The Historian articles from June 1994

The Historian archives from June 1994

James F. Byrnes and the politics of segregation. (speech by former Phi AlphaTheta President Thomas S. Morgan)(Transcript)
June 22, 1994... Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1934, Thomas S. Morgan received his B.A. from Davidson College, his M.A. from Duke University, and his Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill. He taught in high school in Baltimore, Maryland, and at Wake Forest University,...

Fighting everything German in Texas, 1917-1919.
June 22, 1994... As the United States entered the twentieth century, many Americans felt that the American way of life was under serious challenge. The year 1890 marked the dosing of the frontier, and many worried its dose would end democracy as they had known...

Racism in Japanese in U.S. wartime propaganda.
June 22, 1994... During World War II, propaganda produced by Japanese and American artists reflected and shaped the emotions and attitudes of that era. The messages that these two nations conveyed through their graphic propaganda reveal a good deal more about...

Public health in U.S. and west African cities, 1870-1900.
June 22, 1994... Africa has given rise to many myths. In current phrasing, Africa has had a bad press. Although historians no longer seriously use terms such as the "Dark Continent" in their writings, they were formerly accepted by most scholars, and remnants of...

British working women and the First World War.
June 22, 1994... Many in World War I-era Britain believed the war would be a turning point for women. The war created a new image of the woman worker, who left oven and cribside to go to work for the first time, who was rewarded by a grateful nation with the...

Antislavery politics and the Pearl incident of 1848.
June 22, 1994... As the debate over slavery intensified in the United States before the Civil War, antislavery agitators exploited events to increase public indignation against slavery and the "Slave Power." The Daily Union of Washington, D.C., labeled two such...

The Elizabethan "foreign office."
June 22, 1994... Although the British Foreign Office as it is known today was not established until 1782, a "foreign office" emerged in all but name at least two centuries earlier. The historian Garrett Mattingly maintains that "a first-rate diplomatic service"...

Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In his analysis of the struggle of the African peasantry of the Transvaal colony to regain their ancestral lands during the Anglo-Boer War, Jeremy Krikler notes that "in many ways, the history of the rural Transvaal in the early twentieth century...

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400-1680.
June 22, 1994... Traditional accounts of the "Age of Discovery" often overlooked the role of the "discovered parties" in the making of the New World. Typically, European travelers took center stage, emerging as either villains or heroes depending on the slant of...

Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Other than the problems of economic mismanagement and political instability in the independent African nation state, few issues have attracted more attention recently than that of ethnic particularity and its attendant nepotism. Africans have...

"Brother Woodrow": A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson.
June 22, 1994... The publication of the final narrative volume of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, a project to which Arthur S. Link has devoted so much of his life and talents, has been the occasion for an important discussion of the future of documentary editing...

Liberty, Justice, Order: Writings as Past Politics.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Political history of the United States does not enjoy much of a vogue among academic readers. It focuses largely on the endeavors of elite, dead, white males coping with issues of public policy by reconciling conflicts within the social order....

The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the1920s.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Any work of comparative women's history should be welcomed with open arms, because cross-national perspectives can be especially illuminating. In Christine Bolt's The Women's Movements, one would hope to find a systematic and focused comparison...

Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Fritz Pollard, a pioneer in professional American football, is the subject of this well-written biography by John Carroll. Blending a variety of source materials, including extensive oral histories, Carroll describes how Pollard overcame a...

Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Prisoners without Trial tells of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Roger Daniels brings some three decades of scholarship, a well-considered thesis, and a dear prose style to this subject. With a sure hand, Daniels guides...

The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In the annals of American railroad history, one company stands out as truly heroic, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company (B & O). Although this Baltimore-based carrier gained considerable recognition in the twentieth century for the innovative...

The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The cotton textile mills of Massachusetts were industrial pioneers in the nineteenth century. Laurence F. Gross emphasizes that the Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell foreshadowed industrial decay in the twentieth century and observes that these mills...

The Making and Remaking of Asian America Through Immigration Policy: 1850-1990.
June 22, 1994... This book, a valuable addition to the increasingly rich literature on Asian Americans, is the first comprehensive study of the impact of U.S. immigration policies and laws on the development of six Asian-American communities - Filipinos, Chinese,...

The Arabists: Romance of an American Elite.
June 22, 1994... In The Arabists, Robert D. Kaplan examines American Arabists from the missionaries of the early republic to the foreign service officers who stumbled into the Persian Gulf War of 1990. By "Arabists," Kaplan means those "men and women . . . who...

