© 2011 Phi Alpha Theta

BOOK REVIEWS
EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University;
Delaware, OH 43015. TELEPHONE: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643.
E-MAIL ADDRESS: brhistor@owu.edu
WEB ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor
EDITOR
RICHARD SPALL
Ohio Wesleyan University
REGIONAL SUB-EDITORS

Douglas R. Bisson Richard B. Allen

(Early Modern Europe) (Africa, Middle East, and South Asia)
Belmont University Framingham State College
Helen S. Hundley Betty Dessants
(Russia and Eastern Europe) (United States Since 1865)
Wichita State University Shippensburg University
Jose C. Moya Paulette L. Pepin
(Latin America) (Medieval Europe)
University of California at Los Angeles University of New Haven
Susan Mitchell Sommers Richard Spall
(Britain and the Empire) (Historiography)
Saint Vincent College Ohio Wesleyan University
Sally Hadden Peter Worthing
(United States) (East Asia and the Pacific)
Florida State University Texas Christian University

STUDENT EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Kaleigh Felisberto Eric Francis
Kara Reiter Neill McGram Abraham Gustavson
Lily Strumwasser Gregory Stull Chris Heckman
Celia Baker Drew Howard Nicholas Oleski
Amadea Weber Jeffrey O’Bryon

WORD PROCESSING: LAURIE GEORGE

hisn_294 317..414
318 THE HISTORIAN

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Becoming Somaliland. By Mark Bradbury. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University

Press, 2008. Pp. 200. $22.95.)

This book presents a case in support of the northwestern Somali region’s 1991
proclamation of independence from the Somali Republic. Its first two chapters
trace the history and culture of the Somali people and the collapse of the state in
1991, while the following eight chapters focus on the political processes that
culminated in the creation of “Somaliland” from “ashes” to “democratic transi-
tion.” The central questions the author asks are: “Why has Somaliland not
followed Somalia into ‘state collapse’?” and “What explains why Somaliland has
not received international recognition; and what are the chances for a viable
Somali unitary government in the future?” To answer these questions, Mark
Bradbury emphasizes how the notion of “state” was imposed on the Somali
people as these were “famously stateless” clan-based societies in precolonial
times. Clan is placed at the center of any viable state in any Somali-inhabited
region, and the author discusses in detail the prominent role this social organiza-
tion has played in major successful peace conferences in Somaliland. The bulk of
the book is a critique of the international community’s failure to recognize
Somaliland while bequeathing resources and political legitimacy to the search for
rebuilding the Somali nation, which the writer views as unattainable.
Bradbury’s theoretical underpinning emerges as an homage to I. M. Lewis’s
Pastoral Democracy [1961]. His analysis and even terminology do not deviate in
any way from that presented in Lewis’s 1950s British Somaliland. Consequently
the author essentializes “clan” as the only viable mode of political structure that
can hold Somalis together. There is no mention of the vibrant literature focusing
on colonialism and its impact on ethnic and political constructions. In addition,
the writer pays lip service to writings that challenge his perspective of Somali
society and the processes in Somaliland, while overtly relying on secessionist
narrative.
If Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” explains the emer-
gence of the modern nation-state, Becoming Somaliland is “de-imagining” the
Somali nation par excellence. This is done based on historical misrepresentations
that are contradicted by research. For example, the author confuses northern
Somalis’ indisputable cultural, religious, and social affinity with Somalis elsewhere
with the brutal dictatorial rule of Siad Barre’s regime, which indeed included
many northerners in its highest posts. In fact, the current president of Somaliland
was a former high official in Barre’s notoriously violent National Security Service,
BOOK REVIEWS 319

and Somaliland’s first president [1993–2002] was also the 1967–1969 Somali
prime minister. The latter is only one example that contradicts northern margin-
alization in previous Somali governments that the author presents as factual.
Moreover, Bradbury never mentions the concept of Soomalinimo, a nationalist
notion of Somalis as one people, which was the bedrock of unification and early
postindependence Somalia, but instead reduces postindependence unification of
northern and southern Somali regions to “economic” rationales. Although the
book might best be characterized as a manifesto for Somaliland secession, it is also
filled with arguments that contradict its merit for international recognition. For
example, the author emphasizes how this independence project is mainly a “one
clan” affair in a multiclan region. What emerges as the biggest challenge con-
fronting secession is hence not the absence of international recognition but rather
its legitimacy in the eyes of important segments of its own population. Further-
more, the book outlines some northern secessionist leaders’ mixed loyalty to this
project and pervasive corruption and human rights abuses including the arrests
and expulsions of northerners who disagree with elite secessionist discourses.
In a nutshell, although this book is the first to summarize the political processes
in the Somaliland region, and the author demonstrates close ties and deep knowl-
edge of the secessionist movement, theoretical, methodological, and historical
shortcomings unfortunately limit its contribution to Somali studies.
University of Minnesota Cawo Abdi

The Life and Times of the Shah. By Gholam Reza Afkhami. (Berkeley, Calif.: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2009. Pp. xvii, 713. $34.95.)

This monograph is a detailed account of the life and the reign of Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979. Despite its length and academic
style, it is an easily accessible book, which should prove useful to people who are
interested in the history and politics of modern Middle East as well as in United
States foreign policy during the Cold War.
The book consists of five parts. The first part sheds light on the Shah’s
childhood and his relationship with his father. The second part focuses on his first
decade on the throne and his struggle to assert himself as a leader. The third part
explains the domestic and international policies pursued by the Shah between the
1950s and the late 1970s. The fourth part discusses the Revolution of 1978–1979
and how it ended with success. Finally, the last part deals with the Shah’s years in
exile and his death.
320 THE HISTORIAN

What sets this monograph apart from many others on twentieth-century

Iranian history is the approach employed by the author. Aiming to “make it
possible for the readers to see the shah’s world through the shah’s eyes,” Gholam
Reza Afkhami “lets the shah speak his thoughts and express his judgments about
what he did, why he did it, and how he felt about it.” He “lets his friends, enemies,
officials, and other interlocutors, Iranian and non-Iranian, tell their experiences
with him and express themselves about him” (xi). In the end, the picture that is
portrayed is a ruler whose naïve and mild character, hatred of violence and
bloodshed, and “proclivity to turn from adversity rather than to face it” brings his
downfall (x–xi).
The strength of the book lies in the extensive research conducted by the author.
In addition to consulting British, American, and Russian archives, as well as
primary sources in Persian, Afkhami interviews the members of the Pahlavi family
and Iranian and foreign officials, most of whom he knows personally due to his
previous position in the Iranian government. These sources not only provide the
readers with inside knowledge about the decision-making process and political
struggles in Iran but also present a different perspective on intricate and contro-
versial issues, such as the nationalization of oil, the coup d’etat of 1953, and the
White Revolution.
Notwithstanding its contributions to the literature on the Pahlavi dynasty and
modern Iran, Afkhami’s work has a major flaw. It never directly addresses the
problematic issues associated with the Shah’s reign, such as lavish military spend-
ing, inflation, charges of corruption, human rights violations, and political
oppression. This is most evident in the chapter on SAVAK, which fails to mention
its systematic use of torture against the members of the opposition. Accordingly,
the book provides a partial portrayal of the Shah, as it highlights his achievements
and downplays his failures.
University of Arizona Serpil Atamaz-Hazar

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. By Judith
A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 296. $27.50.)

The studies of African and the African diasporic pasts reside in a somewhat
ambivalent space. On the one hand, they constitute two of the most innovative
fields of history, breaking the boundaries of traditional historical methods,
sources, and approaches. On the other hand, their practitioners are often still
engaged in proving that these communities have histories worth studying and in
BOOK REVIEWS 321

establishing the parameters of these pasts. This study is an example of scholars’

attempts to negotiate the dual challenge of addressing the silencing of Africans’
presence in mainstream academic work and at the same time breaking through
conceptual and methodological barriers. Judith A. Carney, a geographer best
known for her study of transatlantic pathways of African rice, is assisted in this
task by independent scholar Richard Nicholas Rosomoff.
From the introduction of the volume, Carney and Rosomoff set out to correct
an “imbalance” in global historical narratives of the Columbian exchange, which
focus on the movements of Eurasian and American plants and animals among
continents. They explicitly connect this imbalance to the minimization of African
agency in contemporary scholarship. Thus they establish the pattern of the book,
which emphasizes the shared roles played by Africans and their crops in the
making of the Atlantic world. In successive chapters, the authors seek to redress
the imbalance through environmental history, social history, and forays into
memory and historical consciousness. They begin by asserting Africans’ achieve-
ments in domesticating the flora of their own continent in the first chapter and
then that of African plants and people in global botanical history. In chapters
three and four, the authors chronicle the ways in which subsistence and social
patterns in West Africa shifted during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and
similarly how issues of subsistence and provisioning underpinned the mechanisms
of the Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the next three chapters, the authors look
at how Africans in the Americas shaped foodways as well as production and
consumption patterns in marooned communities, on formal plantations, and in a
“shadow world” of slave-plots and plantation yards. Following a brief description
of the impact of African animals and grasses on environments in the Americas,
they conclude by arguing that many contemporary foodways in the Americas
show evidence of African inputs and deem these to be “memory dishes” of the
African diaspora.
There is no doubt that this is an important volume in beginning the process of
effectively placing Africans and their crops in a leading role in the creation of an
Atlantic world. Some sections of the book provide excellent examples of empirical
research as the authors present numerous and diverse sources to support their key
argument. The authors are also to be applauded for effectively explaining histories
of social change and organization in terms of human relationships with the
environment in societies throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The reader
should especially note their innovative argument that the gendering of the Atlantic
slave trade had to do in part with the preparation of foodstuffs aboard ship (73).
If there is a weakness to the text, it is the authors’ failure to reach the full potential
322 THE HISTORIAN

in using their sources. Although oral tradition, which they call oral history, is
mobilized very effectively in some cases, linguistic and archaeobotanical data are
by contrast buried in the study even when secondary sources that make use of
them are central to the argument being made. Similarly, although the authors
make much of “memory,” they choose to avoid the theoretical complexities
surrounding it, especially in the final chapter. Nevertheless, In the Shadows of
Slavery is a solid study that should not be neglected by any historian purporting
to put forward an Atlantic or world history, and it has great value in other fields
as well.
San Francisco State University Trevor R. Getz

The Rise and Fall of the Shah: Iran from Autocracy to Religious Rule. By Amin Saikal.
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xxxvii, 279. $24.95.)

One suspects that Australian political scientist Amin Saikal conceptualized this
book, first published in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, as
something other than a postmortem of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign. As a
consequence, the title is a bit misleading. Saikal’s main topic is less why the
monarch was toppled and more how the shah conducted international relations
and managed the Iranian economy. These themes are not unrelated to the shah’s
fall from power, but readers should be aware: a book that pays only glancing
reference to Khomeini and none to intellectual precursors of the revolution like Ali
Shariati only tells a portion of the story.
Nevertheless, what Saikal does tell, he tells well. Over twenty-six years stretch-
ing from the 1953 Mossadeq-era coup to the 1979 revolution, the shah sought to
strengthen his hold on power by lessening his dependency on the U.S. and making
Iran the dominant regional power. His chosen means had obvious ramifications
for Iran’s domestic policy. Iran’s oil revenues, which quadrupled after 1974,
subsidized extravagant weapon purchases at the expense of education and social
welfare programs. Given the neglect he paid to the needs of the populace and his
failure to attain a popular base of support, the shah’s policies were ultimately
self-defeating (201–208).
The author divides the book into two parts: “The Shah and Iran: Between
Dependence and Oil Power” and “The Emergence of Iran as a Regional Power.”
In chapter one, the author provides historical background from the turn-of-the-
century Anglo-Russian rivalry through Mossadeq’s failed efforts at nationalizing
Iran’s oil. In chapter two, he deals with 1953–1963, a decade that Saikal char-
acterizes as an era of Iranian dependence on the U.S. “at the cost of the country’s
BOOK REVIEWS 323

traditional nonalignment” (46). Despite an ambitious program of domestic social

reform, Saikal sees the White Revolution, discussed in chapter three, as being
principally motivated by foreign policy aims. He writes,

The White Revolution represented an attempt on the part of the [s]hah to

carry out a systematic process of centrally controlled general mass mobili-
zation and selected socio-economic reforms, largely in line with Western-
ization, in support of his leadership and rule, in order to achieve a higher
degree of independence. If successful, he could increase his foreign policy
options and alter Iran’s relationship with the United States to one of greater
symmetry. (80)

Chapter four offers the shah begrudging admiration for his role in creating
OPEC and wresting control of the oil industry from western companies. In
chapters five through seven, Saikal describes the shah’s regional ambitions and
military expansion. Chapter eight returns to the theme of domestic policy and the
social repercussions of the military build-up and the monarch’s obsession with
internal security.
Saikal updates this edition with an excellent introduction devoted to the
dynamics of contemporary politics in the Islamic Republic and Iran’s nuclear
ambitions. Ironically, the shah’s main foreign policy goals have in fact now been
achieved: Iran is no longer dependent on the U.S. and is now the dominant player
in the region thanks to the resurgence of Shi’i politics and ill-conceived American
policies. Saikal does not frame his observations in terms of historical continuity,
but this study, still timely after three decades, naturally invites comparisons
between the autocratic shah and his equally repressive successors.
Oregon State University Jonathan G. Katz

Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727. By Nabil Matar. (New York, N.Y.: Colum-
bia University Press, 2009. Pp. xxviii, 313. $45.00.)

This book is a major contribution to a hitherto little-experienced field, despite the

abundance of Arabic writings about Europe and the West in general. What also
distinguishes this book is the thoroughness with which the author analyzes and
comments on an array of travel accounts, letters, and descriptions written in
Arabic by mostly North African travelers, rulers, and captives that shed light
on conditions in Europe and the relations between Muslims and European
Christians.
324 THE HISTORIAN

The book is divided into two parts. Part one includes two chapters. The first is
titled “Popular Sources: Accounts of Muslim Captivity in Christendom.” The
second chapter is titled “Elite Sources: Muslim Ambassadors in Christendom.”
Part one is preceded by an intensive, thoroughly researched introduction that
deals with various aspects of the relationship between Muslims and Europeans
and is followed by a lengthy conclusion, “Encountering the Dunya of the Chris-
tians.” Part two includes readings in English translation from twenty Arabic
sources that relate to the theme of the book. Extensive notes for the chapters then
follow, and a very detailed bibliography brings the book to an end. The book also
has a list of contemporary rulers in Europe and the Muslim world.
The beginning date of 1578 in the book’s title marks the Moroccan victory
over the Portuguese-led crusade and the consequent Muslim reconquest of regions
in North Africa that had been formerly colonized by Europeans. The ending date
of 1727 marks the death of Morocco’s ruler, Mulay Isma’il, who retook Tangier
from the British in 1684 and defeated the Spaniards at al-Arai’sh in 1689.
Nabil Matar’s aim of writing the book is to show:

that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq were eager to engage
Christendom, despite wars and rivalries, and hoped to establish routes of
trade and alliances through treaties and royal marriages. However, the rise
of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of Euro-
pean military technology brought these advances to an end. (91)

Mercantilist Europe, on its part, did business with the Muslim world through
commercial companies, nations of merchants living abroad, and the implementa-
tion of the Capitulations. When Europe changed from mercantilism to capitalism,
it became intolerant and exclusionary in its dealings with the Muslim countries. Its
primary aim was to find new markets for its products and raw materials for its
factories. European capitalism then generated imperialism and the occupation of
many of the Arab and Muslim countries.
The author makes a distinction in the approach between North African Muslims
from the Maghrib and eastern Muslims from the Mashriq to Europe and to
Christendom in general. He gives the example of Ahmad ibn Qasim, an Andalusian
Morisco, who fled from Spain in 1597, settled in Morocco, and was sent by the ruler
of Morocco to France and the Netherlands where he spent three years trying to
retrieve stolen Moroccan goods. Matar also recounts the story of Emir Fakhr al-Din
al-Ma’ni II, an Arab Druze Amir of Mount Lebanon who sought refuge from the
Ottomans with his business partners, the Medicis in Italy. Ousted from Spain by
Christians, ibn Qasim initially saw Christian bigotry, ignorance, and anti-Muslim
BOOK REVIEWS 325

expressions. He later avoided religious disputations and came to recognize a

brighter side of the Christians of the Protestant Reformation in the Netherlands,
with whom he compared the intolerant Catholics in France and Spain. Fakhr
al-Din, by comparison, was opposed to the Muslim Ottomans, whom ibn Qasim
considered his allies, sought refuge from them for five years [1613–1618] in Italy,
and spoke highly of the Christians and their culture even though his ship was
attacked by Christian pirates. Al-Khalidi, the biographer of Fakhr al-Din, high-
lights the fact that Fakhr al-Din was an Arab, lived amongst Maronite Christians in
Mount Lebanon, traded with European Christians, and consequently took refuge
with them. Matar captures the difference between the two men by saying,

In this unwillingness on the part of ibn Qasim to gaze at the European hosts,
he missed presenting to his readers the very important information about
the economic and industrial transformation in Europe. It is to the credit of
al-Khalidi/Fakhr al-Din that they recognized the importance of Italy’s devel-
opment and wealth and understood how the new technologies and naval
innovations made that wealth possible. For ibn Qasim, the Christians were
dangerous; for Fakhr al-Din, they were impressive. (91)

Europe Through Arab Eyes is a landmark in the study of the exchanges

between Christendom and Islam in the early modern period. Matar is to be
commended for having produced such a fine piece of research, and Columbia
University Press is to be complimented for publishing this important book.
College of William and Mary Abdul-Karim Rafeq

THE AMERICAS

African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–
1861. By Leslie M. Alexander. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Pp. xxiv, 258. $45.00.)

Where once slavery was thought a sideshow at the Constitutional Convention,

a no-show in American political discourse until the Compromise of 1820, a
recent push exploring the bounds of race and slavery in the early American
republic is forcing a new consensus. Bringing to view the early national debate
among black and white Americans from all regions, but particularly the North,
has redefined understandings of liberty, citizenship, and, above all, emancipa-
tion. Leslie M. Alexander’s study of black identity and political consciousness in
New York City from 1784 to 1861 clarifies for readers the ramifications of
326 THE HISTORIAN

Northern emancipation and abolition. Navigating the evolution of free black

activism, Alexander charts a community in search of a physical and ideological
homeland. Scholars of African American history, the early national and ante-
bellum periods, and race and slavery will find the book worthwhile.
The 1799 New York “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” put in place
a measured emancipation program that, over the next several decades, greatly
expanded New York City’s free black community. But it is how community
members positioned themselves to one another that concerns Alexander. In 1784
a combination of moral improvement and appeals to an African heritage marked
New York blacks’ efforts for uplift. Facing racism and poverty, however, spokes-
men often chose moral improvement over African modes by 1809. From 1810 to
1826, black leaders continued with moral uplift but again turned to Africa.
Rejecting the elitist and racist goals of the American Colonization Society, many
African American New Yorkers forged emigration plans to Haiti and Sierra
Leone, seeing themselves as part of a larger Pan-African community. Their work
for global racial progress, however, found an abrupt end with the 1827 abolition
of slavery in New York State.
Flooded by freed blacks from the countryside, New York City’s African Ameri-
can community stood at a crossroads—with “enemies of emancipation” focusing
on colonization, espousing emigration, and unintentionally associating the black
community with white racists (54). Black leaders instead embraced America,
looking to unify their community against Southern slavery, fugitive slave catchers,
and Northern racism. The turn from “African” to “American” marks the great
transformation in Alexander’s account.
The author impressively tracks the political thought of New York’s African
Americans but leaves significant questions untouched. The trajectory of interracial
exchange, for example, is a surprising exclusion given the last chapter’s focus on
activism, Seneca Village, and the “triumph” of Central Park. Readers will wonder,
too, how the city’s blacks fit the founding documents of the United States within
their calls for being African, American, or both—the question as to whether the
Constitution was an antislavery document riveted antebellum blacks and whites.
Alexander’s failure to address meaningfully the changing and charged religious
landscape in a study focusing on black leaders, including ministers, during a time
when many freed blacks arrived in the city from regions rampant with revivalism is
most disappointing. The shift from gradualist to immediatist understandings
reshaped American religion, abolition, and interracial relations from 1780 to 1850.
Trinity College Scott Gac
BOOK REVIEWS 327

The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism. By

Judith A. Allen. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 467.
$35.00.)

This author has written a fascinating and important biography of Charlotte

Perkins Gilman. In it, she attempts to wrestle Gilman away from the literary critics
who have made Gilman’s fiction her best known work and to resituate Gilman as
a central actor in Progressive-era social and intellectual movements. Indeed, Judith
A. Allen argues compellingly that Gilman was a leading feminist theorist of the
early twentieth century and that she belongs integrally to the history of progres-
sive reform.
One of Allen’s signal achievements is to establish Gilman’s renown—and
consequent influence—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Espe-
cially after publishing her magnum opus, Women and Economics: A Study of the
Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution in
1898, Gilman was in great demand as a speaker and writer. In fact, Gilman’s
pronouncements were routinely covered by the press in the United States and
England, and she was often held up as one of the three most important feminist
thinkers of her day, the other two being Sweden’s Ellen Key (whose gender
essentialism offended Gilman) and South African Olive Schreiner (whose belief in
the historicity of sex differentiation Gilman shared).
Allen painstakingly lays out the origins and shape of Gilman’s particular
version of feminism, which depended in just about equal parts on reform Dar-
winism and Gilman’s personal suffering from dominant gender expectations.
Gilman was ambivalent about the feminist label, which she associated with
advocacy of a sexual indulgence that she believed oppressive to women and
detrimental to further human progress. But she sometimes accepted the label,
aiming to identify it with hopes for a world in which women were not confined to
domesticity, economic dependence, or sexual subservience to men.
Allen also carefully sorts through existing scholarly claims about Gilman and
sets a remarkably errant record straight. With incredible power, for example,
Allen argues that Gilman’s early brush with madness, fictionalized in her famous
short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” resulted not from a doctor’s prescription of
the rest cure as the story might suggest, but from the excruciating miseries—
sexual, economic and otherwise—of her first marriage. Gilman’s subsequent
relations with women, Allen believes, may not have been sexual, as some earlier
analysts have thought, but did confirm Gilman’s sense that economic indepen-
dence from either male or female partners was essential to a fully human life. Allen
328 THE HISTORIAN

demonstrates that, contrary to current understanding, Gilman was a passionate

participant in the women’s suffrage campaign and the movement to abolish
prostitution, both of which, according to Allen, locate Gilman in the mainstream
of progressive reform. And, Allen shows that late in her life Gilman became a
proponent of birth control, a surprise given Gilman’s earlier resistance to the
cause.
A brief review cannot do justice to Allen’s rich analysis of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, a progressive public intellectual who has been misunderstood as often as
not by historians. This book is a must read for historians of feminism.
University of Maryland, College Park Robyn Muncy

The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. By Jeremy Black. (Norman, Okla.: Univer-
sity Press of Oklahoma, 2009. Pp. xvii, 286. $32.95.)

In 1989 Donald R. Hickey labeled the War of 1812 “A Forgotten Conflict.” In

2004 he admitted that so much had emerged since then that it was forgotten no
more. First Jon Latimer, and here Jeremy Black, have published detailed analytical
treatments from British—and with Black international—perspectives that have a
fresh context within which to review the historiography of the War of 1812. Black
notes that Britain was unmoved by the American declaration of war because of its
focus on leading the continental coalition against Napoleon. London focused on
the immediate threat, defense of the Canadas, and little more once the United
States launched its campaigns.
The tiny federal army meant that Washington had to rely upon raw state militia
and volunteers. The British and provincial defense blunted the early northern
assaults, and Washington in time managed not a single conflict, but several
regional wars: the northwest borderlands; Great Lakes; the St. Lawrence valley;
the southeast; and the war at sea. And the war remained regional and dispersed.
Meanwhile, the British managed their coalition in Europe in a remarkable
display of strategic international, political, and military management. They fought
a defensive war until 1814, when Napoleon fell, after which they had the freedom
to expand their efforts. Black notes the lack of American strategic thinking,
planning, preparation, or coordination. Throughout the conflict, the native
peoples suffered major defeats that led to their expulsion from east of the Mis-
sissippi River after 1814. In his chapter on the war at sea, Black notes the British
faced no threat, except from privateers, and controlled the American coast from
Maine to the Carolinas by 1814. They occupied northern Maine, launched
harassing and spoliation raids in the Chesapeake Bay, besieged Baltimore, and
BOOK REVIEWS 329

ransacked Washington. Black is clear that these theaters and campaigns remained
largely discrete. American interests and capacities varied with the regions. Andrew
Jackson fought Georgia’s war to crush Indians and eject the neutral Spanish,
which led to the postwar American takeover of Spanish territory in the Gulf of
Mexico. The British suffered a defeat at New Orleans, but not catastrophe, and by
then the delegates at Ghent had produced a treaty.
Black sees several North American consequences from the war. First, an Anglo-
American accord developed that resolved future problems by diplomacy and
commissions. This spawned the “undefended border” myth of Canadian-
American relations. Second, defeat and expulsion of Indians in the northwest and
southeast allowed expanded settlement in the Mississippi valley that fed American
economic development. Third, a myth of victory fed American nationalism.
Fourth, the Anglo-American accord created for the United States an age of free
security. Throughout the study, Black shows how both his British perspective and
international context provide fresh vantage points from which to reconsider
several themes and issues of the War of 1812. In sum, this sophisticated, wide-
angled, and readable treatment of the War of 1812 from the British perspective
belongs in all university and large public libraries.
Mount Saint Vincent University Reginald C. Stuart

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. By Max Blu-
menthal. (New York, N.Y.: Nation Books, 2009. Pp. 394. $25.00.)

