed by the United Nations have received considerable coverage. Less attention has been given to the preceding years,...

The Farmers Union, McCarthyism, & the demise of the agrarian left. (National Farmers Union)
January 1, 1996... The cold war took a toll on U.S. liberalism. Subjected to McCarthyite attacks, liberals often had to defend themselves rather than advance their agenda. In many cases, besieged reformers adopted a defensive strategy, attempting to portray...

Race and organized labor in Australia, 1850-1901.
January 1, 1996... The White Settler Societies of the Americas, Australasia, and Africa from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries all resulted from a particular form of European colonization that imparted a number of shared historical experiences, including racial...

Modern design and history, 1885-1945.
January 1, 1996... Design has contributed to our perception of the modem world, as a key element in reform movements, an agent of modernity, and a vehicle of propaganda. "The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945," the inaugural exhibition of The Wolfsonian,...

Apprenticing reporters: Lincoln Steffens on 'The Evening Post.'
January 1, 1996... Anxious for his first job and unsure what to do for a living, a twenty-six-year-old Lincoln Steffens approached the venerable Evening Post. Steffens, attired in his best London-tailored suit and top hat, was quickly engaged as a cub to "do...

Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908.
January 1, 1996... In bringing these three useful volumes about the early years of baseball before the public, the University of Nebraska Press provides still another sign that baseball history has entered the mainstream of historical studies. In retrospect it is...

Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer.
January 1, 1996... In bringing these three useful volumes about the early years of baseball before the public, the University of Nebraska Press provides still another sign that baseball history has entered the mainstream of historical studies. In retrospect it is...

Sol White's History of Colored Baseball, with Other Documents on the Early Black Game: 1886-1936.
January 1, 1996... In bringing these three useful volumes about the early years of baseball before the public, the University of Nebraska Press provides still another sign that baseball history has entered the mainstream of historical studies. In retrospect it is...

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier.
January 1, 1996... Slavery in South Africa is a collaborative effort by several scholars who led the attack on Julian Cobbing's interpretation of the Mfecane and South African frontier history as contained in his much debated 1988 Journal of African History...

Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838.
January 1, 1996... Slavery in South Africa is a collaborative effort by several scholars who led the attack on Julian Cobbing's interpretation of the Mfecane and South African frontier history as contained in his much debated 1988 Journal of African History...

Colonialism in the Congo Basin: 1880-1940.
January 1, 1996... Although the story of human exploitation in the Belgian Congo is now well known, this book is long overdue. It has been so painstakingly put together, meticulously documented, and superbly edited that it must very soon take its place among the...

Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914.
January 1, 1996... The question of unequal historical development in Latin America has generated many comparisons (usually unfavorable) between the region and other parts of the world, primarily Europe and North America. Two areas that have received such attention...

James Buchanan and the American Empire.
January 1, 1996... This volume is written in the grand tradition of an almost quiescent field, nineteenth-century U.S. diplomatic history. It emphasizes the big picture, with rich detail on the most important men of the time. Part biography and part a broad...

The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power.
January 1, 1996... Paraphrasing the U.S. transcendentalists of the 1830s, history students often remind their professors that "the past is a foreign country. People do things differently there." For those old enough to remember the Johnson presidency, much has...

Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.
January 1, 1996... This well-written and fascinating account shows how important white moderates were to the success of the civil rights movement and how black leaders consciously made winning them over to their cause an integral part of their strategy. In the...

Lion of the Forest: James B. Finley, Frontier Reformer.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... In recent years historians' works dealing with the opening and the impact of the frontier have greatly increased, and their methodologies and focuses have broadened considerably. Part of this development centers on the roles played by specific...

The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This intriguing study takes readers inside the predominately mixed-race casta society of Mexico City during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. R. Douglas Cope describes a plebeian society whose members largely defined their own...

Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History.
January 1, 1996... This impressive collection of essays displays the dramatic impact of "new social and political" studies on our knowledge of Southern labor history Distilled from the Southern Labor Studies Conference in Atlanta in 1991, the contributions stress...

Women of the Mexican Countryside: 1850-1990.
January 1, 1996... One cannot imagine a more timely work than Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990, a collection of essays by thirteen U.S. and Mexican women scholars, published just months after the peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, began on 1 January...

Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... For millennia, indigenous Andeans have "chewed" coca as a stimulant and used the leaves in their religion and medicine. As Joseph Gagliano details in this carefully researched book, controversies over coca use have a long history as well. These...

