The Historian articles from March 1993

The Historian archives from March 1993

Interview with John Demos. (social historian of early America) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... THE HISTORIAN: Could we begin with how your personal and political experiences have affected your historical treatment of personality, family, and values? DEMOS: I have slowly come to appreciate how much the present, including my personal...

Mystic Seaport Museum. (museum in Mystic, Connecticut dedicated to U.S. maritime history)
March 22, 1993... Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, originally founded as the Marine Historical Association in 1929, is committed to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting the artifacts, traditions, and skills of U.S. maritime history. Mystic, which...

Assessing the role of the NAACP in the civil rights movement. (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
March 22, 1993... Because of the attention focused on Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent strategy, the role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been overshadowed and its major contributions to modern civil...

Terrorism in India during the freedom struggle.
March 22, 1993... Because the Image of Mahatma Gandhi and the ultimate success of his nonviolent methods have dominated western views of the movement for India's independence, many believe that India achieved its freedom without resorting to violence. In fact,...

The frustrations of a Mexican mine under U.S. ownership. (Cedral mine in Coahuila state)
March 22, 1993... The Mississippi San Rafael Silver Mining Company and its successors were modest-sized, U.S.-based corporations that operated the Cedral mine in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila from 1870 through the early 1890s. During that time the mine...

Farm policy and Truman's 1948 campaign. (Harry Truman's presidential campaign)
March 22, 1993... AT THE END OF World War II U.S. farmers were enjoying their greatest prosperity m recent memory. Demand for farm products was high and government support during the war had been generous. The immediate postwar outlook was bright. Nevertheless,...

Hans Delbruck and modern military history. (German military historian)
March 22, 1993... MILITARY HISTORY has often been written by what anthropologists call participant-observers--career soldiers or civilians who fought in wars. After Carl von Clausewitz and Henri Jomini one thinks of Helmuth von Moltke the elder, Theodore von...

The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I.
March 22, 1993... Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorff, forever associated with Germany's eastern-front victories early in World War L the military dictatorship that undermined the country's weak parliament, the draconian Brest-Litovsk treaty...

The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... David Bankier has probed once again the question of the extent and effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda machine in producing and manipulating the attitudes of the German people on the Jewish question during the Hitler era. He has drawn on such...

The Two Cities: Medieval Europe, 1050-1320.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This book has been devised, as Malcolm Barber says in his preface, "to introduce the fascinating world of the European Middle Ages to those who have not previously encountered it." It is not, then, meant primarily for the professional academic...

To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In this interesting and readable book, Thomas Neville Bonner places the late nineteenth-century quest for women's medical training in international perspective. Although structured around a traditional generational theme of pioneers breaking...

Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist.
March 22, 1993... Long overshadowed by her more celebrated mother Emmeline and sister Christobel, English feminist and international socialist Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) has emerged from obscurity in recent years. The fullest details yet of her promising but...

Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
March 22, 1993... Paul Bushkovitch presents an important contribution to the social history of Russia. His work stands alongside the pioneering work of Nancy Shields Kollman, Robert Crummey, Brenda Meehan-Waters, and Marc Raeff in the elucidation of the social...

The Production, Distribution and Readership of a Conservative Journal of the Early French Revolution: The Ami du Roi of the Abbe Royou.
March 22, 1993... At a time when the cultural life of the late eighteenth century is coming under greater scrutiny, the history of the press assumes an increasingly important place. In the last few years scholars have learned more about newspapers and pamphlet...

The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence.
March 22, 1993... Paula C. Clarke does not substantially revise the theses of her intellectual predecessors (Nicolai Rubinstein and Dale Kent) that the Medici secured dominance in Florence through a network of reliable friends, control over political...

For King and Kaiser! The Making of the Prussian Army Officer, 1860-1914.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The education of an officer is a regimented enterprise. According to Steven E. Clemente, nineteenth-century Prussia emphasized conservative traditions and aristocratic values in preference to humanistic learning and technical expertise. To...

A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony, 1581-1990.
March 22, 1993... Despite the seminal role that Siberia and Siberians have played in Russian and Soviet history for over 400 years, comparatively little scholarship has been done on Siberian history. The annexation of Siberia, an area encompassing nearly...

Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Great revolutions never fade away. They are fated to be regularly exhumed and reinterpreted. The revolutionary year of 1989 saw a spate of reinterpretations celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the...

Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... To the modern mind theology and natural science are incommensurable. That is not a vogue word but was actually used over a century ago by theologian Wilhelm Herrmann. Herrmann was a follower of Albrecht Ritschl, and in this book represents what...

The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Few ancient societies, or states have been the focus of such intensive scrutiny by modern scholars as the Athenian city-state and democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. However anomalous the Athenian system of government was among its...

Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Meirion and Susie Harris succeed admirably in pointing out the terrible duality of the modem Japanese soldier. This is their second work on the Japanese military after Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Japan, 1945-52 (1987). Here the...

English and French Towns in Feudal Society.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... R.H. Hilton, one of the foremost historians of medieval rural England, has turned his attention to the comparative study of towns in English and French feudal society. His objective is to determine "the extent to which the economic, social,...

Helmut Nicolai and Nazi Ideology.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Recent studies by Jane Caplan, Dieter Rebentisch and Karl Teppe have significantly knowledge of the role played by the traditional German civil service in both the Nazi movement and the administration of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, few...

A War Imagined: English Culture and the First World War.
March 22, 1993... For most historians of Europe 1914 remains the great watershed year when a century of economic growth, partial democratization, and relative international peace ended amidst an orgy of bloodshed. Samuel Hynes takes for granted that for the...

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Born in 1887 to a poor Brahmin family in a town in south India, when Ramanujan graduated from the local secondary school first in his class with a scholarship to the local college, his mathematical precocity was already recognized. Upon...

Cinema and Soviet Society: 1917-1953.
March 22, 1993... In recent years Peter Kenez has written extensively about Soviet revolutionary culture, emphasizing the interrelationship between culture and politics in the period following the Bolshevik Revolution. He continues to do so in this book, a study...

Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This short, lively survey of a difficult period in south Italian history is just what English-speaking students and teachers of the medieval Mediterranean have been looking for. Barbara M. Kreutz deals with the complicated, mixed society of...

Parliament Under the Tudors.
March 22, 1993... The history of the Parliament of England has long been a subject of intense interest to historians. But for all that attention, it has only been since the 1970s that an accurate picture of Parliament in the era of the Tudor dynasty (1485-1603)...

Rewriting the French Revolution: The Andrew Browning Lectures, 1989.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Composed to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and recast as richly documented essays, these lectures provide a range of interpretive synthesis ideal for use by advanced undergraduates and graduate students seeking an introduction to...

United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia: 1900-1914.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The last years of the Romanov dynasty have drawn increased attention in the last fifteen years. The narrow focus on the events of 1917 has given way to a deeper examination of the reign of Nicholas II. Although this change of emphasis has...

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The publisher's blurb claims that "Not since The Guns of August has modem European history come so vividly to life." The claim is bold, because Barbara Tuchman was a mistress of the craft of popular history. Is the claim valid? This question...

Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... These essays recap a decade of important scholarship on women and the French Revolution by examining the double bind created by a movement that promised universal rights to all, only to deliver revamped forms of subjugation to the "second sex."...

The "Nazi Menace" in Argentina: 1931-1947.
March 22, 1993... This well-documented volume makes a significant contribution to an understanding of the complex economic, strategic, and political issues that evolved in the 1930s and 1940s in a four-way conflict between Great Britain, Nazi Germany, the United...

Byzantium: The Apogee.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This is the second of John Julius Norwich's three-volume history of Byzantium. It covers the period from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the accession of Alexios Komnenos to the Byzantine throne in 1081. Norwich's approach is very...

From Ostpolitik to Reunification: West German-Soviet Relations Since 1974.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This book's title, and its dust jacket photo of Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, are badly in need of a truth-in-advertising disclaimer. The real topic of the work is West German policy toward the Soviet Union during the chancellorship of...

Philanthropy and the Hospitals of London: The King's Fund, 1897-1990.
March 22, 1993... The King's Fund, launched by Edward, the Prince of Wales, to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee, was part of a pattern of British charitable societies responding to the needs of a rapidly expanding, urban, and industrialized population....

Saint Louis: Crusader King of France.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This volume is an English translation and abridgment of Jean Richard's well-received 638-page Saint Louis: Roi d'une France feodale, soutien de la Terre Sainte (Paris, 1983). That the abridgment is slightly more than half the length of the...

Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1920.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In 1925 a French philosophy professor, Edmond Goblot, wrote a book titled La barriere et le niveau in which he presented education as a major social identifier: barrier between the middle and upper classes and the unschooled, unleisured...

Reform and Revolution: The Life and Times of Raymond Robins.
March 22, 1993... The name of Raymond Robins is not one with which most historians, let alone the general public, will be familiar. Yet in the origins of Soviet-American relations in the first months after the October revolution of 1917, Robins, the acting head...

Women in the Chartist Movement.
March 22, 1993... Despite the proliferation of work and research on Chartism in the last thirty years, surprisingly, there has been no comprehensive account of the role of women in the movement. There is no shortage of evidence of women's involvement in...

Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... As the subtitle indicates, W. P. Stephens offers his readers a concise introduction to the principal themes in the theology of Huldrych Zwingli, the reformer of Zurich and sometime rival to Martin Luther in the first generation of Protestant...

Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This work is an important addition to the study of late medieval Catholicism, a topic less well explored than it ought to be. Larissa Taylor has carefully analyzed about 1,600 sermons given by French preachers from the mid fifteenth to mid...

The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions, 1948-1991.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Did communist internationalism ever exist? Or was it nothing more, after Lenin's death, than a fraud manipulated by Stalin, the man whom intellectuals the world over accepted as the true interpreter of Marxism? This thesis, brilliantly...

A Policy Calculated to Benefit China: The United States and the China Arms Embargo, 1919-1929.
March 22, 1993... Stephen J. Valone has examined an important but neglected aspect of Great Power relations in Asia after World War I. In the process, he has convincingly shown that the China arms embargo was part of a broader Anglo-American effort to limit...

La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... "Women's bodies contain more fluid than men's, and as it sloshes around it excites their passions, dampens their reason, and renders them all but ineducable." "Dysentery should be treated by strong purgatives, which aid the body's curative...

The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain: 1829-1860.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... John Wolffe has given something less than his title suggests, but he has done it very well. From the outset he makes it clear that "protestant" will be used as a virtual synonym for "anti-catholic," a formulation he justifies through an appeal...

Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Anti-Slavery Reform, 1854-1868.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... How was it that leading businessmen not known traditionally as apostles of radical change, were at times in the vanguard in what amounted to a revolution, the overthrow of the slavocracy? The short answer is that this overthrow strengthened the...

Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In his engrossing biography of W. Averell Harriman, Rudy Abramson presents a sympathetic but balanced account of a man who played a variety of supporting roles in the dramatic national and international events of his lifetime. According to...

Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Most studies of racial attitudes tell a bleak story of prejudice and indifference. Studies by Winthrop Jordan and George Fredrickson, for example, are often depressing explorations of the development of a mentality that in its early years...

A People's Charter: The Pursuit of Rights in America.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... A People's Charter is both a masterful history of the struggle for human rights in the United States and a secular sermon about the shortcomings of that struggle. The thesis is that humans deserve to have their basic needs satisfied by the fact...

Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Bill Cecil-Fronsman's Common Whites is an insightful study of antebellum non-elite whites, a group frequently ignored by historians. Building from the foundation set by the Owsley school in the 1940s and recently expanded on by several...

John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... That women played a central if not dominant role in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is perhaps sufficiently appreciated. Their more formal role in assuming speaking and leadership functions traditionally...

A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture.
March 22, 1993... Even though most contemporary Americans profess to be God fearing and church going, compared to their nineteenth-century relatives Americans are a secular people. Susan Curtis suggests in this provocative book that Protestant advocates of the...

A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Conventional interpretations of Indian history during the seventy-odd years from 1745 to 1815 have maintained that the native tribes of the eastern woodlands made several noteworthy attempts to unite against European invasion (especially under...

Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... John H. Ellis has written a thorough and meticulously researched account of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 and its effects on three major southern cities. Based on many local sources, including newspapers, medical journals, public health...

Indian Law/Race Law: A Five-Hundred-Year History.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In this short but incisive study, James E. Falkowski skillfully narrates a complex body of metaphysical decrees, discriminatory legislation, and judicial interpretations dealing with the legal status of native people of the Western Hemisphere,...

John Adams: A Life.
March 22, 1993... This richly textured study humanizes John Adams and his family in a wonderful analytical narrative of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Although John Ferling does not exactly make the nation's second president beguilling,...

The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America.
March 22, 1993... A Vital Few for the 1990s, Myth of the Robber Barons is an excellent book in which Burton W. Folsom, Jr., makes critical points many business and economic history textbooks ignore. Folsom challenges the characterization of all big business...

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This is an example of local history at its best. Timothy J. Gilfoyle's efforts have deservedly been recognized by his being awarded the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the manuscript prize of the New York State...

The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... It is refreshing to find a revised Ph.D. dissertation that is as sharply incisive and valuable as this one. Richard Godbeer's Devil's Dominion explores how colonial New Englanders used magic to gain some control over their destinies, often in...

"Or Does It Explode?" Black Harlem in the Great Depression.
March 22, 1993... Focusing on the lives of ordinary African Americans in Harlem, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg's study focuses on work, relief, and black political action from the late 1920s to the early years of World War Il. Though many Americans suffered during the...

Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Invoking the words of Benjamin Disraeli for the first two words of his title and Gunnar Myrdal for his caste condition thesis, Andrew Hacker advances an updated socioeconomic statement of what it means to be a black citizen in the United...