The main purpose of this new book is to expose what the author argues is the
absolute and fundamental hypocrisy of a movement whose foundation rests on
religious purity and moral codes. In a detailed and richly descriptive narrative,
Max Blumenthal connects the dots among the key actors in the conservative
religious right movement and recounts numerous examples of alleged infidelities,
financial corruption, and even violence committed by individuals who have been
supporters of, or supported by, such groups as the Christian Coalition, Focus on
the Family, and the Family Research Council. Blumenthal also presents lengthy
case studies of a number of prominent Republican politicians who have been
accused of adultery, the use of prostitution, and homosexuality. He points out that
adultery, drug use, and alcoholism have all been deemed forgivable sins, but that
individuals associated with these groups were thus far unwilling to acknowledge
homosexuality.
Blumenthal clearly makes a contribution to understanding the deep and long-
standing interconnections among major activists in the religious right movement
330 THE HISTORIAN

and the intellectual and literary foundations for the ideology that these groups
espouse. He is clearly and adamantly opposed to their viewpoints and even the
existence of these groups. The book’s theme suggests that he believes they are
inconsistent in their application of religious principles, that they lack tolerance,
and that they are willing to advocate and support violence to accomplish their
religious and cultural mission.
The missing component in this work is an analytical overview of how these
groups became so powerful and so embedded in the broader American political
scene. Blumenthal does a very good job of showing the concurrent rise of these
groups with conservative Republicans at the elite level, but except for a brief
discussion in the early part of the book, he never addresses the question of why
and how these groups appeal to millions of Americans. The major players in the
Republican Party described in this book most certainly decided to align with
these groups to expand their voting base, an effort that goes back to Richard
Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968. That strategy rested far more heavily on
racial politics, and Blumenthal spends too little time on the broader public
reaction to the transition from race to religion among Republican elites. Why
did this religious message resound so clearly with so many voters for three
decades after the Vietnam War? At the very least, Blumenthal might have
devoted a longer chapter to this crucial transformation in American party
politics.
But that was not the author’s purpose in writing this book. Blumenthal wished
to expose the vast inner workings of a movement that has multiple power centers
and charismatic leaders who are all vying to stay relevant and powerful in a
swiftly moving political arena. Looking forward, he might document Sarah Palin’s
meteoric rise and whether she represents the type of politician who can transcend
the power boundaries set up by the male-dominated movements chronicled in this
book.
Brown University Wendy J. Schiller

Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York. By Elizabeth L. Bradley. (New Brun-
swick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii, 191. $24.95.)

The author opens this study by reminding readers that in 1809 a young Wash-
ington Irving published his satiric A History of New-York from the Beginning of
the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, narrated by a fictional, elderly
Dutch-New York gentleman, Diedrich Knickerbocker. She points out that Knick-
erbocker claims, with mock heroics, that everything that is “unique and inimi-
BOOK REVIEWS 331

table” about the city comes from its Dutch founders with their “idiosyncratic,
bourgeois, and tolerant rituals and morals” (3). Elizabeth L. Bradley then traces
“the creation, evolution, and prevalence of the ‘Knickbocker’ identity in New
York literature and history, from Irving’s satire to the present day” (6). Her thesis
is that the “ornery, insular Dutch bard became an instant icon for New Yorkers,
who used him by their own means, but always, finally, to the same end: to signal
the city’s myopic sense of destiny and difference” (6).
Bradley’s material comes primarily from the collections of the New York City
Public Library, where she is a deputy director, and from the libraries of New York
University, Harvard, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York
Historical Society. In her monograph, she has reproduced documents, prints, and
photographs from these archives showing how Knickerbocker has been depicted
and used over the years in advertisements, political cartoons, books, and even the
original logo of the Knicks basketball team.
Among the earliest New Yorkers to embrace Irving’s Dutch historian were the
city’s merchants, who began touting the sophisticated, unique qualities of their
products or services by adopting the name. There was the Knickerbocker Bakery
advertising superior loaf bread; the Knickerbocker packet ship bringing in Jamai-
can rum; and the Knickerbocker Hotel, “a ‘spacious and airy’ tavern on little
George Street” (43). As the commercial uses of Knickerbocker proliferated, Irving
himself, in 1848, noted that his character had become a “brand” (63). By the
mid-nineteenth century, Irving’s creation was being put to quite a different
purpose by nativist New Yorkers reacting to their city’s burgeoning immigrant
population, which was both impoverished and disorderly. They, the real New
Yorkers, were Knickbockers, first defined in a dictionary in 1859, as “a descen-
dent of one of the old Dutch families of New York” (84). In the Gilded Age, newly
wealthy families attempted to research and prove their Knickerbocker connec-
tions. At the turn of the century, Andrew Haswell Green and his supporters used
the image of “Father Knickbocker” to sell consolidation of the boroughs into
greater New York, and in the more democratic twentieth century, Knickerbocker
was redefined once again to stand for all New Yorkers. So, you have Knicker-
bocker Village, the first large-scale middle-income housing development; anti-
Tammany Democrats coming together in reform Knickerbocker Democratic
clubs; Knickerbocker beer; and the basketball-playing Knicks. In short, “New
York is still imbued with Knickerbocker, and his name hovers at the edges of
everyday life, all over New York City” (149).
Pace University Barbara Blumberg
332 THE HISTORIAN

Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina. By
Mark L. Bradley. (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 2009. Pp. ix, 370.
$50.00.)

Given the United States’ ongoing experience in Iraq and the growing literature on
occupation during the Civil War, this study is a timely arrival. It is also a welcome
addition to Reconstruction historiography. Historians have always recognized the
importance of the army during Reconstruction, but they relegate it to the sidelines
far too often. Mark L. Bradley puts it front and center. Drawing on an impressive
research base culled from archives, museums, and other repositories across the
country, Bradley has produced a compelling and well-written study of the army’s
role in reconstructing one former Confederate state.
In seeking to reconcile defeated white Confederates, while protecting white
loyalists and former slaves, Bradley argues that the army accepted a virtually
impossible mission. It was a vexing problem made tougher by a steadily declining
military presence and widespread racism among its white troops. The military’s
presence in the state fell from roughly 40,000 in April 1865 to just over 2,000 by
January 1866. Such a rapid demobilization weakened the army’s ability to patrol
the entire state, which made it harder for officers to collect pertinent information
in a timely manner and reinforced their conciliatory approach in the name of “law
and order.” Conciliation drew further strength from the fact that a shared “white-
ness” predisposed many of the remaining soldiers to feel more sympathetic
towards the ex-Confederates than the Unionists and freedpeople they were sup-
posed to protect. After the sweeping Republican victories in 1868, the army pulled
back, opening the door for white southerners to take stronger and more violent
steps to restore as much of the antebellum status quo as possible. The author is
especially critical—for good reason—of the foot dragging and seeming denial that
led the army to do little to stop the Ku Klux Klan during its reign of terror across
the state. Only after the Klan helped the former white elite regain political,
economic, and social control did the army’s conciliatory policy bear fruit. In the
early 1870s, white Union and Confederate veterans came together for a Decora-
tion Day celebration. African Americans were once more on the outside looking
in.
One issue that this reviewer would have liked the author to analyze more
thoroughly was the impact of local resistance upon military policy. Bradley argues
that the generals and various commanders retained their conciliatory stance
despite heated opposition, but the author could have developed the effect of local
affairs on military policy more than he did. How did local affairs shape military
BOOK REVIEWS 333

policy? Did the military effectively create alliances at the community level that
shaped their course of action? At times Bradley sacrifices too much of the local for
a broader state narrative that can obscure much of the nuance of military-civil
relationships when dealing with occupation. Such quibbling should not deter any
interested lay or academic readers from picking up Bluecoats and Tar Heels. In
fact, scholars should find much in Bradley’s extensively researched study to
encourage further study of the army’s role during Reconstruction.
East Tennessee State University Steven E. Nash

Ronald Reagan and the House Democrats: Gridlock, Partisanship, and the Fiscal
Crisis. By Karl Gerard Brandt. (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2009.
Pp. 280. $44.95.)

The 2008 election reminded us forcefully that Ronald Reagan and the era he
inaugurated belong to a past generation and that it is time for American histori-
ans, endowed with thirty years’ perspective and the abundance of sources that
comes with time, to fill in the picture sketched by able writers like John Ehrman
[The Eighties] and James T. Patterson [Restless Giant]. An excellent place to begin
is the challenge posed by Reagan’s 1980 election to the Democratic Congressional
establishment, entrenched in power for a half century (with two brief interrup-
tions), and the Democratic lions’ search for an effective response. With the
memoirs and papers left by Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, and other participants, it
should be possible to write a dramatic study of veteran leadership challenged by
a charismatic interloper riding a wave of popular support. So it must have seemed
to Karl Gerard Brandt when he chose to tackle this topic.
Unfortunately, Brandt’s writing skills are not up to the task he set himself.
Legislative battles, though complex, can be high drama in the hands of a writer
like Robert Caro [Master of the Senate] or, for an earlier era, Eric L. McKitrick
[Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction]. Brandt eschews both complexity and
drama. His narrative is a succession of mostly simple declarative sentences that
walk the reader through the Democratic Party’s internal organization and the
Congressional budget process. The perspective is limited almost entirely to
Capitol Hill and to formal proceedings. There are few scenes in corridors or back
rooms and few expressions of emotion. Important personages are introduced with
a minimum of background, and sometimes (Newt Gingrich, for example) with
none; their opinions are mostly drawn from public speeches. In the absence of
strong characters, the story line of gridlock and intensifying partnership, though
334 THE HISTORIAN

present, is tenuous indeed. In short, the book has both the detail and the flatness
of its chief source, the Congressional Record.
Brandt’s decision to base his work on the hard evidence of Congressional
debates and the papers of Democratic leaders, rather than the froth and exag-
geration of media reportage, is an understandable one, but there are some major
studies in this area by political scientists—David Rohde’s Parties and Leaders in
the Postreform House [1991] and Barbara Sinclair’s superb Legislators, Leaders,
and Lawmaking: The U.S. House of Representatives in the Postreform Era [1998]
and Party Wars [2006]—that deserve attention for the same reason, and these are
not even mentioned. Also inexplicably missing is John A. Farrell’s major biogra-
phy, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century [2001]. Their absence, together
with the Brandt book’s limited perspective and wooden style, make it hard to take
seriously. Readers seeking information on Reagan and the House Democrats are
advised to stick to them, or to the other works cited above.
Bucks County Community College Hendrik Booraem V

State Governors in the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1952: Portraits in Conflict,

Courage, and Corruption. Edited by Jürgen Buchenau and William H. Beezley.
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009. Pp. xii, 208. $29.95)

This is a concise, valuable anthology in the tradition of David Brading’s landmark

Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution [1980]. In this case, however,
the contributors seek collectively to assess the “crucial role” played by formal
political intermediaries––state governors––in shaping Mexico’s postrevolutionary
regime, either by the rapid implementation (or stubborn negation) of revolution-
ary reforms (7). After a lively and useful introduction by William H. Beezley, the
chapters are loosely broken down into periodic thirds: chapters two through four
analyze governorships during the armed revolution (in Oaxaca, Sonora, and
Yucatán, respectively); chapters five through seven focus on 1920s revolutionary
“laboratories” in Veracruz, Jalisco, and Tabasco; and chapters eight through
eleven present findings from cardenista Tamaulipas, Chiapas, and Puebla. Paul
Gillingham’s stylish closing chapter on Baltasar Leyva’s governorship in Guerrero
takes readers into the era of PRI hegemony. As Gillingham shows, by 1950 even
bronco states were seeing peasant demobilization and the assimilation of techno-
cratic, then political, alemanismo. The political moral was that state governors
could now rule their satrapies over and against popular or factional, but not
presidential, interests: the era of apparatchik governors was dawning.
BOOK REVIEWS 335

Given this slow emasculation, in what sense were state bosses crucial political
actors? The contributors offer finely calibrated answers to this question. No “ideal
type” analysis of the governor’s formal role is offered (which is in itself revealing),
yet it is clear that governors who were (or became) bureaucratic caciques, and vice
versa—thus combining formal and de facto powers—clearly enjoyed a competi-
tive advantage. Some, indeed, presided over local revolutions or near-hereditary
fiefs. This pattern emerges strongly, for instance, from Andrew Grant Wood’s
insightful study of Tejeda’s Veracruz, María Teresa Fernández Aceves’s valuable
take on Zuno’s Jalisco, and David LaFrance and Timothy Henderson’s richly
colored essay on avilacamachista Puebla, which are among the highlights here.
That gubernatorial and real power were not coterminous is shown negatively in
the chapters on Efraín Gutiérrez (Chiapas) and Marte R. Gómez (Tamaulipas),
whose late cardenista governorships are explored in good essays by Michael Ervin
and Stephen Lewis: here readers see that agrarian or indigenista governors who
attempted state-wide revolutions on the authority of the governor’s sash alone
quickly became beholden to the federation’s political or economic largesse, such
that their projects rose or fell proportionally to support from Mexico City. Hence
the gubernatorial office, disassociated from informal political networks, acted as
a federal bridgehead into the provinces, as weak governors needed the center in
order to crush local foes. By contrast, local ties, alloyed with variants of populist
caciquismo, made the governor’s office resilient; astute governors could even
project some of their radicalism at the national or regional level. In sum, state
governors were central to the dialectic of postrevolutionary state formation as
effective lacunae or, decreasingly by 1940, mid-range holders of real political
power.
In this reviewer’s view, the chapters that work best here, not least in a com-
parative sense, opt for synoptic study of a particular state governorship; but a few
of the contributions (for instance, Stephanie Smith’s essay on revolutionary
Yucatán, or Kristin Harper’s on Garrido’s Tabasco) address a thematic question
(Constitutionalist feminism and garridista roadbuilding, respectively) within a
gubernatorial context. Nobody would deny these topics’ importance, or the
sophistication of the essays, only here they seem comparatively oblique. As with
any anthology, some will cite sins of omission, particularly the absence of classic
figures such as Saturnino Cedillo or Gonzalo Santos. But overall, the editors
should be congratulated for a difficult and judicious selection. The range, schol-
arly rigor, and accessibility of the essays, which are edited firmly down to a dozen
or so pages, also means that this will work well as a classroom text. In short, this
is a welcome volume that contributes to the understanding of the synthesis of
336 THE HISTORIAN

formal and informal power holding in Mexico’s postrevolutionary political

culture.
University of Texas at Austin Matthew Butler

The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Adminis-
tration, 1965–1968. By David C. Carter. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 359. $35.00.)

What happened to the civil rights movement following the successful campaign in
Selma, Alabama? Did “dissension and pessimism” replace “harmony and opti-
mism” (xv)? And to the extent that it did, what responsibility did the Johnson
administration bear for the music going out of movement? These questions lay at
the center of David C. Carter’s exhaustively researched analysis of the latter stage
of the civil rights years, a period that, he correctly asserts, has received less
attention than it deserves.
Carter begins his narrative by describing President Lyndon Johnson’s com-
mencement address at Howard University on 4 June 1965. Delivered in the
afterglow of the Selma campaign, LBJ sought to use this speech to turn the
nation’s attention toward the economic needs of African Americans, emphasizing
that legal equality was not enough. In making this assertion, Johnson hoped to
“leapfrog” or to get out ahead of the movement. Instead, Carter demonstrates, the
Johnson administration ended up in a virtual permanent crisis mode, reacting to
both grassroots protests and national events beyond its control. As a result, LBJ
not only failed to achieve the goals he set out at Howard University, he left office
with the liberal coalition in shambles and with the prospect for closing the racial
divide worse than when he took office.
Though others have reached similar conclusions, Carter’s analysis of LBJ’s
second term, especially his close attention to the details of the administration’s
civil rights policymaking, makes this book well worth reading. In addition, rather
than characterizing Johnson as a tragic figure, whose liberal domestic policies,
especially in the arena of racial matters, were undermined by his fatal flaws—
Vietnam and personal insecurity—Carter emphasizes the irony of Johnson’s
legacy. Johnson’s response to the Kerner Commission’s Report illustrated the
irony of his presidency. Even though he hand-selected the commission’s members
and even though its conclusions largely paralleled his own understanding of the
depth of the problems that underlay the civil disorders of the latter half of the
decade, he refused to thank the commission members for their work. To a large
part he did so because he felt personally betrayed by their report, which he read
BOOK REVIEWS 337

as a critique of his administration, and because he recognized that it was no longer

politically possible to implement their recommendations.
In addition to his careful analysis of Johnson’s civil rights record after the
Voting Rights campaign, Carter presents nuanced descriptions of the controversial
Moynihan Report, Black Power, and the Child Development Group of Mississippi
and the role it played in the battle over Johnson’s War on Poverty. As suggested
above, his research, especially his use of the records of the Johnson administra-
tion, is commendable. Perhaps the only significant shortcoming of the book is its
chronological imbalance. Six of eight chapters focus on the years 1965 and 1966,
leaving his discussion of Johnson’s final years in office, not to mention his ultimate
legacy, a bit rushed.
York College Peter B. Levy

Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America. By Evan Carton. (Lincoln,
Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 386. $19.95.)

John Brown streaked across American history like a meteor, burning brightly
between his murder of five proslavery Kansans through his execution after his
attempt to incite slave rebellion with his raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Accord-
ing to Evan Carton, historians’ efforts to label Brown insane reflect modern
society’s “stunted moral imagination” and “incomplete embrace of democratic
principles” (342–343). In Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America,
Carton presents “the timely true story” of Brown as a principled, though flawed,
antislavery hero (x).
Carton balances his detailed account of Brown’s well-known exploits with a
careful examination of his first fifty-five years. Throughout the study, the author
offers comments to locate Brown’s life in the larger historical context with
observations to help explain his subject. Contrary to the view of Brown as a
lifelong failure, Carton shows that, by his mid-twenties, Brown had made himself
a successful tanner, livestock broker, and postmaster in Richmond Township,
Pennsylvania. His decision in 1835 to return to the family homestead in Ohio,
however, led to a series of reverses that soon reduced him to day labor. Though he
regained some standing, for the rest of his life he lived on poverty’s doorstep.
Notwithstanding the reversals and the death of twelve of his twenty children,
Brown remained devoted to his family. Frequent absences strained relations with
his second wife, but his daughters adored him, and his adult sons remained
committed to their father’s antislavery convictions despite their rejection of his
strict Calvinist beliefs.
338 THE HISTORIAN

As his fortunes fell, Brown’s antislavery convictions increased. Unlike most

abolitionists—including William Lloyd Garrison—Brown moved easily in the
black community, for his “utter lack of discomfort” around African Americans and
his sincere belief in equality won him their confidence (104). Notwithstanding his
black friends’ warnings, he concluded as early as 1839 that only a massive, violent
uprising of bondsmen could end slavery. Family responsibilities prevented him from
implementing a plan to incite the necessary rebellion until the “Sack” of the Kansas
free-soil capital at Lawrence triggered him into action. He believed the execution of
the “chief local proslavery instigators” would force a resolution of the slavery
question in Kansas, while an attack on Harper’s Ferry would “restore” the nation
to “its revolutionary commitments and Christian principles” (189, 280). Despite
the raid’s failure, Carton concludes, it nevertheless “activated explosive contradic-
tions” across the Union “that shattered the political status quo” (320).
Though a work of nonfiction, Patriotic Treason often reads like a novel, as
Carton admittedly conjectures dialogue and emotions. Scholars will want to see
more thorough documentation, for only the sources of direct quotations are cited.
Readers will also question Carton’s principal contention: the biography clearly
shows an inverse correlation between Brown’s radicalism and his personal cir-
cumstances, and few modern biographers actually argue that Brown was insane.
Still, this work presents a well-written and thoughtful account that will help
readers better understand what drove a unique and significant figure.
Berry College Jonathan M. Atkins

The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960. By Shaun A. Casey.
(New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 261. $27.95.)

At a time when many people are expressing pride over the inauguration of the first
African American president, the author of this study has produced a book about
an earlier breakthrough, the election of the first Catholic president. Shaun A.
Casey, who served on the staff of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, sees
parallels between his boss’s career and John F. Kennedy’s “trailblazing victory”
(206). The 1960 election, he asserts, “should give Americans hope that they may
yet again choose a president who helps them to break down some of the many
internal barriers” in American society (206). Nearly a half century later, they did.
Casey’s book has no overarching thesis, save that the religious issue was both
a bother and a blessing to Kennedy. It was troublesome because anti-Catholic
sentiments in general and the notion that JFK would be answerable to his church
in particular continued to haunt Americans. At the same time, the prospect of
BOOK REVIEWS 339

Catholics voting as a block would benefit the Massachusetts senator, provided he

retained the support of a sufficient number of Protestants to win.
Casey develops these themes in a generally persuasive fashion. He has
unearthed much data, some of it from little-used archives, to show that Kennedy’s
staff had been preparing to respond to the religious issue before the campaign
commenced, that JFK had rehearsed the themes of his famous speech to the
Houston Ministerial Association (September 1960) before he gave it, and that
Kennedy’s Catholicism placed Richard Nixon in a bind from which he never freed
himself. The trick for Nixon was to hold onto enough Protestants to offset
defections by Catholic Republicans. He tried to do so by professing his belief in
racial and religious tolerance, reaching out to Protestant ministers in an open,
responsible manner, and encouraging anti-Catholicism in a sly, underhanded way.
That last point is the most intriguing, and problematic, part of Casey’s argument;
although some Protestant clergymen, such as Orland K. Armstrong, worked to
undermine the Kennedy campaign, their ties were to the Republican National
Committee, not to the Nixon campaign, which was something separate, and not
to Nixon directly. Casey is not necessarily wrong to suspect the Republican
nominee of skullduggery, and Nixon may have sanctioned it, privately, through
the Reverend Billy Graham who was a “mutual friend” of both his and of
Armstrong (100). But the statement that “Nixon chose to fan the flames of
intolerance in a manner he could not publicly acknowledge” demands further
evidence and, perhaps, a “smoking gun” (205).
Overall, Casey’s book has pluses as well as minuses. On the positive side,
readers will gain a somewhat fresh view of Kennedy, who exhibited “fear” and
trepidation in the presence of Protestant clergy (12). They will also learn about a
game-changing gaffe in the campaign’s final stages when Henry Cabot Lodge,
Nixon’s running mate, endorsed federal aid to parochial schools, something that
Kennedy, and many Protestants, opposed. Lodge’s snafu may have helped JFK
retain enough Protestant support to triumph. On the negative side, though, The
Making of a Catholic President lacks narrative horsepower. Casey structures
much of the book around debates among religious periodicals—and analyses of
campaign memoranda—and buries his larger points deep within, or at the end of,
his chapters. As a result, he drains a lot of the drama from this nail-bitingly close
election. Thus, in terms of understanding the dynamics of the 1960 election,
Casey’s book supplements, but does not supplant, another recent work, W. J.
Rorabaugh’s The Real Making of the President [2009].
Salisbury University Dean J. Kotlowski
340 THE HISTORIAN

Eagles and Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle for a Continent. By
David A. Clary. (New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, 2009. Pp. xxx, 590. $30.00.)

For almost one hundred fifty years, the Mexican War was obscured by the shadow
of the more far reaching Civil War that broke out only thirteen years later. In
recent years, it has emerged from that shadow, and renewed interest has led to a
substantial number of books. Most of these, however, tell the story from the
American side. In Eagles and Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle
for a Continent, David A. Clary has attempted to rectify this by adding the
Mexican view.
Clary begins by recounting the life of the most prominent Mexican of the age,
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was a key player in the war. The reader
quickly realizes that Santa Anna’s life was a microcosm of everything wrong in
Mexico in that era, and that he was, in essence, the personification of these flaws.
Santa Anna was quickly joined by a supporting cast of disillusioned Mexican
intellectuals trying to achieve some sort of order, and self-serving Mexican con-
servatives who were determined to preserve the status quo. Factions included the
federalists, who sought local autonomy, and the centralists, who were determined
to have an autocracy controlled by the traditional elite. Because of the continual
power struggles, the country had virtually no government.
If the intellectuals and conservatives had anything in common, it was suspicion
of the avaricious Americans, casting a greedy eye to Mexico’s northern provinces,
and evangelical Americans, who believed they had a divine mandate to civilize the
continent. Throughout the Mexican consciousness, there was an undercurrent of
impending disaster at the hands of their northern neighbor. Neither nation under-
stood the problems, needs, or ambitions of the other.
As for the Americans, Clary points out there was a very real—if unfounded—
fear of encirclement. Great Britain already had Canada to the north, Mexico was to
the south and west, and relations between the newly established Republic of Texas
and the European powers were becoming too cordial for comfort in the United
States. Additionally, there was wild speculation that Great Britain would attempt to
establish itself in Mexican-owned California, thus permanently cutting the U.S. off
from the Pacific. To all these factors, add corruption, deceit, and political maneu-
verings in both the U.S. and Mexico, and the ingredients for war fall into place.
The results of the Mexican War reverberate into our own time. American
foreign policy has remained largely Eurocentric, with a profound ignorance of
Latin America. That region, and particularly Mexico, respond with xenophobic
contempt to any suggestion that they might make much-needed internal improve-
BOOK REVIEWS 341

ments by following the example of their northern neighbor. Cold War politics only
exacerbated the situation. Clary sums it up perfectly when he observes that neither
the U.S. or Mexico seems to have learned much in the 160 years since the war;
“they still talk past each other” (449).
South Texas College Charles M. Robinson III

Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern
America. By Adam Cohen. (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2009. Pp. 355. $29.95.)

In March 1933, Republican Herbert Hoover’s policies were in complete disarray

while Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared to take office after a landslide
victory. In this history of the Hundred Days, Adam Cohen, assistant editorial page
editor of the New York Times, focuses on key personalities around FDR who led
an unprecedented burst of reforms enacted by an emergency session of Congress.
Citing 1958 and 1973 books by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Frank Freidel,
Cohen argues that the values and hard work of Brain Trusters Raymond Moley,
Director of the Budget Lewis Douglas, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace
and assistant Rexford Tugwell, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and relief
administrator Harry Hopkins laid the groundwork for the entire New Deal of
1933–1938, which represented a revolutionary break with past policies. Employ-
ing biographies, personal papers, and oral histories, Cohen makes a strong case
for the significance of these six individuals in guiding Roosevelt through the
challenges facing the early New Deal. He often cites the New York Times,
Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and Colliers, relying especially
on pieces by journalist Ernest K. Lindley. Cohen has an apt eye for the striking
story, incident, and quotation. For example, he uses the story of how dazed
newcomers Perkins and Wallace met on their way to the inauguration to introduce
the protagonists. This is history as biography written by a talented journalist.
Invoking Schlesinger, Cohen argues that only “elected officials, journalists, and
academics who were there in 1933” can give true history (31). He is unaware of
entire bodies of scholarship. Cohen dismisses Hoover revisionists whose works
“have a kernel of truth, but they vastly overstate Hoover’s role” without noting
subtle and well-researched works by Ellis Hawley, Martin Fausold, George Nash,
and others (31). Cohen’s knowledge of New Deal historiography largely ends
with Schlesinger and Freidel. He never mentions major works since by Robert
McElvaine, Michael Parrish, Anthony Badger, Alan Lawson, or Alonzo Hamby.
Cohen’s account provides a few new details about the Emergency Banking Act,
the Economy Act, labor law reforms, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,
342 THE HISTORIAN

and relief programs (FERA, CWA, and PWA), but it fails to flesh out institutional
roots, implementation, and limitations of these policies. To Cohen, the labor
provisions of the NIRA matter more than the 750 industrial codes dominated by
corporations and business trade associations. He cites none of the standard
histories of the National Recovery Administration. Cohen conflates the skill-
intensive demands of the Public Works Administration with the unskilled, labor-
intensive jobs created by the later Works Progress Administration.
Nothing to Fear is a very good popular history of the first one hundred days for
the current generation that breaks no new ground. This well-crafted work will be
well received by the general reader. Cohen’s penchant for letting contemporary
works by journalists trump scholarly research reflects his own commitments.
Historians might consider why journalists who can write well publish and sell
more books than scholars more familiar with primary sources and historiography.
Tennessee Technological University Patrick D. Reagan

Vindicating Andrew Jackson: The 1828 Election and the Rise of the Two-Party
System. By Donald B. Cole. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
Pp. ix, 254. $34.95.)