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism.
January 1, 1996... When the directors of the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University asked Eugene Genovese to deliver the 1993 William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, they undoubtedly hoped that the reigning patriarch of...

Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897.
January 1, 1996... This volume examines Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as police commissioner of New York City. He was sworn in on 6 May 1895, and his colleagues - Avery Andrews, Andrew Parker, and Frederick D. Grant (son of the Civil War general) - elected TR...

Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster.
January 1, 1996... This is a splendid book. It is extremely well researched, intelligently written, and cogently argued. Forging American Communism makes it possible to understand and evaluate the career of William Foster, a complex, often contradictory, and...

The Populist Persuasion: An American History.
January 1, 1996... "We're the people," Ma Joad announces in The Grapes of Wrath; "we go on." So does the populist impulse, a perennial force in U.S. politics. Note that John Steinbeck's earth mother does not identify herself with the peasantry - and certainly not...

Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England.
January 1, 1996... During the nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization, and migration changed the shape, form, and function of business organizations. Naomi Lamoreaux's study traces these changes for New England's banking industry. Focusing on the...

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
January 1, 1996... This book is far less a work of historical research than a vigorous social and political critique of the selfishness and self-absorption of contemporary U.S. economic and intellectual elites. It is a perceptive, if too often truncated, attack...

Andersonville: The Last Depot.
January 1, 1996... The need to relieve the overcrowding of Union captives at Richmond was the reason for the establishment of the Andersonville Prison. The Confederate secretary of war, James A. Seddon, issued the order to Captain William S. Winder to find a site...

Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Creatively using census and economic data, Dean May has produced a well-researched, provocative study of three towns in the U.S. West - Sublimity, Oregon; Alpine, Utah; and Middleton, Idaho - thus crafting a comparative analysis of people in...

The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854-1920.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... As Martin Paulsson points out in this competently researched study, by 1910 Atlantic City, which annually hosted over three million visitors, could well boast of being "the world's playground." The popular resort city provided various forms of...

Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives.
January 1, 1996... This volume brings together sixteen papers presented at the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 1989 Amazonian Synthesis Conference at Rosas dos Ventos, Brazil. As curator of archaeology at the Field Museum of Natural History and professor of anthropology...

Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850.
January 1, 1996... When Darrett Rutman's Winthrop's Boston was published thirty years ago it pioneered a social history approach to the study of New England Puritanism. Instead of focusing on the ideas of religious leaders, Rutman examined the lives of ordinary...

Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in new York City, 1870-1900.
January 1, 1996... This volume presents an analysis of the German working class in New York City during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the experience of cigar makers, brewers, and bakers. Dorothee Schneider attempts to trace...

Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.
January 1, 1996... This study of Chinese "public women" between 1849 and 1882 - the year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which greatly complicated the life of California's Chinese community, including the demimonde - makes a valuable contribution to the...

Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium.
January 1, 1996... This book has everything a university press could ask for and more. There is intrigue, fine prose, and wit, as well as good scholarship. The task that Andie Tucher sets for herself is to explore the evolution in the 1830s of the "penny press."...

The Evolution Controversy in America.
January 1, 1996... There have been so many good books on Darwinism in the United States that one wonders on first picking up this one whether it is really needed. In addition to older classics like Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism, the brilliant analysis of...

Civil Law in Qing and Republican China.
January 1, 1996... Chinese legal history has until recently focused on administrative and penal law, especially of the Qing period (1644-12). Chinese law in the Republican period (1912-49) has received less attention. Historians have assumed that the legal system...

American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century Japan.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... As Fumiko Fujita states at the outset, "this book is about the experiences - especially the ideas and attitudes - of the Americans who crossed the Pacific to develop Japan's frontier" (x). Over the years there have been a number of other studies...

The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan.
January 1, 1996... Claims to universal truth notwithstanding, marxism is deeply influenced by the context in which it grows, a point made indisputably clear in this rich study of socialist thought in twentieth-century East Asia. The focus of Germaine Hoston's...

War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945.
January 1, 1996... Almost any book that seeks to make a significant contribution to understanding the history of twentieth-century China addresses at some point the reasons for the success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the failure of the Nationalists or...

China Since 1978: Reform, Modernization and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... "The aim of this book is to provide a simple and accessible account of the history of China from 1978 to 1992" (1). This mission of the authors, three Australian scholars, to produce an integrated approach to understanding current events in China...

Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This book provides a rare insider's view of Chinese high politics with remarkable clarity and insights. As an aide for ideological matters to Hu Yaobang, the late secretary general of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), Ruan Ming helped to...

