The Historian articles from March 1995

The Historian archives from March 1995

Interview with Walter L. Arnstein. (historian)(Interview)
March 22, 1995... Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1930, and immigrating to New York City in 1939, Arnstein earned his bachelor's degree in history at City College of New York, his master's degree at Columbia University, and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He...

War's eclipse of primary education in Alsace-Lorraine, 1914-1918.
March 22, 1995... That European Primary schools fostered nationalism before World War I is clear from the official curricula and textbooks that taught children about national identity, if not nationalistic chauvinism. Europe's schoolchildren sang national anthems...

Chinese currencies and stamps, 1932-1949.
March 22, 1995... The historical debates over the republican era in China (1912-49) arise from its being the most promising and unsettled period in modern Chinese history. The ouster of the last emperor and collapse of the imperial system before World War I gave...

U.S. aid to Poles under Nazi domination, 1939-1940.
March 22, 1995... THE GERMAN CONQUEST of Poland in the fall of 1939 produced a flood of refugees. The Commission for Polish Relief (CPR), a consortium of relief agencies headed by Herbert Hoover, the former U.S. president, and the American Red Cross (ARC), headed...

The Venezuelan claims controversy at the Hague, 1903.
March 22, 1995... Former Secretary of State John W. Foster, in his 1906 book, The Practice of Diplomacy, gave President Theodore Roosevelt credit for submitting the Venezuelan claims dispute to the Court of Arbitration at the Hague. Foster's contentions were...

Upstreams and downstreams in early modern Sumatra.
March 22, 1995... Southeast Asia is commonly seen by nonspecialists as a geographical unit that encompasses the mainland (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia) and the island world (Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore). However, the range...

The American Nazi Party, 1958-1967.
March 22, 1995... George Lincoln Rockwell (1918-67), the founder and leader of the American Nazi Party (ANP), was one of the most controversial and reviled public figures in the United States. As the era's most notorious advocate of racist and anti-Semitic...

Picturing American history, 1770-1930.
March 22, 1995... The European IDEA that cast the painting of historical characters and events as the highest form of artistic expression came to the United States during the late eighteenth century. Establishing pictorial traditions where none had previously...

The Royal Indian hospital of Mexico City, 1553-1680.
March 22, 1995... The Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519 began a new age for the Americas and Europe. While many scholars have concentrated their research upon the military conquest, disease - the hidden ally of the Spaniards - has received less scrutiny and...

A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875-1917.
March 22, 1995... Plantation colonies have been the subject of intense historical interest for many years. The literature on these societies and economies is extensive, and the attendant scholarship has frequently been informative and insightful. However, even...

Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918.
March 22, 1995... Plantation colonies have been the subject of intense historical interest for many years. The literature on these societies and economies is extensive, and the attendant scholarship has frequently been informative and insightful. However, even...

Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation.
March 22, 1995... Plantation colonies have been the subject of intense historical interest for many years. The literature on these societies and economies is extensive, and the attendant scholarship has frequently been informative and insightful. However, even a...

Mau Mau and Kenya: An analysis of a Peasant Revolt.
March 22, 1995... Wunyabari Maloba outlines in this study the "intenial contradictions, setbacks and triumphs" of the Mau Mau peasant resistance movement of the 1950s, which preceded independence from British colonialism in Kenya. While he argues that this was...

Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and the State in Modern Iran.
March 22, 1995... This work is a thoughtful and theoretically rigorous study of the relationship between the practice of punishment and the development of modernity in Iranian society Darius Rejali has written a post-modern critique of modem punishment and its...

Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Elizabeth Schmidt offers a stimulating account of Shona women as they wrestled with a patriarchal society that seemed frozen in time. In this finely crafted work, Schmidt exposes the intricate web of constraints that African and European...

Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... The past fifteen years have witnessed a succession of studies devoted to the Islamic pilgrimage including David Long's study of the contemporary pilgrimage, the travel essays edited by Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Elton Daniel's...

