The Historian articles from June 1995

The Historian archives from June 1995

Geoffrey Barraclough: From historicism to historical science. (British historian)
June 22, 1995... When Geoffrey Barraclough delivered the Stevenson Inaugural Lecture in 1957, marking his appointment to the Research Professorship of International History at the University of London, he began his address in an entirely characteristic manner. "I...

The U.S. women's motor corps in France, 1914-1921.
June 22, 1995... The massive relief effort engendered by World War I gave women an opportunity to demonstrate and develop their skills on a previously unknown scale. Although generations of women had used philanthropy to "expand their fields of action and their...

The history of time keeping at the Watch and Clock Museum.
June 22, 1995... The Watch and Clock Museum, located in Columbia, Pennsylvania, was established in 1977 by the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC). The museum is committed to the study of horology - the science of measuring time and the art...

The foreign settlement in Nagasaki, 1859-1869.
June 22, 1995... Although the port town of Nagasaki had long been a crossroads for East and West, it reached a new zenith when it was designated one of three ports opened to foreign trade and residence following the arrival of Commodore Perry and his "Black...

Race, slavery, and the law in early modern France.
June 22, 1995... During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much of France's Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade was tied up with the expansion of slavery. In the late 1600s, Louis XIV chartered two slave-trading companies in West Africa. Slave labor gradually...

Virginia and the westward movement.
June 22, 1995... Migration is a central theme of U.S. history. The nation has been shaped by movement - whether the overseas journeys of immigrants, the overland trek of those who settled the frontier, or the constant flow of the population from country to city...

The Teutonic knights and Baltic chivalry.
June 22, 1995... The knight was the central figure of medieval warfare, evolving from a simple mounted warrior in the tenth century to a member of a hereditary landed class. Knighthood was much like a guild: members were required to possess the proper ancestry,...

A century and a half of French views of the United States.
June 22, 1995... A single visit to the United States does not allow an author fully to understand that vast nation, its complex society, or its unprecedented experiment in self-government. Yet, for a century and a half, French intellectuals have converted brief...

Peoples and Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder.
June 22, 1995... This festschrift in honor of the late Michael Crowder contains thirteen essays reflecting the breadth of Crowder's interests and his influence on a generation of Africanists. The editors' introduction gives a brief, lucid summary of Crowder's...

Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times.
June 22, 1995... As its title clearly indicates, this volume is essentially a study of cross-cultural encounters before 1492. The author describes the dynamics of early cross-cultural exchanges and studies and analyzes the lasting effects of such contacts. He...

Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's Urabi Movement.
June 22, 1995... The 1881-82 revolution associated with Colonel Ahmad Urabi was a turning point in Egypt's modern history, whether political, economic, or social. Urabi's shadowy coalition of Egyptian officers, reformist ministers, and Islamic ulama did not...

The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule.
June 22, 1995... "I have seen a great vulture, coming down from the sky, and scooping up the land of the Turkana in its talons," predicted the Turkana diviner Lokorijam in about 1875 (48). In this study John Lamphear chronicles the responses of the Turkana of...

Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People.
June 22, 1995... This book is majesterial history, fully researched, evocatively written, spanning the sweep of South African history. It gives an understanding of South Africa's geography, which is vital to understanding its history. Beginning with European...

Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson.
June 22, 1995... This book is devoted to the proposition that alone among the Confederate leadership General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had the tactical and strategic savvy to win the war for the South. Bevin Alexander, newspaper writer and former combat...

Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas.
June 22, 1995... This volume, the product of a conference at the University of Maryland, argues that work was the "determining" force in slave life and society in the Americas. This tacit criticism of those who stress what happened "from sundown to sunup" does...

Masters and Lords: Mid Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.
June 22, 1995... This study of Prussian Junkers and planters of the American South joins a growing literature that seeks to compare both elites and labor systems in the nineteenth century. Shearer Davis Bowman follows in the tradition of several scholars who have...

Alexanderson: Pioneer in American Electrical Engineering.
June 22, 1995... Ernst Alexanderson was one of America's great inventors, with important patents in radio, television, power transmission, and computers, yet his name is hardly known outside engineering circles. One of the questions posed in James Brittain's...

Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954.
June 22, 1995... Migration is fast becoming a major subfield in black urban history, and Albert Broussard has given us an excellent study of it here, the first comprehensive history of black San Francisco since Daniel's Pioneer Urbanites. Broussard's thesis is...

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.
June 22, 1995... The message of this racily written and at times hugely entertaining book is a serious one. The "commonplace misbehaviors of the nineteenth century," those "little sins" listed in his subtitle, writes Burnham, have "turned into a powerful force,...

When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941.
June 22, 1995... When Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford went to the Union College campus in the fall of 1981 to film scenes of "The Way We Were," many students learned to their surprise that neither student protests nor antiwar activism was invented during the...

American Indian Children at School: 1850-1930.
June 22, 1995... Michael C. Coleman has analyzed 108 autobiographical accounts by 102 native Americans focusing on their childhood and teenage schooling experiences. His conclusions are twofold: that native Americans "responded to an alien education institution...

Suburb in the City: Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1850-1990.
June 22, 1995... Urban history has moved well beyond the pioneering works of urban biography of the 1930s. Although a considerable improvement over the antiquarian local histories that preceded them, these works still painted unidimensional pictures of urban...

The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America's Greatest Lawyer.
June 22, 1995... Saul Alinsky, a radical community organizer, once responded to the trite truism that "the ends don't justify the means" by jeering that "if the ends don't justify the means what the hell does?" In this book, two "terrorists" are accused of the...

Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance.
June 22, 1995... This study of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and its cultural context places that document at an "oratorical moment" in the development of the United States and the western world. The declaration, Fliegelman suggests, is best understood...

The Draft: 1940-1973.
June 22, 1995... George Flynn has written an extraordinarily successful study of the United States' modern draft from its creation on the eve of World War H to its abandonment by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. With abundant documentation and an economic...

Chancellorsville 1863: the Souls of the Brave.
June 22, 1995... The battle of Chancellorsville, fought in the thick forests and tangled underbrush of the Virginia wilderness, was a Confederate masterpiece. During the first week of May 1863, Robert E. Lee and his able lieutenants thoroughly whipped "Fighting...

Portia: The World of Abigail Adams.
June 22, 1995... Identifying herself as a feminist historian, Edith B. Gelles takes a topical rather than chronological approach in her study of the life of Abigail Adams, wife of the second president of the United States and mother of the sixth president....

Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775-1925.
June 22, 1995... This entertaining book gives a cultural overview of the role and significance of fire in U.S. society from the rounding of the Republic to the early twentieth century. During these years American citizens were much more intimately acquainted with...

The Jazz Scene.
June 22, 1995... Eric Hobsbawm first published The Jazz Scene in 1959, with an updated edition appearing in 1961. Hobsbawm, one of the great labor and social historians of the mid twentieth century, published both these early editions under the pseudonym "Francis...

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy.
June 22, 1995... In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness Gerda Lerner documents how "women's lack of knowledge of our own history of struggle and achievement has been one of the major means of keeping us subordinate." This volume extends the historical analysis...

The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers.
June 22, 1995... This study of a legendary Civil War regiment is a classic. The Minnesota-born author claims that Governor Alexander Ramsey offered the first men to the Lincoln administration. The state had been in the Union only three years, and one company had...

Buffalo Soldiers, Braves and the Brass: The Story of Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
June 22, 1995... Fort Robinson, located on the upper White River in far-northwest Nebraska, served the army from 1874 to 1948. Established to serve the Red Cloud agency for Oglala Lakota, it played a prominent role for the army in the Sioux War of 1876-77 and the...

The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City.
June 22, 1995... This is an informative and provocative book. It differs from its companion volumes in the Urban Life and Urban Landscape series by focusing on the career and ideology of one man, legendary New York builder Robert Moses, and the elite "liberal"...

Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women.
June 22, 1995... In her epilogue, Anne Firor Scott notes her good fortune that the publication of her book The Southern Lady in 1970 coincided with the "new wave of feminism" that created a demand for works in women's history. Otherwise it, like the work of the...

