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 William H. Alexander (Modern Western Europe) Norfolk State University Richard B. Allen (Africa, Middle East, and South Asia) Framingham State College Douglas R. Bisson (Early Modern Europe) Belmont University Betty Dessants (United States Since 1865) Shippensburg University Helen S. Hundley (Russia and Eastern Europe) Wichita State University Nigel Kennell & Stefanie Kennell (Ancient World) Memorial University of Newfoundland Jose C. Moya (Latin America) Columbia University Paulette L. Pepin (Medieval Europe) University of New Haven Susan Mitchell Sommers (Britain and the Empire) Saint Vincent College Richard Spall (Historiography) Ohio Wesleyan University Susan Westbury (United States) Illinois State University Peter Worthing (East Asia and the Pacific) Texas Christian University STUDENT EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS SENIOR ASSISTANTS Josh Warner Wes Goodman Amanda Stacy Susan Flanagan Douglas Sampson Jennifer Kirsop Alex Winsor Paul Krog Colin Magruder Matthew McGuire Jillian Snyder Ryan Colopy Ryan Jarvis WORD PROCESSING: Laurie George & Valerie Hamill 812 THE HISTORIAN AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. By Andrew Apter. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. x, 334. $24.00.) This awkwardly titled but splendid book explores what is surely the most fascinating and arguably the most significant period in the history of independent Nigeria. This book covers the 1970s, when federal Nigeria had closed out the attempted secession of Biafra and was quite suddenly surprised by the wealth gushing from Africa’s most productive oil deposits. Nigeria in the early and middle 1970s found itself a rich “poor country.” Yet by the beginning of the next decade, Nigeria found itself a poor country again. The 1970s represent a real hinge in Nigerian history. No event better symbolizes the gigantic national aspirations of the period (or better exemplifies the gigantic and ultimately ruinous expenditure of free-flowing oil money) than the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), hosted by Nigeria in early 1977. Andrew Apter’s book tells the story of FESTAC in lovingly researched detail (the audits and investigative tribunal reports are wonderful grist in his mill). The book is considerably bigger than its number of pages would suggest. In a sense, it is two books that are inextricably mixed: a long, comparative postmodernist analysis and an equally ambitious work of history. Further, Apter not only tells the story of the FESTAC itself, but brilliantly goes backward in Nigerian history to explore the origins, meanings, and transformations of two of FESTAC’s central events: the riverine Regatta and the northern durbar. In the final two chapters, grouped in a section titled “La Mise en Abime,” the story is carried forward into the 1980s and 1990s. Apter examines Nigerian “419” scamming and links it to the political scamming by Nigeria’s artful military dictator Ibrahim Babangida. The second chapter in the section, called “Death and the King’s Henchmen,” uses the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni revolt and his execution (with eight colleagues) in November 1995 as symbolically central to what Nigeria had by then become. He reflects that, looking back on the FESTAC event, “one is struck by how much has changed in Nigeria since the euphoric marriage of oil and culture, when the future, burning bright, appeared like a mirage on the horizon” (278). The assessment of this review, with its simple linear progression, gives an inadequate notion of the book, for, as noted, it is really at least two works. Apter’s main interest—and love—seems to be in what the history means, in the elegant, abstract, and (to this reader) sometimes obscure intellectual apparatus of postmodernism, with its tendency toward reification of its own concepts. The book is written mainly in high postmodern style, with intervals of straightforward BOOK REVIEWS 813 historical English. (In both languages, Apter writes extremely well, and often with wit.) Though leading occasionally to exaggeration in empirical terms, it is more important that the postmodernist analysis also leads to wonderfully rich interpretive lodes, as in the sections on the durbar and regatta traditions. Throughout the study, the approach leads to rich and thoughtful explorations of Nigeria’s most crucial problem: creating national culture. The book seems, to this reader, a little less successful in its interpretations of political history, for example, of northern “hegemony,” of the Babangida period, and of the Saro-Wiwa drama. But these are not central foci of the work. The book, with any faults it may have, is richly rewarding and highly recommended, both for those interested in Nigeria and also as an addition to the growing number of reexaminations and interpretations of the great world fairs and exhibitions of the past. University of Wisconsin—Madison Paul A. Beckett “THE OTTOMAN STATE” The Ottomans in Syria: A History of Justice and Oppression. By Dick Douwes. (New York, N.Y.: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. viii, 244. $55.00.) Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Eugene L. Rogan. (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xv, 274. $64.95.) Taken together, these two books present a challenge to the traditional narrative of state modernization in the Middle East. Dick Douwes studies coastal and western Syria in the period 1750–1850, a region of ancient urbanization delineated by the cities of Hama, Damascus, and Acre, while Eugene L. Rogan examines the more southerly area known in the 1920s as Transjordan, whose capital of Amman was newly founded around 1880 by Circassian refugees from southern Russia. Rogan’s study covers the period 1850–1921. Douwes analyzes traditional Ottoman provincial governance and questions the current notion that the Egyptian occupation under Muhammad ‘Ali during 1832–1841 introduced a modern state, ascribing it to a later period; Rogan in turn, analyzes post-Egyptian Ottoman governance and questions the notion that the British mandate after World War I introduced the modern state, ascribing it to the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. Both authors rely on the registers of the Islamic court. Douwes also uses local chronicles, while Rogan utilizes Ottoman state documents, European diplomatic sources, and memoirs. Rogan’s book is beautifully clear and well organized; Douwes’s is rich with detail but has some organizational problems. 814 THE HISTORIAN Douwes argues that popular perceptions of the Ottoman state’s effectiveness rested on the concept of the Circle of Justice, and he tries to understand how this justice accords with the ever present political violence of the region. The Circle allowed for a level of violence that was acceptable to contemporaries if it protected them, restrained provincial officials from exploiting the common people, and kept taxation reasonable and predictable. However, imperial governance at that juncture worked against these desiderata. Provincial officials, as extensions of the ruler’s arm, were responsible for order in the provinces and the suppression of exploitation. They possessed delegated power, which required them to act independently but not to have independent aims. To keep the sword of dismissal over their heads, the ruler prevented them from legally collecting sufficient revenues to fulfill their tasks. Thus, part of provincial revenue always lay outside the government’s accounts, forcing provincial officeholders to develop independent relations with local magnates, which became a source of contention with the center. The context for Douwes’s analysis is the agrarian life of inland Syria, a mélange of villages and settled or transhumant tribes paying protection to desert-dwelling camel nomads and taxes to Ottoman officials. The period saw an increase in levels of coercion, which Douwes maintains was not endemic to the region but resulted specifically from the disruption of this traditional arrangement by foreign invasion and state intervention. Tribes displaced from Arabia by the Wahhabi uprising invaded Syria and pushed its desert tribes into the cultivated area. The Ottoman state tried both military confrontation and financial appeasement, but abandoned the protection system in favor of direct state administration. This in turn was disrupted by the Egyptian invasion and Muhammad ‘Ali’s highly coercive regime. After the Egyptian withdrawal, Ottoman state authority was reestablished militarily. Violence also arose from factional politics. In the early eighteenth century, the governorship of Damascus was dominated by the ‘Azm family of Hama because they could control disorder on the pilgrimage route. The second half of the century saw the rise of coastal economic power under Ahmad Jazzar. Jazzar monopolized trade and raised taxes by force, but still was seen as falling within the Circle of Justice because of his protection of the area from Napoleon’s army. Despite his successes, however, the Ottomans would not appoint him permanent governor of Damascus. Rapid rotation in the governorship stimulated provincial factionalism and violence, leading to a fateful showdown in Hama between Jazzar and the ‘Azms. When Jazzar lost, the government transferred responsibility for protecting the pilgrimage and suppressing the Wahhabis to Muhammad ‘Ali of Egypt, stimulating his expansionist ambitions. BOOK REVIEWS 815 Increased revenue extraction in this period resulted from the need to support campaigning and pay provincial troops. Much of the revenue went directly to local officials, whose expenditures the state could not control. Efforts to control expenditures enhanced state penetration of the provincial economy. Revenue extraction intensified and became more violent under Muhammad ‘Ali, who subordinated or disbanded local military organizations and salaried the officials. He nearly doubled state income by sharply increasing taxes, expanding the area under cultivation, and eliminating traditional exemptions. This result was not due to modernization, however, but merely an extension of Ottoman policies accompanied by an immense increase in brutality and force. Douwes concludes that Syria’s government, under Egyptian occupation, was no more modern than that of the Ottomans. Rogan asserts that it was the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the later nineteenth century that really established the modern state. In the frontier region of Transjordan, there was almost no state control before the nineteenth century, and local arrangements resembled those of eighteenth-century Syria. Nomadic tribes, which offered protection in return for tribute, and the chiefs of the towns, who exercised hospitality and managed trade relations with surrounding regions, dominated the sedentary population. The vehicle for establishing a modern state was the Milayet Law of 1864, which articulated an Ottoman administration down to the district level, backed by sufficient military force to overcome tribal resistance. The Ottomans wished to increase revenue by sedentarizing nomads and increasing cultivation and to erect a buffer against Egyptian expansion, especially after the British takeover in 1882. In 1894 they established an administration that was centered on Karak. Governors constructed public buildings and communications infrastructure, vastly increasing the region’s governability. The railway and the greater military presence it made possible diminished tribal authority and allowed the government to provide security and services. The expansion of cultivation and revenue, plus refugee resettlement in new villages, more than covered the costs. Farming for the market became more lucrative, and by the 1890s the area south of Amman yielded as much revenue as the district of Hama. Modernization of the state apparatus was accompanied by economic and social modernization, carried out by Palestinian merchants and European missionaries. The new mercantile elites supplemented trade with moneylending and agricultural investment. Missionaries provided education and health care as well as religious services but fostered religious polarization and European intervention, causing the Ottoman state to develop its own educational and religious missions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the government was providing social services and the 816 THE HISTORIAN region was becoming urbanized. The people looked to official rather than traditional authorities to solve their problems. In local life, sectarianism and factionalism were replacing tolerance and negotiation. Resistance to the state’s attempt to standardize and Ottomanize its rule after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 culminated in the 1910 Karak revolt, which proposed secession. Fears of a nationalist movement among united Arab tribes fueled a massive military response, whose destruction and impoverishment contrasted tellingly with the earlier economic growth. The aftermath of the revolt united Syrians in dissatisfaction with the Ottoman state and, according to Rogan, “expanded the political imagination of the Arabists,” preparing the way for the Arab revolt (216). The Ottomans worked hard to retain Transjordanian loyalties and were successful until the army’s retreat at the fall of Damascus. Under the British mandate, the Hashemite Amir Abdullah came to power in 1921. He created the unified state, but on the political, legal, and fiscal foundations laid by the Ottomans. With these two books, then, the old story of somnolent Ottomans modernized from outside yields to a narrative of Ottoman state activity and intervention that—absent external interruption—maintained order, collected reasonable taxes, and, in time, created a modern state in the region. University of Arizona Linda T. Darling The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 455. $27.95.) One of the most important themes in African diaspora historiography is the Yoruba diaspora. Although the subject of the Yoruba has generated an impressive list of academic publications over the years, we are still a long way from a full understanding of the Yoruba dimension of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. This study is a welcome contribution to this academic effort. The editors must be commended for this impressive volume. Following a very useful introduction on methodology and research literature by the editors, the study is divided into four sections: the Yoruba homeland and diaspora; the Yoruba diaspora in the Americas; the cultural foundations of the Yoruba diaspora; and the return to Yorubaland. The origin of the Yoruba diaspora in the transatlantic slave trade is well treated in the chapters by David Eltis on Yoruba speakers from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, by Paul Lovejoy on the Yoruba during the transatlantic slave trade, and by Ann O’Hear on the enslavement of the Yoruba. BOOK REVIEWS 817 One of the strengths of this book is the comparative treatment of the Yoruba presence in the Americas. The contributions of Joao Jose Reis and Beatrize Gallotti Manigonian on the Yoruba diaspora in Brazil, Michael Reid on the Yoruba in Cuba, Russell Lohse on the Yoruba in colonial Costa Rica, Rosalyn Howard on the Yoruba in the British Caribbean, and Kevin Roberts on the Yoruba in Haiti highlight this strength. Of all African cultural legacies in the Atlantic world, Yoruba culture, through the Yoruba diaspora, has been one of the most widespread and long lasting. This is especially the case in the context of religion. The chapters by Luis Nicolau Pares on Bahian Candomble and Christine Ayorinde on Cuban Santeria, among others, expand and enrich our understanding of the Yoruba cultural contributions to African diaspora. The subject of return is a major aspect of African diaspora studies. In the case of the Yoruba and their descendants, return to Yorubaland occurred in both the West African and American contexts of their diaspora. The chapters by Robin Law on the return of liberated Yoruba slaves to West Africa, C. Magbaily Fyle on the Yoruba diaspora in Sierra Leone, and Gibril R. Cole on liberated Yoruba Muslim slaves in nineteenth-century West Africa are important contributions to the literature. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World is a well-researched and wellwritten volume. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Yoruba diaspora in Yorubaland, the involuntary migration and settlement of the Yoruba in the Americas, the cultural contributions of the Yoruba to the African diaspora in the Atlantic world, and the return of the Yoruba and their descendants to their ancestral homeland in southwestern Nigeria. University of Texas at Arlington Alusine Jalloh The Persians. By Gene R. Garthwaite. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Pp. xviii, 311. $59.95.) It is rather difficult to write a complete history of a whole people, from their origins to the present, that will be informative for the general reader and satisfy a multidisciplinary academic audience (as is the intention of the series in which this volume appears). Iran has a very long history, going back around 2,500 years—if we accept the miscalculations of the late shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi—based on the duration of the monarchical tradition. Like other politically and culturally imperialistic nations, the “Persians” and their influence 818 THE HISTORIAN have, at different times in the past, spread far beyond the modern borders of Iran. This creates problems of definition and focus, not least, in this case, the problem of nomenclature. The book is called The Persians, but the term is only used for the pre-Islamic period, “partly because of convention” (283, note 1). Thereafter, we are dealing with Iran and the Iranians. Perhaps the less said about this (as here), the better, but the crucial issue of how the Iranians perceive themselves remains. The conclusion is that “the history of Persia/Iran is the history of the interaction between the place and the peoples who have lived and currently live there” (2). This defines the scope of the book, elaborated in chapter one (“Persia: Place and Idea”), and we have to be content with that, and with the rather brief geographical account of Iran, which, as is so often the case, is got out of the way at the beginning but plays no discernible role in the later explication of Iranian culture. In some senses, the identity of the Persians is irrelevant to the book, as we are merely told that they “moved in from Central Asia” in the first millennium BC (16). What follows is a largely political history of Iran, with a very strong focus on the question of dynastic legitimacy and the idea of universal rulership, which seeks to embrace the multiracial and pluralistic constituencies of society and to act as the cement that holds it all together. The emphasis on monarchical continuity is natural, and indeed incontrovertible, given the deliberate cultivation of the notion of the splendor of the King of Kings in both Iranian and Greco-European visions of Iranian history. It is far from the only recurrent factor, however, and Gene R. Garthwaite acknowledges also the role of religion and of pastoral nomadism in shaping events and ideologies, as well as the significance of Iran’s position between Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There is much of value here, much that is provocative, and much also with which to take issue. One must at least put the record straight in one respect and give Jean Calmard credit for the first Safavid round table in Paris in 1989 (see Jean Calmard, ed., Etudes Safavides [Institut Francais de Recherche en Iran, Bibliothèque Iranienne 39, Paris-Téhéran, 1993]). The reviewer is not comfortable with the implicit theory that the Safavids [1501–1722] were the heirs of the Sasanians [224–651], and with the treatment of all intervening periods in one chapter on “Non-Iran,” though it is an interesting formulation. Garthwaite’s treatment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more fluent, convincing, and assured. Overall, he has provided a useful introduction to the long and varied expanse of Iranian history. University of Cambridge Charles Melville BOOK REVIEWS 819 The Modern Middle East: A History. By James L. Gelvin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 357. $31.00.) This is not your ordinary historical survey. The author immediately grabs the reader’s attention in the introduction with a discussion of how we might explain al-Qaida’s September 11 attack on the United States. He dismantles the “clash of civilizations” thesis as reductionist and asserts that to make sense of the attacks requires a nuanced understanding of the Middle East’s modern history. Eschewing the customary packaging of historical developments into compartments of empires and nations, he offers a sweeping vision of the region’s transformation under the impact of modernity’s two driving forces: the global capitalist market and the system of nation-states. Rather than placing the region outside the train of world events, James L. Gelvin’s template reveals how modernity emerged in Europe and then reshaped the Ottoman and Persian empires. Instead of juxtaposed chapters about the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Iran in the nineteenth century, we get discussions of how imperialism and defensive developmentalism (state-directed efforts to fashion modern institutions of governance) encompassed the entire region. This approach allows him to emphasize events and personalities that illustrate broader trends. With the big picture as a criterion for selecting what to include or leave out, the result is a less crowded stage and a more sensible narrative. The route to the present begins with a brisk overview of Islam’s rise and early dynasties. Gelvin then examines the sixteenth-century transition from unstable military-patronage states to durable gunpowder empires. The heart of the book relates how modern historical forces reshaped polity, economy, society, and religion. On one hand, his thematic approach has the virtue of making room for the sort of original insights seldom found in surveys, as in his treatment of the culture of nationalism and contemporary Islamic movements. On the other hand, certain themes receive short shrift. The chapter on secularism and modernity, for example, poses the question of why secularism has not taken root in the Middle East. Readers learn that Ottoman rulers put an Islamic stamp on nationality, but why it endured in Ottoman successor states—Iran and Egypt—remains an open question. The reviewer would rather see fuller discussion of secularism, constitutionalism, and Islamic political movements than primary documents, which are available in anthologies and electronic format. Nevertheless, the virtues in this volume are preponderant. Gelvin presents history as a vibrant field of inquiry marked by arguments between its practitioners, not a stockpile of dead facts. Readers looking for explanations of political 820 THE HISTORIAN Islam, the region’s immunity to democracy, and the resistance of the Israeli– Palestinian conflict to diplomacy will find boldly formulated answers. They will relish Gelvin’s conversational style, spiced with humor and colorful anecdotes (like the apocryphal origin of the croissant and the bagel in the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683). His fresh interpretation will keep undergraduates alert and spark discussion among specialists. Dickinson College David Commins The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900. By Rudi Matthee. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 346. $39.50.) The author of this book explores the production, commerce, and consumption of stimulants and drugs in early modern Iranian society, as well as their cultural context, role, and what accounted for their spread and adoption as part of everyday life. The book is divided into two parts; the first, dealing with Safavid rule and its aftermath [1500–1800], discusses how drinking alcohol, particularly wine, evolved, and, despite religious prohibition, became an integral part of the Safavid court life and the lives of the elite. Unlike wine, hashish and opium carried no religious stigma, were more widely used and consumed by rich and poor alike. In the sixteenth century, wine and opium were joined by tobacco and coffee, which spread rapidly; this, argues Rudi Matthee, indicates the existence of a vibrant society readily receptive to new consumables. The rise of coffeehouses in the early 1600s, bringing together coffee and tobacco, also affected patterns of sociability. Safavid Iran, the author argues, was a society in which habits and economic imperatives could overshadow moral considerations. Although deriving its legitimacy from religion and paying lip service to it, the Safavid state was essentially secular. It connived at prostitution and smoking largely because of the tax income these activities generated. The second part of the book deals with the Qajar era [1796–1925]. Matthee explores the themes of continuity and change, the development of wine drinking beyond the Safavid era, and how it became a “statement and an act of defiance.” The author explores developments in the consumption of opium, tobacco, and coffee, and discusses the ascendancy of tea drinking in the late nineteenth century. Tea and coffee were both relatively popular in Safavid Iran, but by the late nineteenth century tea had become the favorite beverage, partly because of the influence of tea-consuming societies such as England and Russia. The emergence of the new tea-serving “coffeehouses” in the second half of the nineteenth century BOOK REVIEWS 821 attracted the unwelcome attention of the government, which sought to control them, as they exemplified an emerging public sphere. The author also discusses the sociopolitical implications of the increased cultivation of opium as a cash crop— precipitating famine and addiction—and the growing popularity of smoking tobacco, which led to a widespread protest against the granting of a concession for tobacco production to a British national. The author emphasizes the gap between the normative and the actual life in the period and society under study, and how a life fully conforming to religious precepts differed from life as “lived practice”—untidy and resistant to control and strict boundaries. The religious hold over the public sphere was more “rhetorical” than real; people managed to defy and deflect royal or religious injunctions. On the basis of a deft use of a variety of sources, the author provides a rich account of little known dimensions of life in early modern Iran. Matthee helps to debunk some of the facile assumptions regarding Islam as the sole determinant of behavior among Muslims. This book is a stimulating and significant contribution to Iranian sociocultural history, which might also be profitably read for a better understanding of present-day Iran. University of Connecticut, Storrs Fakhreddin Azimi Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse. By Mansoor Moaddel. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 424. $24.00.) The scholarship on Islam since the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s has focused very much on reexamining the relationship between the Muslim religion and western civilization. Generally, the conclusion arrived at is the same: that there is no separation between civil and political society in the Muslim world because Islam as a religion is all encompassing. That being the case, politics in the Muslim world became more radicalized and the religion more fundamentalist as the West encroached on Muslim culture. Mansoor Moaddel disputes this standardized mode of interpreting politics in the Muslim world since the mid-1800s. The author’s previous publications heavily inform this work. Having already contributed much to the field, Moaddel is best able to pull together a study of political change in the Muslim world into this larger volume. Central to the argument is his call to avoid a universalistic/monolithic interpretation of Islamic reactions to modernism. Also, the author identifies the state in the history of the Muslim world—colonial, postcolonial, secular, religious, liberal, and 822 THE HISTORIAN authoritarian—as an important generator of issues to which reactions were directed. In fact, it was to these targets that the episodic discourses selected for analysis in this work find value. This comparative evaluation of target analysis includes studies drawn from Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, and India. Though it is not a study of the whole Muslim world, this book remains an ambitious historical discourse about ideological production. The author shows that there was no consensus about the form that Muslim governments or states were to take, nor were there agreements about the status of women, the acceptable mode of economic integration, appropriate relations among Arab countries, or how Muslim nations were to relate to the rest of the world in the modern environment. Moaddel points to the various factors that informed and influenced the discourse over time. They range from variations of responses to the European Enlightenment as an appropriate mode of assessing Muslim societies, to reacting to Ottomanism, European colonialism, and secular rule. It was, however, the author’s ability to look critically at each of the cases so as to identify particular issues and groups that emerged at given historic moments as targets of discourse that makes this work an important contribution to the field. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism—in the modern histories of Algeria, Iran, and Egypt, for example—was one of the target responses to secular authoritarian regimes that the author examines. Mansoor Moaddel’s Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse is highly recommended for advanced students and those already familiar with the history of the Muslim world. David Owusu-Ansah James Madison University THE AMERICAS The History of the American Indians. By James Adair. Edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 589. $65.00.) Any student who wishes to understand the frontier of Britain’s southeastern colonies in North America before 1775 must consult this volume, which includes William Bartram’s Travels of William Bartram, Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, and Bernard Romans’s A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. These are, without question, a sine qua non for fundamental information about the native peoples, forest BOOK REVIEWS 823 diplomacy, and natural history of the region. Happily for the modern researcher, Kathryn E. Holland Braund not only has spent the last twenty-five years investigating this subject, but now has brought us three of these classics in modern edited versions. Braund and Gregory Waselkov extracted Bartram’s material on native peoples in 1995, then Braund published an edition of Romans’s book in 1999; now she offers us the magnum opus of James Adair. Anyone following in Braund’s footsteps also would be wise to consult Francis Harper’s 1958 edition of Bartram’s book, which Braund’s notes clearly indicate she has done. Certainly the University of Alabama Press should be awarded its measure of praise for making the modern versions of these books available. Above all, Braund should be acclaimed for her painstaking mining of the sources in bringing Adair back to us in such an illuminating fashion. Without a doubt, her work has eclipsed the earlier reprints of Adair, which were prepared by Williams in 1930, Berkhofer in 1968, and Snyder in 1995. None of the other editors have the rich research experience in southeastern frontiers that she possesses. Thanks to her, we once more have a wonderful handbook for investigating the southern colonial frontier put on the historiographical map by Verner Crane more than seventy-five years ago. James Adair knew the southern frontier as no one else, having lived there, enmeshed in forest diplomacy, trade, and travel, unlike visitors such as Bartram, Catesby, and Romans, however insightful they may have been. To be sure, Adair has to be used with caution because of his clear biases: the American Indians as a lost tribe of Israel, the French as papist plotters against the British colonies, and his enemies, such as the Sphynx Company of Indian traders. Braund understands, as do all of us who have traversed this historical landscape, that we must follow Charles Hudson’s timely admonition that with every source we must always read between the lines. That said, one cannot help but be amazed at Adair’s keen insights into southeastern lifeways. Indeed, his references to “half moon” military strategies and scalping techniques compare favorably to those of scholars like Leroy Eid and James Axtell two centuries later (381, 382). Investigators at every level, from novice to expert, are indebted to Kathryn Braund for refreshing this incomparable and ever rich source. This should be in every college and university library in the United States and on the shelf of all scholars manqué wherever they may labor. Marietta College James H. O’Donnell, III 824 THE HISTORIAN Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. By George Reid Andrews. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 284. $19.95.) This book originated in an undergraduate course, and its pedagogical outlook surfaces in its first sentence: “New Census Shows Hispanics Now Even with Blacks.” George Reid Andrews uses this newspaper headline on the 2000 U.S. census to remind the reader that blacks and Hispanics are not mutually exclusive terms. Almost a quarter of the Latin American population is of African ancestry. During the slave trade, ten times as many Africans were taken to Ibero-America as to the United States and today Afro-Latin Americans outnumber Afro-North Americans by three to one. Like any good teacher—or scholar—Andrews then elucidates his categories, beginning with that of the title. What is Afro-Latin America? One normally associates this term with the tropical lowlands of the region, the main sites of plantation economies and African slavery where blacks and mulattoes have historically formed the majority of the population: the Caribbean islands and basin; coastal Brazil north of Sao Paulo; and parts of the Pacific coasts of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Much of the book does concentrate on this “core” (minus the non-Hispanophone Caribbean), but Andrews’s definition of Afro-Latin America is more encompassing: all countries where people of African origin represent, or represented at some point in time, more than 5 percent of all inhabitants, the level at which he feels “blackness” becomes a visible element in social systems of stratification and in national cultures. This inclusive definition may derive from Andrews’s previous research (on Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo) and present project (on Uruguay), places where blacks represented a minority, but it seems too ample. It would have included all of Latin America except Bolivia at the start of the period the book covers, and countries such as Ecuador and Uruguay at the end. What logic could warrant defining nations where over nine-tenths of the population is of Amerindian and European ancestry respectively as “Afro” rather than “Indo-Mestizo” or “Euro”? One would have to argue that the African influence was so pronounced that it overwhelmed that of the majority groups. Andrews does not do so, and the conceptual conundrum may originate in a misleading title. This is a book about Afro-Latin Americans rather than Afro-Latin America. Andrews begins by describing the African background, the multiplicity of roles played by slaves throughout the hemisphere, their equally manifold strategies of adaptation and resistance and those of the free population of color, which—unlike in most of non–Ibero America—outnumbered slaves by the nineteenth century. He then discusses the impact on Afro-Latin Americans of the wars of independence BOOK REVIEWS 825 and the ensuing struggles between conservatives and liberals, of abolition, and of the expansion of export economies and European immigration between 1880 and 1930. After this period of “whitening,” Andrews detects a process of “browning and blackening”—related to industrialization, the growth of public employment, unionization, and populism—during which blacks and browns increased their relative numbers and their economic, cultural, and political weight. The last sections of the book examine the limits of this empowerment and the persistence of racial inequality, and the effect of economic neoliberalism and political democracy during the recent decades. Overall, this is an excellent and engagingly written historical synthesis that manages to be both nuanced and broad. It combines a wealth of empirical information with incisive analysis and should appeal to students and scholars alike. Barnard College Jose C. Moya Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob. By Dora Apel. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 259. $34.95.) The lynching of an African American was an attack not just on an individual, but on an entire race. In this quest to instill terror, representations and reminders were often as powerful as the lynching itself. Even today these horrific reminders still exist in the form of photographs and artist renderings. Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching combines historical accounts and art criticism to evaluate sources that have “been too long suppressed” (xi). These images range from private photos passed on as keepsakes to paintings and sculptures displayed in national exhibits. Though the victim is clearly the focal point of these pieces, Apel’s work significantly portrays the perpetrators of these crimes, the larger society that condoned these acts, and the artists who attempted to educate society on these horrors. Apel reminds the reader that those who conducted these murders were not demons or psychopaths, but average, if not upstanding, local citizens. The entire work seems to echo the sentiment of one exhibitor who stated, “If you walk away from here hating white people, you’ve been had. . . . What we’re trying to do is reclaim and humanize these people” (13). But aside from trying to make sense of the perpetrators’ actions, Apel provides a voice to those who opposed lynching. Antilynching art exhibitions created a venue for artists to voice their dissent against lynching and what they believed was a general lack of empathy in society. African American artists looked within their communities to provide scenes of resilience and a rare take on the effect as a mourning family recovers the remains 826 THE HISTORIAN of their loved one. These artists found positive ways to “reenvision the degradation of the lynching victim” (109). As African Americans reflected inwardly, communists and leftist artists portrayed lynching as emblematic of the larger problems of capitalism in the United States. Other than the noose, the swinging corpse, and an often smiling assailant, the female form was a focal point in these exhibitions. As a lynching usually stemmed from an accusation of rape or miscegenation, gender was often as much of a theme as race. The “story” behind an accusation often contradicted realities involving consensual sex, and antilynching artists portrayed these inaccuracies and contested the image of black rapists and supposed white innocence. The visuals in Imagery of Lynching are disturbing and graphic, but deserve the reader’s attention. Apel painstakingly and effectively discusses the strength of these images and details the controversies that often followed their public displays. Specifically, Apel analyzes the graphic images of Emmett Till’s disfigured corpse after his mother demanded an open casket funeral. Mamie Till Mabley, even in her grief, fully understood the importance and powerful impact of “seeing” the story that she wanted everyone to know (180). Unfortunately, many will still question the reproduction of these graphic images with labels such as “voyeuristic.” Hopefully, if readers go beyond just “looking” at these pictures and comprehend Imagery of Lynching, they will understand this terrible history and “see” the bigger picture. Florida State University Vincent Mikkelsen The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. By Richard R. Beeman. (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. 366. $39.95.) How do rulers rule? The author of this book centers his exploration of early American political experience around this question. Rather than finding a single, simple answer, he traces experience in different places. Some are separate colonies: Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. Others are provincespanning regions: the Southern backcountry, northern New England, the Northern port cities. Rural New York gets a chapter of its own, while Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut hardly get a mention. But beneath the variety, or out of it, Richard R. Beeman finds convergence toward a distinctively American political style. Beeman’s starting place is the “traditional order of politics,” or so he titles the first chapter. Its opening sentence states, however, that there was no such thing BOOK REVIEWS 827 either in England or America. Whether or not such an order existed, Beeman’s colonials tried to live up to their image of it, most of all to a sense that good politics combined genuine consent with rulers’ ability to rule. Not surprisingly, wherever Beeman turns he finds colonial parvenus trying to act like grown-up English gentlemen, but he also finds Hogarthian discord. Virginians probably came closest to a deferential ideal of lesser men acknowledging their betters, with the planters forming a genuine ruling class, able by a variety of means to convince lesser men that its interests and theirs converged around a shared public good. Massachusetts men sought out “good rulers.” Oligarchs controlled New York, though they were uneasy in the face of tenant unrest and border uncertainty. The same sort ruled South Carolina, where they were complacent atop their rice fortunes and massive slave forces. North and South alike, the backcountry was unsettled, as would-be grandees tried to establish both their legitimacy in the eyes of more established men and their power in the face of squatter opposition. Pennsylvania was paradoxical, beginning with the Penn family itself in their melding of feudal lordship and (initially) Quaker ways. Taken together, the three Northern ports developed a political culture that pointed toward democratic pluralism. Beeman writes in the shadows of Carl Becker, who found class conflict in New York, and Robert and B. Katherine Brown, who found democracy in both Massachusetts and Virginia. Perhaps his greatest debt is to J. R. Pole, who formulated the deference concept half a century ago. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The whole subject has needed an updated one-volume overview for some time, and Beeman provides it. However, Beeman ignores the continent-spanning turn of much colonial American historiography. That is his right. Nonetheless, his account of colonial political life might be stronger if native people figured among his actors. They did not vote or seek office, but a major Indian treaty, which meant a many-sided parlay rather than a single document, was just as political as any election, and often more important to both white colonials and British officials. That ceased to be so following independence, which may be among the major changes that the Revolution wrought. Southern Methodist University Edward Countryman 828 THE HISTORIAN Baseball’s Greatest Season: 1924. By Reed Browning. (Boston, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 205. $19.95.) It is difficult to substantiate the claim contained in the title of this delightful and frustrating book. The author admits as much in the introduction. Regardless of the validity of the claim, the baseball season of 1924 featured tight pennant races that remained undecided until the final days of the season. The World Series went the distance, featuring remarkable performances in their first appearance in a World Series by the Washington Nationals and by their beloved pitcher, Walter Johnson. The organization of the book is effective. In alternating chapters, the author first charts the season and then comments on particular developments within major league baseball. Reed Browning deftly examines the ebb and flow of the two pennant races won by John McGraw’s New York Giants in the National League and the usually forlorn Washington entry in the American League. Both races were filled with excitement and nicely propel Browning’s narrative. The seven-game World Series, in which Washington won the final two games, is briskly reported. The saga of Johnson, who lost two heartbreaking games before winning the final matchup as the relief pitcher in the twelfth inning, provides great drama. Browning astutely analyzes the managing decisions and the crucial points of action. In the alternating chapters, such subjects as the business of baseball, the great players of the day, and baseball in the 1920s flesh out the wider context in which this season is set. It is these chapters, however, that also leave a sense of frustration, as the analysis is thin, conventional, and too often noncritical. For example, there is an interesting statistical analysis of Babe Ruth’s hitting prowess, but there is little analysis of his role in creating baseball’s new popular dominance. Browning’s description of the 1920s as a return to normalcy ignores the fact that the 1924 season opened in the wake of the death of a president and was punctuated by serial revelations of corruption surrounding the White House. The author’s portrait of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis recycles conventional images, and certainly many will question his overall assessment of Landis as the leader in maintaining baseball’s integrity. According to Browning, there are two types of baseball history: the first featuring narrative and commentary, and the second driven by statistical analysis. His aim is to combine these two strands in his work, and to a great extent he achieves that aim. He also produces an entertaining portrait of an exciting baseball season. BOOK REVIEWS 829 The author might have added a third type of baseball history that seeks to place baseball within the larger themes of American social, cultural, and economic history. It is here that Browning does not go, and that decision leaves the reader longing for more. As a result, Baseball’s Greatest Season: 1924 adds little to our overall understanding of the game and its place within the fabric of American life. University of Central Florida Richard C. Crepeau America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic. By Richard Buel, Jr. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 302. $29.95.) It is an axiom of politics that the only thing worse than being wrong is being stupid. The Federalist Party’s behavior in the opening years of the nineteenth century qualifies it as guilty on both counts—and more. On the surface, the party lacked sagacious leadership that could curb rank partisanship. It lost touch with the mounting political and social trends sweeping across the country and became a sectional oddity, reflexively lashing out at presumed domestic enemies while flirting with actual international ones. With astonishing consistency, the Federalists misread the events that led to the War of 1812, behaved petulantly once it broke out, and declared it irredeemably lost at just the moment when Andrew Jackson’s successful defense of New Orleans made its conclusion seem a national triumph. The subsequent devolution of the Federalists in the years after the war became a case study of how unforgiving the political arena can be for those who have been wrong and stupid. Still, the Federalists have had their defenders, and recent scholarship has tended to be charitable in describing their activities as at least understandable (they were trying to adjust to their minority status) and, by some estimates, beneficial (they might have been overzealous, but they did curb Democratic–Republican excesses). In a careful and measured study, however, Richard Buel, Jr., challenges these generous judgments by refusing to accept the indulgence that hindsight provides the Federalists. Because the war ultimately turned out all right does not mean, he insists, that Federalists were not as dangerous as Republicans claimed. Buel works from the perceptions of the time. In that regard, he does not so much turn the tables on the Federalists as he readjusts the historical gauge by which they have been measured: historians have lately been inclined to judge Republicans through Federalist eyes, but Buel thinks it is more illuminating to judge Federalists from a Republican perspective, especially because the Republicans were the country’s majority party. The result is an absorbing analysis, 830 THE HISTORIAN meticulously researched and ably presented, in which the Federalists come off very badly, very badly indeed. Rather than a valuable minority that pulled Republicans to the center, the Federalists, according to Buel, were a strident gaggle of extremists who nearly pulled the country apart. In the years before the war, failure in national elections and fading influence compelled their retreat to presumed strongholds in New England, but they were horrified to discover their control of that region ebbing as well. Increasingly powerless and insecure, the Federalists were eventually willing to do anything to save the country from the Republicans, even if it meant siding with the British. For their part, the Republicans were not blameless, for they reacted to, rather than coped with, alarming Federalist tactics, and the result was their belief that both internal dangers as well as external threats necessitated war with Britain. Yet, Buel sees the Federalists as most culpable for placing America on the brink in these formative years of the republic. His reevaluation of familiar sources and the insight afforded by years of study make this a welcome contribution to the literature. It is also a vigorous beginning for what is sure to be a spirited debate, for Buel sees in these events a cautionary tale for our own times. Colorado State University, Pueblo David S. Heidler American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture. Edited by Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. 297. $23.95.) During the 1940s and 1950s, a tumultuous battle over communism tore apart the U.S. labor movement. Labor’s internecine fights led to the collapse of a social democratic alternative in American politics and to the current pitiful state of the unions. The articles in this volume provide useful and provocative views of this story in order to reassess the crisis of postwar labor. Viewed from the top of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), postwar anticommunism was a bitter but straightforward story. The CIO purged and raided communist-led unions, which represented approximately one-fifth of its membership. Although a few Communist Party-led unions survived intact, by the end of the 1950s, the era of red trade unionism in the United States was over. Debate has centered on whether this transformation was a necessary step to labor’s survival or a cowardly betrayal of the militants who had built the movement. As historians over the last thirty years have shifted their research from big conventions and top leadership to local unions and communities, a messier but BOOK REVIEWS 831 more compelling picture has emerged. Although it fails to break new ground, this volume does confirm with solid research that a key part of the Cold War in the CIO arose out of local union issues and community character. Communists in labor were not simply (or only) followers of the USSR, but also activists deeply involved in their local issues. The elimination of the communist Left may have saved the labor movement from large-scale government intervention, but as a result of the purges and a failure to confront racism, as Michael Honey writes in his contribution on the CIO’s southern organizing drive, “most unions ceased to be agents of social change” (235). Importantly, this volume also focuses on the ideas, character, and activism of anticommunists. Though often vilified as unreconstructed reactionaries or opportunists, most anticommunists in labor were actually progressives. William Issel’s chapter, for example, surveys Catholic activism, emphasizing its “grassroots origins and positive character” (170). This finding confirms that opposition to communist leadership or radical politics was often made for good reasons. If there is a common position here, it is that, as Kenneth Burt writes on an east Los Angeles conflict among Mexican American electrical workers, “it was ultimately grassroots issues and not the national red scare” that settled the issue in the labor movement (118). Even in the midst of the fears raging around the country, workers rationally considered their options with communist-led unions. If the organization was effective, the leaders charismatic and honest, then anticommunism was least effective. Where the communist leadership was driven by party ideology or factional needs rather than effective trade unionism, they lost. For all the excellent research and careful arguments, the big debates remain inconclusive. Did the purges foreclose an ongoing progressive movement in the United States? Were the communists really a danger? Although they cannot fully answer these questions, the authors and editors have done an excellent job showing the depth of current scholarship on labor’s domestic Cold War. Pomona College Victor Silverman Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. By David Chidester. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 294. $19.95.) This study is a work of cultural criticism rather than history, in which the author examines how closely elements of popular culture and religion have been interconnected in recent American history. The author interprets religion in an extremely broad sense, identifying what he believes have been the most significant 832 THE HISTORIAN components of what he contends is a religious culture, not in the traditional sense of worship and relationship to a supernatural power, but in Americans’ current worship of popular icons and practices. The religious aspects of recent popular culture in the United States, as analyzed by David Chidester, are manifest in such diverse and surprising settings as rock and roll; baseball; the international business operations of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Disney; and Jim Jones’s cult of the People’s Temple. At the same time, he discusses the importance of religion in the cultural setting. The author attempts to explain the role of what he calls “fakery” in the American popular experience. Although Chidester’s definition of “fake” is rather inexact, he generally refers to those efforts to portray religion as something with lessthan-sincere purposes. The topic considered in Authentic Fakes, indeed the theme of the relationship between religion and American popular culture, deserves serious attention. Chidester is at his best describing some small corners of the world, whether summarizing the origins of Tupperware or telling about Jim Jones’s People’s Temple incident (about which he has written a separate book). However, his total presentation is so disjointed that no picture emerges except that American religion has been—and is being—presented in the guise of fakery. In fact, modern American fakery often appears to be religion and vice versa. The author treats historical and geographical evidence rather casually in the book, sometimes moving around in time and place, and comparing people and events without acknowledging the possibilities of significant differences in these contexts. Chidester fails to acknowledge many obvious American antecedents of our contemporary fakery and phoniness, including P. T. Barnum and snake oil salesmen. On the other hand, with little supporting evidence and few citations, he critiques late twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy with a farfetched interpretation of Disney motion pictures, hardly worthy of an undergraduate film class. Even if it were not for these problems, the book is difficult to read because the author seems addicted to jargon. Unfortunately, Chidester has not met the challenge of presenting a clear discussion of the relationship between religion and popular culture in late twentieth-century America within a historical context. Minnesota State University, Mankato Charles K. Piehl BOOK REVIEWS 833 Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. By Michael W. Flamm. (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. 294. $36.50.) The 1960s! Since they ended, numerous journalists and scholars have offered their interpretations of how conflict shaped the decade and affected Americans’ lives. In this recent work, the author addresses this social upheaval and, as he states, “examines the impact that law and order had on an ideological watershed in American history” (5). He offers the Great Migration, the Cold War, and economic conditions as setting the stage for such a tumultuous era and, consequently, a need for law and order when these “sources of tension” were played out. Michael W. Flamm writes that his account “supplements rather than supplants existing interpretations”; and as such, Law and Order is essentially a recounting of events (8). The author tells an interesting story, and, though the study represents a different perspective on the 1960s, he does not really break much new ground. Too often the author erroneously assumes the reader possesses a level of knowledge about certain events and does not adequately relate their significance. For example, readers do not know the circumstances surrounding the execution of Caryl Chessman, who became a cause celebre in the 1950s after receiving eight reprieves (74). Readers also don’t know why the Kitty Genovese assault was “infamous,” the reason why the FBI created COINTELPRO, or what abuses it committed (78). Flamm claims, “The rise of law and order signaled an end to the brief era of liberal ascendency” (179). Liberalism was waning by the end of the 1960s, but it was hardly brief, having dominated government and politics since the inception of the New Deal in 1933. Moreover, while law and order was undoubtedly a factor in the decline of liberalism, it would be an overstatement to say it was the sole cause. A pervasive sexual permissiveness, “Black Power,” Great Society backlash, women agitating for empowerment and liberation, the outrageous hippies, and even music that fomented political protest and promoted illicit drug use, among other “sources of tension,” also contributed to the demise of liberalism. On page 179, Flamm asserts, “The reign of law and order was, however, short-lived,” when there is evidence to the contrary. He does cite the Willie Horton “race card” controversy in the 1988 election. He fails to mention, however, the Reagan–Bush war on drugs and a 1980s media-fueled crack cocaine “epidemic” that prompted Congress to pass two “law-and-order” Anti-Drug Abuse Acts that remain controversial twenty years later. 834 THE HISTORIAN Arguably the most divisive law-and-order event of the era was the tragedy at Kent State University, when national guard troops fired over sixty times into a peace-rally crowd, killing four persons and wounding nine. The incident occurred in May 1970, but Kent State was a culmination of 1960s frustration and anger with a president who promised to “Bring Us Together.” The major virtue of Law and Order is that it is a cohesive study of the politics-law-and-order nexus. Unfortunately Flamm’s analysis and interpretation is confined predominantly to the introduction and epilogue. An academic audience with a particular interest in the era’s social issues will likely find this book more useful than the general reader. Penn State University, DuBois John C. McWilliams When Public Housing was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago. Edited by J. S. Fuerst and D. Bradford Hunt. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 228. $20.00.) J. S. Fuerst spent ten years collecting and editing the seventy-nine interviews that comprise this superb oral history. The interviewees—a diverse group that includes public housing officials, tenants, and others who contributed to community building in the projects—chronicle the intriguing story of the first two decades of public housing in Chicago. These were the halcyon years for the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), when it implemented policies growing out of the actualization of Elizabeth Wood’s vision for public housing. CHA policies under Wood’s administration embodied the philosophy advocated by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers, which held that government should play an active role in the social welfare of its citizens. This philosophy culminated in the programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Recognizing, however, the current trend away from that philosophy and back toward laissez faire, Fuerst used his chapter introductions and conclusions as commentaries on and evaluations of the changes in political thought that began gaining adherents during the Ronald Reagan presidency. The editor grouped the interviews in seven chapters under the themes that he determined were responsible for the positive experiences of the residents and that led to the building of viable communities in the projects. Wood and her staff did not conceive of public housing as homes of last resort or as permanent housing. Rather, it was a step up from the overcrowded, inadequate tenements occupied by many lower-income Chicago residents. Through careful screening, Wood and her staff selected families, whether two-parent or single-parent households, that shared her dream of forming viable communities. Wood also selected staff BOOK REVIEWS 835 members who shared her dedication. Project managers lived among the tenants, provided guidance and assistance, saw that the housing was properly maintained, and enforced the rules. Although the leitmotiv of almost all of the interviews is a paean to Elizabeth Wood, her vision, and her work, the former residents also realized that other forces contributed to the salutary results achieved under her administration. Education was a key force for those who advanced to leadership positions locally and nationally. Even those who failed to take advantage of the educational opportunities provided testified to the importance of the role of the schools. Other character-building forces—such as religion, sports, and music—promoted upward mobility and contributed to the quality of community life. Race and racism in Chicago, however, were the major barriers to the eventual realization of Wood’s vision. She was uncompromising in her determination that public housing must be integrated. White opposition to integrated neighborhoods led to political control of housing policies and the forcing of Wood out of office. Ironically, residents used the term “paradise” to describe public housing during the administration of the political machine boss Mayor Edward Kelly. Kelly appointed Wood and protected the CHA from blatant political interference, but the CHA began its downward spiral during the administration of the so-called reforming mayor Martin Kennelly. Fuerst’s conclusion is a call for a rebirth of public housing. He acknowledges, however, that “[i]t may seem utopian to propose a rebirth of public housing at a time when many public housing projects are being demolished. . . . In Washington, the Clinton and Bush administrations have essentially ignored the widely acknowledged housing affordability crisis in the United States” (193). University of Missouri–Columbia Arvarh E. Strickland One Nation Under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State. By Mark Douglas McGarvie. (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. Pp. 256. $38.00.) Given the debate that is currently taking place in the United States over the role of religion in public life, this is a very timely book. At the outset, the author states clearly and forcefully that the Constitution speaks to the separation of church and state and that such language can be found in the contract clause. Moreover, he specifically argues the weakness of the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation. In fact, he refers to an “implicit constitutional mandate to separate church and state” (96). This mandate became apparent in the early 836 THE HISTORIAN national debate over public and private corporations. Within the context of the climate that led to the First Amendment, churches in America were recognized in the early republic as private corporations, a new status that created a sharply drawn line between religious institutions and government. At the heart of Mark McGarvie’s argument is his interpretation of the Dartmouth College case. John Marshall’s opinion in the case—that the contract clause protects private corporations from state interference—is well known. McGarvie’s unique perspective on the decision is that institutions such as Dartmouth, with a religious foundation, were actually, under constitutional law, private institutions and, therefore, could serve no public purpose. This is a proposition that is sure to generate some debate in the legal field. The author points out that during the summer of 1787, religion was not a major issue at the Constitutional Convention. Religious liberty was a given. How to protect it from state interference became the subject of some debate. During the ratification process, debate arose over the prohibition of religious tests for federal office holding, over the Constitution’s silence about God, and over how to protect religious liberty. In each instance, according to McGarvie, those who promoted individual belief over Christian belief prevailed. If there is a single theme that emerges from this study it is that in the early republic there was an ongoing tension between those who saw government as an instrument of religion and those who saw it as an instrument of man. This was a relatively new debate, as established churches were common and accepted in most colonies, as were church attendance and moral codes. As McGarvie argues, even colonies that had no established church still promoted religion through their commitment to Christian values. The author shows how the liberal ideology of the early republic led to a substantial weakening of the Christian foundation of America’s colonial past. Even the key players in the early republic—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.