The Sorrow of War: A new Novel of North Vietnam.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The first edition of this novel, which was published in Hanoi, bore a title that can roughly be translated as "The Lot of Love" or "The Destiny of Love." A later edition published in Ho Chi Minh City was titled The Sorrow of War. The second title...

Turbans and Traders: Hong Kong's Indian Communities.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This work is commendable for recognizing a significant South Asian presence in Hong Kong. Barbara-Sue White searches beyond the tailors and the tradesmen, the hotel doorkeepers and policemen, who are visible even to the casual tourist in Hong...

Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages.
January 1, 1996... Under Crescent and Cross systematically compares Christian-Jewish and Islamic-Jewish relations between the seventh and fifteenth centuries. "Its purpose," Mark Cohen writes, "is to go beyond the facile assertion that Jews lived more securely in...

The Diplomats: 1939-1979.
January 1, 1996... Forty years ago, Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert published The Diplomats, 1919-1939, a collection of outstanding essays on interwar Europe's leading diplomats and their political and institutional milieux. This worthy sequel, with twenty-three...

William Tyndale: A Biography.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This book is a biography in the sense that encomium was a form of life-writing in the Renaissance. Sometimes, to judge from the large tracts of background information, aimed at a general audience, sometimes intended for professionals, the book's...

Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.
January 1, 1996... "The thought of Jews conducting large-scale statistical experiments to determine Jewish skull shape and the prevalence of blue-eyed blond Jews," John Efron writes, "seems a bitter irony" (176). This concise book examines the issue of race during...

The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The story of public executions in England is well known. The large crowds attending executions created a near-carnival atmosphere, and growing numbers of death sentences in the 1820s resulted in most being reduced to transportation or...

Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium.
January 1, 1996... This study of memory explores the ways people of all social ranks in the formerly Carolingian territories preserved the past, whether by written or non-written means. Patrick Geary is interested in the history of memory as historiography, as the...

Saint Peter: A Biography.
January 1, 1996... Jesus once rebuked him as Satan, yet entrusted him with the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. What kind of man could elicit such responses? Protestant and Catholic scholars generally concur that the apostle Peter enjoyed a special closeness to Jesus...

Battle Tactics of the Western Front.
January 1, 1996... The appalling carnage of the Western Front led historians, writers, and politicians to ask hard questions about World War I. Despite the ultimate Allied victory, these groups attacked the senior leadership of the Allied armies. "Incompetent"...

Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome: AD 407-485.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... On the strength of his poems and letters, Sidonius is a choice witness to the last century of the western Empire and has been much noticed. Barbarian power-centers in Gaul were a fact throughout his formative years, and the end of Roman control...

Dictionary of east European History Since 1945.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Because it makes available in succinct and readable form rather detailed historical information on the countries of Eastern Europe (defined in cold-war terms to exclude the Soviet Union) during the period of communist rule, Joseph Held's...

The German Colonial Empire: 1884-1919.
January 1, 1996... All historians of nineteenth-century Germany, particularly those interested in political economy and in economic history, are familiar with W. O. Henderson's work. Henderson's books include The Zollverein and The Rise of German Industrial Power....

The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This wide-ranging and creative book explores certain themes in the history of the ritual year in England during the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Ronald Hutton, who has already shown himself to be thoroughly skilled as a biographer...

Nazi Germany at War.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... In the never-released German war movie, Kolberg (1945), one of the characters says: "The important thing is that we should have nothing to be ashamed about afterwards when we look at ourselves in the mirror" (275). This was the illusion the Nazi...

Disraeli.
January 1, 1996... This short biography of the great nineteenth-century Conservative prime minister is part of the Profiles in Power series, useful to students for their brief and authoritative accounts of figures ranging from Elizabeth I to Castro. So far the...

Preaching the Crusades: Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century.
January 1, 1996... Within its narrow compass, this book ably treats the large issue of mendicant friars and the cross in the thirteenth century. Indeed, the study's subtitle better describes its contents: besides mendicant crusade preaching, there are separate...

From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates.
January 1, 1996... What a bequest J. Russell Major has given to his colleagues in French history. Major has already presented historians with noteworthy studies of political institutions in Renaissance and early modern France, but this is his chef-d'oeuvre, the...

Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Using the duel as both metaphor and lens, Kevin McAleer has produced a positively captivating look at turn-of-the-century Germany This unique approach explains, as the subtitle indicates, the pervasive cult of honor in fin de siecle Germany. In...