From Skisport to Skiing: One Hundred Years of An American Sport, 1840-1940.
March 22, 1995... The first scholarly, comprehensive study of skiing as a recreational activity and a competitive sport in the United States, From Skisport to Skiing is an historiographical landmark. John Allen, professor of history at Plymouth State College in...

The South and the New Deal.
March 22, 1995... These two books prove that the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt remains a subject about which historians can still write with originality and effect. Although each has a discrete focus and approach, they are complementary in their emphasis on the...

The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt.
March 22, 1995... These two books prove that the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt remains a subject about which historians can still write with originality and effect. Although each has a discrete focus and approach, they are complementary in their emphasis on the...

Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912.
March 22, 1995... Ardis Cameron presents a convincing argument for the centrality of women and gender in U.S. working-class history. She illustrates how women established female networks that were forged on stoops, across backyard fences, in local shops and...

Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America.
March 22, 1995... Redeeming America offers a deft guide through the subdivision of evangelical Protestantism in the antebellum U.S. In fewer than two hundred pages, Curtis Johnson attempts to introduce the reader to the variety within antebellum American...

Redeeming America: Evangelicals and the Road to Civil War.
March 22, 1995... Redeeming America offers a deft guide through the subdivision of evangelical Protestantism in the antebellum U.S. In fewer than two hundred pages, Curtis Johnson attempts to introduce the reader to the variety within antebellum American...

Dangerous Passage: The Santa Fe Trail and the Mexican War.
March 22, 1995... The Santa Fe Trail is best known as an avenue of commercial exchange between Mexico and the United States from the 1820s through the Mexican War. Historical attention to the trail falls off rather quickly after General Stephen Watts Kearny's...

"No Sorrow like Our Sorrow": Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
March 22, 1995... David Chesebrough analyzes 340 sermons delivered during the seven weeks following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865 in this volume. The majority of the sermons were delivered on Easter Sunday, 16 April, and the...

The Presidency of Andrew Jackson.
March 22, 1995... Fundamental to Donald Cole's interpretation of Andrew Jackson is the need to place the Jackson administration in the context of the "market revolution." Old Hickory's successes and many failures occurred as the nation experienced unprecedented...

Up from Communism.
March 22, 1995... John P. Diggins analyzes the thought of four intellectuals who journeyed from Karl Marx to William F. Buckley and the National Review: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Dos Passos (1896-1970), Will Herberg (1909-77), and James Burnham (1905-87)....

Antisemitism in America.
March 22, 1995... Twenty six years after the publication of his first book on the Leo Frank case, Leonard Dinnerstein presents us with a massive survey of American anti-Semitism. No scholar has labored longer in this particular vineyard so there is a high...

Intervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution: 1913-1917.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Arguing that most accounts of the U.S. intervention in Mexico are not simple enough to be understood by the general reader," General John S. D. Eisenhower, son of the former president, has offered a broad overview of the Mexican Revolution,...

The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800.
March 22, 1995... Historian of the early United States have become increasingly concerned with analyzing the past in the terms of its participants. Attention has been refocussed away from events and figures of great magnitude and concentrated on personal and...

In the Absence of Towns: Settlement and Country Trade in Southside Virginia,1730-1800.
March 22, 1995... In this well conceived and nicely executed work of historical geography, Charles J. Farmer provides a thorough description and analysis of settlement evolution and patterns of economic life in eighteenth-century Southside Virginia, a region...

The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... J. Matthew Gallman provides a useful digest of recent Civil War scholarship, including that relating to gender and race issues. Although Gallman is chiefly concerned with the northern home front, he does mention important battlefield events...

Mexico and the Spanish Conquest.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Ross Hassig travels a well-trodden path to present his survey of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He does so from a new perspective, approaching the subject as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian. The author's previous works have prepared his...

The Nation and Its City: Politics, "Corruption," and Progress in Washington,D.C., 1861-1902.
March 22, 1995... Calvin Coolidge once declared that the business of America is business. Alan Lessoff, in his ably researched and Written study of Washington, D.C., between 1861 and 1902, attributes much that went wrong with our cities, induding our capital to...