“Tip” O’Neil’s famous dictum that “all politics is local” has found yet another
advocate in this new book. Donald B. Cole provides in this new study a detailed
analysis of the election of 1828 and argues that Andrew Jackson’s ascendency to
the presidency had little to do with the candidate and his positions on national
issues such as slavery, the Bank of United States, and tariffs; instead, Cole argues
that Jackson’s rise to preeminence rested on the machinations of a handful of
backroom local “politicos” with deep pockets and significant regional influence.
“The Old Hero” takes a backseat to lesser known figures such as Kentucky’s
Amos Kendell, Missouri’s Duff Green, New Hampshire’s Isaac Hill, and Virginia’s
Thomas Ritchie, who, with the help of other minor characters, helped to forge a
new populist partisan base for Jackson and, in so doing, formed a powerful new
political party. Through highly localized campaigning and sophisticated election-
eering techniques, these men created the Democratic Party. Cole investigates
partisan activities between 1824 and 1828 in six “representative states”—New
Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia.
Broad issues that political historians of the early republic typically rely on to
explain the election of 1828 are missing from Cole’s treatment. They are replaced
by a colorful cast of Democratic partisans who innovatively labored together to
form a new, more energized type of politics that enhanced popular democracy. As
BOOK REVIEWS 343

Cole stresses throughout his narrative, Adamsmen are time after time forced into a
defensive posture, dumbfounded by the aggressive and hostile nature of a Demo-
cratic barrage that exploited a rougher kind of partisanship. Although the Adams
Republicans would try to catch-up to the partisan innovation of their opponents,
they, in the end, could not match the crafty Democrats, who, in the election of 1828,
established a new standard for American partisan politics. As Cole concludes,
“[t]he Jackson party won because it offered a more charismatic candidate, a more
vigorous campaign, . . . and a more forthright acceptance of a new political system.
It was an election in which campaigning outweighed issues” (203).
Cole’s analysis is remarkably detailed, and his comparative approach will be
appreciated by both political historians and generalists. Vindicating Andrew
Jackson brings us into the backrooms, where deals are cut and compromises
made, and yet, behind all campaigns (both good ones and bad ones) lie funda-
mental, core issues. Although Cole’s analysis of the campaign is truly masterful,
there is little contextualization. He does not discuss in any detail how the cotton
boom in the South and the growing slave labor force that supported it helped
define the election; nor does he address the rise of an emerging market revolution
in the North and its growing free labor system. However, by limiting his scope,
Cole provides an insightful depiction of the men who were behind the Democratic
Party’s genesis and propelled Andrew Jackson to the presidency.
Keene State College Matthew Crocker

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. By Morris Dick-
stein. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 2009. Pp. xxiii, 598. $29.95.)

Examining creative expression through an era of economic depression, the author

of this study invites readers “to feel the pulse of society from the inside” in this
unusually insightful analysis of literature, film, music, and photography of the
1930s (xv). Morris Dickstein tackles themes from the cultural construction of the
nature of poverty in fiction to the “success as failure” films that culminated in
Citizen Kane (354). Measuring tensions between “modernism” and “populism,”
the investigation is particularly illuminating when comparing, for example, the
photographs of Margaret Bourke-White with Walker Evans, or the literary
achievements of Nora Zeale Hurston with Richard Wright (507). Dickstein shows
how the lyrics of popular music, particularly when expressed with the “narrative
conviction” of Bing Crosby, became a sensitive metric of social change (418).
Because the commentary is so thoughtful, those most familiar with the works
under consideration may enjoy this analysis most.
344 THE HISTORIAN

Dickstein’s examination of changing sexuality may deserve a more direct

approach than he presents, although the title of this book is suggestive. Busby
Berkeley’s choreography in the “Young and Healthy” sequence of the film 42nd
Street was a celebration of sexuality, suggesting that romantic partners in America
were becoming interchangeable parts, almost like rides on the merry-go-round;
this interpretation is reiterated through the tunnel of love that is actually a tunnel
of legs, and anticipates the form of serial monogamy that became commonplace
in postmodern American culture. The assertion that “Matrimony is baloney” that
Dickstein cites from “Shuffle off to Buffalo,” in the same film, is a radical assertion
of a redefinition of Americans’ mating and marriage practices (236–240). Cin-
ematic threats to old standards of behavior seemed so alarming to contemporaries
that the formal censorship of American films, which of course, Dickstein
addresses, was already inevitable. He later labels the “adult frankness” of Bing
Crosby’s songs as the “aural equivalent” of these pre-Code films of the early
1930s and could tie these elements to his observation that “many young people
drifted into the orbit of the activism in the 1930s in search of casual, guilt-free
sex” (415, 514).
No single study of culture is definitive, or historians would be out of business,
and there is much that is missing from this reading of Depression America:
Superman flies through only twice, not long enough to land; Dickstein does not
focus his attention on the “War of the Worlds” broadcast or Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times; readers may be disappointed that his sensitive eye does not gaze
at powerful developments in American painting nor animation, although one
might readily extend Dickstein’s thesis by comparing, say, the visions of Georgia
O’Keefe and Grant Wood, or Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.
Yet this monograph seems almost encyclopedic in scope, and many of Dick-
stein’s assessments are authoritative. Conveying expressions of a culture in con-
stant, sometimes frantic, motion, though still stuck in the same place, Dancing in
the Dark will be a standard history of American arts and letters during the Great
Depression. One well might call it magisterial.
University of Arkansas at Little Rock Vincent Vinikas

The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. By Charles W.
Eagles. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. i, 560.
$35.00.)

James Meredith’s struggle to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962 and

the ensuing segregationist machinations, intimidation, and violence exploded in a
BOOK REVIEWS 345

campus riot that became a watershed in the struggle for equal justice. Although
many participants and historians have previously written accounts of “the Battle
of Ole Miss,” Charles W. Eagles’s book uses new sources to examine how the
triumph of the rule of law opened doors to one of white supremacy’s most
important symbols, the flagship university in a state dubbed “the closed society”
by historian James Silver in 1964. Building on existing works while identifying
sources that cast new light on the story, Eagles successfully “examines events
within the broader context of confluence of race, politics, and higher education in
postwar Mississippi” (4). This now stands as the definitive account of this seminal
moment in the struggle for racial equality.
Using previously unavailable and underutilized archival materials, Eagles crafts
both internalist and externalist analyses of Meredith’s quest to attend Ole Miss
and the ensuing segregationist fury. Private faculty manuscripts, white suprema-
cist broadsides such as the Rebel Underground, and previously closed university
files allow Eagles to analyze the complex struggles within Ole Miss’s power
centers, from the chancellor to the registrar and the trustees. He uses Meredith’s
personal papers to analyze not only his fight to integrate the university but also to
understand how Meredith’s firm belief in hard work and individual responsibil-
ity ultimately led him to an iconoclastic conservativism (in 1989, he worked on
the staff of arch-segregationist Senator Jesse Helms). Eagles not only shows
Meredith’s drive and courage but also illuminates his growing discomfort with his
new status as a symbol.
Amidst this debate between the university’s guardians of white privilege and
the few dissenting campus voices who sought internal change, Eagles shows how
Governor Ross Barnett and White Citizens’ Council leaders not only rejected
peaceful solutions but also worked overtly and covertly to defy federal enforce-
ment of appellate court orders to admit Meredith. His deftly crafted internal and
external analyses reveal contingencies that culminated late on the night of Sep-
tember 30, 1962, as each side “stumbled through a confused night of uncoordi-
nated actions and reactions,” leaving two dead and sending shock waves across
America (340).
In an excellent epilogue, Eagles contends that recent debate over memorializing
Meredith reflects the present-day university’s commitment to preserving the insti-
tutional mythology of history and memory at the expense of truth. Meredith’s
campus image makes no mention of race; instead, its sanitized quotations from
him and others describe their love for Mississippi, devoid of references to the
burdens of the past. By divesting the monument of any symbols of struggle or
justice, Ole Miss’s president struck a pose that would look familiar to segrega-
346 THE HISTORIAN

tionists of the past, who wielded their version of history and memory as a weapon
to maintain white supremacy in the name of “the Southern way of life.” This book
stands as a correction.
Western Kentucky University Patricia Hagler Minter

The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh. By Donna B. Ernst.
(Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Pp. xxiii, 233. $29.95.)

This brief outline of the life of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, opens with
a two-page discussion of the Wild Bunch, a loosely connected group of perhaps
twenty robbers and highwaymen that operated in the late-nineteenth-century
American West. Then it tries to focus on the Sundance Kid and to a lesser extent
on his companion Butch Cassidy, both of movie fame. The author traces Long-
abaugh’s life from his birth in 1867 until his 1908 shooting death in San Vicente,
Bolivia.
Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Sundance traveled west at age fourteen
to work for his cousin, George, in Colorado. There he learned to train horses and
mules and often turned to ranch work between his stints as an outlaw. After five
years with his cousin, Harry, as the author usually calls him, struck out on his
own, and by 1887 he had been arrested for robbery. He escaped, was recaptured,
and then was released because he was just twenty years old. At this point the
narrative follows his exploits as a bank and railroad robber for more than the next
decade, but at times his direct connection to the events remains vague at best.
Obviously, most outlaws never bothered to write detailed personal journals, much
less keep archives of papers that a researcher could use to trace their exploits. This
forces the author to guess, speculate, or just discuss events that are only vaguely
related to Sundance’s actions, leaving her unable to do more than mention many
events briefly.
The result is a book that may satisfy people who will read anything about
Western outlaws, but that can offer little for others interested in late-nineteenth-
century American developments. Members of the Wild Bunch and their actions
appear, but there is no logical pattern here beyond simple chronology. Clearly
because there is so little data at hand, the author is unable to provide motivations
for many of the characters’ actions. She mentions some surprisingly large amounts
the outlaws took, but it is never clear how they spent the money. Surely, if her
figures of tens of thousands of dollars being taken in many of these robberies are
correct, they could have lived well for decades. The author has used material
gathered by earlier students of the outlaw West and has used Pinkerton Detective
BOOK REVIEWS 347

agency materials frequently, but the Sundance Kid rarely appears as a real person.
The result is neither effective biography nor history. Rather, it is a loosely con-
nected chronology without a lot to recommend it to serious readers.
University of Arizona Roger L. Nichols

Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend. By Linda A. Fisher and
Carrie Bowers. (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Pp. xxii,
385. $29.95.)

In this exhaustively researched biography, the authors tell the story of Agnes Lake
Hickok, a popular performer whose remarkable career illustrated both the
promise and perils of circus life in the nineteenth century. The authors rather
straightforwardly document her unconventional life, emphasizing how Agnes
defied contemporary strictures about the proper role of women and eventually
became the first woman in America to own and operate a circus. Persevering
through the shocking murders of two husbands and the deaths of several children,
Agnes was a model of resiliency and, as the authors note, “few mid-nineteenth
century women stand out in such sharp relief against the broad backdrop of U.S.
history” (286).
Agnes was born in Germany in 1826 to a poor rural family that soon after
immigrated to the United States and settled outside of Cincinnati. At the age of
nineteen, she eloped with William Thatcher Lake, a veteran performer on tour
with the Great Western Circus. Agnes made her first appearance in the ring in
1847 and achieved prominence as an equestrian performer. Life with a circus in
those days was hard, and the authors provide an excellent introduction to the
many travails that circus performers faced. Despite these difficulties, the Lakes
eventually acquired enough to become circus proprietors in their own right, and
their growing family prospered until 1869 when Bill Lake was shot and killed by
an angry patron in Missouri. Following the tragedy, Agnes took over management
of the circus and ran it successfully for several seasons. After retiring from the
circus business, she wed James “Wild Bill” Hickok, but the marriage was tragi-
cally cut short when he was murdered in 1877. Agnes eventually moved to New
Jersey and spent the remainder of her life training horses and helped manage
the career of her daughter, Emma Lake, who was also a celebrated equestrian
performer.
The overall work suffers somewhat from a focus on the minutiae of Agnes Lake
Hickok’s story at the expense of a stronger interpretative line that might have
better articulated her significance. In particular, the extensive amount of time and
348 THE HISTORIAN

effort spent unraveling the particulars of her brief marriage to Hickok seems
ancillary to establishing her importance as an uncommonly independent and
successful woman of the era. The wealth of detail does indicate an impressive
amount of research across a wide variety of available sources, and the more or
less chronological narrative proceeds in clear, if rather programmatic, fashion.
Although the work will perhaps prove most valuable to those interested in cultural
and women’s history, its lively portrayal of nineteenth-century circus life will
appeal to general readers as well. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this book
was that it was published at all as the original author, Linda A. Fisher, passed
away before completing the manuscript. At the family’s behest, Carrie Bowers
stepped in and completed the project, and she deserves praise for her contribution
in bringing the fascinating life of Agnes Lake Hickok to wider attention.
Bard Graduate Center Matthew Wittmann

1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. By Charles Bracelen Flood. (New York, N.Y.:
Simon & Schuster, 2009. Pp. ix, 521. $30.00.)

We are accustomed to remember the soaring rhetoric of Lincoln’s Gettysburg

Address [1863] and his Second Inaugural [1865]—words that encapsulate our
national reason for being—but perhaps more intriguing is this author’s Lincoln,
the political mastermind of 1864. It was the Lincoln of 1864, Charles Bracelen
Flood emphasizes, that enabled him to become “the linchpin holding together the
Union’s military and political structure” (212).
Flood portrays his characters in a juxtaposition of opposites. Throughout the
early pages of the book, he describes Robert E. Lee as stereotypically bold, but
eventually makes this masculine trait exquisitely delicate in his characterization of
the Confederate general on the eve of his bloody encounter with Grant in Virginia
in 1864: “Lee acted less like a commander who possessed dramatic battlefield
presence than a safecracker leaning forward to listen to the tumblers in a lock
while his sensitive finders moved the knob back and forth” (72). His handling of
Lincoln is similar. While describing his primary subject in all of the familiar
portrayals of the man—democratic, plain, disorganized, tormented—he adds the
perception of Lincoln’s youngest personal secretary. John Hay saw something
more, and something quite different, something that may well have been the
nucleus of Lincoln’s atom—an almost arrogant appreciation of his own ability.
Hay appreciated what he described as Lincoln’s “intellectual arrogance and
unconscious assumption of superiority.” His secretary concluded, “It is absurd to
call him a modest man. No great man is ever modest” (75). Another juxtaposition
BOOK REVIEWS 349

of opposites is perhaps most telling. While holding a steady course to save and
extend American democratic ideals, Flood’s Lincoln engages in multiple question-
able manipulations of the democratic process needed for victory in 1864 (313–
320).
Flood portrays Lincoln’s management style in vignettes involving Benjamin F.
Butler. He traces Lincoln’s maintenance of this political general whose errant
military decisions severely hampered Grant’s summer campaign against Lee. For
most of the book, Flood leaves readers questioning Lincoln’s judgment regarding
this apparent misfit. Then, preceding the election of 1864, a Butler-led military
force is ordered into New York City to manipulate both political and financial
threats to the president’s reelection. In this environment, the military incompe-
tent’s skillful political moves vindicate Lincoln’s earlier decisions to keep Butler
ready and able to lend assistance when needed.
Any book entitled 1864 is necessarily bound to chronological narrative. The
educated reader knows what is coming before the author gets there. There are no
surprises: Grant, a potential political rival to Lincoln, is appointed to command
the Northern armies. His military decision to crush Lee with brute force takes a
predictable political toll, and the fate of the nation is imperiled by Lincoln’s likely
defeat in the looming presidential election of 1864. Military victories, starting
with Sherman’s taking of Atlanta in early September, and followed by young Phil
Sheridan’s domination of what had previously been a Confederate-controlled
Shenandoah Valley, turn political despair into a Lincoln landslide in November.
After the election, Sherman marches through Georgia. All of this is familiar
ground. But through the weaving of his artful narrative, Flood leaves the reader
with a sense that none of this was predestined. He records a familiar story as a
contemporary must have experienced it, appreciating how “the gates of history”
under different management might have developed much differently.
California State University, San Bernardino Ward M. McAfee

The Kennedy Assassination—24 Hours After: Lyndon Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as
President. By Steven M. Gillon. (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2009. Pp. xvii, 294.
$25.95.)

Few topics have produced more books than the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Yet, shockingly, no one has written a detailed study of the hours immediately after
the shooting. No one, that is, until now. In this study, Steven Gillon puts under the
microscope the period from 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963, until the same time
350 THE HISTORIAN

the following day. In doing so, he provides a thoughtful look at one of the most
turbulent days in American history.
Gillon successfully challenges a number of narrow points about the events of
that day, ranging from the exact time of JFK’s death to the amount of time that
passed before Lyndon B. Johnson was notified of it. In other areas, he accepts
conventional wisdom but provides a more detailed picture, fleshing out, for
example, the tension between the Kennedy and Johnson camps on the return flight
from Dallas in more detail than done elsewhere. Perhaps his biggest contribution
is the implicit defense of Johnson that runs through these pages, as Gillon gives the
Texan much credit for skillfully handling a difficult situation, refuting the canard
propagated by the Kennedy people of boorishness and insensitivity.
A few problems hinder the work. Some are minor, such as the number of names
of prominent figures that are misspelled. Among others, Gillon renders incorrectly
the names: Luci Baines Johnson; Texas Congressmen Henry Gonzalez and Homer
Thornberry; Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen; murdered Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit;
and Texas governor John Connally. One might also question his reliance on the
notes and interviews of William Manchester, taken in preparation for his book
The Death of a President, since, as Gillon acknowledges, Manchester had a clear
anti-LBJ bias that mars his work.
Perhaps the most notable problem, however, comes when the book goes
beyond the twenty-four-hour period. Gillon suggests that the events of the day
reveal qualities in LBJ that would be repeated throughout his presidency and that
crises brought out the best and worst of the man to whom the nation’s eyes now
fell. Yet, Gillon himself argues that this situation was without parallel in American
history. Heightened media coverage; the Kennedys’ “Camelot” image; the exist-
ence of the Cold War; the suddenness of the president’s death; and numerous
other factors made this a crisis like none other. But the very uniqueness of the
situation itself makes it somewhat useless as a predictor of future behavior.
Johnson certainly stretched the truth a number of times during that fateful day in
Dallas, but he had done so thousands of times beforehand as well, so to suggest
that November 22 somehow opened an important window into the man’s char-
acter seems a bit too strong.
Still, Gillon’s main focus is the hours after the assassination itself, and in that
arena he has provided what will likely stand as the definitive account. Gillon has
somehow done what few could have imagined: found something new and inter-
esting to say about that fateful afternoon in Dallas.
The Ohio State University, Newark Mitchell Lerner
BOOK REVIEWS 351

All-Out for Victory! Magazine Advertising and the World War II Home Front. By John
Bush Jones. (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 314. $50.00.)

The author of this study examines World War II advertisements published in ten
large-circulation magazines, most of them aimed at the general reading audience.
However, he also includes “one women’s magazine, one men’s magazine, one
aimed at the business community, and one with a readership primarily of farmers
and other rural Americans” (viii). The wartime ads, he argues, fall into three
broad categories: “All-Out” ads, which sought to raise and sustain morale,
stimulate civilian support of the war, and promote home front unity, without
making a sales pitch for specific products or services; “Double-Barrelled” ads,
which used wartime rhetoric not only to mobilize the home front but also to
market goods; and “Brag” ads, which served industries largely as a means of
self-promotion by providing them with an opportunity to publicize their wartime
contributions while “keeping brand consciousness alive both in the business
community and among the public” (65).
Not surprisingly, all of the ads used wartime rhetoric; however, they employed
a variety of different appeals. Many of the ads explained why America was at war;
the reasons for shortages and rationing; and the need for efficiency, conservation,
sharing, and personal sacrifice. Others illustrated industry’s role in the war effort,
paid tribute to the men and women in uniform, and praised the contributions of
defense industry workers and homemakers. Yet others cautioned Americans not
to spread rumors; urged consumers not to buy scarce items on the black market;
and encouraged civilians to boost the morale of soldiers, to donate blood, to
engage in volunteer work, to buy war bonds, and to support returning veterans.
John Bush Jones’s attempt to place World War II magazine ads in different
categories is laudable but problematic. Many of the ads drew on a variety of
wartime appeals, which makes a clear-cut categorization difficult. Moreover,
Jones often takes a descriptive rather than analytical approach. He summarizes
the content of ads but does not explain why businesses and advertising agencies
decided to use specific wartime rhetoric and appeals or to what degree the
government played a role in influencing their selection. An examination of the
records of the industries that ordered the ads and the advertising companies that
designed them would likely shed some light on that issue. Likewise, it is not clear
why the author did not consult the records of the Office of War Information and
the War Advertising Council, especially because he claims that the latter “became
a significant presence in wartime advertising whose importance cannot be over-
estimated” (29). Equally troublesome is the author’s nostalgic view of American
352 THE HISTORIAN

society during World War II. If indeed “nothing ever broke apart Americans’
national unity in support of the war,” why was the country plagued by labor
strikes and race riots (25)? If indeed “the American people were . . . as patriotic as
could be,” why did advertisers have to remind them to conserve food or to refrain
from buying on the black market (36)? Finally, the author’s decision not to use
conventional footnoting limits the book’s usefulness for scholars.
Ball State University Nina Mjagkij

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. By
Brian P. Luskey. (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 288.
$48.00.)

The urban clerk—young, white, male, unattached, and ambitious—has become a

stock demographic cohort for historians. Yet, as Brian P. Luskey skillfully dem-
onstrates in On the Make, beneath this homogenizing stereotype were the four-
teen thousand clerks of mid-nineteenth-century New York, whose backgrounds,
aspirations, and living realities defy such facile classification. Consulting a wide
and creative variety of sources by, to, and about clerks—from diaries, credit
reports, and fictional and prescriptive literature to census returns, court docu-
ments, and newspaper accounts—he illuminates the experiences of a group of
(mainly) men attempting to navigate the rapidly shifting opportunities and
inequalities of an evolving capitalist environment.
Beginning with their aspirations for power, prestige, and an independent live-
lihood, Luskey unfolds clerks’ lives as they embraced an ideology of self-making,
believing that character (who they were or projected themselves to be) ultimately
mattered more than wealth or family background. Yet whereas clerks tried to cash
in on the capital of whiteness (referring both to the color of their collars and their
race), they often performed manual labor alongside working-class porters of all
ethnicities, while their efforts to improve working conditions only further empha-
sized their subservient labor status. Ironically, in concealing the physicality of their
work, clerks instead became caricatured as unproductive, effeminate counter-
jumpers who spent their days catering to the whims of (or preying on) female
consumers. Clerks thus sought to separate themselves from women, blacks, and
the working class (as well as to increase their personal capital) through their dress,
living arrangements, and extracurricular activities. While some asserted their
manliness by joining a gymnasium or debating society, others frequented bars and
brothels. Luskey is at his best when fleshing out the complexities and inconsis-
tencies of these choices.
BOOK REVIEWS 353

On the Make presents a magnificent snapshot of clerks at midcentury, yet it

does not trace developments in the profession over time. Luskey treats his focal
period from the 1830s to the 1860s—a time of rapid industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, market consolidation, unprecedented levels of immigration, and a wrenching
Civil War—as one homogeneous whole. Although he nimbly weaves together
events and evidence decades removed in time, the reader is often left uncertain
about when the narrative is unfolding and if their antebellum experiences truly
remained as static as this structure implies. Likewise, in the conclusion, Luskey’s
discussion of whether clerks ever achieved the independence and status they
sought gets lost amid his theorizing about how the strivers of the antebellum
period became (a generation or two later) the complacent middle managers of the
Gilded Age. His interesting analysis of both the statistical data and individual
anecdotes of antebellum clerks feels overly rushed, while his thoughts on the late
nineteenth century seem underdeveloped.
These minor critiques should not detract from the overall academic value and
quality of this work. Luskey’s accessible writing style and clear arguments rec-
ommend it to both undergraduate and graduate students. On the Make is essential
reading not only for the history of clerks, but as well for the history of manhood,
urban life, and class development in antebellum America.
Providence College Sharon Ann Murphy

Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order. By Robert J.

McMahon. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009. Pp. xii, 257. $25.95.)

