The Historian articles from June 1993

The Historian archives from June 1993

The Center for the History of Freedom. (Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri)
June 22, 1993... The Center for the History of Freedom was founded at Washington University in St. Louis in 1985, with J. H. Hexter as its first director and R. W. Davis as associate director. In 1989, Davis became the director of the center. The purpose of the...

Remembering the Ghetto Uprising at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (1943 Jewish uprising against German forces in Warsaw, Poland) (Illustration)
June 22, 1993... On the eve of Passover, just after daybreak on 19 April 1943, a German police patrol entered the Warsaw Ghetto to begin rounding up the ghetto's remaining 62,000 Jewish inhabitants for deportation to concentration and death camps. As the patrol...

Health care in the coal fields: the Miners Memorial Hospital Association.
June 22, 1993... Social theorists have long been interested in public health. Most have agreed that good health is central to any society's general well being, while few have argued for denying health care because of an inability to pay. Arguments over public...

The empress' new clothes and Japanese women, 1868-1912. (Empress Haruko's adoption of Western dress)
June 22, 1993... The Empress of Japan shifted from Japanese dress to Western clothing for public appearances in 1886. The scholarly literature on Japan has treated this sartorial transformation as part of a craze for things Western represented by the...

Senator Borah's crusade to save small business from the New Deal. (William E. Borah)
June 22, 1993... Although contemporaries viewed William E. Borah as a giant of the U.S. Senate, the Idaho Republican's historical reputation remains controversial because of his opposition to major policies of the Roosevelt administration. Borah's political...

"Let them eat cake": the mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution.
June 22, 1993... One of the most universally believed facts" about the French Revolution is the famous line attributed to Marie Antoinette: If the people have no bread, then let them eat cake." No reputable biographer has traced the remark to her, nor has any...

Church and City, 1000-1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Two of Christopher Brooke's interests throughout his scholarly career have been medieval cities and the medieval church. The articles in this collection address both of these concerns, for each of them involves some aspect of the relation...

Bureaucrats and Beggars: French Social Policy in the Age of Enlightenment.
June 22, 1993... In this carefully researched and well-written book on the depots de mendiciti, institutions in which beggars and vagrants were incarcerated, Thomas McStay Adams traces the development of social policy in eighteenth-century France. Analyzing the...

The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored.
June 22, 1993... In this, volume 2 of Abraham Ascher's magisterial study of the Russian Revolution of 1905, he analyzes the political events Of 1906-1907, an era formerly dismissed by Soviet scholars as the "decline" of the Revolution. As the author shows, this...

The Tudor Nobility.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Many are the inkwells expended over the English nobility, particularly those of the Tudor era, with their retainers, friends, tenants, and the sovereign. The seven studies and introduction included in this book illustrate the range of the...

Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Eugenio F. Biagini reexamines liberal politics in nineteenth-century Britain and studies in considerable detail the social background of the rank-and-file supporters of radical and liberal reform. More than just recounting party politics,...

Martin Luther: Theology and Revolution.
June 22, 1993... In 1980, when Gerhard Brendler accepted the East German government's call to write a biography of Martin Luther that would reflect its decision to rehabilitate the reformer in time for the five-hundredth-birthday festivities in 1983, he little...

Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499.
June 22, 1993... In this mammoth study, based on almost twenty years of research in archival sources, Christine Carpenter does not provide a comprehensive account of the late medieval Warwickshire aristocracy. Indeed, she ignores certain important questions...

Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660-1760.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Ireland in the eighteenth century has often been called "the Ascendancy"; the period of its history in which the social, economic, cultural, religious, legal, and governmental aspects of life in Ireland were dominated and controlled by the...

Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This book brings together ten of Robert V. Daniels' articles and conference papers on the history of early Soviet Russia. It is a welcome addition to the existing scholarly literature on this subject. Daniels is one of the most creative and...

Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The general reader will find this a hard book, but one worth persisting with. Doyne Dawson's aim "is to provide an outline account of one of the most distinctive traditions of ancient Greek political thought: the literary depiction of imaginary...