—avoided the promotion of a Christian message in favor of individual belief. It is also McGarvie’s contention that, as Christian belief gave way to individual belief, important reforms took place in such areas as inheritance law, women’s rights, and criminal law. This contention in itself could be the subject of another monograph. There is a great deal to digest in this study. The author does not shy away from laying out his own perspective, as controversial as it may be. But the scholarship is solid, the subject is timely, and the author’s arguments should help to inform the contemporary national debate about religion and government. Marshall University Donna J. Spindel BOOK REVIEWS 837 Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822. By Alida C. Metcalf. (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. xxi, 280. $22.95.) Historians of Brazil, rejoice! This pathbreaking study of family strategies in rural colonial Brazil is back in print. First published in 1992, this work represents an exceptional contribution to our knowledge of colonial Brazil, family history, and the social and economic dynamics of frontier societies. Using an extensive body of primary documentation, Alida C. Metcalf reconstructs the dense social networks that bound freeman and slave, landowner and commoner, white and nonwhite, and male and female. Metcalf argues that individual fortunes and the potential for social mobility were structured significantly by interaction with the frontier. She also documents how family strategies changed as the area of Santana de Parnaíba shifted from a sixteenth-century frontier to an increasingly cohesive, settled area by the early nineteenth century. Frontier resources intertwined with inheritance and property conveyance to shape the family fortunes of the elite, peasants, and slaves. Portuguese inheritance law was partible: half of the family property went to the surviving spouse and the remaining portion was divided among legitimate or natural children. A maximum of one-third of an individual’s property could be alienated freely in a will, to favor a particular heir, an illegitimate child, or the church. Inheritance law was most crucial for those at the top and the bottom of the social scale. To avoid partitioning property, elite families adopted strategies that favored select heirs. The alienable third might go to a favored son or toward a daughter’s dowry. A child might be destined for the church and thereby eliminated as an heir. As a gold-mining frontier emerged, sons had sums of money and slaves settled on it in order to make their fortune. The availability of a frontier thus intertwined with economic strategies to maximize wealth. For slaves, both Portuguese inheritance law and the existence of a frontier were disadvantageous. An owner’s death typically resulted in the breaking up of slave families as their members were divided among multiple heirs. Slaves also risked separation from loved ones if they were sent to the frontier. Expanding economies often favored the importation of slave men over women, and imbalanced sex ratios depressed family formation. Slave women also had children by free men, both black and white, though not always by choice. Finally, the presence of a frontier facilitated the lives and families of peasants. Most independent subsistence farmers lacked formal title to real property and squatted on unclaimed land. They formed large, nuclear families and depended heavily on child labor. However, as Santana de Parnaíba shifted to sugar cultiva- 838 THE HISTORIAN tion in the eighteenth century, peasants were increasingly dispossessed of lands they customarily worked. Most shifted to a life of rural dependency or moved to towns. Family size shrank, and female-headed households became more common. For peasant families that did manage to secure title to land, partible inheritance law was detrimental. Siblings often opted to retain land in common after their parents’ death. Officials also refused to divide property if legal fees exceeded the value of the land. In short, Metcalf finds that the availability of frontier resources perpetuated inequality rather than mitigated it. Her analytical conclusions, empirical findings, and methodological rigor will assure a continued readership for this exceptional and innovative monograph. University of New Mexico Judy Bieber The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. By Gregory Mixon. With an introduction by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller. (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xv, 197. $59.95.) This new book joins several other recent studies of the 1906 riot and its aftermath, including David Godshalk’s Veiled Visions and Mark Bauerlein’s Negrophobia. Gregory Mixon’s work provides especially extensive coverage of the background of the riot, explaining the conflicting agendas of whites and blacks in part one of the book, the complicated political situation surrounding the gubernatorial campaign of 1905–1906 in part two, and the riot and its aftermath in part three. A series of detailed city maps aid readers in identifying streets and neighborhoods where racial incidents and rioting took place. Mixon argues that the riot was a “critical event,” which “embodied most fully and vividly tensions growing since Reconstruction” (2). He places the riot in the context of New South urbanization and the efforts of the white “commercial-civic elite” to unite whites across class lines to control black autonomy. Hoke Smith, former publisher of the Atlanta Journal, was originally a racial moderate who embraced the “antiblack attitudes” of former Populist leader Tom Watson as a gubernatorial candidate in 1906 (62). Arguing that black disfranchisement would be a reform measure, Smith’s victory over Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell in the 1906 white primary was also a victory for the race-baiting tactics of the Journal. Some African Americans in Atlanta faced charges of assaults on white women, largely untrue, which contributed to the tense atmosphere in the city. Accounts of black violence, though greatly exaggerated, pointed to an unwillingness to accept BOOK REVIEWS 839 white regulation of their “bodies, labor, and place in Atlanta” (43). Members of Atlanta’s black elite, which included Atlanta University professor W. E. B. DuBois and First Congregational Church pastor Henry Hugh Proctor, were “willing to share responsibility with the white elite for supervising the working classes,” but their agenda of racial uplift conflicted with the whites’ goal of racial control (40). Mixon argues that the instigators or perpetrators of the riot, which began on Saturday, 22 September 1906, involved the “full social and institutional spectrum of white society” (86). He provides detailed accounts of days of rioting, which finally ended on 25 September. Atlanta’s commercial-civic elite played “dual roles of racial terrorists and peacemakers”; though they were major instigators of the trouble, they sought to use racial segregation to ensure future peace once the riot ended (73). The African American elite, on the other hand, hoped to win concessions that would establish their leadership role in the city, “using class as a demarcating difference” (117). Instead, segregation and the economic dominance of the white elite characterized postriot Atlanta. Further, the riot “installed disfranchisement as the capstone to four decades of political reform” (130). Comparing the Atlanta riot with those in cities such as Wilmington, Mixon provides national context for racial violence. Consulting a wide range of personal and governmental sources, Mixon clearly demonstrates the methods of the white elite in achieving a racial dominance in Atlanta that made it a “prototype metropolis of twentieth-century America” (130). Kennesaw State University Ann W. Ellis Pullen The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power. By Lance Morrow. (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2005. Pp. xxxi, 312. $26.00.) Like the 1946 Oscar-winning film, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a story of three soldiers returning home from World War II to face difficult adjustments, this author’s book is misnamed. The veteran Time magazine writer argues that 1948 was both a “seedbed”—a time, he writes, “when we started to become . . . what we became”—and a profound turning point in the political lives of Richard Nixon (whose exposure of Alger Hiss gave him national prominence) and Lyndon Johnson (whose defeat of Coke Stevenson for the Senate magnified his political power), but surely not the “best year” of their lives (284). Nor was it for John Kennedy, whose year was marked by pain (diagnosis of Addison’s disease) and grief (the death of his sister, Kathleen). The book, moreover, discloses the “secrets 840 THE HISTORIAN of power” only if one subscribes to the jaundiced notion that political power accrues largely, if not exclusively, to those with fatal personality and character flaws and sinful dispositions. Permeated by an unyieldingly judgmental tone, this extended essay borrows selectively and freely from leading scholarly biographies, encapsulating intriguing life episodes and contextualizing the three future presidents within the national security state, which they, in turn, eventually would lead and further shape. Lance Morrow ruminates on the Cold War culture’s shaping influences, comments on the drift toward the diminution of political authority, and reflects on the combination of anxiety and affluence coloring American culture in the postwar years, cleverly finding political meaning in cultural markers such as Lana Turner’s career and the movie “Red River.” Written in a lively, accessible style, the book is meant for general readers and is not, as Morrow readily concedes, a scholarly work. There are no footnotes and only a selected bibliography. Fascinated by parallels in the three men’s lives, Morrow emphasizes the commonalities of their failings, and in the process indicts American politics and its necessarily ambitious, self-promoting nature. All three men, Morrow insists, lacked “completeness of character” and achieved political power “through a convergence of personal ambition with secrecy, amorality, and a ruthless manipulation of the truth” (140, xviii). Rummaging through the detritus of recent American politics, Morrow marks the trail of their lost or abandoned ideals. All became “media-generated archetypes” (xx). “None of them,” Morrow concludes, “was a great man” (294). Each was guilty of a deadly sin—JFK (lust), Nixon (anger), LBJ (greed) (282). All three, he claims, were “sick” and displayed “pathological” behavior (203). As the standard against whom the three ought to be compared, Morrow holds up Truman’s Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, as the “noblest Roman” (133). Lauded for his “grandeur and completeness of character,” Marshall, according to Morrow, was a “paradigm of a certain kind of American virtue” that was found lacking in JFK, LBJ, and Nixon (140). Temple University James W. Hilty The Generals: Andrew Jackson, Sir Edward Pakenham, and the Road to the Battle of New Orleans. By Benton Rain Patterson. (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 288. $32.95.) The author’s intent in this book is to piece together the careers of Andrew Jackson and Sir Edward Pakenham and the events that led to where their lives BOOK REVIEWS 841 intersected—the Battle of New Orleans. Unfortunately, because of a paucity of information about Pakenham, virtually all of the data about him is derived from a single biography and small bits of information from other works, particularly those about his brother-in-law, the Duke of Wellington. Even for details about Jackson’s life, the author relies almost exclusively on secondary sources, many reflecting outdated scholarship, such as those by James Parton, Marquis James, and John Spencer Bassett. Many recent works on Jackson, and even the new scholarly edition of Jackson’s papers, have been ignored. Put succinctly, this is a work intended for the general reader, which is based heavily on the work of other scholars. Though Pakenham’s career may be unfamiliar to most readers, its treatment could have been reduced to a single chapter without the additional material relating to Wellington’s Peninsular campaign in Spain. Similarly, the summary of Jackson’s early life and the survey of the causes and conduct of the War of 1812 are largely unnecessary. If there is any value to this book, it is in the second half, which contains a spirited retelling of the Battle of New Orleans. Even though the author again relies on secondary sources, he has woven together a compelling account, in some respects excelling Robert Remini’s excellent scholarly account of the battle. Benton Rain Patterson has more carefully assembled the facts relating to the British efforts than previous historians. Pakenham arrived late, and the plan for the campaign had already been developed by Admiral Alexander Cochrane, who had transported the troops to New Orleans. Pakenham’s fate was sealed when he accepted these arrangements, and he died on the battlefield trying to carry out the flawed plans of another commander. Jackson’s victory, while significant, was due as much to the failures of the British as it was to his leadership. In fact, Patterson hints, without making much of it, that Pakenham’s greatest failure was in launching the attack despite the tardiness of Colonel William Thornton in landing his force on the west bank of the Mississippi River. If Pakenham had delayed his main assault by a day, until after Thornton had swept the west bank of American resistance and trained his guns on Jackson’s line, the outcome of the battle might have been different. Patterson concludes that the British failure was not because of Pakenham alone; it also owed to feelings of arrogance that pervaded the British officer corps, which led them to “believe they would take New Orleans no matter the disadvantages of their position or attack plan” (265). Although the second half of this work has some value as a well-told story of the Battle of New Orleans, the first half is superficial, thinly researched, and poorly 842 THE HISTORIAN organized. The problem of pairing a well-known figure with a little-known person is glaringly evident. Only in the battle were they equals on the historical stage. University of Memphis C. Edward Skeen Virginia’s Western Visions: Political and Cultural Expansion on an Early American Frontier. By L. Scott Philyaw. (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. Pp. xxvii, 176. $33.00.) In this elegant book, the author examines Virginia’s western empire from the colonial period through the end of the Civil War. In particular, he describes how Virginia’s colonial and early national elites viewed western expansion both politically and culturally, how they tried to control frontier development, and how the western movements affected the state. Furthermore, he suggests the ways that the Virginia experience of the frontier shaped national policies toward the western frontier as a whole. The author’s thesis seems to echo and in many ways update Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis. L. Scott Philyaw’s focus on Virginia, rather than on the nation as a whole, is appropriate and insightful, as it narrows the focus to a manageable and logical level. Virginia, he reminds his readers, once claimed the whole of North America as its own and saw itself as an imperial agent from its founding. From Bacon’s Rebellion onward, Virginia’s elites were concerned about both the opportunities of western expansion, especially in land speculation, and their ability to control their western domains. In effect, their solution was constantly to recreate Virginia in the West, insuring that its expanded domain would be both politically and culturally incorporated into the imperial core of the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. It was this experience that made Virginians the natural frontier policymakers when it came time for the new nation to decide how it would handle its own broad frontier. In this sense, both Thomas Jefferson’s influence in the Northwest Ordinances and George Washington’s measures in frontier development and military control are seen as heirs of Virginia’s imperial colonial experiences. Such control was often contested, however, and as time passed, Virginia lost both its sense of what the frontier should be and its influence over western policy. Virginia’s frontier domains—places like Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois—grew restless under Virginia’s control, forcing Virginia’s elites to turn toward the federal government. Furthermore, western domains grew increasingly estranged from the planter elites of the Tidewater. By the time of the Civil War, Virginia was torn not BOOK REVIEWS 843 by north and south, but by east and west, as the state’s western domains turned almost exclusively against their ancestral home. Philyaw’s study points to many of the critical roles that the frontier played in both Virginia’s and the nation’s development, a theme that has been disparaged and discarded by many historians of the American West. Philyaw’s achievement is to remind us of the critical role the frontier did play in early national development, and to do so on terms much more considered and precise than Turner’s original thesis. Though the book is a rather short overview more than a detailed study, its instincts are sharp and its insights strong. The work should be of interest to anyone concerned with colonial or early national history, or with the effects of the frontier on American development. University of Portland Mark A. Eifler A Day Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. By Emily S. Rosenberg. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2003. Pp. x, 236. $18.95.) This is a brilliantly conceived, carefully organized, and persuasively argued exploration of the way in which the interaction of history and memory, guided and transformed by modern media, can profoundly illuminate cultural values and political controversies. Emily Rosenberg’s study of “Pearl Harbor” has as its focus not so much the historical event itself, but rather the shifting meanings of the two words in American culture and political consciousness. Her thesis is that “historical memory”—history as it is received through public memory—cannot provide a single “authentic” vision of the past, but is rather a constantly changing and contested forum on how to understand the past. In America, she argues, this forum is continually and inevitably shaped and enhanced, with its arguments disseminated by modern media in all its forms. Rosenberg is too professional a historian to contend that there is no such thing as reliable history based on a careful sifting of evidence, but she does argue that “. . . in the media nation of post-World War II America . . . memory, history, and media” are all interactive (5). Rosenberg sets out her proof by exploring the varied meanings assigned to Pearl Harbor in American culture from 1941 to 1991, and by tracing the political debates in those same years: the wartime label of “infamy” attached to the Japanese attack; the wartime and immediate postwar search for blame for the American disaster; the changing representations of race and its impact on Japa- 844 THE HISTORIAN nese and American relations; and the emerging emphasis on Pearl Harbor as a transcendent symbol of the commemoration of sacrifice by American fighting men. In the second portion of the book, Rosenberg takes up the culturally and politically tested memories of Pearl Harbor since the fiftieth anniversary of the event in 1991: the controversies in America and Japan over the issue of national apologies; the place of Pearl Harbor in the World War II “memory boom”; the heated debate provoked by the attempt to restore the reputations of the local field commanders in Hawai’i at the time of the attack; the conflicted memories of Japanese Americans about Pearl Harbor; and the blurring of the boundaries of history, memory, and entertainment by Hollywood and tabloid journalism. She closes by viewing the national outrage after Pearl Harbor as a template for the American response to the “infamy” of 11 September 2001. A Day Which Will Live is also valuable as a resource work, which comprehensively and objectively explores and summarizes in the text and in the endnotes the political controversies and debates that have become major legacies of the event. But, in doing so, Rosenberg makes transparent her commitment to rational argument based on careful review of evidence. The author conveys all this in a clear and engaging style, which, in combination with her meticulous research and reasoned tone, makes her book an excellent choice for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in the history of World War II, twentieth-century American culture, Japanese American relations, and the role of the media in American life. Stanford University Mark Peattie At the Water’s Edge: American Politics and the Vietnam War. By Melvin Small. (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. Pp. xi, 241. $26.00.) In what has become a multivolume account of the movement in America against the war in Vietnam, the author of this book has often touched on the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics. Melvin Small’s latest reflection on the Vietnam War takes that relationship as its primary focus, arguing that the “key to understanding American policy in the Vietnam War was American domestic politics” (x). His concise and energetic demonstration of this thesis (not in itself very startling) is a welcome addition to the literature on U.S. politics and the war. Inevitably, Small recapitulates the history of the war itself, summarizing events in Vietnam even as he explores the impact of those events on everyday politics in Washington D.C. (and vice versa). He brings the violence of the war years at BOOK REVIEWS 845 home—as well as in Vietnam—powerfully to life. Small reminds the reader that a pervasive sense of domestic insecurity did not begin with 11 September 2001. For example, between 1 January 1969 and April of the following year, there were hundreds of actual bombings in the United States and thousands of bomb threats. On campuses in the same period, 7,000 students were arrested for violent acts of protest. Bill Ayer’s call to the youth of America to “[k]ill all the rich people . . . Bring the revolution home, kill your parents,” though not quite up to contemporary standards of apocalyptic fantasy, was shocking at the time (213). As Small recounts the chronicle of the wartime administrations, it becomes clear that the domestic divisions he discusses are not so much analogous to the divisions in the United States today, but rather their history. The issues that bedevil the right wing now drove it equally wild forty years ago. Republican denunciations of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, for example, read almost like today’s headlines: he was the “triple A candidate,” standing for abortion, acid (LSD, which alone dates the slogan), and appeasement (186). Such fury possessed Democrats on the Right as well as Republicans. One delegate to the 1972 Democratic Party convention declared that he was ready to work for “ ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ but not for ‘sex, dope, and queers’ ” (187). Small’s valuable discussion of the 1973 peace agreement notes that its terms could have been negotiated in 1969, if not earlier, “But like Kennedy and Johnson before him, he [Nixon] could not leave Vietnam in a way that would result in the Communists taking over the South before his reelection” (197). The reviewer would like to put in a plea for a single word change, from “could” to “would.” Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all chose not to withdraw if withdrawal meant a united Vietnam controlled by Hanoi. They could have done so. Instead, each administration held its own reelection more dear than peace. New York University Marilyn B. Young U.S. Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua. By Mauricio Solaún. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 391. $59.95.) Among the many accounts of the 1979 collapse of the Anastasio Somoza Debayle regime in Nicaragua, this book stands out. It is the most intimate report of the dictator’s mind in the regime’s last months, and yet it is broadly based theoretically. This is possible because the author, a sociologist who is thoroughly familiar with political and social theory of revolution and dictatorship, served as the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua from 1977 to February 1979. 846 THE HISTORIAN However, the book is not focused on revolution or dictatorship; rather it is an analysis of intervention, particularly U.S. intervention. When Mauricio Solaún arrived in Managua, there was substantial opposition in Nicaragua to Somoza’s declared intention to remain in office until 1981. The Conservative Party formed the most substantial political opposition, and the newspaper La Prensa was the most persistent opposition voice. Sandinista guerrillas had been in the field demanding drastic change since the late 1950s, but with minimal success. In August 1978, the Sandinistas, in a spectacular assault on the National Palace, demonstrated their rising importance by capturing and holding hostage many important politicians and successfully negotiating a ransom payment for their release. Outside the narrow Somoza circle it was clear that Somoza was not likely to complete his term. The dilemma for the Jimmy Carter administration was how to stand firm on its commitment to nonintervention and yet persuade Somoza to resign in order to avoid a likely bloody revolution. From Solaún’s viewpoint, which his contacts with Somoza, his followers, and his opponents all supported, more pressure was needed. Carter, however, preferred promoting political compromise over risking force or even the threat of force. Thus, some Peace Corps volunteers remained in Nicaragua until early 1979, the military mission was reduced but not withdrawn, and Agency for International Development funds were trimmed but not ended. Solaún provides exhaustive detail of his failed efforts to get the Carter administration to increase pressure on Somoza and of his loyalty to instructions that he persuade Somoza to provide for elections prior to 1981 and step down. By early 1979, the Sandinistas’ final offensive was eminent, the Nicaraguan political opposition to Somoza was disgusted with the United States for its failure to condemn Somoza, and all Organization of American States mediation efforts had failed. Solaún left Nicaragua in February 1979, leaving the Sandinistas to oust Somoza by force, which they did in July. The value of Solaún’s account is threefold: 1) It provides an exceptionally detailed view of an ambassador’s attempt to carry out instructions with which he disagreed; 2) it provides perhaps the most complete picture of the inner workings of the Somoza dictatorship yet published; and 3) it highlights the shortcomings of a superpower attempting to do good by stubbornly sticking to a noninterventionist commitment. The book is well documented in general, except that many direct quotations from Somoza and his entourage are not available to other scholars as they evidently come from Solaún’s journals. In addition, many important newspaper citations are not identified by date or page. Despite these limitations, the BOOK REVIEWS 847 book is an extraordinary contribution to an understanding of the Somoza regime and to U.S.–Nicaraguan relations in the critical years 1977–1979. University of Kansas Charles L. Stansifer Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York. By Thomas Summerhill. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 287. $38.00.) Agrarian populism in the nineteenth century is a favorite topic in U.S. history, but almost exclusively as a Southern or Midwestern phenomenon. This book considers the development of agrarianism in a different and perhaps unexpected context, in three counties of central New York from 1790 to 1900. Radical collective action peaked with the Anti-Rent movement’s extralegal actions in the mid-1840s, which encompassed tar and feathering of representatives of authority and a pivotal killing. Apart from the analysis of New York agrarianism, the book provides a fascinating story of the development of agriculture in these counties during the nineteenth century. We see the area transformed over one hundred years from a frontier economy, where the activity consisted largely of clearing timber and other resource-exploitive activities, to a settled farming community, made up most notably of technologically progressive and market-oriented dairy and hop-growing farms. Thomas Summerhill’s approach is detailed, with chronologically organized descriptions. Eight chapters cover, respectively: 1) the period 1790–1825; 2) the years 1825–1840; 3) the Anti-Renters (centered on the 1840s); 4) the 1850s; 5) a diversion to primarily nonagricultural matters covering 1848–1865; 6) 1870– 1900; 7) an overview of farmers’ attempts at cooperation during the last half of the century; and 8) the Grange from 1874 to 1900. A short introduction at the beginning and conclusion at the end make an effort to unify the story. The first of the author’s two conclusions is that “agrarian agitation formed a constant element of political discourse,” but unified action became increasingly difficult to achieve; the second is that “the radicalism of central New York farmers took on increasingly conservative tones as the century progressed” because the “manifestations of capitalist development in their midst—social disorder, political corruption, economic uncertainty—threatened the agrarian world” (223). These conclusions are reasonable but are not the most significant aspects of the book’s considerable scholarly contribution, which is, rather, the detailed description and analysis of the available information about key events in the period covered. This reviewer’s only criticism concerns the book’s repeated 848 THE HISTORIAN invocation of the deleterious consequences of the market economy in explaining agrarianism, without sufficient consideration of technological change as a perhaps more fundamental cause. Occasionally, the conclusions or conjectures of other historians are cited and then gently deflated when confronted with the facts about New York. This kind of argument is quite effectively deployed here. Summerhill is not a controversialist, but by suggesting to proponents of generalizations that they look more carefully at the facts, he performs a real service. The book is best read as a multifaceted story from which readers should take what strikes their interests. It is a well-told and well-documented story. Anyone interested in U.S. history will be entertained as well as enlightened by this book. University of Maryland, College Park Bruce Gardner The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917. By David W. Southern. (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2005. Pp. vii, 239. $15.95.) This slender volume thoroughly examines its subject; it is well organized, well written, and concise. Its two main theses are convincingly argued. First, by the end of the Progressive Era, Southern disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks was completed through legislation, fraud, and intimidation, with national acquiescence. Second, Southern myths about Reconstruction and the inherent inferiority and savagery of lesser races came to permeate the North and West, promoted by pseudoscience, Southern literati, the Dunning School of Reconstruction, and new motion pictures. David W. Southern details the massacres, murders, and lynchings of the Redeemer Era that restored white supremacy and reduced blacks to powerlessness and peonage. Conditions worsened during the 1890s as legislation—the poll tax, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause—eliminated blacks as a political force. Subsequently, though Southern Progressives played important roles in sealing the Solid South, Northern Progressives, social gospel ministers, and women’s rights advocates were largely uninterested in the question of race; some embracing Anglo-Saxon mythology. Both Spencerian and Progressive Darwinists embraced the pseudoscientific distortions about an inherent racial hierarchy. Socialists either thought that only a socialist society could eliminate racism or were outright racists like Victor Berger and Jack London. Although the platforms of the dominant Republican Party consistently condemned disenfranchisement and lynching, little legislation was even attempted. President Theodore Roosevelt consulted Booker T. Washington when he feared BOOK REVIEWS 849 a nomination challenge; once his nomination was secure he courted Southern whites and, later, created a lily-white Southern Bull Moose Party. William Howard Taft fended off the Progressive challenge with solidly white Southern delegations. And, despite campaign promises, once in office, Woodrow Wilson’s Southerndominated administration dismissed many black employees and segregated the rest. At the same time, blacks were led by the accommodationist Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee machine. It was in the Progressive Era that Washington first faced the challenge of W. E. B. DuBois, through the Niagara Movement and then the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, demanding equality, an end to segregation and lynching, and a talented tenth to achieve these ends—the beginning of a modern civil rights movement. Where this reviewer differs with Southern is not the main thrust of the book: prohibition preceded the Progressive Era and the issue bridged the conservative– progressive divide. Even teetotalers such as George Norris evaded the issue, though other Progressives considered it an embarrassing distraction. After 1907 the shortcomings of the financial system were widely conceded. The fight over the Federal Reserve System centered on two issues: Would the United States follow the European model of a privately controlled central bank or would the government appoint the majority of directors, and would bank collateral meet the needs of Main Street as well as Wall Street? Progressives triumphed twice. And the Clayton Act, with its caveats, did not exempt organized labor from antitrust prosecution. The reviewer discussed these issues in his last two books. Still, this review cannot do justice to Southern’s richly detailed account. Queensborough Community College, CUNY Fred Greenbaum The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. By Marianna Torgovnick. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 209. $25.00.) This book is a work of literary criticism rather than history, but it is worth the attention of historians nonetheless. Probing the question of why polities form collective memories of key events in the ways they do, Marianna Torgovnick examines several slices of the layered Western memory of the Second World War. Hers is an intensely personal book, not only because she is drawn to issues that have particular resonance for her, but also because her writing was influenced and reshaped by the traumatic events of 9/11, which occurred while she was still drafting her volume. The book does not have anything like the usual 850 THE HISTORIAN structures of chronology and narrative, which most historians employ in their writing; it is instead eclectic in approach—perhaps maddeningly so for some—as it moves from topic to loosely related topic in five very distinct chapters. In her first chapter, Torgovnick examines the signal place that D-day holds in American imagination and public memory. While revealing some of the distortions and omissions that have pushed the American interpretation of D-day into its present shape, she makes a perceptive case for why we molded it that way and have clung rather tenaciously to it ever since. Her second chapter uses a similar format to examine the Eichmann trial of 1961, which, she argues, more than any other single event came to shape American postwar thinking about the Holocaust. She draws particular attention to an extended interview with Eichmann that Life magazine ran in November and December of 1960 (four months before the trial commenced), and to a CBS docudrama on the trial, aired the night after the trial began, which, she argues, “predecided many issues judged there” (63). While arguing that Eichmann fully earned his fate, she nonetheless contrasts it—in striking and telling ways—with that of the charming, smooth-talking Nazi leader Albert Speer, who escaped the executioner. In chapter three, Torgovnick departs rather distinctly from the form of her first two essays and delves into the way in which she and many of her acquaintances have come to regard the Holocaust; an event, she argues, that can—and indeed must—be interpreted by those postwar children “in or near the middle distance, anyone who feels an emotional response, and not just those who have a biographical or genealogical connection—an idea that carries with it the belief that the Holocaust belongs to all of us as a test case of modernity” (90). Torgovnick’s fourth chapter, yet another departure, focuses on the ways that we suppress memory. She highlights, in particular, the way in which reference to the attack on Hiroshima was removed from Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, as the book made its way from work of literature to popular film. She explores, as well, the forms of repressed memory embedded in Kasuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. Finally, Torgovnick examines the themes of war, imperialism, and wartime consciousness in the novels of W. G. Sebald, the brilliant German writer who spent most of his professional life in Britain at the University of East Anglia and died an untimely death at the height of his literary powers. Because she ranges so freely over fascinating ground, picking up and inspecting shiny nuggets wherever she finds them, Torgovnick serves as a kind of quirky and compelling guide on a walking tour of popular memory, drawing us in with her enthusiasm for her BOOK REVIEWS 851 subject and provoking us to notice—and to think deeply about—the cultural and literary landscape of the post–World War II era. U.S. Army War College Tami Davis Biddle Bread & Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. By Bruce Watson. (New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, 2005. Pp. i, 319. $24.95.) The author of this study argues that the Lawrence Strike of 1912, which has been too often relegated to “history’s ghetto,” is a “quintessentially American event, one of which the entire nation can be proud.” People came from all over the globe, bore their burden, rose up, and became citizens—in name or only in spirit— demanding a living wage and a little respect (3). Bruce Watson, bringing a journalist’s skill at storytelling, offers a well-written account of the strike, but labor and Progressive Era historians will find little that is new. Bread & Roses is well suited for undergraduates who are unfamiliar with the strike; the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); and the personalities, like “Big” Bill Haywood, Joseph Ettor, and William “Billy” Wood. Lawrence, founded in 1845 as a model city, had become, by the early twentieth century, one of the world’s leading textile cities. The strike began on 12 January 1912. On 1 January, a new Massachusetts law had cut the maximum number of hours one could work per week by two, to fifty-four. Workers welcomed the reduction of hours but not management’s decision to cut wages accordingly. Unions were of negligible importance, but some local members of the IWW asked Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti to organize a strike. The arrival of the IWW, the most radical organization in the American labor movement, quickly upped the ante for all involved parties. Both men had boundless energy, but Ettor, who spoke five languages, was the leader. IWW membership quickly rose to 16,000. Mayor Michael Scanlon mobilized the city police and asked for militia support, heightening tensions. Violence erupted and two people were killed. Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested on charges of being accessories to the murder of Anna LoPizzo, who died on 29 January of a gunshot wound, probably fired by a striker. Their arrest made Haywood, the IWW’s notorious chief, a more central figure. In the fall of 1912, they were acquitted. Authorities later arrested Haywood on trumped up charges, and he too was acquitted. The violence prompted congressional hearings, which highlighted the brutality of millwork. The presence of First Lady Helen Taft in the gallery added to the hearing’s importance. The testimony of Camella Teoli shocked America. At thirteen years of age she left school to work in the Washington mill. Several weeks 852 THE HISTORIAN later, in July 1909, her long hair got caught in a machine and she was scalped (192–193). One-third of the textile workers died within a decade on the job, and their average life expectancy was only thirty-nine (9). The strike and tension dragged on until March 1913, when the owners, led by William Wood of the American Woolen Mills, agreed to raise wages. Authorities later arrested Wood for conspiring to blow up his own factory, but a jury acquitted him. The workers won only in the sense that wages rose. Working conditions did not improve, and mill owners retaliated against strike leaders, which they had promised not to do. Watson does not make clear how the workers became citizens or what it meant to be a “citizen in spirit.” Support for the IWW collapsed within months of the “victory,” and the federal government used World War I as an excuse to crush the IWW. The strike may well be a quintessentially American event, but not for the reasons Watson argues. It was so because labor’s victory was incomplete; rather quickly, management asserted its nearly dictatorial powers, and workers’ gains evaporated. Framingham State College Jon Huibregtse The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac. By Jeffrey O. Wert. (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Pp. xii, 559. $30.00.) There is nothing that compares with this study of President Lincoln’s army. It is a beautifully written, comprehensive, and well-rounded history of the force from its first fight at Bull Run before it was renamed, to its final review on Pennsylvania Avenue, as its veterans marched into the realm of Civil War lore and legend. Fifty years ago, Bruce Catton devoted three volumes to this longsuffering but ultimately victorious army. Jeffrey O. Wert’s meaty history by no means suffers in comparison. Supporting over 400 pages of text are seventy-five pages of notes and a bibliography with fifteen pages of archives visited and manuscript collections consulted, as well as twenty-five pages of secondary works. A rare irritation, found in other titles from this author and publisher, is that Wert does not completely identify his sources when first citing them. Readers will have to find the relevant endnote and then check the bibliography for the author’s full name and complete facts of publication. Not all authors mentioned in the text are identified in either place (e.g., Williamson Murray), but this is no matter. The more readers know about the war in the East, the more likely they BOOK REVIEWS 853 are to admire and value this tour de force, which is crammed with colorful details about men of all ranks, from Ulysses S. Grant, George Meade, and other generals, down to dozens of obscure privates, who occasionally used very salty language. Those new to the Civil War will find this book fascinating and accessible. Wert is remarkably balanced in his treatment of the army’s commanders, even managing good words for George McClellan on occasion. He is less charitable toward Ambrose Burnside. He credits Joseph Hooker with the birth of the army’s cavalry arm, and balances praise for Meade, especially at Gettysburg—including his failure to pursue Robert E. Lee immediately—with criticism of his subsequent performance in Virginia in 1863–1864, even after Grant’s arrival. Though Wert’s primary focus is not the Army of Northern Virginia, he gives credit where it is due to the men in gray. Their counterparts in blue deserved better generals at the top, which is a major part of Wert’s thesis. Another is that the army, until 1864, was tied to Washington, which it had to defend. Few Civil War scholars write more smoothly, and this reviewer can think of none who have Wert’s feel for and ability to maintain just the right narrative pace. The story moves inexorably forward, like the II Corps on the attack. For those who lack the time or interest to read more than one book about the war in the East, this may be the volume, though a similarly comprehensive Confederate title would provide valuable context. Specialists will be amply repaid by close attention to Wert’s characterizations, use of evidence, analysis, arguments, and conclusions; though they will each find nits of their own to pick. He has seemingly read most of the literature on the eastern theater; his voluminous notes cite quite recent works and older classics. Wert skillfully summarizes this well-trod ground, carefully ponders various problems and controversies, and has written an essential work. University of Massachusetts, Boston Michael B. Chesson ASIA AND THE PACIFIC Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. By David L. Howell. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. x, 261. $55.00.) The story of Japan’s transition from a society variously labeled as “feudal,” “traditional,” or “premodern” to a modern nation-state has been told many times, often focusing on themes like the centralization of government, economic 854 THE HISTORIAN reforms, the creation of modern institutions, the abolition of samurai privileges, the adoption of elements of western civilization, and the quest for equality with the Western powers. But what exactly held the Tokugawa system together; what had to change for the modern nation to be created and why? These are the questions David L. Howell seeks to answer by addressing three “geographical identities”—polity, status, and civilization. Of these, the polity is perhaps the most familiar from traditional narratives: a structure consisting of shogunal territories, daimyo domains, and nominally autonomous but actually subordinate peripheries. In seven chapters following the introduction, Howell concentrates on status, which defined the position and obligations of social groups in relation to the state and to each other, and civilization, which distinguished civilized subjects of the shogun from barbarians in accordance with the Confucian worldview. Chapters two through four deal with the autonomous status groups within the polity, with particular attention to the outcasts for what they tell us about status groups’ relations to state power and to each other. The Meiji state abolished the status groups. By paying particular attention to the outcasts, Howell shows how the disintegration of the status system affected social relations. From the core of the polity, Howell turns to the periphery; chapter five, much of chapter six, and chapter eight deal with the Meiji state’s policy vis-à-vis the Ainu. From the mid-nineteenth century the shogunate attempted to “civilize” them, but they retained their autonomy. The Meiji state replaced both status and Ainu autonomy with imperial subjecthood and reinterpreted the content of civilization by adopting the norms of western modernity, which linked civilization to sovereignty. Like the Tokugawa state, it treated customs as a marker for civilization. This explains the rigorous enforcement of regulations governing customs (chapter seven), which other works tend to treat as something of a curiosity that illustrates the excesses of westernization. By concentrating on the outcasts, the Ainu, and the enforcement of “civilized” customs, Howell gives us a new take on the Meiji state’s modernization project and draws attention to the social structures that had to be changed before a national identity could be constructed. As Howell himself points out, the chapters are more like loosely connected essays, and his argument is schematic, but his broad view of the period represents an enlightening contribution to the literature on Japan’s transition in the nineteenth century (17). His wide range of sources includes material from local archives. The balance of specific details and abstraction, as well as the lucid style, make the book very readable. It should interest BOOK REVIEWS 855 historians familiar with the history of modern Japan, including advanced students, and could usefully be included in bibliographies for advanced courses with a broad perspective. University of Copenhagen Margaret Mehl A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. By Ping-chen Hsiung. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 265. $70.00.) The author of this book takes a new approach to the study of childhood, beginning with the development of medical pediatrics in the Song dynasty. The first section of the book contains three chapters having to do with the care of infants, from cutting the cord to breast feeding, which depends largely on pediatric texts. The second section, also three chapters long, discusses children’s social lives, based mainly on autobiographical accounts remembering childhood. Pediatric texts, which grew in number and sophistication as the specialty developed, are also employed. The bond between mother and son is detailed, and the education of boys is also discussed. Because of relatively short life spans, children also frequently had to deal with losing parents, and the extended family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older siblings, often filled the gap. Sons remembered their mothers most tenderly, and fathers affectionately eulogized their daughters. So far, the discussion has been almost entirely centered on boyhood, but in his final section, “Multiplicity,” Ping-chen Hsiung devotes a chapter to girlhood. No gender distinctions were made between infants, and girls and boys were brought up together prior to age seven. At that age they were separated, with boys pursuing their educations and girls mainly learning household skills. However, the late imperial period also saw a marked increase in female literacy, and Hsiung gives considerable attention to the literary education of girls. The second of the two chapters in this section discusses a variety of issues, including normative rules regarding children in the neo-Confucian tradition and concepts of childhood and adulthood in late imperial China. Hsiung notes that the closest we can come to accessing the voices of children is through paintings and the toys interred in tombs. The numerous illustrations of paintings greatly enhance the text. An afterword compares conceptions of childhood in China with those in Europe and other world areas. This reviewer found several problems. First, the discussions are necessarily limited to the elite, who wrote pediatric texts and left memoirs of their own childhoods. Moreover, the voices are overwhelmingly male. Women, when mentioned, are depicted through the writings of fathers and husbands. The book 856 THE HISTORIAN touches only lightly on infant mortality, mentioning deliberate infanticide on page three (and in several footnotes) and ignoring the problem of female infanticide. Furthermore, how could an entire book be written in the twenty first century on childhood—including a chapter devoted to girlhood—with so little attention to footbinding, which is discussed only briefly (216–217)? In spite of the medical aspects featured in this book, the author finds footbinding, which must surely have been the single most excruciating experience of any child’s life, to be “outside the proper domain of this study” (217). Instead, Hsiung states that young girls enjoyed greater freedom and innocence than did boys, who after age seven had to pursue their schooling—precisely when the great majority of girls in late imperial China had their feet bound (218). These flaws of omission tend to date what would otherwise have been a refreshing and informative text from a new perspective. Michigan State University Linda Cooke Johnson Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim Clan. By Bertil Lintner. (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2005. Pp. xv, 290. $18.95.) As a western journalist with twenty-five-year experience in Asia, the author has brought readers a new perspective on one of the few communist countries still largly closed to the outside world. He uses personal interviews, on-site surveys, and communist sources to tell the story from the inside. Bertil Lintner’s book offers a different interpretation of the origins and evolution of the Korean Workers Party (KWP), the two generations of its leadership, and the state—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, in the “axis of evil” alongside Iraq and Iran). By adopting a historical approach that emphasizes social conditions, ideology, culture, and tradition, this book examines not only the politics of North Korea from the 1940s to the present, but also the society, economy, military, and international relations through North Korean eyes. Lintner separates the unique characteristics of the Kim clan from the inscrutable and mystic nature of the KWP and corrects some misperceptions of the DPRK. He views Kim’s ruling ideology, Juche (self-reliance or self-identity), as a combination of Confucianism and “Soviet industrialization ideology” (46). The author explains that this ideology makes North Korea different from other former communist states in Eastern Europe. A mixture of “Red Confucianism and National Socialism” provided “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung with a highly centralized bureaucracy and lasting military loyalty to support his personality cult, mandate of heaven, and tight mind control, BOOK REVIEWS 857 which, seemingly more effective than institutional control of the masses, saved Kim’s regime during the Cold War (xii). After his death in 1994, his son, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, faced a different world. The collapse of the Soviet Union and changes in China’s policy toward both Koreas undermined the security system in Northeast Asia and brought the Stalinist movement to an end in North Korea. To fill the huge gap between propaganda and reality, Kim Jong Il focused on the “military first”—with nuclear weapon development the national policy in order to survive in the post–Cold War world (95–96, 124–125). He plays the “nuclear card” to “extract concessions and benefits from the rest of the world” (128). His military expenses—maintaining a huge army of 1.2 million men in active service, the fifth largest armed forces in the world after China, the United States, Russia, and India—and his economic failure attributed to the famines in the 1990s, when “starvation and malnutrition related diseases” killed more than 600,000 North Koreans (99, x). Nevertheless, Lintner shows some substantial changes in the country’s economy since the early 2000s, even though they may not be irreversible (200–201). Lintner provides a welcome addition to the contemporary literature on the North Korean regime with an in-depth analysis of its leaders’ mentalities and the party’s determination. Both students and scholars of Asian Studies and world history will find the previously unavailable materials useful and new interpretations provocative and helpful for a better understanding of North Korea. University of Central Oklahoma Xiaobing Li China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. By Peter C. Perdue. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xx, 725. $35.00.) In the author’s own words, this work is “long,” “large,” and “sprawling” (xiv– xv). It is also magisterial and monumental. Drawing on archival and published sources as well as secondary scholarship in at least seven languages, Peter C. Perdue recounts the epochal struggles between three empires—Qing, Muscovite, and Zungha—as each pursued the resources (logistical, material, ideological, etc.) needed to dominate Central Eurasia, a region with no natural boundaries, only politically imposed ones (23). The author has labored admirably “to give a balanced account of the motives of all the major parties,” but concedes that “since the bulk of the sources are in Chinese . . . this is primarily a book about the Qing rulers and the world they made” (xv). Still, Perdue’s combination of comparative and global approaches yields many valuable insights into the history of early modern imperial formations. 858 THE HISTORIAN Perdue begins by outlining ecological barriers confronted by all with ambitions in Central Eurasia, while nicely developing key analytical themes: the logistics of military supply, strategic and military decision making on the frontier, and the ramifications of such decisions on state formation (51). Perdue’s overarching thesis that “both Muscovy and the Qing grew out of the traditions of Central Eurasian state competition but learned to adapt their institutions so as to make maximum use of the settled societies they ruled” is convincing. This allowed both to succeed “brilliantly” in a “double expansion into settled and nomadic realms” and led states to the closing of Eurasia’s continental frontier—an event of global-historical significance. Chapters four through seven comprise a detailed narrative of the Qing conquest, guided by Perdue’s vision of the process as “the expansion of a Central Eurasian state that used the massive resources of the Chinese bureaucracy and economy to bring as much as possible of Central Eurasia and the Chinese core under its rule” (20). In another set of solidly researched chapters, he elucidates a number of state policies aimed at the incorporation of border territories into the empire. Given their technical nature, these chapters may be of less interest to nonspecialists. Worthy of attention, however, are direct links drawn between frontier warfare and domestic welfare as well as Perdue’s portrayal of the former as a source of administrative dynamism and institutional innovation (377, 549, 562). In two chapters devoted to the ideological dimensions of the conquest, Perdue notes that “it took active cultural work” for the center to hold (461). However, by reminding us in chapter fourteen that these ideological constructs were products of their time, he offers a trenchant critique of nationalist teleology without denying certain continuities between empire and nation. Some readers may wish for a Chinese character list or wonder about the use of “Europe” as a unit of comparative analysis. Few will deny that this is a big book, in terms of size, scope, and significance. Perdue’s nuanced arguments about complex historical interactions between ecology, ethnicity, economy, and state structures should be of great value and interest to students of both Chinese history and comparative empires. George Mason University Michael Chang Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937. By James ReardonAnderson. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 288. $60.00.) The author of this study presents a description of “the settlement of Manchuria and the neighboring areas of Inner Mongolia and the incorporation of these BOOK REVIEWS 859 territories into China during the Qing [1644–1911] and Republican [1912–1937] periods” (1). His description showcases two prominent features of this settlement. The first is the resultant spatial enlargement of China, stemming directly from the annexation of these previously autonomous northern areas. But second, and far more of a question than a fact, is whether this heretofore unprecedented growth brought about any change in China, and if it did, then, as a corollary, how it did so. James Reardon-Anderson concludes that this dramatic expansion of China northward facilitated no change. However, before doing so, he deliberates on and yet discards two theoretical paradigms of borderlands that have now achieved classic status. He first rejects the approach proposed at the end of the nineteenth century by Frederick Jackson Turner, in which a dominant empire or civilization radiates outward to overwhelm and subsume a peripheral zone that is, by definition, a wilderness. He next dispenses with the approach first promoted in the 1990s by New Western historians such as Richard White, in which the frontier is hardly a wilderness but, instead, a place in between, a “middle ground” wherein the change that occurs does so in a context of mutuality. Reardon-Anderson’s dissatisfaction with both models leads him to posit the alternative of a “reproduction or transplantation” thesis, in which the territories that China appropriated north of the Great Wall were made over “less from the outside in, than from the inside out,” as essentially replicated Chinese environments (7). He thereafter proceeds over the three major parts of his book to make a persuasive case for “growth without change”; these parts are “Land,” “People,” and “Economy.” Reardon-Anderson has wisely elected to concentrate not only on the how of China’s settlement of the northern territories but also on the why, and thus this interpretive attention devoted to both parameters is the greatest strength of the book. For the Chinese, no border has engendered more anxiety than their northern one, and the fact remains that, at any point in history, relatively few have relished the idea of crossing over it, not to mention the thought of settling at some indeterminate place beyond it for a period of unknown duration. Recognizing this fact, Reardon-Anderson injects the all-important factor of motive. He offers us a vital and palpable sense of the trepidations harbored and the risks confronted by the many millions during Qing and Republican times who felt compelled by the direst circumstances to make the migration north. Or as Reardon-Anderson himself sympathetically describes their plight, “[O]n one side was the imbalance in material conditions that made migration to Manchuria seem attractive; on the other was the compulsion 860 THE HISTORIAN to stay home, in the village, with the family, near the graves of the ancestors” (120–121). Don J. Wyatt Middlebury College EUROPE The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. By Bryan Ward-Perkins. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 229. $30.00.) This book examines what happened after the Roman Empire came to an end. The author summarizes two divergent views. First, the empire in the West collapsed, in large part because of barbarian invasions; second, a long period of change (from the third to the eighth century) should be understood in terms of “transition” and “transformation” rather than “decline” and “fall.” Bryan Ward-Perkins makes clear that his purpose is to demonstrate that the end of the empire in the West was indeed a collapse and that life changed profoundly for the inhabitants of the affected lands. His discussion touches on all parts of the empire and on some regions beyond it, with particular attention to Italy and Britain. The emphasis is on the fourth through seventh centuries. Ward-Perkins examines large quantities of information pertinent to this complex and much-discussed subject. He quotes many passages from late Roman writers to present perspectives of people living at the time. In discussing Roman attitudes toward those who they regarded as “barbarians,” he provides wellbalanced judgments on the texts. He suggests that Rome’s inability to hold off attacking forces stemmed in large part from the decline in the tax base in lands ravaged by invasions, thus limiting the possibility of paying soldiers. Discussions of conditions in the former Roman lands after conquests by Germanic armies are particularly interesting and informative, and Ward-Perkins presents thoughtful views of how different groups experienced their new situations. His treatment of identity among peoples such as “Romans” and “Goths” is very good, and it shows appreciation of the complex factors that we now understand are involved in forming individual and group identities, including language, physical appearance, and material culture. The author marshals a variety of archaeological evidence from different parts of the empire and formerly imperial lands to argue that, with the end of Roman political control and the peace it assured, systems of manufacturing and distribution broke down, leaving people with a much more limited range of goods available to them. BOOK REVIEWS 861 The final chapter examines ways that the social and political circumstances in which researchers live influence their understanding of this critical period. Especially interesting are his thoughts about how collaborative projects among scholars in the European Union affect thinking about the Roman Empire and its end. This is a very fine book, packing a great deal of information and well-informed discussion into a short and highly readable format. Archaeologists who work north of the Alps may disagree with some of the author’s interpretations, but his arguments are always reasonable, fair, and balanced. Maps, site plans, and photographs of objects are of high quality. Footnotes lead the reader to a rich bibliography of relevant literature. This would be an excellent textbook for a college course on Roman or early medieval history. Graduate students and professionals in the field will benefit from the excellent synthesis and clear argument. University of Minnesota Peter S. Wells Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein. By Niall Barr. (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2005. Pp. xliii, 531. $35.00.) The Battle of El Alamein has attracted the recent attention of a number of military writers from the British Commonwealth. Readers with time for only one would do well to turn to this volume. Niall Barr combines extensive archival research, command of published sources, and mastery of operational analysis in what is clearly the best book to date on a battle that remains as controversial as it is complex. Part of the work’s strength is its perspective. Instead of focusing on the well-known October battle, Barr begins with the initial fighting on the Alamein line in July, then carries the story through the bitter September struggle at Alam Halfa. The author shifts away from familiar issues of tactics and personalities to a broadly conceived history of a campaign in which balance was constantly shifting and the eventual outcome reflected unpredictable synergies of ideas, events, and men. Barr presents El Alamein as a structure of watersheds. El Alamein was Britain’s last independent operation of a war she would finish dependent on the United States. El Alamein began the final swing of the desert war’s pendulum. Never again would Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps emerge from nowhere, sowing panic in their wake. Above all, however, the El Alamein campaign marked a turning point in the development of a British army that—finally, it must be said—began assimilating and institutionalizing lessons learned at high cost in over two years of war. 862 THE HISTORIAN The central issue of any military operation is whether it failed or succeeded. In light of that, was the outcome determined by the shortcomings of the defeated or the abilities of the victor? Barr, writing from a British perspective, eschews the currently popular exercise of Rommel bashing, instead depicting him as a daring commander with a remarkable capacity for punishing the enemy’s mistakes, who was repeatedly handed opportunities to demonstrate that talent. Barr demonstrates that even in the first stages of El Alamein, the British fought entropically, almost randomly. In part, this reflected the 8th Army’s multicultural nature, which handicapped cooperation among its different contingents. In part, it reflected prewar shortcomings of training and doctrine. Most important, however, was ineffective staff work, broadly defined, which created and sustained an environment of uncertainty that played to Rommel’s strengths. Not until El Alamein, according to Barr, did the 8th Army begin integrating particular lessons and experiences into a coherent system. While the new broom wielded by Montgomery facilitated the army’s reeducation, the central process involved the development and dissemination of combined-arms doctrine and tactics: integrating air and ground forces—infantry, armor, artillery, and engineers—into an interlocking instrument of war. The 8th Army was fortunate in having enough of a breathing spell before El Alamein’s final stage to implement fundamental changes. Even more important, as Barr demonstrates, was the willingness at all ranks and levels to take stock, reach out, and develop what he calls “British” responses to the lessons of defeat. The final combination of superior firepower, precise planning, and tactical coordination was undramatic and unspectacular. But it produced decisive results in the desert and established paradigms that served usefully all the way to Berlin. Colorado College Dennis E. Showalter Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640–1760. By Caroline Castiglione. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 254. $19.95.) In the second half of the seventeenth century, one of the issues that most preoccupied the town council of Monte Libretti was whether to salary both a physician and a surgeon at the town’s expense. It may not seem like much, but with a physician costing as much as twice the amount of a surgeon, townsfolk had to decide whether they could afford the luxury of both or make do with just a surgeon. Moreover, attracting either type of practitioner to reside and practice in this small town in the hilly countryside outside Rome was fraught with difficulties. BOOK REVIEWS 863 And then there was the town’s bell. For years it had needed replacing—at considerable expense—and so it was decided to put the physician’s salary toward this. Those townsfolk who still wanted the services of a physician had the option of pooling money together in order to bring in a physician once a week from a nearby town. Even so, the men who made up Monte Libretti’s town council still had to turn to the town’s noble overlord, Maffeo Barberini, in their quest for a medical practitioner. The town’s priors, the elite executives of the council, who were also the most determined to obtain a physician’s presence, though not without ongoing friction within the council, exercised most vociferously in the role of petitioners. Small towns like Monte Libretti continued to exercise a degree of control over their own internal affairs, even in the wake of the “absolutism” of the early modern period. They determined the hiring of a schoolteacher, the renting of the communal inn and grocery store, and the support of certain devotional practices (this is where the bell came in). All of these issues were seen in terms of the public good—not without disagreement as to what this meant, as we have seen—and had to be paid for out of the town’s budget. They are indicative of just how carefully organized small town life was. The chief contribution of Caroline Castiglione in her carefully crafted study is her focus on the everyday politics of the small town, detailing the sorts of issues that animated (and divided) local life, and how these were decided upon. Rather than see these issues and strategies from the point of view of the distant capital, or through the prism of remarkable and exceptional events (like a riot or rebellion), the reader is capably guided through the minutiae of regular council meetings and appeals to higher authority, which Castiglione has painstakingly reconstructed. If this can be a bit dry at times, and if we could have been told much more about the vibrant social and cultural life lying behind the politics, we are nevertheless rewarded with a vivid portrait of how townsfolk in Monte Libretti managed to exercise and maintain power over their own affairs while occasionally negotiating with their noble overlords, the Barberini, on their own behalf well into the eighteenth century. Just as the strategies of the Barberini evolved over the 120 years studied in this book, so too did those of the inhabitants of Monte Libretti, who cunningly adopted forms of political activism to protect their own interests. University of Leicester David Gentilcore 864 THE HISTORIAN The Fabric of Gender: Working-Class Culture in Third Republic France. By Helen Harden Chenut. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 436. $60.00.) It seldom escapes observers’ notice that capitalism has taken divergent paths in France and the United States: the French, more than Americans, see their state as a true “social republic” rooted in a respect for broad-scale equality and workers’ rights. Prior to World War II, however, republican France was a very different place, where industrialists and the state conspired to protect the interests of capital and where workers fought, often futilely, for social justice. Thanks to Helen Harden Chenut’s fine monograph, we now have a much more thorough understanding of that struggle. Class solidarity, Chenut argues, allowed workers to sustain their battles from the 1880s through the 1930s, despite repeated setbacks at the hands of industrialists and internal divisions stemming from political and gender differences. Working-class cohesion, she further concludes, was built and sustained less on the factory floor than through the social practices of daily life. Chenut bases these conclusions on an exhaustive local study of Troyes, the “capital of the French knitted goods industry” (9). Given the importance of textile production in French industry, the choice is logical, and Chenut successfully relates her research to other studies of the garment trades. She also draws from an unusually broad range of sources, from union records to picture postcards and oral interviews. The resulting portrait of working-class culture and industrial life is as richly woven as the goods produced by the workers under consideration. Two of the most valuable contributions to labor history that Chenut makes with this study relate to issues of gender and consumption. Knitting, Chenut demonstrates, was an increasingly feminized profession over the course of the Third Republic. Millowners’ reliance on women was tied to mechanization, which created greater demand for the traditionally female finishing work of bobbin winding, seaming, and finishing (190). It was also linked to millowners’ deliberate efforts to keep wages low and labor unions weak (281). Both trade unions and socialist parties sought to woo women by stressing sexual equality, but neither made women’s issues a priority. Women thus became the most numerically predominant and politically marginalized members of the working class, to disastrous ends: women textile workers died, on average, ten years earlier than their male counterparts (91–92). How did workers manage to transcend gender divisions to cohere as a class? Chenut argues that the answer can be found in the social practices of daily life, BOOK REVIEWS 865 such as shopping. The working class, Chenut contends, formed a single “community of consumption,” united in needs and desires as structured by the local consumer cooperative, La Laborieuse (212). La Laborieuse supported workingclass families through strikes, promoted class militancy, and most importantly, helped shape a street identity for workers through the clothing it promoted (248). Chenut is not entirely clear on why men’s fashion, with its characteristic cap, retained a distinctive working-class identity longer than did women’s, nor does she fully articulate how the “democratization of demand” in the interwar years influenced evolving class identity for male and female workers alike (317, 298). These questions aside, The Fabric of Gender points the direction toward a more inclusive labor history that takes into account the many varied sites of class formation. California State University, Sacramento Mona L. Siegel Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons. By Lisa Forman Cody. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. Pp. xiv, 353. $100.00.) Birth and reproduction are such vital facets of human life that it is stunning we know so little about their history. In this important book, the author argues that as men-midwives gained scientific authority over the birthing process and women’s bodies, undermining female midwifery, they stood for a growing kinship between the sexes. She also shows how central metaphors of reproduction became to the conceptualizing of such abstract categories as national, political, religious, and paternal identity. At once history and compelling story, Lisa Forman Cody’s book has much to tell us about politics, midwifery, gender, and the history of science. She argues that “once men believed they had conquered the world of birth, reproduction could operate as an objective reference point within the natural world and even social relations” (23). Reproduction and birth would provide irresistible metaphors for the British nation. In her introductory chapter, Cody suggests that men-midwives began to make men and women more socially akin because they had to emphasize their sympathy and emotional ties to their female patients. One would like to hear more on how their scientific objectivity was not compromised by their need to take on feminine feeling. Cody dwells on anti-Catholic fears surrounding the birth of a male Catholic heir to the English throne in another chapter, highlighting how reproduction literally engenders revolution; if Catholic midwives had the authority to declare the legitimacy of the heir, the British nation itself would 866 THE HISTORIAN have been gravely under threat. In “Fathers of Science,” she addresses the notion of male pregnancy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, arguing that Leewenhoek’s illustrations of sperm, which implied that sperm were miniature human beings, underwrote the absurd notion that men could become pregnant. The author’s ensuing chapter on the maternal imagination centers on the fraud of Mary Toft, the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, and shows persuasively how this fraud was used to discredit George I’s reign. Cody then demonstrates how Scottish men-midwives sought to overcome their ethnic identities by presenting themselves as cosmopolitan Britons rather than narrow Englishmen, and by touting their successes over difficult pregnancies along with their expertise in neonatal care. She further considers how men-midwives became figures for the world upside down at a time of the French and American Revolutions, with Scottish midwives penetrating Britain. Then she examines the role that such midwives played in the formation of racial and national differences, and how the state, with the help of men-midwives, increasingly envisioned unborn children as living beings, redefining the beginnings of human life away from the mother’s subjective feelings of quickening and toward the objective knowledge of medical science. The historical range and wealth of materials unearthed (caricatures; midwifery manuals; satires; English, Scottish, and American manuscript materials; Royal Society publications; periodical accounts; and hospital records) are this study’s real strength. They can also work to the study’s detriment. Satires and caricatures are given as much weight as scientific publications, and although their ideas seem often equally outlandish, one wonders how any of these ideas gained suasiveness. History is sometimes achieved at the expense of epistemological questions. Was sex as clearly bifurcated as she claims? What does the “facetiousness” of caricature and satire do to their status as historical evidence (305)? And if menmidwives had achieved scientific authority by 1800, why weren’t they called on by the courts more often? Occasionally generalizations do not quite stand up to scrutiny. For example, although Cody claims that “midwifery manuals in fact skated over the subject of pain lightly,” that does not hold true for Thomas Denham (later cited by Cody) and William Osborn, late eighteenth-century menmidwives who fiercely debated the extent to which God had meant for women to experience the pain of childbirth (36). Her point that Spallanzani supported women as passive vessels of reproduction ignores how he redefines life as a more passive circulation of fluids and thus backhandedly gives women the credit for life (291). Despite these limitations, Lisa Cody’s Birthing the Nation is a rich, signal, BOOK REVIEWS 867 and absorbing study; one that all scholars of the eighteenth century overlook at their own peril. American University Richard C. Sha Love and Death in Renaissance Italy. By Thomas V. Cohen. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 306. $27.50.) Hadyn White once polemically remarked that it did not matter to him if a historian had spent ten days or ten years in the archives. All those footnotes directing readers to archival sources functioned for him as just one more selfauthenticating device whereby a historian formally asserted a claim to his or her authority to speak within the accepted conventions of the discipline of history. In Thomas V. Cohen’s book, however, all those footnotes deeply matter. In essence, the footnotes constitute the fabric of the entire study, and all the archival work— all the sleuthing about in order to figure out who said what to whom and when—constitutes much of the essence of the message conveyed. In reading Love and Death, we are constantly reminded that Cohen could not have possibly told the “stories” that make up the six chapters—stories about murders, household squabbles, love, passion, and rape—if he had not spent so many years in the archives. Indeed, in some respects all the “stories” told collectively recount the “meta-story” of Cohen’s adventurous love for the archives in Rome. And one uses the term “stories” advisedly, since Cohen self-consciously crafts the chapters of his book as stories, each with a writer’s concern for voice, irony, literary conventions, drama, and genre. In one sense, then, this is an exhilarating book. Historians of Renaissance Italy adore the archives, but their love for the archives often fails to get fully conveyed to the reader through their narratives. Additionally, the texture of life discovered through all that sleuthing about in the archives often finds itself lost in methodology or subsumed by the larger questions being investigated. Cohen’s book does not lay claim to much of an elaborate methodology, though he does advocate the importance of microhistory, and though he does insist that history is about coming to terms with the pastness of the past and the textuality of texts. Nor is Cohen deeply interested in investigating larger questions about the period. Indeed one could argue that this is not a book about “Renaissance Italy” but certain limited aspects of “Renaissance Rome.” It is true Cohen is concerned with agency, cruelty, and household relations, but no master narrative emerges about agency, cruelty, and household relations in the period. Consequently, macrohistorians, who are used to addressing the big picture with one chapter building on another, 868 THE HISTORIAN may feel frustrated with this book for its lack of coherence in argumentation (one chapter does not really flow into the next, and the order in which one reads them does not much matter). But the reviewer does not think that should matter to readers of this book. “Caress the details,” Vladimir Nabokov implored. This is what Cohen is interested in doing: caressing, in a very personal way, the details. In doing so, he has written a book that gives us a distinct feel for some detailed aspects of everyday life of Renaissance Rome, and in the process, he may well have inspired others to make their way into the archives in search of finding other stories to tell. University of Texas at Austin Douglas Biow Cleopatra’s Kidnappers: How Caesar’s Sixth Legion Gave Egypt to Rome and Rome to Caesar. By Stephen Dando-Collins. (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Pp. xviii, 276. $24.95.) Biographers from Suetonius and Plutarch to M. Gelzer and C. Meier have regarded Caesar’s failure to follow up his victory at Pharsalus in 48 BC, his intervention in Ptolemaic politics, and his “dalliance” in Alexandria with Cleopatra while his forces were mired in a savage, seven-month urban war, as a reckless adventure. In this third, popular, novel-like book on famous Roman legions, the author centers on this “life and death struggle” in the Ptolemaic capital. Stephen Dando-Collins argues plausibly that Caesar’s departure in 48 BC for Alexandria was a strategic decision—intended to secure the resources of Egypt and the clientship of the Ptolemies (65). His narrative begins with the war in Alexandria and traces the knowable history of the Sixth Legion from its enlistment in 65 BC. Soldiers of this legion, the author asserts, “guarded” Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra during their detention in Caesar’s quarters (72). On this assumption, he can proclaim that the Sixth Legion changed the course of history, as by kidnapping Cleopatra and her brother, they were instrumental in securing Egypt—a rich prize for any ruler—as the private domain of the Caesars and later the emperors (2). This and other plausible fictions, such as the legion’s desertion in AD 43 from Lepidus’s forces to those of Antony, initiating the Second Triumvirate, together with the author’s racy, colloquial style (“This suited Caesar just fine”) sweep the reader along to Britain in the fifth century AD, where the legion is last attested (227, 76). The author entertains and, through chatty digressions on “Roman civilization,” military practices, myths, and historical and geographical curiosities, also BOOK REVIEWS 869 instructs the general reader. His analysis of political situations, however, is conventional and superficial. Instead of exploring Caesar’s and Cleopatra’s political and ideological imperatives and interrogating the biases and political contexts of the sources, he succumbs to popular, sexist tradition: Cleopatra is the “manipulative vixen” and her liaison with Caesar is determined by “love,” physical attraction, and her own self-interest (238). Whether she might have been Caesar’s victim and “hostage,” rather than his lover, is not discussed and the possible political reasons behind her detention in Alexandria and prolonged sojourn in Rome are not investigated. Could it have been that Cleopatra’s political skills and imperial aspirations, coupled with the resources of Egypt, would have alarmed the Romans, who, from the third century, had systematically eliminated independent states in their sphere of influence? Without specific references to the sources, which Dando-Collins obviously knows well, the book offers little for the historian. Anachronistic equivalencies for Roman technical terms (“major-general” for “praetor”, “cruiser” for “wargalley”) are misleading, and factual errors undermine the reader’s confidence: Carrhae is in Turkey, not present-day Iran; neither Plotinus nor Ptolemy the Geographer (second and third centuries AD) could have enjoyed the “financial patronage of the Ptolemies,” and to assert that Caesar was “notoriously virile” contradicts the ancient sources (14, 19, 63, 28). We may hope that such errors and the numerous solecisms (e.g., “freshwater” and “relent” used as nouns) evident in the prepublication review copy will be corrected (7, 109). University of New Brunswick Adrian Tronson Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia. By Isabel de Madariaga. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii, 484. $35.00.) Ivan IV of Russia [1533–1584], has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. His usual epithet, “The Terrible,” derived from the Russian word “groznyi”, best translated as “The Awe-Inspiring,” has turned Ivan into the butt of many jokes and the source of much mythmaking in Russian history. Beyond doubt, Ivan’s reign was one of the bloodiest in Russian history, but historians are divided on almost everything else about his reign, including, most especially, his personality and whether his policies, in spite of their violence, actually served any purpose. Isabel de Madariaga’s new biography covers the historical background, a brief description of the reign of Ivan’s father, Vasilii III, and Ivan’s entire life. Twenty-one chronological chapters are followed by a final chapter on Ivan’s legacy. The author discusses all the major episodes of Ivan’s tumultuous reign and 870 THE HISTORIAN proposes answers to many vexing questions. She brings to this difficult task a long experience in writing about eighteenth-century Russia, a formidable intelligence, and a highly readable, often witty, literary style. As one would expect in a biography intended as much for the general reader as for scholars and students, de Madariaga depends chiefly on secondary sources, an unusual proportion of which date to the nineteenth century. The result is a comprehensive, readable survey of Ivan’s reign in English, with particularly good coverage (with reference to primary sources) of diplomacy and its impact on domestic issues and of comparisons with contemporary Western Europe. Yet this ambitious biography fails in some major respects to be definitive. It passes over much new scholarship, particularly in the West, which has seriously questioned the received master narrative of Ivan’s reign that the body of this book seems ultimately to support. A host of features in this conventional view of early modern Russia—the existence of the “Chosen Council,” the importance of the possessor–non-possessor conflict, the “struggle” between conservative aristocrats and the centralizing state—are roundly criticized at various points but still appear as features in the book’s narrative. This failing is perhaps inevitable at this moment when expert opinion is sharply divided, particularly over the dating of crucial sources, and no generally accepted overall interpretation has replaced the obviously defective Stalinist ideas of the last century. The author dismisses in two pages the ideas of perhaps the most innovative historian of early modern Russia, Edward L. Keenan, particularly his redating to the seventeenth century the alleged “correspondence” between Ivan and his courtier, Prince Kurbsky (xv–xvi). Instead, she makes the correspondence a cornerstone of her picture of Ivan, who in her account emerges as a remarkably learned and complex man, whose wide reading of literary sources allowed him to justify his sadistic policies. Ivan’s religious ideas, in turn, were central in determining his policies (43–47, 380–381). Keenan believes that Ivan was illiterate and knew almost nothing of Muscovite literary culture. More importantly, de Madariaga gives little attention to the widely accepted notion that sixteenth-century Russia was an oligarchy based largely on kinship relationships, rather than on the unlimited rule of one person. (It did become something close to the latter through the use of terror during the later part of Ivan’s reign, but this was surely a very destructive exception.) As a result, the reader finds the meaning of Ivan’s reign elusive, beyond the personal notions of tragedy and Luciferian pride discussed in the final chapter. University of Kentucky Daniel Rowland BOOK REVIEWS 871 The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment. Edited by Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 397. $55.00.) The Renaissance celebrated the third-century-BC Hellenistic mathematician Archimedes both for disciplining the science of mechanics with the rigor of geometry and for feats of military engineering. These thirteen essays, ably introduced and set in their historiographical context by the editors, explore the early modern invocation of Archimedes. Was it merely a rhetorical flourish or an act of homage from the artillery officers, mathematicians, military engineers, navigators, chemists, and administrators who were his “real intellectual heirs who re-created for themselves his personal union of science and the art of war” (3)? Although largely affirming the latter proposition, the various authors nonetheless carefully qualify it even as they richly illustrate it around four topics. Kelly DeVries and Frederic J. Baumgartner examine the introduction of firearms in Europe that began in the late Middle Ages, while Barton C. Hacker and Gábor Ágoston do the same for the Islamic empires. Gunpowder-propelled innovations in fortification, naval warfare, and infantry tactics developed largely without a scientific or formal theoretical and institutional base, thus removing one of the props of the conventional view of Islamic backwardness. The medieval fortress’s adaptation to artillery was not revolutionary, as usually assumed, but evolutionary, and differences among aristocratic cultures, not lack of scientific knowledge, explain why some states embraced firearms sooner than others. European rulers and merchants, dazzled by overseas wealth, clamored for improved mastery of the oceans. Alexzandra Hildred, Lesley B. Cormack, Amir Alexander, and Michael S. Mahoney fruitfully explore the often direct and influential interplay of mathematics and astronomy with innovations in shipbuilding, navigation, and naval ordnance and operations. What role did chemistry play in the production of the gunpowder that “fueled the ‘internal combustion’ engines of firearms and artillery” (21)? Brenda J. Buchanan examines England; Thomas Kaiserfeld studies Sweden; and Seymour H. Mauskopf compares England and France. By 1789 the state’s role of joining chemists with producers was so pronounced that gunpowder production “increasingly embodied the Archimedean ideal of employing science to enhance military acquisitions while simultaneously inspiring new theoretical innovations” (22). French chemist Antoine Lavoisier and English artillery officer William Congreve, Sr., both administered production operations that effectively incorporated formal research and development. 872 THE HISTORIAN Janis Langins and Brett D. Steele detail how military engineers and artillerists used mathematics and mechanics. Their research supports the conclusion that “the Renaissance synthesis of science and the art of war was intensified and expanded to vast proportions during the eighteenth century” (25). Scientific artillery schools, for example, allowed the “mass-production” of skilled artillery officers, despite little actual experience with guns or combat, finally giving Europe an edge over the Ottoman Empire, whose continued reliance on apprenticeship produced fewer gunners more slowly. The editors argue convincingly that science and military historians have traditionally dismissed or neglected connections between early modern warfare and science. These engaging and accessible essays contribute not only to their particular specialized fields, but collectively accomplish the editors’ desire “to encourage the synthesis of these ostensibly independent branches of early modern history” (12). Bexley High School Ben S. Trotter Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. By Robert A. Doughty. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 592. $39.95.) For the last eighty years, accounts of the First World War have been dominated by a cabal of British historians, officials, and fellow travelers who have cultivated the idea that England fought the war almost single-handedly and won it with little help. Anyone who questioned this fairy tale was smeared, from Winston Churchill after he wrote The World Crisis through Niall Ferguson and The Pity of War. So it is good to see Robert Doughty telling the story from the neglected perspective of the French, who did by far the greater part of the fighting. Unfortunately, they also did most of the dying, and thus the title of the book. Insofar as the Allies won the war, it was a Pyrrhic victory indeed. Anglo-American scholars, who have been dutifully trudging along the paths defined by British government propagandists in their early histories of the war, will find much to ponder in this account of the war as seen from inside the French high command and the civilian leadership. Three major points emerge from the wealth of documentary evidence Doughty has painstakingly assembled. France fought hard and long and bore the brunt of the struggle. Although there were horrific disasters during the first part of the war, the army did indeed have a learning curve and learned how to fight with fewer casualties and more successes. Last, the French had been thinking seriously about BOOK REVIEWS 873 an impending war and how to fight it for many years before 1914: the country had both a coherent national defense policy and sophisticated strategic planning that depended on its ability to maintain important alliances. The academy has generally termed such efforts “revisionist,” but the issue here is not new interpretations; this book rests on evidence that has been routinely suppressed or denied because it contradicts the legend. The exposition is lucid and impressive. It seems churlish to quibble with any part of Doughty’s argument. However, there are three minor problems. First, the French Army’s wartime archivist pointed out long ago the pitfalls of relying on internal documents produced by the staff. Those materials reflect the view the army wanted everyone to have, not the actual reality of the war. Second, ignoring the penetrating studies published by the army’s best officers and specialists results in a skewed notion of what was going on. Last, using French and German archives from World War II, recent historians have made a convincing case that the Pyrrhic victory notion is inexact: in May 1940 the army had the weapons, the men, and the will to fight; French soldiers fought hard. They deserved a government considerably better than the one they had. Doughty’s work is an impressive first step, roughly equivalent to Thomas Fleming’s masterful The Illusion of Victory, which challenges the uncritical acceptance of Woodrow Wilson that permeates all American accounts. Quibbles aside, Pyrrhic Victory is a major contribution to the American understanding of the Great War. Loyola University, New Orleans John Mosier Fighting Napoleon: Guerillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–1814. By Charles J. Esdaile. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 272. $40.00.) Few authors are as qualified as this one to undertake this study of the guerillas in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. He has written a number of books on the subject, including Peninsular War [2003] and The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War [1998]. This study is grounded in a mastery of the historiographical literature and in archives stretching from Madrid to Barcelona, Zaragoza, Valladolid, Carpetas, and London, to name but a few. In this study, anchored in a sophisticated analysis of fragmentary, skewed, and often contradictory archival records, Charles J. Esdaile examines the hagiographic myths and legends associated with the so-called “people’s war”—or, according to a contemporary observer, how the French “lion . . . was tormented to death by a 874 THE HISTORIAN gnat” (35). This work stands within a revisionist tradition of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that includes the works of T. C. W. Blanning and others. Esdaile reevaluates the role of the guerillas against a background of desperate poverty and undermines the idea of a popular crusade except, perhaps, in Navarre and the Basque provinces. Most of the guerillas were motivated, he argues, not by love of the fatherland or the old regime, but by opportunism, the love of adventure, the prospect of plunder, and evasion of the draft. Esdaile’s research enables us to encounter individuals whose tales enliven the text. “At the roots of the la guerilla popular lay not heroism but hunger, not daring but despair” in a country ravaged by French requisitioning and the unscrupulous acts of the oligarchy (120). “The contribution of the partidas to the defeat of the French,” for Esdaile, “proves to be rather less dramatic than has often been made out to be the case” (128). He underscores the importance of the Russian campaign in drawing men and resources out of Spain and the role of the regular army rather than the guerillas in the French defeat, while emphasizing, in the words of a contemporary, the “atrocities, outrages and insatiable rapacity of these gangs,” who undermined the Spanish army by their disproportionate use of men, money, and supplies (177). Localism, incompetence, lack of military equipment and training, rivalries, and corruption were rife among the bands, who resorted to pillage and rapine. The local elites struggled to maintain order in an era of widespread resistance to conscription, endemic desertion, and epidemic banditry. The large number of names, the British colloquialisms, and the implicit assumptions of a significant knowledge about the peninsula and the campaign will pose a significant challenge to the nonspecialist. There is one map of the Iberian Peninsula (xii), but the book would have been enhanced by the addition of several larger scale maps. There is a glossary of terms to aid the nonspecialist. University of Montana Linda Frey Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. By Patrick Faas. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 384. $18.00.) The author of this book is a Dutch chef and food journalist. His enthusiasm for ancient Roman food is demonstrated in Around the Roman Table, published in Dutch in 1994 and now available in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside. The book is divided into two halves. Part one (1–172) is a historical survey with many quotations in translation from Latin sources. Part two (175–348) consists of BOOK REVIEWS 875 recipes, mostly rearranged from the culinary text Apicius, with Patrick Faas’s commentary and additional relevant quotations. The recipes and surrounding discussions make this book an important resource for food history classes. The publisher carefully gives “no guarantee that they will suit the modern palate,” but Faas has tested them (or most of them), and they really work (vi). For the sake of those who use them, the reviewer inserts a few corrections. As a modern equivalent for apsinthium, absinthe will not do: absinthe is seriously hard liquor, and as such was unknown to ancient Romans, but we may reasonably use the term “vermouth,” a flavored wine like its Roman ancestor (118). For ram’s peas, whatever they may be, substitute chickpeas (87). For jellyfish read “sea anemone” (337). For the stuffed mouse recipe, be sure to use the edible dormouse Glis glis, which was indeed bred for food in classical Rome, and leave ordinary household mice to cats (290). Faas’s flower bulbs, as he hesitatingly admits, are grape hyacinth bulbs, still a popular appetizer in parts of Greece and Italy. The “salted dogberries” served to divine guests by Philemon and Baucis were sorbs or serviceberries, and their “horseradish” was no such thing. It was a big black radish, but this last confusion occurs commonly in dictionaries; Faas and his translator deserve to be forgiven (84). All these are minor matters. The quotations from sources throughout the book are well chosen, generous, and accurately translated. The remaining text of part one, though engaging and full of fascinating detail on food, wine, dining, and festivity, contains some misunderstandings and questionable assertions, especially where Faas ventures beyond his culinary expertise. Whether because he is not a trained historian, or because the translation fails to render doubts and ironies, he makes dubious assertions without apparent hesitation: that Romulus and Remus “grew up without any noticeable psychological disturbances,” notwithstanding that one was to kill the other; that “the first stage of Rome’s culinary refinement” is to be dated to 616 BC; that “Christians assumed control” at the accession of Constantine (13, 15, 30). He seems to deduce from an aside by Pliny that “the consumption of pigs at dinner parties had trebled over 140 years,” as if marketing surveys were among Pliny’s sources (28). Sometimes (on “parasites,” for example) he absentmindedly limits himself to early Greek evidence, overlooking its irrelevance to Rome (61–62). Faas’s recipes and quotations are extremely useful. Teachers will find his book an indispensable resource, but will want to recommend additional reading on Roman culture. Saint-Coutant, France Andrew Dalby 876 THE HISTORIAN Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. By Frank L. Holt. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 241. $24.95.) This rich book will attract anyone who cares about Afghanistan in ancient or modern times. It will also fascinate—and depress—readers who are concerned for the preservation of the material record of antiquity. The central figure in the work is Alexander the Great, arguably the greatest military genius of all time. Alexander spent almost two years (from 329 to 327 BC) in the Persian provinces of Bactria and Sogdiana (now eastern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan), coping with a native insurrection that he had provoked by occupying and colonizing the area. Frank L. Holt gives a somber narrative of the campaign, which displayed an ever-escalating degree of savagery. First taken by surprise by simultaneous rebellions over the entire vast terrain, Alexander learned to cope with the strategic problem of insurgency. His army was technically superior to any forces he had to face, but it needed to cover and control an expanse of country ranging from the salt desert of Turkmenistan to the mountains of Tadzhikistan. The solution was to fight on several simultaneous fronts in a constant war of attrition until what was left had become a wasteland. This scenario, of course, calls to mind the tragic events of the last generation with the Soviet occupation, and now the abortive efforts to quash the insurgency that the war against the Taliban has unleashed. Holt gives a number of detailed and confronting parallels and presents a grim recipe for lasting peace. If one takes Alexander as a model, then the principal ingredient is total ruthlessness. Rebellious cities were sacked, their inhabitants killed or enslaved, and savage reprisals avenged the few military setbacks After a reverse in the valley of the Zeravshan, Alexander retaliated with systematic devastation of the whole agricultural area as far as the desert and killed all suspected sympathizers. If not genocide, it was mass killing. Added to that, Alexander forcibly recruited tens of thousands of youths of military age, had them trained in Macedonian weaponry, and earmarked them for fighting in the West. They never returned, and in their place Alexander established a permanent holding army of Westerners and a network of garrison cities where a military elite of settlers lorded it over the native population. The most famous is the great foundation of Ai Khanoum on the River Oxus, which was excavated by a French team between 1964 and 1978, revealing the most splendid buildings, including a quite magnificent palace for the resident governor as well as a theater and gymnasium, exclusively for the Greek residents. Holt gives a detailed and compelling description of the ambience of Ai Khanoum but then switches us brutally to the present (154–62). The city is now BOOK REVIEWS 877 in the same state of destruction that it experienced when the nomad invaders sacked it in the second century BC. The excavations “have been obliterated by callous looters and careless warlords,” so that “the whole city now resembles a cratered lunar landscape” (162–63). Holt gives a searing indictment of the sheer destructiveness of the antiquities trade, which has broken up and dissipated some of the most prodigious and historically informative coin hoards from antiquity. Modern greed and ancient ruthlessness combine in a riveting exposition, which at times leaves one in despair of the human condition. But perhaps one should end with the more optimistic words of Paul Bernard, the great French excavator of Ai Khanoum: “The ruins are waiting for us to bring them to light a second time.” University of Western Australia A. B. Bosworth Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. By Sujata Iyengar. (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. x, 310. $50.00.) This book joins a burgeoning field of research into conceptions of race and skin color in early modern England. The author rejects the idea of a single, master narrative about the development of English Renaissance notions of race; instead, she seeks to reveal the “polyphony” of discursive voices about race enunciated in literary, historical, religious, and scientific texts of the time (15). Her monograph offers no groundbreaking central idea; however, in its deft and ingenious orchestration of the polyphonic discourse on race in the Renaissance, it provides fresh and valuable insights into an array of works from erotic lyric to Biblical song and from drama to prose romance. Sujata Iyengar divides her book into three parts: “Ethiopian Histories,” “Whiteness Visible,” and “Travail Narratives.” In these sections, she analyzes a wide range of skin-color phenomena represented in early modern literature: blackness, whiteness, blushing, blanching, sunburning, cosmetic face-painting, and greensickness, to name the most important. According to Iyengar, these representations of skin color have broad implications not only for notions of race, but also for conceptions of sex, gender, sexual orientation, and status during the time. Throughout her analysis of “shades of difference,” she shows the complex and indeterminate meanings that writings on skin color often produced. What she asserts about blushes—they “prove nothing except their own ambiguity”—she might have claimed about any skin coloring as rendered in English Renaissance literature (130). However, Iyengar provides more than a simple series of examples of ambiguous meaning. Despite her aversion to master narratives, her analysis 878 THE HISTORIAN adheres to a general developmental scheme. She borrows Raymond Williams’s idea that any moment in cultural history represents a mingling of residual, dominant, and emergent “structures of feeling” (3). She sees a gradual movement within early modern literature from residual racial mythologies to an emergent racial “science”—from narratives that often show the socially constructed nature of race to narratives that increasingly emphasize an essentialist view of race (race as something fixed, innate, and, to speak anachronistically, biological). If there is a weakness in this book, it lies in Iyengar’s neglect to explain this movement from mythology to “science” more clearly. The very richness of her account sometimes muffles the force of her main argument. Shades of Difference is a work of impressive scholarship; in it, the author shows careful archival work in the primary literature as well as comprehensive reading in the secondary literature. It provides useful historical contexts (on Afro-Britons, gypsies, slavery, and the roots of scientific racism in England) for the literature it examines. In the density, intricacy, and allusiveness of its analysis, this study is more suited to the scholar than the common reader. However, in its evocation of the wonderful, dazzling plenty of English Renaissance treatments of skin color, it should attract and delight even the newcomer to the field. John Carroll University John McBratney What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, An Oral History. By Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband. (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2005. Pp. xxiv, 434. $27.50.) The authors of this absorbing and important book present the results of a major collaborative oral history project that is remarkable for its scope and sophistication. From 1993 to 1999 the two authors, a historian and a social scientist, used standard opinion survey techniques to send questionnaires to thousands of randomly selected members of appropriate age cohorts in four German cities. They backed this up with similar surveys of German Jews, mostly now living in other countries. The information won from a surprisingly good response rate (over 50 percent) was backed up by nearly 200 in-depth interviews, a selection of which is presented, to powerful effect, in the first 250 pages or so of the book. The real meat of the book, however, is in the statistical analysis of the survey evidence in the last part of the study. This shows, among other things, that everyday relations between Jews and non-Jews in Germany deteriorated steadily from 1933 onward. True, a majority of Jews who stayed in Germany reported that they received significant help from non-Jewish friends or neighbors, but BOOK REVIEWS 879 then, they were the survivors. The authors report an understandable belief by these people that they were being spied on by the Gestapo, which emerges as a more proactive institution than some recent studies have maintained. In their survey of non-Jewish opinion, the authors present data showing that around half the respondents had been “positive” or “most positive” in their attitude to National Socialism at one time or another, but of course the respondents, born mostly between 1910 and 1928 (the cutoff date) were overwhelmingly young at the time of the Third Reich and so belonged to the generation most heavily indoctrinated by the Nazis. The Nazis’ claims to have abolished unemployment and reduced crime rates were the most significant sources of this retrospective popularity. The people interviewed did not mention the regime’s foreign policy successes at all, though these were unquestionably among the most important sources of Hitler’s popularity at the time; by the 1990s Germans no longer thought such triumphs important or perhaps had become ashamed of their enthusiasm for them. The survey data for the impact of terror on ordinary Germans are even more problematic. The authors show that few respondents came into direct or indirect contact with Gestapo, or feared incarceration in a concentration camp. Yet the Gestapo was only one among a vast range of agencies of terror and surveillance under the Third Reich, ranging from the Block Warden to the welfare office. State prisons were far more important than concentration camps up to 1939, and sanctions such as removal of welfare benefits or drafting into hard labor on the West Wall were far more common means of enforcing conformity than arrest by the police. While the authors’ detailed findings give much food for thought and add significantly to our knowledge, they do not justify their sweeping conclusion “that Hitler and National Socialism were so immensely popular among most Germans that intimidation and terror were rarely needed to enforce loyalty.” University of Cambridge Richard J. Evans Hitler Youth. By Michael H. Kater. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 355. $27.95.) Over the past two decades, the scholarly literature on the Hitler Youth, particularly in German, has expanded enormously, ranging from secondary works to documentary films by Guido Koppe and numerous recollections of former members. The author has added to this literature with his general survey on the Hitler Youth, which relies on a wide array of published and unpublished 880 THE HISTORIAN primary sources and numerous memoirs and recollections of former members of the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the League of German Girls (BDM). He examines the genesis and activities of the HJ between 1926 and 1939, and he devotes over half of the book to the role of “dissidents and rebels” and the experiences of the HJ and BDM during World War II. Michael H. Kater notes that the “well organized Hitler Youth mobilized the great majority of Hitler’s young subjects towards Nazi ends,” and its program was “loved” by most of its members (113). According to the author, “[T]he hallmark of HJ socialization was militarization, with a view to a war of territorial expansion and . . . the neutralization of Europe’s Jews” (28–29). Many of Kater’s generalizations about the attraction of the HJ to Germany’s youth, particularly during the prewar years, are well known and supported by a number of recollections of former HJ members such as Alfons Heck (A Child of Hitler, 1985) and Willy Schumann (Growing up in Hitler’s Germany, 1991). Still, a significant part of the book presents a far less positive image of the HJ. The author admits that the expansion of the HJ, until membership became compulsory in 1939, was because of the “forced incorporation of previously organized leagues and less on voluntary memberships . . .” (22). Even though he discounts the impact of young dissidents, Kater describes in great detail working-class gangs who hated middle-class HJ leaders, and he notes that solid middle-class high school students, who belonged to the Swing Youth, accepted “non-Aryans” in their midst. The Hitler Youth was unable to control these groups and it took the judiciary and Heinrich Himmler’s police apparatus to crush them. The Hitler Youth, which Kater charges “appeared corrupt and diseased to the core” and suffered from theft, sadism, and lack of discipline, had difficulties convincing its members to choose Nazi Party career positions or to volunteer en masse for the Waffen SS after 1939 (58). Flakhelfer (antiaircraft gunner assistants) in early 1943 were glad to be separated from the HJ because they thought “it stood for infancy and immaturity” (203). The author’s treatment of the BDM reveals similar problems between the ideal and reality. Kater comments that the purpose of BDM programs was to prepare girls “for wifehood and motherhood,” yet sexual indecency was widespread, leading to illegitimate births and the spread of venereal disease, particularly during the war (83). And by 1944, BDM girls manned the guns as Flakhelfer and used antitank weapons on the Oder front. Nonetheless, Kater concludes that the youth “performed as expected almost to the end” (261). The HJ participated in the racial crimes of the regime, but the author insists that “the degree of guilt” of an HJ member (and former member) depended on his or her age, power position, and crimes committed (262). Much of what is BOOK REVIEWS 881 covered in this stimulating book is familiar to the specialist on Nazi Germany, but it will be of value to the general reader. Mississippi State University Johnpeter Horst Grill Chivalry. By Maurice Keen. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 303. $20.00.) This is a reprint, in the Nota Bene paperback series, of the author’s much-praised book published in 1984. There has been much research on war and chivalry in the past twenty years, so how well has the work lasted? Maurice Keen used much source material but was more attached to the literary than Jean Flori, whose range is even greater.1 Like Flori, Keen concludes that chivalry was essentially a secular code little influenced by the church. But although Flori believed crusading involved rejection of chivalry, most would concur with Keen that it became a part of the code. Keen has less to say than Flori on the origins of chivalry, partly because he emphasizes later medieval developments, asserting that chivalric display was evidence of its vigor rather than its decay. He is also deeply interested in England, which he saw as importing chivalric ideas from France, although Flori suggested that Germany was its birthplace. Both, however, agree in seeing chivalry as beginning among the knights, though K. F. Werner suggested that its origins lie with the aristocracy.2 All three writers take a positive view of chivalry as a civilizing force, and it is on this point that Keen’s book seems most dated. We now understand that the staple of medieval warfare was ravaging, the systematic victimization of the weak, whom chivalry pretended to protect. Gilbert of Mons tells us about the prickly individuality of the warriors, ever ready to indulge in bloody tournaments or war for personal revenge.3 Lords and knights regarded themselves as members of a “club,” and though it is difficult for us to define the criteria for membership, their exclusivism has been chronicled by Constance Bouchard.4 William the Marshal despised Mercadier, yet both fought for Richard I. But William, although not wealthy, was “one of us” while Mercadier was a “mercenary.” His kind threatened the monopoly of violence claimed 1. J. Flori, L’essor de la chevalerie (Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1986). 2. K. F. Werner, “Du nouveau sur un vieux thème. Les origines de la ‘noblesse’ et de la chevalerie”, Compte-rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1985), 186–200; Naissance de la noblesse (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 3. Gilbert of Mons, Chronicle of Hainaut, trans. L. Napran (Woodstock: Boydell, 2005). 4. C. B. Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble. Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 882 THE HISTORIAN by the Marshal and his like and had to be kept in its place. Richard Kaeuper has a much less positive view of chivalry, regarding it, at best, with ambivalence and, at worst, as an important part of the problem of violence in medieval society.5 Keen’s ideas are, therefore, dated, but still in the framework of discussion. In one respect this is very much the case. One of Keen’s key texts, Geoffrey de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie, is unusual in being addressed not merely to nobles but also to men-at-arms, and this reflects not only Keen’s point about fewer men being dubbed, but also the changing nature of war, which was becoming professionalized (14).6 Geoffrey de Charny advanced a much more open vision of chivalry, suggesting that those outside the club could join if they displayed the right qualities. It would be interesting to know how far others shared this view, or reacted against it in favor of the closed world of the noble club. University of Swansea John France The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 418. $39.95.) This author seeks to integrate a chronological history of the Soviet Gulag with pertinent documents gleaned from his extensive knowledge of the Soviet archival record. In concentrating on the period 1929–1941, Oleg V. Khlevniuk does not include the early development of the Gulag or its substantial changes after World War II. In the period covered—what he calls the time of formation and entrenchment—he ably demonstrates how the camps developed, how they fit into the Soviet economy, and the relationship between the center and periphery in their administration. Khlevniuk blames both the camp bosses and the central authorities for the unimaginable abuses that happened regularly across the Gulag system, arguing that Stalin understood and approved of the operations. Many of the important motifs of early Soviet history are played out from the point of view of the camps. Khlevniuk shows how the Ukrainian famine, collectivization of agriculture, the murder of Sergei Kirov, and the Great Terror of the 1930s affected the population and profile of the huge penal system. He traces, 5. R. W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6. Geoffrey de Charny, A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry, trans. E. Kennedy, Intro. W. Kaeuper (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).This was one of Keen’s three key texts; the others have also been translated: Raymond Lull, Book of Chivalry and The Anonymous Ordene de Chivalry, ed. B. R. Price (Union City, Calif.: Chivalry Bookshop, 2004). BOOK REVIEWS 883 using many relevant documents, the plans to reform the camps and to integrate them into the USSR’s centrally planned economy. The grand idea of putting anti-Soviet forces to work in support of the state, however, often ran afoul of the desire to maintain prisoners on the lowest possible rations while giving them nearly unbearable conditions in which to live. Because of his sources—Soviet bureaucratic memoranda full of jargon and acronyms—Khlevniuk’s story rarely illustrates the human toll taken by the Gulag. Even his last chapter, entitled “The Victims,” is more prosopographical than personal. Yet behind the statistics, human suffering peeps through, as in this letter in which a lamenting prisoner schemes to avoid work: “In addition to the usual fake illnesses caused by self-mutilation, self-induced rectum prolapse, and artificial phlegmone, prisoners have lately been affected en masse by stomach disorders and even edemas caused by eating salt or dry coffee and drinking untreated water” (74). The History of the Gulag is aimed at graduate students and professional historians. Scholars of the Soviet period will use it as a resource rather than a comprehensive Gulag history. This book could also be used for undergraduate classes, helping students to produce studies on the economy, politics, and rhetoric of the Soviet state in the prewar period. Though the translation, charts, and index are very good, Yale University Press blundered in the design of the dust jacket. Two of the three photos on the cover portray Solovki, the first major camp of the Gulag system. One is a still from the 1927 propaganda film Solovki and the other shows the mid-1990s reconstruction of the monastery that housed the camp. Obviously, neither of these pictures fits the period 1927–1941. Though this may seem a trivial detail, the use of inappropriate photographs undercuts the authority of a volume devoted to publishing unvarnished primary documents for serious historical use. University of the Sciences in Philadelphia Roy R. Robson England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel. By James McDermott. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 411. $40.00.) In 1988 there appeared a host of books on the defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which generated further studies taking advantage of critical responses and continuing research. James McDermott weighs in with a worthy book carrying fresh material on English piracy and the Royal Navy. Admittedly from an English 884 THE HISTORIAN perspective, it is of limited use for the broader relations of England and Spain during the 1585–1604 war and the 1588 campaign. For the Spanish side, to which Spanish scholars have lately contributed much, McDermott depends on the work of English-speaking scholars of Spain such as Geoffrey Parker. The only Spanish source in his uncritical bibliography is C. Fernández Duro’s (under Duro!) La Armada Invencible [1884–1885]. At times McDermott seems anxious to do for the English what Parker did for the Spanish in The Grand Strategy of Philip II [1998] but lacks sufficient documentation—above all with Queen Elizabeth I, who, unlike King Philip II, was not given to putting thoughts on paper. She seems almost like Leo Tolstoy’s Napoleon, swept along on the tides of history, in her case, tides driven by sea dogs, ambitious traders, and hot Protestants. A strength of the book is its stress on English perceptions of Spain and Spaniards, beginning with the 1493 Papal Bull and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the world between Spain and Portugal for commerce, colonization, and the spread of Christianity. He gives considerable attention to the division of Christendom in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, the gradual development of an English Protestant identity, and the uneasy situation of English Catholics. Into this he weaves English voyages of commerce and, as a student of Martin Frobisher, discovery that often ran afoul of both Spain’s claimed monopolies and the Inquisition. He is good on the problematic growth of English piracy and gives economic issues due attention. His many quotations of original sources retain their original Elizabethan spelling. Matters come together with the revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II that erupted in the mid-1560s and English concerns about the threat of Philip’s power linked to fulminations against Elizabeth by successive popes. With France sidelined by civil war, Spain, once England’s useful ally, became its chief enemy, especially after 1580, when Philip annexed Portugal and acquired its potent navy. McDermott’s treatment of the 1581–1583 Azores campaign is confused. Whether or not “necessary,” the “quarrel” became seemingly inevitable, given English fears created by the Treaty of Joinville [1584] and Spanish successes in the Netherlands that prompted Elizabeth to make the Treaty of Nonsuch [1585] with the Dutch rebels. When Elizabeth let Sir Francis Drake sail against Spain and the Spanish Main in 1585, war ensued. The Armada campaign is fairly, if hardly originally, handled, with the dates all in “Old Style.” McDermott ends on a triumphant note with England’s national identity in full blossom. There are some mistakes: the Marquis of Santa Cruz was Álvaro, not Albaro, de Bazán; Dom António of Avis was prior of Crato, not Cato; at Mostaganem, BOOK REVIEWS 885 12,000 Christians were taken captive, not dead; and the brothers Guise of 1587 were cousins, not uncles, of Mary Queen of Scots (54, 165). Santa Clara University Peter Pierson Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 1280–1390. By James M. Murray. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 409. $100.00.) In this study the author sets out to explore the fourteenth-century social and economic evolution that transformed Bruges into the international commercial and economic center of northern Europe. James M. Murray begins his book with a narrative of the political events that provided the backdrop to Bruges’s emergence as an economic powerhouse. In early chapters, he maps out the city’s economic and social topography and explores the nature and rise of its population. In the central part of the book the author focuses on the dynamics behind Bruges’s evolution as the preeminent center of business in northern Europe. He sketches the evolution of banking and analyzes the complex relationship among money changers, hostellers, and foreign merchants in the city, negotiating the tricky world of currency, hostellers, and international traders particularly smoothly. Here he provides a clear picture of how these elements became intricately interrelated. Murray also discusses the centrality of Bruges as a local, regional, and international economic center, with special reference to the commerce in wool, cloth, and gold. He devotes a chapter to the participation of women in business, both as agents and as commodities. In the final chapter, he details how the Burgundians successfully integrated Bruges into the late medieval Burgundian empire. The book, however, has debilitating flaws. Perhaps the most serious of these is the lack of a thesis, which might have imbued the material with some overarching organization and cohesion. The title is no help. He alludes at the end of chapter one to “a series of social and economic technologies I will call ‘cradle capitalism,’ ” but of what those technologies consist and how they work is never addressed in any systematic fashion (21). The chapter in which he introduces the phrase is, after all, primarily dedicated to a narrative of political events, and the concept does not appear again until page 190, where it gets a paragraph. The chapter on women is particularly weak. Murray begins by claiming that women in Bruges did not suffer from the patriarchal system but then spends the rest of the chapter trying to prove that women had very little agency outside the family. 886 THE HISTORIAN Careless mistakes, omissions, and outright errors are endemic. These include minor slips that should have been caught by the press’s editor, if not by the author. There are instances of poor or unclear wording, for example, “The bodies and costs of the Ghent occupation had scarcely been buried” (358). One does not “bury” costs. The tragedy of this work is that it might have been a very good addition to the historiography of one of medieval Europe’s most fascinating cities. The lack of concern for developing a coherent thesis and the lack of care in assembling the volume, however, can only serve to undermine its otherwise considerable potential contributions. University of Idaho Ellen E. Kittell The Making of the Jacobean Regime: James VI and I and the Government of England, 1603–1605. By Diana Newton. (London: Boydell Press, 2005. Pp. x, 164. $80.00.) Like the modernity of Kansas City, the rehabilitation of James I of England has gone just about as far as it can go. The contempt in which he was long held by historians has been countered, and appropriately so, during the past thirty years; but the author of this work’s attempt to portray him as a masterful statesman suggests that the pendulum will have to start swinging back. Diana Newton certainly demonstrates that the new king handled the competing claims of his Catholic and Puritan subjects astutely during his first years on the English throne. She also rightly emphasizes his moderation, his constant quest for information, and his efforts to improve administrative effectiveness at the local level. In pursuit of this last concern, the king made careful use of his Privy Council, of bishops, and of leading gentry and justices of the peace. On all these counts, the traditional view of the bumbling and inattentive monarch, who owed what little success he achieved in his early years to his shrewd minister, Robert Cecil, is convincingly exploded. Yet the case can be sustained only by ignoring the difficulties that James did not surmount. First was the issue of finance. The large shadow that hung over the entire reign was the chronic shortfall in royal revenue, a problem that the government proved incapable of solving. On the two occasions when the author addresses the issue at length, she evades an admission of failure. In the first, she shifts the focus to a discussion of the treatment of recusants, where her ground is firmer (119ff.). In the second, the best she can do is to agree that James was no “financial fool” (141ff.). Tellingly, she fails to mention that Parliament in 1604 refused to grant supply. BOOK REVIEWS 887 Indeed, it is only by giving skimpy treatment to Parliament, and focusing almost exclusively on its deliberations about religion—in what is otherwise a deeply researched and forcefully argued book—that Newton is able to maintain her interpretation. The contrast with S. R. Gardiner’s magisterial history of these years is instructive. Although her story embraces the second session of the reign’s first Parliament, there is no mention of matters to which Gardiner devoted many pages—wardship, trade, monopolies, purveyance, or the “Apology.” One of the prickliest encounters of these years, the discussion of Union between England and Scotland, receives only cursory mention (in comparison with the extensive treatment of Puritanism and recusancy). Embarrassments, such as the eventual passage of a subsidy in 1606 by just one vote, are ignored entirely. This is, in essence, the view from the court. It is valid as far as it goes, and the different view from the House of Commons has its limits, too. But one cannot have one without the other. Newton’s few passing comments about James misjudging his new subjects are quickly countered by the claim that he learned fast. But did he? That two of his leading ministers were to be impeached within twenty years suggests that he did not. The balanced account, which would give suitable weight both to the king’s successes and to his failures, has yet to be written. Princeton University Theodore K. Rabb The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. By Stanley Payne. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 400. $35.00.) The author of this book is a well-known scholar of twentieth-century Spain. This book is packed with new information and supported by ample notes, but it will be difficult for any general reader to follow. One of the author’s major points is that the Spanish communists and their socialist and anarchist allies had a major influence on the evolution of the Spanish Republic from 1931 to the outbreak of the civil war. First, for some time before war broke out in July of 1936, the Spanish communists had possessed far more influence than the weak Spanish liberals or social democrats. Second, the power the communists had over the Spanish Left has been greatly underestimated in France, Britain, and the United States from 1931 to date. Third, the French Popular Front government, which was elected in 1936, was far more reformist and less revolutionary than Spain’s Popular Front government. Stanley Payne’s treatment of the French Communist and Socialist parties is particularly well done. The political conditions in France were obscured by left-wing journalists and politicians in the Western democracies throughout the Spanish Civil War. 888 THE HISTORIAN The author presents three contradictory themes, but they are scattered throughout the text. In the first of the three, the author presents an objective account of Spain’s confused attempts at democratic reform and class-based revolution during 1931–1936. From August 1936 to March 1939, Soviet military intervention failed to rescue the Popular Front government from General Francisco Franco’s victorious armies. Unfortunately Franco, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, as enemies of democracy, are almost totally absent from this book. Payne writes a fine account of how Georgy Dimitrov convinced Joseph Stalin to drop his 1928 “socialist fascist” line and adopt the “popular front” strategy from August 1935 to March 1939. The author portrays Stalin not as the cartoon figure of the 1950s, but rather as a wise politician collecting intelligence from Germany, Austria, France, and Spain. Stalin’s deliberative, ad hoc decisions from July–September 1936 to send military supplies to the Spanish Republic are quite informative. In chapter eight, on Soviet military operations in Spain from September 1936 to March 1939, Payne is at his best. The Soviets sent more men and military supplies to the republic than hitherto understood in the democratic West. The author remains balanced in this portion of the book in neither praising nor condemning Dimitrov or Stalin, but simply letting the facts speak for themselves. Stalin’s dozen top “secret agents” who were dispatched to Spain are described as “frightened, treasonous, murderous, paranoid and incompetent.” Which of these agents were really carrying out Stalin’s flexible programs will probably remain a mystery. Most previous accounts of the Spanish Civil War written in English heretofore treated the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity (POUM) as somewhat heroic, or at least as martyrs of democracy, as did George Orwell. POUM’s members became victims of Stalin’s police in May 1937 in Barcelona. In contrast, Payne regards the POUM from its beginnings as revolutionary agitators who helped destroy the constitutional Republic of Spain in 1931. For Payne, the “revolutionary process,” not Stalin, was the major enemy of democracy. Payne provides many up-to-date sources for professional historians, analyzing scholarly monographs, printed documentary collections, and leftist pamphlets published during the 1930s; he also includes many sources, including new monographs, which became available only after the collapse of the USSR. When reading the citations, however, the reader has little idea which of these sources are reliable. A bibliography would have been a welcome addition. Payne discusses the ideas of “revolutionary communists”; “revolutionary socialists”; “reform socialists”; “revolutionary anarchists”; “Leninists”; BOOK REVIEWS 889 “Trotskyites”; “Kerenskyites”; and their many front groups, youth committees, liaison committees, and fellow travelers among the working and middle classes in Spain and elsewhere. Yet it is difficult to distinguish mere propaganda from mindless ideology or well thought out philosophy in this extended account of Spanish revolutionary agitation. To put the problem in military terms, the tactics sometimes get in the way of the strategy. The conservative author becomes, at times, the self-appointed advisor to Spain’s many parties, union leaders, and cabinet ministers during the 1917–1939 era. This will raise many doubts among historians. Whether Stalin’s use of propaganda was tactical or represented his ultimate goal remains problematic, and Payne’s frequent comparisons of Spanish revolutionary sentiment with crises in Finland, Weimar Germany, Mongolia, China, and Afghanistan strains the imagination of the historian of the 1930s. This book represents a first-class job of research, but the use of the passive voice will annoy the reader. What emerges from the study is that, in February 1936, there were many idealistic communists, socialists, and democrats who, because of Spain’s civil war, wound up becoming cynical and disappointed over Stalin’s deal-making with Hitler. Ohio University Robert H. Whealey Print Culture and the Early Quakers. By Kate Peters. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. $75.00.) The author of this study has produced a model monograph on how Quakers before 1660 used printing to forward their movement. She writes for two audiences: the relatively narrow group of specialists in Quaker history and the much larger one of historians of the English Revolution and Interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s. Her work speaks clearly to both. As Kate Peters notes, in Quakerism, we have an unusual conjunction of resources for study of a radical religious movement. Quakers were not only prolific publishers of books and pamphlets, but they were also careful to preserve manuscripts and correspondence, which allow us to glimpse the discussions and negotiations behind the printed word. Peters mines both in a series of carefully argued and documented chapters. Peters concludes that printing was central to the rapid growth of Quakerism in the British Isles between 1652, usually regarded as the beginning of an organized Quaker movement, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Engaging historians who have questioned how effective print could be as a means of 890 THE HISTORIAN communication in a society with significant illiteracy, she concludes that Quakers aimed at profound changes, “requiring an almost corporate response in their readers, first to change the way in which they led their individual spiritual lives, and then to urge their contribution to the establishment of a truly godly religious community” (253). Peters argues that a small group of Quaker leaders—George Fox, Edward Burrough, Richard Farnworth, James Nayler, and Margaret Fell— closely controlled Quaker publishing, which was concerned with communicating a focused, consistent message. A good example is the Quaker defense of women’s preaching. Although the prominence of Quaker women ministers marked the movement as hopelessly radical in the eyes of many contemporaries, Peters notes that the printed defenses were largely the work of men, and they did not challenge other aspects of patriarchal culture. The overall Quaker message, in Peters’s view, was both religious and political. Quakers wanted to direct all of their hearers and readers to the Light of Christ that they felt was within all people, obedience to which was the foundation of Christian life and society. Thus, with an intensity that Karl Rove and James Carville would applaud, they were quick to respond fiercely to any attack. But they had a political agenda as well. From the earliest days of the movement, the Society of Friends used the press to argue for religious liberty and to try to influence Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and Parliament in the direction of what the Friends perceived as a godly society. There is simply nothing not to praise about Peters’s work. Wide-ranging in its research, unobtrusive in dialogue with other historians, careful and thoughtful in its conclusions, it is an important contribution to our understanding of both a religious movement and a critical period in British history. Earlham College Thomas D. Hamm Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain. By Lucy K. Pick. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. 239. $65.00.) The author’s analytical study provides remarkable insight into the quintessence of Spanish medieval history in which three religions and cultures—those of Christians, Jews, and Muslims—though frequently in conflict with one another, coexisted within the same political, economic, social, and intellectual dimensions. This paradox, initiated with the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, endorsed their subsequent dominance over the former Christian Visigothic kingdom. Unlike María Rosa Menocal’s 2002 Ornament of the World depiction BOOK REVIEWS 891 of al-Andalus as the reverential “culture of tolerance,” Lucy K. Pick has instead chosen to demonstrate that the convivencia, or tensions, among these three groups created unique opportunities for Christians to dominate the peninsula, not just as conquerors forcing conversions on the Jews and Muslims, but to promote the Christian faith through religious polemic writings, which in turn “. . . could support a Christian self-understanding that allowed Christians to permit certain non-Christians under particular circumstances to live in their midst” (5). How and why this convivencia succeeded provides Pick with her essential theme that this extraordinarily paradoxical milieu occurred under the instigation and guidance of the prodigious early thirteenth-century theologian and historian, the archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada [1209–1247]. In a precise and logical formularized style, Pick convincingly argues that Rodrigo supported and encouraged the 1212 crusade of Las Navas de Tolosa, which eventually turned the tide and demolished the Almohad’s control of al-Andalus. Pick asserts, somewhat justifiably, that Rodrigo promoted this crusade not to recreate the secular monarchy of the Visigothic kingdom, but to reestablish Christian unity and primacy in Spain under the archbishop of Toledo. However, readers should not misunderstand the true nature of Pick’s book. She has not written a hagiographical biography of this renowned archbishop, but an articulate and well-researched study of how and why Rodrigo used his profound belief in the unity of God, within the Trinity, to nurture the continued military expansion of Christianity, as well as “a belief in the originary divine unity of all creation, a return to which Christians could help foster by assimilating foreign peoples and bits of learning” (14). Indeed, it is these “foreign peoples” and their “bits of learning” with which Rodrigo, the true believer, must contend and at the same time establish a relationship. Rodrigo’s Christian mission is epitomized by Pick’s erudition, which allows the reader to delve skillfully into how Rodrigo, certainly influenced by northern French scholars as well as Toledan thinkers, used one particular anti-Jewish polemic, the Dialogus libri uite, to promote the realization that Christianity is the true faith. Yet Rodrigo’s polemical writings were not a barrier to convivencia, but rather a program of activities, though paradoxical, to stabilize the relationship among these three divergent peoples and to promote Arabic and Hebrew scholarship. “This program was one that supported Rodrigo’s understanding of the world as ideally unified, and it provided a welldefined understanding of how Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted and could continue to coexist in it” (20). University of New Haven Paulette L. Pepin 892 THE HISTORIAN Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. Edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury. (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. x, 261. $85.00.) This collection of eight essays, with an introduction by the editors, focuses on aspects of female religious experience that can be analyzed under the rubric of “space.” The term is defined broadly, referring to everything from the ways in which female patronage created physical spaces of medieval churches, to Margery Kempe’s imposition of her religiosity on public spaces, to the positioning of male and female in religious art. Although most of the essays focus on English topics, three concern continental subjects. The time frame of the essays is also varied, with a few focusing on the period between 800 and 1300, but with the majority concentrating on the later Middle Ages. Although hardly comprehensive, the volume presents an accessible introduction to the issue of space and gender in the medieval church. The introduction seeks to ground the eight essays in a theoretical context; this is somewhat less successful than perhaps intended, because there is little theoretical focus in the essays themselves. This is not to say that the authors of the essays are naive or simplistic in their approaches; indeed, all are well wrought and thoughtful, if not all that deep. The organization of the volume seems random, with no apparent chronological or thematic order, but because the essays themselves are discrete and rarely reference each other, this is not jarring. The first essay, by Ruth Evans, focuses on the York play cycle’s use of cross-dressing and the physical locations of their performance. Virginia Blanton’s essay on the relationship between Ely Cathedral and the cult of St. Aethelthryth, as documented in the historical cartulary, the Liber Eliensis, follows. The third and fourth essays, by the editors, focus on Margery Kempe. Fifth is Katherine French’s essay on gender-specific seating in English parish churches and the ways in which the installation of pews affected seating arrangements. Sixth is Ena Heller’s study of female patronage in Florentine churches. Seventh is Jane Schulenberg’s essay on female exclusion in male monastic centers. The last essay, by Corin Schleif, discusses the ways in which right/left dichotomies influenced the positioning of male and female figures in religious art. As the essays themselves are so varied in subject, it is difficult to discuss them as a group. The general impression the reader receives is that the relationship between gender and space in the medieval world is an area only beginning to be studied and that there is room for a great deal more work on this topic. BOOK REVIEWS 893 In general, the essays themselves are well written, reasonably clear of jargon, and accessible to advanced undergraduate students. Notes follow each chapter, as do lists of suggested readings. One odd choice was to include original languages in the text with translations only in the notes; this works against easy understanding by students, even though other aspects of the book’s organization suggest that the goal was to make it useful for them. There are some sloppy copyediting errors that are unfortunate, but they are nothing that could interfere with the reader’s understanding of the text. Alfred University Linda E. Mitchell The Spanish Inquisition. By Helen Rawlings. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. xvii, 174. $29.95.) This author’s latest volume bears the hallmark of her previous books; it provides a succinct, comprehensive introduction to the topic—here, a survey of the institution known as the Inquisition, or the Holy Office, which operated in Spain and its colonies from 1478 to 1834. The author provides substantative scholarly apparatus to support the historical argument, while at the same time writing in a style accessible to a wide range of readers. For those who wish to understand the basics of Inquisitional ideologies, mechanisms, personnel, and procedures, as well as those who, for example, want to check a date or a fact, the seven chapters that constitute this work will serve as a useful resource. In chapter one, the author supplies one of the most valuable features of the book: a review of the historiography of the Inquisition. Citing both the more traditional trends in scholarship—the institution as a tool of the authoritarian state; the themes of corruption, torture, and prejudice; and its contribution to the cultural, economic, and political decline of Spain—and more recent, “more objective multi-disciplinary” approaches, Helen Rawlings situates the work of major scholars from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries in their historical and ideological context, highlighting what she views as their most important contributions to the field (2). The introductory section of the book continues in chapter two, which discusses the procedures that the officials of the Inquisition followed, including a description of the Inquisition’s day-to-day workings and the role that various social sectors played in its operations. Aids such as a chart that summarizes procedures and an appendix listing the Inquisitors General facilitate accessibility to the material. 894 THE HISTORIAN At the heart of The Spanish Inquisition is a series of chapters that take up each of the categories prosecuted by the Inquisition in turn: conversos (chapter three); moriscos (chapter four); Protestants, Illuminists, and humanists (chapter five); and those accused of minor heresies such as bigamy, blasphemy, witchcraft, sodomy, and solicitation (chapter six). In general, Rawlings discusses in detail the history of each group’s relationship to state and ecclesiastical mechanisms during the period covered, underscoring the complexity of the struggle to maintain hegemony by functionaries of the official institutions and the ways in which accused groups and persons resisted. During the first few decades of its existence, she suggests, the Inquisition, which prosecuted mostly so-called Judaizers, was at its most brutal: between 1480 and 1530, about 2,000 people, approximately 75 percent of those brought up on charges, died. In the next chapter, she points out that for a time, despite the assault by Christian authorities on the whole cultural identity of the moriscos, in practice, moriscos were able to maintain their religious selves intact, through the concept of taqiyya (precaution), which allowed for external Christianity and private Islam (77). She then demonstrates that, though prosecutions of Illuminists were numerically insignificant, they formed part of a deliberate strategy to link innovative trends in intellectual and religious life with the “Lutheran heresy.” Later on, the Holy Office devoted its attention to rooting out the crime of moral ignorance with the same vigor it had applied to the Jewish, Islamic, and Protestant heresies (114). One more chapter—about the last years of the Inquisition—contains a section discussing Francisco de Goya’s famous critical depictions of Inquisitional procedures and personnel, as well as a final historiographic assessment of the institution. In The Spanish Inquisition, Rawlings skillfully weaves together the juridical, social, religious, cultural, and political threads that together shaped the Spanish Inquisition, producing a volume that will probably satisfy historians and laypeople alike. Throughout the study, she offers translations of excerpts of key documents that supplement the historical record. Unfortunately she does not discuss the colonial tribunals at all, but as an accessible, comprehensive introduction to the institution, its time, and its place, the book contributes a great deal. West Chester University Stacey Schlau BOOK REVIEWS 895 The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. By Philippe Roger. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 516. $35.00.) At a time when impassioned anti-Americanism is a growing and worldwide phenomenon that often finds violent expression, it is tempting to believe that it must be the result of the mistaken policies of the United States or the serious flaws of American society. This, however, is not the case, at any rate as regards the French variety, according to this thoroughly researched and erudite study written by a distinguished French author. It is among his conclusions that “in the course of its long history French anti-Americanism had acquired a wide margin of autonomy . . . it was largely self-sustaining and self-sufficient . . . it did not depend on particular events . . .” (450). That is to say, it had much less to do with what the United States did than with what America has represented or how it has been perceived. Much of French anti-Americanism is “a checklist of prejudices” in search of validation (273). These attitudes are all the more puzzling given the affinity between many of the ideas and ideals of the founders of this country and those of the French Enlightenment. French anti-Americanism has a long history going back to the eighteenth century; it has primarily been an attitude or “emanation” of intellectuals (who influenced the rest of society or public opinion), and a “cultural hostility” has been the most enduring and dominant aspect of it. Why have the French (or the French intelligentsia) been so anti-American? To this reader the answer is not entirely clear, notwithstanding the large amount of information found in this volume devoted to tracing and cataloging the specific manifestations of these attitudes over time. Less is said about the causes than the manifestations, not that the former are overlooked. It would seem that these attitudes originate in French identity problems (again, mostly those of intellectuals), in “hatred for America fed on violent self-loathing,” and in “uneasiness over France’s decline” (274, 277). The latter has been especially pronounced in the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of American global political and military power and cultural influence. French anti-Americanism, like most other kinds, embraced a wide range of apprehensions and stereotypes (or “a bric-a-brac of grievances”) about American society and culture: materialism, money-grabbing (all the familiar evils of capitalism), soullessness, cultural backwardness, bad taste, lack of refinement and sophistication, and the identification of America with machines or a destructive technology (374). Philippe Roger comes close to proposing that America has become a menacing symbol of evil because of its 896 THE HISTORIAN identification with modernity and its problems, but cannot quite bring himself to say so. Though French anti-Americanism has its distinctive characteristics and long historical pedigree, one may suspect that some of its features are more universal, especially at the present time. They include the underlying human need to find an explanation and a target of blame for widely shared difficulties and frustrations (such as modernization has created) and for the chronic difficulty of human societies to realize their idealized aspirations. The United States was bound to stimulate disappointment as it originated in an attempt to realize ideals, many of which are incompatible or inherently unrealizable. Although a definitive study of French anti-Americanism, American readers in particular would have welcomed at least some hints as to the similarities and differences between the French and other versions. Such comparisons would help determine to what extent the phenomenon is a response to what the United States does as distinct from what it represents and why this country has lent itself to become a near universal target of scapegoating impulses. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Paul Hollander The Middle East under Rome. By Maurice Sartre. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 665. $39.95.) Studies of the Roman Near East have proliferated recently, not least because the Roman experience of what was (and is) the meeting point of vastly different cultures and peoples is still highly relevant today. There have been several works in this field of late, some of which are comparable in scale to this one, although they do not always paint with as broad a brush. Maurice Sartre is a well-respected scholar who has condensed his massive and comprehensive D’Alexandre a Zenobie: Histoire du Levant antique, I’ve siecle av. J.-C.-IIIe siecle apr. J.-C. into the present volume. He replaced the Hellenistic section with an opening chapter setting the Roman era within its historical context. As with the original, this book finishes with the remarkable story of Zenobia of Palmyra. The author gives a perfectly justifiable explanation for this cutoff point but also admits that his history ends “in mid-stream,” leaving a considerable portion of the Roman era unaccounted for. Perhaps we can hope for an equally comprehensive follow-up covering the Roman Near East from Diocletian to the Moslem conquests of AD 641. The combined experience of Catherine Porter and Elizabeth Rawlings as translators and historians helps this work’s readability. This partly offsets the density BOOK REVIEWS 897 of the subject matter, which makes this book difficult for those new to the subject. Sartre deals not just with history, but with demographics, archaeology, city planning, and rural communities, and still finds space for the sociology and religious life of the half dozen or so cultures he describes. The fact that just under half of the book’s 665 pages consists of notes, bibliography, and index reflects the extensive range of his sources. Given the work from which the text is derived and the author’s nationality, the Francophone bias of the secondary sources is unremarkable. However, the fact that those fluent in French might prefer the original work while many students who peruse the English version will be lamentably deficient in French makes the case that references to French secondary sources could have been edited down in favor of an expanded main text. The main text is broadly divided into two parts, the second part exploring the cultures involved in the first section, which is mainly chronological in character. In the first part, Sartre does a good job of explaining the reasoning behind various imperial policies and their effects in the areas where they were implemented. His impressive use of a wide variety of primary texts means that we do not see the peoples of the area simply as an administrative issue for their Roman overlords, but we also see the Romans from the various viewpoints of the peoples they administered. Cambridge University Philip Matyszak International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000. Edited by Lisa Z. Sigel. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 283. $26.95.) “Dirty” pictures or magazines did not begin or end with the American Playboy in 1953. Pornography has had a rich cultural and political history in Europe, reflecting the major turning points of the Enlightenment, revolutions, and wars. Building on the recent, seminal scholarship of Robert Darnton, Ian McCalman, and Lynn Hunt, the eleven essays in the edited collection, International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000, delve into some of those hidden links that most scholars have been too afraid to discuss. The editor wrote two of the essays, setting the parameters and contexts for the other ten contributors (one essay had two authors). Most useful is Lisa Z. Sigel’s introduction, which ties the other pieces together even though they span the seemingly unbridgeable space from the expansive definition of obscenity in the German states in the 1850s all the way to electronic transsexual imagery of the late 1990s. Here Sigel maintains that, throughout the 898 THE HISTORIAN nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pornographers could both undermine and strengthen traditional hierarchies with their stories and pictures, whether in Victorian England or in postcommunist Hungary and Ukraine. In the nineteenth century, both absolute kings and middle-class prudery could be lampooned in obscene tracts, as found by Sarah Leonard in her look at the milieu of Lola Montez in Bavaria. In twentieth-century France, most erotica remained malecentered, but that did not preclude the development of stories catering mainly to women and gay men, as noted by John Philips in his précis of prurient texts in twentieth-century France. One trend does emerge from this anthology, however. As the individual pursuit of happiness inherent in contemporary capitalism has gradually eclipsed any moral or communal restraints on desire in the West and, after 1989, in the old Soviet bloc, pornography has become more commonplace and, with globalization, more boring and predictable. John Philips notes the taming of erotica into mainstream literature in France, while Clarissa Smith describes the strange death of Britain’s traditional soft-core business. National brands now cater to expected niches, with Hungarian videos automatically associated with anal sex and multiple partners, as Katalin Milter and Joseph Slade discern. Yet the most surprising and polymorphous materials discussed in these articles stemmed from the heyday of censorship and well before sexual liberation. For example, while uncovering the persistence of the trope of the flogged slave woman in European and American pornography long after emancipation, Colette Colligan concludes that by the 1880s, heterosexual whipping fantasies routinely added twists of miscegenation, exotic locale, lesbianism, and male homosexuality to spice up tired parodies of actual slave narratives. Yet, just as the flogging scenes of William Lazenby retrospectively made the peculiar institution seem even more peculiar than it was, a few decades later, “the flogged female slave was transformed into the figurative trope of master and slave” without the West Indian or antebellum plantation setting (90). Thanks to insights such as these, this collection makes reading about the glorification of sexual violence and deviance, however taboo, worthwhile. Norfolk State University Charles H. Ford Caliban’s Shore: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Strange Fate of Her Survivors. By Stephen Taylor. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. Pp. xvi, 297. $14.95.) Tales of shipwrecks and castaways have always captured the public’s imagination. This author has written a remarkable account of the 140 individuals who sailed BOOK REVIEWS 899 from India in June of 1782 on the Grosvenor, bound for England. Disaster befell them off the southeastern African coast that August. The author has crafted a riveting narrative of their ordeal, re-creating personalities, character traits, and emotions. This work is not a scholarly study, and academic historians may be disappointed and somewhat frustrated by the absence of formal reference citations. Stephen Taylor does, however, provide notes that indicate the sources of direct quotations. Evidence obtained from written testimony of survivors and accounts of those who attempted rescue missions, along with oral histories of native tribes, form a solid base for a highly detailed rendition of events. Taylor does alert the reader to the speculative nature of parts of this account. Overall this is an exciting and suspense-filled story, which also provides insight into contemporary economic activity; technology; and values regarding social class, ethnicity, and gender. Part one provides a glimpse of late eighteenth-century British merchant culture. Taylor introduces the main characters—the passengers, captain, and crew of the Grosvenor, a 741-ton “East Indiaman.” As he discusses the uncomfortable nature of shipboard life, Taylor reminds the reader of the importance of social-class distinctions in this era. These conventional demarcations would lose their significance after the Grosvenor ran aground on a rocky reef one hundred yards offshore at Lambasi Bay, approximately 400 miles north of the Cape of Good Hope. Part two details the struggles of the 125 survivors of the shipwreck. The author expresses disdain for the conduct of Captain John Coxon. Ultimately the survivors broke off into small groups, as the strongest moved on ahead, following a southerly path. The author describes the dramatic landscape of the “Wild Coast” region in lyrical terms. The narrative relates individual experiences in detail, as the men suffered starvation, exhaustion, illness, and exposure. Taylor’s narrative grows confusing at points as the reader often struggles to keep track of the fate of specific people. What is clearly evident is the technological chasm that separates our own era from that of the Grosvenor. Relations with the native Pondo people are crucial to the survivors’ fate. The author provides some general information about various tribes in the region. Contemporary images of these people as “savages” are reinforced, as the natives continually prey on the castaways, assaulting them and plundering their meager possessions. But ultimately, it is because of the aid and hospitality of various natives that several of the group survive. Part three of Taylor’s account is the most speculative, as legends, rumors, and conjecture outweigh substantive evidence regarding the ultimate fate of three women, one of whom was pregnant, and three female children. The author argues 900 THE HISTORIAN strongly for their survival and subsequent reproductive role in native societies. But contemporary public opinion, not receptive to “ethnic fusion” and horrified at the thought of British ladies living “among naked brutes from a primitive tribe,” was more comfortable believing these women had died (228, 211). York College, City University of New York Laura Fishman Before Darwin: Reconciling God & Nature. By Keith Thomson. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 314. $27.00.) European intellectuals did not know it at the time, but they spent two centuries waiting for Charles Darwin to decide the question: is God necessary to explain the natural world? From the interventionist God that Newton needed to keep his model of the solar system working to modern-day scientists who are mostly agnostics or atheists, the pivotal figure was the second evolutionist Darwin. The suspenseful centuries before Charles Darwin completed the liberation of natural science from religion receive charming portrayals in this history of the philosophical, scientific, and theological prelude. Although there are brief sketches of the Darwinian revolution’s early impact and passing allusions to “continental” thought, the satisfying meat of Keith Thomson’s book is the portrait of the British intellectuals who were dealing uneasily with the relationship between theology and science in the wake of Galileo and Newton. Important figures like John Ray, William Paley, and Philip Henry Gosse rise from history’s dustbin and receive thoughtful portraits. In Thomson’s hands, these are no longer dim-witted losers, doddering exponents of an ancient scholastic regime destroyed by Darwin. Instead, we are given the opportunity to appreciate the contemporaneous significance of their attempts to resolve the disparity between the “Book of God” and “His Works.” The portrait of John Ray, one of the founders of biology as an academic discipline, is particularly revelatory. Ray is now rarely given his just measure of credit as a scientific pioneer. This book is not an exercise in bland on-the-other-hand-ism. The theological arguments that do not work are gently but firmly dissected so that their flaws become easily visible. The first stages of the burgeoning scientific alternatives receive attention with their early confusions and missteps equally visible. There are many good books on the Darwinian revolution itself, but this volume is outstanding as a fair-minded presentation of the preceding period. Thomson is well suited to the considerable task he attempts, as he is both a natural writer and well read across the spectrum of philosophical, theological, and BOOK REVIEWS 901 scientific literatures required to do justice to the issues resolved by the Darwinian revolution. He is apparently as much a polymath as the great intellectual figures that he renders in his prose. However, he wears his learning lightly, and one does not feel that he is bludgeoning the reader with his mastery of obscure points. He also never indulges in stylistic excesses, so that one proceeds with pleasure from chapter to chapter. If there is a weakness to the book, it is that by the end Thomson’s account of the Darwinian moment is almost deliquescent. Perhaps it is possible to hope that Thomson will raise the level of the present controversy over intelligent design. The idea that a designer is necessary to explain life has been debated since classical times, as Thomson shows us so well, and it has not been significantly improved with the passage of time, whatever one thinks of its original merit. University of California, Irvine Michael R. Rose The Last Sentry: The True Story that Inspired The Hunt for Red October. By Gregory D. Young and Nate Braden. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005. Pp. 250. $19.99.) This is an exciting account of the 1975 mutiny aboard one of the Soviet Navy’s most advanced warships, the destroyer Storozhevoy (Sentry in English). The mutiny was led by the ship’s political commissar, Valery Sablin, a Communist idealist who became fed up with conditions in the Soviet Union and hoped that the mutiny would trigger the overthrow of Leonid Brezhnev’s government. The Soviets suppressed news of the incident, but one of the authors of this work, Gregory D. Young, a U.S. naval officer, succeeded in piecing the story together while studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His report was discovered in 1982 by Tom Clancy, who made it the basis of his best-selling fictionalized account, The Hunt for Red October. However, unlike Clancy’s novel, the ending of The Last Sentry is tragic. Sablin’s ship was bombed and seized by the Soviet military, and he subsequently was executed. Though Sablin’s story is exciting to read, it is particularly valuable for the insights it provides into the conditions that existed in Brezhnev’s empire. In a speech to the crew (reproduced in the book’s appendix) that Sablin delivered after he had imprisoned the ship’s captain, he accused the Brezhnev regime of depriving the people of basic human rights, as well as necessary consumer goods, while squandering the country’s natural resources on the military-industrial complex. Most of the crew went along with him, not only because they believed what he 902 THE HISTORIAN said was true, but also because Sablin lied to them when he said that other naval units were also preparing to rebel. Why did Sablin believe he could overthrow the Brezhnev government? Because he knew, from his study of Russian history, that naval mutinies had succeeded in bringing about political changes in the past. Several warships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet mutinied in 1905, triggering a revolution that prompted Czar Nicholas II to accept a constitution. The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 began when the cruiser Aurora fired on the Winter Palace. Moreover, Brezhnev’s government reacted as though Sablin’s mutiny was the beginning of a coup, which helps to explain why the Soviets covered up the incident. The Last Sentry is an impressively researched, clearly written, and balanced assessment of a significant event in Soviet history. Additionally, the authors interweave Soviet history throughout their account of the mutiny. For this reason, among others, the book should be of interest not only to specialists in naval history but also to more general readers seeking to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed. Cleveland State University Ronald E. Powaski GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL By Birth or Consent: Children, Law & the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. By Holly Brewer. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005. Pp. xi, 390. $34.95.) The author of this volume has written two books, magnificently intertwined. In the first of these, she argues that new views of the capacity of children and the proper rearing of the young transformed the political theory of consent. “Children and childhood held a central place in seventeenth and eighteenth-century political thought,” she writes (3). References to children and parents were not metaphorical, as other scholars have argued, but factual and persuasive. Participation in public life, which was once based on birth, rooted itself in consent, a voluntarism that infused the revolutionary movement. In the process of thinking through the confluence of these ideas, subjects of the crown became citizens of the new United States. The second book is a social and cultural history of the shifting view of childhood through civil and criminal law, religion, and domesticity. Its primary sources thus range and, even more importantly, fuse court records, philosophi- BOOK REVIEWS 903 cal disquisitions, sermons and religious tracts, and literary works. Holly Brewer demonstrates how age limits, based on the reasoning capacity of the young, attached themselves to voting, jury and military services, and all the other appurtenances of modern coming of age. Indeed, although Brewer does not claim the mantle, the work strongly supports the master narrative of modernization found in the works of Richard D. Brown and Jon Butler, locating the shift from the old to the new in England and America during the eighteenth century. In a work so diversely documented and forcefully argued, there are bound to be a few misstatements and questionable claims. A “king’s power” did not just arise from “birth” (22). Divine ordination was necessary for accession to the throne. The delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787 were not “modeling” the new government on “the English system of government” (36). Dual federalism had no precedent in English rule. It is not accurate to say “[j]ust so did birthright determine membership in the Catholic Church” (51). Converts were always sought. Infant baptism was not “the major concern of every synod . . . called in New England” (56). The synod of 1637, settling the free grace controversy, did not concern itself with infant baptism. The debates over “baptism and casuistry” did not of themselves lead “to a change in the definition of reason and understanding during the seventeenth century” (75). The scientific and philosophical writings of Descartes, Hobbes, and others in the Age of Reason were surely influential. Because the chapters are largely topical, some folding together of time and space is inevitable. But some fairly large jumps from place to place and century to century result in curious confabulations. For example, Brewer writes, “[the Puritans’] emphasis on the development of the understanding . . . parallels Enlightenment ideas about education” (79). There is no citation for this, which is not surprising, for surely the author should have said “anticipates” rather than “parallels” for events so many years apart. That “most important political thinkers, especially in their impact on later thinkers, were religious radicals” is a considerable overgeneralization, unless one includes all low church adherents, deists, and dissenting sects in this category (86). These cavils aside, the measure of a work is whether it becomes part of the canon—a book that everyone must cite. There is no doubt that Brewer’s book will take a privileged place in all future accounts of childhood and political thought in the Atlantic world. University of Georgia Peter Charles Hoffer 904 THE HISTORIAN Lovers and Livers: Disease Concepts in History. By Jacalyn Duffin. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 299. $27.50.) This author, a practicing hematologist, holds the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at Queen’s University where she is a professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, the Department of History, and the Department of Philosophy. This book of three substantial chapters presents the 2002 Joanne Goodman Lectures that Jacalyn Duffin read to a public audience on three separate evenings in the fall of that year. The lectures conclude with the statement “[o]ld or new, diseases are ideas,” a concept, although familiar enough to medical historians, which may sound foreign to some readers of The Historian (127). The reader, however, is forewarned of the “foreign”; on the first page of the text Duffin writes “I will try to convince you that diseases are ideas” (3). This reviewer suspects most will be convinced before the journey between the first and last pages ends, and everybody should find the trip entertaining. The first chapter, “The Disease Game: An Introduction to the Concepts and Construction of Disease,” sets the stage by discussing in historical contexts four competing theories of disease causation, showing how diseases become “medicalized,” meaning that in the West, at least, they become the property of the medical profession rather than of religious, social, or political elites. By contrast, there is also “demedicalization.” For example, homosexuality was medicalized in the nineteenth century only to be demedicalized in the latter part of the twentieth century when it became clear that there was no cure, most patients did not want one anyway, and society was taking a more benign view of sexual orientation. But what about love? Can it be a disease? In chapter two: “Lovers: The Rise and Apparent Fall of Love Sickness,” Duffin shows that it was regarded as such from ancient times to the recent present. Symptoms such as lust, flaming desire, mind befuddlement, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and mood swings seemed to indicate a disease, and from around the fourth century or so, lovesickness began to be medicalized. Society and culture had crucial roles in defining the condition as a disease, and predictably, a considerable decline in the construction of lovesickness as a disease began when masturbation, homosexuality, pedophilia, and the like became subdivisions of lovesickness. Today lovesickness is no longer viewed as a disease, although Duffin (perhaps with tongue-in-cheek) does not seem to completely share this view. With chapter three, “Livers: The Rise of Hepatitis C,” no one would question that a disease is involved. The trouble was that nobody knew for sure until 1989 (when its virus was discovered) that hepatitis C was a disease. Since the time of BOOK REVIEWS 905 Hippocrates, hepatitis had meant any liver disease, and it was only in the nineteenth century that medicine began sorting out liver ailments—and only in the second half of the twentieth century that some of these were designated hepatitis A (infectious) and hepatitis B (serum). Yet there was a leftover disease called “hepatitis non-A non-B.” Duffin tells well the fascinating story of its identification as hepatitis C, showing how it entangled with AIDS research and entered the stocks of blood held by blood banks and the Red Cross. She enlivens the text of this elegant book with amusing asides drawn from her own clinical experience. The work is made complete with tables, figures, illustrations, a bibliography, and an index. Bowling Green State University K. F. Kiple Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. By David Hempton. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 278. $30.00.) This is an impressive book, displaying a depth of scholarship and understanding. The aim is to explore the development of Methodism, both in Britain and in the United States, from its beginnings in the 1730s until the late nineteenth century. Methodism is shown to be a religion that carried the genes of dialectical tension—the tension between enlightenment and enthusiasm, rational calculation and direct inspiration of the spirit, godly discipline and emotional excess, work ethic and ecstatic ritual, female empowerment and submissive domestication, and between the spiritual egalitarianism of the message and the authoritarianism of its ecclesiastical structure (204). David Hempton analyzes these tensions, using existing scholarship and archival sources to show the complexity and adaptability of the Methodist Church and its message. He provides fascinating insights into the commonality and variation in Methodists’ beliefs and practices. Throughout the study, this is a global consideration with the experiences of Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic—and, indeed, in the wider world— compared and contrasted. Hempton addresses contradictory themes in discrete chapters. “Competition and Symbiosis” engagingly utilizes a biological metaphor to show how Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic were supported by existing society and its institutions, acting like “clever parasites,” taking from the tradition what they needed (19). “Enlightenment and Enthusiasm” shows the complexity of John Wesley’s attitude toward these and the consequences for the sort of movement it became, with a disciplined commitment to self-improvement combined with a 906 THE HISTORIAN fervent belief in divine intervention in daily life (54). The “Medium and the Message” uses fascinating analyses of biographies and hymns to investigate the message of the church as opposed to its theology. Hempton admits that the nature of the message is difficult to discern, given its “noisy, eclectic and populist” tone, and he calls for historians to develop “imaginative empathy” to aid their reconstructions (206). “Opposition and Conflict” explains the nature of conflict inside and outside Methodism, showing that this was as revealing about the structure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society as it was about the nature of Methodism itself (207). “Money and Power” discusses the conflicts that arose over finance within the societies on both sides of the Atlantic. “Boundaries and Margins” shows convincingly why Methodism became so attractive to the lower classes, women, and African Americans. “Mapping and Mission” discusses the church’s rise to globalism, and “Consolidation and Decline” searches for the seeds of collapse in numbers and influence. Hempton sees the “energy, change, mobility, and flux” that it required to thrive being assumed in the twentieth century by Pentecostalism, the true child of original Methodism (200). Hempton is thought provoking and original in the book’s themes, content, and style. The metaphors used, from biology to fine arts, help to maintain the pace of the argument. He teaches much about the Methodism of the past and, in so doing, provides lessons for the present church. University of Hull John T. Smith How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets. By Andy Kessler. (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 2005. Pp. ix, 262. $14.95.) Technological innovation, when nourished by capital, has often led to economic development. This book, written in a breezy style, is an account of some features of this process from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age. Reflecting the author’s Wall Street background, the sections on finance and capital formation in several historical settings since the eighteenth century are the most informative and reliable. Readers may find much of the information fascinating, but some may be put off by the style. For example, the Bank [of England] issued banknotes backed only by the fiat, or command, of the government (maybe that’s why those Italian Fiat cars rarely start up in the morning, no matter what commands you swear at them!) That’s it. ‘We said thee is worth a pound sterling, so thee is, got a problem with that?’ (87). BOOK REVIEWS 907 Apart from the style, most readers will surely be lost among some of the technical details, all without illustrations. It is, moreover, unclear what purpose the details serve other than to display the author’s admittedly impressive command of them. In discussing the invention of innovative looms during the Industrial Revolution, Andy Kessler writes: A loom is nothing more than a wooden frame. You would warp a loom by winding thread or yarn up and around the top and bottom frames, making a figure eight each time. You would weave by taking thread or yarn, called weft, and moving it with a shuttle sideways through a gap in the warp called the shed. Then you would move a sword to tighten the weft, and move the sword toward the other end of the warp to send the shuttle through the new shed. Got it? (29) It gets worse—with “pulse code modulation,” “AND-logic gates,” and “mercury delay lines.” Kessler’s subtitle promises an “irreverent” history of technology, but it is rather pop history, and it obscures his line of argument. Readers who tolerate the jokes and the technicalities can learn much from this book about the history of capital market formation since the eighteenth century, about connections between technological innovation and markets, and about the operation of the stock market in today’s economy. Stevens Institute of Technology Harold Dorn The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code. By Sharan Newman. (New York, N.Y.: Berkley, 2005. Pp. 337. $15.00.) The name of this book is somewhat of a misnomer. There is no “real history” behind the Da Vinci Code because Dan Brown’s book is fiction—a fast-moving thriller in which the postmodern hero undergoes a series of quests like those of Lancelot, solves arcane puzzles, and faces a conspiracy (fictional) involving the Catholic Church. The last has made its puzzles seem more real or more blasphemous, depending on the reader. There are only slightly disguised real modern institutions, such as Opus Dei (on which Sharan Newman is excellent). There are many other references, sites, and works of art in Paris; various apocryphal Gospels; and a history of the papacy that Newman’s alphabetized entries help the reader “decode.” Newman’s “notes,” moreover, do not give the story away. Newman and her book themselves require decoding, because, as in almost all works of reference, some entries are better than others. Newman’s training as a 908 THE HISTORIAN medievalist, turned to such good account in her mystery series, is occasionally outdated, and her understanding of modern history is limited. Under “Women in Early Christianity,” she still assumes, as was once generally agreed, that religious women’s communities declined with the widespread introduction of anniversary masses, but recent work has shown the vigor of later medieval women’s religious communities. Nuns always had to hire priests to celebrate Mass, including those for donors’ death dates. On Mary Magdalen, she has not listed Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages [2000] and does not discuss the modern cult of Mary Magdalen found today at la Sainte-Baume in Provence, where, in a cave at the top of a rocky crag not far east of Marseilles, the saint was believed to have heard the angels singing in paradise. When Newman moves beyond medieval history, she can be dismissive or confused. This is nowhere more apparent than in the entry on Jean Cocteau, the important twentieth-century playwright, filmmaker, and visual artist who has the misfortune to be identified by Les Dossiers Secrets as a master of the Priory of Sion—the forgeries concerning a short-lived proto-Nazi society with imaginary roots traced back many generations. Identifying Cocteau as the leader of the forgery says nothing about Cocteau’s politics, but makes it clear that this is a twentieth-century forgery. Newman inaccurately concludes that there must have been some reason in his political stance that led to Cocteau being in the list of masters. Under “The Papacy/ The Vatican,” a little reading of G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic 1848–49 on the movement for Italian unification in the nineteenth century might have made her less enthused about conditions in the Papal States, where education was discouraged, priests informed against villagers, and a church content to live on its rents resisted modernization. On the other hand, entries on Dagobert, Merovingians, the date of Christmas, and many others, are very useful, as are illustrations of pictures by Leonardo. There is a whole series of identifications that have nothing to do with history, but are interesting: that aringarosa means red herring, that James Faukman is Langdon’s editor in the book, whereas Jason Kaufman is Brown’s real editor, and that Baphomet may be derived from Muhammad. University of Iowa Constance Berman BOOK REVIEWS 909 Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago. By Harold L. Platt. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 609. $49.00.) All cities are fundamentally “unnatural.” The demands they place on resources and the natural environment are so great that without massive technological solutions to such problems as water, sewage, housing, food, and energy, life in cities would be simply unsustainable. Harold L. Platt has undertaken an ambitious task, exploring how that imbalance was first magnified and then ultimately addressed during the nineteenth-century period of rapid industrialization and associated urban growth. Platt focuses on two cities where the environmental and social impacts were so severe that they became “Shock Cities.” This is at one level a specific study of two cities, Chicago and Manchester. On another level, it is about the inevitable confrontation with nature that occurs in all cities as they grow and evolve over long periods. Platt’s approach is encyclopedic. He explores the hydrology of the two regions, the impact of weather variations, and the effects of engineered changes in water systems. He examines in detail the energy needs of new industrial processes and the resulting impact on larger regional land use as the dominant energy source changes from water to wood to coal to electricity. The author recounts in detail specific political conflicts over the role of government in addressing infrastructure development, disease control, environmental justice, and tax distribution. Platt also considers how gender politics and class privilege affected the policy responses to the environmental shocks. His book is, in short, an impressive, comprehensive examination of two multifaceted dynamic urban systems during their most dramatic periods of growth and industrialization. Platt leaves no aspect unconnected to the whole. That strength of the book is also its weakness. A historical project like this is inevitably pulled in two directions. It can undertake a thorough examination of the details of a few specific events. Alternatively it can seek the larger significance of a series of events. Platt provides a great deal of detail about many different elements—so much detail that he sometimes obscures the underlying “plot line.” For example, there is a detailed discussion of the development of brewing, complete with a short biography of Louis Pasteur, his position in the nineteenthcentury scientific community, a map showing the location in Chicago of all individual breweries from 1890–1900, and a discussion of the ownership contracts of British pubs. That is not quite enough detail for a specialist in the history of the brewing industry and too much for a generalist interested in the environmental impacts of industrialization. 910 THE HISTORIAN The reader simultaneously wants more and less. Any of the individual stories— ranging from the role of women in Chicago’s development of clean air policies to the impact of its geology on flooding in Manchester—is worthy of a detailed analysis in itself. The strength of the book is its willingness to undertake an inclusive analysis of all the various elements connected to these two important cities’ industrialization. Still, when one tries to look through so many lenses at once, it is often hard to keep the whole picture clearly in focus. Smith College Randall Bartlett