The Historian articles from September 1994

The Historian archives from September 1994

Interview with Stephen J. Pyne. (Interview)
September 22, 1994... Born in California in 1949, reared and educated in Arizona, Pyne earned his bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University and his master's and doctoral degrees in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Pyne has written...

NASA and the decision to build the space shuttle, 1969-72.
September 22, 1994... The Technological prowess of the United State's was symbolized by what became known as the space shuttle, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began to work on in the late 1960s. With the shuttle program NASA planned...

The sacred art of Ethiopia. (Illustration)
September 22, 1994... One of the most important events in Ethiopian art history occurred around 330 A.D., when Ezana, the Askumite ruler of the highlands of northeastern Africa, accepted Christianity. This occurred not long after the emperor Constantine declared...

Coerced labor in Venezuela, 1880-1936.
September 22, 1994... Latin American agricultural historians have long focused on the importance of coercive systems of labor mobilization. However, recent historical studies recognize that very different productive relations characterized distinct regions and that,...

Colonial dreams of the French right wing, 1881-1914.
September 22, 1994... The imperial expansion engaged in by the European powers in Africa and Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been one of the least understood aspects of recent political history. A variety of interpretations of this phenomenon...

Brown v. Board of Education and organized labor in the South.
September 22, 1994... The 1954 Decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education, was the greatest challenge to state-sponsored segregation that the South had ever faced. The Court outlawed racial segregation in schools, buses, beaches, parks, hotels,...

Scenes from Polish working-class life in Milwaukee, 1900-1940s. (Illustration)
September 22, 1994... Waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe began to arrive in major U.S. cities during the 1890s and 1900s. Often feared and hated by contemporaries, and forgotten by later historians, these newcomers played a major role in building...

Rudolf Hilferding and the total state.
September 22, 1994... Among those who fled Germany in 1933 were Rudolf Hilferding and his colleagues in the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Within months of Adolf Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship, the National Socialists had...

History's advances: recasting a historical reference classic.
September 22, 1994... Over the past two years a number of historians and graduate students at ten institutions in the United States and Australia have been revising the venerable William L. Langer's Encyclopedia of World History. As their efforts draw to a...

Iran's First Revolution: Shi'ism ad the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In this book, Mongol Bayat details the complexity of Iran's constitutional revolution. Such a study presents a daunting challenge to the historian, who must analyze a variety of political and social variables: the intractable, reactionary Qajar...

The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This book, the culmination of decades of careful research and reflection, provides an illuminating and reliable description of how the Swahili community understood both itself and the outside world. John Middleton begins with a brief account of...

Chained Together: Mandela, de Klerk, and the Struggle to Remake South Africa.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... David Ottaway has authored a riveting account of the personalities and the political jockeying for power that dominated events in South Africa between 1990 and 1993. This period saw the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven...

Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Historical study of South Africa has thrived in recent years. Much of the work has focused on the development of the mining industry and the fashioning of institutionalized racial domination since the late nineteenth century. The capitalist...

The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The Devil We Knew is one of the first post-Cold War analyses of the United States' forty-plus-year obsession with the communist menace. In just over two hundred tightly argued pages, H. W Brands explores the Cold War's strategic, economic,...

The Man in the Mirror: A Life of Benedict Arnold.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The hero-traitor of the American Revolutionary War has attracted more attention than any other general in that conflict except George Washington. All of the twentieth-century biographies of Arnold have been trade publications, because his name...

Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation and the Origins of the Constitution.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In this thoroughly researched work, Roger H. Brown focuses on tax policies of pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts during the 1780s. In each state, legislatures followed a "pattern of pressure-resistance-retreat" as...

Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The March 1994 assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta was a shocking reminder of Latin America's deepening poverty, flagrant social injustice, and rampant daily violence. Jorge G. Castaneda examines these...

The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1655-1740.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In this detailed overview of post-Restoration Anglo-American journalism, Charles E. Clark examines the catalytic function of the public press in replicating England's culture in her trans-Atlantic colonies. Clark here expands on his "Newspapers...

Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In the 1920s and 1930s the child-welfare movement established a scientific base for its action in the new field of child-development studies, believing that any improvement in the status of children would pay huge dividends by improving...

Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In the pantheon of Southern heroes Stonewall Jackson ranks second only to Robert E. Lee. Jackson's reputation as a brilliant commander was growing even before his death in May 1863. Biographies of the man reflect this adulation and are replete...

The Presidency of John F. Kennedy.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... James N. Giglio's book is an excellent addition to the publisher's series on the American presidency. Since the publication of the work, a number of polemical and largely critical accounts of Jack Kennedy have appeared. Attention has centered...

Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's 'Fictitious Prosperity' of Guano, 1840-1880.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This is a major, long-awaited reinterpretation of the impact of native economic ideologies during the Peruvian Guano Age, a period of lost opportunities for economic development The book grows out of a mature and insightful treatment of an...

The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The Lincoln Persuasion is the posthumously published work of J. David Greenstone, formerly a political scientist at the University of Chicago. It the ideologies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, William Leggett, Stephen Douglas, Martin Van...

Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Most of the literature on the abolitionist movement has either ignored or minimized the integral role women played in the fight against slavery. Debra Gold Hansen's book is an excellent addition to the history of abolitionists, detailing the...

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.
September 22, 1994... "It is time for a new biography of Stowe" (xi), Joan D. Hedrick writes in the preface of her book, referring to the more than fifty years that have elapsed since Forrest Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Crusader in Crinoline. Hedrick is right....

Brotherly Love: Murder and the Politics of Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Rhode Island.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Charles and Tess Hoffmann engagingly tell the story of the murder of textile industrialist Amasa Sprague, placing the event in the context of ethnic and political conflict in mid nineteenth-century Rhode Island. One of the most notorious...

Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth-Century City.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Thomas H. Holloway's is the first monograph in English on Rio's police and crime. It should attract readers interested in Brazil and comparative studies of nineteenth-century police, urban history, slave societies, arid the larger issues of...

American Slavery: 1619-1877.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... With American Slavery, 1619-1877 Peter Kolchin contributes a much-needed synthesis of the ever-growing historical literature on slavery. Arranged both chronologically and topically, this monograph provides an overview of the peculiar...

Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... George Armstrong Custer, one of the most controversial individuals in U.S. history, had Civil War and frontier fighting careers that earned him both respect and scorn. Historians and many others still debate the meaning, significance, and even...

Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898-1968.
September 22, 1994... This collection of nine original essays (with the exception of that by William A. Williams) was written by doctoral students of Fred Harvey Harrington in honor of their mentor. The theme that binds together the articles is the role that "action...

The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In 1993 the Huntington Library opened a superb exhibit that illuminates the essential facets of Abraham Lincoln's legacy. This slender volume was published as a companion piece for the exhibit; Mark E. Neely's biography is categorized as a work...

Thomas Jefferson: A Life.
September 22, 1994... Any aspiring biographer of Thomas jefferson must recognize that the odds are stacked against success. There is the sheer volume of material over 28,000 private letters and another 10,000 public papers, all of which have been combed through by...

Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800-1860.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In confessing both that his study focuses on elites and that it began with curiosity about why women dominated the membership rolls of Episcopal churches in antebellum North Carolina, Richard Rankin acknowledges, his debt to a new generation of...

The Coca Boom and Rural Social Change in Bolivia.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Coca production in Bolivia, its impact on the Indians of that country, and the market furnished by the United States for cocaine are the subjects of this book. Harry Sanabria's study is based on research conducted in Bolivia during three...

Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Becoming Mexican American, George J. Sanchez's excellent new history of the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles, is an engrossing, entertaining, and important study that will be discussed for years to come. Using analytical tools taken...

American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... James Roger Sharp begins with the promise to restore our understanding of the bitter conflict and unpredictable fluidity that characterized the political struggles of the early republic. Contrary to the consensus interpretation that finds a...

Roger Williams' Dream for America.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This work, much like its subject, the life and significance of Roger Williams, is complex. The book is at once a biographical sketch, an historiographical essay, and an argument to redress an oversight committed by previous historians. At...

Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Employing quantitative methods and group biography based on census data and other statistical sources, Donald Fithian Stevens explores the roots of instability in Mexico following the turbulent decade of the independence struggle. Stevens is...

The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri: 1840-1865.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The new printing of John E. Sunder's 1965 study of the upper Missouri River fur trade is worthwhile. For what he attempts to do, Sunder's scholarship is impeccable. Each fur frontier season between 1840 and 1865 is recorded in chronological...

Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Every serious student of modern America should read Christopher L. Tomlins' first book, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (1985). It combines the pro-labor cultural...

General James Longstreet: the Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier, A Biography.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... James Longstreet was born in 1821 and grew up on a cotton plantation in Georgia. He graduated from West Point in 1842, fifty-fourth in a class of fifty-six. His best and lifelong friend was cadet Ulysses S. Grant Longstreet served in the U.S....

Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala: 1821-1871.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Rafael Carrera is a controversial figure in the historiography of Latin America. The strongest of a multitude of strong men in Central America from 1837 until his death in 1865, Carrera has long been excoriated by historians writing about the...