Charles, Earl Grey: Aristocratic Reformer.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... John W. Derry, long a fixture at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and an important contributor in the field of British regency Politics, now turns his considerable expertise to the life of Charles, Earl Grey, and the politics of his times....

Target Hitler: The Plots to Kill Hitler.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... An impressive succession of individuals attempted to assassinate Hitler starting in the 1920s, though more frequently after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. That he survived these attempts is not overly surprising and was certainly not due to...

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-39.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This major work provides a striking reinterpretation of the role of the gold standard in the international economy during the interwar years. Although the gold standard has long been regarded as an ideal stabilizing mechanism, Barry Eichengreen...

Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol.
June 22, 1993... This intriguing but uneven book began as a doctoral dissertation on unreformed health care for the poor. The core discussion of Bristol's medical system from the patient's perspective remains the most vital aspect of the book. In the early...

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In this narrative history of Germany from 1918 to 1990 Mary Fulbrook finds nothing that was inevitable, nothing that was destined, nothing that came of some national character defect, nothing that resulted from a "wrong turn" in history. Thus,...

Shokan - Hirohito's Samurai: Leaders of the Japanese Armed Forces, 1926-1945.
June 22, 1993... This book consists of hundreds of brief biographies of Japanese admirals and generals, and some officers of lesser rank, who served from 1926 to 1945. It also contains organizational charts for the Imperial Army and Navy, accurate for most of...

Hidden Ally: The French Resistance, Special Operations and the Landings in Southern France, 1944.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The military contribution of the resistance to the liberation of France has often been underestimated by historians. Admittedly in the case of Operation Overlord, the name given to the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the resistance was...

Landownership and Power in Modern Europe.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Landed property, pace Durkheim, is the most ancient form of property known, significant because it constitutes a bond. This collection of papers dealing with landownership in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916-1920.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The connection between waging war and engaging the ensuing peace, between victory and political strategy, is the subject of this book. Halfway through World War I the British began to plan for the peace settlement that would follow the war. The...

Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland: 1850-1914.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... With this study another gap in the history of Scottish labor has been bridged. Eleanor Gordon has focused on working women in Scotland from 1850 to 1914, with particular emphasis on the effect of gender ideologies on women in the work force....

Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688-1689.
June 22, 1993... With this book Richard L. Greaves brings his trilogy on the British radicals of the Restoration era to a triumphant conclusion - triumphant in tracing the continuity and connections of radical endeavors with the same detail and clarity as in...

The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian.
June 22, 1993... The title of Bridget Hill's study of Catharine Macaulay, Republican Virago, reflects the ambivalent feelings of even "enlightened" Europeans toward independent, intelligent, and radical women. "As a historian, a political polemicist, a...

The Baltic and the Outbreak of the Second World War.
June 22, 1993... The Baltic and the outbreak of the Second World War marks an important contribution to understanding the origins of the 1939 war in Europe. Stimming from a 1990 conference at the University of Bradford, these eight essays define the Baltic...

The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar, 1274-1580.
June 22, 1993... This study of crusading activity from the Second Council of Lyons to the Habsburg-Ottoman truce provides a valuable survey of military campaign, governmental planning religious evolution, and social change. It will be welcomed as a useful...

The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means.
June 22, 1993... As this review is written, the Intifada is entering its sixth year. For the historian, five years, Particularly when they cover the recent past and trust into the present, is too brief a period to generate "history". Still, the historian can...

Liberty Secured? Britain Before and After 1688.
June 22, 1993... The nine contributors to Liberty Secured, a volume in the Making of Modern Freedom series edited by R. W. Davis, aim to explain what and for whom liberties were seam after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The impression is that only, the...

Scotland and War: A.D. 79-1918.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This is one of several recent collections of essays designed to bring Scottish history to a wider public. Because the history of the Northern Kingdom is so little studied, the general reader will experience difficulties with the degree of...

Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.
June 22, 1993... As this most murderous of centuries comes to an end, Robert Melson's useful, essential monograph provides historians with conceptual tools to deal with the age's most gruesome creation - genocide. He accomplishes this grim task by analyzing the...

Charles James Fox.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... There has long been a need for a definitive scholarly biography of Charles James Fox, Charles II's great-great-grandson, who became "The Man of the People" and the patron saint of nineteenth-century Whigs and Victorian Liberals. Shortly after...

A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In this sweeping study of the origins of culture of Western science, David F. Noble describes the absence of women from the world of science as an intellectual and institutional legacy of the male-dominated Christian religious tradition. He...

The Engineer of Revolution: L.B. Krasin and the Bolsheviks, 1870-1926.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Timothy Edward O'Connor, who has written previously on Soviet intellectual-spetsialists Anatolii Lunacharskii and G. V. Chicherin, has now turned to L. B. Krasin, early commissar of foreign trade and international diplomat. Arranged in...

Germany's Rude Awakening: Censorship in the Land of the Brothers Grimm.
June 22, 1993... Censorship prevailed among the German states after the defeat of Napoleon until the revolutions of 1848. It was instituted at the Confederal level beginning with the Carlsbad Decrees c)f 1819; however, it had already been imposed by some rulers...

Bernadotte: Napoleon's Marshal, Sweden's King.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Alan Palmer's ever-extending net of historical writing now encompasses this biography of Bernadotte. This book is well written, easy to read, and, as such, yet another testament to this author's enduring popularity with a wide reading public....

A Different World for Women: The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Millicent Garrett Fawcett was the leader of the moderate women's suffrage movement from the late nineteenth century until shortly after the vote was granted to women aged thirty and above in 1918. Although David Rubenstein focuses on Fawcett's...

The Revolution of 1688: Changing Perspectives.
June 22, 1993... Drawn almost exclusively from papers delivered at a 1989 conference sponsored jointly by the Folger Shakespeare library and George Washington university, the sixteen essays in this volume cover a wide range of subjects in the ongoing...

Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660-1725.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Prosecution and Punishment is a splendid complement to the standard interpretations of crime and society in eighteenth-century England previously published by Douglas Hay and E. P. Thompson. Those works concentrated on felonies to illuminate...

Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In this excellent study of Brittany during the Carolingian age, Julia M. H. Smith has made an important contribution to Carolingian studies. The originality of the book stems primarily from her unique conceptual approach. Smith seeks to assess...

Our Great Solicitor: Josiah C. Wedgewood and the Jews.
June 22, 1993... In this slim volume Joshua B. Stein has not attempted to write a full-scale biography of Josiah C. Wedgewood IV, but focuses on his efforts to help the Jews of Palestine and central and eastern Europe. For a full life Stein still deferentially...

Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance.
June 22, 1993... The subtitle is precise and telling: Nancy S. Struever has written a book on ethical inquiry, not a text on Renaissance ethics. Each of her five subjects - Petrarch, Cusanus, Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne - undertook a profoundly original...

Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c.1500-1640.
June 22, 1993... This study of 202 town halls built or refurbished in 178 English towns during a construction boom between the Reformation and the Civil War demonstrates the value of physical evidence - here the "built environment" - as a supplement to written...

The Early Germans.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This book will prove invaluable to nonspecialists. Malcolm Todd summarizes in the first part what is known about the premigration Germans and in the second half concentrates on the ethnogenesis of the individual tribes and their settlement...

Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan: The Corporate Villages of Tokuchin-ho.
June 22, 1993... Hitomi Tonomura's study of Tokuchin-ho, a rural locality in central Japan, is one of the few works in English to look below the upper crust of medieval Japan. Meticulously scrutinizing surviving documents, she shows that the political...

Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century.
June 22, 1993... D. Underdown never fails to entertain as well as to inform, and in this; elegantly constructed and gracefully written history of the modest county town of Dorchester he has provided a distinguished addition to the history of towns in the early...