This study of Dean Acheson’s influence on American foreign policy is the initial
volume in the “Shapers of International History” series, which is aimed at the
general reader and seeks in the words of the series editor, Melvyn Leffler, “to look
at the forest, not the trees” (x). Robert J. McMahon sets a very high standard for
all those who will contribute to this series in his impressive overview and analysis
of Acheson’s life and contribution to the making of American foreign policy.
McMahon is a truly accomplished historian who writes of his subject with a sure
and insightful hand. His opening chapter exploring the forces and individuals who
helped shape Acheson is a tour de force. Under the influence of Justices Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, the future secretary of
state developed as a “confirmed empiricist and pragmatist” (12). While it is easy
for historians to criticize Acheson for his renowned arrogance and caustic wit,
McMahon largely paints a favorable picture of the man noting his “uncommon
wisdom, vision, and forthrightness” (217). He praises Acheson’s virtues as a
354 THE HISTORIAN

policymaker noting especially his prodigious energy and his “sheer strength of
intellect, command of the issues, and mastery of the fine art of diplomacy” (75–76).
Acheson served a significant apprenticeship in the State Department during World
War II and the early years of the Cold War, and McMahon elucidates skillfully the
key aspects of this formation. He tracks the rather slow Achesonian movement into
“the cold warrior camp” and the key role of the Turkish Straits crisis in “his
conversion,” and then describes well Acheson’s important contribution to both the
Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan (46). Appointed secretary of state in 1949,
Acheson proved the key builder of the political, economic, and military structures
designed to contain the Soviet Union. McMahon provides a compelling and
broadly sympathetic portrait of Acheson’s role in creating an “American-
dominated world order” and judges him, “more than any other Western states-
man,” as responsible for developing and implementing the West’s “essential Cold
War strategy” (209). The author explores the numerous and complex issues that
demanded Acheson’s attention in a masterly yet succinct fashion. The treatment of
the Korean War and its significance is especially noteworthy.
Not surprisingly, in this synthetic work, McMahon neither explores the devel-
opment of specific policies at any length nor records in any detail the contributions
of Acheson’s various advisers and associates. Those who seek a more exhaustive
account of Acheson’s policymaking should consult Robert Beisner’s excellent
recent study. That said, however, it must be made clear that McMahon’s book
should be required reading for all those-–specialists and generalists alike—who
truly want to understand the development of American foreign policy during the
Second World War and the Cold War. Readers of all persuasions are likely to be
convinced that “by almost any measure, Dean Acheson ranks as one of the most
important, accomplished and consequential diplomats in the entire sweep of U.S.
history” (209).
University of Notre Dame Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.

First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. By David J. Meltzer.
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 464. $29.95.)

The author of this study takes on one of the most controversial topics in archae-
ology today: the peopling of the Americas. Intended originally as a second edition
of Search for the First Americans [1993], the author explains that changes in his
thinking and in the field compelled him to move beyond the scope of the earlier
work. It is impossible to read this text and not think of the widely popular work
by Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus
BOOK REVIEWS 355

[2005]. Mann, as does David J. Meltzer, addressed the history of the field,
although perhaps in a more accessible way. Meltzer’s contribution is in the depth
of his academic investigation and discussions. He presents a field that can be both
popularly compelling and frustrating. One wants more statements in the field like
that of Tom D. Dillehay, in Probing Deeper into First American Studies [2008],
who wrote researchers “may learn that multiple migrations and multiple routes
were used at different times by different peoples from different places.” The public
needs some “we don’t yet know” statements coming from the field until the new
science has had a chance to catch up with the materials studied. After all, as
Meltzer acknowledges, new methods of testing have the potential to change the
entire landscape of archeological research in the coming years.
Meltzer bravely tackles the many political ramifications of archeological
research in the Americas. He presents the debates that flared up surrounding the
identity of Kennewick Man. As Tim Flannery noted [2009], although academics
have long since taken off the table the idea that Kennewick Man was of Caucasian
origins, the claim is still adding fuel to the fire, a fire that could have serious social
implications for today’s Americans. Native American groups see it as a threat to
their fight. White supremacist groups see it as a justification for their own claims.
Meltzer writes that “the ancestors of the first South Americans must have come
via North America; we haven’t a shred of evidence to indicate South America was
peopled directly by ocean crossing” (xiv). He follows this statement with a bit of
faulty logic: “If the oldest accepted sites in the New World are in the Southern
Hemisphere . . . then there must be ones older still in the Northern Hemisphere.
Only, we’ve not found them yet.” That would imply that there is also not a shred
of evidence to prove the latter, or that the ocean claim for the settlement of South
America cannot be dismissed. This all, as well as a style at times too academic,
makes the subject confusing for the general reader Meltzer seeks to access. It also
reintroduces the image of a field on fire, both due to its popularity and its heated
debates. One can only hope that the new science grants readers more answers and
less fuel.
West Virginia University Silver Moon

The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet.
By Garrett Peck. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Pp. xi,
309. $26.95.)

This new book is a well-written study of the contemporary liquor industry. The
author begins with the premise that alcohol drinking is an accepted and appro-
356 THE HISTORIAN

priate part of American society. After an introductory chapter, Garrett Peck

proceeds to a rudimentary and very brief look at over three hundred years of
drinking history. His main point is that as the twenty-first century began we have
developed many niche markets, including those for alcohol. American consumers
today place a great value in buying premium products; in terms of consumables,
these also include products that taste good. People are willing to pay more for
such items. However, America’s three favorite alcoholic beverages are Bud Light,
Yellow Tail Shiraz, and Bacardi Rum. Global corporations, not niche small
artisans, produce all three.
Peck briefly looks at the federal taxation of alcoholic beverages and
correctly concludes that the industry currently contributes very little to the
internal revenue of the country. He believes that “excise taxes have largely
fallen out of favor,” which may be less true since the economic downturn that
began in 2009 (33). He also does not give as much credit as is due to the
extremely strong lobbying efforts of the liquor industry to forestall further tax
increases. There is currently a bill before Congress to lower taxes for small
brewers.
Peck looks at “Spirits Inc.,” and “Wine Inc.,” providing vignettes about
various aspects of each of these businesses. The section on wine is the strongest
probably because the wine industry has the lowest profile of the three and is the
smallest. His discussion of whiskey focuses on bourbon, which has recently seen
a resurgence in market share. Peck believes this is because “taste (has become)
more important . . . than price” (67). Bourbon is also sweeter than scotch and
thus fits the American palate better. His discussion of cocktails, New Orleans, and
the Kentucky Bourbon Trial reinforces the image of whiskey as a premium drink
thus undercutting his objectivity.
Peck believes that “we need a nationwide discussion on alcohol to renego-
tiate its role” (257). His position is that alcohol is a consumer product like
bread or ice cream and should be treated as such. He does examine the public
health argument about restricting access to minimize negative consequences of
alcohol abuse and misuse. He is more even handed in his approach to so-called
neoprohibitionists than either industry spokespeople or craft beer advocates are.
There is nothing new about calling for promoting a moderate, healthful use of
alcohol along with greater alcohol education. He further supports lowering the
drinking age to eighteen, something he acknowledges seventy-seven percent of
Americans do not support. Although he says his book is for consumers, he is
really advocating for greater market access for small producers. Most Ameri-
cans are probably satisfied with the current status quo around alcohol that
BOOK REVIEWS 357

maintains certain regulations by both federal and state government but also
provides a reasonable amount of access for most consumers.
Amherst, Massachusetts Amy Mittelman

Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War.
By Romesh Ratnesar. (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Pp. 229. $17.82.)

On 12 June 1987, amidst the shadows of the Brandenberg Gate, President Ronald
Reagan appeared to be issuing more of a taunt than an invitation. “General
Secretary Gorbachev,” he said, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this
gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” These
now-famous words seemed prophetic two years later, on 9 November 1989, when
jubilant Germans began dismantling the Berlin Wall. For Romesh Ratnesar,
however, the significance of Reagan’s speech “lies less in the outcomes it directly
led to than in the ideas it represented” (190).
Ratnesar argues convincingly that Reagan’s words were “as much an invitation
as . . . a challenge” to Gorbachev, representing Reagan’s “core belief” that “the
world need not remain divided, that people could overcome the barriers between
them, that change was possible” (7, 190). Reagan envisioned the Cold War not as
a permanent backdrop on the international stage but instead as an act ending with
the ideological conversion of top Soviet leaders. Gorbachev, according to Ratne-
sar, shared this view and emerged as a leader who had the moral and political
courage to recognize, acknowledge, and seek to change the flaws inherent in the
Soviet system. Ratnesar shows that, although Reagan was a key actor in the
drama that led up to the end of the Cold War, in the actual finale, he played only
a supporting role to Gorbachev, the leading man (189).
Although Ratnesar is not the first to draw such conclusions about the roles of
these two leaders, his book is important to the literature dealing with the end of
the Cold War in two ways. First, his work is rare in its contextualization of the
speech as a diplomatic overture rather than a challenge (7). He explains that the
relationship Reagan had forged with Gorbachev prior to the speech allowed him
to believe optimistically that personally calling on Gorbachev to tear down the
Wall “might actually inspire him” to do so (8). Second, Ratnesar’s work joins
James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold
War as a work that reconstructs the intricate details of the development and
delivery of Reagan’s iconic address. Ratnesar interviewed over thirty-five former
358 THE HISTORIAN

Reagan administration officials and American and German eyewitnesses to the

speech and conducted primary document research in archives in both America and
the former East Germany.
Readers who like to know what goes on behind the scenes and are interested
in political infighting will find the details intriguing. Though there are no foot-
notes for scholars to leverage for their future research, this detracts minimally
from the authoritative nature of Ratnesar’s account. Tear Down This Wall is a
work that teachers and students of the Cold War will find useful and engaging.
United States Military Academy Gail Yoshitani

The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. By Miguel Tinker Salas.
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. vii, 324. $23.95.)

Venezuela has been the object of two colonizing waves; the first by Spain during
the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries; the second by North American and
British oil companies during the twentieth century. Venezuela achieved its inde-
pendence from the first early in the nineteenth century; now, Miguel Tinker Salas
writes, the nation is endeavoring to liberate itself from the legacy of the second.
He describes in meticulous detail the social and cultural impact of the oil com-
panies’ powerful presence, combining the methodology of his academic training
with the personal experience of having been born and reared in the oil camps of
eastern Venezuela.
The description of life in the oil camps sets this book apart from the traditional
studies of the Venezuelan oil industry, which concentrate on the economic, envi-
ronmental, and political factors, although Tinker Salas contends that the nature of
the lifestyle within the camps affected everything else. Following the initial,
chaotic boom-town period, the oil companies, namely Creole (Standard Oil of
New Jersey) and Shell, established colonial enclaves—“oil camps”—for their
mostly white managerial, technical, and skilled employees. Life “behind the
cyclone fences” duplicated hometown America from Little League to supermar-
kets (199). But even beyond the fences, for the work force in general, the com-
panies sought to create a work ethic that extolled “virtues” such as punctuality,
loyalty, and initiative and ambition, and to change an alleged mindset of
“mañana” into one of “today.” The steam whistle became a metaphor for the
start of the workday and its end. Needless to say, the distinction between the
“privileged” residents of the oil camps and those of the surrounding communities
created a condition of discrimination and segregation that could not be sustained
beyond midcentury.
BOOK REVIEWS 359

Just after World War II, Creole especially initiated a policy of “Venezolaniza-
tion,” id est, “the hiring and promoting of Venezuelans to most positions in the
company” (185). The company accompanied this strategy with a public relations
blitz designed to identify the success of the oil industry with the well-being of the
nation. Seeking to allay the resentment engendered by the earlier practices, Creole
and Shell attempted to make the oil industry synonymous with “modernization
and development,” promoting the concept of “sowing the oil,” that is, the use of
oil revenue to diversify the economy and fund social programs.
For his part, Tinker Salas challenges the oil companies’ claim as the agent of
“modernization and development,” affirming that the “privileged lifestyle” of oil
company employees and their “allies” in the Venezuelan middle class did not
extend to the nation at large. Nor, he adds, did the nationalization of the oil
industry in 1976 succeed in overcoming this closed circle of privilege. In a slight
contradiction, he suggests that “sowing the oil” may work under Hugo Chávez.
Setting politics aside, this is an outstanding work of social history.
Penn State University Charles D. Ameringer

The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S.
Spy Ship. By James Scott. (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Pp. 368.
$27.00.)

In this interesting study, journalist James Scott recounts the story of the deadly
attack on the American intelligence ship USS Liberty (AGTR-5) by Israeli forces
during the Six Day War in June 1967. In writing this book, Scott, the son of one
of the junior officers on board the Liberty during the attack, sought not only to
furnish a much more complete account of the attack than heretofore presented but
also to detail the high-level, behind-the-scenes wrangling in Washington over the
level of Israel’s culpability in the weeks that followed the attack. He has succeeded
in both endeavors.
The story he presents of the machine-gunning of the Liberty’s bridge and
engine room by Israeli-flown Mirage jet fighters and the subsequent torpedoing of
the ship by one of three Israeli torpedo boats half an hour later is both riveting and
poignant. In these assaults, thirty-four officers and crewmen were killed and
another 171 were wounded. Having interviewed a significant number of the
surviving members of the Liberty’s crew, Scott is able to piece together aspects of
the attack that have not been known before now.
In this same regard, the author’s account of the high-level maneuvering over
the issue in the White House and on Capitol Hill is enhanced not only by his
360 THE HISTORIAN

access to newly or recently declassified official documents but by his detailed

interviews with former Johnson administration senior officials. He shows how
angry Secretary of State Dean Rusk was about the Israeli attack on the American
ship. Responding to the government of Israel’s initial apology for “this tragic
accident,” Rusk drafted a harsh, three-page letter to Israeli Ambassador Avraham
Harman in which he stated, “[a]s a minimum, the attack must be condemned as
an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.” Rusk
stressed that the United States government expected Israel to take the disciplinary
measures required by international law against the military personnel responsible
(159). However, following the receipt of an equally caustic Israeli reply two days
later, the Special Committee of the National Security Council agreed to soften the
administration’s hard line on the incident and avoid publicly releasing the
exchange of letters because its members felt that the President could not afford
the political controversy (165–166).
In his 2002 book The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S.
Navy Spy Ship, A. Jay Cristol exploded the various conspiracy theories that the
Israeli government had intentionally targeted the Liberty for attack, but Scott’s
book provides little new information related to this aspect of the subject. What the
author does show, however, is Israel’s disinclination to follow up the incident by
holding the lower-level personnel who carried out the attack accountable for their
actions. Indeed, the official Israeli report exonerated its military personnel of all
charges of negligence in the events, and no one was even relieved of duty for his
actions during the deadly assault, much less put on trial (264–265).
Solidly crafted and intriguingly written, this book should prove of interest to
historians as well as to the general public.
Naval History and Heritage Command Jeffrey G. Barlow

Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848. By Joel H.
Silbey. (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2009. Pp. 240. $34.95.)

The recently inaugurated (no pun intended) American Presidential Elections series
from Kansas has already produced such well-received works as Michael Holt’s
study of the 1876 Hayes-Tilden battle. This year sees several new entries in the
series, including the present work by one of the masters of antebellum politics,
Joel H. Silbey. Interestingly, in a series devoted to especially significant elections,
Silbey argues that perhaps 1848 was not quite as significant as has often been
thought. Traditionally, the 1848 campaign has been seen as the beginning of the
end of the Jacksonian party system, with the long-delayed irruption of the slavery
BOOK REVIEWS 361

question into mainstream American politics. The end of the Mexican-American

War, and the resulting massive cession of Mexican territory secured by the Treaty
of Guadelupe-Hidalgo (ratified in the spring of 1848), had unleashed a national
debate on the future of slavery in those new territories. This issue had been
thought to have been settled by many after the Missouri Compromise of 1820,
which actually had settled the issue explicitly, but only for the lands of the
Louisiana Purchase. Now, many Northern politicians—mostly Whigs, but also
including many Democrats—rallied behind a proposal put forward by Pennsyl-
vania Democrat David Wilmot to ban slavery in any lands acquired from Mexico.
That this Wilmot Proviso was motivated as much by politics (fear of the power the
South might gain from new slave states) as by moral aversion to slavery in no way
lessened the incendiary affect the Proviso had among some Southerners, many of
whom realized, as some historians have not, that the desire of many Northerners
to limit slavery had to be rooted in at least some unease with the Southern labor
system (regardless of their own racism).
The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, a man long associated
with the causes and needs of “the West” (mostly what we now consider the
“Midwest”), especially territorial expansion; his running mate was William O.
Butler of Kentucky, successful as a volunteer general in the late war. Their
platform was a traditional Democratic platform of limited government and non-
interference with slavery. Whigs had generally opposed the war or criticized its
conduct, but, desperate for a popular candidate, nominated General Zachary
Taylor, one of the two leading American generals in the conflict, and paired “Old
Rough and Ready” with vice-presidential nominee Millard Fillmore of New York.
As with the Democrats, the Whig platform was traditional, favoring internal
improvements and opposing executive tyranny, but was necessarily equivocal on
slavery expansion. They hoped Taylor’s slaveholdings in Louisiana would comfort
many Southerners, while implying to Northerners that he might not oppose the
Proviso. These nominations and platforms elided a few pro-Proviso dissidents
from both parties, who combined with the remnants of the old Liberty Party to
form the new Free Soil Party. Perhaps the most important component of the new
party was New York’s Barnburner faction, long estranged from the more conser-
vative and spoils-minded Democratic faction, the Hunkers, and smarting from not
having been recognized as the official New York delegation at the Democratic
convention. The Barnburners contributed their leader, former President Martin
Van Buren, as the Free Soil nominee—a great irony, since many credited (or
blamed) Van Buren for the creation of the very party system the Free Soilers
sought to disrupt, especially the system’s deliberate quashing of sectional contro-
362 THE HISTORIAN

versy. As Silbey’s title suggests, he argues that despite the heat generated by the
Proviso, longstanding party loyalties and party issues retained sufficient hold on
Whigs and Democrats to keep both parties largely intact. Even many passionate
supporters of the Proviso backed Taylor, in part because it made more sense to
experienced politicians to support a likely winner over a certain loser—and
especially because longtime Democrat Van Buren had been second only to Andrew
Jackson in Whig demonology. Historians often dismiss the “old issues” as dead,
in part because, unlike slavery, they might seem irrelevant today. They were not
dead or irrelevant in 1848; indeed, one of Taylor’s problems gaining complete
Whig loyalty was his lack of public commitment to Whig positions. Taylor, of
course, won, and Silbey argues that the Free Soil vote played little role in the
outcome, despite a strong showing in New York; indeed, a stronger Free Soil
showing would have cost Taylor the election, rather than securing his triumph. It
should be noted that Silbey’s analysis of the election results sometimes draws
conclusions from, but does not show details of, the quantitative techniques with
which he is often associated.
This reviewer’s own work on the 1850s, when the parties genuinely did
fragment, suggests that Silbey is quite correct to downplay the Free Soil disruption
of 1848, although the Free Soil Party did loom large in some individual careers,
easing certain pro-Proviso politicians out of their old associations. Were this not
part of an election-year series, this reviewer would like to have seen more discus-
sion of these later echoes of Free Soil, such as the troubled efforts of the Barn-
burners to reenter New York Democracy. Silbey is also shrewd to see that
antislavery politicians were usually well ahead of the voters on the slavery issue,
not, as sometimes portrayed, stodgy career pols pushed into action by an enraged
populace, which is evident when one compares congressional debate with the
intentionally conservative line often taken in stump speeches. This short survey
is not only interpretively sound, but also entertaining, as Silbey provides a
lively sweep through hastily written campaign biographies, lurid editorials, and
overheated campaign rhetoric—something that enriches our understanding of all
antebellum campaigns, not just that of 1848.
University of Virginia Bookstore R. Scott Burnet

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier. By Lea VanderVelde. (New York, N.Y.:
Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv, 480. $34.95.)

This volume follows Harriet Scott from 1835, when she was a slave girl taken to
the Northwest Territory, to 1857, when her family experienced momentary fame
BOOK REVIEWS 363

after defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court in a freedom suit. Although the thesis is
weak, the method of the study is vigorous and worth consideration in African
American studies and legal history. Lea VanderVelde argues that two factors in
Scott’s frontier life make it likely that she, not her husband, was the force behind
the suits that finally became the Dred Scott v. Sanford case. Those factors were an
ethic of hard work and independence that her master, Lawrence Taliaferro,
preached as U.S. Indian Agent to the Sioux and an insistence, also like that of
Taliaferro, that justice be meted out fairly across racial lines and be sensitive to the
lives of those facing authority. This is plausible, but the only evidence presented
for it is Taliaferro’s performance as Indian Agent, an observer’s brief comment in
1857 about Harriet’s strong role in her marriage, and the stronger claims to
freedom that Harriet and her daughters could have made without Dred—
something buried by their attorney’s decision, late in the process, to submerge the
woman’s and girls’ case into the man’s case and argue theirs on the merit of his.
Evidence and conclusion barely match here, despite the attractive idea of Harriet
Scott’s fortitude and perseverance.
However, the method of the book deserves praise on several counts. VanderVelde
traces Scott’s life not with much information about her subject herself but through
reconstruction of her contexts, from her youth in the Northwest Territory to her
maturity in St. Louis as a washerwoman, wife, mother, and Supreme Court litigant.
Though Scott’s role in these contexts is approachable only through speculation,
most readers will accept most of the author’s conjectures and will be rewarded by
the reminder that Scott observed great dramas of American history such as the loss
by native groups of lands in the Northwest Territory and the depredations of fur
and timber companies on the people and landscape of the territories. In African
American studies, whose actors often elude historians for lack of evidence, this
model of contextual reconstruction of everyday minutiae and landmarks of history
is valuable. Also, VanderVelde understands slavery in its contexts. Despite a
common core to slavery, a slave’s experience varied with context, and it was variety
that gave Scott her freedom. Taliaferro owned her in 1835, but soon he regarded her
as a semifree dependent, and he probably believed that in marrying Dred she
became free. Transition to semifree dependent was, in the context of master and
slave shared, not only moving toward freedom but also ensuring survival. No
totally independent person could have survived the Minnesota-Wisconsin winter.
Finally, in developing the details of the Scotts’ various suits, VanderVelde reminds
those who believe in freedom as a natural right that in fact a well-focused legal
argument against slave-traders’ and slaveholders’ claims is paramount. The Scotts
and their lawyers were hard pressed to focus on exactly who was claiming mastery.
364 THE HISTORIAN

The infamous Sanford was a late and distant candidate for master, while the real
owner was ultimately revealed to be a free-soil Massachusetts politician who was
deeply embarrassed that his wife had brought slaves into their marriage apparently
without thinking about them or informing him.
Western Michigan University John Saillant

Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. By Karen Dixon
Vuic. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xv, 271.
$50.00.)

In June 1970, General William Westmoreland elevated Army Nurse Corps Chief
Anna Mae McCabe Hays to brigadier general, making her the first female general
in U.S. history. The ceremony might have highlighted the gains women made in
the twentieth century but for the fact that Westmoreland concluded the ceremony
by kissing Hays in what he described as “a new protocol for congratulating lady
generals” (55). Westmoreland’s action is but one example of how gender compli-
cated and defined military women’s experiences during the Vietnam War. In her
engaging, well-researched study, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps
in the Vietnam War, Karen Dixon Vuic explores military nurses’ experiences as
they served their country in Vietnam. Vuic argues that the Army balanced emerg-
ing feminist demands with traditional gendered expectations to recruit women
into the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) and, once there, to govern their experiences.
According to Vuic, the controversial nature of the war and the feminist move-
ment necessitated a shift in the Army’s traditional reliance upon idyllic images of
nurturing and patriotic selflessness to recruit women. The ANC balanced prom-
ises of respect and equality with assurances that service would not compromise
recruits’ femininity. Nurses themselves joined the ANC for many reasons. Some
adhered to notions of female domesticity, while others cited practical concerns,
political ideology, or a personal desire to transcend marriage and motherhood.
Despite their motivations, however, the realities they encountered in Vietnam
forced women into new roles and situations. “Nurses in Vietnam,” Vuic notes,
“were often called upon to . . . assume a level of responsibility they would not
have assumed in civilian or stateside army nursing” (77). But the position of
female nurses as a starkly visible minority in an overwhelmingly male environ-
ment also awakened some to the problematic nature of traditional assumptions
about women in wartime. Although the ANC took pains to maintain women’s
femininity —requiring traditional “nursing whites” in many locations and encour-
aging recruits to pack “party dresses”—women had mixed feelings about existing
BOOK REVIEWS 365

as icons of femininity (147). Some felt empowered by their special status, while
others felt extremely vulnerable. Constantly propositioned, harassed, and occa-
sionally physically assaulted, women in Vietnam fell victim to persistent beliefs
that boys will be boys and that women existed to cater to men’s needs—be those
needs medical or sexual.
Vuic argues that changes in the Army reflected “how mainstream feminist
ideologies were becoming in the 1960s and early 1970s” (191). But what explains
the concessions to women during World War II when, in the absence of organized
feminism, the government appealed to women using many of the same themes
found in ANC literature? Vuic asserts the power of the feminist movement but
offers no proof that feminists catalyzed changes in Army practice. It seems more
likely that the Army made concessions to women (and male nurses) to address a
crisis, but retained informal inequality by conceptualizing those concessions in
traditionally gendered terms.
Despite this criticism, this is a wonderful book, chock full of oral history and
riveting personal stories. It makes a meaningful contribution to Vietnam War and
twentieth-century gender historiography.
Bethel College Penelope Adams Moon

The Brittle Thread of Life: Backcountry People Make a Place for Themselves in Early
America. By Mark Williams. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.
Pp. xi, 288. $45.00.)

The author of this book tells mostly parallel stories of two New England back-
country communities, Salmon Brook (later Granby), Connecticut, and Huntstown
(later Ashfield), Massachusetts, situated in the less-desirable, hilly frontier lands of
the western Connecticut River Valley. His goal is to weave the microhistories
of these two communities into a single narrative of how people on the margins of
early New England carved out independence and respectability.
Mark Williams begins with Salmon Brook, located in the remote meadows
beyond the ridgeline west of Windsor, Connecticut. Although pioneered in the
1640s, it took decades to establish Salmon Brook as a permanent settlement.
Overland and water routes offered only limited access. Attacks by Native Ameri-
cans or Frenchmen remained threats until the eighteenth century. Thus, few
colonists were willing to settle there. Those who did came from New England’s
margins. Most of the settlers were landless and few of them were Puritans. Instead,
they were a diverse group of Welsh, Huguenot, and Anglican colonists, including
many bachelors and young couples. Salmon Brook was thus not the typical New
366 THE HISTORIAN

England Puritan community of families. Over the course of the eighteenth century,
these hardworking settlers found prosperity in farming, lumbering, and the tar and
turpentine industries. Still, social consensus remained elusive. Salmon Brook
residents were divided over where to place the meeting house, how to oversee the
copper mines found there, and whom to seat as a minister. Not even the American
Revolution fully united them. This was a contentious place.
Huntstown, the focus of the book’s second half, followed mostly similar
patterns. Although settled later, Huntstown’s origins, like those of Salmon Brook,
rested in land grants and other enticements offered to colonists. Those who did
venture into the hilly lands beyond Deerfield lacked land and privilege in New
England society; others were indebted, while still others were Baptists. Once there,
these colonists labored hard to clear small farms where they could plant grain,
establish orchards, and graze livestock. And they, too, experienced the isolation
and fears of life on the frontier. Furthermore, like their counterparts in Salmon
Brook, Huntstown residents expected to be rewarded with autonomy for their
efforts. When they were not, they contended over numerous local issues, which
Williams details at length.
Williams offers a readable and detailed portrait of these two communities, their
early settlers, and the local quarrels that divided them. Yet his narrative lacks
drama. Indeed, despite all of the threats, disruptions, and divisions that Williams
tells us these communities weathered, his narration of them falls flat. In the end,
these backcountry people were not rebels but consensus builders. One also ques-
tions his assertions of their atypicality. Have not scholars demonstrated, for
example, that colonial New England was populated by bachelors, servants, and
other peoples on the margins, as well as Puritan families? Finally, Williams leaves
larger questions about the New England backcountry and its society unanswered.
What qualities defined this region? How did religion and/or ethnicity influence
how backcountry colonists defined their autonomy? Answers to these questions
would have made for a more significant microhistory.
Muhlenberg College Judith Ridner

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. By
Ritu Birla. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 346. $84.95.)