The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 1, Ancient Japan.
September 22, 1994... The long-awaited Cambridge History of Japan is now appearing, not in sequence, but as the volumes are completed. The result is worth the wait. In no other Cambridge History volume is the information more valuable, it might be argued, because...

Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Poshek Fu's slender monograph, though particularized by place, raises universal questions about the "gray zone" of moral ambiguities necessitated when the thinking person confronts evil. Major chapters analyze the choices of resistance,...

Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This book is a welcome addition to Asian-American studies. Lauren Kessler tells the story of three generations of a Japanese-American family, the Yasuis, and makes an important contribution to the fields of sociology, ethnic studies, and...

The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Anita Inder Singh has written an exceptionally detailed monograph on Anglo-American relations in South Asia from Indian independence to the Suez Crisis. Her work is based on extensive use of manuscripts in Indian, British, and American...

The European City.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The European city evolved alongside Europe itself, and European civilization is inextricably tied to the development of European cities. In this volume, Leonardo Benevolo provides a masterful analysis of the important outlines of European urban...

Palmerston's Foreign Policy: 1848.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Drawing on Palmerston's correspondence, George J. Billy has written a detailed analysis of his diplomacy focusing on early 1848. Throughout the crises of that revolutionary year, Palmerston was primarily concerned with preserving the peace,...

The Merchant Adventurers of England: The Company and the Crown, 1494-1564.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In his brief monograph on the Merchant Adventurers of England in the early sixteenth century Douglas R. Bisson complements G. D. Ramsay's study of the declining fortunes of the company in the reign of Elizabeth I. Though the book deals with...

In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age, Europe in the 1840s.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The issue of modernity - its meaning significance, causes and contours - claims a large and impressive literature. Jerome Blum's In the Beginning is a welcome addition. In it he attempts to demonstrate that the 1840s were "the most amazing...

Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr's Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... For a half century Reinhold Niebuhr wore many hats: preacher, professor, theologian, activist, writer, and "vital center" liberal. Charles C. Brown's well-researched book is an intellectual biography of this towering political intellectual whom...

William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture.
September 22, 1994... William Cobbett has been appropriated both by the right and the left, as a spokesman for rural nostalgia and the harbinger of revolution. A man who has appealed equally to Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold, G. K. Chesterton and Edward Thompson,...

The Cultivation of Hatred.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Starting with a lengthy description of the duelling rituals of German students and continuing through the bullying of Theodore Roosevelt, the debates about capital punishment, the political satire of Gilbert and Sullivan's show tunes, and the...

Lord Curzon: The Last of the British Moghuls.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Nyana Goradia begins her study of Lord Curzon with a prologue that retells the story of Curzon's being passed over for the premiership in favor of Andrew Bonar Law in 1923. The prologue concludes with Curzon's wife, Grace, saying that her...

Anglo-French Naval Rivalry: 1840-1870.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Between the first and second world wars several scholars began studying naval history in a new way Among them were Robert Greenhalgh Albion, James Phinney Baxter III, Arthur J. Marder, and Theodore Ropp. These and other researchers undertook...

Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Barbara A. Hanawalt's Growing Up in Medieval London is a valuable contribution to the history of the family. The book opens as a priest tells the tale of a boy bishop to an audience of children and adolescents. This story within a story catches...

The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East.
September 22, 1994... Within a broad band extending from the Caucasus Mountains to the Red Sea, garrisons of Roman soldiers were stationed in towns and deserts presumably to secure the hinterland against external, eastern threats. When Theodor Mommsen wrote his...

The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Historians generally portray the French Third Republic as a weak state. Following the collapse of the imperial government in 1870, they argue, the authority of the new republic was frequently challenged, in large part because France's...

Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Jacob Katz's analysis of the internal communal and institutional experience of Ashkenazic Jewry "at the end of the Middle Ages" remains a classic of Jewish social history long after its publication in 1958. Bernard D. Cooperman has now...

The Origins of Railway Enterprise: The Stockton and Darlington Railway, 1821-1863.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Although not as pioneering as once believed, the Stockton and Darlington Railway played a crucial role in the regional economic development of south Durham and northeast Yorkshire in nineteenth-century Britain. Maurice W. Kirby's excellent...

Humphry Davy: Science and Power.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was the most renowned scientist in Britain during the first decades of the nineteenth century. His discoveries in chemistry, especially his identification of a number of new elements, made him a figure of immense...

Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This is a major scholarly study both in demographic modeling and in the demographic history of London. In the first section of the book, John Landers contests the view that fertility was the prime determinant of population growth arid instead...

The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... W. Bruce Lincoln's works are always a joy to read and his recent outing into Siberian history is no exception. This long study - the history of the Russian connections to Siberia from Chinghis Khan to the present is after all a large subject -...