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The Rockefeller family is known in contemporary America for its philanthropy and for its place in political and business history. In this biography, Bernice Kert suggests that Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948), wife of John D. Rockefeller,...

Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This book assesses the culture of consumer capitalism from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Depression. William Leach argues that his work goes beyond economic analysis "to see the culture as a whole, as a complex set of relations...

Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917-1920.
June 22, 1994... It used to be so simple. There were the Bolsheviks; there were the Americans. There was Lenin; there was Wilson. One aspired to world revolution; the other sought the expansion of liberal capitalism. Two nations were separated by different...

Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Dean Acheson played a decisive role in shaping the postwar international order and defined the basic tenets of postwar U.S. foreign policy for the next several decades. During Acheson's tenure as secretary of state, the United States made a...

Cortes: The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Richard Lee Marks calls his biography of Cortes a "story of ancient glories" (335), a phrase that well conveys its romantic and uncritical spirit. The book may fairly be said to belong to an old-fashioned "trumpet-and-strumpet" school of writing,...

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Strategic Communicator.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... For many people, Dwight Eisenhower personifies the United States during the 1950s: a nation satisfied with the status quo and interested only in stopping communism. Eisenhower's rhetoric has been characterized as uninspired and circular. Yet,...

George Washington and American Constitutionalism.
June 22, 1994... Neither a systematic thinker nor a brilliant prose stylist, George Washington is easily overlooked by students of U.S. constitutionalism. The commander-in-chief was the "indispensable man" in the revolutionary struggle for independence, but other...

Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago Civil Rights Movement.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... It has long been conventional wisdom to view the civil rights campaign led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago in 1966-67 as resulting in failure not only for King but for the entire...

Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Philippa Strum has supplemented her highly praised biography, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People, with a brief analysis of his political thought. This latest work is particularly significant, since Brandeis was not a systematic thinker who...

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Writing a biography is an awesome task, for the biographer must make sense of another person's life and, most importantly, must illuminate that individual's inner self. As Robert M. Utley notes in the preface to this book, the task is even more...

Persistent Oligarchs: Elites and Politics in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1910-1940.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Mark Wasserman has written extensively on the evolution of society in the important northern Mexican state of Chihuahua during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His latest work complements his earlier Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution:...

New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Early twentieth-century suffragists and the later proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment faced the greatest obstacles and realized the least success in the U.S. South. Of the southern states, only Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas could...

The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Leonard Y. Andaya has written a valuable historiographic study of the colonial European period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Maluku, the Pacific islands of Eastern Indonesia. The author places these islands, especially Ternate...

Kimono: Fashioning Culture.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This beautifully designed and felicitously illustrated volume is as enjoyable to read as it is to behold. An anthropologist thoroughly familiar with Japanese language and culture, Liza Crihfield Dalby draws on her earlier participant...

Chiang Kai-Shek's Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Ch'en Chieh-Ju.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This volume contains a tale within a tale. The first is the purported memoir of the second Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The second outlines the obstacles placed in the way of the memoir's U.S. publication. This second tale is far more intriguing and...

Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri, 1869-1947.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In this book, Ranajit Das Gupta analyzes the social, economic, and political changes in the district of Jalpaiguri, north Bengal, from the inception of the district in 1869 to India's independence in 1947. The book begins with a discussion of...

Old Malacca.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This is a delightfully old-fashioned little volume, with glossy cardboard covers and maps of Southeast Asia and Malacca along with twenty-six photographs in both black and white and sumptuous color. Today, in bustling and thriving Southeast Asia,...

Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This volume contains essays by six scholars who examine the urban history of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Shanghai, all of which were major cities in the Jiangnan (literally, "south of the River") region. Situated in the lower reaches of the...

Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society Under Vijayanagar Rule.
June 22, 1994... Noboru Karashima's Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society under Vijayanagar Rule focuses on the problems of socio-economic development in South india from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and provides a sequel to his earlier work...

The Japanese Merchant Marine in World War II.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This work aims to present the other side of America's submarine war against Japan in the Pacific, with a focus, as Mark Parillo puts it, "on the Japanese maritime transport network and the Imperial Navy's forlorn attempts to protect it" (xiii)....

Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor.
June 22, 1994... Shanghai on Strike explores the important role of Shanghai labor unrest In the modern political transformation of China. It focuses primarily on the origins and dynamics of Shanghai's labor culture and its tradition of strike protest, with only...

Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers'Jaws.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... One sometimes feels that the wont aspect of dying in an airplane crash would be the inability to communicate one's last thoughts and emotions. In this book, Lynn A. Struve allows the experience of those who were butchered in the infamous 1645...