This smart, original book retells late colonial Indian history as a story about the
interdependence of economic developments and legislative changes and the impact
BOOK REVIEWS 367

of that entwinement on nationalist politics itself. It is not simply that the colonial
subject was also an “economic man” or even that the imperial state intervened to
try to regulate “vernacular market actors” (6). As significant for the history of
imperial capital more generally, “the installation of contractual market relations
delineated a public of subjects for whom modern civic association would be
modeled on market organization” (5). By identifying this historical process and
examining struggles over the terms of its unfolding, Ritu Birla asks readers both
to reconsider the relationship between nationalist idioms like “trusteeship” and
to rethink the role of “the social worlds of capital” in the making of colonial
modernity (233).
Readers will appreciate the deftness with which Birla cuts through the archives
of legislative enactment and fiscal reform to make her case about the rule of law
as more than a passive “civilizational” standard or a routine mechanism for
guaranteeing regional hegemony. Focusing on the period 1880–1920 and using
the Marwari community as the basis for her claims about indigenous capital, she
painstakingly reconstructs how Hindu (and, briefly, Muslim) forms of charitable
provision were legally coded as public trusts. Jurists did this not by drawing
religious endowments into equivalence with English or modern forms but pre-
cisely by recoding them as remnants of custom and culture. She demonstrates how
a variety of colonial subjects participated in this process, mainly by seeking
protection for the “Hindu Undivided Family” and by capitalizing on imperial
presumptions about the private, the domestic, and the sacred (27 and ff). Debates
over gambling were critical to this project for all concerned. As a result of a series
of legislative changes that were embedded in a free-market philosophy shared by
imperial officials and representatives of native commerce alike, by the interwar
period, civic participation had been redefined as charitable support of the public
with “freedom to profit in the private” by commercially respectable men. It was
the realization, in other words, of classic laissez-faire principles (101).
Birla is determined to challenge presumptions about the segregation of
economy from culture and about the irrelevance of political economy to an
understanding of nationalist politics (twin inheritances, arguably, from this very
period). Her brief but suggestive reading of Gandhi as the quintessential economic
man who refashioned trusteeship as an idiom of governance in a deeply paternalist
mode could profitably be the starting point for a truly revisionist history of
twentieth-century Indian nationalism. Birla’s capacity for staging this interpretive
framework is enabled in part by her skepticism about the teleology of “status to
contract” narratives. It is also the consequence of her commitment to feminist
political theory, which informs her subtle readings of how public and private were
368 THE HISTORIAN

redeployed around questions of family, conjugality, and privacy. That she ends
with Marwari reactions to the Age of Consent Act of 1929 is further evidence that
gender is critical to an appreciation of the history of colonial modernity and that
its technologies were indispensable to the work of global capital in the age of
empire.
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Antoinette Burton

China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. By Mark Edward
Lewis. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Pp. 340. $29.95.)

This is the second in a projected six-volume series covering the major Chinese
dynastic periods, and one of three written by Mark Edward Lewis, proving he is
a skilled synthesizer as well as a formidable researcher. This volume is especially
valuable because it addresses a period that has lacked a solid single-volume
overview, despite a treasure trove of excellent specialized studies. It will inevitably
be compared to the long-awaited but as yet imaginary second volume in the
Cambridge History of China series, but the Belknap series has quite different
ambitions with only a single author, one-third (or less) the number of pages, and
at one-sixth the price per volume, it does not seek to break new scholarly ground,
but rather to offer a readable synthesis for a broader public.
Judged on this basis, Lewis’s volume succeeds mainly due to his wide-ranging
command of sources and the lack of alternative choices; otherwise it is rather
disappointing. The basic organizational template, which works fairly well for his
volumes on the centralized Qin-Han and Tang empires, serves less well here. The
very brisk treatment of the complex but critical political and military narrative,
which is folded in among other issues in chapters two and three, is inadequate, and
lacks good maps (a problem throughout the series). The five themes identified in the
introduction are addressed unevenly and do not give structure to the work; for
example, the third theme (military institutions) is addressed only in chapter three,
while the fourth (detachment of state from society) hardly appears, and is actually
contradicted by the material in chapter four on public spaces and urban life. Lewis’s
unusual placement of fundamental topics is another problem. For example, family
and kinship, a central issue in the scholarship, is introduced in chapter two on “The
Rise of Great Families,” but only regarding literary culture and political posturing.
The main discussion of the economic and social basis of great families is,
paradoxically, buried in chapter five, “Rural Life,” even though most of the
leading families were in court service. By the time we get to chapter seven,
BOOK REVIEWS 369

“Redefining Kinship,” we have what seems like an array of leftovers: cemeteries,

funerals, and genealogies. Furthermore, the chapter begins by stating that “the
fundamental structures of family organization did not change,” a bold assertion
that clashes with the core account in chapter five (170). The discussion of Bud-
dhism undergoes a similar, baffling dispersal; we get temples as public spaces in
chapter four, Buddhism and foreign trade in chapter six, and Buddhism and
kinship in chapter seven. Only in chapter eight do we finally get a systematic
account of how Buddhism was introduced and spread in China and its institu-
tional basis.
For those already familiar with the period, Lewis’s digest of current scholarship
offers many signposts to interesting and perhaps overlooked issues and resources,
making it useful rather than groundbreaking. For the nonspecialist, the work is
likely to prove an engaging but somewhat disjointed read.
Eckerd College Andrew Chittick

The State in Myanmar. By Robert H. Taylor. (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii

Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 555. $28.00.)

Distinguished Myanmar/Burma scholar Robert H. Taylor has produced an

updated edition of The State in Burma, which first appeared two decades ago.
This welcomed addition to the literature centers on the “analytical problems
involved in the study of the state in Burma” and in “describing the characteristics
of the state and analyzing its relationships with other institutions in society” (4).
The volume is divided into six sections, dealing with successive periods in the
history of the Burmese state from 1825 to 2008.
The State in Myanmar is enhanced by the inclusion of several useful maps,
including “Myanmar and the Kingdom of Bagan” and “Major Administrative
Divisions of Myanmar,” plus extensive bibliographies divided into pre-1988 and
post-1988 parts, which include books, monographs, and articles in both Burmese
and English. The addendum on the third constitution of Myanmar provides
insightful background on this political document.
In the current phase of the Myanmar state from 1988 onward, Taylor argues
that the army “arrogating to themselves a position above party politics . . .
insisted its role was by definition apolitical and therefore ‘national.’” Further,
writes Taylor,

The army’s view of itself as the saviour of the nation has certain corollaries.
One is that politicians are by their nature potentially anti-national as their
370 THE HISTORIAN

purpose is to present a partial and partisan view of the national interest that
only a supra-political organization such as the tatmadaw (military) can
understand and defend. (396)

Taylor correctly asserts the difficulty of locating reliable and accurate data,
despite the plethora in recent years of new internet sources such as Mizzima,
Irrawaddy, Shan Herald Agency for News, and the Democratic Voice of Burma.
The enormity of the research material gathered throughout the volume is particu-
larly illustrated by such charts as “Estimates of Military Expenditures as a
Proportion of GDP, 1988 to 2005”; “Exile Political Organizations circa 2005”;
and “Major Ceasefire Agreements, 1989–1997.”
The book is occasionally marred by stilted English usage, which sometimes
obscures the meaning of the author. One issue, which was not amplified, was the
impact on governmental institutions of income from timber and fishing conces-
sions, opium and drug profits, and the revenues from the increasing export of
natural gas and petroleum to Thailand and China. Do any of these funds reach
government coffers or are the funds lost before reaching the official budgetary
process?
On balance, The State in Myanmar represents an informed, insightful, and
up-to-date introduction to modern-day Myanmar.
University of Hartford Bruce J. Esposito

EUROPE

The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War. By
Caroline Alexander. (New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, 2009. Pp. xxi, 296. $26.95.)

Caroline Alexander’s 1991 Columbia University dissertation examined Achilles’

Iliad. After having published valuable accounts of nautical adventure (The Endur-
ance [1998] and The Bounty [2003]), she returns to tumultuous legends of the
Bronze Age Aegean. Subtitles and blurbs like “True Story” and “real lessons” may
put off more readers than they attract, but the research and footnotes are impres-
sive. Alexander denies having any insight into the Trojan War’s historicity (this
is wise but contradicts her subtitle) in favor of examining for our time “what
the Iliad says of war” (xvii). Jonathan Shay argued in Achilles in Vietnam that
Homer can help us understand the psychology of lethal conflicts and help
traumatized professionals and conscripts recover from damage. This book also
shares something with The Iliad, The Poem of Force [1941], Simone Weil’s
decidedly Goyaesque, pacifist meditation on tribal violence and the eradication of
BOOK REVIEWS 371

communities. “What . . . went wrong?” Alexander asks (55). In Homer’s fogged,

disastrous world, little goes right. Alexander neatly observes: “Achilles hijacks the
Iliad” (98).
This comparative project encounters predictable problems, since no nation-
state, city-state, or hierarchical polity fought windy Ilion’s war, if war it was,
rather than a cooperative pirate raid. The oral, traditional, Iron Age epic justifies
and magnifies in heroic terms (60,000 Achaeans living ten years on a beachhead!)
a surprise attack gone wrong. And the Iliad’s six weeks were not “the least
consequential period of this all-encompassing war” (13). The narrative slowly
achieved its current idiosyncratic shape (e.g., extended length, compressed plot—
forty days, approximately—deconstruction of divinities) in the Greek archaic
period of polis state-formation (new institutions, weapons, and battle-techniques).
Attempting to draw historical or ethical lessons for industrial autocracies and
representative democracies imperils the narrative’s more existential than political
message.
Even great translations persist in anachronistically mistranslating Homer’s top
rank as “kings.” Achilles and his tactless nemesis Agamemnon act like what
anthropologists call “big men.” Hereditary right and constitutional confirmation
mean little for fluid ranking among competitive Achaean warlords. Alexander’s
terminology can alarm: “military service” as if Hellas had a nationwide draft,
Achaean “patriotism” (even worse: Roman Aeneas’ “fascism”), Achilles’ “insub-
ordination” in “challenging his commander,” and his “giving up his life for his
country.” She concludes (not elucidating Homeric values here) that Achilles
should have left behind “a pointless catastrophe” and gone home (220).
Alexander shows admirable learning, but the desire to reveal “what Homer
really means to us” engenders edgy analogies, e.g., American mothers’ bake sales
raising dollars to buy armor (154). Thus one commends her effort to show the
continuing relevance of this profound epic poem and its understanding of fragile
male egos and vulnerable bodies, but historians must cautiously weigh her every
historical analogy.
Alexander’s retelling shadows Homer’s, quoting at length—always from Rich-
mond Lattimore’s superior translation. The general reader may ask: Why not
instead (re-)read the unconventional poem itself? This impassioned book offers an
insightful, contemporary, and informed reexamination of a perplexing war
“hero” for those who want an enthusiastic guide’s “read” of Homer with blow-
by-blow background and interpretation.
Ohio Wesleyan University Donald Lateiner
372 THE HISTORIAN

The Battle of Waterloo. By Jeremy Black. (New York, N.Y.: Random House, 2010.
Pp. xv, 227. $26.00.)

Thanks to Jeremy Black’s iconoclastic reassessment of this familiar subject in a

century-long European (and even global) context, it’s possible to welcome this
latest addition to the immense Waterloo library. Its books range from hourly,
unit-by-unit analyses of that bloody Sunday in June (Mark Adkin’s 2002 Water-
loo Companion) to accounts embedded in larger studies of Napoleon’s campaigns
(by David Chandler, Owen Connelly, Harold Parker, and others) to books that
focus principally on the battle from the perspective of one of the opposing
commanders. This tradition effectively began with Captain William Siborne’s
History of the War in France and Flanders in 1815, published in 1844, a semi-
official account based on a lengthy questionnaire mailed to most of the British
officers who survived the battle. Most historians since Siborne have endeavored
to find on that day a decisive moment in Western European, if not world, history.
For many readers today, it still seems reasonable that Edward Creasy’s much-
reprinted Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World [1815] begins with Marathon and
concludes with Waterloo. Although later battles might be added, few would
suggest Waterloo be deleted.
Most of Black’s work has focused on the impact of warfare and military change
in a global context and generally avoids attributing excessive significance to events
on a single battlefield or a single day. Although the book provides an account of
the fighting (emphasizing that Wellington, with Prussian support, essentially
fought and won the battle for which he planned), the most interesting chapters
present his analysis of war-fighting and politics in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries and the consequences of the engagement. For Black, the
greatest significance of Waterloo lay in its commemoration as a symbol of British
gallantry and fortitude against the odds (a historical inaccuracy) and global
expansion by Europeans freed from twenty-five years of costly warfare. Tactically
and technologically, Waterloo differed little from hard-fought battles a century
before then, and the 1815 campaign to restore Napoleon’s throne and defeat the
coalition armies was doomed—a victory at Waterloo could only delay, not
prevent, his ultimate downfall.
Controversially, Black argues that historians greatly overrate the significance of
the French Revolution and the Empire and that the century from 1750 to 1850
was largely one of continuity and incremental change (typified by Britain) rather
than revolutionary transformation. The generosity of the Vienna peace settlement
in 1815, compared with the brutal terms imposed on France by Prussia in 1871
BOOK REVIEWS 373

and Hitler in 1940, underline the fact that as an aggressive militarist Napoleon
and his goals were “a dead end,” and his disruption of the European status quo
was both temporary and shallow (205). The conservative monarchical regimes
that defeated Napoleon enjoyed more widespread popular support than his did.
A book that intelligently questions the significance not only of Waterloo, but of
Napoleon himself, should generate controversy and for that reason alone is well
worth reading.
Baylor University David Longfellow

Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter

the Great. By Brian J. Boeck. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2009. Pp. xiii, 255. $99.00.)

Imperial Boundaries serves as two books in one: it is a close examination of the

incremental integration of the Don Cossack community within the Russian empire
and a geopolitical survey of the shifting balance of power between Russia and the
Ottoman empire, as both the Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars transitioned from
valued allies to undesirable liabilities. Brian J. Boeck succeeds on both fronts,
managing to balance his narratives in a clear and concise manner. Most impor-
tantly, his choice of subjects demonstrates that Russia’s frontier spaces were as
essential to the construction of the state as its interior.
In addition to its thematic breadth, Boeck’s book presents new evidence con-
cerning the major Cossack “events” of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, which have drawn the lion’s share of the historiographical interest. This
includes two Cossack revolts, the first led by Stepan Razin in the 1670s and the
second by Kondratii Bulavin in the 1700s, as well as the Cossacks’ involvement in
Peter the Great’s campaign against the Ottomans at Azov in the 1690s. Rather
than treating these as singular moments, Boeck situates these events as signposts
of the ongoing transformation of the Cossack host. The increasing settlement of
Russian refugees among the Cossacks during the seventeenth century slowly
homogenized the previously multiethnic group, resulting in a closer alignment
with the concerns of the tsar against his Ottoman enemy.
The shifting composition of the Cossacks produced other, equally important,
changes to Cossack independence. The increased population made nomadic
raiding insufficient to support the population, leading to a turn toward agricul-
tural production. A century of boat construction to raid merchant shipping in the
Black Sea and along the Volga had left the Cossacks dependent upon lumber
exports from Russia, providing the tsar one more tool to influence Cossack affairs.
374 THE HISTORIAN

Though the Cossacks would retain many of the elements of their historical
“freedoms,” by the mid-eighteenth century, the Cossack nomadic tradition was
unsupportable without Russia.
With the undercurrents of the demographic and environmental changes weak-
ening Cossack traditions, it is understandable why the Cossacks accepted tsarist
limitations on their membership to control further migration. Only a radical
change could prevent the transformation of the host into a virtual Russian
colonial settler population. As Boeck concludes, the “end” of Cossack indepen-
dence and their acceptance of their role as the tsar’s military servitors was not a
victory of the Russian empire as much as a mutual agreement between the
Cossacks and the state where each party gained a necessary benefit from their
agreement.
Boeck has produced an accessible narrative of not only Russian empire-
building but also more generally the collapse of an unique borderland, which he
has situated in a thoughtful discussion of relevant theory and historiography. The
book’s inclusion of the well-known moments of Cossack military accomplish-
ments, as well as the decline of Ottoman fortunes on the north shore of the Black
Sea, should provide engaging material for a variety of interests. The only discon-
certing feature of this fine study might be its subtitle: there is far more here than
a discussion of the “Age of Peter the Great.”
University of Hawai’i at Mânoa Matthew P. Romaniello

Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism and Civil Society. By

Joseph Bradley. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv,
$55.00.)

This author’s latest book takes up the paradoxical question of how so many
voluntary associations developed in autocratic Russia. Through an examination
of the Free Economic Society; the Moscow Agricultural Society; the Russian
Geographical Society; the Moscow Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthro-
pology, and Ethnography; the Russian Technical Society; and the Pirogov Society
of Russian Physicians, Joseph Bradley argues that tsarist Russia did in fact have a
civil society. Even though these learned societies received state support and
included prominent state officials among their membership, the tsarist secret
police considered the associations a potentially powerful oppositional force.
The state-versus-society paradigm is well established in the Russian field, but
Bradley’s main contribution is to place the emphasis on the private initiative and
give the often neglected society side its historical due. In doing so, Bradley
BOOK REVIEWS 375

succeeds in showing that voluntary associations in tsarist Russian society

belonged to the same general family as their European and North American
cousins. In each of these cases, civil society transitioned from state-guided entities
into private ones, and the Russian examples followed the same basic trends as a
mission to expand scientific knowledge and education in the name of patriotism
turned into a call for a public sphere to serve society. As part of that transforma-
tion, scientific and professional societies began to assert scholarly and professional
autonomy in their internal governance and in their public meetings and con-
gresses. For example, the Committee of Political Economy of the Geographical
Society began to chafe at state intrusion into its scholarly affairs as it dared to
advocate its own recommendations for government policy unsolicited from the
state. The committee held fast to the idea that it could hold free discussions even
though there was no right to free speech in tsarist Russia. Such behavior gets to
the heart of Bradley’s conclusion that the emergence of a civil society is not a
consequence of the inviolability of personal and property rights. Instead, civil
society itself may strive for these rights as a by-product of the maturation of
learned societies and professional associations.
In its broad outlines, the story that Bradley tells is not a new one. Histories of
the Russian intelligentsia and the liberal constitutional movement have already
established this pattern of enlightened nobles who redefined their service
to the state, in terms of patriotism, and subsequently transferred that service
from the state to the “people.” As part of their desire to improve Russia through
the exercise of their own expertise, these elements began to lock horns with the
autocratic state. What Bradley has accomplished with this study is to link the
well-known story of the constitutional movement with a narrative of the history
of science. Those who want to know more about the history of Russian science,
or these particular associations, should read this book.
Florida State University Jonathan Grant

Charity & Religion in Medieval Europe. By James William Brodman. (Washington,

D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. xiv, 318. $59.95.)

The variegation of the millennium that is the Middle Ages makes any survey of an
enduring topic a daunting task. In this new book, the author provides an accom-
plished study of the

pivotal role played by religion and religious institutions in the creation,

evolution, and sustenance of the myriad of hospitals, leprosaria,
376 THE HISTORIAN

almshouses, orphanages, and confraternal and parochial charities that made

up the medieval opera caritatis. (1)

James William Brodman admits that the subject is so pervasive “that it almost
defies generalization,” yet his excellent use of accumulated historical opinion on the
matter gives the book a wholly informative, almost historiographical, cast (46).
The author consistently identifies the Rule of St. Augustine as the common
denominator of charitable religious orders and institutions. He explains that
Augustine’s Rule was less ascetic and more social, and thus congenial to those
who “led active lives within the secular world,” especially after it was redacted by
Pope Gelasius II in 1118 (222, 225). Augustine’s Rule provided the double benefit
of being flexible enough to encompass lay activity and yet venerable enough to
lend a “stamp of legitimacy” in an age that prized antiquity (243).
There is much to recommend in this book. Brodman’s training in Spanish
history informs the study, acting as a corrective to many surveys on medieval
topics that exclude Iberia. He also redresses the imbalance concerning crusading
hospitallers between their caritative works and military activities, making them
more than the one-dimensional warriors of received wisdom, noting that “among
contemporaries, the order’s reputation derived from its charity” (93). He paints
vivid scenes to illuminate his points, such as the Mercedarian Order’s “captive
procession . . . whereby recently ransomed prisoners were paraded past prospec-
tive donors” to encourage contributions to free Christians from Muslim slavery,
or the spectacle of poor Parisian women feigning prostitution in order to gain
admittance, and sustenance, from a religious shelter (168, 259). Brodman shows
his historical perception by acknowledging the interplay of outside factors such as
the Sicilian Vespers and the Great Schism with the charitable institutions he
examines (147, 133). The Church, whether its mission be charitable or not, does
not exist in a vacuum.
The reader would have liked to see more done with the Waldensians, who were
also known as “The Poor Men of Lyon,” to explore the instigative impact of such
marginal, heretical groups on the mainstream Church of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries (182). Also, the relationship between the healing nature of hospitals and
the curative power of saints’ tombs might explain the comparative paucity of
hospitals that he notes for the early Middle Ages.
But Brodman has done well in presenting the “mixed character” of medieval
charity that made it “straddle two worlds” between the clergy and the laity—
between the Church and society (255). For that he should be commended.
Asbury University Burnam W. Reynolds
BOOK REVIEWS 377

The Pilgrims’ Complaint: A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North. By
Michael Bush. (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiv, 307. $124.95.)

Although the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellions took place during some of the most
heated times of the English Reformation, they were not merely about religion.
This is not a radical conclusion about an arguably radical event. The late Sir
Geoffrey Elton, most highly regarded among Tudor historians, neglected discuss-
ing the uprising in his otherwise solid book, Policy and Police. But later writers
painstakingly analyzed the reasons behind the Pilgrimage. In one study, Scott
Harrison focused on the lake counties in the coastal northwest. He highlighted the
economic, political, and religious background, and posited that a struggle for
power among entrenched families, as well as an abuse of power by the Earl of
Cumberland, contributed to civil unrest. Even a general text such as Anthony
Fletcher’s Tudor Rebellions, written before Elton’s book, notes the complex
nature of the opposition to the English Reformation by the north’s pious conser-
vatives. Indeed, even before Michael Bush published Pilgrimage of Grace [1996]
and Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace [1999], the existing scholarship on the
rebellion had already made significant progress since the 1915 publication of the
Dodds sisters’ seminal study, and any notion that the uprising was simply about
religion had been thoroughly debunked. What, then, makes The Pilgrims’ Com-
plaint so special?
In short, the author does not rely on the traditional sources for political
rebellion—government statements, correspondence between government officials,
and sermons written by a clergy attempting to tell the rest how they should live.
Rather, he focuses on popular sources such as prophetic rhymes; often dubious
sources, such as eyewitness accounts; and also controversial sources, such as the
Pilgrim’s Petitions, whose veracity, Bush notes, sometimes has been too quickly
dismissed. These show that the rebels were not interested in turning society upside
down, but rather in putting what had been removed back in place. They were
conservatives who sought to restore the preeminent power of the pope and the
spiritual efficacy of their beloved saints, but not to overthrow the monarchy.
Political greenhorns, at least when compared to Oliver Cromwell and Henry VIII,
they failed to restore the previous order.
Bush’s principal conclusions come largely from his examination of popular
literature. The Pilgrimage of Grace, in brief, was a grassroots uprising devoted to
papal supremacy and the traditional worship of saints, and fearful of the effects of
their demise in England. The commoners had many beefs about money—new
taxes, higher manorial rents and dues, and in particular the transfers of clerical
378 THE HISTORIAN

wealth to laymen in the south. Some complaints centered on the threatened and
apparent loss of rights, and some addressed agrarian grievances.
A particular strength here is the appendix, “Key Declarations of Pilgrim
Complaint and Intent.” Reprinted in this volume are over two dozen documents,
including “A Captain Poverty muster proclamation” and “Pickering’s Song.”
Some of these do appear in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of
Henry VIII but often not in their entirety.
Bush’s study of popular radicalism during the English Reformation is a
welcome addition to Ashgate’s series on Catholic Christendom.
Elizabeth City State University Glen Bowman

Bannockburn: The Triumph of Robert the Bruce. By David Cornell. (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 320. $45.00.)