To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign.
June 22, 1995... In his study of the American Civil War's Peninsula Campaign, Stephen Sears has continued in the vein of his previous works, a biography of George McClellan and a study of the Antietam campaign. Chronologically he is working backwards in his...

Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation.
June 22, 1995... It all began with John Marshall. He was the first biographer of Washington of any note, and he was not trained as a historian. Neither were Rupert Hughes, Douglas Southall Freeman, or James Flexner; all, however, wrote biographies of Washington...

The Era of Good Stealings.
June 22, 1995... Mark W. Summers has become this generation's reigning expert on historical political corruption, an academic Lincoln Steffens with an extraordinary command of his subject and an important message for his readers. In his first book, Railroads,...

Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest.
June 22, 1995... Few recent phrases have imposed themselves on public consciousness with more force than the "rust belt," which has become a synonym for the economic decline besetting many of the older industrial areas of the United States. Teaford adds an...

Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan.
June 22, 1995... Gary Leupp has made a significant contribution to our understanding of life in Tokugawa Japan. Equally important, he has formulated his work in a comparative context. Leupp continually places his analysis and his statistics alongside the work of...

Modern British Jewry.
June 22, 1995... In this authoritative, expensive study on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Jews and their attempts to create a cohesive community, Geoffrey Alderman posits that the search for consensus is ongoing and will doubtless extend into the...

The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690-1830.
June 22, 1995... Irish politics and Irish relations with the parliament in Westminster throughout the period 1690-1830 were dominated by the "Catholic Question": To what extent, if any, should political rights be restored to the Catholics of Ireland and Britain?...

The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century.
June 22, 1995... As fate would have it, I had barely finished reading David Lodge's latest piece of hilarity - a campus-cum-tourism novel - when Jeremy Black's impressive and profusely illustrated British Abroad arrived on my doorstep for review. As I entered...

Labour's War: The Labour Party During the Second World War.
June 22, 1995... Since 1975, when Paul Addison's The Road to 1945 was published, views about the politics of the Second World War have been heavily colored by the idea of consensus. Stephen Brooke's new volume is a welcome attempt to re-evaluate the war's impact...

Victorian Feminists.
June 22, 1995... This is a valuable contribution, even though one might wonder at first why another book is needed on the study of the women's movement in Victorian England since so many have appeared in recent years. This book is significant, however, for two...

Lord Beaverbrook: A Life.
June 22, 1995... It can be claimed that Lord Beaverbrook was the last of the British press barons, who were so important in journalism and politics in the early twentieth century. Latter-day international media tycoons like Lord Thomson and Rupert Murdock fail to...

The Evolution of Women's Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women.
June 22, 1995... Sherrill Cohen's study is a solidly researched book. It is, however, seriously mistitled, since in fact it is not a history of women's asylums in Europe or the United States since 1500 but rather a dose study of religious refuges for women in...

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy.
June 22, 1995... In Death and Property in Siena (1988), Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., analyzed testamentary bequests as a key to understanding changes in mentalities over the course of six centuries, from 1205 to 1800. He found that in Siena, the first major...

The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c. 1550-1700.
June 22, 1995... England gained thousands of French Protestant (Huguenot) exiles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Escaping from religious repression at home, the refugees found England to be "the Refuge." The Protestant churches remaining in...

Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany, 1945.
June 22, 1995... Although the titanic Nazi-Soviet conflict of 1941-45 was perhaps the most terrible military confrontation in all of human history, this volume's contention that "the Second World War was won and lost on the Eastern Front" seems at least arguable....

Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse, and Disguise.
June 22, 1995... One might be surprised to observe a scholar leafing through the pages of this book while lunching in the Readers' Lounge of the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane. More likely one will see the book tucked under the arm of a literary type...

War, Strategy, and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard.
June 22, 1995... This splendid Festschrift presented to Sir Michael Howard on his "tactical withdrawal" to Yale from the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford demonstrates the quality of work currently being produced by British scholars in the field of...