The American Presidency: An Intellectual History.
March 22, 1995... Forrest McDonald's purpose is to provide a comprehensive, modern account of the presidency that emphasizes changing conceptions of presidential authority -- that is, "a history of the idea of the presidency" (viii). Though he has chosen...

The People of Quito, 1690-1810: Change and Unrest in the Underclass.
March 22, 1995... The historical study of Latin America's colonial past continues to advance with modem methods and interdisciplinary approaches. Colonial Latin America is a fascinating and challenging field for those historians eager to use rich historical...

Los Comanches: The Horse People, 1751-1845.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... The author of Los Comanches is not a trained historian. This does not matter as long as he gets the story straight, but this may create some knee jerk resistance to his effort to delineate Comanche history (or, often, the probable course of...

A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Most Civil War Americans regarded the battlefield as a clearly male sphere. Women who made it there did so usually by disguising themselves as men. Clara Barton was a notable exception. Playing upon the desperate need of the ill-organized...

Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization: Selected Essays.
March 22, 1995... This collection of previously published, virtually unrevised, and wholly unrepentant essays spans writings from the mid-1970s through 1991. It covers such topics as readings of the several editions and impact of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange...

General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution: From Redcoat to Rebel.
March 22, 1995... This volume, a revised doctoral dissertation, is the first book-length biography of General Richard Montgomery, a former British officer, who commanded the American force that invaded Canada and attacked Quebec in 1775. Although it breaks little...

The Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South.
March 22, 1995... Mitchell Snay has crafted an insightful and informative study of the critical role that Southern religion played in formatting a distinctive sectional identity during the three decades before the Civil War. Snay's thesis is that "[Southern...

Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Hugh Thomas established his reputation as an historian of things Spanish with his first, still important, study of the Spanish Civil War. He then went on to write an immense history of Cuba's experience since 1762, which was admirably readable....

The La Follettes of Wisconsin: Love and Politics in Progressive America.
March 22, 1995... At first, Bernard Weisberger's intention seems straightforward, a collective biography of two generations of the La Follette family whose combined political careers cut a wide swath of U.S. history from the 1890s to World War II. "Fighting" Bob...

Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution: The English Connection.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Paul W. Wilderson's well-researched study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the governorship of John Wentworth on the eve of the American Revolution. From the time he became governor of New Hampshire in 1767 to the time he...

Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.
March 22, 1995... This is a book about "great men" - Eisenhower, Kennedy, and especially Jean Monnet - who, Pascaline Winand argues, strove together to realize their common vision of a truly united Europe. Although focusing primarily on U.S. policy, Winand does...

The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics andLineage Discourse.
March 22, 1995... Chinese intellectuals, in an effort to cope effectively with a variety of socio-economic, political, and ethical issues confronting them in the late Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), moved away from a doctrinal, didactic presentation of Confucian...

Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764-1858.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Indirect and direct rule have been seen as the two contradictory "native systems" of the British Empire, an administrative schizophrenia that contrasted with the greater centralization and cultural appropriation of the French Empire....

Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1785-1895.
March 22, 1995... Recent critical reappraisals of colonial experience have emphasized the context of "discourse" that paralleled and supported the imposition of European economic and military hegemony over much of Asia and Africa. These studies have generally...

The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan.
March 22, 1995... When India and Pakistan gained independence, the subcontinent seemed unlikely to become a theater in the Cold War. Officials in Washington noted that the absence of industry, skilled workers, military bases, and raw materials placed both...

The Origins of the Tiandihui: The Chinese Triads in Legend and History.
March 22, 1995... This book analyzes contradictions between legend and the history of the Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society), one of the most important secret societies in modern Chinese history. While legend holds that the Tiandihui was formed in the...

China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Revolution has been a major theme in China studies. Scholars, however, often associate revolution narrowly with radical revolutionaries and violent mass uprisings against corrupted governments. Hardly does anybody talk about peaceful yet...

Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture.
March 22, 1995... Jonathan Spence has become perhaps our leading interpreter of modern Chinese history in the United States. His The Search for Modern China has supplanted John Fairbank's United States and China, a leading textbook on Chinese history for three...

The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Ann Waswo's skillful rendering of Nagatsuka Takashi's (1879-1915) novel into English captures both the beauty and the melancholy of rural life in early twentieth-century Japan. The son of a wealthy farmer, Nagatsuka drew on his personal...

The Dragon, The Lion, and the Eagle: Chinese-British-American Relations, 1949-1958.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This fine book by a young historian demonstrates what international history should and can be. Multiarchival in its research, skillfully written, modestly interpretative, and also insightful, this study reminds us that there is still much to...

In Europe's Name, Germany and the Divided Continent.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... In this brilliantly conceived, felicitously written, and exhaustively researched account, Timothy Garton Ash painstakingly develops a provocative narrative of east-west relations in postwar Germany. He demonstrates the ambiguity of the Federal...

The Later Roman Empire, AD 284-430.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Since the 1970s, ancient historians have been reclaiming late antiquity from the medievalists. The period from Diocletian's investiture in 284 to Justinian's immediate successors (c. 600) once exemplified decline the Roman Empire devolved;...

Bisexuality in the Ancient World.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Eva Cantarella has provided a sane and sophisticated analysis of the sexual mores of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Her research is firmly based in the ancient literary, artistic, and archaeological sources and shows a sound grasp of modern...

The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire.
March 22, 1995... This volume, which covers the period from 1985 to early 1993, makes lucid the bewildering, albeit crucial, events of perhaps the most important episode in recent world history. John B. Dunlop has based his account of the tumultuous Gorbachev era...

Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock.
March 22, 1995... Dyan Elliott's study begins with Jesus and traces the history of spiritual marriage to about 1500, but focuses on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when elaborate dossiers were prepared to prove the case for sainthood. Spiritual marriage is...

The Gilded Youth of Thermidor.
March 22, 1995... The jeunesse doree or gilded youth of the French Revolution played "a not inconsiderable role" in the social and political history of that phase of the Revolution known as the Thermidorian Reaction, from 1793 to 1795. The jeunesse were drawn...

Church, State and Society: 1760-1850.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... William Gibson's study is designed "to provide the undergraduate with an accessible examination of the principal themes and issues in the history of religion and society in the period" (ix). Drawing chiefly on Jonathon Clark and Linda Colley for...

Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Though works on the life of Constantine abound, M. Grant's new book is a welcome addition. His goal is to clarify the many uncertainties about Constantine's life, while treating the emperor in a balanced manner that lies between the skeptical...

The Weimar Republic.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Why do we have this book? What purpose does it serve? What does the author tell us about the period under discussion, and how does this interpretation of events fit in with those of other scholars? These are the standard questions one asks when...

First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This book has two sets of qualities that help explain why it will long stand as the definitive biography of one of history's most intriguing figures: a strong interest and empathy for its subject, and meticulous scholarship with intellectual...

The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... John Keay has written a history as fast-paced and gripping as any novel. Using language as rich and colorful as the merchants, seadogs, and soldiers who people his narrative, Keay recounts the near-mythic exploits of those who built a trading...

Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Arguing Revolution offers a detailed examination of the collapse of the revolutionary ideal in French intellectual discourse after 1968. Sunil Khilnani wants to contextualize French left-wing intellectuals' arguments, to situate or position them...

Diplomacy.
March 22, 1995... Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy is finely textured, rich in detail, and impressive in its scope. It draws heavily from the author's vast reservoir of historical knowledge and his experience with statecraft and foreign policy. As he has so frequently...

Politics, Censorship and the English Reformation.
March 22, 1995... The scope of this book is expansive. Collecting over thirty years' worth of previously published articles by David Loades, it embraces the three most tumultuous decades of English history during the sixteenth century, those spanning the Henrican...