For the author of this study, Robert the Bruce’s improbable triumph at Bannock-
burn in 1314 must be approached as “the fusion of the Scottish wars with two
separate political conflicts” centered respectively on Robert and his English
nemesis, Edward II (xvii). He follows these narratives to Bannockburn. A succes-
sion crisis involved the Balliols, Bruces, and the Scottish political nation in a
decades-long contest for the crown. This “internal” conflict intersected with
Edward I’s imperial ambitions, most famously his adjudication of the succession
(for Balliol) and campaigns to subjugate Scotland proper. Finally, the fortunes of
Robert, who seized the crown in 1306, received encouragement from the turmoil
that plagued Longshanks’s weak successor. Readers of A. D. M. Barrell’s Medi-
eval Scotland will find this familiar, but the inclusion of Edward II’s political
troubles nicely expands the perspective.
David Cornell’s doctoral research on castle warfare pays dividends in his
account of the 1314 campaign. Readers learn why Bruce consistently avoided any
set-piece battle against an assuredly superior English host. The usurper’s reign
might well end if he tarnished his reputation for military prowess and success.
Conversely, just such a triumph might allow Edward II to see off his opponents in
England. The insecurity of their regimes lured both kings toward just such a
reckoning near Stirling Castle. Two engagements on the first day crucially boosted
Scottish morale and revealed the shortcomings in the English levies, including the
relative paucity of archers. Edward’s determination to bring his enemy to battle
led to a disastrous night deployment in the constricted ground across the Ban-
nockburn. Robert consequently chose to stay and chance his cause at a decisive
meeting. When the English cavalry bogged down the next morning against the
BOOK REVIEWS 379

Scottish schiltrom—a dense infantry formation armed with spears—and Edward

left the field, the weary, anxious English infantry broke and found themselves
fatally trapped by the river. The Scots achieved a bloody, spectacular victory, but
Cornell reminds readers that, though it strengthened Robert’s position, Bannock-
burn neither ended internal unrest nor English ambitions, particularly once the
two kings left the stage to Edward III.
The analysis of the campaign proper is by far the best part of the
book. Bannockburn is an increasingly familiar type of book, especially in the
U.K. market. Graduates with newly minted degrees hire literary agents to
negotiate deals for books with a self-consciously “popular” appeal. The schol-
arly and popular do not always mesh here. Breathless, affected prose soon
wears thin. Of the carnage, “[e]ntrails and organs lay starkly exposed where
they had split from horrendous gashes torn into the soft paleness of flesh”
or “Metal sliced through flesh. Bones shattered. Blood sprayed the air” (3,
204). The idea that the scene “would have lived with him [Robert] for the
rest of his life” is nice character development but hardly substantiated by
ensuing raids that terrorized English border communities for years (3). Novel-
istic moments aside, Bannockburn will reward readers who like popular history
with scholarly substance and academics seeking a well-rounded account of the
battle.
Union College John Cramsie

The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century. By
John D. Cotts. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009.
Pp. xi, 320. $74.95.)

Peter of Blois was neither the greatest nor the least of those Latin writers whose
work has been termed by C. H. Haskins and others the “Renaissance of the
Twelfth Century,” but he is certainly one of the most elusive. Conflicting scholarly
opinions on the part of major historians and Latinists have made Peter’s life,
sensibility, and famous and long-used letter collection a matter of extensive and
sometimes dismaying debate. But the intellectual and cultural life of the period has
recently been sufficiently explored and reassessed to the extent that some of the
puzzling and irritating aspects of Peter’s life and work have become more suscep-
tible of careful analysis. John D. Cotts has impressively and convincingly under-
taken just such an analysis.
Cotts locates Peter in a distinctly twelfth-century “clerical dilemma, the bal-
ancing of professional, educational, and spiritual concerns in an uneasy synthesis”
380 THE HISTORIAN

in extremely trying circumstances (15). Peter was a secular cleric. The status of
such an administrative cleric, whose life and livelihood depended on patronage
and was spent largely in service in lay or ecclesiastical courts that increasingly
needed masters of the written word, was as yet incompletely and unsatisfactorily
defined in comparison with those of monk, bishop, or canon regular. As Cotts
shrewdly observes, “The secular clergy, in fact, represent a kind of blank space on
our conceptual map of the High Middle Ages” (11–12). To many, the secular
cleric veered too close to the saeculum, the worldly concerns and duties of lay or
ecclesiastical courts, and was hence an easy target for moral criticism, invective
from rivals, and satire. And Peter seems to have received and sometimes given
more than his share of these.
Cotts traces Peter within the context of this new and unstable kind of clerical
status and function of which Peter was acutely aware. Among other things, Peter’s
letters, sermons, and treatises constitute for Cotts “a microhistory of anxiety” in
a world of enhanced and articulated power that depended more and more on the
written word and those who could produce it (56). Cotts begins with Peter’s
clerical life and continues with chapters on his role as archdeacon (at Bath and
London) and the circumstances of the production of his letters and his own
decision to collect them, the formation of a clerical mind, the changing role of
courts (lay and ecclesiastical), administration (Peter was a member of Europe’s
first generation of middle managers), the figure of the ideal bishop (which Peter
knew close-up from experience), and pastoral duty (including Peter’s reaction to
the Third Crusade and his emphasis on the importance of instructed preaching).
He concludes with a perceptive assessment of Peter’s distinctive and ultimately
admirable piety and includes a detailed discussion of the editorial problems of
Peter’s letter collection in an appendix.
University of Pennsylvania (Emeritus) Edward Peters

Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern
England. By Gregory D. Dodds. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press,
2009. Pp. xx, 405. $85.00.)

In exploring the English legacy of the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, the
author has chosen a potentially unmanageable topic. For two centuries following
his death in 1534, Erasmus continued to influence English literary culture. His
books were printed, studied, translated, parodied, and debated so frequently that
assessing his impact seems the work of a lifetime. Gregory D. Dodds has wisely
restricted himself to a single aspect of the Erasmian legacy in England. Exploiting
BOOK REVIEWS 381

Erasmus focuses on the use of Erasmus’ writings in reference to religious issues.

Because religion in early modern England is inseparable from politics, Dodds
often strays into political questions, but he is not directly concerned with political
theory. Dodds’s principal goal is to trace the relevance of Erasmus’ books to
England’s “long Reformation.”
Dodds is equally ambitious in the length of the period he covers. He begins in
the middle of the sixteenth century, when Erasmus’ New Testament paraphrases
assumed an important role in the English Reformation. The study closes on the
threshold of the eighteenth century, when the Glorious Revolution of 1688
legitimized notions of religious tolerance different from anything that Erasmus
had conceived. The chapters are ordered by chronology rather than subject, and
this structure allows Dodds to present a straightforward account of the develop-
ment of Erasmian themes over nearly two centuries.
By framing his study in terms of “legacy” rather than “influence,” Dodds
avoids the near-impossible task of demonstrating the persistence of clearly defined
“Erasmian” religious doctrines. “Erasmus’ legacy,” explains Dodds, “should be
viewed more as a way of thinking and a style of expression than a coherent set of
ideas” (160). In many cases, Dodds merely demonstrates how Erasmus’ reputa-
tion was exploited for polemical purposes. Sometimes a religious position is
defended through association with Erasmus, and at other times the name of
Erasmus is used to criticize an idea or teaching. Dodds is content to establish that
Erasmus remained a much-adored but controversial figure throughout the period
covered in his study.
Dodds is too thoughtful to succumb to specious generalizations, but he still
identifies a consistent pattern in the responses of English writers to Erasmus’
legacy. For both his admirers and his critics, Erasmus is consistently associated
with the notion of religious moderation. Some of Dodds’s subjects praise this
moderation as devotion to Christian unity, while others denounce it as a capitu-
lation to the evils of heresy. But nearly everyone identifies Erasmus with the
rhetoric of religious compromise and the search for middle ground between
doctrinal extremes. In addition to this overarching theme, Dodds discusses
an impressive number of related issues, from the debate over Calvinist soteri-
ology to the origins of Latitudinarianism and Arminianism. These smaller argu-
ments, often original and always well considered, contribute to the outstanding
value of Dodds’s book for students of religious thought in early modern
England.
University of Toronto Brendan Cook
382 THE HISTORIAN

The Third Reich at War. By Richard J. Evans. (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2009.
Pp. xvii, 926. $40.00.)

In the fall of 1984, this reviewer read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich. It was the book that set him on the path to becoming a historian, so
the comparisons between Shirer’s one volume and Richard J. Evans’s three
volumes, of which this work is the final installment, are inevitable.
Starting with the obvious, Shirer was writing more as a journalist, with the
“you are there” kind of immediate reporting on the Third Reich that no one
else has been able to replicate. By contrast, Evans is more scholarly and com-
prehensive in his approach. His combined three volumes, for example, total
2,560 pages to Shirer’s 1,257; and, compared to Shirer’s 520 pages dedicated to
the WWII era, there are 765 pages of text in this third volume alone. As in his
previous surveys of the Third Reich’s history, Evans masterfully interweaves
testimony that has come to light in the intervening decades with learned judg-
ments from hundreds of authors to create a balanced and thoughtful narrative.
This book, therefore, will assuredly become the definitive work on “The Third
Reich at War.”
A more accurate title, however, might have been “The Third Reich during
War.” For Evans, the actual engagements of the conflagration are almost mere
backdrop for, in his estimation, the more central story about the misguided
ambitions and fateful consequences of the society-wide embrace of various aspects
of Nazi racial ideology. In the first nine pages, he provides a quick overview of the
conquest of Poland, but in the following sixty-five he chronicles in great depth the
horrific occupation policies that ensued. Even more noticeably, the Normandy
invasion gets only one paragraph, while minor figures in the concentration camp
system receive multipage analyses. For a military historian like this reviewer, such
authorial decisions can be a bit jarring.
But they do fit with Evans’s larger argument that, given the limited resources at
Hitler’s disposal in comparison to those of the Allies, German defeat was likely
once the attack on Russia ground to a halt in December 1941, and it was all but
assured once the Battle of Stalingrad turned against the Nazis and the Allied
bombing campaign began in earnest. Many will find this point of view too
sanguine about the potential directions that the war could have taken, but Evans
does marshal his evidence well. And his view has the great advantage of under-
mining the postwar contentions of many Germans, especially those of the German
generals, that only Hitler and his ilk were really to blame for carrying out the
Holocaust, for losing the war, and for destroying much of German civilization.
BOOK REVIEWS 383

While Shirer leaves readers with Goering escaping justice by committing suicide,
it is again with this “bottom-up” focus on the interactions between ordinary
Germans and the Nazi leadership that Evans concludes his book. He writes, “The
Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the
human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all
of us” (764). This is perhaps not a splashy Hollywood ending, but it is a sound basis
for societal and political reflection from a master historian.
John Brown University Ed Ericson III

Inquisition: The Reign of Fear. By Toby Green. (New York, N.Y.: Thomas Dunne/St.
Martin’s Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 458. $29.95.)

With this highly personalized history written for a general audience, Toby
Green offers his contribution to the growing number of publications on the
Hispanic Inquisitions. Enlivened by stories and anecdotes from the records of
the Holy Office, this lengthy book seeks to “adopt a more overall perspective,
to try and see what the significance of the whole ghastly business really was”
(8). The use of “ghastly” here sums up two of Green’s primary concerns in
writing the book: to counter some earlier historians’ justifications of inquisito-
rial policies and procedures as either necessary or not as bad as has been
thought, and to argue that the Iberian Inquisitions provided “the first seeds of
totalitarian government, of institutionalized racial and sexual abuse” (8). His
argument derives from the premise that the Inquisition was primarily a political,
not a religious, organization, one of the first modern persecuting institutions,
whose abuses of power rested on the underlying worldview that conformity
should be paramount, and that “anything . . . different was a form of rebellion”
(231, 14).
Green’s study straddles the entire spatial and temporal continuum of the
Iberian Inquisitions, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, from
Spain to its colonies in the Americas, and even touching on the Canary Islands
and Portugal. He insists that the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions must be
studied together, although the book does not fully present a pan-Iberian frame-
work (10).
In fourteen chapters, which follow a more or less chronological order, the
author provides information about and interpretations of such topics as torture
and administrative apparatuses, as well as covering a range of specific crimes:
religious heresies (judaizing, alumbradismo [Illuminism], Lutheranism, and adher-
ence to Islamic practices); sexual deviations such as bigamy, homosexuality,
384 THE HISTORIAN

sodomy, and solicitation; intellectual transgressions, which were repressed

through such mechanisms as the indices of prohibited books; and other offenses,
such as blasphemy, possession by the devil, and witchcraft. Throughout the study,
Green implicitly accepts the widely accepted link between chronological period
and preponderance of specific crimes prosecuted.
The reign of fear to which the author alludes in the title refers to inquisitorial
procedures, which hardened the hatred of persecuted groups like the moriscos
(persons of Moorish descent) and laid the groundwork for corruption and abuse
at all levels of bureaucracy and society. Ironically, he argues, the Inquisition helped
to divide Spain, rather than unite it, by inventing enemies instead of destroying
them; using torture more widely and more severely than in civil courts; co-opting
ordinary people for the purposes of spying on neighbors, friends, and family; and
adopting and profiting from the national obsession with “purity of blood” (that
is, whether or not one’s ancestry included Jews or Arabs).
Green manages an enormous number of primary and secondary sources
with aplomb, a major feat considering the sheer volume of extant written
material by and about the Holy Office. The quantity of writing available for
examination is partly due to the obsessively detailed recordkeeping character-
istic of the Inquisition itself. The resulting documents constituted “an exercise
in transparency before God,” although the author offers an additional motive:
exorcism of a fascination with pain through turning iconography into reality
(72).
Eminently accessible to most readers, Green’s book allows the material dis-
cussed to come alive through stories of real people, from all walks of life, racial
and religious backgrounds, and places in the Iberian empires. Case studies include
those already much studied and well known, as well as many others to which little
attention has been paid in previous scholarship.
In the latter chapters, especially in chapters twelve and thirteen, Green’s
neo-Freudian framework becomes more visible. His discussion of sexual crimes,
for instance, is based on the premise that these were “extraordinarily repressed
societies” (308). This leads him to some rather startling conclusions, and it
detracts from his general argument. Regarding priestly solicitation in the confes-
sional, the most-increased crime in the first half of the eighteenth century, for
instance, he avers: “It would be wrong to be too judgemental [sic] of these priests.
If you put sexually repressed men in an enclosed place with sexually repressed
women, this sort of thing is likely to occur” (313).
In spite of its shortcomings, Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is an extremely
useful introduction to the Iberian Inquisitions, including the historical context,
BOOK REVIEWS 385

underlying ideologies, institutional practices, and people involved both in imple-

mentation and as victims.
West Chester University Stacey Schlau

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the
World. By Holger Herwig. (New York, N.Y.: Random House, 2009. Pp. xix, 391.
$28.00.)

Before its destruction in World War II, the chapel at the French military academy
at St. Cyr had just one entry to memorialize the dead of World War I’s first year:
“The Class of 1914” (315). This vivid and stark statement is a reminder that
despite the infamy attached to 1916 and 1917 battles such as Verdun, the Somme,
and Passchendaele, 1914 was the bloodiest year of the war. That the societies and
armies of 1914 had even less experience with war to help prepare them psycho-
logically for such levels of casualties only adds to the sense of deep tragedy.
Holger Herwig’s thoughtful and intelligent study of the Marne campaign of
1914 provides readers with a far-reaching analysis of that murderous first year. Its
title is, in fact, a bit misleading; Herwig analyzes not only the titanic Battle of the
Marne (then the largest battle ever fought) but also the critical Battles of the
Frontier that preceded the Marne and helped to establish the conditions under
which the battle was fought. Indeed, the first half of this book provides one of the
best analyses available of these crucial, yet often overlooked, first engagements.
Herwig’s analysis of the Battle of the Marne itself stresses the roles played by
fear, rumor, confusion, and faulty communications. Especially as the reality of war
failed to conform to the images men on both sides had of it in 1914, these factors
quickly overwhelmed the careful and meticulous prewar planning that all too
soon had to be discarded. In its place came improvisation; as Herwig argues,
“choice, chance, and contingency” were as important to the campaign’s outcome
as any decision made on the battlefields themselves (307). Armies in 1914, Herwig
reminds us, were often much more amateurish, disorganized, and confused than
their weapons and uniforms might suggest.
Another great strength of this book is Herwig’s analysis of the federated
structure of the 1914 German Army. His appreciation of the roles played by
non-Prussian units adds a welcome dimension to a discussion of a German Army
that was more complex and nuanced than many scholars often appreciate.
Readers will also find a relatively positive treatment of French commander
General Joseph Joffre, whose understanding of railroads and logistics, more than
386 THE HISTORIAN

any operational or tactical brilliance, helped the Allies to be in a position to win

the battle.
This impressive book will surely find its way onto the must-read lists of First
World War scholars and historians of warfare more generally. It should, however,
reach a much wider audience because its themes and analyses range far beyond the
Marne. Herwig has made a solid contribution to readers’ understanding of 1914,
a vital turning point in European and world history about which we still need to
know much more.
The University of Southern Mississippi Michael S. Neiberg

Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome. By Ray Laurence. (London,

England: Continuum Books, 2009. Pp. viii, 248. $29.95.)

As Rome’s political influence expanded throughout the Mediterranean during the

first century AD, so too did the increased availability of luxury goods—animal,
vegetable, mineral, and human—contribute to many of the stereotypes with which
we now commonly associate the idea of “Ancient Rome.” In cataloguing “the
passions that the Romans collectively felt defined themselves as a culture and from
which they derived pleasure,” the twelve chapters of this book survey both
expected areas (baths, banquets, violence, and sex) along with the less overt, such
as the elite passion for collecting, or the ways in which emperors forged Rome’s
architectural fabric in order to make pleasures openly available to each citizen (2).
Since scholars have devoted much attention to prescriptive moralizing texts from
the period (most prominently Michel Foucault) and to surviving literary and
visual representations, emphasis falls here on recovering actual practice. Inevita-
bly, however, discussion must rely heavily on these same literary and visual
sources, with the result that large portions of Roman Passions consist of the
retelling of familiar passages from Petronius, the elder Pliny, Juvenal, and Sueto-
nius, with the data culled from these normally accepted uncritically as fact.
The most interesting observations derive from Ray Laurence’s established
expertise in reading material evidence. A helpful chapter on gift exchange begins
with Martial’s epigrams on both exotic and mundane presents, supplemented by
archaeological and other evidence for the availability of luxury goods, from
pottery produced in southern Gaul to figs grown in Syria. The chapter concludes
by tying this ubiquitous exchange to the newly developed status of emperor as
supreme gift-giver. In the chapter on “Roman Erotics,” Laurence marshals statis-
tical analyses of Pompeian graffiti to support the frequently discussed evidence
from the literary and visual realms. Insults referring to oral sex, for example,
BOOK REVIEWS 387

include a man acting as both fellator and cunnilinctor in roughly equal propor-
tions. This counterintuitive equivalence matches biases apparent in, and expli-
cable from, textual discussions. Evidence for prices and practices among
prostitutes also enlightens. In another chapter, discussion of advances in the design
of theaters and of musical instruments supports a convincing demonstration that
song and dance increased in importance during the period.
Much that remains consists of a hurried assemblage of facts and anecdotes.
Alongside the uncritical acceptance of literary material stand instances of careless
presentation: scores of typographical errors and stylistic infelicities, with the same
points repeated in close proximity; scholars being cited for views that they do not
hold (e.g., on women reclining to dine or hierarchical seating in the triclinium);
and inconsistent use of poorly-captioned illustrations. The text occupies roughly
two-thirds of the book, with inconsequential back matter taking up space out of
proportion with utility. Finally, the author freely uses others’ translations of Greek
and Latin texts without crediting these published sources. Scholars seeking close
critical analyses are advised to consult the specialized works available, several of
which appear in the bibliography.
University of Kansas Anthony Corbeill

Cronies or Capitalists? The Russian Bourgeoisie and the Bourgeois Revolution from
1850 to 1917. By David Lockwood. (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. vii, 281. $39.99.)

This book is an analytical synthesis of well-known secondary and primary sources

(overwhelmingly in the English language) concerning political relations between
the Russian merchantry and the state in the last decades of tsarism.
David Lockwood reinterprets Russian developments from 1905 to 1917 (the
book’s actual chronological range) using the tools of historical materialism, so as
“to draw some conclusions that are useful for Marxism in an era that is leaving
behind the domination of states and entering the domination of capital” (243). He
argues that Marx and Engels mistakenly saw the state as a superstructural devel-
opment (i.e., as the instrument of the ruling class) rather than as an “autono-
mous” historical agent that helped bring about the bourgeoisie’s development but
then competed with the bourgeoisie for control over markets. Lockwood believes
that, from 1850 through the mid-twentieth century, European states vied with the
bourgeoisie for direction of market forces, and that in recent decades (since 1945
or so), the bourgeoisie, largely freed from its national origins through the process
of globalization, has established primacy in the market; meanwhile, during this
388 THE HISTORIAN

last period state power over markets has waned. He sees the assertion of bourgeois
primacy as “the final stages of the bourgeois revolution,” and thus as laying the
material basis for a future socialist order (246).
For Lockwood, the Russian example is a case study. Under Sergei Witte, he
maintains, the Russian government invested capital in industry mostly for security
purposes, unwittingly fostering an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie. From 1905
to 1914, the bourgeoisie, through the Progressive and Octobrist parties, advo-
cated political and economic modernization of a more thoroughgoing sort than
that pursued by tsarist officials. The Octobrists tried to use the Duma to exert
control over the Russian military, and they promoted war as a means to secure
“reform” in domestic life. Ironically, by 1917 the bourgeoisie found itself trapped
into statist policies: A. I. Konovalov supported “welfare statism,” while V. P.
Ryabushinskii favored “military statism” (a strong nationalist state controlled by
the bourgeoisie) (171). In Lockwood’s opinion, this wartime statism prepared the
way for the Bolsheviks’ centralized statism and was therefore a policy ultimately
fatal to the bourgeoisie’s commercial ambitions.
In the book, there is little new beyond Lockwood’s revisionist theory of
bourgeoisie-state relations. This theory rests on shaky foundations. The label
“bourgeoisie” implies more social and ideological coherence among the empire’s
variegated, far-flung merchants than may have existed. It exaggerates the mer-
chants’ autonomy vis-à-vis the state, since large firms in St. Petersburg and
Moscow depended on state patronage, especially in wartime. It also underesti-
mates the degree to which Progressists and Octobrists sought the rule of law as an
end in itself, not as means to advance their material interests. Finally, the book’s
title suggests a false dichotomy: couldn’t Russian merchants have been both
cronies and critics of the government?
Claremont McKenna College G. M. Hamburg

A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation. By Scott C. Lucas.
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Pp. x, 275. $39.95.)

This elegant and insightful study opens up the inner workings of a text of which
many students of the sixteenth century will have heard, but comparatively few will
have read: A Mirror for Magistrates. Cast in the form of a series of first-person
poetic narratives, delivered by the ghosts of tragically fallen political figures from
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Mirror was a work begun in Mary I’s
reign that became an Elizabethan and Jacobean bestseller, going into seven editions
between 1559 and 1621. Earlier literary scholarship consigned the volume firmly to
BOOK REVIEWS 389

the shelf marked “context,” a source of unremarkable ideas and motifs for E. W.
Tillyard’s homogenizing “Elizabethan World Picture.” But Scott C. Lucas’s meticu-
lously close reading of the work challenges us to reassess it as an example of
“interventionary poetics,” a collection of allusive yet highly political and topical
texts, with specific messages to impart to their contemporary readership. In
particular, Lucas sees the Mirror as reflecting the outlook and concerns of a group
of evangelical authors (William Baldwin, George Ferrers, and Thomas Chaloner are
the three who can be identified) as they contemplated the recent collapse of the
godly Edwardian regime and re-establishment of Catholicism. Using historical
allusiveness as a form of protective cover, these and the other, anonymous, authors
used the fates of prominent figures from the Lancastrian Usurpation and Wars of
the Roses to explain the overthrow of their beloved Edward Seymour, duke of
Somerset, and his subsequent, troubling, political intrigues, as well as to rue the
abuse of the law by the Marian authorities, and the demise of English imperialist
ambitions in France and Scotland. The models were consolatory as well as
explanatory ones, and unusually for evangelicals, they gave weight to the role of
fate and fortune, as well as divine providence, in the ordering of human affairs.
This is a book that, with admirable disregard for current scholarly fashion,
consistently emphasizes authorial intention rather than readerly experience or
wider cultural reception. Its reconstructions of those intentions are in the main
highly persuasive, though in the absence of very much direct discussion of how
these sometimes complex historical parables were read, the book is sometimes
tempted to make unproven claims for the effectiveness of such poetic interventions
into the political and public sphere. It is also the case that Lucas can occasionally
appear to view the mid-Tudor world through his protagonists’ eyes, for example
buying into a rather old-fashioned interpretation of Mary I as the unpatriotic
“Spanish Tudor” (165). Yet these are minor carpings in the face of a substantial
academic achievement. In addition to providing an invaluable account of the
complex authorial and publication history of the Mirror for Magistrates, Lucas
has given readers a model of effective interdisciplinary scholarship, and one that
will be much cited by historians and literary scholars alike.
University of Warwick Peter Marshall

Prison: Five Hundred Years of Life Behind Bars. By Edward Marston. (Kew, England:
The National Archives, 2009. Pp. 240. $36.00.)

A book is best judged by its own purposes rather than any that a reader thinks it
ought to have had. By this standard, Edward Marston’s history of imprisonment
390 THE HISTORIAN

in England succeeds. It appears under the recently established imprint of The

National Archives (UK), the principal objectives of which, apparently, are to
entertain and inform intelligent members of the general public, while showcasing
some of the vivid stories that can be recaptured from the records housed at Kew.
So there are none of the theoretical engagements—with the likes of Michel
Foucault, Norbert Elias, or David Garland—that one might expect to find in a
scholarly history of the prison. No careful weighing of the “gains” versus the
“losses” to human liberty and dignity that frequently preoccupy such accounts.
Marston’s primary aims are to accentuate the punitive (so far as most prison
systems have been concerned) and to tell tales of heroes and victims (so far as
concerns, respectively, the influence of some individuals upon those systems and
the experiences of those within them). He deploys materials and character
sketches that many would think had no place in any measured, “representative”
account of the English prison. Here is the Tower of London and “the two princes”
done to death by wicked Uncle Richard of Gloucester—though what effect that
vile deed had on the broader history of English prisons, if any, is not at all clear.
Here, too, we have, at somewhat disproportionate length, the proto-Gothic
horrors of eighteenth-century English gaols (Newgate, inevitably, above all) and
the hulks.
By comparison, the far more richly documented experience of prisons during
the Victorian era gets only about forty pages. And beyond the highly narrow—if
undeniably fascinating—parameters of force-fed suffragettes during its early
years, and of systematically brutalized conscientious objectors in wartime, the
twentieth-century prison gets scarcely a nod. Finally, in the spirit of giving the
crowd what it wants, a final chapter is devoted to some of the more sensational
accounts of execution and the road to abolition. Here, too, however, an early hint
of a fascinating topic—the psychological impact of executions upon other
inmates—goes wholly unexplored (7–8). Pride of place in explaining change over
time goes, not to impersonal forces of socioeconomic and cultural change, but
rather to the usual heroic, self-sacrificing, and largely uncomplicated figures such
as John Howard and Elizabeth Fry. The latter’s neglect of her own family gets a
passing nod; the suicide of the former’s son, possibly as a consequence of his
father’s unbending temperament, receiving nothing at all.
For all these limitations—as they undoubtedly will seem to the scholarly
reader—it bears repeating, however, that Marston’s study is better evaluated more
in terms of what he means to provide than what he omits. Attractively produced
and affordably priced, Marston’s book provides a vivid sense of the horrors that
many inmates of English prisons have undoubtedly endured from the middle ages
BOOK REVIEWS 391

to the present. The integration of substantial “quotable quotes” from both the
National Archives and a variety of print sources is engaging and, occasionally, as
horrifying as the cheerfully morbid reader might hope. So abandon all hope,
academics who enter here. Many others will enjoy the ride.
University of Victoria, Canada Simon Devereaux

Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution. By Iain
McCalman. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Pp. 423. $29.95.)