A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c. 1422-c. 1485.
June 22, 1994... Eric Acheson examines the fifteenth-century gentry of Leicestershire as landholders, members of a county social community, leaders in shire government, members of wider family units, and as individuals. In broad terms he contends that the gentry...

Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain, 1884-1914.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In the 1880s Lord Salisbury complained that Britain's landed elite found itself in a struggle for political existence, a "bloodless civil war." Its ability to escape political oblivion, at least for a couple of decades, forms the subject of...

The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security, 1918-1957.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... As a subject of historical investigation, the European search for stability has often been overlooked in favor of the causes of instability and war. This is changing. In this superb new collection of twenty-one essays, some of the most prominent...

Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871.
June 22, 1994... In order to address the interwoven problems of Industrialization, class formation, and political change, Ronald Aminzade analyzes the historical processes in France that led to the failure of the century's social revolutions and to the triumph of...

Germany After the First World War.
June 22, 1994... Richard Bessel, one of today's preeminent modern German social historians, has made another fascinating contribution to the study of the Weimar Republic, focusing this time on the Great War, the immediate postwar period, and the problems of...

The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... R. O. Bucholz's purpose is "to fill a gap in our understanding not only of the later Stuart court, but of the constitutional, political, financial, social, and cultural history of Augustan England" and to explain "why an institution that had...

Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In July 1642, barely a month before Charles I raised his standard at Oxford, Benjamin Rudyerd warned the House of Commons, "If blood once again begins to touch blood, we shall presently fall into a certain misery" (64). In the tradition of S. L....

Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Students of the period will welcome the republication of David Chandler's 1979 Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars. Chandler's compendium covers 1,200 subjects with such literary flair that the reader soon abandons focused inquiry for the pleasure...

The Greek Civil War, 1943-1950: Studies of Polarization.
June 22, 1994... This volume of essays seeks to bring a comprehensive understanding of the Greek Civil War to the English-reading public. The book is needed because of the broader importance of this struggle as the first armed conflict of the Cold War and because...

Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This is a pioneering investigation of a difficult but important topic how ancient Greek dries managed their water supplies. Dora P. Crouch, an urban historian who has studied dries as diverse as Palmyra and Santa Fe, draws on several disciplines...

Marriage, Wife-Beating, and the Law in Victorian England.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In this slim monograph, Maeve E. Doggett establishes the relationship between wife beating, coverture, and the fiction of marital unity, and then uses it to examine the changing law regarding wife beating in Victorian England. Longstanding legal...

Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This book is a translation of an important study of French social and cultural history that first appeared in 1986 as La vie fragile. Using the judicial archives of the eighteenth cent, Arlette Farge brings the lower classes of Paris to life....

Russian Peasant Women.
June 22, 1994... Academic publishing today appears to be driven chiefly by pecuniary considerations, so that many worthy manuscripts remain unpublished simply because they do not relate to any well-publicized scholarly agenda that could enhance their...

Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity inBrittany.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Caroline Ford has put together a well-reasoned study that examines the relationship between religion and the development of French national identity in the lower Breton department of Finistere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Fuhrer State, 1933-1945.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This short introduction to the Third Reich begins with a description of a major event that represents the book's primary theme - in this case Hitler's "double coup" in 1934 against the SA leadership under Ernst Rohm and the Nazi Party's...

Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English Civil War, 1642-1649.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Christopher Hibbert's book on the English Civil War is a wonderfully readable narrative of the events of the 1640s. This is popular history in the best sense - painstakingly researched, but aimed at a general audience. Hibbert is little...

Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World: 1571-1640.
June 22, 1994... The purpose of Ronald C. Jennings' scholarly tome is "to give the history of a small, largely Greek-speaking and mostly Greek Orthodox island" under Ottoman Turkish rule between 1571 and 1640 (6). Because of its strategic location between Europe...

History and the Historians of Medieval Spain.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This is a massive work of extraordinary wit and erudition. Witty volumes on the subject of medieval Spain are rare, to say the least, but Peter Linehan's accomplishment is also unusual with regard to the more common virtue of erudition. No one...

Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914-1950.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The importance of mass reading habits is well recognized by historians, although few have had much to say about them or have done sustained research on the subject. Arguably, popular reading first took hold and the press developed in its modern...

Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pieta of Florence.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Carol Bresnahan Menning's book investigates how a charitable organization, the Monte di Pieta of Florence, evolved from a pawnshop for the poor into a full-service bank, serving the Florentine elite and becoming a tool for the Florentine dukes'...

Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The title of this book is misleading. It is not about the English Revolution or the Restoration, but (as the subtitle more accurately indicates) the period in between. Seven authors assess the accomplishments of the Interregnum, which did not...

The First Jesuits.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The First Jesuits is required reading for anyone interested in late medieval piety, religious life, Catholic Reform/Counter Reformation, and the Society of Jesus. In this work John W. O'Malley traces the origins of the Society of Jesus in the...

Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War.
June 22, 1994... Why another book on Chamberlain and appeasement? R. A. C. Parker gives no due at the start; there is no preface, no general introduction. Rather, he begins with a chapter on disparate elements of Chamberlain's personality and policy, which, taken...

Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850-1900.
June 22, 1994... As Dermot Quinn's bibliography reminds us, the Roman Catholic revival in nineteenth-century England and Scotland has received much scholarly attention in recent decades. Quinn's book is the first, however, to focus specifically on the...

The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648-1652.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... With no general synthesis in English since P. R. Doolin's book, published in 1935, the long-awaited study of the Fronde by Orest Ranum will be welcomed by students and scholars alike. Since more specialist works in English, such as Sal Westrich's...

A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Joachim Remak's title, A Very Civil War, may explain why his is the first work in English on the Sonderbund War; small wars with few casualties attract less attention. Yet, it might be argued that these are exactly the wars we should study, where...

Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain: 1750-1990.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... W. D. Rubinstein's avowed aim "is to analyze and dispute a widely held theory of Britain's 'economic decline' since the mid-nineteenth century, and to offer an alternative view" (1). He criticizes the view that Britain was the first to become an...

One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Three-fourths of this book are a superb narrative of Napoleon's road to Waterloo from the day he left the island of Elba to the day he left Paris to take charge of the French army assembled on the Belgiam frontier. It often an excellent,...

Demosthenes and His Time: A Study in Defeat.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Demosthenes' lifetime (384/3-322/1 B.C.) was a troubled period in the history of Greece. It has received much attention of late, but more from the perspective of Philip II and the Macedonians than from that of Demosthenes and the Athenians....

Revolutionary Justice in Paris: 1789-1790.
June 22, 1994... This book examines "a group of largely forgotten judicial affairs of 1789-1790" to analyze early revolutionary treatment of political opposition (223). Barry M. Shapiro's fascinating research concentrates on two institutions, the Paris Comite des...

The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600-1740.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In the past quarter-century a number of studies have appeared in English to give the modern history of Vienna the attention it richly deserves. John Spielman's The City and the Crown commands the available published primary and secondary...

Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theater in Seventeenth-Century Spain.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Louise K. Stein examines the dramatic function of music in the seventeenth-century Spanish theater. In Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theater in Seventeenth-Century Spain, supported by an impressive array of musical examples...

European Revolutions: 1492-1992.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... World events have made it opportune to publish this brief but sweeping comparison. The work begins with a theoretical discussion of revolution, followed by a broad outline of state and capital transformation since 1492. Succeeding chapters...

The Nobility of Holland: From Knights to Regents, 1500-1650.
June 22, 1994... Although H. A. Enno van Gelder in 1930 was the first historian to question the traditional picture of the economic, social, and political decline of the nobility of Holland on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, not until English historians debated the...

German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad 1938-1945.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This book concerns the efforts of groups and individuals inside Germany to make contacts with the outside world in order to facilitate their goal of ridding Germany of Hitler. They sought understanding, encouragement, and support for their...

Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... For connoisseurs of the exotic, the bizarre, or the downright unhinged, anti-Catholicism in Victorian England offers a rich field of study Fear of popery amounted to a national obsession and, in an age of social rigidity, a surprisingly classless...

The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This book provides a clear, updated outline of the attempt by Goebbels' Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda to influence and mold German public opinion. David Welch has managed to compress a complex end heavily researched topic into...

The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power, and Religious Belief in Early Modern France.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... One of the landmark events in the French Wars of Religion was the 1593 conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism, an act that allowed the Protestant king to retake his rebellious capital and begin the pacification of the kingdom. Important as this...

The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The Past in Ruins is more a creative synthesis of social theory than a work of conventional history. It is something of a guided tour of postmodernist literature that is broadly conceived and judiciously balanced, and it should be widely read....

Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This paperback edition of E. L. Jones' Growth Recurring published only five years after the original hardback edition may bring the book the readership that it deserves. It is a highly original, brightly written essay that challenges conventional...