Diderot: A Critical Biography.
June 22, 1995... P. N. Furbank has written about Diderot in Diderot's own manner, mixing thoughtful analysis of the author's texts - major, obscure, and downright recondite - with headlong narrative of the philosophe's outer and inner life. He manages to convey...

Revolutionary France: 1770-1880.
June 22, 1995... Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 is a detailed account of more than one hundred years of dramatic changes. Over a third of this voluminous opus is devoted to the Revolution and the Empire, which decisively influenced everything that followed....

Road Transport Before the Railways: Russell's London Flying Waggons.
June 22, 1995... Here is a detailed, narrow, and expensive monograph that provides another piece in the complex mosaic of English economic history during the era of the Industrial Revolution. It is a well-written product of painstaking research. What made this...

David Lloyd George, A Political Life: Organizer of Victory 1912-1916.
June 22, 1995... In this the second of a projected four-volume biography of David Lloyd George, Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert covers precisely the same period as journalist John Grigg in the third volume of his biography, but Gilbert is rather more ambitious....

Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300-1520.
June 22, 1995... To what extent was marriage an economic necessity for medieval women? P. J. P. Goldberg uses the rich Yorkshire archives to explore the ramifications of this question in York and Yorkshire, from 1300 to 1520. The author examines women's work,...

Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism: 1828-1866.
June 22, 1995... Russian liberalism has not commanded the attention that its counterparts have received in the West. This is in part because its history has been brief, but it is also because Russian liberalism has not enjoyed comparable political success. The...

A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s.
June 22, 1995... Recent works on Hanoverian politics have largely ignored the 1740s, save for the Jacobite rising of 1745, and there has been no systematic treatment of the press in that decade. Robert Harris' excellent book demonstrates (contra Michael Harris)...

The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War: 1898-1914.
June 22, 1995... M. B. Hayne's book joins a growing literature on the role of foreign ministries in European policymaking before the First World War. It follows on the work of Zara Steiner on the British Foreign Office and Lamar Cecil on the German one, but Hayne...

The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-1945.
June 22, 1995... The Ecole des Cadres, a "leadership school" at Uriage for adults and particularly the younger generation, was one of the innovative experiments of the Vichy regime. The brainchild of an aristocratic cavalry officer, de Segonzac, its purpose was...

The Battle for Coal: Miners and the Politics of Nationalization in France, 1940-1950.
June 22, 1995... Returning to work shortly after the Liberation, French miners were confronted with Kitcheneresque posters proclaiming, "France needs coal, France needs you." Older members of the workforce had been faced with similar exhortations in 1918. Yet...

Britain's Persian Connection 1798-1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia.
June 22, 1995... With this volume, Edward Ingram completes his charting of the origins and nature of the "great game in Asia," the diplomatic contest over control of Persia and the east that dominated Anglo-Russian relations in the nineteenth century. Ingram...

Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe.
June 22, 1995... Students of the Enlightenment have been well sewed by studies of its major thinkers and their ideas. Only in recent years, however, have attempts been made to show how such ideals were appropriated and lived out by ordinary members of society. In...

Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917-1934.
June 22, 1995... This work provides useful material on the administrative structure of Soviet prisons before 1934, but the information is difficult to extract from the mass of sometimes nonsequential detail on bureaucratic wrangling. The author does not use any...

Marlborough.
June 22, 1995... In 1722 John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, died. His implacable opponent, Jonathan Swift, composed a satirical elegy for the occasion: Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of kings; Who float upon the tide of state,...

In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942-1944.
June 22, 1995... H. R. Kedward's purpose in this book is to explore the nature and life of the rural resistance fighters of southern France, explaining who they were, how they lived, and what led them to take up arms against the wartime Vichy government and the...

War and Peace in the Baltic: 1560-1790.
June 22, 1995... Stewart P. Oakley's latest book is a study of the diplomatic context of war in the Baltic from 1560 to 1790, covering nearly all the ins and outs of more than two centuries of complex international relations among Denmark, Sweden,...

Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randall MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609-1683.
June 22, 1995... Students of seventeenth-century British history have more and more come to realize the importance of including Scotland and Ireland in their examination of what used to be thought of as purely English events. This willingness to consider all of...

The Political Career of Oliver St. John: 1637-1649.
June 22, 1995... Like so many of the parliamentary leaders in the English Civil War, Oliver St. John was, by contemporary standards, a middle-aged man when he first rose to national fame in 1637, as counsel for John Hampden in the Ship Money Case. During the...

Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales.
June 22, 1995... Scholars of the medieval fringes have not always made their territories particularly welcoming to outsiders. Huw Pryce's book is a pleasurable exception: it opens the closed world of medieval Welsh law to any adventurous invader. Those willing to...

Spenser's Secret Career.
June 22, 1995... Richard Rambuss' study is addressed not to historians, but to his fellow Spenser scholars, and presents his contribution to the ongoing debate about the manner in which Spenser's poetry should be read in the light of his career. Specifically,...

The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789.
June 22, 1995... Clay Ramsay has set out to revise conventional wisdom concerning the Great Fear, the collective panic that convulsed Revolutionary France from 20 July to 6 August 1789, covering two-thirds of the country. The fear was provoked by a rumor that...

Town and Countryside in the English Revolution.
June 22, 1995... The essays in this volume are generally of a high quality, particularly those that deal with urban topics, including those of Keith Kindley on London, David Scott on York, Ann Hughes on Coventry, David Sacks on Bristol, and Ian Roy on Oxford. The...

Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome.
June 22, 1995... At first blush one may suppose that looking for pornography in ancient societies is pointless. Where is the ancient "private shop" or newsagent's top shelf? Are we to suppose that furtive Athenians drooled over the latest naughty vase-paintings,...

One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo.
June 22, 1995... Alan Schom writes history to be read and enjoyed. He is unperturbed by the sorts of questions that detain academic historians and unapologetic about offering a colorful and at times racy narrative of events. That is, after all, his declared...

A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawson.
June 22, 1995... English Catholics have always found themselves in a peculiar and somewhat defensive stance within the English social and intellectual communities. Christina Scott, in this biography of her father, Christopher Dawson, illustrates very well the...

Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions: 1918-1929.
June 22, 1995... Lewis H. Siegelbaum's latest book is a pioneering study of the interaction of Soviet state and society in the ideological, political, economic, and social spheres from 1918 to 1929. Eschewing conventional political narrative and social history,...

Hitler's Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted.
June 22, 1995... in this volume R. H. S. Stolfi presents a lucid and stimulating analysis of the genesis and implementation of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Providing more than a descriptive narrative of this monumental...

Politics and Class in Milan: 1881-1901.
June 22, 1995... In the years between unification and the Great War, the city of Milan was the center of industry and business in Italy. Not surprisingly, it also became the focus of socialist and trade-union activity throughout the peninsula. Many of the key...

From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution.
June 22, 1995... This is a collection of essays published by Hugh Trevor-Roper over the past twenty years. In their original form the essays were lectures or analyses of books on various topics predominately from the latter half of the seventeenth century. No...

The Illyrians.
June 22, 1995... Over twenty years after the appearance of his massive contribution on Dalmatia to the sadly defunct series on the provinces of the Roman Empire, John Wilkes has returned to his old stomping ground with this study in an ambitious new series on...

Bread, Wine and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral.
June 22, 1995... Jane Welch Williams presents a new interpretation of images at Chartres Cathedral that should engage historians of medieval culture, society, economics, and politics, as well as her fellow art historians. Williams aims to elucidate the meaning of...

Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905.
June 22, 1995... While seeking to increase our understanding of how workers in the Donbass region collectively demonstrated their dissatisfaction with working and economic conditions, Charters Wynn has presented us with an elegant study of turn-of-the-century,...

The A-bomb controversy at the National Air and Space Museum.(Transcript)
June 22, 1995... STATEMENT BEFORE THE U.S. SENATE, MAY 18, 1995 I served on the advisory committee for the National Air and Space Museum's proposed exhibit, "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II", because of my engagement with a number of...