Milton's 'History of Britain': Republican Historiography in the English Revolution.
June 22, 1993... In this revised version of Nicholas von Maltzahn's Oxford doctoral thesis, an outstanding study of Milton's History of Britain, the author deftly explores such key questions as dating, methodology, sources, and historical context. Although not...

National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926-1932.
June 22, 1993... The Labour minority government of 1929, with James Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister, faced what most contemporary commentators recognized as a true national crisis when the worldwide economic collapse hit the British, Empire. MacDonald...

Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This volume makes few pretensions to originality or high scholarship. In a book written to accompany a British television series on anti-Semitism, Robert S. Wistrich presents a popular overview of the subject with an emphasis on recent...

Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South.
June 22, 1993... In his jacket blurb for Singing the Master, Henry Louis Gates accurately lauds Roger D. Abrahams as "one of the preeminent scholars of Afro-American vernacular culture." Indeed, Abrahams is probably the most celebrated living preservationist of...

Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal.
June 22, 1993... Did political federalism, instead of flawed New Deal vision, constrain national reform in states, cities,, and rural counties during the Depression ers? In pursuing that question, Douglas Carl Abrams argues that strong Democratic organization,...

The Eagle-Dragon Alliance: America's Relations with China in World War Two.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... World War II was an important period for U.S. relations with China. During this period - for the first time - the United States became more embroiled in China than the traditional European powers. Basing his work on a wide array of...

John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice.
June 22, 1993... For a justice of such importance, students of the Supreme Court ha,,e given slight attention to John Marshall Harlan, the "Great Dissenter." Harlan served for thirty-three years, from 1877 to 1911, and his opinions, both for the majority and in...

A Ship to Remember: The Maine and the Spanish-American War.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Congress authorized the steel, steam-powered battle cruiser Maine in 1886 and the keel was laid in 1888. By the time it was launched in 1895, the vessel had been upgraded to a second-class battleship whose armament, size, and cruising range...

The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In this elegantly written And handsomely produced book, Richard L. Bushman examines the efforts of Americans to create a genteel culture and spread refinement throughout the population between 1700 and 1850. Making imaginative use of...

Unholy Grail: The U.S. and the Wars in Vietnam, 1965-1968.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Larry Cable focuses on the "intellectual constructs of the Johnson Administration" that led to the massive build up of U.S. forces in South Vietnam in 1965 (ix). There is much to agree with in this volume. Cable correctly identifies most of the...

Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Albert Castel's exhaustive research, vivid narrative, and controversial interpretations make this book a must for military historians and Civil War buffs. Despite a mass of technical details, the general reader will also find it fired with...

France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Frank Castigliola's new study deals with the most difficult relationship the United States had with a Western ally during the Cold War. He looks at the "cold alliance" between the United States and France not only in terms of the diplomatic...

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Union Major-General William Rosecrans telegraphed, We have met with a serious disaster." Twenty years later Confederate General Daniel Hill called it a "barren victory [that] sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy" (536). Peter Cozzens,...

Watergate and Afterward: The Legacy of Richard M. Nixon.
June 22, 1993... The occasion was a conference on the Nixon presidency held at Hofstra University in November 1987, and assembled to provide a retrospective were journalists, jurists, scholars, and former aides. Thanks to Leon Friedman and William R...

We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In this book, James W. Geary intends to provide a general, but analytical, history of the Civil War draft in the North" (x). He wants to show "how the Union draft evolved, and how it affected Northerners and their attitudes toward the draft"...

The Salem Witch Crisis.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This book does almost exactly what Larry Gragg promises it will do and does it well. He offers the general reader a coherent, readable, straightforward narrative of the Salem witchcraft episode. He tells the "good story" he sets out to tell -...

Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... One of the new research areas in studying the West looks at the experiences of children on the frontier. With the publication of this book, Elizabeth Hampsten provides new insights into the lives and experiences of children of the first...

Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The nineteenth-century West produced a surprising number of the nation's leading historians, philosophers, and novelists. Josiah Royce, Jr., a young man from Gold Rush-era California, became a prominent Harvard professor and made important...

The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America.
June 22, 1993... The U.S. system of child welfare and social services for homeless or delinquent youngsters has once again aroused a sense of crisis. The United States is a nation obsessed with its children, never more so than when those children come to public...

A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Few subjects have been as fiercely debated by U.S. historians as the origin and meaning of the Cold War. The first comprehensive study of these subjects to appear after that war's end surely deserves full attention. It deserves it all the more...

The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... William Lee Miller relates the story of James Madison's contributions to the founding of the American republic in the years 1784-1791. He writes in a lively, conversational style that is unusual for such a sober topic and for a professor at a...

Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Those teaching survey courses in modern U.S. history were glad to see the release of the Norton's Twentieth Century America series. Previously released volumes by John Cooper, John Patrick Diggins, and John Morton Blum proved to be workable and...

Early American Methodism.
June 22, 1993... This slim volume, three of whose six chapters have appeared in Methodist History, is not for the uninitiated reader. It is "self-consciously a revisionist endeavor," and its interpretive concerns and analytical procedures make it fully...

In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s.
June 22, 1993... In his timely case study of social welfare and juvenile reform in Boston, Eric C. Schneider provides a nuanced and provocative interpretation of successive attempts to redeem the poor. Employing a Gramscian hegemonic analysis, he charges...

The U.S. Navy, the Mediterranean, and the Cold War: 1945-1947.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This is a straightforward account of the deployment of US. Navy vessels in the Mediterranean during the early years of the Cold War within the context of Western and Soviet rivalries in post-World War II Europe, the Middle East, and North...

The American Political Nation: 1838-1893.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Joel H. Silbey's valuable study of U.S. political history from the 1830s to the 1890s synthesizes many recent monographs and much primary material, analyzes the structure of party politics in these years, and offers an interpretation rooted in...

John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Most early twentieth-century Progressives were middle-class moralists who supported a few reform issues that were either social or political in nature and helped preserve or acquire power for their followers. According to Tom Sitton the...

The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers.
June 22, 1993... In this comprehensive history of the Shakers Stephen J. Stein examines this movement within a broad developmental framework, reflecting forces at work in society as a whole as well as among the Believers. It is the definitive historical study...

Tea Party Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776.
June 22, 1993... This work is the third and final volume of a trilogy about British relations with the American colonies from 1763 to 1776. In Tea Party to Independence, Peter D. G. Thomas examines what he calls the third phase of the American Revolution, the...

The American Encounter with Buddhism: 1844-1912, Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent.
June 22, 1993... Americans' reports of their encounters with Buddhism in the nineteenth century - like Thomas A. Tweed's excellent study on the subject - tell modern readers much more about American culture than about Buddhism. Tweed explores various Western...

John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire.
June 22, 1993... In this fascinating book., William Earl Weeks argues that John Quincy Adams was the greatest secretary of state in American history. Adams' skillful and resolute negotiation of the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819 resulted not only in the...

Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... David A. Zonderman calls his analysis of writings by the first generation of New England factory workers (1815-1850) "working-class intellectual history"(4). He applies to his materials the qualitative, literary techniques of traditional...

The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State.
June 22, 1993... Basil Davidson is unmatched as a popularizer of African history, and this work, like its predecessors, will be widely read and influential, not the least among Africans. The book is very readable. Davidson's literary skills were honed in...

African Philosophy: Traditional Yoruba Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities.
June 22, 1993... With an unusual combination of university degrees in philosophy, government, economics, and African studies, Segun Gbadegesin is well placed to write this interesting book. Added to this is the advantage of being a member of the culture that he...

The Slave Coast of West Africa: 1550-1750.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... One of the ironies of modern historical scholarship is that interest in the non-European peoples of the Atlantic basins - wider and more intense than ever before - cannot be met without mastering European sources. Robin Law's earlier work on...