The figures of Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred
Russell Wallace have long been linked together in the development and acceptance
of evolutionary theory. As the author reveals, however, these four British natu-
ralists shared far more than a commitment to a new scientific perspective. Each
gained his naturalist credentials through exploration activities in the southern
hemisphere. Not only did this experience provide the opportunity to add to the
store of knowledge, but it also enabled these scholars to share perspectives that
mutually reinforced their insights concerning the natural world. Equally signifi-
cant, the four comrades dedicated themselves to the creation of science as a
legitimate profession in Victorian England. Huxley and Wallace viewed this effort
as a way to wrest control of Victorian science from the prelates and amateurs who
had long dominated the scene, while Hooker and Darwin regarded the campaign
as no less important for the establishment of a scientific community to advance the
study of nature.
Iain McCalman constructs his study in an innovative and effective fashion,
mining an extensive array of primary and secondary sources. Following a well-
crafted prologue that sketches the importance of Darwin and his colleagues, he
offers biographical studies of each of the four principal characters, providing the
reader with an appreciation not only of their scientific activities, but also of the
cultural milieu in which they lived. McCalman next provides a succinct but
revealing account of the development of the theory of evolution through natural
selection and the campaign to gain its acceptance among contemporary scientists.
McCalman also shows convincingly that within a decade of the publication of
Origin of Species the general concept of organic evolution was widely accepted
among knowledgeable scientists and among the educated public.
The author does an admirable job of explaining the scientific contributions
of the members of Darwin’s fleet. He also adds much to our understanding of
the campaign to convert Victorian scientists to the evolutionary worldview.
McCalman reveals Darwin as far more than the semi-invalid who rarely strayed
392 THE HISTORIAN

from his country house in Kent and allowed Huxley to direct the campaign. On
several occasions, Darwin coordinated efforts both to convince contemporaries of
the value of his concept and to establish science as a profession. But McCalman
accomplishes much more. Throughout his account, he stresses the importance of
the mid-Victorian British empire, exploring the role played by colonial officials in
advancing the work of Darwin and his colleagues. McCalman also makes a timely
contribution to our understanding of the scientific pursuit. He shows clearly that
science is a cumulative process that relies on the constant questioning and revising
of existing explanations. As antievolutionists continue to reject Darwin’s ideas as
mere speculation, McCalman’s explanation of how science works is particularly
valuable.
Tennessee Tech University George E. Webb

The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land, 1190–1291. By Nicholas Morton. (Wood-
bridge, England: Boydell Press, 2009. Pp. xiv, 228. $105.00.)

Though better known for their successful prosecution of crusades in Prussia and
Livonia, the Teutonic Knights were founded in the Holy Land and never ceased to
provide as many knights and soldiers as they could to its defense.
This military order—combining monastic vows with the duty to defend the
Church—was one of three major orders (with the Templars and the Hospitallers)
committed to the defense of Jerusalem and the crusader states. Its origins reflected
the fact that some knights were moved to become monks but were better suited for
protecting pilgrims and holy places than emptying bedpans or meditation; cru-
saders could be recruited only slowly, and until they could arrive in the Holy
Land, the military orders defended the castles and cities.
The Teutonic Knights began as a hospital order during the Third Crusade but
took on military duties when the next large group of Germans came east in 1198.
Their growth was slow until the Fifth Crusade, when their effectiveness made
them well-known and respected. Awkwardly, as the one military order owing
obedience to both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, the Teutonic Order
was caught in the middle when those powers quarreled. Grandmaster Hermann
von Salza managed to steer his order through these roiled waters from 1210 to
1239, but his immediate successors could not. This was because, in Nicholas
Morton’s opinion, Hermann had overextended the order’s resources.
Hermann had employed his knights in Prussia and Livonia at moments when
there was peace in the Holy Land. In the 1240s, it appeared that his order would
BOOK REVIEWS 393

be overwhelmed in all three theaters, but in the following decade it rebounded so

strongly that the last pagan tribes in the Baltic signed truces and the Lithuanian
ruler converted to Christianity.
Although the Teutonic Order continued to send men and money to the Holy
Land, even when its Baltic campaigns were in danger, no large scale German
crusading expedition marched east after 1250. Germans preferred to crusade in
Prussia, which was easier to reach, where success seemed more likely, and where
there were fewer distractions from feuding local factions.
Toward the end of the century there were new crises in the Holy Land and the
Baltic, ending in the fall of Acre. Afterward, the order concentrated on its Baltic
activities.
Morton tells this story in such detail that his book will be challenging reading
for the neophyte, but it is a model of how a scholar pulls together scattered facts
from chronicles, documents, and earlier publications to make a coherent narrative
of the administrative and economic foundations of a medieval institution and its
political fortunes. He brings order to crusades generally known for dramatic
military disasters that, in this reviewer’s opinion, lend themselves well to moral-
izing about Christian shortcomings and seeing the Islamic world not as the victors
its warriors were, but as victims. Morton’s straightforward study avoids all this.
Monmouth College William Urban

What Happened at Vatican II. By John W. O’Malley. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 380. $29.95.)

The author of this book has certainly achieved his goal of providing the first
“brief, readable account” of Vatican II that narrates “the essential story line”
from the announcement of the council by Pope John XXIII in 1959 until its final
session in 1965 and places this story in historical context (1). John O’Malley
summarizes the debates at Vatican II incisively and compares them eruditely with
those of previous church councils from 325 to 1870. The one disappointing
section of the book is the brief discussion of the Vatican’s response to the spread
of communism, the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, and the Holocaust. The author
simply dismisses suggestions that the Holy See ever tended “to favor despotic,
right-wing regimes” (81).
O’Malley succeeds best at analyzing the vocabulary and style of the sixteen
resolutions adopted by Vatican II. All previous church councils regarded them-
selves as legislative bodies, and their preferred mode of expression was the canon,
a firm rule of conduct. Vatican II adopted, instead, the literary form of the
394 THE HISTORIAN

panegyric, “the painting of an idealized portrait in order to excite admiration and

appropriation” (47). O’Malley concludes that these resolutions promoted the
development of Catholicism from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals,
from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to con-
science, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to
integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility
to friendship (307).
O’Malley also shows that Vatican II had little impact on church institutions. A
small group of influential prelates at the council defended tenaciously the posi-
tions of the nineteenth-century church, including the view of church government
as a highly centralized papal monarchy. A second group, led by cardinals from
France, Germany, and Belgium, appealed to the authority of the ancient church
fathers to argue for “collegiality” as the basis of church government, decentrali-
zation, and a whole new approach to relations with other Christian communities
and Jews. An overwhelming majority of 85 to 90 percent of council delegates
consistently supported the second group against the first. John XXIII gave this
majority free rein, but he died after the first council session, and the new pope,
Paul VI, paid more attention to strident warnings by the minority that radical
reforms could destroy the church. Paul removed from the council agenda the
issues of clerical celibacy, birth control, and reform of the Vatican bureaucracy,
and he repeatedly demanded amendments to resolutions. O’Malley concludes that
Vatican II had no effect on the old trend to concentrate even more authority in the
hands of the pope: “On the center-periphery issue the minority never really lost
control. It was in that regard so successful that with the aid of Paul VI the center
not only held firm and steady but, as the decades subsequent to the council have
irrefutably demonstrated, emerged even stronger” (311). Readers must reflect on
which result is more significant: the failure of Vatican II to achieve institutional
reform or its success at articulating a new vision of holiness.
Washington and Lee University William L. Patch

Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. By Kirk Ormand. (West-
port, Conn.: Praeger, 2009. Pp. xiii, 292. $49.95.)

The title tells the tale. For Greek and Roman men, sexuality was not based on with
whom they had sex but how. Some preferred partners of their own sex; some did
not. Most desired lovers without much caring if they were male or female and
expected others to feel like they did. What mattered was to be in charge, to play
the dominant role in a hierarchical relationship, in particular, to penetrate. The
BOOK REVIEWS 395

passive partner, anyone who was penetrated, was typically of lower status: a boy,
a woman, a slave. And since sex was an appetite like hunger or sleep, yielding to
desire too often, even to have too many women, was in itself unmanly. So too was
the inability to control the expression of the sexuality of social inferiors, or access
to it. As for women, their own sexual subjectivity is scarcely in evidence—Sappho
is an exception—and of little interest to men, beyond a concern that their lack of
self-control might be dangerous. Men imagined same-sex female couples on the
same hierarchical model they followed themselves.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Controlling Desires is a book-length test—and
validation—of ideas first put forward a generation ago by Michel Foucault. But
Kirk Ormand offers much more in this account, which stretches over one thou-
sand years. In each chapter, he treats a different kind of literary evidence, all
carefully introduced—and translated—for the benefit of the nonspecialist readers
of Praeger’s “Series on the Ancient World.” A short glossary of Greek terms that
are often mistranslated is particularly welcome. Among many sensitive readings,
the chapter on Platonic dialogues, especially The Symposium, is a model of a clear
discussion of a work that is as dense and difficult conceptually as it is artistically
seductive. Perceptive as he is in outlining the problems caused by the different
conventions ancient genres follow in representing (and repressing) sexual activity,
Ormand nevertheless identifies some changes over time. For example, both clas-
sical Athenians and Hellenistic authors find pederasty problematic. But while
Athenians “exhibited an almost paranoid fascination with questions of whom a
boy should give himself to, under what circumstances, and for what recompense,”
Hellenistic texts instead focus on the moment of transition, when a boy loses his
allure with the appearance of hair on his thighs or cheeks (127). In addition,
unlike some other books on ancient sexuality, Ormand devotes over half his pages
to the Romans, and here too identifies (sometimes surprising) dissimilarities
within the general framework. In particular, Juvenal’s diatribes against passives
(cinaedi) who hide their true sexual desires bring us as close as we come in the
ancient world to “deliberate gender and sexual deviance—what we might call a
minority sexual identity” (261).
Though he prints a few illustrations, Ormand feels that his book is too short to
allow him to treat the evidence of images on the same scale as literary texts. This
is a shame. Some Greek vases (showing male lovers of the same ages or, perhaps,
expressing the ideal of marital fidelity long before the stoics) challenge Foucault’s
generalizations. Other images raise different questions. Why are Greek depictions
of sexual activity generally confined (as Ormand observes) to vessels used at
parties from which respectable women were excluded, while wall paintings and
396 THE HISTORIAN

other media brought couplings of all kinds into Roman domestic interiors? Those
interested in pursuing such issues will have to put aside Ormand’s fine book, with
some regret.
University of Winnipeg Mark Golden

1688: The First Modern Revolution. By Steve Pincus. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii, 647. $40.00.)

This study of the Glorious Revolution is an exhaustively researched and extremely

well-written volume that is likely to set the standard against which other accounts
of the period are measured. Steve Pincus’s arguments are strikingly fresh and
generally persuasive, though some are stronger than others.
What are the author’s main assertions? He debunks the “orthodox Whig view”
of T. B. Macaulay and others, denying that the Revolution was a consensual and
conservative coup by English leaders to get rid of an un-English Catholic king.
Rather, he insists, a modern revolution occurred—one broad based, violent,
divisive, and radically transformative. He argues that decades of social and
economic developments had created a wealthy, politically aware nation poised for
modernizing change. In this context, James II offered his program for modern-
ization: the creation of an efficient, bureaucratized, French-style monarchy.
James’s efforts to implement his vision destabilized society, which created a
window of opportunity for his radical opponents to put forward their own
modernization plan—one based on limited royal authority, opposition to French
domination, support for manufacturing and commerce, and religious toleration.
The success of the revolutionaries, which took years, not weeks, shaped the
nation’s future.
There is much that is persuasive in Pincus’s study. He is perhaps most persua-
sive in arguing that by the late seventeenth century, England’s national identity
was no longer defined in confessional terms. Englishmen no longer thought in the
mode of the early Reformation—with Protestantism and Catholicism headed for
an eschatological showdown. Although religion remained extremely important,
most people were motivated by concern for the preservation of civil liberties at
home, and the prevention of French domination of Europe.
Pincus is also very effective in describing the economic changes that created
new wealth and energy waiting to be harnessed by one plan of modernization or
another. As part of this, his analysis of the land-based wealth theory (James and
the Tories) compared to the labor-based theory (reformers and Whigs) is particu-
BOOK REVIEWS 397

larly helpful. Also, Pincus is especially illuminating in describing James’s plan for
modernization. Most readers simply will not have thought of James II as having
anything to do with modernity.
There are less satisfying aspects of the book as well. The author’s determina-
tion to show that 1688 was a truly modern revolution can at times become
distracting. It requires him partially to redefine the notion of revolution and then
to argue that England’s experience was much the same as that of France and
Russia; indeed, his claims that the bloody rampages in England in 1688–1689
were as violent as those later in France are not entirely persuasive. But the
emphasis on 1688 being the first European revolution does not diminish what is
most valuable about the book—its excellent descriptions of the social and eco-
nomic context for the revolution, the role of James II in destabilizing society, and
the nation’s attention focusing more on political than confessional issues.
This is a magnificent piece of scholarship. Its arguments will need to be
considered by every serious student of the period.
Coe College James Phifer

Henri IV of France: His Reign and Age. By Vincent J. Pitts. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 477. $45.00.)

Writings about Henri IV—Henry of Navaree—at once involve a tricky decision:

at what length should one deal with his early years, and his struggle to the throne?
Some writers spend nearly half their books on these preliminaries; oddly, for a
book which is about Henri’s reign, Vincent J. Pitts also takes up many pages on
Henri’s early years, thus leaving less space for the actual reign, 1589–1610.
These years are nevertheless covered fully and accurately as far as internal
politics and external affairs are concerned. The book makes no claim to break new
ground among the manuscripts, but it does bring together a wide range of
secondary literature, which is well listed in an exceptionally full bibliography.
There are also extensive notes on various problems. The author’s judgements seem
well balanced, though perhaps he is oversanguine in believing that the Treaty of
Vervins [1598] “ended Spanish meddling” in France (204).
This book does not go far into economic matters, and is weak on the cultural
sphere. There is very little about painting, gardening, music, poetry, or architec-
ture, all areas in which Henri IV had strong views and was active. Nor is there
much about Henri’s personality. It would have been good to have included the
Pere de Dainville’s account of the king as a very visually oriented person, able
primarily to understand things in terms of images (Le Dauphine et ses: Confins,
398 THE HISTORIAN

1968). Perhaps, too, readers could have learned more about the King’s medical
problems, by considering his relations with physicians like Andre du Laurens and
Jehan Ribit, Sieur de La Riviere, both of whom were close to him.
More seriously, there is nothing about his very personal sponsorship of Samuel
de Champlain’s venture to Canada. Not only was this a development of huge
future implication, but there has been excellent recent work on it, some of this
suggesting that Henri perhaps bore some family relationship to Champlain.
Historians still, then, have no English rival to Ernest Babelon’s great work. But
historians do have an accurate account of political events in Henri’s reign, taking
account of the most recent literature. In one respect, too, Pitts’s book is much
more satisfactory than most of the French ones; his publishers have allowed him
very full notes, so that readers can always know why he writes as he does. Without
such notes, even a full general bibliography leaves the reader at a loss on specific
points that need to be queried.
The Newberry Library, Chicago David Buisseret

Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire. By Brendan
Simms. (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2009. Pp. xxix, 802. $39.95.)

In this masterful study of British foreign policy, the author argues for the primacy
of continental affairs in eighteenth-century British history. He suggests that Britain
thrived when government ministers secured alliances with continental powers, as
was the case during the War of Spanish Succession, the War of Austrian Succes-
sion, and the Seven Years War (“three victories”). Alternatively, when continental
affairs were mishandled, Britain suffered, as during the War of American Inde-
pendence (“a defeat”). British foreign policy, he contends, was most effective
when Realpolitik trumped ideology and when geopolitical strategy was placed
above commerce.
To attribute the wax and wane of British fortunes in the 1700s to the ability of
British leaders to find allies is not to break new ground. So the immense value of
Brendan Simms’s book is his elucidation of process—with rich detail and readable
prose, he documents how British leaders cobbled together alliances for three
major wars but then found themselves friendless in a fourth. In so doing, Simms
also shows that Hanoverian kings were key players in foreign policy, that Hanover
was at times a diplomatic and military asset, that foreign secretaries were minis-
ters of foremost importance, and that foreign policy blunders brought down
ministries. Simms even suggests that continental affairs helped to determine party
politics, statebuilding, imperial ideology, and British identity.
BOOK REVIEWS 399

Simms, however, tries to ascribe too many events to balance-of-power politics.

For example, he does not convince the reader that British leaders objected to the
Ostend Company in the late 1720s and that Robert Walpole was reluctant to
engage Spain militarily in the late 1730s primarily for diplomatic rather than
commercial and financial reasons, instead of domestic political ones. Simms also
is too quick to denigrate both British policymakers who failed to build lasting
alliances with German powers and historians who have contributed to the recent
spate of Atlanticist research; the former may have had an impossible task after
1763, and the latter are fleshing out an underdeveloped historiography. Overall,
Simms’s contempt for empire and for anticontinentalism are transparent.
Indicative of these predilections, Simms’s careful eye occasionally loses focus
when gazing beyond the continent. Thus, he contends that George I ruled “three
kingdoms, twelve colonies, and an Electorate,” which affords him an extra
kingdom but shorts him a handful of colonies, and Simms fails to include the
Battle of Plassey as one of the important British victories during the Seven Years
War (87). Simms’s reliance on the word “partition” in describing the loss of
thirteen American colonies in 1783 is also troubling. Prudence cautions against
using that word, given its close association with Palestine and India, especially
when contemporaries seemed to prefer the word “dismemberment,” which has a
very different meaning.
Although this book’s considerable length limits its audience, it is an impor-
tant contribution to eighteenth-century historiography. It is an effective
reminder of the importance of European diplomacy. It suggests that further
research into British connections with German lands would be sensible. And it
resonates on many topics of present-day significance, including Britain’s rela-
tionship with the continent, the wisdom of unilateralism, and the maintenance
of domestic security.
Radford University Kurt Gingrich

Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. By Michael Slater. (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii, 696. $35.00.)

Charles Dickens lived life at full throttle. Boundless in energy and ambition, he
produced an enormous body of work. Early in his career he wrote two novels
simultaneously while editing the journals in which they appeared. He wrote travel
memoirs, annual Christmas books, short stories, political pieces, scripts for the-
atrical productions and his public readings, and thousands of letters. All this plus
manuscripts, notes, and the public records that accumulate around the life of a
400 THE HISTORIAN

celebrity are covered in Michael Slater’s remarkable study. Though Edgar

Johnson’s 1953 biography balances Dickens’s professional and private life and
Peter Ackroyd’s 1990 work channels Dickens’s inner life, Slater pays foremost
attention to Dickens’s development as a creative writer.
Central to Dickens’s growth from writer of comic sketches to brilliant novelist
is his relationship with his audience, notably palpable in his public readings, but
he also interpreted sales and multiple editions as evidence of being loved. Slater’s
sorting out parallels between themes and characters and his incisive commentary
on major and minor writings show Dickens tuned to the voice that will please his
audience. Even his use of disguised autobiography is a coy game in that effort.
Though Slater pays scant attention to Dickens’s early years, they haunt the
biographer as they did Dickens. His meteoric rise at first seems an escape from the
past, but the maturing of the artist is inextricably tied to his probing the psychic
scars of his childhood—the humiliation of the blacking warehouse, shame for his
parents’ time in debtor’s prison, and resentment toward his mother. David Cop-
perfield is a culmination of this probing, yet successive novels and stories return
to its themes. As the divergence in Dickens’s private life and public image becomes
more acute in later years—he led “three distinct lives” in addition to his creative
life—disguised biography continues to propel the complexity and psychological
depth of his themes and characters (471).
There is much ground to cover. Apart from his prodigious writing, Dickens
attended to a numerous family, enjoyed a large circle of friends, and engaged in
philanthropic activities, all rather sparingly mentioned. Slater puts economy of
style to effect with wry comments, such as noting that Dickens’s subordination
of everything to his writing included naming or dedicating his sons to “famous
writers, as though they were books” (162). “Writing off a Marriage,” about
shedding Catherine and embracing Ellen Ternan, claims more attention than
other chapters of Dickens’s private life. His passion for social justice and fas-
cination with the margins of society, his equivocal—sexist—view of women, his
ability to control his public image and make friends and relatives complicit in
this effort all speak to his character and the aura produced by his stature as a
writer. Drawing on a lifetime immersed in Dickens’s studies, Slater’s Dickens is
extraordinary and complex as writer and man, deserving of great admiration
and sympathy yet disappointing for his failings. The biography is sagacious and
fair, if sometimes overwhelming, as was Dickens himself, even at times to
himself, Slater notes.
University of Wisconsin-Stout Susan Schoenbauer Thurin
BOOK REVIEWS 401

Neville Chamberlain. By Nick Smart. (New York, N.Y.: Routledge Press, 2010. Pp.
xiv, 306. $90.00.)

Neville Chamberlain is well known to posterity as the man who got colossally
on the wrong side of history and, to use his own ill-fated words about Hitler
against him, “missed the bus.” Succumbing to cancer in 1940, he had no oppor-
tunity to work at rehabilitating his reputation (unlike, say, Eden, who enjoyed
two decades of interview-giving and memoir-writing after the Suez debacle). The
Churchill industry and Cold War mythology ensured that Chamberlain’s late-
1930s diplomacy became one of the “lessons of history”—a failure to be
avoided at all costs. No U.S. or British political leader since will risk being seen
as “appeasing” (though as Eden for instance learned, this does not always work
out well).
In light of this, Nick Smart argues, most who have studied Chamberlain’s life
and career have operated in what he terms a “compensatory” mode by elevating
his ideas, motives, and achievements before the great fall. This does not include,
of course, the small minority that think Chamberlain should have let Hitler get on
with things and kept British energies properly focused on maintaining firm control
over the Empire (about which, however, Chamberlain cared little). Breaking out
of this compensatory tradition is Smart’s principal justification for offering
another biography. He presents his protagonist not simply as a mediocre politician
of at best modest accomplishments, but also, ad hominem, as a bumptious,
self-absorbed, small-minded, thin-skinned “cold fish,” “an unpleasant man,” and
a “nasty piece of work” (xiii–xiv). Chamberlain’s human (rather than political)
limitations are the relentless theme of the book. It is not an interesting approach,
and Smart does not endow these personalities with very much in the way of
explanatory force, other than to show that Chamberlain repeatedly overestimated
his own abilities and thus the results of his efforts fell short.
Chamberlain appears here as a pooterish figure wholly marginal to the impor-
tant events that took place around him—until, of course, he becomes prime
minister and decides to take charge of diplomacy himself. Curiously, however,
when the chips are down, Smart performs his own acts of compensation. For
example, he admires Chamberlain’s toughness and perseverance in his meetings
with Hitler, and firmness of purpose during his eight months as wartime prime
minister. More generally, Smart acknowledges some virtue in Chamberlain’s
capacity for doggedly carrying out difficult and unglamorous work.
For a study focused on the qualities of the man, it is curious that Smart touches
only glancingly on the psychological effects of growing up in the shadow of his
402 THE HISTORIAN

hard-driving, domineering father and much-praised elder half-brother. Instead,

it pays considerable attention to how the “diary letters” he wrote to his doting
spinster sisters functioned as the echo chamber for his unreflective pomposity. It
can certainly be argued that Chamberlain, though not a major figure, is one who
merits periodic reevaluation. By resting its main historiographical claims on
personal shortcomings, Smart’s book offers little of substance for achieving useful
new insights into important episodes in British and world history.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Joseph S. Meisel

“A Victorian Class Conflict?”: School Teaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister,
1837–1902. By John T. Smith. (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2009. Pp.
viii, 233. $70.00.)