The Social Legacy of Communism.
January 1, 1996... At the present, social problems in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe look rather grim. Conditions deteriorated steadily in the 1970s and 1980s because of the suppression of traditional social institutions and the failure of economic...

Peace Without Victory for the Allies: 1918-1932.
January 1, 1996... Accepted wisdom holds that in 1918 the kaiser's army fought an honorable retreat back to Germany; that unreasonable Allied demands on the Weimar Republic's supposedly feeble postwar economy created Germany's catastrophic hyper-inflation and led...

The Impact of the Reformation.
January 1, 1996... At the quincentennial of Luther's birth, Newsweek extolled Heiko A. Oberman as "Europe's foremost Reformation scholar." Oberman himself speaks modestly of the three phases of his career: his first U.S. period, 1958-66, at Harvard Divinity School;...

Herds of the Tundra: A Portrait of Saami Reindeer Pastoralism.
January 1, 1996... The Saami in Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Russia constitute some fifty thousand people, thirty thousand of whom live in Norway. Their problems are related to those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand....

An Economic History of Medieval Europe.
January 1, 1996... This new edition of a well-known survey of the medieval economy provides a clear, solid, and wide-ranging overview that is suitable for students and general readers. Its ten densely packed chapters proceed roughly chronologically from a...

Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia.
January 1, 1996... These essays show a historian relentlessly in pursuit of the central problem of Russian history, constantly attacking it from new angles and with new methodologies while penetrating deeper and deeper into the subject. This book offers a...

Innocent III: Leader of Europe, 1198-1216.
January 1, 1996... Innocent III was one of the greatest popes, and his pontificate marks in many ways the high point of papal influence in Europe. These propositions have long seemed axiomatic, and they have defined studies of particular aspects of Innocent's life...

Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement: c. 1640-1649.
January 1, 1996... The issues at stake in the English Civil War continue to cause controversy among historians of the seventeenth century. One traditional line of thought has seen the conflict as a reflection of ideological struggles between Parliament, which...

The Russian Far East: A History.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... The current and future economic impact of the Pacific Rim region is a topic of great debate. It is important to understand the history and cultures of this area in order to analyze the strengths and limitations of their economies. John Stephan,...

Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire: 1876-1923.
January 1, 1996... The essays in this volume study the relationship between nationalism and socialism among the Macedonian, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire between 1876 and 1923. Initially, the images that these two ideologies...

The Irish Constitutional Tradition: Responsible Government and Modern Ireland, 1782-1992.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This is an outstanding book on a subject that has long needed systematic analysis. Contrary to popular perceptions (particularly outside Ireland), the dominant strain of Irish nationalism since the late eighteenth century has been unmistakably...

Neither Kingdom Nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698-1800.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This study traces the development of the Irish constitution from the mid-seventeenth century, when Ireland had its own parliament, through the passage of the Act of Union, when that same parliament voted itself out of existence. During this time,...

John Stuart Mill and India.
January 1, 1996... John Stuart Mill's thirty-five-year India House career has long posed a problem for those who have endeavored to understand the relation of his life to his thought. Given the part played by India House in his daily routine over a period of...

Turkey: A Modern History.
January 1, 1996... This brilliant new study covers the history of the Ottoman Empire during its last century of reform and modernization and then studies its principal successor state, the Republic of Turkey, to the present day. It largely supplants two monographs,...

Oldest Allies, Guarded Friends: The United States and France Since 1940.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... This study reexamines the "permanent tension" between France and the United States in a series of case studies beginning with the troubled association of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement after the fall of...

International Relations Since 1945: A History, 2 vols.
January 1, 1996... These companion volumes present a highly ambitious survey of post-World War II international relations. Their publication is timely, given the end of the cold war and the problems of constructing a new world order in its aftermath. Longman's...

Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India.
January 1, 1996... This worthy addition to non-European historiography is the result of an international conference, "Foundations of Imperial Hegemony: Western Education, Public Health, and Police in India and Anglophone Africa," sponsored by the German Historical...

Churchill and Roosevelt at War: The War They Fought and the Peace They Hoped to Make.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1996... Eleanor Roosevelt once described the relationship between her husband and Winston Churchill as "a fortunate friendship." Yet, as Keith Sainsbury points out in this brief but useful study, the relationship between the two men was far from idyllic....

Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History.
January 1, 1996... Any review of a volume with contents that spread as widely across academic disciplines and historical periods as Gender Rhetorics serves best by listing the book's contents and suggesting the extent of the articles' relationship to each other....