The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The Rise of the Penitentiary is a new look at the origins of penology in the United States. Within the framework of legal history, Adam J. Hirsch explores how the use of prisons for the punishment of convicted criminals in the United States...

The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Case studies of local and statewide chapters of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan are transforming historical understanding of this massive organization. Sweeping explanations of the Klan's rise and decline now appear simplistic in light of the wide range...

Forms of Uncertainty: Essays in Historical Criticism.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... One of the critical problems historians have faced is the drive for certainty of judgment about the past. Can historians in the present with imperfect records and partial sources and a mind formed differently from the period of their subject be...

Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In this book Walter Licht addresses three issues not widely addressed in U.S. labor history: how working people in an industrial city got jobs; how that process changed over a long period of time; and how it varied among different kinds of job...

Fortress California: 1910-1961, From Warfare to Welfare.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This is a highly original, significant, and stimulating book. Although Roger W. Lotchin succinctly states his thesis, the book's myriad and subtle complexities defy easy generalization. Furthermore, the massive detail Lotchin provides based on...

Women's Culture, American Philanthropy and Art: 1830-1930.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... In Women's Culture, Kathleen D. McCarthy analyzes women's philanthropic and professional roles within art promotion systems from 1830 to 1930 in the Northeast and Northwest art centers. The era supported the establishment of art institutions as...

Pretty Bubbles in the Air: America in 1919.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Generally speaking, history rides roughshod over the calendar. We talk of decades and centuries, but rarely do conventions for marking the passage of time coincide with the rhythms of the changes that give it meaning. Yet sometimes the two...

The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This stout volume is a daily account of Upton Sinclair's California gubernatorial race in 1934. Greg Mitchell begins with the date of his primary victory and proceeds onward through the day after the election, followed by an epilogue. Mitchell...

Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630-1760.
March 22, 1993... Covering the antinomian controversy of the 1630s to Jonathan Edwards' classic Freedom of the Will in 1754, Jon Pahl shows how religious ideas about free will directly influenced Americans' thinking about liberty. The first English...

There's a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This is a fine, fat book at a bargain price. Geoffrey Perret, author of a well-received work on the homefront during World War 11 and another on U.S. military history, brings solid credentials to his task. This is the most comprehensive...

The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89.
March 22, 1993... In this slender but informative volume, Robert A. Pratt recounts Richmond, Virginia's struggle to cope with both the social and educational implications of school desegregation. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, black...

Out on the Wind: Poles and Danes in Lincoln County, Minnesota, 1880-1905.
March 22, 1993... This little gem of a book originated as an undergraduate senior thesis and is a model for Phi Alpha Theta members everywhere. It demonstrates again the promise of studying "nearby history." The setting of this community history is John...

Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union.
March 22, 1993... In some of his many talk around the country, Robert V. Remini has told a funny little tale about himself, one that well underscores his many years spent as a Jackson scholar. It seems that Remini's mother-in-law used to ask him what he, as a...

The Presidency of James Madison.
March 22, 1993... Historians have generally been baffled in explaining James Madison's ineffectiveness as chief executive. In The Presidency of James Madison Robert Allen Rutland provides the details of the disarray of Madison's administration to let the reader...

The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875.
March 22, 1993... Kenneth A. Scherzer analyzes the nature of neighborhood and society in New York City from the Jacksonian period to 1875. His conclusions correct some findings of the new social history and the earner new urban history. The latter, according to...

The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History.
March 22, 1993... During the past three decades US. history has undergone a draMatic transformation. The older concerns with political, diplomatic, and military events have been replaced by a preoccupation with social structure, class, race, gender, and culture....

Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The old-fashioned theme of democracy as a force in the American Revolution has refused to remain on the historiographical backlot, despite newfangled ideology and republicanism. Every study of society, politics, loyalism, institutions, and the...

The Confederacy's Fighting Chaplain: Father John B. Bannon.
March 22, 1993... Father John Bannon loomed large as a leader in the Irish community of antebellum St. Louis as an enthusiastic secessionist, Confederate, courageous and devoted chaplain, Confederate messenger to the pope, secret agent in Ireland, and as a...

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West.
March 22, 1993... The "new" western history is no longer new, and Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own proves the point. For two decades or more, scholars have reexamined and dismantled the West of heroic white male pioneers transplanting and...

Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics.
March 22, 1993... The issue of "Republicanism" virtually dominates current discussion of the American Revolution. Most historians focus on the views of Revolutionary leaders, never asking how the colonial elite translated republican ideology to the grassroots...

In the Floating Army: F.C. Mills on Itinerant Life in California, 1914.
March 22, 1993... On 21 May 1914 Frederick C. Mills, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, began two months of undercover investigatory work for the California Commission of immigration and Housing. Mills' mission was to work as a migrant...