Surveys of modern British history have often raised the question: Why, in contrast
to say France and Prussia, did compulsory, tax-supported, nonsectarian elemen-
tary education arrive in Victorian England so very late—only by the 1890s? This
author’s prime concern is with the religious schools that dominated such educa-
tion until the final decades of the nineteenth century. The vast majority of those
schools were operated by the Church of England, and in smaller communities they
were directly managed by the local parish clergyman, who, in effect, employed the
schoolmasters and (to an increasing degree) schoolmistresses. The “class conflict”
that author John T. Smith postulates was that between the cleric and the teacher,
and in six successive topical chapters he contrasts the differences in social back-
ground, in education, in authority, and in income that long separated the average
parson from the average schoolteacher.
When the nineteenth century began, most Anglican clerics were graduates of
Oxford or Cambridge, members of a gentlemanly profession who belonged to
upper-middle-class families, and who could generally expect to live, with wife and
children, in comfortable parsonages. Even as, from 1833 on, the state began to
provide financial subsidies for (and impose standards on) elementary education,
many clerics became devoted to the growth and preservation of such Christian
schools, schools that they largely managed and often personally helped finance.
Such a pattern remained in effect into the early 1870s, when, in the course of three
decades, the agricultural “great depression” reduced average clerical incomes by
as much as a third. By then too, fewer “gentlemen” were entering the profession.
In contrast, early-nineteenth-century teachers were often of working-class
background who learned their trade primarily as pupil-teacher apprentices. They
were expected to show deference to their clerical managers and to do additional
BOOK REVIEWS 403

unpaid jobs such as church organist, choir master, parish clerk, and escort of their
school children to Sunday services. Only during the mid-Victorian years did most
such teachers attend training colleges and only during the late-Victorian years did
organizations such as the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and revised govern-
ment education codes insist on formal certificates, legal contracts, improved
salaries, and a rise in social status.
In 1871, for every hundred Church of England clergymen, there were fifteen
Roman Catholic priests and twelve Methodist Wesleyan ministers, and Smith
helpfully compares and contrasts the elementary schools they helped manage.
Thus Roman Catholic priests and teachers (at least a third of them Irish) were of
comparable social status and generally poorer than their Anglican counterparts.
Because Wesleyan ministers were moved to a new congregation every three years,
teachers in Methodist schools held greater authority. A final chapter focuses on
the impact of the nonsectarian “board schools” (products of the Forster Educa-
tion Act of 1870) that by the end of the century were educating over half of
England’s children. Not all of Smith’s conclusions are novel, but his carefully
documented conclusions—based on school minute books, memoirs, newspaper
advertisements, and an exemplary compound of secondary books and articles—
alert us to oft-neglected facets of elementary education during the Victorian era.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Walter L. Arnstein

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire. By Giusto Traina.
Translated by Allan Cameron. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Pp. xix, 203. $24.95.)

Theodosius II is now at the forefront of the study of late antiquity. In 2006 Fergus
Millar published A Greek Roman Empire; in 2008 the journal Antiquité Tardive
devoted itself to Theodosius’ reign. Giusto Traina’s work is thus at the cutting
edge of late antique studies and has made extensive use of recent scholarship. The
main body of the work, 120 pages long, offers a snapshot of what was going on
in the Roman Empire and beyond in and around this year, starting with
Armenia—the author’s domain of expertise—then heading westwards to Antioch,
Constantinople, Italy, and Gaul, in an anticlockwise arc, returning eastwards
through Spain, Africa on the eve of the Vandal conquest, Egypt, Jerusalem, and
finally Iran. It is an interesting approach underlying which is the contention that,
despite the proximity of the end of the western empire, “the Roman Empire
remained the key reference point” in the eyes of contemporary authors (132).
Perhaps in order to justify the choice of the year, the author undoubtedly exag-
404 THE HISTORIAN

gerates the importance of the removal of the Arsacid dynasty in Persarmenia in

this year; in fact, the Romans maintained control of their (rather small) portion of
Armenia, from which they had removed the Arsacid ruler already in 390.
The original Italian version of the book was published in 2007, and few (if any)
changes have been made in the process of rendering the work into English. The
translation, however, leaves much to be desired, as a few examples will demon-
strate. Virgil’s imperium sine fine becomes an “empire without end”; we hear of
“the Tarraconensis”; a monastery in Palestine is referred to as having “an admin-
istration,” although referring to a building; the term apochrysarioi, on the other
hand, a bizarre deformation of the Latin apocrisiarii, is actually to be found in the
Italian original. Geographical or administrative names cause particular difficul-
ties, e.g., the “Doors of Cilicia” instead of “Gates”; “Iranic” instead of “Iranian”;
and the curious noun “Porphyrogenite.” Above all, the press has translated even
the work’s title incorrectly into English: Anno Domini dates, of course, follow the
letters AD rather than vice versa. It is worth pointing out, moreover, that the
publishers have done the author a disservice not merely by the inadequate trans-
lation, but also by changing footnotes into endnotes, presumably on the assump-
tion that English-speaking audiences are too daunted by the apparatus of
scholarship. They have also suppressed thirteen photographs that accompanied
the Italian edition.
Despite these shortcomings, the book does render a valuable service, above
all in its wealth of notes, amounting to some sixty pages; unsurprisingly, the
author frequently cites Italian scholarship, as well as French, German, Spanish,
and Russian sources. All too often, valuable studies in these languages pass
relatively unnoticed in the English-speaking world since scholars generally
prefer to cite material in their native language. The publication of this work
thus throws light on the important work being carried out not only by the
author himself but also by many other scholars in Italy and elsewhere. For this
reason at least, Princeton deserves our thanks for broadening the bounds of
scholarship on late antiquity.
University of Ottawa Geoffrey Greatrex

The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. By
Claudia Verhoeven. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. i, 248.
$39.95.)

Some scholars argue that terrorism has existed throughout history, citing such
examples as the ancient Jewish revolts against the Romans or the assassins’ cult
BOOK REVIEWS 405

during the Middle Ages. Other historians trace its origins to the French Revo-
lution or the guerrilla wars in the Vendee, Spain, and Russia in the following
Napoleonic period. Still other scholars see modern terrorism as a product of the
1848 revolutions in Europe. Claiming that historians have failed to produce a
paradigm to frame terrorism, the author argues that modern terrorism began in
nineteenth-century Russia more than a decade before another group of Russian
revolutionaries launched a campaign against the czarist government.
On April 4, 1866, Dmitry Karakozov attempted to assassinate Czar Alex-
ander II as he strolled from a garden onto the streets of St. Petersburg. The
attempt failed, but Claudia Verhoeven believes it was a crucial turning point in
the history of terror. Although the People’s Will would herald the arrival of
revolutionary terrorism in czarist Russia, Verhoeven argues that Karakozov sig-
naled its beginning fifteen years before the campaign of Russia’s first terrorist
group.
Verhoeven’s thesis is comprehensive and thought provoking. She places the
attempted assassination within the political context of social changes in Russia
and other parts of Europe. She achieves this goal, incorporating the roles of
Russian law, technological change, the emerging and competing media, and the
advent of modernity. It is an outstanding analysis. She takes the argument further
by placing Karakozov within the structure of Russian literature, projecting his
actions within the type-setting of Russian novels. Karakozov becomes the ideal-
ized revolutionary savior. This is probably the strongest and most provocative
section of the book. She also examines the distinct class differentiations within
Russian society, demonstrating how various social groups interpreted the event.
Finally, Verhoeven analyzes the attempted assassination within the context of the
history of Russian revolutionary thought. Karakozov ultimately becomes a liter-
ary tragedy, she concludes, because he acted fifteen years too early. Revolutionary
terrorism would come with the People’s Will.
Some of her points will generate controversy. Verhoeven argues that most
experts agree that modern terrorism began in nineteenth-century Russia, but a
review of standard works reveals multiple theories of origin. In addition, some
terrorism analysts would argue that historians cannot produce a paradigm
because the meaning of terrorism vacillates over time. The contextual archetype
has been developed in other disciplines, such as Donald Black’s social geometry in
sociology. Her arguments do not represent weaknesses. On the contrary, she
advances her own model supported by exhaustive analysis.
Readers will find Verhoeven’s work to be a valuable contribution to the history
of Russian terrorism. This book will be cited as one of the definitive studies, and
406 THE HISTORIAN

her engaging style may even make readers think—at times—that the work is a
piece of Russian literature.
Grand Valley State University Jonathan R. White

The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity. By
Yirmiyahu Yovel. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. ix, 490.
$35.00.)

This erudite and comprehensive study traces the fascinating and compelling story
of the Marranos, “former Jews in Spain and Portugal who converted to Chris-
tianity under coercion or hard pressure, and their descendants in later genera-
tions” (ix). These Conversos or New Christians, or as the author refers to them,
“The Other Within,” were individuals who lived a dual existence, one in which
they were no longer considered as members of the Jewish community nor fully
accepted as true believers in Jesus Christ as the redeemer. With a literary style that
exhibits clarity of purpose interlaced with passion, Yirmiyahu Yovel supports his
thesis with a series of scholarly portraits based on contemporary trial records,
personal stories, prayers, customs, and popular poems.
One such group of “The Other Within” are those one might describe as
contradictory Marranos, or Judaizers, whose dual identity had assumed diverse
forms—one in which they desired to retain their Jewishness, though in secret, and
thus had not truly assimilated into the Christian community. Also representative of
this phenomenon is Fray Diego de Marchena, whom Yovel states was “an active
and determined Judaizer” who not only was overheard reciting Jewish prayers but
also was seen abusing the holy sacrament, the Eucharist (120). At the same time,
there are other examples of those who did not even acknowledge their Jewish
origins but instead openly presented themselves as fervent Christians. One such
example can be seen in the fifteenth century, after the initial forced conversion of
1391 and prior to the intolerant religious fanaticism of the “True Inquisition,” in
which readers are told the story of Pedro de la Caballería. As Yovel states, “Pedro
de la Caballería’s paramount concern was his career, which dominated his life and,
one might say, also his death” (114). Yovel’s purpose here is to demonstrate how the
desire of one Converso, a renowned jurist and government official, was to hide his
duality in order to maintain his respected and celebrated position in society.
Indeed, Yovel’s thematic thread of “The Other Within” permeates this study
and coalesces into his conclusion that it is the Marranos who have played one of
the most unique roles in the development of the modern Spanish identity. He bases
his conclusion, rather persuasively, not only on his exhaustive and meticulous
BOOK REVIEWS 407

scholarly research, but also on his own interpretations of such classical Spanish
historians as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and Claudio
Sánchez-Albornoz, who saw the historical role of the Marranos as almost irrel-
evant. It is the renowned Spanish historian Américo Castro whom Yovel views as
one scholar who understood the true nature of the Spanish character that was
formulated through the interactions of all peoples and faiths within the historical
framework of the Iberian peninsula. Whether one accepts Yovel’s interpretation of
primary and secondary evidence or not, his conclusion that Marranism, and its
dualistic conflicts, produced an extraordinary series of intellectual and secular
forces of modern thinking is convincing and worthy of thoughtful meditation and
continuing discussion.
University of New Haven Paulette L. Pepin

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age. By David Andress. (New York, N.Y.: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2009. Pp. 439. $30.00.)

This is an interesting book in the tradition of that now often forgotten 1950s
classic, The Age of the Democratic Revolution by R. R. Palmer. Essentially a
constitutional history of the transatlantic world in the last third of the eighteenth
century, 1789 adds a new dimension to Palmer’s book. Largely concentrating on
events in Britain, France, and the United States—the three preeminent powers the
author believes came to define the West—it ignores the lesser European powers for
a larger world canvass. This perspective allows the author to discuss developments
in the American Old Northwest, the West Indies, India, and beyond.
If the author develops non-European themes, it is not, as he freely admits, a
work on global history, but the thematic approach allows the author to form a
long-term view of how constitutional events in the transatlantic world did not
export concepts of liberty to the larger world. Paradoxically, the author suggests
events in this transatlantic world, especially in economic thought and industrial
trends, laid the foundations for the subordination of native communities and later
nineteenth-century imperialism. Beginning with the arrival of Benjamin Franklin,
that “homespun sage of the eighteenth century,” to the court of Louis XVI in
1776, the narrative treads a well-known path through the developing political
ideas among the political elites of the three powers (7). There is little original
primary research in the book, but the author presents a solid synthesis of recent
secondary scholarship. The portrayal of some of the primary figures, especially the
408 THE HISTORIAN

Americans—Washington, Jefferson, and even Franklin himself—are somewhat

wooden and dated, but there are many fascinating smaller vignettes of the lesser-
known figures of the age. The chapters on France are also well developed and will
be very informative to readers who need to comprehend the complicated events
that led to the outbreak of the French Revolution in a wider context. Some,
however, may be surprised to learn that although the American Bill of Rights was
a retrogressive step in the language of political modernism, the French Declaration
of Rights led us to a “new world of equality” (321).
For many contemporaries, the increased awareness of individualism, the rec-
ognition of the rights of a citizen, and their increasing codification signified the
dawn of a new epoch. This new constitutionalism would “spread like measles
across Europe and the postcolonial states of Latin America from the 1820s
onwards,” but if this new political language defines, the author suggests, the dawn
of our modern age, he also reminds readers in his brief, but “starkly negative,”
conclusions that the events of 1789 would unleash a darker side of human nature
(397, 391). Another unfortunate lasting legacy would be the modern govern-
ment’s awareness of how to control these impulses in increasingly ingenious and
repressive ways. Not surprisingly, in 1789 Thomas Paine emerges as one of the
prophets of the age and Edmund Burke once again is one of the antiheroes of the
era. Readers would do well, however, to remember Burke’s warning that it is easy
to make governments, write constitutions, and grant freedoms. To create a lasting
government that both protects liberty and restrains government is a more difficult
process. The failure by many emerging leaders of this generation to recognize this
reflects upon their political naiveté, not their statesmanship.
Winthrop University Rory T. Cornish

Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America and
France. By Leora Auslander. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009.
Pp. xii, 243. $19.95.)

This book is an exploration into the relationship between revolutionary nation-

states and the day-to-day culture of their citizens. The central revolutions of the
modern West, specifically England’s Puritan Revolution, the American Revolu-
tion, and the French Revolution, are Leora Auslander’s subject. These are well-
trodden grounds of study, as is the comparative approach. What makes
Auslander’s work unique is that she brings to bear her well-honed skills as a
scholar of material life and a strong understanding of feminist theory to create a
work at the intersection of several historical disciplines.
BOOK REVIEWS 409

The core of the book consists of a chapter on each of the three revolutions. The
initial chapter provides an introduction, while chapter two examines the plain
spun colonial culture in America along with the court-based material cultures of
old regime Europe. This chapter allows Auslander to argue that even revolution-
ary cultures rely on pre-existing models to produce new or hybrid forms. The final
chapter explores the nineteenth-century legacies of the revolution, noting how the
cultural revolutions contributed to the consolidation of nation-states. Unfortu-
nately, for this fairly complex essay, there is no summing up chapter.
The three revolutions were different in ways that Auslander had to consider in
explaining the cultural production of each. In seventeenth-century England, com-
mercial production for the nonprivileged was far less developed than in America
and France over a century later. Religion was more central in England than the
creating of a national culture. The American Revolution was concerned not just
with independence, but with politically unifying thirteen diverse colonies into a
national body, a task facilitated by the production of daily goods recalling the
common struggle and heroes of the war against Britain.
French revolutionaries were rigidly committed to the doctrine of separate
spheres. Auslander believes that this helps to explain why French women did not
produce homemade textiles incorporating images that memorialized the Revolu-
tion. In contrast, by contributing to the movement to wear homespun clothing and
boycotting British textiles, American women contributed to the ideal of republi-
can motherhood. During and after the American Revolution, women produced
embroidery, quilts, and other domestic goods celebrating the political struggle
against Britain.
The pleasure of reading Auslander’s book—in spite of sometimes terse
prose—is in seeing the use she makes of material artifacts. Her extensive notes and
bibliography demonstrate mastery of textural sources, but Auslander’s historical
understanding of textiles, clothing, coins, ceramics, and other material objects
combed from archives like the French Musée Carnavalet is compelling. Such
research enables her to refute scholars who argue that French craftsmen produced
no unique style between the regimes of Louis XVI and the Empire. Auslander
argues that work decorated with revolutionary themes was created, but because it
was often plain, it has simply been ignored. Two dozen photographs of clothing,
furniture, and other objects provide a visual sample of material evidence she has
consulted. Scholars of material culture and comparative revolution will find much
to value in this work.
Lander University Joel S. Cleland
410 THE HISTORIAN

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. By Cătălin Avramescu. Translated by Alistair

Ian Blyth. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 350. $29.95.)

In this important work, the author deals with the European obsession with
anthropophagy/cannibalism and the manner in which leading European thinkers
such as Hobbes, Locke, Bacon, Hume, Montaigne, Montequieu, Rousseau, Vol-
taire, and Malthus employed the trope of the cannibal in multiple discussions of
“natural law.” These include the Hobbesian war of all against all, arguments on
the divine right of kings as well as broader notions of Christian morality and
doctrine. Although the cannibal takes center stage, “bizarre customs” of other
peoples such as sodomy, infanticide, incest, wife-sharing, and many more could
also be framed within discourses on natural law. It is in the Americas and to a
lesser degree in Africa, Persia, India, Turkey, and other places that the cannibal
appears in full form, with greedy appetites, drinking blood, impregnating captive
women to eat their offspring followed by consuming the women themselves.
These horrendous accounts are mostly treated by their authors as factually true.
Cătălin Avramescu skillfully traces the genealogy of many such beliefs to the past
of European culture, for example to Homer “where Odysseus and his men are
fattened in order to be eaten”; or the Greek mercenaries in Herodotus drinking
“the blood of a child before engaging the Persians” (10–11, 100).
This study is essential reading for those interested in the intellectual history of
Europe and for ethnographers concerned with cannibal discourses and fantasies.
Nevertheless, this reviewer finds several flaws in the argument. First: Avramescu
believes that after the late eighteenth century there occurred a “dismantling of
natural law” and with it the cannibal (and the vampire) ceased its hold on the
European imagination. This is incorrect. During that very period cannibal dis-
courses resurface with a vengeance in the “cannibal islands” of New Zealand and
Fiji in the voyages of Captain Cook and other sea captains. Intellectual discussions
of cannibalism, its origins and contemporary practices, and indeed its relation to
natural law continued in the work of Cook and his men, including distinguished
philosophers such as Reinhold and Georg Forster. Soon settlers imputed canni-
balism to Australian aborigines; and then on to New Guinea where even now one
can take “cannibal tours” to witness erstwhile man-eaters. And how could one
ignore the contemporary proliferation in literature and the media of cannibals,
vampires, and other monstrosities, all alive and well in our imaginations?
Second, though Avramescu is good when he discusses the genealogy of what
this reviewer would call “cannibal talk,” he totally ignores the implications of
attributing the horrors of anthropophagy to other cultures after the various
BOOK REVIEWS 411

voyages of discovery. It is hard to miss the significance of these discourses for

understanding colonialism and imperial expansion and power and equally hard to
ignore (as Avramescu does) whether the cannibalism of the “other” is in any way
related to actual indigenous practices of anthropophagy, if at all they existed. One
final note: This reviewer wonders how Avramescu could possibly treat Jonathan
Swift’s deadly barbs in A Modest Proposal as a literal solution to the Irish famine
(172, 206–207)!
Princeton University Gananath Obeyesekere

The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–
1900. By Thomas Benjamin. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2009,
Pp. xxx, 721. $99.00.)

Recent historical works are rarely synthetic, reflecting the unfortunate specializa-
tion and Balkanization within the profession that is at least four decades old. The
recent revolutions in information technology have only accelerated this preference
for intellectual fragmentation with scholars putting out even more narrowly
tailored research than ever before and finding little time to compare notes. Thank-
fully, Thomas Benjamin has bucked that trend, venturing far beyond his earlier
work on the Mexican Revolution to provide a magisterial integration of conti-
nental histories over five pivotal centuries. In this work, he draws upon a genera-
tion of his own archival studies and teaching experiences, in addition to recent
historiography, to bring alive the vanished theater of globalization’s first wave.
Benjamin lays out his three main themes in a moving introduction and hews to
them faithfully throughout the book without the ever-tempting detour of unnec-
essary detail. First, he unapologetically sees Europe as the creator and destroyer of
the initial Atlantic world, echoing the late Philip D. Curtin. At the end of the
Middle Ages, Iberian and Italian mariners began this worldwide web of trade and
bondage, and the revolutions and emancipations of the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, driven largely by European and European-inspired actors and
events, would bring that commercial nexus to a swift and unexpected end. The
author avoids, though, a simple recitation of “Western Civ” pieties by placing
familiar European developments firmly in an Atlantic context. Second and most
interestingly, he traces the effects of the mixing of Europeans, Africans, and
Indians upon the parameters and directions of the Atlantic world, agreeing with
Africanist John Thornton and others about the voluntary nature of many of these
contacts that could be both mutually helpful and horribly one-sided at the same
time. The oppressors and oppressed in these fluid milieus could be red, white,
412 THE HISTORIAN

black, and/or anything in between. Finally, he perceives a definite beginning and

end to this often-tragic drama, proving the assumed truism that our Atlantic is not
that of our Enlightenment-era forbearers. Accordingly, he dispenses largely with
ancient and Indian Ocean background, although his opening use of Seneca’s
Medea is especially well chosen. Equally memorable was his brief incorporation of
the story of the slave ship Henrietta Marie and its two very different journeys.
Throughout his narratives, Benjamin offers deliciously rich excerpts from
relevant contemporary works, ranging from Duarte Lopes’s sixteenth-century
account of Portuguese Angola to William Strachey’s curious explanation of the
origins of indigenous Virginians from 1612. This deployment of primary sources
makes Benjamin’s ambitious overview a perfect text for upper-level undergraduate
and graduate reading seminars in Atlantic and world history. Teachers of future
world history instructors, in particular, will also appreciate Benjamin’s concise use
of visual allegory as, for example, in his stimulating discussion of William Blake’s
famous 1796 engraving, Europe Supported by Africa and America. The general
reader may be dissuaded by its length and depth, but this reviewer highly recom-
mends Benjamin’s The Atlantic World for both the classroom and the library.
Norfolk State University Charles H. Ford

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. By Michael Burleigh. (New York,
N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2009. Pp. xiii, 512. $29.95.)

The author of this study, a distinguished historian of Nazi Germany, has ventured
into new territory with his mammoth popular history of terrorism since the
nineteenth century. Its primary focus is on the lives of the terrorists (and their
victims), with some attention paid to the social, economic, and cultural milieus in
which they became terrorists. Little historiography or theory—be it cultural or
ideological—appears here, since the author contends that “life histories and
actions . . . seem a relatively neglected part of the picture” (ix–x). His thesis is that

the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely

criminal. . . . Destruction and self-destruction briefly compensate for some
perceived slight or more abstract grievances that cause their hysterical
rage . . . they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic. (x)

Interspersed in the text and in his final pages are Michael Burleigh’s suggestions
for counterterrorism measures (480–512). “A properly funded police, intelligence
and military response is essential; but so are improved public diplomacy and
efforts to deradicalise potential terrorists, for the Hot and Cold Wars are now
BOOK REVIEWS 413

parallel” (xi). The declaration of a “war on terror” has hurt the fight against
terrorism, which is more aptly likened to a “contagious disease” that can be
contained but never “entirely eliminated” (417).
The author’s fast-paced narrative proves amazingly entertaining, despite its
gruesome subject. Burleigh has an eye, ear, and even nose for quirky detail. Among
the members of Spain’s antiterrorism organization GAL, which fought a dirty war
against ETA, the Basque terrorist group, was the “Blonde [wigged] assassin,” “a
lady so short that the recoil from the shotguns and rifles she used to kill nine
people with routinely almost knocked her flat” (283). The author names the bands
and the music that the IRA preferred and notes that the 9/11 hijackers shaved off
all their body hair and doused themselves with perfume in preparation for their
fatal flights. Less enjoyable are his graphic descriptions of the physical havoc
caused by bombs and knifings, which serve the goal of making terrorism’s dev-
astation tangible, rather than simply an abstract body count.
The strongest part of the book is its discussion of post-World War II terrorism,
i.e., the various forms of Arab and Islamic terrorism, as well as Basque, South
African, and Irish terrorism. Among all these, the conflict in Northern Ireland, a
place that Burleigh knows personally and has written on, is probably the best.
On the other hand, the analysis of nineteenth-century terrorism is sometimes
shallow and unpersuasive. This reviewer found seven factual errors in his discus-
sion of anarchist terrorism. In 1893, Paulino Pallás did not throw bombs at the
military governor of Catalonia to avenge the torture of anarchists detained after
a terrorist assault on a Corpus Christi procession, as that event occurred in 1896
(81–83). Burleigh’s rage against multiculturalism, left liberals, “Londonistan,”
defense attorneys, and the media mar the book and frequently threaten to turn it
into a polemic. Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and the Nobel-prize winning
author Heinrich Böll are written off as “academic charlatans” or “idiots.” None-
theless, this somewhat hastily written book makes many persuasive arguments
worth considering.
Louisiana Scholars’ College at Richard Bach Jensen
Northwestern State University

Liberation or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century. By

Michael Howard. (London, England: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. vii, 213.
$44.95.)

Sir Michael Howard, a decorated veteran of the Italian campaign in World War II,
is perhaps the most prominent military historian of the twentieth century. Con-
414 THE HISTORIAN

sequently, his reflections in this five-part series of essays offer fascinating insights
into that most violent century in human history. Howard begins with the Enlight-
enment, which he considers triumphant in Europe with the First World War’s
destruction of the old order and the survival of liberalism and Marxism. Then,
however, the “rough beast” of fascism’s populist irrationalism challenged both
until defeat in the Second World War. Finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union left
the Western Enlightenment triumphant. Yet, Howard doubts that bourgeois
culture will spread peacefully to the third world after the world wars’ destruction
of the world dominance of European elites, a development that he deems either
liberation or catastrophe, hence the title of the book. The decline of Britain as
global hegemon has left the United States as a reluctant, if essential, replacement,
but one greatly in need of advice from its European allies.
In the book’s second section, the author discusses the “German Wars” in essays
that range from a perspective of the two wars as a single Thirty Years’ War in
Europe to the absence of any prospect of success for the German resistance against
Hitler. The book’s third section on the Cold War begins with a personal retro-
spective and ends with an essay on NATO that points out the differences in
perspective between European nations and the United States. These differences,
which Howard often notes in parts four and five on “Europe after the Cold War”
and the “War against Terror,” respectively help delineate American mispercep-
tions and overreactions to international events. In chapter eleven, “Cold War,
Chill Peace,” Howard repeats much of the discussion in the first chapter of the
book and would be better focused on the last section, containing his wise advice
about the limits of applying Western models to non-Western societies in a multi-
cultural world and of the dangers of being an enforcer of global order. In part four,
a minor but jarring error is a reference to Herbert von Bismarck when the author
meant Otto von Bismarck (154).
Perhaps Howard’s last essays on the “War against Terror” are most instructive
and relevant in his trenchant critique of the United States’ false assumptions about
and misguided approach to terrorists and the difficulties of formulating a viable
policy that protects Enlightenment values without undermining them. In conclu-
sion, this fascinating little study in twentieth-century history offers some valuable
nuggets of wisdom for our twenty-first century, and we would do well to heed
Howard’s cautionary notes. Readers, particularly Americans, may well not agree
with some of his assumptions, but we ignore his ideas only at our own peril.
University of Georgia John H. Morrow Jr.