The Historian articles from January 1998

The Historian archives from January 1998

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Drew Gilpin Faust. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. 326. $29.95) The Organization of American Historians has presented its Avery O. Craven Award for 1997 to Drew Gilpin Faust, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of...

Vietnam 1945: the Quest of Power.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By David G. Marr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. 587. $50.00.) The American Historical Association presented its John K. Fairbank Prize for 1996 to David G. Marr of the Australian National University for his study of...

William Cooper's Town: Powers and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Alan Taylor. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Pp. 549. $35.00) Professor Alan Taylor of the University of California at Davis is the recipient of the Albert J. Beveridge Award. The prize is presented each year by the American Historical...

The Secret World of American Communism.
January 1, 1998... By Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. xxxii, 348. $25.00.) Three recent studies challenge the prevailing academic consensus on the nature of American Communism and...

Red Scare or Red Menane?: American Communism in the Cold War Era.
January 1, 1998... By John E. Haynes. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Pp. viii, 214. $24.95.) Three recent studies challenge the prevailing academic consensus on the nature of American Communism and anticommunism. They may well constitute the first rumblings of...

Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism.
January 1, 1998... By Richard Gid Powers. (New York: The Free Press, 1995. Pp. x, 554. $30.00.) Three recent studies challenge the prevailing academic consensus on the nature of American Communism and anticommunism. They may well constitute the first...

The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History.
January 1, 1998... By Ami Ayalon. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 300. $49.95.) The idea of a history of the press in the Arab Middle East seems to be a promising one because the topic is one that is not easily accessible. As the...

The Oral History and Literature of the Wolof People of Waalo, Northern Senegal: The Master of the Word (griot) in the Wolof Tradition.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Samba Diop. (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Pp. iv, 389. $109.95.) This work is a portrayal of the social, cultural, and literary heritage of the Wolof people of northern Senegal. Samba Diop's argument, that...

The State and Its servants: Administration in Egypt from Ottoman Times to the Present.
January 1, 1998... by Nelly Hanna. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995. Pp. 128. $35.00.) This collection, drawn from a 1993 seminar at the American University in Cairo, comprises an introduction and seven essays on various features of Egypt's...

Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais. (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv, 346. $17.95.) This volume of essays forces the reader to look closely at slavery and to do so not only in another light, by posing new...

Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850.
January 1, 1998... By John Ashworth. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 520. $64.95.) This first of a projected two volumes discusses abolitionism, the pro-slavery argument, and the causes of the Civil War, which are "best understood in...

Lost Legacy: The Mormon Office of Presiding Patriarch.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 258. $32.50.) In December 1833, Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr. ordained his aging father to the "patriarchal priesthood." He proclaimed...

Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920.
January 1, 1998... By Charlotte G. Borst. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 254. $39.95.) For historians of American medicine, nursing, and women, childbirth and controversies over the use of midwives or physicians have been a...

Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies.
January 1, 1998... By Elaine G. Breslaw. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. xxv, 243. $24.95.) "Between March and October of 1692 over 150 people were arrested on suspicion of witchcraft. Twenty-four would die before the crisis was...

The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870.
January 1, 1998... By Richard D. Brown. (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 252. $29.95.) If the idea of an informed citizenry is necessary for the conduct of public policy, three questions emerge. Who should be informed?...

Roosevelt's Warrior: Harold L. Ickes and the New Deal.
January 1, 1998... By Jeanne Nienaber Clarke. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii, 414. $39.95.) This biography of former Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes fills a gap in the literature on Franklin Roosevelt's presidency....

The Saving Remmant: Religion and the Settling of New England.
January 1, 1998... By Cedric B. Cowing. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. vii, 352. $19.95.) This volume is a masterful synthesis of the major secondary works dealing with the impact of the "Great Migration" of English Puritans to...

Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Roger A. Fischer. (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1996. Pp. xiv, 253. $37.50.) In this breezy and often perceptive collection of essays on American political cartoons, Roger A. Fischer provides welcome context for the old saw that...

Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Edited and Translated by Elborg Forster and Robert Forster. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. iii, 322. $19.95.) As the subtitle indicates, this book consists of the letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles,...

Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Kevin K. Gaines. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xxv, 312. $17.95.) In nine fully documented chapters with an excellent bibliography and index, Kevin K. Gaines develops his ideas with regard to an "uplift...

Love Across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and Kathy Peiss. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 144. $12.95.) This brief and engaging book is based on a remarkable find: the discovery beneath the floorboards of a Northampton,...

Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Earl Ofari Hutchinson. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. ix, 255. $27.00.) Recent acts of racial violence, the rise of white supremacy groups, and the reluctance of presidents to condemn such violence have led Earl Ofari Hutchinson to...

Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross.
January 1, 1998... By John E Hutchinson. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xxii, 448. $35.00.) The author of this book has made a courageous attempt to write a critical history of the Red Cross during its formative years from 1863 to 1921. Unfortunately,...

Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Harvey T. Jackson III. (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 300. $29.95.) In conscious emulation of the old Rivers of America series, Harvey Jackson's Rivers of History chronicles the Alabama River system...

Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Glen Jeansonne. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xix, 264. $29.95.) Glen Jeansonne, an expert on the history of the far right in the United States, has produced a fascinating study of extreme right-wing groups...

The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation fo Cultural Criticism in the United States.
January 1, 1998... By Michael Kammen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x, 495. $35.00.) This book is an intellectual biography of the popular culture critic, Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970). Seldes is a neglected figure, but Kammen makes a convincing...

The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. 266. $29.95.) This is a careful and objective examination of one of the most complex and controversial spy cases in recent American history. While...

Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By James M. McPherson. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 258. $25.00.) Like Douglas Southall Freeman and Bruce Catton before him, James M. McPherson has emerged as the best-known Civil War historian of his...

City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America.
January 1, 1998... By Donald L. Miller. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Pp. 704. $35.00.) In the last half decade, historians and Chicago readers have been treated to two high-quality urban "biographies" of the Windy City. The first of these, William...

O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 399. $55.00.) The authors of this book, both art historians, take a rather well-worn subject but examine it from a different perspective...

Icons of American protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman.
January 1, 1998... Edited by David Morgan. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi, 246. $35.00.) This volume is the product of one of David Morgan's research projects, which dates back to 1990. Later grants from the Louisville Institute for the...

Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860.
January 1, 1998... By Thomas D. Morris. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. x, 575. $49.95.) Thomas D. Morris presents the fullest and most probing explication to date of the policies and practices of the "laws" of slavery...

American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Joane Nagel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi, 298. $45.00.) In this important book, Nagel, a sociologist, examines the rise of American Indian identity and its relationship to the Red Power movement of the 1960s and...

The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900-1945.
January 1, 1998... By Thomas F. O'Brien. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 356. $49.95.) In the first half of "the American century," United States corporations entered Latin America in large numbers, and many of their executives...

The Army and Politics in Argentina, 1962-1973: From Frondizi's Fall to the Peronist Restoration.
January 1, 1998... By Robert A. Potash. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xv, 547. $55.00.) In 1969 Robert Potash published the first of a projected two-volume study of the Argentine military's role in politics from 1928 to 1962; the second...

Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.
January 1, 1998... By Jack N. Rakove. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Pp. xvi, 439. $35.00.) This book has two intertwined subjects. The first deals with the intellectual and political history of the framing of the Constitution; the second treats the...

The Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson in the Shadows of the Game.
January 1, 1998... By Mark Ribowsky. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Pp. 319. $23.00.) Josh Gibson, black baseball's greatest slugger, is a logical subject for Mark Ribowsky, who is also a biographer of Gibson's legendary contemporary, Satchel Paige....

Wild Bill Hickok: The Man and His Myth.
January 1, 1998... By Joseph G. Rosa. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. xxiv, 276. $24.95.) This is Rosa's latest offering on his favorite subject, James B. "Wild Bill" Hickok (1837-76), and marks a continuation of Rosa's effort to write the...

Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Jennifer Scanlon. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 278. $16.95.) Jennifer Scanlon has written a thoughtful and elegant study of the relationship between magazines, consumer culture, and the construction of womanhood in the...

State Trust Lands: History, Management and Sustainable Use.
January 1, 1998... By Jon A. Souder and Sally K. Fairfax. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. ix, 370. $40.00.) History is an essential tool for administrators and members of the public who seek to understand how governments function. Jon A....

Poor Richard's Principle: Recovering the American Dream Through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money.
January 1, 1998... By Robert Wuthnow. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 429. $24.95.) Many Americans today are suffering from an anxiety born of affluence and rising expectations. Workers earn more than ever before at jobs that are more...

A Modern History of Southeast Asia: decolonization, Nationalism and Separatism.
January 1, 1998... By Clive J. Christie. (London and New York: I B. Tauris Publishers, 1996. Pp. x, 286. $59.50.) This book represents scholarship at its best, despite the fact the title belies its content. Clive J. Christie's volume is not a modern history...

Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China.
January 1, 1998... By Prasenjit Duara. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. x, 275. $32.00.) Prasenjit Duara has embarked on an ambitious project--to rescue history from the nation. History needs rescuing, in the author's view, because...

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400.
January 1, 1998... Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts 600-1400. By Valerie Hansen. (New Haven: Yale University, 1995. Pp. vi, 285. $30.00.) Analyzing hundreds of private contracts, compilations of exemplary legal...

Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700-1947.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar. (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. Pp. 348, $32.00.) Its title notwithstanding, this useful anthology is as much a volume about science, nationalism, and modernity as it is about technology and...

The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937.
January 1, 1998... The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937. By Brian G. Martin. (Berkeley: University of Carolina Press, Pp. x, 314. $40.00.) The author of this book presents the best available account of Shanghai's dominant gang and...

Competition and Collaboration: Parsi Merchants and the English East India Company in Eighteenth-Century India.
January 1, 1998... By David L. White. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995. Pp. xxi, 194. $23.00.) Historians of both European expansion into Asia and Indian history agree on the pivotal importance of the period c. 1680-1740 in the economic and...

Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco.
January 1, 1998... By Judy Yung. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 395. $15.95.) By describing the transition from the old Chinese custom of binding women's feet to the second-generation Chinese-American unbinding of...

Criminal Church men in the Age of Edward III: The Case of Bishop Thomas de Lisle.
January 1, 1998... By John Aberth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Pp. xxiv, 280. $45.00.) In her valuable study of crime, Barbara Hanawalt showed that organized crime was widespread in fourteenth-century England; that there were...

Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.
January 1, 1998... By Steven E. Aschheim. (New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. x, 210. $40.00.) Culture and Catastrophe is a collection of essays concerned with issues of German and German-Jewish culture, their symbiosis, and the catastrophic...

Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945.
January 1, 1998... By Yehuda Bauer. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. vii, 306. $15.00.) In this book, the author, one of the foremost historians on the Holocaust, discusses one of the most controversial aspects of the genocide by...

The Birth of Absolutism: A History of France, 1598-1661.
January 1, 1998... By Yves-Marie Berce. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 262. $19.95.) Written in a sprightly, engaging style, this fresh and reflective study argues that royal absolutism was not necessarily the destiny of Bourbon France. At any...

Sonia's daughters: Prostitutes and Their regulation in Imperial Russia.
January 1, 1998... By Laurie Bernstein. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 344. $45.00.) This work is the first comprehensive study of prostitution in the Imperial period. Laurie Bernstein deepens our understanding generally of...

The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Michael Bush. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii, 445. $69.95.) The Pilgrimage of Grace--the Northern rising that was the most serious rebellion of Henry VIII's reign, and perhaps of the Tudor era--has...

European Jewry and the First Crusade.
January 1, 1998... By Robert Chazan. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. 380. $17.95.) Although much has been written in the past 10 years on the subject of the First Crusade and the Jews, Robert Chazan's book remains the...

Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Roger Chickering. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 538. $99.50.) The writing of broad historiographical works is a difficult undertaking. Those persons who are bold enough to take up this challenge must make...

The Empress Theophano: Byzantium and the West at the Turn of the First Millennium.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Adelbert Davids. (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press in association with the Institute for Eastern Christian Studies, 1995. Pp. xvi, 344. $59.95.) Holy Roman Emperor Otto I wanted a Byzantine princess for his son, Otto II....

Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature.
January 1, 1998... By Peter Berresford Ellis. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. Pp. 288. $25.00.) Peter Berresford Ellis has written a rather silly book about women in Celtic societies. What is it about the fields of Celtic...

Liberalism and Social Reform: Industrial Growth and Progressiste Politics in France, 1889-1914.
January 1, 1998... By David M. Gordon. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pp. i, 226. $59-95.) Even specialists in modern French history may fail to recognize Eugene Motte, Antoine Arbel, Georges Claudinon, and Francois de Wendel, the protagonists in David...

Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune.
January 1, 1998... By Roger V. Gould. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. vii, 253. $15.95.) The author of this study contrasts the Parisian revolts in 1848 and 1871; "the insurgents of mid-century fought . . . as workers, those of 1871 did so as...

The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade.
January 1, 1998... Edited by John Guy. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 313. $54.95.) This collection of 13 essays, most of which were first presented during a 1991 conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library, demonstrates...

The Spanish Economy, From the Civil War to the European Community.
January 1, 1998... By Joseph Harrison. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 78. $27.95.) One problem of modern Spanish history that has yet to receive a satisfactory explanation is the social and economic transformation that occurred during the...

The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806, vol 1, The Oxford History of Early Modern Europe.
January 1, 1998... By Jonathan Israel. Volume I, The Oxford History of Early Modern Europe. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xxx, 1231. $39.95.) Jonathan Israel's magnum opus is the first volume of the new Oxford History of Early Modern Europe. If Israel's...

Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia.
January 1, 1998... By Adele Lindenmeyr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 335. $49.50.) Taking Samuel Johnson's maxim that "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization" as her point of departure, the author of this...

The Druids: Priests of the Ancient Celts.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Paul R. Lonigan. (Westpoint: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pp. 144. $49.95.) There was an old saying, which this reviewer's good friend and mentor, Professor Gearoid MacEoin of University College, Galway, used on many occasions when works in...

Medieval Russia, 980-1584.
January 1, 1998... By Janet Martin. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xxv, 450. $65.00.) This book surveys the history of the medieval Russian state from its formation in the late tenth century to the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584. Martin...

Women in Antiquity.
January 1, 1998... Edited by Ian McAuslan and Peter Walcott, with an introduction by Gillian Clark. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 216. $19.95.) What do we know now about Greek and Roman women that we did not know in the early 1970s? This...

Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom, vol XXXIV, Studies in British History.
January 1, 1998... [Volume XXXIV, Studies in British History.] Edited, with an introduction, by Alan O'Day. (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Pp. vi, 404. $109.95.) No question excites interest among historians of the United Kingdom...

Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
January 1, 1998... By Norman Roth. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xvi, 429. $50.00.) The author's research considers the story of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interactions in medieval Spain. Most of this book is about the Jewish,...

The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... By Nicolai Rubinstein. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. ii, 154. $79.00.) The author of this book is the dean of Italian Renaissance historians in the English-speaking world and has drawn upon his half-century of study to write this...

Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860-1980.
January 1, 1998... By Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Pp. x, 322. $45.00.) Using demographic records and interviews, Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider study the century-long fertility decline in a Sicilian...

Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... Edited by Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xix, 292. $54.95.) The collective biography is a tried and tested means of making the history of women easily accessible, but it is beginning to...

Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940.
January 1, 1998... By Simon Szreter. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xix, 602. $74.95.) This work is a blockbuster of a book; it is monumental in size and scope, iconoclastic in its revisionism, and brilliant in its argumentation. Simon...

Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France.
January 1, 1998... By Geoffrey Treasure. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. xv, 413. $39.50.) This book is worthy of the author's surname. It is certainly the finest biography of Mazarin, to date, in any language. The organization is clear, and the...

When Capitalist Collide: Business Conflict and The End of Empire in Egypt.
January 1, 1998... By Robert Vitalis. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xxi, 282. $15.95.) Two groups of scholars will value this detailed study of rival capitalists seeking economic rents in pre-1952 Egypt. Members of the first group...

Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years.
January 1, 1998... By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. (New York: Scribner, 1995. Pp. 816. $18.00.) This book is a gracefully written and erudite world history of the past 10 centuries, intended for a general reading public and well worth its attention. The author...

At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995.
January 1, 1998... By George F. Kennan. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996. Pp. 351. $27.50.) This volume is a compilation of 40 essays, several previously unpublished, of widely varying length. Common to them all is the crystalline prose and thought...

Why the Allies Won.
January 1, 1998... By Richard Overy. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. Pp. xv, 396. $29.95.) Was there ever any doubt that the Allies would emerge victorious in the Second World War? Was the Allied cause not a just one, and victory, therefore,...

Mistress Stagg's petitioners: February 1642. (political participation of English women)
January 1, 1998... Women have always had political interests, even in periods when they were denied formal participation in political life. This was certainly true of English women in the mid-seventeenth century. Because accounts of their activities were framed...

Thomas Goode Jones and African American civil rights in the New South. (white southern leader)
January 1, 1998... While the Democratic party generally ruled the South before 1865, the defeat of the Confederacy brought Reconstruction and Republican rule to the region. Not until 1877 did the Democrats win enough elections to again become the dominant party...

The moderates in the League of Nations battle: an overlooked faction.
January 1, 1998... Following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919, where he played a major role in negotiating that treaty, which established the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson turned his attention to...

The Kenyan government and the Kikuyu independent schools: from attempted control to suppression, 1929-1952.
January 1, 1998... Prior to 1929, African elementary education in Kenya was primarily conducted by European Christian missionaries. In the 1920s, however, Kikuyu parents in Central Province became increasingly concerned about the quality and availability of the...

Fifty years of change: societal attitudes and women's fashions, 1900-1950.
January 1, 1998... Philosopher Anatole France once said that to see into the future, "I would take simply a fashion magazine in order to see how women will dress themselves....[T]heir fantasies would tell me more about future humanity than all the philosophers,...

The collapse of the Lenin personality cult in Soviet Russia, 1985-1995. (political leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin)
January 1, 1998... It is a devastating thing for a society to discover that its greatest myths are based not on truth but on propaganda and fantasy.(1) Viacheslav Shostokovskii The death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin in January 1924 was a terrible blow to the...