The Culture of Labourism: The East End Between the Wars.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This book is somewhat mislabeled. It examines in detail not the whole of the East End of London, but concentrates on West Ham, and not for the entire interwar period, but mainly from 1918 to 1929. During the nineteenth century, West Ham was...

Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer.
March 22, 1995... This is a surprisingly good book. Unlike many Festschriften, these essays honoring G. E. Aylmer are held together by a compelling theme - the conflict that people experienced between their public roles and their personal consciences. The best...

The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1718-1792.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Lord Sandwich is popularly remembered as the man who invented the sandwich so that he could continue to gamble without stopping to eat and as the hypocrite who denounced John Wilkes for publishing the pornographic "Essay on Woman" even though...

'We are but Women': Women in Ireland's History.
March 22, 1995... Women's history in Ireland received little scholarly attention until the last quarter century and it remains remarkably sparse. Missing Pieces: Women in Irish History, a 1983 Irish feminist publication, expressed this lacunae. Roger Sawyer's book...

Mazzini.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Of the major figures of the Italian unification movement of the mid-nineteenth century, Giuseppe Mazzini is probably the least well known. Nor was he even one of the most popular men of his time. Monarchists feared his uprisings and labeled him a...

The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867-1918: Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism.
March 22, 1995... This volume, a continuation of Lawrence Sondhaus' earlier work, The Habsburg Empire and the Sea, examines naval developments within the complex political, economic, and social context of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. Written on the basis of...

Fathers & Sons in Athens: Idealogy and Society in the Era of thePelopennesian War.
March 22, 1995... Barry S. Strauss has drawn on recent developments in the social sciences and literary theory to illuminate Athenian social history. In his first book, Athens after the Peloponnesian War, Strauss gave a penetrating interpretation of the connection...

Raglan: From the Peninsula to the Crimea.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Lord Raglan, best remembered for the debacle of the charge of the Light Brigade at Baladava, and immortalized by his design of a sleeve, actually had, as John Sweetman demonstrates, a distinguished military career. Born into a period and class...

The Work of William Morris.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Paul Thompson's study of the work of William Morris has remained a major part of Morris scholarship since its first publication in 1966. In large part this work followed the lead of E. P. Thompson's William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary...

The New Regime: Transformation of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... In his latest work Isser Woloch argues that the French Revolution laid the groundwork for a new civic order that provided a long-lasting foundation for French public life (15). Woloch defines this civic order as "the values, policies, and...

Hippeis: The Cavalry of Ancient Greece.
March 22, 1995... Leslie Worley sets out to trace the evolution of cavalry on the battlefields of ancient Greece. He succeeds at doing that with general clarity, and this account will probably prove of great interest to the general reader. He discerns three stages...

D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Stephen Ambrose has done a great service for the new mass of readers who have been drawn into the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of World War II. His D-Day June 6, 1944 is a masterful narrative, replete with first-hand accounts that give a...

Women's Work: The First 20,000 years.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... For more than 20,000 years the story of textiles and the daily lives of women have been intertwined. The only more basic part of female work responsibility outside of childrearing, argues Barber, was food gathering and preparation. The task most...

Emerging Feminism from the Revolution to World War.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This collection of essays covers the nineteenth century as the fourth volume in a projected five-volume history of women. Its unifying analytical theme is the significance of ideology and image, "representations," as primary determining factors...

At all Costs! Stories of Impossible Victories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... In this brief book Bryan Perrett describes eleven incidents of courage in battle and makes an attempt to understand the motivations of individual soldiers and officers. The book is a well-written collection of battle stories, but the whole has...

The Industrial Revolution in World History.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This book describes the global processes of the industrial revolution. According to Peter Stearns, the industrial revolution is comparable to the Neolithic agricultural revolution in that it fundamentally reordered social and economic...

Taxation & Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State.
March 22, 1995... In 1789, Benjamin Franklin stated that, "In the world, nothing is certain, except death and taxes" (16). The only certainty about tax policy is that it will change, and change often. Sven Steinmo's book analyzes the development of tax policy in...