The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The Second Republic," a time of incipient civil war" and "complex class struggle ultimately resolved" by Louis-Napoleon's military coup, has long fascinated historians (2). It has played a significant role in a number of historical debates. Was...

Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485-1640.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Roger B. Manning handles a complex, demanding subject concisely and clearly in this work, which complements his 1988 study, Village Revolts. In Tudor and early Stuart times hunting meant principally deer hunting from horseback. Poaching...

Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This outstanding study provides a detailed, sensitive, and complex view of Greece under Italian and German occupation. Based on a mass of documents from several countries, an intimate knowledge of Greek politics, society, and culture, and an...

War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... "War Plan Orange" was a code phrase covering all the contingency plan for war against Japan drawn up in the four decades before World War Il. Naturally, these plans changed as military technology advanced and as the international situation...

Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights: Images of the Military Orders, 1128-1291.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In the present, as in the medieval past, physical violence in the name of a higher cause holds a dire fascination; the rhetoric of the crusade continues both to attract and repel in a variety of global contexts. This book is a modest and sober...

Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Why did the Second Spanish republic fail? Defeated Republicans would argue that General Franco, with the assistance of two fascist powers, overthrew it with force in the bloody civil war, 1936-39. Stanley G. Payne explores the question...

Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The title evokes the well-known surveys of Cochrane and Nock, but Jaroslav Pelikan provides sharper focus and a more profound depth of vision than any survey could offer. Pelikan demonstrates precisely how a group of classically educated...

1940: Myth and Reality.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In this interpretation of the "finest hour," Clive Ponting examines the historical drama, the personalities, and the events of that critical year in Britain, 1940, including the leadership of Churchill, Dunkirk, the fall of Frame, the Battle of...

War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy, 1470-1560.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Despite the misleading title, this important book deals with just one province, Picardy. David Potter traces the transformation of this amorphous collection of sovereignties from disputed territory left by the collapse of the Burgundian state...

The Medieval Spains.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The Medieval Spains is aimed at students and other interested readers with no previous background in medieval Spanish history. It is relatively brief and uses no footnotes, although it does include a short bibliography containing suggestions...

Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Referring to the current climb in Russia's death rate, a front-page story in the 6 March 1994 New York Times referred to a society so nervous about the future that it has all but stopped having children and a death rate rising faster than that...

The Nazi Impact on German Village.
September 22, 1994... In 1965 William Sheridan Allen published The Nazi Seizure of Power, a pioneering study of National Socialism at the local level that inspired historians to reexamine the phenomenon of Nazism through the lens of community life Walter Rinderle...

Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century.
September 22, 1994... This book explores the evolution of siegecraft in the Latin West during the twelfth century. Randall Rogers selects the First Crusade as his starting point, arguing that the twelfth century saw siegecraft reach and surpass Roman levels in this...

London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850.
September 22, 1994... This book in the Cambridge series on population, economy, and society is essentially a statistical and graphical updating - whether as validation, refinement, or revision in detail - of previous economic studies of London. Specifically, L. D....

The Latitudinarians and the Church of England: 1660-1700.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In recent years scholars have come increasingly to recognize the importance of religious issues - tensions between high Church and Dissent - as source of political contention in Restoration England. In this context, a new study of the...

Disraeli: A Biography.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The worth of this biography has been obscured by its early notoriety. Even before it was published, its supposed disclosure that Disraeli bad two illegitimate children excited the British press, already worked up over the Conservative double...

Assassinating Hitler: Ethics and Resistance in Nazi Germany.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... To illustrate the relationship between virtue and politics, Robert Weldon Whalen has written a fine, short case study of the moral universe of the participants in the attempt of 20 July 1944 to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi...

A History of God: The 400-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In a highly readable work, which has been well publicized, Karen Armstrong ambitiously attempts to give a panoramic "history" of the concepts of a personal god in the major monotheistic religions. The scope of the work reaches from pre-history...

Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In 1957, Norman Cohn produced the first edition of his now classic book, 7he Pursuit of the Millennium. It was a sweeping survey of apocalyptic sects on the fringes of mainstream Christianity from the early Middle Ages through the Reformation....

The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C..(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In The End of the Bronze Age Robert Drews explores the cause of what he calls "the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C.," an event that led to the collapse of many Bronze-Age Age civilizations. He defines the Catastrophe as the fiery destruction of...

The Madness of Kings: Personal Trauma and the Fate of Nations.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Vivian Green traces the connection between madness and rulers from ancient to modem times. We learn how madness (very broadly defined) affected rulers; we learn less, as might be expected, about the impact these rulers had on their subjects....